Bitch or Bust

This year there just hasn't been any room for the shopping, card-sending and gift-giving. Although, our family did make it to two Solstice celebrations. Tomorrow, I finally get to the post office between two client readings and some ice skating. After some bouts of illness on the home front, it's been all work all the time playing catch up. There's nothing I'd rather do with most of my mental power, energy and spirit, than surrender myself to the loving and intelligent wisdom of the angels, and help convey personal messages to my clients and mind-body insights for their health and well being. My healing practice mandates a ceremonial lifestyle with daily meditation and few distractions from the modern world. It requires my undivided and absolute attention when I am working. The state of mind required by my profession is that of oneness, harmony, fluidity, humility, neutrality, duty, and balance. I must be surrendered to divine love and feel a pervading sense of trust and safety, cradled by Mother Nature's loving arms. Sometimes, every day practical life interjects itself like an alarm clock, Hello...time exits and it's ticking!

Frankly, I was so busy channeling messages about Mary, Jesus, and from Archangel Michael for my clients, that I forgot to buy stuff and send cards. Silly me.

The other deeply satiating endeavor...Thankfully, starting Thursday I will have a week just to write, with the exception of one healing and two classes. I know I've said this before, but it's so true. I wasn't ready to write the book I am meant to write before. My perspective on things has evolved so much. I feel much less polarized, in terms of feminism, my politics and the sacred feminine. I see what's required within the manuscript to blend the insights of an angel medium with the chutspa of a spunky, righteous and rallying 'sex priestess' of a modern revolution. As Naomi Wolf and I discussed in my forthcoming interview with her (airing this Thursday at 9am EDT, on 92.1 WOMR-FM Provincetown), sexual empowerment wakes one from a deep sleep, it increases conscious awareness, it doesn't allow the soul to be oppressed, and it is revolutionary. So, it's back to manifestos for me. Things have kinda come full circle. May even buy copies of Bitch and Bust magazines for myself this Christmas....

Update, it looks as if the online content for Bitch and Bust has gotten a tad more tepid since the 90s. Wow! Doesn't really have the fanzine quality of my own 'self-published' feminist grrrl magazine, I edited back in 1998 called, Pillow Book: Funky Cunts' Guide to the Emotional Universe. We poked fun at tampon and IUD propaganda, explored female sexuality with a post-Sisterhood-is-Powerful pre-matrifocal existentialism. I edited it, drawing from a dozen friends' writings and artwork. Loved the name, but I never knew where to wear the t-shirt.

We created, the Funky Cunts' Guide around the same time I was writing a paper at Community College about the media backlash against women in the early eighties. The backlash had parallels with the early 50s propaganda calling for the post-WWII female workforce to return to home, be good little homemakers, give up wearing pants, quit their jobs and let financial independence be a distant memory. Sadly, in the 80s game shows and soap operas started hypnotizing a whole new generation of moms. Propaganda from right wing groups and ultra conservatives started sending messages for women to get back to the home. Popular columnists like Popcorn and mags like Women's World had a huge hand in shifting popular opinion, or at least the appearance of it by using false statistics, and over time gained a lot of genuine influence.

The 80s created the newly improved material girl prototype (the trophy wife who could be bought and sold), the suburban soccer mom, the hyper-sexualized and infantalized object of desire, the self-esteem galvanizing dead model look which invoked elements of violence against women (and embraced the Victorian ideal), and the trend in 80s sitcoms of having orphaned children with dead moms (Full House, My Two Dads, Webster, Gimme a Break, Who's the Boss, Diff'rent Strokes, and The Hogan Family). (Then, there's the kids' whose moms just up and left Punky Brewster and Blossom.) For my paper, I drew quotes from books by authors Susan Faludi, Peggy Orenstein, Inga Muscio, Lois Banner, Robin Morgan, and Naomi Wolf. There's that Wolf again. Go by her book, Vagina, if you haven't already.