Serpentine Fire–the Preface to Spirit in the Dark

Serpentine Fire

Earth, Wind, and Fire, the Black Soul group sings a still popular song by the title, “Serpentine Fire.” That song has always spoken to me, but even more so now: “Come on tell the story, Morning Glory, all about the serpentine fire. You know as a people, you will laugh one night in the serpentine fire.” I suppose this is the night. I may not be laughing (yet), but I am feeling the victory of my recovery from one of the most important events of my life, and it is at the end of long journey fraught with deep thinking and multi-tiered feelings that I am finally prodded by forces within to actually start to write (again) in earnest. The urge, like the reflex that makes one regurgitate despite an equal urge to hold back, is larger than I am, and though I’d like to know what I shall say, and would want to wait until I could structure it, I can’t hold back any longer. The time has come and the story will doubtless tell itself. But this will be a collection of disparate essays and notes, and journal entries that attempt to trace my spiritual development while documenting my esoteric thought on new age topics. I am not sure I can chronicle the journey of my late life to this new phase of it, but it seems I necessarily have to start with my encounter with the “serpentine fire.”

I will talk here about the lightning strike injury that I sustained in 2002 and the vicissitudes of the initial impact on my life, the day to day coping, and the gradual healing and grand changes that it affected in my life. But I also want to tell anecdotes and tales from the broad road of my travels. As a confirmed and seasoned feminist, I continue to think of my writing life in terms of the dialogue: as a Black woman, woman, a lesbian, and a senior, a person with disability and, more recently as a spirit healer.