‘Disappointment is a multilayered teacher. Not many of us would choose to apprentice with her, yet sooner or later, most of us do. People disappoint us. Luck runs out. Status declines. Strength fails us. Then, the goddess Dhumavati flies into our awareness, accompanied by her crow, a harbinger of worldly misfortune who ironically also bestows the inner gifts of detachment, emptiness, and freedom.’
(Sally Kempton, 2013, Awakening Shakti: the transformative power of the goddesses of yoga, Sounds True, p. 221)
Dhumavati, the crone goddess of disappointment and letting go, challenges me to spend some time in her company, although there is no outer sign of her presence: life is going well. Perhaps it is because of that, that I can pause, and look behind.
Kempton describes Dhumavati as sitting in a chariot that has nothing harnessed to pull it: stalled. I find it an uncomfortable image. Perhaps too close to how I feel in some important creative projects.
Yet Kempton explores deeper esoteric meanings, finding the carriage going nowhere ‘can also represent the stillness of the eternal present… the void state where forms dissolve…’ (p. 223). The energy of Dhumavati, of disappointment and letting go, ‘lives in whatever is desolate, abandoned, unfortunate, and unpleasant… a dry lake bed… barren rice fields in a drought-ridden landscape, or in places where clear-cutting has turned rainforest into desert. She is dead coral reefs and foreclosed houses with broken windows… refugee camps and displaced peoples moving without passports over desolate ground. In all these ways, she denies the ordinary sweetness of life. She is everything that we want to turn away from’ (p. 223).
I too, want to turn away. Perhaps a superstitious fear, that if I linger too long, some of Dhumavati’s territory will rub off on me. I am not doing so well that I can afford this, I decide.
Kempton describes many lush, abundant, generous goddesses in the book, but none has quite the power to discomfort me this primitive, fearful way, as Dhumavati.
Perhaps it is the time of year: the end of the old, the start of the new. Festivities, uncertainties. A feeling it is time to do some deep reflection, and perhaps some reordering of priorities. And perhaps, turning to face the dust, and embark on some grim travelling through some inner, infertile landscapes that have been left dry a long time.
Disregarded. Turned away from. Deserted, in the hope of more abundance, elsewhere. And, it has proven so. Many of us live lives of unparallelled abundance, prosperity, peace.
‘Dhumavati is not a popular goddess’ says Kempton (p. 228). ‘But sometimes in a moment when the worst happens, you discover an enormous dignity and peace in simply standing in what you are’ (p. 231).
‘As an inner archetype, Dhumavati is your capacity for letting go of the things you thought you needed… a skill that arises through a particular form of grace’ (pp. 232-233).
Perhaps Dhumavati can be seen as accompanying some of the difficult aspects of the creative process. The time where we have worked as hard as we are capable of, and can do no more, and the work is not done. The stage of surrender, of letting go. That bleak moment of laying down all our hopes and visions.
And yet, it can be that disappointment, loss and despair, the time where we admit defeat, and give up… somehow these moments can dig a channel for other energy to flow into the work, from somewhere that feels like outside of ourselves.
I don’t think we can fake this giving up, bypass the real gritty work of emptying ourselves of resources, of trawling to the bottom of what we have to give. But somehow, there, sitting in an empty chariot going nowhere, for however long… we can receive a gift of grace: A sudden new idea of how to approach at a different angle. A realisation that the piece is not entirely what we thought it was: that there is a vein we have tapped, that needs to be worked in a different direction. Quite suddenly, we can be excited about the work again. ‘Why didn’t I see it before?!’ I have wondered, as a new, previously unseen approach now seems so obvious.
Perhaps I was too busy steering the chariot? Flying along, the wind in my hair, heedless of what the work was trying to express through me. Caught up in my own vision, oblivious to the forthcoming hazards, roadblocks, and dead ends.
Dhumavati is described by Kempton as ‘ugly, unsteady, and angry’ (p. 222), wearing dirty clothes, with four hands carrying a winnowing basket and broom, a torch, a sword, a spear, and a skull bowl or a club (depending on the reference): a rare, unbeautiful goddess, one whose name means ‘the smoky one’ (p. 221). Her gift is to show us who we are, when everything else falls away. ‘She takes us down into the cave of the soul, and when we follow her, she shows us the spring that bubbles up out of the empty places in the heart’ (p. 227).
Dhumavati, in crushing us, expands our borders ‘until borders have no more meaning. Then you flow through reality like smoke and stare out at the world with a vision that understands that you are in everything’ (Kempton p. 233).
And, in this place of no borders, you can begin again, take a new approach to the creative work. A humbled, more vast approach, recognising there is more than you, available to you.
Dhumavati and her crow watch over us, from her silent chariot, in stillness.
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