The Body Is an Altar
Before medicine named it,
my body already knew itself.
Before stigma circled it,
my ancestors had already touched it.
Today, I release
Embracing the Path of Alchemy: An Embodied HIV Alchemist and Spirit
— not as revelation, but as remembrance.
There was a moment when a diagnosis entered my life —
clinical, structured, confined to language that felt sterile.
But spirit does not speak in sterility.
Spirit speaks in the current.
And what I came to understand is this:
My body was never a verdict.
It was an altar.
An altar holds fire.
An altar holds an offering.
An altar holds transformation.
This book was written in ritual hours —
in prayer, in disciplined study, in lineage memory,
between the clinic and the ocean.
I do not speak of HIV here as a curse or a catastrophe.
I speak of it as a catalyst.
Alchemy is not denial.
Alchemy is transmutation.
To be an HIV Alchemist is to refuse contamination narratives.
It is known that spirit cannot be diagnosed.
It is to inhabit your body as sacred geography
— even when the world tries to reduce it to pathology.
My ancestors did not survive, so I could live small.
They survived so I could live luminously.
If you feel called to this work, approach it gently
— not because it is fragile,
But because it is sacred.
The body is not a confession.
It is an altar.
And I have chosen to tend mine with fire.
— Sherley
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