your mouth is the fire | bhakti poem by téa nicolae

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your call is the cinder
your mouth is the fire
burning the tips of my fingers,
weaving my thoughts in gold wire.

my tears are the milk,
my oblations are the flowers
gliding onto the blest thāli,
pouring into fire that devours.

your curls are the waves,
your teeth are the moons
cooling the ārti of my heart ,
more precious than kingly boons.

my love is the oath,
my longing is the path
jostling me to you,
enough to endure the world’s wrath.

monsoon one, tell me
when my yearning reaches the skies
are you the sunlight
bathing my eyes?

Glossary
thāli – metal plate used in rituals of worship, on which offerings of fire and water are laid.
ārti – Sanskrit for ‘affliction’ or ‘distress’, as well as an alternative modern spelling for āratī, a ritual in which the light of a burning flame is offered to deities.

.❀。• *₊°。 ❀°。 my creative contribution to the Florilegium Anthology .❀。• *₊°。 ❀°

🖤🥀🌼 FLORILEGIUM 🥀🌼🖤 is an anthology of fiction & non-fiction literature compiled by the 2022 cohort of the Warwick Writing Programme, birthed out of love for writing and out of commitment to expression and self-discovery through the art of writing. Florilegium features 21 emerging writers and it holds short stories, flash fiction & poetry. it was a pure delight to work on this collection with my very talented colleagues and it is a joy to see it out in print! the Florilegium launch was held in february in London 🖤 photos from the launch below!

lemon tree flare | bhakti poem by Téa Nicolae

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i had thought
that i was just a girl
who wanted to plant lemon trees
but my hot blood scorched
the vine trailing on the windowsill.


Keśava,
you are pulling me to you by my teeth
and i follow happily.

exploring the warm tones of warwickshire beauty 💛


i followed you into the seven seas
and i followed you into the circle of mountains
i have been calling you with folded hands
and now i will dance to you
with my mouth open
and with flowers woven into my skin tissue.


monsoon one,
did you know
that the crevices of my heart
can hold you whole?
did you know
that the fire in my belly
can swallow the three worlds?


i know you did,
Hari.
i know you did.

Homam – Bhakti Poem by Téa Nicolae

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happy Mahāśivarātri! 🙏 reflecting today on the need to destroy within that which is familiar to be reborn as new. a poem inspired by the homam witnessed at the Chidambaram Temple (pictured):


Agni
is starved


mantra pours into the fire
ghee pours into the fire
milk pours into the fire
curd pours into the fire
sugar pours into the fire
silk pours into the fire


fear pours into the fire
past pours into the fire
doubt pours into the fire
attachment pours into the fire
woe pours into the fire
ire pours into the fire


Agni
licks his lips


quenching the homam within,
i wear the embers on my eyelids
with each blink
i regenerate.


Har Har Mahādeva!


🔱 further context: scholar Richard K. Payne explores homa as symbiosis between fire, the deity invoked in and concomitantly identified with the fire, and with the practitioner, who themselves becomes ‘ritually identified with both the deity and the fire’. in this, the offerings immolated in the fire are connoted with ‘spiritual obstacles that impede the practitioner from full awakening’. most significantly, ‘the practitioner’s own inherent wisdom is identified with the fire, and just as the offerings are transformed and purified, the practitioner’s own spiritual obstacles are, as well’. (2017)
Payne interestingly identifies two strains of interpretation of the ritual: first, ‘the yogic interiorization of ritual found in post-Vedic Indian religion, more as a form of esoteric physiology than as a psychologized understanding of visualization’; second, ‘the sexual symbolism’ ‘attached to all aspects of fire rituals’. (2017)

The Western Revival of Goddess Worship – Academic Paper

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very excited to share the first academic paper of mine that is published in complete form in a peer-reviewed journal! it is entitled ‘The Western Revival of Goddess Worship’ and it has been published in Feminist Theology, volume 31(2).

