Keeper of Shadows and Miracles

She's a shaker of stones, this one. The original rattlesnake. So hot, she feels cold. So cold, she feels hot. Her language is a code, an amalgam of old words and gestures.

She shudders when she wakes, and howls. Her life, a wild freedom. The elements bless her asleep. Caves secure her secret. And when the rain shines, she falls.

Sometimes, she loops back on herself. It feels like sliding down the mountain. It feels like release. She might slip off the face of the planet. She welcomes the rush. Her knees are not brakes. Giant disks hurtle through air and stop with a float. The mountain is more than metaphor. The wind breathes her sane.

A tiger kisses her cheek. Striped yellow on black, creature in negative. On its back, she rides air, floats on the blowing. Moored to the earth by loose gravity, a hot flame.

Like steel, forged smooth, her bones. Flame-smoked eyes, purple tongue flickers sticky dew when mouth parts to laugh. Voice grained from calling rain. Ships follow her light home.

Her bosom swells to sunset, heaves from enfolding sun in night till dawn. Her afterglow, a rainbow. Her precision, a beat.

Belly Up, Not Dead--In a Pose of Surrender

What happens when you eliminate capitalization? You get really honest. Try it. What's that? You're not feeling compelled? Here, I'll start, just to show it doesn't hurt, and the laws of physics will not suddently rearrange themselves as a result.

it's a very punk thing to refuse the shift key. some might call it post-modern. whatever. i've noticed the new trend on message boards and IM exchanges (during the relatively brief period that i ventured into the online dating scene. and just so you know, there's a reason those people are standing behind the electronic curtain), emails, and even business cards. i liked the look, but i'm not much of a bandwagon hopper, so i did my usual buck-the-trend pretense to indifference act until, just for kicks, i made my pinkies stop stretching down. it was as if someone had stripped me of my mask. i communicated without self-censorship. it felt like freedom.

now i'm gonna try it here.

but first i have a question: are anarchists allowed to have fund-raisers? bahahahahahahahahaha!

i had a reiki session today, the first one in several years. and i cried when the reiki master, a beautiful creature named angel (her given name, and an apt one) targeted my throat chakra. i'd suspected as much for a while, but today confirms it: i have a bad habit of non-authentic self-representation. that, translated, means i tell people what they want to hear really well. i don't change who i am. i just selectively reveal what i believe they can handle. true, i have an edge, and when it's safe, it comes out to play. when i'm provoked, i'm not much into self-censorship, either. but the mask is really interfering in my ability to BE me. live my life as boldly as i know i'm capable of. there's so much fear of failure that holds me in check. and it is essentially a problem with self-acceptance. so i, the hypocrite, striped yellow, have to admit i am deathly afraid of rejection and failure. not just because these are weaknesses that astrology insists i should possess as a scorpio, either (what, you think i'm that much of a cad?). because for many years, i've thrown my voice to a pitch not mine and rolled on my belly to protect it. the tears were a release of someone else's voice imitating my own.

and now i am just me, frail, tired, and silly-strange. and i'm gonna bleed the heat to rest, once and for all.

Going Televisional

The other night, I caught a commercial featuring Denise Austin, exercise and health guru, speaking on behalf of Idaho potatoes. Her support of a diet featuring carbohydrates stunned me because, these days, it is not "in" to tell people to eat their carbs. Granted, the woman is making a pretty penny for her endorsement of the tater, specifically Idaho's taters, but there's no way she would have come out in support of Nature's comfort food if she didn't endorse that old-fashioned food pyramid that's been snubbed ever since the Atkins fad caught on. [Sigh]

I was elated. I leapt up and kissed the television. I did a swan dive into the refrigerator and came up grasping two rounded 'tatoey beauties, a loaf of bread, a container each of pasta, rice, and beans, some tortillas, a vat of maple syrup, and a bowl of hummus, placed them individually on the floor, and bowed to each of them in turn. An impromptu speech followed. "Oh Great Carbohydrates, forgive us for scorning you. It's not your fault you're so tasty. It's not your fault that we don't eat our vegetables. It's not your fault that we don't exercise. It's not your fault that we prefer bacon and eggs to a veggie stir-fry, green salad, or pasta primavera. Forgive us for scorning you. Long live CARBS! And long live Denise Austin!"

