Swarna, I am absolutely in chills and speechless after listening to you read your poem. I don't even have enough words to express how much I love all of this essay(s) and poem, but the way you brought the spirit of it -- dark spirit and light -- to life with your reading is phenomenal. Thank you for sharing it with us, in the midst of all you're going through.
"We can only grasp the depth of another's anguish if we ourselves are fated to undergo similar trials in the same manner. In this realization lies the elusive essence of the divine, the quest we so fervently pursue in scriptures and holy sites." Can we not gather for tea together with no deadlines and no other obligations, sit somewhere warm and timeless, and talk about this until the world is repaired?
‘..sit somewhere warm and timeless, and talk about this until the world is repaired’ - we need to, we must Nia. Our world is bursting at its seams with all this focus on materialistic or mainstream success, the pursuit of exerting more power over another in order to feel better- all these brokenness and wrong imitations is just so very exhausting.
Sending you hugs and moonlight Nia, hope we will meet someday beyond these fields of wrongdoings and rightdoings to sit with tea and poetry and converse till our heart feels full, till the world feels safe again 💜🔥
Yes please! Talk about reclaiming the commons -- time, tea, companionship, free minds, and a world where care and relationship are valued above all else. 🧡
This was so cathartic to read. Thank you for expressing what so many of us long to express. Your description of masculine energy out of balance was particularly meaningful to me. And hearing the poem in your own voice was beautiful - thank you!!
Thank you Lindsey for your constant presence here. I’m deeply grateful that it resonated with how you felt about all these issues unfolding too. If we all awaken and inner rage and say ‘enough is enough’, I believe there could be a global change and movement towards peace. 💜
This was pure fire, pouring from your soul. MY GOODNESS. I can't stop listening to your voice over. I am truly at a lose for words. The power. The fire. The feminine rage. This was everything. 👏👏🔥🔥❤️ I am so glad I waited to listen and sit with your words when I had space to myself.
I am so excited for the works to come. Thank you for sharing your words and voice with us. I am so inspired.
I am do grateful to be in great company alongside sisters and allies like you. We might be continents apart but you really appreciate my work as I do yours. You are one of those women whose courage and voice impact me deeply to feel powerful enough to share this. Thank you so much for your fierce presence in this space. 💜🌼🔥
This post is specially for you since you asked for my voice dear friend. This is for our baby Lila and little Rosie. May they forever bask in the grace of the mother goddess.
I should really get down to get it published Nicola. I still have the google form in which you sent your feedback bookmarked and saved for reference and guidance. I wouldn’t have pushed through the self doubt of sharing it here without your words still floating in my mind 💜
Swarnali, I wanted to let you know that the sound of your voice reading your poem has accompanied me through my week. The anger you poetically dance into flame is an anger I’ve learned not to feel. It’s not the anger that wants to control my 4-year-old or that bristles at the driving patterns of strangers—that anger will flash through my body in an instant. But this is an anger that wants to unmake the world—that demands we unmake the world—and I will feel anything—anxiety, shame, depression—to avoid the tremors of this rage. Because it’s easier to unmake myself than to unmake the world.
So this piece has stayed with me in my time offline. I can’t imagine the depths of self-accompaniment required to give such a full-throated expression to feminine rage, but I am blessed to be in the company of your words. Thank you.
You nailed it, Shaina! That rage you described isn’t just about venting frustrations—it’s about tearing down the world as we know it. I totally get where you’re coming from as a mother and woman, weighed down by layers of shame and guilt along with that burning rage. So many times, I’ve bitten back my anger because speaking up felt unsafe.
Living in a bustling Indian city means dodging construction chaos and crazy traffic every day. Walking to work used to be my only option, and it was a nightmare. The constant blare of motorcycle horns on the sidewalks, treating me like an inconvenience, ignited a rage I can barely put into words, leaving me on edge and frustrated.
