How Oshun Helps Creatives Power Through the 2020 Paradigm Shift
Illustration by Amirah Mercer. Photo credit: Netflix / Giga Khurtsilav.
When Beyonce dropped her visual album Lemonade four years ago, she popularized the image of Oshun, the sensual Yoruban goddess — or orisha — of the rivers. In a golden goddess gown, she emerged from a torrent of water as a woman scorned with a smile on her face and a bat in hand ready to wreak havoc on other people’s property. She was sexy and vengeful and joyous all at the same time.
Ayesha Faines, a Grapevine fan favorite and the founder of Women Love Power, an educational resource for women to expand their “soft power” skillset, saw an opportunity to use Oshun’s newfound popularity as a metaphor for exploring feminine power. In a video viewed more than 125,000 times, she broke down what women could learn from Oshun’s seemingly chaotic energy.
While trying to make sense of being creative or productive in this 2020 coronavirus pandemic, I came across Ayesha’s video. I saw the parallels between Oshun’s beautiful storm and Mother Earth’s current cleansing. I felt like if there were any energy we artists should tap into right now, it’s one that aligns with a more natural and unpredictable process of creation, like Oshun.
As people deal with very real problems of health and finances, working through grief, confusion and fear, we artists and entrepreneurs are under increasing pressure to continue to find inspiration through it all. So, I asked Ayesha to return her gaze to Oshun to help us make sense of why this very feminine process of rebirth is actually a good thing for artists, and what we can learn from Oshun in order to ride through the storm.
AMIRAH MERCER: Let’s start with defining ‘soft power.’
AYESHA FAINES: Soft power is power by means of attraction versus power by means of coercion. Typically when you think about power, these very masculine ideas come to mind: power-wheel steering, for example, or power lunch. But power — and brands are a great example of this — can also come from inspiring people to want to join you, to want to follow you by way of pleasure, by way of attraction, by way of influence and diplomacy. It’s a softer hand.
AMIRAH: That’s a perfect segue into Oshun. Why is Oshun one of your favorite goddesses?
AYESHA: She represents soft power, but more than anything, I think she represents the power of love. And when I say love, I don’t necessarily mean ‘I love you,’ but more so love as a universal energy, an attracting force that brings things together — creative energy. Creative energy is love.
She is a metaphor for all that is pleasurable and good and sweet in society, and the idea that we must have pleasure. I think that’s something we forget, because Western society is so anti-feminine that we often reject these aspects of the feminine, like pleasure. We are a sensible society, not a sensual society, because we look at things like pleasure as frivolous, but they’re really significant and necessary for human beings to thrive. We’re so focused on work and production. I think that’s why so many people feel uncomfortable right now, because the feminine is reclaiming itself. And we’re in a place where we are forced into the very feminine realm of chaos.
AMIRAH: A lot of people are feeling guilty about the fact that they might not be productive in the middle of a pandemic. What advice do you have for that creative or entrepreneur?
AYESHA: You hit the nail: It’s the guilt and the shame of being still, of spending time in meditation. And meditation might be any time you just stop and think — you’re just meditating on things, you’re meditating on life. Creativity happens in cycles. All creativity is a cycle — death, birth, rebirth — so we have these periods in our life where we are giving birth, we are fruitful, the seeds we planted are sprouting, but we have to have these periods of darkness. That’s the period of stillness. All creatives have to respect that there’s a balance that you’re going to have to battle through, and that you’re going to have periods where things are going on the inside but not necessarily on the outside. It’s a great thing. And I believe that the universe is self-correcting. When society gets to a point where it’s completely out of balance, self-correcting forces will happen. Right now we are experiencing what it is to be in that realm of feminine, which is so necessary in order to have production — to have stillness, to have time for contemplation, to have time for rest, to have time for community, because that’s how we get our inspiration, by interacting with other people. So all these meaningful conversations we’re having on FaceTime will one day be useful.
Illustration by Amirah Mercer. Photo credit: Beyonce / Ivan Bandura
But I think what you said is so profound — the guilt, because we do live in a world that is so production-oriented, particularly America, that we do have a guilt over taking time to do nothing, or taking time for pleasure, or taking time for ourselves. There is a lot of guilt wrapped around that. And that’s really unfortunate, because, as Oshun represents, it’s necessary.
There’s this myth about how Oshun seduces Ogun, the orisha of technology, productivity, and industry. One day he decides to stop producing and he goes off into a forest by himself and everything shuts down. No other orisha can appeal to him to come out of the forest and allow things to begin working again. Sort of like Trump wanting to come back to work, but we can’t. And Oshun goes into the forest and she just starts dancing and laughing and being all the things that she is, being this embodiment of pleasure, appealing by way of attraction. Ogun starts to walk over to her, and she seduces him and she leads him out of the forest, and things start working again. So not only is that a metaphor of soft power, but it’s also a metaphor for how you have to have a balance between productivity and pleasure.
