Matîrjâ Dabâkâ ✦ Mythic Tale
A mythic tale of what is handed down within the maternal lineage. 🏺 An ode to the pattern breakers and lineage healers.
✦ Matîrjâ Dabâkâ - The Vessels of Maternal Lineage ✦
When I was a girl, my mother carried a large vessel against her waist. This rounded aginâ, or clay pot, had a large crack running down the sides and could hardly contain that which resided within without the contents errupting and spilling about.
But yet, my mother carried this old clay pot, storing her beloved and precious stories and weavings within and telling me that one day, this vessel would be mine.
For this was no ordinary clay pot, it was my mother's mother's, and her mother's before. And it carried not only the cherished fragments and weavings, but also the things that had been left behind in each of these women's lives - the words left unsaid, the unrequited loves, the memories forgotten.
And with each new pair of hands the vessel moved into, the cracks grew deeper with the weight of all that it has witnessed and held. Containing traditions and loss, pain and love. With every initiated woman who was gifted the aginâ, the weight was harder to bare, yet no one seemed to realize the increasing burden.
By the time that this vessel came into my own hands, I could hardly lift this weathered pot without losing all that laid within. I lugged this offering around day after day while tending to my hearth and home until one day, seemingly without warning, the clay pot slipped from its' long held perch upon my hip and went hurtling towards the earthen floor.
Upon much consideration, it seemed much more practical to allow the vessel to lie in crumbles - yet I heard the whispers of a call to gather the shards and remains, grind them into dust, and mix them within the clay that will form the new body of what will be my freshly minted aginâ.
This vessel is light, mighty yet small. Created to be held by multiple sets of hands, crafted with those who will weild it in mind, and infused with all the ancestral wisdom and stories from the mothers before, but free from the fetters that were passed along for so long in the old dabàká.
For no woman, nor vessel, should carry the weight of a lineage alone.
A chant in Proto-Celtic, the ancient mother tongue of all Celtic languages to connect with the essence of the matîrjâ dabâkâ - the pronunciation doesn't matter much, follow your inner knowing. Repeat this chant when connecting to the wisdom of your womb and lineage.
Feel free to drum and make up your own melody while singing aloud.
Matîrjâ dabâkâ
Matîrjâ dab - â -kâaa
Wosistam adkeni wêdo
Wamba sâti sneru
Matîrjâ (maternal lineage) dabâkâ (vessel, container, clay pot)
Wosistam (protect, guardianship) Adkeni (lineage) Wêdo (wisdom)
Wambâ (womb) sâti (filled, saturated with) sneru (bone marrow wisdom, ancestral memory)