Orixás beyond borders …

Religion is often used as a flag.

A large colored cloth that you can wave or use to wrap yourself in to find protection.

It defines us, but it can close us within rigid boundary lines.

I remember a girlfriend who had been dating an Indian guy; he professed to be an atheist but had on his bedside table a delicious statue of a deity that his mother had given him to accompany him during an important study trip (in which he would have met this girl, of different culture and religion).

She loved the statuette and took it with herself at her parents' house. Her mother was terrified: was it that her daughter was converting to Hinduism? She figured the daughter in colored clothes and with a dot on the forehead.

One morning the deity was found beheaded. The culprit was never identified: the subsequent inquiry concluded that it certainly had accidentally fallen from the shelf on which it rested. The (non-existent) risk of "conversion" was thus averted.

Another globetrotter friend was in New York when she fell in love with two piercing (and islamic) black eyes that moved with ease in the most fascinating and tested melting pot.

Everything was fine, but only in New York.

Love could not be carried across the border.

I remember another friend who argued, until breaking, if to get married with a Christian Catholic or Orthodox Christian rite.

I would have other examples of cultural barriers never broke through, but I prefer to tell a story of opening: that of candomblé.

I advise you to start from the reading of a novel by Jorge Amado, the one in which Oyá is incorporated in a statue of Santa Barbara to go and free her daughter, unjustly and sadly forced into a bourgeois and respectable environment.

When finally, after a succession of hilarious events, the order is restored and the life path of the girl realigned to her odu (destiny) and Oyá's daughter is free to dance in a terreiro of candomblè, there is no break between before and after.

The girl does not stop being what she was (born in a certain family, with a different culture and religion) but, simply and happily, she becomes free to be all of herself.

Candomblé is a story of openness.

The slaves had to cross the boundaries between their regions and their tribes, making their orixás survive in a single pantheon that did not exist in Africa. Forced to Catholicism, many embraced him, never ceasing to believe in the orixás.

Until not long ago it was common to end the initiation with the blessing of the Catholic priest in church.

Even today, the axexé funeral ritual almost always precedes the funeral in church.

There are many people who come to candomblè from various life paths and who never stop being what they were before: however they add to what they already were, the ability to draw energy from an inner spiritual resource whose existence they ignored.

Candomblè is a story of openness and realization.

Openness to one's interior, access to one's energy, realization of the spiritual path.

Orixás know no boundaries, especially those of our mind and heart.

Axé.

Fuchsia. The flower of freedom and openness.