By this point, my cat is raising her eyebrows at my antics and giving me one of her "do-you-need-more-excitement-in-your-life?" looks. In answer, I scooped her up and marched around the apartment with her on my shoulders. She licked her lips in response (one of her nervous habits), but I swear I heard a "hell yeah" come outta her before our victory boogie was over.

After being delivered such a pleasant (and rare) surprise by television (PBS and Everybody Loves Raymond are the only two televisionary products I enjoy these days), I cautiously sat down on the couch with a bowl of chips, bean dip, and salsa to absorb more quasi-revolutionary messages. My mind spun with the possibilities. Maybe there was hope for pop music someday featuring actual talent! Maybe radio would kill the video star! Maybe reality television was on its way out! Maybe people would stop looking like clones of each other and learn how to have REAL conversations WITH each other (versus talking AT each other about NOTHING)! Then, another ad aired. This time, for an actual television program on FOX (a network about which I have nothing good to say except it gave us The Simpsons).

Briefly, I must say that I loved fairy tales when I was a little girl. I still love fairy tales, the unrevised, original versions without modernized, patriarchal plots, characters, and themes. And one of my favorite tales was about The Ugly Duckling. What a beautiful message for awkward children (which, near as I can tell, is all children at some point), that they will someday find their niche and blossom into beautiful swans. If it isn't already obvious, the reality show I am referring to is The Swan.

To qualify this upcoming rant, I have to say that I didn't watch the episode. I watched a preview of the upcoming episode, and that was all I could stomach before I promptly ran into the bathroom and vomited up my premature celebration snack of chips, bean dip, and salsa.

Everybody knows about this show, right? It's a season's worth of severe make-overs for "average" or "below-average" women. At the end of the season, there's a beauty pageant for the most beautifully transformed "swan." Okay, I have to admit, I've watched one or two daytime talk shows where they give rather mousy-looking or outdated people a new look. It's kind of fun to see what a little makeup, wardrobe change, and new hair style can do for a person. But this show takes it to a whole new level. Instead of enhancing someone's natural beauty, this show alters it. Surgically. And all the potential "swans" are women. American people, this is not okay. What kind of message is this sending to young women? If you don't like yourself, have someone take a scalpel to your face, maybe some acid, too, with a scalpel, vacuum hose, and laser combo for the rest of your body after you have gone on a crash diet and extreme workout regimen that you'll never maintain once the pageant is over. How many young women do you know who like themselves? Teen-agers? Mature women? With rising rates of anorexia and bulemia, and scores of women (and men) on Atkins diets to avoid dealing with their obsessive/compulsive problems with food (all of these disorders being related to control and self-esteem issues), how the hell is a show like The Swan empowering young women to feel good about who they are? If you manage to scrape together a healthy amount of self-esteem, it's in spite of the culture of idealized beauty we live in that says "Female Beauty Is Power." This message is everywhere, and it's a message we, The Empire, are forcing on other cultures with radically different notions of beauty and eroticism. We who've grown up in The Empire are well-acquainted with our superficial cultural obsession with image and what it does to us when we are genetically unable to fit into Cinderella's glass slippers. Despite our awareness that conforming to a certain ideal image isn't going to fix what's wrong with us on the inside, millions of people gather together in front of the mind number to see which "ugly" person is gonna look the most like Miss America at the end. So instead of appreciating and valuing our various forms of beauty, individually special and pleasing like different varieties of flowers, instead of looking inside ourselves for what makes us lovely and manifesting that light so that it animates us and affects others with its unique, sheer magnificence, we're gonna go with Botox and plastic surgery, thanks. We'll cut out what we don't like and inject the proper amount of disease to make us "acceptable." This is insanity. This is cultural suicide. This is prime-time programming served with a side of instant gratification, and Americans love it.

After I was done retching, I switched off the t.v., again vowing to only watch PBS and Everybody Loves Raymond, disappointed in myself for hoping to find something other than the cultural epidemic of emptiness on network television, disappointed in the part of me that wondered what I would look like after such an extreme make-over, disappointed in a country that would label such self-hatred entertainment.