Since we were little, we’ve been taught to swallow our anger, to hide it away to stay safe. But let’s face it—safety has never really been guaranteed, has it? So why keep swallowing our emotions when we could let them out, loud and strong, and finally feel heard and understood? I’m sharing these thoughts to stand beside you and everyone else, urging us to embrace our anger as a powerful force for healing and change.
I am so glad you felt this deeply and carried me with you all week long through this meditation. Feeling seen and appreciated like this, dear sister, fills me with gratitude and strength. Here’s to you, and all the power you hold. 💜🔥🌼
Thank you, Swarnali. I wonder if this anger can only be fully embraced communally—gathered around fires, as you say in your piece. Because our bodies in isolation can’t brace against despair.
My grandmother, mother, and I all experience(d) trauma-induced mental illness, whose onset occurred at female life events (mine pregnancy, my mother’s menopause, my grandmother’s postpartum). My illness is less severe than my mother’s, and hers is less severe than her grandmother’s—but I’ve been contemplating this week the depth of wisdom trapped in each of our bodies—like the damming of matrilineal legacy.
I’ve been trying to raise my daughter to not fear her own drive for autonomy—to not dissociate in order to connect socially—and it feels like threading my way through a dark, frightening, magical forest. I feel so deeply the importance of this task, and the fear that accompanies mothering outside the lines prescribed by patriarchy.
This week I started talking with my grandmother—who died when I was a teenager, who I only met twice in my life, of whom I had been scared because I was a child and her behavior was erratic, whose erratic behavior is stored as trauma in my mother’s body because she also was only a child—asking her to guide me, because I sense vast depths of wisdom submerged beneath the stories written over her body.
Because they took away our communal fires, isolated us within patriarchal narratives, and pathologized our rage, I’ve inherited a matrilineal legacy of trauma—so I’m trying to tenderly gather my grandmother’s authentic voice to pass to my daughter—flowers instead of pain.
I write all this to say, I’m keen to the forces that isolate us, that dam up the wisdom of our bodies, and your voice feels like a river spilling over its prescribed banks to seek out hidden channels of collaboration, because we need our wisdom and fury to touch one another so we can gather our power to baptize the world.
Sorry for such a rambling reply! Please don’t feel pressure to respond to it all. Just keep the brilliance of your flickering flame illuminating the dark. 🕯️🖤
Dear friend, there is so much in this to respond to. The anger of isolation and the despair that you feel is familiar to me beyond words. I too have carried the fears and traumas of generations of women before me paralysed by the severing nature of patriarchy, by wars, communal rifts, and partition of countries. This world is a dark place to raise a daughter, it is hard to not hand down our fears. I too am haunted by my grandmother's spectre who has gone through the trauma of losing her homeland never to return and have done all she could to not pass down the trauma but she inadvertently did. I believe it is important to exhume these ghosts that we so wilfully carry to scavenge nourishment from the dead like the vulture does. Nourishment in the wisdom of 'stories written over her body' as you said. I feel so much of your pain, your trauma, and your rage. Here's to garnering flowers instead of pain for our daughters, here's to fury and rage of our grandmothers.
I am here standing in solidarity with you, reinforcing your voice, your freedom to express your anger with all the institutions that separate our circles, that keep us in silos, hold us back from gathering around the fire and bringing our unique flames to light up the world.
Thank you so much for this awe-inspiring comment essay, I truly grateful to have found you and your eloquent voice across space and time. So much love and power to your firebrand heart. ❤️
“I believe it is important to exhume these ghosts that we so wilfully carry to scavenge nourishment from the dead like the vulture does”
Thank you so much for this response—your words are so powerful. And thank you for the links. I will read one tonight and one after a little more offline time.
My hope is that we could cross-pollinate each other’s work in ways that are meaningful, in response to our body and mind demanding us to connect to our sisters. I too am assigning some time tonight to rummage through your substack archive. True connection is rare in this world and please know that I truly value this one. Thank you so much for your powerful presence in our shared communities 💜🌼
Thank you! My archive is brief—still finding my public voice:). But, contrary to appearances, I haven’t abandoned it. I’m in the final stages of revising a piece that has taken me months to write.
