Written by Before the storm breaks, there is a change in the air. Something electric. Something that sweeps through and tells every living thing, bird, tree, blade of grass, that what is coming cannot be stopped and should not be.
That is Oyá.
She is the wind before the lightning finds the earth. She is the wall of air that precedes the hurricane, the dust devil spinning in a dry field, the cold front that arrives in the night and leaves the world unrecognisable by morning. She is the force that clears the old away so entirely that new things have no choice but to grow.
She is the oriṣa of winds, lightning, and storms, and she is the only oriṣa capable of controlling the Eégún. The spirits of the dead. That combination, storm and death, wind and the ancestors, is not coincidental. Both are forces of total transformation. Both sweep away what was and leave behind a changed world. Both move through you whether you are ready or not.
In Yorùbá, the name Oyá is believed to derive from the phrase ọ ya, “she tore”,