Mama Visolela's Message

By Dr. Stephanie Mines

Alchemizing Grief Into Confidence: The Message of Mama Visolela

Mama Visolela speaks at the Climate Change & Consciousness 2019 conference

Mama Visolela with her daughter and grand-children reached out from their living room in Namibia with a ceremony to alchemize grief on Indigenous People’s Day, October 12, 2020. This transformational grief ceremony was presented in a collaboration between CCC and Now What?! The message Mama Visolela says moved through her is that we must alchemize grief into confidence to deliver our vision of hope.

In Namibia where the COVID-19 pandemic rages, where Mama Visolela’s work for women and girls is more needed than ever before as they are the primary target of the virus, she speaks with personal knowledge of this alchemy. And the gold that she makes from it shines through her eyes and her face: the channels of her heart.

I first encountered the power of Mama Visolela’s love on the night during Climate Change & Consciousness in 2019 when I learned of the death of Polly Higgins, just a day before she was scheduled to speak. Polly is the lawyer who seeded awareness of Ecocide Law which is now an international movement. I fell into a deep hole when the news hit me. It was so dark there that I could no longer see where I was or who was with me. Mama Visolela found me in that hole and pulled me out with her humming songs and the fullness of her compassion. She carries the feminine power of the Earth voice and it moves through every cell of her being. This is how you alchemize grief.

“Do it with confidence,” Mama Visolela said on Indigenous People’s Day. The “it” she refers to is the movement to cherish the Earth, the very same movement that rules the mission of Polly Higgins and that created Climate Change & Consciousness. That movement itself is indigenous. It lives in all of us and women are its most natural transmitters. Join Mama Visolela in the confidence of that movement. “Confidence,” she said, “leads to conviction.”

It was Mama Visolela who gave the name Walking the Land to the indigenous leaders of Climate Change & Consciousness who came together at the CCC19 conference to declare their shared allegiance as voices for Our Living Earth. In the spirit of that same unity and connection, the kinship we all share, we listen to Mama’s voice now and let the articulation of confidence refuel our conviction to not be daunted by outer circumstances. Collectively we keep building the fire within that alchemizes those circumstances into confidence. That is the way of Walking the Land; that is the way of Climate Change & Consciousness. That is the way forward.

- Stephanie Mines, PhD.
   CCC Founder