The pieces you linked where very meaningful reads for me. Climbing in my grandmothers skin—and offering my skin to her—feels like the exact language of my current spiritual movements.
Thank you John for taking out time to listen. I was really doubtful about recording this but then dived in anyway. Thank you for your constant support 💜
Swarna, I LOVE hearing your voice--it's resonant and strong and just fantastic to hear with your writing! And I am so excited to learn of the work you have not yet published which you are publishing yourself here, that we get to witness and share in it. There is so much in this I love, but especially the strength of your words and voice, of lines that emphatically say "you pronounce it wrong." So grateful to stand alongside you in not suppressing rage, of care as an act of strength and fierce rebellion. I see your firefly light. 💜🕯🧚🏼
Freya, I feel so deeply grateful to have found my circle, to be able to fight alongside you. Your attention makes me visible. We have to put an end to this cycle of abuse that perpetuates. To our mothers, sisters and daughters- in fierce struggle of survival. To the goddess kali and her destructive rage ! 🧚🏽♀️🔥💜
First of all, Swarnali, thank you thank you thank you for sharing again this wild fire of a post, for I didn't see it when it was first published. There are so many lines that stoked my own feminine/feminist rage, particularly around the under-reported prevalence of sexual violence and war crimes against women, but this one, 'Preventing women from gathering around the fire and telling our stories is a tactic to keep us invisible' felt especially validating, as I prepare to hold women's circles, both online and in real life. And your poem – my – powerful beyond words. 🔥🔥🔥
Oh wow, you found your way to this! I am so happy about that. This post is very close to my heart because I, like most women, often find it hard to channel my rage into something that doesn’t make me look ‘hysterical’. I guess we are all so tired of keeping the anger in and pretending to be okay but sometime we need solidarity even in anger and outbursts. This post exists to remind every woman who come across it that her anger is valid.
A women’s circle! How wonderful! I am cheering on you from here. I wish I could join the online one, though our time zones might not align. I am so grateful that this essay and poem has found you. In present, like in history- it is sisterly love that will see us through the darkest of times. More power to you, sister. 💜
Your emotions sits really well in the poem and I and so grateful that you took time to share it here. If we keep our rage in, the world will never be a safe place for vulnerable children and people.
I just saw in the news that the Rafah’s UN humanitarian aid center was bombed by Israel preventing wounded women and children from getting food, medicines, etc for survival. The rage and hurt in me has never been so strong.
Swarna, I am absolutely in chills and speechless after listening to you read your poem. I don't even have enough words to express how much I love all of this essay(s) and poem, but the way you brought the spirit of it -- dark spirit and light -- to life with your reading is phenomenal. Thank you for sharing it with us, in the midst of all you're going through.
"We can only grasp the depth of another's anguish if we ourselves are fated to undergo similar trials in the same manner. In this realization lies the elusive essence of the divine, the quest we so fervently pursue in scriptures and holy sites." Can we not gather for tea together with no deadlines and no other obligations, sit somewhere warm and timeless, and talk about this until the world is repaired?
‘..sit somewhere warm and timeless, and talk about this until the world is repaired’ - we need to, we must Nia. Our world is bursting at its seams with all this focus on materialistic or mainstream success, the pursuit of exerting more power over another in order to feel better- all these brokenness and wrong imitations is just so very exhausting.
Sending you hugs and moonlight Nia, hope we will meet someday beyond these fields of wrongdoings and rightdoings to sit with tea and poetry and converse till our heart feels full, till the world feels safe again 💜🔥
I can almost feel your fire with my heart all the way from over here. ❤️🔥🧚
As I always feel yours Nia 💜🔥
That tea invitation! ❤️🌱☕️
💜🔥
Yes please! Talk about reclaiming the commons -- time, tea, companionship, free minds, and a world where care and relationship are valued above all else. 🧡
I will be rallying in the front with flag saying ‘relationships above all else’ - yes 🙌 💜
💚🕯️
I want it so bad it hurts 😭
Me too 💜
This was so cathartic to read. Thank you for expressing what so many of us long to express. Your description of masculine energy out of balance was particularly meaningful to me. And hearing the poem in your own voice was beautiful - thank you!!
