Chapter Two: The Language of Grace

She’d had a lover, once, in college– a Iyawo priestess of Yemaya who paradoxically held a Bachelor of Arts in Religion from one of the South’s largest universities. A woman with broad shoulders and long flowing dredlocks, who had seduced her with the lyrical cadence of her Louisiana patois and the indefatigable glimmer of amusement in her endless brown eyes. "You’re too much of the mind, cher…Where is your sense of wonder? Your awe of those things greater than you?" her lover had chided on more than one endless sweating night, their bodies twined about one another in a shameless display. Had it been seen—it would have brought the Klan to their door, burning them out the way her lover’s father and grandfather’s churches had been burned. A vain attempt to sear out the ideas they had preached, the passion they had carried within them. "You are the most secular Catholic I’ve ever met."

And you’re the most disingenuous, overeducated voodoo priestess I’ve ever met," she had always countered dryly, forestalling further lecturing– such as that initiation into la Regla Lucumi didn’t imply immediate surrender of one’s modern sensibilities—by straddling her lover’s broad hips and bending her mouth to a task that invoked many gods in all their multicultural glory.

But twelve-odd years gone, the admonition still remained with Kim Legaspi– her life’s work a seeming testament to mind over matter, despite her incessant attempts to holistically treat the damaged souls and hearts of the people who came to her for care. It was never enough, she mused more often than she’d wanted to admit. Treat the mind, sacrifice the soul. Were she to believe in the Western concept of the soul as demarcated by the religious powers-that-be, hers would be sentenced to an unfathomable Hell all too soon. There was just enough Catholic in her to make some renegade synapses in her brain believe that maybe Dante wasn’t completely wrong, and shuffling off this mortal coil held no particular appeal to Kim because of it.

Still, she had shaken off the dregs of her father’s Old World side of the family and lived her life the only way she had known how. Integrating her own heart and mind, offering her lovers the best of her soul and her body, never promising more than she was able to give at any one time, never accepting more from an overzealous suitor’s affections than she was prepared to reciprocate.