In a Dark Time Even Accidental Prophecies Must Be Heard

To Make Right More Right: On True Ho'oponopono

Jan 19, 2025

Two of my most popular posts here on The Corpus Callosum Chronicles are essays I wrote in response to submission calls from the journal Dark Mountain.

The editors have just declined my third submission, and it couldn’t be more timely. In fact, I’m grateful, because not only did they inspire me to write the first two well-loved essays, their “rejection” has also provided me with the opportunity to be delighted at the merging of my daily life and the mystical, showing me how I am a prophet writing letters to myself, or some version of myself far into a future I can’t see, and will never experience in this form named Jennifer Denise Lighty, only this time, I do get to experience the prophecy coming true!

The delight came in ceremony today with Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals. Brother Ke’oni has been sharing the codes of archaic ho’oponopono, which originally did not emphasize forgiveness as a method of conflict resolution. Instead, archaic ho’oponopono began, and still begins, with what is right, and moves outward in circles from there. The word literally means, “to make right more right.” I am not going to go into all the incredible wisdom shared by Brother Ke’oni in this ceremony, which is still ongoing. If you’d like to learn about true ho’oponopono, you can still join for Part 3 and watch the replays of the first two ceremonies here:

The Code of Ho'oponopono and Its Role in the Completion of Poverty

I will share one aspect of how one comes to know one’s own “rightness” according to Hawaiian culture.

Traditionally, a child would name itself before it was born, passing this info on to a makaula, a mystic, who would inform the birth parents of their incoming child’s name. Because the Hawaiian language is so poetic, these names are coded with clues and metaphors about a child’s destiny.

Those of us raised in cultures that have lost this practice may feel like our names are hollow shells without intention or purpose, but the story I’m about to share will show you how the mystic always finds a way to come through. Even in a world that doesn’t believe it exists, the mystic can’t be denied, won’t be denied, for it is a greater truth than the facts of this seemingly troubled world where we are encouraged to remain in conflict to serve the hungry ghosts who need our wars to survive.

That’s another subject, a big one, and I’m not going to go into that either because I want to focus on making right, more right. So here’s the story of my name. My parents may not have received it from a makaula, but as you’ll read, the spirit came through. It always does.

In a Dark Time Even Accidental Prophecies Must Be Heard

Before she had her own body, when she was still a story dwelling in the shadowless chamber of her mother’s womb, sharing blood that meandered like a river snake on currents that matched its sinuous motion.

Before she was birthed into a legacy of longing that began when her mother’s song was severed at the umbilical.

Before her grandparents left the land between the forked rivers that had begun to plant them in a continent where their ancestors had landed centuries ago, after crossing an ocean for unknown reasons, losing the stories of where they came from.

Before she realized she’d been given a body without a land that could truly hold it, because she’d forgotten her blood’s song received from trees and stones, her name was Lisa.

This is the name her parents chose at the beginning, calling her with seed and egg out of the void into flesh and bone.

But when the time came to name her, they chose Jennifer. Lisa was too common they said, not knowing a lot of other parents in 1967, were being struck by the same impulse. A current of Jennifers was moving through the collective unconscious to make themselves known.

Why were they called? What wanted to come into the world through these eight syllables?

Her parents didn’t know the meaning of Jennifer, its root-song in Cymraeg, the starry-streamed tongue of Wales, where the name was born.

Jennifer—Gwenhwyfar—Guinevere—Queen to the Bear King Arthur, himself pole star through centuries of darkness when an empire fell and the tribes left behind couldn’t unite in their stories.

Guinevere, Queen of the Summer Lands. I wonder if she knew what her name really meant in the brief time she inhabited a body and stood with the bear?

White Wave, it meant, the breaking waters of a storm.

Arthur carried the light in the sky. Guinevere, the breaking waves flaring on the bruised-wine oceans. She bore the broken song because everything must break to reform.

As far as she knew, her parents didn’t believe in prophecy. They couldn’t have know that they, along with the other parents of the late 60s who named their daughters Jennifer, were summoning, sea by sea, a storm of breaking waves that no dyke or breakwater would be able to hold; that the time of fire and water had come, and that white flames burned the hottest.

