Transmission of the Death Mother
A Final Offering From the Portal
This essay is the third and final installment in a triptych that began with the Day Out Of Time, followed by Bending the Realm. I now present to you the final piece of the puzzle. As you read it, I am back home on the playa with my people, raising a temple. See you all on the other side.
The last portal of this story finds me deep in the desert.
Along with 70,000 others already covered in dust, I have journeyed to the vast depths of a different kind of fertile crescent to take part in a primal rebirth ritual. For the first time in several years, I find myself back at Burning Man for what feels like a mission critical moment; a momentous bend in the arc of history. A climactic moment feels ripe to happen, for it is summer 2019 and humanity is on the brink. To help us get there, the theme of this year’s gathering is Metamorphoses. Shedding the old skins.
What is the most vibrant present you can imagine? This is the question we come together to explore.
The fringes have always been a haven for outlaws, those who embrace the elusive now at the expense of the dead rules, which only describe the past we have left behind. We are here to discover what we are becoming inside these temporary vessels, what can happen in a temporary reality that we all co-create.
What better place to throw things at a wall than one you’ll burn down at the end?
Without sacrifice, there is no advancement. And inside advancement, always a shadow that seeks illumination. Out here there is no promised destination beyond that which each person brings to the table: our vast realms of visioning a new kind of currency in this civilization. So what if our world only lasts for a week? That is more than some fictions which die on the page, never having breathed the light of day.
On playa, we all live for the dawn. We dance at the rowdy altar of the deep void before sacrificing our demons to the sun’s rays, aware of the relentless arrow of time even as the matrix melts down. Primal worship of natural cycles is fundamental to the culture here, for it underlines what the universe teaches: everything will terminate at some point, so spread your hands and receive while you can.
Make juice from monstrous fruits.
I am invited to participate in the experiment that is Naked Heart, a legacy camp in a large village known for its transcendental and tantric offerings. Devoted to developing living principles of the Divine Feminine, Naked Heart’s model of co-creation was more transformational than most in that it didn’t adhere to a top-down leadership structure. Rather, it was a community-driven praxis. Everything in camp existed because someone had taken it upon themselves to make it so — even the sex tent.
Don, one of the camp elders and our unofficial figureheads made it clear when everyone finally arrived that we were all responsible for taking up the mantle of world-maker and running with it as far as we could go. He was unassuming in a white linen shirt and embroidered Kufi cap, but his rich voice circumnavigated the dome covered in colorful fabrics and penetrated the crowded bodies bedecked in shimmering capes and face paint and various forms of netting to make its point. I called him Maestro, for he was sharing master teachings on how to spend our precious time.
Transformation would be happening whether we realized it or not; it was an inevitable fact of participating in such an intentional crucible. We would be stewed in our own juices for ten days and out of that liquid we would sift the fat, the ore, the rare residues that made it through. Don was there to remind us of something — this essence, this extract, was no longer enough if we only lived it here.
Be the thing you are afraid to be everywhere else.
It was here we were invited to play all out. Who are you outside of your default self? The maestro was asking us to envision our participation in camp as though it were a consciousness catapult, a way to eject ourselves from restrictive narratives and blow past all preconceived boundaries and trajectories. To shatter an invisible fourth-wall comprised of our stories as a way to access a transcendent collective intelligence.
It was a compelling offer.
For many people, Burning Man is an epic adventure; a seize-the-day escapade made possible by a trippy buffet that morphed given the hour and the day. When you agree to Leave No Trace, you adhere to a universal law: everything is temporary. If fully claimed, this idea is deeply liberating.
All the same, many players leave their cards on the table; choosing superficial escapes to the real game being played.
Destiny is out of my control by this point and what better way to learn that I have only just begun the journey than to become basically bedridden at the beginning. Two days into the burn, the green rubber boots I had ordered on a chaotic preparation whimsy had ridden my feet with so many blisters that I could no longer walk. I was left to concoct my own amusements within the camp walls, porous as they were to the shenanigans spilling out of every nook and cranny. At the end of the day, we were a fluctuating membrane of moving cells on their way to a naked rave.
A metaphor for life, maybe, before we gave it a civilized face.
What I assumed was the end of the line for me that week was instead a surprise opening: a door that I wouldn’t have noticed had I been off frolicking, swept away by serpent energy, lost in the glittering pulsating distractions of this dusty carnival. Instead, I was given opportunities to practice being still in the swirl, rooted amidst the seductive allure of orchestrated chaos.
