Kali

So when I got graduated college and got married, I also had to do a hard break from my family and the conservative culture I grew up in. Not really what I wanted, but my parents thought they got to have a say in who I married. Also, I was coming to terms with my queerness and it’s fair to say that the people who say that “a good gay [person] is apostasy“ clearly didn’t have room for me.

It was all pretty traumatic. I spent well over a year in deep depression, without any concept of how to get help.

Even still, I am generally a very curious person. I like learning things and I love to draw. The name Kali came up and I realized that it and naga I was obsessing over have some strong cultural connections. So I got a book and started reading. I got a decent explanation of the absolute basics of Hindu religion and I read the Story of Kali.

That this fierce and terrifying woman was a force of nature, that she overcame all the … I want to say daemons, but really it’s not the best translation for Rakshasa. Point being–she was able to defeat the enemies that none of the other gods could, not even the strongest and the best. Yet Kali came, born of their desperation, dancing through the battle field, destroying all the monsters, overcoming all obstacles, dressing herself in the bodies of the defeated. She was new beginnings that came from the end, she was the end of the cycle, she was time itself.

Those concepts were important to me. Her fierceness, her power, her strength gave me solace, energy, and hope; but the ending of cycles something else all together. I was coming out of some abusive relationships. Bad family, bad culture, and then there was the church.

The ending of cycles. The ending of that cycle. Kali, the fierce goddess that I did not know or understand gave me strength. She gave me solace. She gave me a vision of feminine power, of defiance of “beauty “ and the sound of crushing the self hatred. She gave me a vision of creative destruction, of new beginnings from dire endings.

I will freely admit that I will never understand her as someone who has been raised or fully converted to the Hindu religion will. I’m agnostic and I admit to my lack of understanding to the spiritual. But I am grateful. I don’t confuse God with the church, nor my understanding of another cultures traditions as being the “right way” to see her, but it was a point of view, an idea, a belief that helped me in my darkest times.

So that’s why I drew this. Out of gratitude. To give back what I found, to share.