‘[Western] Women are resisting secularism and are connecting with the transcendental on their own terms, while seeking self-understanding and self-realisation in a gynocentric cosmology. From deifying female sexuality to revering the cosmos as the womb of an all-pervading Mother Goddess, the Goddess Movement encapsulates women’s defiant quest for wholeness.’

i wrote this article two years ago (which is the approximate duration of academic publishing, haha!) during my first MA at Lancaster University, under the supervision of the fantastic Dr. Brian Black, whom i am most grateful to. this paper encapsulates my views at that time, and although my perspectives have become more refined since – both as a scholar and as a practitioner – i remain pleased with this work and i am hopeful that it contributes to the illumination of the phenomenon of religious revival in scholarship. 🙏

you can read it here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/09667350221135089

Caturāvṛtti Tarpaṇam | bhakti poem by Téa Nicolae

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my Lord,

melt me on the betelnut leaf

show me that i am rough on the surface

but soft all the way through

my rugged edges,

my delusions of mass

my convictions of being,

my frights of flow

in the melding of haldi

and sanctified water,

apaḥ sips my contractions

pours of holy water,

my fissures dissolve into You

fingertips adorned in yellow hue

and moist eyes of velvet,

i throw my head back and gasp

𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝓂𝓊𝓈𝓉 𝒷𝑒 𝓁𝑜𝓋𝑒

🌼 photos: the ecstatic Caturāvṛtti Tarpaṇam, completed in forty-one days with my saṅgha of Śabda Yoginīs.

“Tarpaṇam is ritual libation in which the gross flows into the subtle, the lower into the higher, the rigid into the flexible, the known into knowing and the knowing into the knower.

Gaṇapati rules over the gaṇas in the Mūlādhāra cakra. It is here at the Mūlādhāra that solidity becomes our way of life. As soon as I think or say, “this is how I am,” my being has solidified exactly into that way of being. All other possibilities are eliminated. What was previously flowing (from the Sva-adhiṣṭhāna) has now become fixed, definitive, and stubborn.

When we invoke Mahāgaṇapati, he dissolves these self-imposed chains, allowing them to flow out of restrictions toward expansiveness. Unless this solidity melts, there is no growth or expansion.

In November 2022, Śabda Yoginīs across the world took the saṅkalpa of completing the Caturāvṛtti Tarpaṇam for forty-one days. Every day, we prepared a turmeric pyramid representing Mahāgaṇapati that dissolved with 444 offerings of mantra-infused water. The collective experience of this ritual resulted in exponential expansion, groundedness and miraculous transformation and transmutation of the gross to the subtle…

Deep gratitude to our Guru Maṇḍala for guiding us, leading us, and dissolving us.” 💛

🌼 read the rest on Śabda Institute, where you can also find many gorgeous photos from the collective Tarpaṇam experience. 🙏

Morocco: immersion into beauty and devotion

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“The Universe belongs to God.” is written on the walls of the Hassan II Mosque. 🤍 Morocco weaves beauty and devotion magnificently within itself, and it has left a profound mark on me. seeing those splendid lands filled me with joy and almost recognition, as if i had been there before, perhaps in another life. what was most significant for me was witnessing the calls to prayer. it moved me to tears – to see people drop their everything to join prayer, with fervour and innocence. from truck drivers parking their car on the side of the road and kneeling before their devotion on the land, to workers kneeling on the pavement on busy streets with folded hands… truly a most touching sight for sore eyes.

what is more, the scents, the architecture, the nature, the monuments – “deeply fulfilling to the senses”, as my beloved teacher wrote, who, as grace happens, had just experienced Morocco before i did. 🤍

photos from Casablanca, Rabat, Essaouira, Marrakesh, Fes, including captures of… tree-climbing goats!! 💛 a romanian custom is to caress a lamb on the first days of the new year for good luck & auspiciousness – hopefully holding a goatling baby is a close-enough attempt!

and, finally, photos from New Year’s Eve, spent in the electric Marrakesh! 🖤

“I drop the dying year behind me like a shawl and let it fall. The urgent fireworks fling themselves against the night.
I lean back, lip-read the heavens talking on in light, syllabic stars. I see, at last, they pray at us. Time falls and falls through endless space, to when we are.”

