Honouring the Hidden Goddess Within

[cedar_grove]

She is mad, her lover ismad, and I am mad for loving her!
This world is bewitched by the lovely goddess.
No one can describe how lovely she is, how glorious,
how perfect her gestures, how sudden her moods.
Her lover, poisoned with love for her, calls out her name
endlessly, singing Kali's name over and over and over.
Life has currents, cycles, tides which ebb and flow.
She looks upon them all with equanimity.
Nothing is opposite in her mind: not life, not death;
not love, not hate; not the self, not the void.
Your raft, the poet said, floars upon the sea of life.
It drifts up with the tide, and down with the ebb.
But the goddess is there. The goddess is always there.

--Indian poet Ramakrishna

What she offers us is not a gray mixture of black and white, but a paradoxical world in which both exist in all moments, at all points, in all ways. Life is both pain and pleasure, love and hate. Kali is beyond both, but includes both.

The little acknowledge 4th face of the goddess, to me, is what this particular meditation is all about. I've always had an affinity with this occult aspect of the goddess - hidden even to many women, though I'm not arrogant enough to think that I have in any way mastered any kind of deep connection or knowing of her in this aspect.

Different than simply the 'dark' of the moon, the relationship with the Hindu's Kali is perhaps one of the better representations that I've seen. But even that is somewhat flaws by perceptions of Kali as a sword wielding destructress.

The Fourth Face of the Lady is everything and nothing. It is the cry that comes in the dark when there is no more hope left, and the sweet laughter of the deepest joy. It is a woman who is in tune with her destructive side as much as her creative one - the impulse to devour as well as nurture. It is simply balance in the extreme - and not always gentle about it... and I would say it is the ultimate honour a woman can give to herself to come to know the goddess' fourth face, and to love and embrace it for what it is... a woman's strength.