The Tomb, The Erotic, The Knowing

and where they churn in our bodies

Today, I spend hours writing, thinking about the lowest chakras and how they grip one another by the elbow. It’s just a crook, a bend, a river turning north in such an unusual way. But the root takes a dip overhead, a hollow place forming like the soft spot on an infant’s head. Press too hard here, and maybe everything will collapse, maybe we’ll flood every pre-verbal memory until it floats waterlogged and bloated to the surface.

Sacral sloshes a saltwater hymn up against the tomb, a hungry thing with too many deep, dark mysteries to make sense of. Reverently, almost, she fills the tender, vulnerable hollow of the soft slope. “Hello root,” she murmurs, but what she means is, “Hello death.” And it’s true, it always has been. At the base of our living, the very tip of our tailbones, is a cave we struggle to understand has always been a grave. Now, she has already sung a ballad, and curling up around the edges is a serpent-shaped memory. Erotic little thing, she’s never forgotten how to seep beneath the skin and turn the dial just enough to hold open the gate to Below.

Solar plexus flare. Slow temperature rise and acidic spiritual digestion. If you could hold the sun to your belly (think a flashlight gripped behind closed fingers), you’d know what I know. You’d see veins stretching out like branches, like lightning strike, like an awful gasp. You’d ask without expecting an answer and it would always, always sound something like, “What the fuck is this?” And the drip of that sacral serpent body would melt off a branch, land with a thud, answer you back. “If you really want to know, you’ll have to…”

And then the moment slips off the edge of the horizon, gone just like that. Interpret it if you can. Make sense of the overlap, of the soft spot, of the oddities spit out by the sea, of a tree spread through the mind of your gut.

We begin with death. We all do. Not one of us is an unmarked life, we all carry the afterbeforetaste of death on our newborn tongues. From the moment we’re born, we are turned in only one direction. We grow while we decay. We evolve while we become still more fragile. We build momentum while we lean against the edge of an eventual collapse. And so we ferry it with us, the tomb that harbors first memories, body stories, mythlines that make such little sense for so, so long.

We are born with the power turned on. With bright light cresting over the first cry, and a surging force crawling up along our spines. The Erotic dances through our bloodstreams, playing with threads of death, weaving along branches of knowing. Somewhere between the underworld and the oracular, an erotic lifeforce swells into a womb and we call it the sea. Every miraculous, beautiful, potent, creative thing crawls from the water of us. That is how we give it life.

We are infused with a Knowing. Intuition laced spirit spinning wild below our ribs. And it never stops speaking, never goes quiet or abandons its post. If only we’d let it digest everything we consume, everything we take in, everything we press against our lips and call holy. Look closely, wild thing, and you might see what you were always meant to.

Today I move back and forth between the root, the sacral, the solar plexus. Between Death, The Erotic, The Knowing. And I put my laptop down, curled over the screen, let out a breath like slow, dripping honey. “Oh,” I tell myself. “Oh.”

taken by Mel Gentry Bosna in the Arizona desert

In the lowest parts of every one of us is everything an old colonizing patriarchy was so afraid we’d access. “Don’t touch that fruit,” a god told the woman. Or more eloquently, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’

The root. Tomb. Death.

But the serpent, such an old, old embodiment of the wisdom of the Goddess, said, “god knows that when you eat from it, your eyes will be opened.”

The sacral. Erotic. Awakening.

“And you will be like god,” sang the wise one, “knowing good and evil.”

The solar plexus. Intuition. The Knowing.

I keep my hands over my lower belly even when I get up, walk down the stairs, stand in the kitchen. “Oh,” I keep saying. “Oh.” Here in our bodies are secrets, branches, roots, great wells of power, open tunnels between life and death. And I suppose, if it were nothing, there’d be no reason to carve a counter myth so deep. There’d be no point in taking it so far. There’d be no warning to chisel into religion. There’d be no Eve to villainize, no serpent to diminish, no garden to burn down.

So I let Lilith in me reach out across the expanse. I watch while she brings her Red Sea to the tomb of my own christ consciousness. I ask her to carry the tree’s fruit, press it to my lips. I make communion of the first woman reclaiming the second. And I hope the Eve in me is becoming a wild thing, a death portal, an erotic force, a crisp and dripping knowing that drips all the way to the hollow of my throat and pools against the cool river of my voice. I am seeing threads everywhere I look, rope bridges slung between every wide canyon of my life.

“Oh,” I find myself saying at the end of the day. “Oh. Well who fucking knew?”

Did you know this about us? The maplines creased into our bodies? Coagulating pools of energy pressing weight into our shared humanity, into our single bodies, until we bend. Until we become a river turning north in the strangest way. Whatever it takes to make us pause, put our faces right up against the ground, and wait for the blaze within to light up every branch, every detail, every persuaded interpretation, and then to breathe so hard it all bursts into flames.

Let the garden burn. Let the trees that rattle us awake hold steady like the burning bush, not a leaf singed, while the ground around them turns irrevocably holy. I will gladly take off my shoes on a Monday afternoon and press my fingers into words that remain painfully incapable of delivering the message. I will tell you that the more I understand the Inner Territory, the less I truly know.

But oh my god, I am not done.

This week in the Inner Territory Guide Training, we are moving further in and wider out. The Erotic, the archetype of the Great Goddess, the sacral chakra, and everything woven between.