🎆 Carol Ann Duffy 🎆

haunting beauty

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Roma – the haunting beauty of marble! the sculpture of Artemis (#2) is her incarnation as “Lady of the Animals”. the close rows of overlapping breasts, interpreted by some to be bulls’ testicles, signify fertility & abundance. spellbinding to see the sculptures coming to life in the city & mesmerising to face Artemis. tears upon seeing Mary’s beautiful face in the Pietà. 🤍

*sculptures of Ponte Umberto I, Artemis, Pietà, Vaticano, Ponte Sant’Angelo, Fontana di Trevi, Pantheon.

cresciuti sotto un fiore
nascosti con i segreti
creati da Dio
sparsi nell’universo
🥀

[blanco]

gratitude to have celebrated mammina in the beautiful citta eterna. thank you for your out-of-this-world support, for bearing with me through my times of casual cruelty and immaturity. i owe what i have built and what i am building to your generosity. i love you.

my youth spills on dancefloors by Téa Nicolae

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*poem published in Kamena Magazine, 2022. written in 2019. from my ‘teenage angst’ collection.

pitch-black clubs,
dazed fridays.
my youth pumps through my veins.

high heels,
shiny fake ids.
my youth grounds me.

grimy dance floors,

my youth bursts inside of me

it glides through me

wildly

as my heart throbs beneath my skin
matching the music’s beat

i please my youth
bending my body obediently
with the deafening bass

midnight
the synth dismantles my mind
and my limbs are not mine anymore
they follow the sound

there is no past
or future
only my body
spinning madly
only the music
twisting in my ears
only my youth
spilling on dance floors
from the crashed bottles of wine at my feet

She dances me to her call | bhakti poem by Téa Nicolae

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in the depths of my being, She dances me to her call:

“come to me. I want all of you, my child. no part of you is too dark, too gritty, too cruel for me. I claim all of you.”

Māiyā! your waves carry your call and roll it against my chest. i seek you with my breath, eyes, hands, and knees. my lungs seek you like they seek air.

Ya Devī! soothing her tears,

Kṛṣṇa told Pāñcālī

that just as you, Śrī Gaṅgā, hold and wash all pollutions yet are ever-pristine,

so does the fallen empress remain untainted by her shame.

aches bathed in your luster,

i plead:

take all of me, Devī.

leave nothing of me behind.

establish me in knowing

that despite my wrongs, fears and corruptions, i, too,

your fragment in the microcosm,

remain unmarred.

may the holy flow of your untamed waters

sweeten the harshness i bear towards myself and the world

soften the rigid corners straining my being

loosen the knots hindering you from coursing within me.

Śrī Mātre Namaḥ. 🙏

photos: before & after bathing in the waters of Śrī Gaṅgā in the auspicious Gangotri. Śabda Yātra. 🙏 the blessing of blessings. 💙

for how many lifetimes have you been calling me to You? | bhakti poem

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for how many lifetimes
have you been calling me to you, Devī?
for how many lifetimes
have i cowered?

for how many lifetimes
have i been lost, Devī?
for how many lifetimes
have you watched me stumble?

i have been through many wombs
to rest my head at your feet today.

yet here i am,
my Devī.

would it be
greedy of me
to plead with you
one more time?

will you
grace me?
will you
wash away
my good, my ugly?
my irreverences, my pride?
my agonies, my beauty?

will you
cleanse this heart
until i am nothing but flow
rushing forth to meet your shores
like the water running between your locks

🤍 what came to me upon seeing the magnificence of Gaṅgā Devī for the very first time. pictures: Gangotri. Gomukh, Her Source. they fail to encompass Her beauty.