The DooR(M) Is a Jar
Ancestral Theology and Collective Subconscious
Recently, I saw the title of a literary journal called The Door is A Jar and I thought it would be a good title for my last post of the year. The word ajar’s root is allegedly related to the word char and chore, and from Old English cerr, cierr "turn, change, time, occasion, affair business,” “from ċierran (“to turn, change, turn oneself, go, come, proceed, turn back, return, regard, translate, persuade, convert, be converted, agree to, submit, make to submit, reduce”), from Proto-Germanic *karzijaną (“to turn”), from Proto-Indo-European *gers- (“to bend, turn”).” (from Etymonline and Wiktionary). Then I remembered that the word crisis means a turning point when it all changes. A point of transformation.
This year has been full of turning points and changes for me — my first trip to the African continent, specifically to Senegal, my first writing/art fellowships, my father’s mini-stroke, my mother’s advancing health issues, the US election, the world’s growing awareness of genocides and oppression around the world — that forced me to expand my visions of who I am now and who I want to be. What am I turning into? What door am I entering?
The card that I pulled for myself at the beginning of the year, before I went to Senegal, was the Hierophant card, but it was upside down, meaning that my spiritual work, knowledge and structure would come from the return — returning to my roots, to my ancestors, to the knowledge deep within my body, challenging the current spiritual program we are operating under, finding true spiritual freedom. According to wikipedia, a hierophant is described as “a person who brings religious congregants into the presence of that which is deemed holy. As such, a hierophant is an interpreter of sacred mysteries and arcane principles.” I am a spiritual learner and growing my own practice over time. I remember someone on IG posted about feeling alienated by the Christian church and feeling as if they didn’t have a spiritual community and practice they desired, and I told them that maybe we should be like Lauren Olamina from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, creating our own EarthSeed religion(s). And as Lauren wrote, “God is change.” New religions and spiritual practices always come into form at a moment of social crisis.
The reason I put the M in parentheses at the end of door in the title is because in my return to ancestral knowledge, I am also returning to a kind of mother tongue language and what I realized was in several African-based languages, the sound of M represents a place or holder of something; it can also represent an act of mothering, loving, tending to something, bringing things together. When I put M at the end of DooR, it turns into drum or even dream, and a drum and a dream are containers of collecting knowings. Drums are containers and vessels, like a jar, and like the root of the word jar, they are communication and congregating devices, gathering resources, bringing people together and aactivating energies to come into being. A dream is also a place of collectivity, gathering all that our body is sensing and manifesting them into visions, visions beyond what we are told to see, to perceive, to experience. Another word that comes to mind is dorm, a place of sleep or rest, and its root meaning either sleep or run. But why run? With further looking, it is associated with wandering or wavering, and I am brought back to dreaming, dreaming of another world, wandering away from the status quo of this world, a runaway, a drapetomaniac. This year has been a place, a collection, of leavings and enterings, arrivals and exchanges, me moving away from the limitations I placed on myself and limitations the world placed on me. As this new year begins, I am entering and sensing what is coming, paying attention in a new way. Life is but a DooR(M).