My cat smiled at me as I placed the un-regurgitated remnants of my snack back in the fridge and removed a tupperware container filled with veggies and spinach dip instead. I stomped back into the living room, sat down. Breathed. When I finally flipped on the television again, I got up to bake a potato. Masterpiece Theatre was great.

TransPersonal Evolution

Living powerfully does not involve feeling alone and cut off from your soul tribe. It requires learning how to build with others your most beautiful visions. Living by your soul, you must listen to your heart. And when the heart has been hidden and protected, learning to follow it requires finding it.

Now is an unmet potential. In each potential, there is a press of longing for connection. Forming connections requires discarding the impulse that commands us not to trust. Step by step, it unfolds.

Many of us were not taught how to love. This does not mean we cannot learn. We cultivate our soil to grow our blue-seeded brightness. We grow it and glow. My prayer is for the echoes of our collective voices, amplified. For combinations of sound, deep and resonant.

My prayer is for healing. My prayer is for peace. The Earth, she rises. Her children, asleep. My prayer is for their waking. My prayer is for your release.

Resistance Is Not Futile

This is a shadowed time. Some would say it's been foreshadowed by various prophecies. Before you get your panties in a bunch, though, allow me to say that I do not for one second buy into the notion of an apocalypse. Although most of us have been forcefed a steady diet of End Times propaganda (kind of like Atkins mania, but worse), some of us have managed to avoid the brainwashing. Our Emperor hasn't, of course, but anyone who honestly believes he has an ounce of sense in his body, that his cellular structure isn't polluted by fear-based delusions, probably believed him when he insisted we were invading Iraq because they harbored terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. Hear this: we are the terrorists. We terrify an entire culture of people who were taught to believe in God differently. We terrorize a nation of innocents and say we're liberating them. We see footage of toddlers whose intestines are falling out, whose limbs are shattered and/or missing, as their mothers wail and cry out to the same God that Dubya believes talks to him and tells him to wave his mighty hand and make such suffering happen . . . we see this insanity and feel powerless to stop it. I'll tell you one thing, he might think he's the king, but he does not govern by divine right. His will is not the will of God. His perversion of a religion to suit his own political agenda speaks only to the ignorance of his dark soul and the ignorance of those who "elected" him to power.

What do you do when you're forcefed a steady diet of fear and hatred? Practice the opposite. Unplug from mainstream media. Stop supporting corporate entities that fund war (money's the only thing they understand, especially if it's money's absence). If you have a gas guzzler, sell it. Don't work for businesses that don't support your values and ideals. Work for what you value instead. Try to see and appreciate everyone's humanity, especially when they irk the shit out of you. Even Dubya, because behind all his posturing and strutting (Rooster Man), he's a very scared individual playing hardball with boys way out of his league. And he knows it. If it'd been up to him, he never would have run for reelection. But nothing about his administration has really, in the end, been up to him. He's just an ignorant man doing the bidding of very clever, corrupt, powerful motherfuckers.

I could prattle on and on. What good does that really do anyone, though? Ultimately, how you resist these oppressive times is up to you. Just resist!

America, the Broken

Yesterday, as soon as I was able to stop throwing rocks and screaming, I sat down and cried for a long time. Watching my last great hope exit stage left was almost more than I could bear, my hopes for a true moral leader dashed. Naw, John Kerry isn't perfect, but he represented very simple yet elemental things: integrity, heart, principle, and hope. Hope for a world that gnashes its teeth and cowers in fear of The Empire. Hope for the Earth and all her creatures, even the ignorant ones who re-elected the Fuehrer to power.

So we have a president who is mentally unwell calling the shots. Nothing new there. What is new? The man who munches fundamentalism and swigs on his delusions from on high as he straddles his throne has no one to be accountable to anymore. He doesn't have to worry about reelection ever again, and he can do as he damn well pleases. Why, as his good buddy Dick said, he has a mandate now from the people (a-hem, barely half the people). He is gonna bring it to you like you ain't never seen before, complete with Dolby surround sound and LCD clarity for your viewing pleasure. And his supporters honestly believe that he's not going to do anything that hurts them directly. Ri-i-i-ght. I hope they keep telling themselves that. Especially when they are hurting from the domino effect of this man's actions, they need to remember to tell themselves that it doesn't hurt. I hope they're practicing now.

