Today, I am going to share part of what I have learned during my time with Coatlicue. I’ve been reading analysis related to this Goddess. Those that speak to her as a fertility, feminine, earth, death, rebirth, Mexican, Chicano/a/x, Mestizo/a/x, Tejano/a/x, and indigenous nature. To interact with her energy is to interact with the history of what the people who came from Aztec civilization have experienced. To honor her is to honor her people. It makes me feel more connected to the land in Texas. So before I speak on my experience I want to say- go to the source. Go to the people who came from the experience of Coatlicue and learn from them.
Today, I went for a walk as we are allowed to spend time outside for exercise. I looked at the land. The trees, the flowers, the cacti, and the animals. While walking, I read Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a work that dives into an exploration of what Anzaldua calls “the Coatlicue state”. I first found Coatlicue when I began to research Goddesses of Life and Death. I had never heard of her although I was born and raised in the south of Texas. My mothers peoples are from San Antonio and I love to visit the Shrine to Our Lady of Czestochowa, a shrine to the black Madonna, who I find to be directly linked to Goddess energy.
I spent my last birthday in San Antonio and witnessed the butterfly migration. Hundreds of butterflies brought a tree outside of the San Antonio Museum of Art to life with the fluttering of their wings. I then visited the Japanese Tea Garden one of my favorite spaces to find peace. I finished my evening at the park where a large black snake slithered past me into the river and lightening bugs flickered in the twilight. This represents just a little of magic of this land which has such a tragic bloody past. But, isn’t that true of all the spaces in the U.S.?
Coatlicue shares a tale of transformation in a moment of death. Her children had turned against her based on something that was outside of her control. A symbol of lack mentality in a world full of abundance. Balance is always needed and thus a son was born from Coatlicue who balanced out the energy of the feminine daughter moon. Each one must have their own space to flourish.
Coatlicue, whose name means she who has the skirt of snakes, has snakes for a head turning towards each other. The placement of the snakes reminds us of the cycle of life. That as we come from the earth we will return to it. Conscious embodied life is not ever-lasting but our souls continue through our legacy that we birth into the world.
Coatlicue reminds me that my body is my own and that through it I experience the world. Through this form, I can transmute the experiences of this life in its totality.
Spring is a time of darkness nestled in the shrinking confines of the womb buried deep in the warm nurturing soils of the earth until the fire within us forces us to break free of our confines and begin to reach for the life giving energy of the sun. Darkness is life. Hold on loves, soon we will be reborn.
Kamilah Rose
Kamilah Rose | The Bliss Institute 