AMIRAH: Production is a form of creation, and creation is a feminine principle, but this idea of production is so masculine in our society. What’s the difference between ‘production’ and ‘creation’?
AYESHA: The creative process is the birth process. It’s the inception, it’s the brainstorm, it’s literally that chaotic process that it takes to bring something into fruition. So if I were to create a work of art — I’m inspired, I sit down, I play with it, I work on it, and boom, I have this work of art. That’s creativity. I think production is, ‘Now I need to market and sell this work of art.’ So now the focus is less on the birth process, but it is on how do we go out and market and sell it and produce more copies. So it’s a different kind of energy, and both energies can exhaust themselves over time. You can create so much that you have nothing left, but you can also produce so much that you have nothing left. There is this sort of balance. Creativity on a large scale looks like conservation, it looks like planting trees, whereas production looks like chopping them down to make things. So you see why there has to be this balance.
AMIRAH: What would you say to someone who was thrown out of balance by what’s happening right now? Let’s say, they had a period of creation, and now they were getting ready to produce, they were getting ready to sell, and it’s like, there’s no one to sell to right now, or they can’t go out and sell the way that they normally do because they have to stay in the house. How can they learn from Oshun and ride the wave until they can start producing again?
AYESHA: One of the things that I think is powerful about her is that she’s the deity of the rivers and the sweet waters. This concept of water as something that represents flow and the ability to go with what is happening — the power that exists in surrendering to what is happening, because we have an expectation of how things are supposed to unfold in our lives, but you know, anybody who knows anything about bringing things to life knows that expectations are made to be dashed. You can set your intentions, and you can put faith and energy and love into that intention, and know that it will come to be, but you don’t get to control how it will come to be.
A lot of people right now are thrown off, because the idea of how things were going to come to fruition has been shattered. But that’s a good thing, because it’s an opportunity to learn flow, to learn that, ‘Okay, everything that I sowed is going to fruit, but I’m not going to be able to determine how and when, so I need to surrender to this moment.’ I think when you start to surrender to the moment you realize that there is always opportunity to be had. Whereas the opportunity you thought you might have had may be gone, there’s another one here in this moment.
AMIRAH: How can someone in general bring more feminine energy into their work?
AYESHA: Honestly, by resting, by doing what a lot of people are uncomfortable doing and making time for pleasure. And that can look like anything. For me, I grew up dancing and I didn’t realize as an adult how vital that was for me, but even in the beginning of this quarantine, the dance studio shut down, and the last thing I’m doing is dancing salsa during the pandemic! But they started putting classes up online, and I finally took some classes in my kitchen and I felt like myself again. I didn’t even realize that I didn’t feel like myself, and I suddenly had all this energy.
I think that to stay creative and to be able to bring that feminine energy to your work is to really acknowledge the need for rest, the need for pleasure, the need for love, not just people to love but things to love and loving energy, so not allowing any energy that is not of love into your life. And the need for communing with other people. Nothing sparks the creative process like interacting with other people or even interacting with other creative things. Like, I always get inspired when I’m in a museum. I leave with all these ideas because other people’s passion is inspiring me. So yeah I think it’s kind of immersing yourself in that realm of the feminine and not seeing that realm of pleasure and beauty and art and love as something that is optional, but something that is totally vital for our creative process and just for us to thrive.
AMIRAH: Are there any other feminine archetypes you’re inspired by?
AYESHA: My favorite deity is Neith — she’s an ancient Egyptian goddess, who is not only a deity of war, but she’s a deity of sensuality and sex. She gives birth to Ra, the sun god. The Greeks kind of took Neith and turned her into Athena, who was a virgin, and instead of giving birth to the sun god, she is birthed by Zeus, the sky god, so you see how the Greeks put their own patriarchal remix on this very powerful goddess. But I love goddesses like Neith or even Ishtar or Inanna, who are goddesses of both love and war, because they represent the idea that these two realms of wisdom and strategy and going for what you want are just as feminine as loving and sexuality and beauty. And in the ancient world, those dualities are balanced within feminine entities. So they inspire me quite a bit, and also I think I have a warrior side [Laughs].
AMIRAH: I can definitely see that! When was the last time you defined freedom for yourself?
AYESHA: In 2014, I was up for a position in television news. And I got it. But this executive at a particular network changed their mind, and it made me think really long and hard about what it was that I wanted for my future and what it was that I was willing to fight for. I realized that I was staying in television news because it was all that I knew, but it really wasn’t truly my heart’s desire. And that was the time in my life when I really stopped, stopped thinking about what’s next and took a moment to think about what would my dream life look like, and how could I begin to work toward that. I think that’s the moment when I defined freedom for myself, and it was probably the moment when I got out the matrix.
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Themes: creation vs production; rest; soft power; birth and rebirth; cycles; pleasure