I was forced, in a sense, to surrender. How boring, I thought. To be stuck here.
But what a priceless gift this injury was, for the portend always seeks an opening; a way to penetrate one world in order to pull us into the next.
•
There is a place we are trying to go together.
Every ecosystem has its evolutionary riddle to solve. That is why we are called to certain places, certain people, certain problems.
We are on assignment, whether or not it makes sense to others. The tools and tricks I had been collecting alongside my airline miles were bringing their fruit to bear in new dimensions that to others might have seemed unreal or far-fetched.
Yet here I was: spontaneously colliding with a group whose sole mission was to be fully expressed; finding a path together towards interdependent futures through liberated communion.
Naked Heart was testament to the fact that nothing was impossible, only unlived.
It was becoming more clear everywhere I went: each place bore a test, if not several. The universe is a fan of pop quizzes, and I was getting my share to ensure I learned my lesson at critical evolutionary junctures. Challenges show us the keys to locks that demand our attention in order to transcend them. Why was I being stopped? I needed to face the fact that traveling was only a temporary answer to a larger question.
One morning, Don finds me as I am chatting with Ancient Child in a patch of sun as we sip our smoothie breakfast. I had been relaxing into a liquid state over the preceding days, finding myself melted by the abnormal pace of my stoic burn. I enjoyed leisurely conversations and luscious naps in pillowed nooks and long sweats in our private camp sauna. I felt the deep slowing of a furious wheel that had been grinding for months, hungry for something I had been trying to locate. In retrospect, I was at the end of the line. The liminality of Burning Man was the inevitable conclusion for someone ready to leave it all in ashes.
Would you like a shamanic massage? Don asked. He was only giving a few and word had traveled fast around camp that they were a “next-level experience.” Apparently, it had induced one woman’s moon early and she was now in a half-feral state, dancing like Kali outside her hexayurt, covered in blood.
I accepted gladly, intrigued to find out how far I could take my own journey without going anywhere at all.
An hour later, Don and I meet inside his massage lair, a secluded trailer stashed behind the camp’s gigantic whiteboard where people left love notes to friends they were trying to locate in the ebb and fray of our human ocean. We each chug an ice cold Gatorade from his private stash to hydrate against the heat, then we both ingest a mild dose of mushrooms — enough to induce some inter-dimensional abilities but not so much that I would zoom off into the ethers.
A warm breeze blows through the worn batik sheets, cooling my body as the energies moving through me start accelerating. I can feel electric ribbons emitting from Don’s fingertips, tracing a buried fault line of living memory that has imprinted itself deep inside my molten core. As I contemplate the images flickering inside my closed eyes, a vision arrives.
Suddenly I’m floating in space.
Surrounding me: inky black. It is so cold I start shivering; my teeth chatter in 90 degrees. In front of my eyes dark shapes morph in the distance, calling stars into form. I watch galaxies die, re-emerge. Things cluster into more coherence. All of a sudden, as though my vision has gone from blurry to clear, a being is before me: the divine mother, so immense that she takes up the entire sky; laying on her back, naked and splayed. I stand before the first hole we all emerged from, a tiny human struck dumb.
Her genitals are bigger than me and I am watching them breathe.
As I stare at her opening, pondering where it would take me — this portal back to the beginning, wherever that may be — I can only feel an alien terror. Or maybe I’ve just arrived in another alien terrain, for I am in a place that does feel impassable, impossible. Unreal.
In the present my body clenches, reliving through ancestral senses the great journey of birth: that suffocating tunnel pulsing and groaning, heaving maw of eternity glitching open, crowned with muck. Yet even inside the pain of my becoming, the only urge in my body then is still one I grok now: life, life, life.
Then to break free into this world — imagine that.
I feel it all in my body, the cosmic force of the squeeze collapsing me into being. I cannot fathom, try as I might to push my mind: all the tiny branches forking forward, each cellular rung I climbed to become me, the weight of that thought; what it means.
The being speaks — no, she screams: I am the death mother.
Her totality is all pervading. Next to her I am a baby, fresh and wet with tears, dripping gobs of slime on the packed dirt below my nose. Her words don’t make a sound, but I receive them completely.
You have forgotten: your pain is majestic. You must learn how to pray it.
Everything you deny is food for me.
It will be everything you see until you have remembered how to perceive.
She promises me one last thing.
Divine child, hand over what you think you know. I will scrub you clean.
I agree, not realizing that I am setting in motion galactic cycles far beyond what I can believe.
•
The hands are the extension of one’s will in the world.
