Idé Weré Weré: the song that found me in my grief and took me to Oshun

Hola everyone,

This week, honestly, I don’t have a deep reflection for you. I think I am still emotionally recovering from last week’s essay on missing my grandmother. It took so much out of me to write that piece, and then to read it over and edit it again. I cried so much through the process that I honestly don’t remember the last time I cried that much.

You know that empty feeling after crying and releasing so much? You feel kind of hollowed out. Like something moved through you, but it also left a void behind. That is still how I feel a week later. I am still processing my grief. And with that hollowness inside me, I don’t really have a big lesson or deep reflection to offer.

But even better, I have a song for you.

And the story of a goddess.

After I published my essay last Sunday, I went to a beautiful voice sanctuary retreat held by my dear friends Natalie and Ross. Part of the retreat was singing together. One of the songs we learned was called Ide Were Were. Natalie briefly mentioned that it was an old Yoruba prayer to Oshun, the goddess of rivers and sweet waters.

We started singing together. I didn’t know the meaning of the words. I didn’t know the story behind the song. I didn’t know much about Oshun. But I can tell you how it felt.

As I started singing, I felt water inside the song. It had that circular, rocking quality that makes the mind soften its grip. It didn’t feel like listening to ordinary music. It felt like I was being carried by it.

I started to sway. I felt like I was being rocked by my mother. I felt deeply held.

And then tears started falling again. But this time, even the tears felt different. They didn’t feel as bitter. They felt softer somehow. As if the song was sweetening my grief. As if the wound in my heart was not burning so much anymore, but being soothed by the sound. It was powerful.

And it made me wonder if the power of these prayer songs comes from generations of people singing them through their own heartbreaks, griefs, longings, ceremonies, and ordinary days.

Maybe when something has been sung for that long, by that many people, in that many kitchens and groves and ceremonies and grieving rooms, it carries the weight of all those voices when it lands on you.

You don’t need to know the lineage to feel held by it. The lineage is doing the holding.

I’ve been singing and thinking about this song ever since. So I wanted to learn more about it, and about Oshun.

Here is a little of what I found.

A song with brass bracelets in it

Ide were were is a Yoruba chant. It comes from the Yoruba people of what is now southwestern Nigeria and Benin—a culture older than most maps. The song is a praise song for Oshun, sometimes spelled Osun or, in the Cuban diaspora, Ochún.

The phrase itself is not as simple to translate as many spiritual music websites make it sound.

Some versions translate ide as a necklace, or speak of the song as a “necklace of love.” You may have seen this translation through Deva Premal’s beautiful version.

But other song keepers say the song is more closely connected to brass bracelets —the kind worn by Oshun’s devotees. In this interpretation, Ide Were Were speaks of the bracelets moving softly, gently, with a shimmer. And the later sound in the song, cheke cheke cheke, is the sound of the bracelets themselves.

The brass rattling, the wrists moving and the prayer becoming sound.

I find this so beautiful.

The song does not need to explain devotion. It lets us hear it. A bracelet moves. A river goddess is being called.

The sound itself becomes the offering.

Who is Oshun?

Now, Oshun.

She is the orisha of fresh water —of rivers, springs, the wet places that make life possible. She is the goddess of love and beauty and fertility, yes, but those English words are too small for her. The Yoruba elders call her the unseen mother present at every gathering, because wherever there is moisture, wherever there is attraction, wherever two things draw toward each other and make a third thing: there she is.

In the beginning, the Supreme Being, Olodumare, sent the orishas down to make the world. There were sixteen of them, or seventeen depending on who tells it, and Oshun was the only woman. The men set to work. They tried to build the earth without her. They consulted with each other and ignored her counsel and made their plans.

Nothing grew.

The world they were attempting refused to come alive. Whatever they tried to plant withered. Whatever they tried to shape collapsed. Eventually, defeated, they went back up to Olodumare and asked why creation wouldn’t come alive.

Olodumare looked at them and said: Did you ask Oshun?

They had not asked Oshun.

So they returned, and they apologized, and they begged her to pour her sweet waters over the earth. And only then, only after the masculine deities humbled themselves before the feminine one, did the world begin to bloom. Rivers ran. Seeds split open. Children were conceived. The story says: without her, creation does not happen. With her, everything comes alive.

This is the goddess the song is calling.

And doesn’t this story say so much about the world right now?

We live in a world that keeps trying to build, produce, consume with a very dry, masculine, capitalist energy. A world that keeps trying to create without asking the women, without honoring the body, without listening to the earth, without making space for rest, tenderness, water. A world that feels like it is being built by people who have forgotten to ask Oshun. And then we wonder why everything feels like it is falling apart.

A world built without Oshun can only go so far. There can be no life, no true aliveness in it.

Life cannot truly bloom when sweetness is treated like an afterthought.

And yet, she has not vanished. Despite all the forgetting, despite all the dryness, she has kept reaching us: through rivers, through honey, through songs that have crossed oceans to find us.

How a song crosses an ocean

I want to be careful here, because I don’t know enough to speak with authority about the full history of this song. And I don’t want to romanticize or simplify a painful lineage.

But I learned this: Oshun belongs to the Yoruba tradition, rooted in what is now southwestern Nigeria, Benin, and parts of West Africa. And through the violence of the transatlantic slave trade, Yoruba spiritual traditions also crossed the ocean in the memories, songs, rituals, and bodies of enslaved people. In Cuba, Oshun became Ochún in Santería or Lucumí traditions. In Brazil, she is known as Oxum in Candomblé.

So when a song like this reaches us today, it is not just “a beautiful chant.” It is part of a much larger story of survival, devotion, adaptation, suffering, grief and memory. Songs can carry what people are not allowed to write down. They can carry gods across oceans. They can carry grief, protection, longing, and belonging.

I don’t want to pretend I fully understand the lineage of what I am singing. But I do want to honor that this song comes from somewhere. It has people. It has history. It has riverbanks and ceremonies and ancestors behind it.

The medicine of singing together

There is something very powerful about singing with other people. I think in modern life we often experience music as something we consume. We listen to a song. We put headphones on. We play music in the background while doing something else.

But singing together is different.

It asks your body to participate.

You have to breathe. You have to listen. You have to hear the person next to you. You have to let your voice be imperfect and still join in. I find this very humbling and healing.

You don’t have to be a “good singer.” You don’t have to perform. You don’t have to explain what you are feeling. The song gives everyone a place to put what they are carrying. Maybe this is why prayer songs can feel so medicinal.

What the song left in me

When this chant for a river goddess found me, and my friends sang it, and I sang it, and I felt mothered. Not by my grandmother, exactly, though she was in it. Mothered by something much older. Mothered by the unseen mother present at every gathering. Mothered by every woman who had ever sung this song through her own grief on her own floor.

Oshun, the Yoruba elders say, presides over sweet water. She is what makes the hard things able to grow. And I keep thinking that maybe she is also what makes hard feelings possible to feel without being swallowed by them.

Her offerings are honey, oranges, mead, things that are gold and bright and tender on the tongue. I think singing is one of her offerings too. I think it might be one of her favorites.

I left the retreat with the song stuck in my body. I sing it sometimes when I am washing dishes. I hum it to my baby when we go to bed at night. I do not always know if I am praying or just remembering, and I have decided it doesn’t matter.

The brass bracelets are shimmering softly.

Listen.

Cheke, cheke, cheke.