Spells for the Matriarchy

Cast by alchemist brontë velez of Lead to Life and illustrated by Lise Silva Gomes, these spells will take you on a journey into four of the concepts we are exploring—rematriation, decomposition, surrender, and creation—in relationship to our 2021 theme of matriarchy. Each illustration correlates to a specific spell: we hope that whenever you pause your reading, you’ll take a moment to contemplate the energy we are wishing to evoke through this bookmark.

rematriation

when we say give the land back, we do mean returned, but we also mean, the back. yes, they forced us black folks to enter from the back. made us go around. but what if entering from the back provided its own intelligence? (not to be confused with the back as bridge.) no. the back, a fugitive place. to give the earth back: the soft, muscled part of our flesh that holds it all together. to swim our spine down into the soil so as to say, sabbath. a prayer that when the land is given back, it means we got them and we got each other. how it’s the land who prophesied us into the posture of exhale, head against the earth, belly turned toward the sky, returned to the capacity to pronounce mother in every language the land longs to be known by again.

decomposition

de(compose) as in the music that comes when we lay to rest. when our refusal to participate in harm draws a gospel out of us. god, the dancing that will come! when there will be no question about our belonging because the meaning of abandon is resurrected to its source: abandon as in giving ourselves over to the divine to do their work through us. when we no longer try to repair what was irreconcilable because instead we revere the medicine of death….cuz some shit just needs to die so that which regenerates might live! what creatures need the cue of our wailing to remember their own songs? can you feel how the frequency of our grieving, aloud and together, allows the impossible to occur? el milagro de los hongos dreams us again so that in the waking the ground might read refuge instead of grave.

surrender

we knew it was coming. that season when whiteness and capitalism and cisheteropatriarchy and ableism got dispossessed by the spirit of the salmon. when the salmon shout Lucille Clifton’s prayer: “come into the black and live!” and so they take they weary body upstream and finally let go, release their project of terror, violence and extraction, surrender as an offering to the health of the people and the land, know they are worthy in dying, in permitting the grace of transformation. the rest of us cry out and croon like a chorus of gulls, bears, eagles prepared to feast, enlivened by the beings who finally came home to give their flesh back over to source.

creation

oh sweet sabbath, how you remind me there is nothing to be made, that everything is already here, that the work is done. that seventh day where the shattered moons of saturn’s rings dance me into time outside of time. today, creator/creation, you make me, you put me in my place, you dream me free: supine and affirmed. tomorrow, when the sun rises, i’ll lose track of what day it is. your erotic spell to rest will still be over me. the economy on my attention collapses. you enchant me into conjurer: i trust i am not separate from god.