The dark, faced

To worship her is to turn and face the thing you have spent your life arranging not to see, and to find, in the facing, that the terror was never in the dark. It was in the running.

Kali is the image most people arriving from the West find hardest to look at: black as the night before creation, garlanded with skulls, tongue out, dancing on the body of the god. She is death, time, and the dissolution of every form you are trying to hold. And the people who worship her call her Mother, and approach her not with dread but with devotion.

That is the teaching, and it is the previous three readings given a face. Emptying, planting, the refusal of hubris: all of it comes down, eventually, to whether you will turn and look at the thing you have spent your life arranging not to see. Notice the sentence the passage ends on. The terror was not in the dark. It was in the running from it. Read this slowly, and if it frightens you a little, that is the reading working. The Tantric tradition is very clear that the fear is the door, and that what is on the other side of it is called Mother for a reason.