Cyrah Dardas - Birth of Mithra
Winter Solstice 2022
Yalda Night is a celebration of resilience and a ceremony of community love and care. It asks us to hold and protect each other in our darkest time. To nourish each other with fruit, sweets and stews. In the absence of the sun, we hold fire together and are protected from the dangers of being in darkness for too long or while alone. We read poetry and practice divination, utilizing the light we each hold inside of ourselves to warm and keep each other safe. Yalda celebrates our ability to co regulate and regenerate with one another. It honors the return of light to our life after this long period of darkness; the return of Mithra, our yalda queen, our god of light, who comes to us more each day as we cross over the winter solstice.
Each year I deepen my understanding of these practices and the way they align with our earths rhythms and patterns of regeneration.
I consider my practice as a ceremonialist as an alchemy that can rebuild and remember sacred relationships, patterns and processes. Curiosity, learning and connection are integral to this practice as it is reflective and relational. I seek a re-belonging to this land that can only be possible with deep study and rigorous listening. I do this for personal liberation and to move toward a regenerative way of being on this land and with others who also inhabit it.
Cyrah Dardas (b.1990) is a Queer, ecological, intuitive artist and care worker living in Detroit /Waawiyaatanong MI. Dardas uses her art practice as a tool in remembering the forgotten networks between humans and the earth for the purpose of regulation and healing across species to restore a collective ecological body and heal. She is informed by they work in childcare, her stewardship of land and as a grower of plants, as a collaborator with youth, as a member of an artist cooperative, as a ceremonialist, as a space maker, and through her work with natural fibers, earth pigments and botanical inks. Their practice is deeply rooted in process + ritualizes art making as a tool for personal and collective liberation. They are the Lead Teaching Artist at People in Education and lead a curatorial fellowship at Room Project called “Our Craft of Care.”
Through my practice I seek to reestablish forgotten and disrupted relationships and patterns between humans and the rest of creation that have been destroyed by settler colonial anthropocentrism, heterosurpremacy, the constructed binary of gender + the fractured understanding of where the self begins + ends. I look to ancient folk tales, celebrations, rituals and art forms to guide my reconstruction and remembering of these relationships.