They are servants of the heart and idle prey of the mind; eternal weavers of reality. Now I am learning how to hold these palms steady, to offer them up in prayer. For the remainder of my time at camp, I serve the goddess.
This seems like a necessary start.
Her grace becomes me as I learn how to soften into my own undoing. One night, I do the dishes of 100 people when two of our members get married at sunset mid-week. I offer to mist the beautiful weirdos who wander into our private sauna with Dr. Bronners and wash their sweaty backs. I muck the kitchen tables of smeared avocado and stray salad remains; return clean coffee cups to their racks in the mess area. I cook bacon for hungry men late into the night and we eat with our hands, feeding one another until the plate is licked clean.
One night I fall into a conversation with a man across from me at the dishwashing station. We are running our hands through the murky water in silence and once again, I forget who begins.
I make note of his playa name — a timely reminder.
Surrender and I step away from the main camp and out to the dusty edge where the bike parking lot meets the boulevard streaked with rainbow people. Here we can smoke a rolled cigarette without bothering the others. As we fall into a lazy slump against someone’s bumper, smudged in white dust, he asks me a question that keeps circling back, as though life is checking my answers.
Who am I? And why do I find myself here?
I’m living in the in-between, I tell him, finally liberated from holding back the truth of the matter. The Bardo, I suppose. I laugh, as though I know, but I am still learning that state of luminous presence suspended outside of time.
But he gets it. You remind me of Artemis, the goddess of wild animals. The Archer.
My heart stutters. Artemis had been surfacing in my dreams and coming up in random conversations, calling my attention. I didn’t reveal this detail to him right away. I wanted to see what the universe would reveal to me through his mouth. After all, the real fun was seeing how certain messages arrived. Why do you say that? I ask.
Because you’re hunting your life.
If every truth contains at least two sides, then the other face of the coin must equally be:
Life is hunting me.
•
Sometimes destiny comes as a dragon in disguise.
Life uses every door. Like a wolf at dawn, the moments that shift us at subterranean levels often emerge from unexpected contexts and combinations of ingredients, ones that don’t seem obvious based on our standardized formulas and predictions. The rules that worked before whatever happens next.
This is why fortune favors the bold: the more you roll the dice, the more opportunities you get to practice your moves and tools. I have my own ideas about what purpose I serve but in the end I don’t get to decide. I choose direction, but surrender the destination — because if Burning Man has taught me anything it’s that we are living inside a responsive world that is also working its own intelligence, morphing us just as much as we move within it.
Or as another writer once said: Life has a way of talking to the future. It’s called memory. It’s called genes.
When you remember that you are a co-creator of the world, you reduce your dependency on time, for that is just a lever, a mechanism. Don’t forget what Tennessee Williams once said: Time is the longest distance between two places. Our linear delineation of what happens as we wait for those magic seeds to germinate in the dark loam of our minds only exists in a dimension we invented to explain cause and effect.
The thing is: you are not separate from the surrounding fabric.
If these portals have shown me a lesson it is this: everything is interwoven, resourced from the collective imaginal cauldron, and so NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE given the fantastic reaches we have already voyaged. If Burning Man has a living gospel, it is that. You pretending otherwise doesn’t serve your glorious mission, which is to live your freakiest expression. My friends, wizards and gods walk this planet.
You are one of them.
Notice how when the conditions are ripe, things move in your direction. Life feeds life.
If there is one thing I invented the internet to tell you, it is that your holy duty is to ripen the soul fruit that lives within you. Thus the most fertile ground, the only place to locate oneself, is in the dirt of the living mystery itself. If you are wise, you will recognize that you invented this thing called time, and as such, you are able to destroy it. Refuse to recognize any definitions the linear mind places on your trajectory. Remove limit from your language. Those are constructs of an all-too-human story when the real truth is: what you can invent is infinite. I will shout this again and again.
Because at the end of the world, everything is up for grabs.
Fate doesn’t decide anything. Stories are the memories we choose to carry forward and plant in our souls, and it is here they germinate, sprout roots. Myths shape us just as much as we shape them. Tell yourself the story that you are bigger than you can fathom and see what happens. Bend life in the direction of your choosing and make it good. For when the portal appears, it is you who must ultimately choose to step through.
That is how life opens to you.
🔺
Katharine Hargreaves is a spiritual mentor, transformational facilitator, ceremonial guide, and initiated medicine womxn. Her first book, The Art of the Experiment, is a transformational manual for people who want to change their life but don’t know where to start. For more information on Katharine and how to work with her, visit her website.
