By Pooja Prema, Rites of Passage Project Founder & Artistic Director
Photo by Jill Goldman
Victory to the flowering of impossible, necessary, visions! Victory to the divine feminine. This room is real in flower and weave. Cynthia Alberto of Weaving Hand came into my life to give form to an impossible vision I have held for 3 years. Maia Robbins-Zust help build the V, along with my dear friends Sarah Nicholson & Gabrielle Senza, all the way up to the final touches supported by my sisters Sokhna Heathyre Mabin & Azaria Carolynn Kent Ulmer. And its every ounce as beautiful and sacred as I had imagined it in my mind's eye - composed of thousands of local and global flowers and fabrics, and dozens of gorgeous hand-thrown vases by ceramicist Jenny Min. This room is dedicated to all of our ancestors. It is the final room of Rites of Passage: 20/20 Vision, the culmination, the ultimate flowering of the House. I wish to keep adding to it, tend it like a garden. But today is the final day. And after today we give death to this temporary garden, and we disperse this amazing community of BIPOC women healers, artists, visionaries.
My life - and our lives - is forever changed in ways I can't even know right now. After 3 years fo gestation, and so much sacrifice - literally laying myself down on the altar of life for this project - and running a marathon to birth it, navigating the patriarchy in order to create a brave and true space for the Feminine to bloom, and extending myself beyond my capacity over and over, I am a proud mama and co-creator of this Beauty.
During our Grief Ritual on the 8th, I spoke this to one of our apprentices, after several nights on just a few hours of sleep. "When a woman gives birth, it can last for 3 days with almost no sleep. Its hard, but it's an honor." And so it's been with ROP. By far, its been the hardest thing I've ever done. But it's also been the most beautiful, most breath-giving thing. This community is something I've longed for my whole life. A temporary village of kindred souls.
We want you to experience this before its gone. We want the whole world to. This is tender and fierce medicine. And it will never happen again.
We are the Once & Future Vision or our Ancestors. Tickets by donation online or at the door.
Thank you to ALisa Starkweather & the many humans of Collective Healing Legacy who sponsored this room