Thank you Lindsey for your constant presence here. I’m deeply grateful that it resonated with how you felt about all these issues unfolding too. If we all awaken and inner rage and say ‘enough is enough’, I believe there could be a global change and movement towards peace. 💜
May it be so 🙏🏽
Cathartic is absolutely the word. Well said.
🥹💜
This was pure fire, pouring from your soul. MY GOODNESS. I can't stop listening to your voice over. I am truly at a lose for words. The power. The fire. The feminine rage. This was everything. 👏👏🔥🔥❤️ I am so glad I waited to listen and sit with your words when I had space to myself.
I am so excited for the works to come. Thank you for sharing your words and voice with us. I am so inspired.
I am do grateful to be in great company alongside sisters and allies like you. We might be continents apart but you really appreciate my work as I do yours. You are one of those women whose courage and voice impact me deeply to feel powerful enough to share this. Thank you so much for your fierce presence in this space. 💜🌼🔥
Me too!
🧚🏽♀️🔥💜🤗
I am glad to be raising girls in a world in which your words exist. 🙏
This post is specially for you since you asked for my voice dear friend. This is for our baby Lila and little Rosie. May they forever bask in the grace of the mother goddess.
Thank you so much for sharing your voice! And the prospect of returning to your manuscript after 2 years is superbly thrilling. 😊
I should really get down to get it published Nicola. I still have the google form in which you sent your feedback bookmarked and saved for reference and guidance. I wouldn’t have pushed through the self doubt of sharing it here without your words still floating in my mind 💜
Swarnali, I wanted to let you know that the sound of your voice reading your poem has accompanied me through my week. The anger you poetically dance into flame is an anger I’ve learned not to feel. It’s not the anger that wants to control my 4-year-old or that bristles at the driving patterns of strangers—that anger will flash through my body in an instant. But this is an anger that wants to unmake the world—that demands we unmake the world—and I will feel anything—anxiety, shame, depression—to avoid the tremors of this rage. Because it’s easier to unmake myself than to unmake the world.
So this piece has stayed with me in my time offline. I can’t imagine the depths of self-accompaniment required to give such a full-throated expression to feminine rage, but I am blessed to be in the company of your words. Thank you.
You nailed it, Shaina! That rage you described isn’t just about venting frustrations—it’s about tearing down the world as we know it. I totally get where you’re coming from as a mother and woman, weighed down by layers of shame and guilt along with that burning rage. So many times, I’ve bitten back my anger because speaking up felt unsafe.
Living in a bustling Indian city means dodging construction chaos and crazy traffic every day. Walking to work used to be my only option, and it was a nightmare. The constant blare of motorcycle horns on the sidewalks, treating me like an inconvenience, ignited a rage I can barely put into words, leaving me on edge and frustrated.
Since we were little, we’ve been taught to swallow our anger, to hide it away to stay safe. But let’s face it—safety has never really been guaranteed, has it? So why keep swallowing our emotions when we could let them out, loud and strong, and finally feel heard and understood? I’m sharing these thoughts to stand beside you and everyone else, urging us to embrace our anger as a powerful force for healing and change.
I am so glad you felt this deeply and carried me with you all week long through this meditation. Feeling seen and appreciated like this, dear sister, fills me with gratitude and strength. Here’s to you, and all the power you hold. 💜🔥🌼
Thank you, Swarnali. I wonder if this anger can only be fully embraced communally—gathered around fires, as you say in your piece. Because our bodies in isolation can’t brace against despair.
My grandmother, mother, and I all experience(d) trauma-induced mental illness, whose onset occurred at female life events (mine pregnancy, my mother’s menopause, my grandmother’s postpartum). My illness is less severe than my mother’s, and hers is less severe than her grandmother’s—but I’ve been contemplating this week the depth of wisdom trapped in each of our bodies—like the damming of matrilineal legacy.
