How my religious lifestyle influences my writing: exploring spirituality, orishas, & death

Illustration by Gina Ledor

After many nights of getting inspired from a ceiling and writing poetry, I finally wondered about how being born into a religious lifestyle has affected my writing, and essentially, my life. I am a practicing Santera. Santería is my lifestyle, and it is why I write (please do not queue in Sublime, as hard as it may be). This may not be true to the blind eyes and minds, but for someone who perceives life through a spiritual and religious lens every day, I can say that my poetry and short stories are highly influenced by the spiritual physicality of living this lifestyle, by the pebbled incense we cleanse our home with after a person with a juju comes in, or walking into a room and feeling the death that lingers.

For those reborn, they are crowned with a feminine and masculine energy. These energies are known as Orishas/deities where all these figures are individualized by paths, Afro-Cuban mythological stories, and by motifs. The energy I am crowned with is the feminine energy of Oshun. She is the energy of love, fertility, abundance, and celebration. She holds great love for humanity and protects all children who cannot talk. She is one of the youngest Orishas. Her colors are yellow, gold, and sometimes coral. Her items and motifs are the mirror, gold jewels, ornate hand-fans, the drum as a representation of music, and peacocks. Her special ingredients are honey, star anise spices, pumpkin, dry shrimp, and cinnamon.

While I pushed myself into the poetry world, producing poems, I noticed I tend to gravitate towards descriptions that fit under Oshun’s favorite things. Many people do not know this about my poetry, but when I add words and images that evokes the senses, I pay homage to my Orisha of Oshun, especially in my poetry of love. Why do I do this? It is a subtle way to pay my respects to this practice and the deities. I am eternally grateful to live day-by-day connecting the world with how I was raised. I do so with more precision to intertwine my soul and my body. To further this conversation about religion and spirituality, I began to write about the spiritual world.

Seeing and interacting with spirits is a great influencer of my material. Not every person can see these things, so would a writer with this ability be expressing poetry in an uncharted layer? Maybe not uncharted, but at least uncommon.

Poets have great pleasures in writing about the living. Living people, living flowers, and death as objects. Death as an abstraction and expression becomes incredibly broad and it is different for every writer. We collectively display mourning, guilt, emotional trauma, but exploring the question of “what is death?” becomes highly subjective. This is why the abstraction becomes entertaining, painful, insightful, and/or introspective to readers. What if we throw in the honesty of a writer’s experience with spirits along with this grand idea of what death is? What layers are then added to a poem of divinity and death?

With all this combined, my poetry holds a great sentiment to many parts of what I am: my egos, my emotions, my creative practice of expanding my voices in poems, and most importantly, my lifestyle (as described). I use the oddities of how I perceive life as material to not only have my readers vicariously live through it, but to acknowledge that perception of life is different for everyone. For every ingredient or color I describe, I quietly reference my practices and display these images with my grand love in my imaginative reality.

Readers and Fellow Poets, take advantage of

your eyes

    ears   ears

      Tongue

         Skin

These pieces of your materialism are the gateway to celebrate humanity and what the world has always offered, whether these gifts sit around or not. Commemorate the earth and the spirits by writing. Your day-to-day visceral experiences cannot be taken for granted. The metaphysical and spiritual will wait for you.

Here is a poem to close this article:

Child of sweet water

Fern whistled like wind

rustle and some kin

of rowdy bodies, tethered 

eyes do something fierce 

to me. Candied touching, 

wind smells of 

anise. River melt 

for felt, candles 

and dreams do know 

about intimacy. Sweet waters 

make me think, and somehow, 

It is singing. 

If you are interested in learning more about Santería, I  recommend Powers of the Orishas: Santería and the Worship of Saints by Migene González-Wippler.