Navaratri, Night 3

O Kali, I vow never to use You as a meme to focus my negative energy around my trauma and political anger. Rather, I will let You use me, to melt the boundaries of outrage, until I can behold the dazzling amethyst of your face at the heart of catastrophe.

On this third night of Navaratri I worship You, O Goddess, in the form of Kali Shakti, the power of inner and outer transformation, who destroys what is old in order to dance as the grace of the new.

Certainly, now is your time. You are in control. But pure devotion to You does not include Western cultural appropriation of your ancient serpent power. You are not a political icon, a symbol of our resistance to fascism, a channel for apocalyptic anxieties, a bandage for sexual wounding, or an embodiment of our trauma. In fact, dear Mother Kali, you are liberation from all such fears and obsessions.

In the Vedic tradition, blessed Goddess, you are pure ecstasy, pure freedom, and pure beauty, disguised in the most obdurate and troubling forms of the external world. You are Sat-Chit-Ananda - truth, awareness, bliss -veiled in tumultuous maya. Yet as you purify our vision through yoga, kriya, and meditation, the heart is empowered to behold You even in the enemy, the obstacle, the catastrophe.

Only then are we liberated from the binding habit-chains of blame and resentment, as You crush the demon of the little mind, and liberate in us the breath of the infinite. Wider wilder vision comes, not through moral or political struggle, but by naturally seeing God in the Other. This is your grace, Mother Kali.

The Bhagavad Gita teaches that, when the "equal vision" of yoga is cultivated in the nervous system through regular meditation, non-violence, seva, and devotion, we begin to see the beauty of the Divine even in the most troubling disguise. No longer bound by the tyranny of form, through every form we see Her. Then prejudice is impossible.

Every day on earth, trauma happens. And so does beauty. To focus our energy around the trauma, rather than the beauty, is our choice, not our destiny. May the grace of the Goddess gently breathe through our will, that we may choose beauty.

Om Shrim Hrim Krim Kalikayeh Namah!