I’ve been trying to raise my daughter to not fear her own drive for autonomy—to not dissociate in order to connect socially—and it feels like threading my way through a dark, frightening, magical forest. I feel so deeply the importance of this task, and the fear that accompanies mothering outside the lines prescribed by patriarchy.
This week I started talking with my grandmother—who died when I was a teenager, who I only met twice in my life, of whom I had been scared because I was a child and her behavior was erratic, whose erratic behavior is stored as trauma in my mother’s body because she also was only a child—asking her to guide me, because I sense vast depths of wisdom submerged beneath the stories written over her body.
Because they took away our communal fires, isolated us within patriarchal narratives, and pathologized our rage, I’ve inherited a matrilineal legacy of trauma—so I’m trying to tenderly gather my grandmother’s authentic voice to pass to my daughter—flowers instead of pain.
I write all this to say, I’m keen to the forces that isolate us, that dam up the wisdom of our bodies, and your voice feels like a river spilling over its prescribed banks to seek out hidden channels of collaboration, because we need our wisdom and fury to touch one another so we can gather our power to baptize the world.
Sorry for such a rambling reply! Please don’t feel pressure to respond to it all. Just keep the brilliance of your flickering flame illuminating the dark. 🕯️🖤
Dear friend, there is so much in this to respond to. The anger of isolation and the despair that you feel is familiar to me beyond words. I too have carried the fears and traumas of generations of women before me paralysed by the severing nature of patriarchy, by wars, communal rifts, and partition of countries. This world is a dark place to raise a daughter, it is hard to not hand down our fears. I too am haunted by my grandmother's spectre who has gone through the trauma of losing her homeland never to return and have done all she could to not pass down the trauma but she inadvertently did. I believe it is important to exhume these ghosts that we so wilfully carry to scavenge nourishment from the dead like the vulture does. Nourishment in the wisdom of 'stories written over her body' as you said. I feel so much of your pain, your trauma, and your rage. Here's to garnering flowers instead of pain for our daughters, here's to fury and rage of our grandmothers.
I am here standing in solidarity with you, reinforcing your voice, your freedom to express your anger with all the institutions that separate our circles, that keep us in silos, hold us back from gathering around the fire and bringing our unique flames to light up the world.
I have a few pieces where I meditated on this, you may check them out for more nudges to explore https://berkana.cc/p/thinking-through-our-mothers and https://berkana.cc/p/an-ode-to-the-heat
Thank you so much for this awe-inspiring comment essay, I truly grateful to have found you and your eloquent voice across space and time. So much love and power to your firebrand heart. ❤️
“I believe it is important to exhume these ghosts that we so wilfully carry to scavenge nourishment from the dead like the vulture does”
Thank you so much for this response—your words are so powerful. And thank you for the links. I will read one tonight and one after a little more offline time.
This interchange has meant so much to me ❤️
My hope is that we could cross-pollinate each other’s work in ways that are meaningful, in response to our body and mind demanding us to connect to our sisters. I too am assigning some time tonight to rummage through your substack archive. True connection is rare in this world and please know that I truly value this one. Thank you so much for your powerful presence in our shared communities 💜🌼
Thank you! My archive is brief—still finding my public voice:). But, contrary to appearances, I haven’t abandoned it. I’m in the final stages of revising a piece that has taken me months to write.
The pieces you linked where very meaningful reads for me. Climbing in my grandmothers skin—and offering my skin to her—feels like the exact language of my current spiritual movements.
This was so powerful, Swarna. Thank you for sharing your voice. That was a lovely surprise. Best wishes with all the heavy weights you are carrying.❤️
Thank you John for taking out time to listen. I was really doubtful about recording this but then dived in anyway. Thank you for your constant support 💜
I loved hearing your voice.
🥹💜
I hear you, and I see you.