They also didn’t know, when they gave her the middle name Denise, they were summoning Dionysus, god of vegetation and wine; he who drove the Maenads to rip Orpheus apart at the seams, eat the shreds of his songs pumping out of his slashed veins until they collapsed in ecstatic blood-lust.

Longing for ancestral ties, she thought of changing her middle name to Elise. It kind of sounded the same, and it was her grandmother’s middle name, and great grandmother’s first, a name that had carried the latter across the Atlantic to root in Philadelphia, where the story of these womens’ bodies played out on ground that couldn’t hear them until they stopped speaking German and began to stutter in English—We are Americans. They claimed a space which they bequeathed to her, a gap of broken water and hidden tears, because life had to go on.

It was the gulls who let her grandmother, Anna Elise, know she at last belonged in this new country. As a child in World War I, other kids had thrown stones at her for being German. Standing on the bulkhead behind her house, she held up dinner scraps to the sky and the gulls appeared out of nowhere. How did they know? Their bodies told them, as did her grandmother’s. Make an offering of yourself, and the sky will come down.

The gulls knew English was not the language of this land. Their squawks and screeches were the primal language of fierce need, uncivilized. They knew her grandmother spoke it. Life must go on.

She didn’t change her name to Elise, because the paperwork was too complicated. In other words, she accepted her destiny as Denise to follow ecstasy in the dark, without implicit consent to what that meant, but her body knew what it was doing.

You will be going down, my dear. No use resisting. Dionysus was glad.

There is too much false light in this world. The only way to be real now is to willingly enter your own darkness, he uttered against her throat, teething the lobe of the ear-shell that had shaped itself around spirals in the water, the original ancestor.

His words descended into her cells. She responded with a shiver, a snake’s rattle, a flickering tongue. Heard.

She said yes, but she was still disconnected from the power of words. There were too many times they had severed her from her body, words of judgment and shame, and not only spoken to her, she had judged others as well.

The word-wounds were so deep she was numb. It took her 40 years to realize her last name, Lighty, an Americanized version of the German name Leichti, contained the word “light.” She thought of herself as so heavy, weighed down by the shame and all the losses. In finding the story of her last name, the final word given to her at birth, she discovered her ancestors had once been woodcutters. They were people who lived in clearings in the forest where light poured down without impediment to touch the ground.

And so she knew herself as:

Jennifer Denise Lighty

A Breaking Wave that Brings the Light Down

She understood a lot about her journey when she saw it spelled out.

She was an enchanter.

A breaking wave may exist in an endless present, but water always forms and reforms as it’s moved by, and toward, and away from shores, the edges that give it definition like a human body’s bones softened by skin that molds around them like water smoothes stones. The stories the waves leave when they break strike shores that make their way inland through reed-fringed marsh. Rooted in water, they expand like dolphin sonar until they find an object that will carry them out of the unconscious onto dry ground. There the waves continue their journey in form, become shells, stones, wigwams, adobe huts, skyscrapers. When the roundhouse is obliterated by the sky-piercing tower, the laments begin. They do not see us anymore, the ghosts croon. They cannot hear the river song or the trees’ wailing ghosts. They don’t realize what it means to be made of breaking, that they, too, will break, and they will be lost in the grey between-lands without a guide. Rebirth is through the body, not skyward.

For a long time, her ecstasy was literal. Many vats of wine were consumed, and there were reckless sexual encounters that were thrilling, until suddenly they weren’t.

She learned that this kind of pleasure eventually ferments to a point it tastes rotten, feeding the bad bacteria, not the good. And it always came with a price, hollowing the marrow from her bones that began to rattle inside her like a skeleton hung by its cranium in a classroom, something for students to examine to go on dissecting the world, compartmentalizing bones as if they’d never been filled with the living tissue of marrow, the way the planet is viewed as an inanimate surface life takes place on. She was haunted by all the abuse, not just of her own body, but of Earth’s.

When she walked the lost forest of the island she loved and heard the ghosts of the trees sacrificed for conquering ships, the dying gasps of the indigenous pierced with muskets and plagues; she began to mourn.

