Cleaning after Crisis
Carrying on my Grandmothers' gifts
My father’s mother was the head janitor at Patton State Psychiatric Hospital for 12 years. These weren’t just the mentally ill she worked with daily, these were the criminally mentally ill. This hospital exists right on the edge of tribal territory.
Before that she worked with my grandpa cleaning a uniform factory for 20 years. They had keys to open these big closed corporate buildings. They had some autonomy over their schedule and would clean during the afternoon to nights.
Sometimes they would watch me while working. I remember roaming around the emptiness, intrigued by the unique and vast spatial designs of all these rooms she knew here way in and out of. All the places to clean, all the ground to cover. It never felt frenetic or pressurized, though the work was obviously demanding. As a whole, being a cleaner was never regarded with shame or inferiority, because for my family, cleanliness is a marker of integrity, harmony, and coherence. The ones with dirty homes were always whispered about, the character of the caretaker was suspect.
I look to my balsamic Libra moon in the sixth house of slaves, illness and physical entropy and now only see my matrilineal heritage so clearly. She was an arbiter of disorder, at the intersection of chaos. She kept dust and decay at bay. Only recently did it dawn on me on how me and my grandmother’s work is the same but different. Like her I am a sweeper of the path.
I am clearing away. I am seeing past the artificial divides. She was a cleaner for the incarcerated, I am a curandero of conquest.
My grandmother is of Tlazolteotl, the ‘eater of filth’. By her, I know how to perform barridas, sweeps, that release stagnant energies, discord, negative self-talk, misfortune. Huitzilopochtli, god of war, was conceived while sweeping, linking the cleaner to warrior. The broom is a weapon, defending against the discord, always encroaching along the periphery, that threatens the person’s, home’s, or community’s constitutional order.
Her power transmutes this energy so that the client, the home, the people regain luminescence. Those who sweep are guardians of the home.
Tlazolteotl watches over diviners, midwives and curers. She has a chapfallen mouth, a sagging stomach and breasts that have been fed from. These mark her as an aged creator goddess. She is a weaver of fate.
The Curandera’s charge is to keep both the cosmos and the body in a state of balance, and so they commonly cross the borders between the living and the spirit. They know imbalance produces illness and I again read my libra moon, my destined light in the 6th house of health, the quotidian, the metakosmios. Many white astrologers can’t really appreciate nor comprehend how deeply embodied this history of servitude is, nor how deeply embedded is resistance. Colonial legacies have a flesh debt. They are reflected in the birth chart, but are obvious all around us.
“Healing the body, then, served as a microcosm for repairing the nation that was dismembered in colonization… Disoriented by exile—which, paradoxically, was an exile within the homeland—the poetic religious movement of don Pedrito centered and thus ordered the anomie of ethnic Mexicans. Healing the brokenness of their individual bodies functioned as a public allegory for healing the broken Mexican national body; his work assumed cosmic, national, and individual meaning.”1
As I am engaged in on-going mentorship and study, I feel called to begin offering these cleansing rites and carrying on these traditions. And so I am proud to announce I am now offering in-person limpias at my home in Golden Hill, San Diego. I labor privately in home, like my mothers.
Being so close to US-Mexico border only makes work as a psychopomp, a shapeshifter, a witch-bitch all the more meaningful for it is at this prominent border that arises the distinctive borderlands consciousness that tolerates ambiguity, and paradox as it hybridizes epistemologies and prophetic practices. We live daily with an impulse to transgress institutional, religious, legal, spatial, linguistic and symbolic barriers policing centers of power.
We write from within. Our theories of the flesh are theories of the spirit are theories of the land. Any situated and embodied epistemology has limitations we must mind. There are no subsuming discourses of oppression. I am only one person, and I cannot speak for everyone. But I am committed to speaking from a localized particularity toward global solidarity. And all of our embodied experiences connect to larger sociopolitical and historical contexts.
Through these personalized sessions we will attend to decolonial imaginaries to heal how conquest has lived within and disrupted each of us. These sessions will typically combine divination, platicas, and shamanic energy clearing.
“The curanderx often knows, sees, or senses energies around the subtle energetic bodies and can journey to different states of reality or consciousness to track and clear the issues that have caused disturbances. These aspects take practice and trust in our intuition, but after many limpias, subtle energies become easier to manage.”2
Depending on what is needed based they can involve cleansing with:
Herbs - Flowers - White Fire - Onion - Garlic - Lemon - Florida Water -Smudging & Fanning - Egg Sweeps & Divination - Herbal Broom Sweeps.
These sessions are to break curses, clear away mal ojo, remove dense energies, bolster spiritual strength. Deploying sacred elements and relationships provide incredibly effective healing, purification and open up pathways for new beginnings.
Curanderismo is a response to crisis. When my mother’s mother was an inmate at San Quentin State Prison she took part of the forestry firefighter training. She was breathing fire, putting her body on the line, still exploited by the state. While inmates are readily stigmatized, firefighters are most universally lauded, and this program proved to be an important part of her rehabilitation. Fire is the truest judge, and I believe it transformed how my grandma shaped her sense of identity. Something in her soul was touched by the fires she literally faced.
Like a fire-fighter for the soul, one remains vigilant. The profession, the vocation, informs the practice of living. This work lives on in those who know tragedy intimately.
And so these are ofrendas of love:
These further expand my regard of reading as a revolutionary rite. Divinatory reading creates a psychic portraiture, and the reader is the guide, going to recover the lost, frightened, silenced soul parts within, guiding the querent to new planes of consciousness and realization. On this plane the threads of time and space converge.
As a reader-writer-diviner, I am a Hierophant, a teacher. I am opening enrollment for Thresholds, to nurture freedom in my students. Liberation could not be achieved without each becoming literate, and this course promises to make students skilled readers, attending to gaze, posture, scale, symbol, implication. Students learn to critically question the nature of knowing, modifying the frames of perception, shuffling and reweaving to continuously adjust toward the scope of freedom.
What I teach is more than logos, more than disembodied technique and skill. I offer pathos, I offer soul care, a soul lineage.
My classroom is my church, where all welcome, but especially those without a home, those turned away, denied, rejected or misnamed. I offer soul stewardship, heart-healing and consciousness raising.
Every time I teach, I heal. I access a state where something pours through me, something that at its best is resonant and nourishing to my students. We are like rivers with calm flowing waters rushing through us and it’s a detangling of confusion, doubt, fear.
When you study with me, you get poured into.
I teach tarot to activate a kaleidoscopic consciousness in my students, showing them a method for personal re-coherence after continuous border-crossing. Learning is a path toward paradise where we wash clean our scars, and see our soul’s naked beauty. At the close of my last Thresholds cohort, I drew the Queen of Cups and a student shared that it reflected the containers I create, the space I hold.
They are beautiful, safe, spacious, initiatory and nourishing, sitting upon the place where life emerges and dissolves. They are like wave gazing, whereby you realize limitless potential, deepened desire and summoned attention toward the soul. These are revelatory Thresholds.
My containers, my classes, can handle the intensity of witness. There’s space for everyone in the ocean, and there’s space for you in my classes, in my cup.
~
Christopher
Luis D. León, El Don: the Gift of Healing, from Mesoamerica to the Borderlands, (University of California Press, 2004), 142.
Erika Buenaflor, Cleansing Rites of Curanderismo: Limpias Espirituales of Ancient Mesoamerican Shamans, (Bear & Company, 2018.)