Swarna, I LOVE hearing your voice--it's resonant and strong and just fantastic to hear with your writing! And I am so excited to learn of the work you have not yet published which you are publishing yourself here, that we get to witness and share in it. There is so much in this I love, but especially the strength of your words and voice, of lines that emphatically say "you pronounce it wrong." So grateful to stand alongside you in not suppressing rage, of care as an act of strength and fierce rebellion. I see your firefly light. 💜🕯🧚🏼
Freya, I feel so deeply grateful to have found my circle, to be able to fight alongside you. Your attention makes me visible. We have to put an end to this cycle of abuse that perpetuates. To our mothers, sisters and daughters- in fierce struggle of survival. To the goddess kali and her destructive rage ! 🧚🏽♀️🔥💜
Swarnali, beyond grateful for you and your words. Thank you dear one x
Thank you dearest. I feel seen 💜
First of all, Swarnali, thank you thank you thank you for sharing again this wild fire of a post, for I didn't see it when it was first published. There are so many lines that stoked my own feminine/feminist rage, particularly around the under-reported prevalence of sexual violence and war crimes against women, but this one, 'Preventing women from gathering around the fire and telling our stories is a tactic to keep us invisible' felt especially validating, as I prepare to hold women's circles, both online and in real life. And your poem – my – powerful beyond words. 🔥🔥🔥
testerical! My oh my! 😂😂😂😂💜💜💜
Oh wow, you found your way to this! I am so happy about that. This post is very close to my heart because I, like most women, often find it hard to channel my rage into something that doesn’t make me look ‘hysterical’. I guess we are all so tired of keeping the anger in and pretending to be okay but sometime we need solidarity even in anger and outbursts. This post exists to remind every woman who come across it that her anger is valid.
A women’s circle! How wonderful! I am cheering on you from here. I wish I could join the online one, though our time zones might not align. I am so grateful that this essay and poem has found you. In present, like in history- it is sisterly love that will see us through the darkest of times. More power to you, sister. 💜
Our anger is indeed totally valid, and entirely justified! Talking about hysterical, today I came across the word 'testerical', and how I laughed! 🤣
In sisterly love and rage, dear Swarnali, and more power to you, to all of us 💙✊🏻
I am Not an Island
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island
I am not a piece of property
That you can or can't afford
I am not your trader's favorite stock
But I'm not to be ignored
I am strong within my boundaries
I am not your fair absurd
I'm the fount of our salvation
And I will have the final word.
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island.
I am the mighty hurricane
That will beat upon your shores
I am a resurrection
I am knocking on your doors
Do you think that I am kidding
Do even think at all
While you play your favorite pastimes
And throw your favorite balls
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island.
I am thriving in the sunlight
I am living my ballet
I will harken to that music
As I hear my sisters play
With one step for the future
And one for all mankind
We shall weave this dance together
And advance in pace and kind.
I'm not an island
I'm a woman
I'm a lover, I am a giver
I have sisters
I'm a woman
I'm not an island.
Malcolm J McKinney 2023
‘I will harken to that music
As I hear my sisters play
With one step for the future
And one for all mankind’
I am so incredibly moved by all of this. Thank you Malcolm, beautiful words. 💜
I was enraged last fall by some things I had read. I wrote this on way to shop and back home in about 1 hour.
Only one other time have I composed a lyric strictly from a woman's viewpoint and revised the third verse with the aid of some virtual sisters.
I wanted to let you know how much I agreed and in what way with your post.
Be well.
Your emotions sits really well in the poem and I and so grateful that you took time to share it here. If we keep our rage in, the world will never be a safe place for vulnerable children and people.
I just saw in the news that the Rafah’s UN humanitarian aid center was bombed by Israel preventing wounded women and children from getting food, medicines, etc for survival. The rage and hurt in me has never been so strong.
My thought is that one must love oneself to be able to love others, and needs to apply that principle for balance.
💯 % agree
Brilliant. Relatable. Important.
Thank you Anagha. Your name is absolutely beautiful. 💜🌼