You must atone for what was done, her body told her, not in words—in moods—currents of chemicals flooded her body with despair as her brain punished her body for all the harms caused by the people that had come before her. She embraced the haunting, believing she deserved it. It was a shame to be a human.

For years she followed heart-shaped deer tracks in sand that disappeared in the surf as if the deer were swimming to the moon that rose out of the eastern horizon, walking across the island to the west side, where the white dome set at dawn, as the sun rose in the east to define all the shadows it seemed no one was willing to see but her.

How far could the deer swim? Did they make it to the moon? She invented their story as one she wanted to live in, until she too, lifted off, thinking she could leave Earth and dwell in the moon’s chill, but the hung skeleton she was would not allow its rattling bones to ascend before their medicine song was remembered. They shattered her like a shaman’s rattle and down she was pulled into her body’s distortions, the stories that needed to be unraveled and witnessed in order to be transmuted from poison to antidote.

Because she wouldn’t listen, her body turned against her, attacking itself with what doctors called autoimmune disease. The wounds became literal; ulcers developed on her colon that made digestion and excretion torture. She learned that hell was not a place outside of her. As Earth burned, society fought, cultures collapsed, her intestines mirrored the inflammation, until she saw her body was not a metaphor, it was Earth itself.

She never would have thought sobriety and abstinence would bring an ecstasy far greater than flesh and wine. If she hadn’t experienced illness, she might never have gotten high on the movement of her own unaltered body on a dance floor, or on swimming for hours in the liquid mirror of the Pacific. Her body became a process that she accepted, including acknowledging it might not ever again be well.

The bleeding and burning in her intestines might never stop. She might soothe the symptoms, but it would flare again, or somewhere else. The process would keep being transferred until right became more right, until she accepted she was an enchanter, and all the pain and problems that came with this power. Only then, would she be able to bring the light down.

And this is what happened. She wasn’t cured, but she fulfilled her names’s prophecy, clearing a space within her own cells through breaking to receive the light that would nourish the seeds deep underground that had been waiting to be fed and called to the surface.

The trees would begin as shoots. Some of them would perish, but they would grow again, tall enough to climb toward the stars where the stories came from, calling to the dark on the other side of the light, the slim band we are blessed to inhabit like the promise of a gold ring to keep us faithful no matter what challenges life offers us.

Light and dark, ecstasy and order, the patterns of the stars channel frequencies of potential we absorb through skin, such a soft barrier between our vital organs and the hardness of the outside world.

What would happen if we released the story the world was out to get us? Accepted suffering as a way of learning essential to Earth, embraced pain as opportunity, and developed compassion for the trials of the human emotional journey as it plays out through the body? What would happen if we chose wonder again and again, kept our hearts open every time we were summoned into the dark, if we knew in our bones we would always make it back into the light, stopped worrying about how that was going to happen to the point we accepted it might not even be in our current forms, our precious bodies with all those edges to experience the hard places, and the softness, of this world?

What if we looked into the dark with awe, stopped trying to figure it out. What if, in allowing ourselves to be penetrated by mystery, we beheld the light that allows us to see the dark, not as the positive opposite of a binary doomed to keep us locked in conflict until we annihilate ourselves, but as the gift that creates shadows, moving outlines of our bodies on a ground that is, and always has been, supporting us?

Offer wine, offer food, offer orgasm and song, offer all the things the body loves, to the unseen roots, the dark holding us in form from both sides. Live in the space between where time wears everything down to dust. Not the past or the future. Here, in the gold-filled cracks, may the people tend their wounds with honey. May they taste the pollen and the nectar, and lead others back to the hive where the song’s pattern that weaves us together can still be heard. Listen. Drink deep. Your story is in your cells, overflowing with honey. It has been named, like you. It is up to you to follow the clues across oceans, up rivers, to the secret spring of your source. From there, after breaking over and over, you will begin to live with the pure stream of prophecy from the stars as your guide. Your body will be a harp string plucked by solar winds, joined by others, a chord sweeping through the solar system without prejudice or aim to be anything beyond a few moments of shared music.

My parents, bless them, didn’t know any of this when they named me Jennifer Denise Lighty, but we are living in a time, when even accidental prophecies must be heard.

Links to those other “rejected” articles below:

The Kingdom of Water

The Deer Dance