The rest of us who voted for hope will continue to lick our wounds and develop new strategies based on this unfortunate escalation of global events. I'm honestly not surprised that this is the scenario playing itself out, but I dared to hope it could be worked out differently. What is working itself out for me, personally, is a painful re-assessment of myself and my beliefs about how to affect change and walk my talk. This is what I have come to.

I have been wringing my hands like an old woman for far too long. I have believed that you can't change the system by fighting against it, that it must be changed from within. But what really happens is you become coopted or you coopt yourself when you stop resisting what you oppose. So maybe I'm not gonna change anything except myself through my ensuing actions, but I can take this rage that paralyzes me like Superman himself and do something with it. There are several camps of opposition now, ones that believe in peaceful protest (ahimsa, Oh Gandhi, so hard, so hard), ones that believe in getting militant about this shit, and ones that think we just sit around passively and wait for it to crash down around us. What I know: I will not be assimilated by this regime. My roots have been pulling at me, and they are tugging me away from a life in which the ongoing disconnection from Gaia makes the fear and dread going 'round so much more potent and distracting. Love is all that matters, after all, and my tugging roots keep reminding me of this. Creating community matters. Harmonious relationships with yourself and others matter. Action matters and contemplation is only powerful when you use it as a springboard. It's really important to follow your heart and principles now.

My guess is that cities are going to get really interesting to live in, especially if you like drama. Myself, I'm tired of it. Tune in to your center, and heed what it's telling you. I am.

As Ozzie sang, Momma, I'm comin' home.

Femma What?

Maybe it's just because I'm feeling myself more these days (take that however you want), but recent episodes of foolishness and chicanery on the part of "the fairer sex" have led me to ponder an ongoing issue: my immediate lack of women friends my age in my vicinity. Now that's not to say I don't have women friends, but they're all old enough to be my mothers (and while they're all dear to me, they're not all cool or empowered). Why is it that I have been unable to meet cool, empowered, younger women? I'll tell you why. There aren't many of them out there. Leastways, not when you are bonded to a circle of women whose sheer beauty, power, and majesty is almost mythical. These women, who I call my women, are far from me now but such a part of who I am. These gems have spoiled me rotten and made me something of a spoiled brat, the kind so accustomed to cheesecake that when a dollop of pudding is served to her, she recoils in disgust and refuses it, preferring to go hungry instead. Maybe the pudding is the right color, and sure, it's sweet and creamy, but it lacks substance and complexity. I do love me some cheesecake.

I guess instead of highlighting exactly what's wrong with most women, I'll do the opposite, and highlight what's right with my women. Through knowing them, I've become a better woman. They're scattered at various global coordinates, but we keep in touch. One day, I will live in closer proximity to them. At least, to some of them (Thessaloniki doesn't look like it's in the cards.)

But do I feel like doing that now? Naw, not really. When you're in the desert, it hurts to remember the ocean.

A composite sketch will have to do until I can delve into their individual complexities. Strong-willed. They live life according to their principles and have renounced what is mainstream to be who they are. This makes them so fucking cool, and I'm not talking in terms of appearances. They're not fixated on appearances because they understand that image matters not, just substance. They're beautiful inside themselves, and this only enhances their natural beauty, making them incredibly exotic and alluring to the opposite sex. They're all peaceniks, activists in the way they live their lives, if not on the political/social scene. Creative like you would not believe, artists, musicians, chefs, writers, poets, gardeners. They live their spirituality, and they lead by example. They're all givers, too, and the real giving kind, not the kind who give and expect a return on it later and figure you owe them big time for such generosity. They give freely, without expectation of payback, and there are no debts among us. They all love to be outside and feel most like themselves when they're there, void of make-up, hair product, mall clothes, nail polish, or jewelry. And this is how they are most alluring. When they've got a tan, it's because, at some point, they got a nasty burn from some outdoors activity, and after aloeing it up, returned outside to do the things they love; the tan was just a result of them being themselves. Some of them think wanting to have a tan is really funny because they are naturally golden, dark brown, umber. They all know how to forgive. This makes them strong, not weak. But they all have such tremendous self-respect that they allow no person to use them.

I miss these women, these mythical figures from my past. And I love them fiercely.

The above is a formula for being an empowered woman.