spirit made flesh
what we can learn from african masquerades on surrender
I’ve always admired Nigerian masquerades.
The ability to pull spirit over you like a cloak and let it consume you, possess you, ride you, express itself through you. It’s a deep level of surrender to the divine, to trust it wholly with your body and allow yourself to become its vessel.
Winter brought a lot of clarity for me, the most illuminating being that my destiny in this lifetime is to be a masquerade: vessel, conduit, and container for the divine. My cloak is my keyboard and pen, and my words are God spilling over and through. It sounds brilliant, but accepting this requires that deep level of surrender I’ve been struggling with.
The bigger question is what am I surrendering to? How do I reconcile with the mysteries of life, death, and the puzzle of a God that straddles both, yet is beyond both? Not God in any religious sense, but God as the creative animus upholding all reality; God as that feeling in times of deep emotion: the viscerality of pain, the depths of sadness, the euphoric peaks of joy. God as flow state, continuous creative energy pulsing life into everything around it. That is God.
Spirit made flesh. Isn’t that what we are? A continuous flow of god-matter running through flesh bodies. Aren’t we all just masquerades in some way? The cloak is our bodies and the dance is our lives, but there’s a part of us that is unknowable and deeply subconscious, and that part controls and attracts all our life experiences. It doesn’t care for good or bad, but rather for experiencing everything on the human spectrum, from pain to pleasure. A back-and-forth, spiralling dance.
My life is not in my own hands. When that recognition first came, my survival instincts kicked in. I felt I had to fight myself for control, for the reigns to my own life. I felt my spirit was the real me, and I was just a pantomime performance, gifted with the delusion of control. When the mirage was exposed, I tried to force spirit into submission with rigidity. Rigid routines, rigid diets, rigid timelines, rigid expectations, all structure, brick house with no windows, no flow whatsoever. I crashed and burned like you wouldn’t believe.
But isn’t that what flesh does? Crash and burn. Live and die. Flesh craves the known, the tangible, the physical. But beyond flesh, there’s something infinitely static and unmoving, unknowable both in desires and mind. How do you cope with that? Doesn’t it make you want to rip your skin away from it, push it out, minimize it, regain control? I tried. Oh, I tried. And then I tired.
I’m scared of the spirit in me. I’m scared of my powerlessness against it. I’m scared of the kind of subconscious sabotage my spirit is capable of when we don’t agree. It’s a paranoia in me that on a certain level, my spirit delights in humiliation, in a fall-from-grace character arc. It makes me wonder if all of me, body-mind-spirit, will ever be aligned.
And then I remember the accuracy of my intuition, or how I can feel into the energy of a room or person with vividness. How I sift through energy shifts, how I receive messages in my dreams, how I commune with the trees and rivers like they understand me (they do). In many ways, I’ve already surrendered to the emerging spirit of all things. Any apprehension or fear I’m experiencing comes from my ego, who knows none of my perceived greatness or goodness is mine to claim. I’m just moving to the flow of God that commands me. I have no say over it, even if I tried.
My life is already in action and God is already unfolding in me. All I need to do is be here and witness. I’m just a key in a divine melody, being pressed by divine hands.
And there’s glory in being the chosen masquerade for your unique destiny. Of all cloaks and costumes this spirit of mine could have manifested through, it chose me. Of all minds to carry out its vision, it chose mine. I was moulded especially for this very destiny I’m enacting on Earth.
Beyond this vessel lies something deeper. Yes, it’s unknowable, but it’s felt too. We meet it each time in our emotional bodies, in our creative outputs, in the rhythm and humdrum of our lives. We meet it through our movements, and we can know pieces of it through ourselves, through what attracts and is attracted to us, through those dreams we chase and can’t let go, through the people we choose to love, and through the lives we are leading. It’s unknowable, yes, but there are traces of it in each present moment. Breadcrumbs of the mystery, curious to know if we will follow its trail home.
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i literally just wrote a poem about egungun and how the eguns are our ancestors and the fact that you posted this just confirmed something in me even though i don't know what that thing is
This was such an amazing read!! I talk to trees too and when I tell people that they actually listen to me, they look at me crazy. Thank you so much for sharing this Nneka.