16 years ago today since hubby and I had our first date, complements of the seashore. He rowed out into the fog to catch some fish, and he grabbed me selkie skin before I could get away. But he's no mere mortal, he's Mercurius. And, he has a really big aura.

A One-Way Ticket on the Hellbound Train and the Chakana That Saved the World

This is my second go at reading, "In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts", and I'm much more present in reading the material now. It helps to write in the margins. Why keep books pristine? A great deal lives between the carnal and spiritual text of Dr. Gabor Mate's work. It eloquently uses the stories of impoverished often-homeless mentally-ill drug addicts who are socially confined to residing in a ghetto as a mirror to draw focus to our collective addictions, be they to shopping, work, sex, or food. The poetic sense in his imagery and the poetry you read between the lines offers nourishment to the hungry ghost within. And as I wrote this, my Mother Mary and Kuan Yin are casting growing shadows on my wall. Life is organically magical, when we don't stop it from being so.

Tonight, my talented FB amigo, musician and artist Rumi Nahui, reminded me of The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle tonight by sharing his Chakana. That story is actually the foundation and bones of two of my screenplays. It plays a more obvious role in the one that features a magical "pet" condor. It's a story that playfully exposes some of the foibles of the pharmaceutical industry. The other one is about a (half) Mayan-descendent who was abandoned at the foot of an Aztec Temple and found and raised by a Quechua woman. It's a Tarzan story, in which the world is saved by the healing powers of the unification of all indigenous people. So, thanks to my friend, I'm thinking about it, and realizing it should be a novel first. And I'll get right to it just as soon as my kid stops puking, and people stop needing curses lifted and demons exorcised ;)

NINA

After a lengthy three hour discussion with my husband, we've come to the conclusion that feminine/intuitive/heart-centered wisdom and the sacred feminine are the only thing that can save the planet.

Author Dr. Dawson Church on Healing Wisdom Thursday

This Thursday at 9am EST on 92.1 WOMR, 91.3 WFMR, and streaming at womr.org, I'm speaking with author Dawson Church in depth about Emotional Freedom Technique and his new book The EFT Manual. Dawson Church, PhD, has edited or authored many books, and collaborated with leading authorities including Larry Dossey, MD, Bernie Siegel, MD, Christiane Northrup, MD, and others. He founded Soul Medicine Institute to research and teach emerging psychological and medical techniques that can yield fast and radical cures. His award-winning book, The Genie in Your Genes, pioneers the field of Epigenetics, explaining the remarkable self-healing mechanisms now emerging at the juncture of emotion and gene expression. He has authored numerous scientific studies through the Foundation for Epigenetic Medicine, and is the editor of Energy Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal. He shares how to apply these breakthroughs to health and athletic performance through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web.

David Ryan at the AMP ("amp"/Art Market Provincetown)

Wicked talented short story writer David Ryan is at the AMP (Art Market Provincetown) this Saturday August 16th at 6pm. Enjoy this interview! And come to a lovely reading with him, Michael Klein and others! (If you like David Sedaris and Raymond Carver, you'll love David Ryan) Here is the podcast! The bonus material will be podcast at a later date.

Dr. Susan Allison on Healing Wisdom

Hear my podcast interview with writer, shaman, poet and Transpersonal Psychologist Dr. Susan Allison. We talk about connecting with the eternal essence of those on the other side, soul mates, twin flames, and poetry. We discuss her latest book, "Our Spirits Dance", poems between her and her departed husband Thomas Hinkenbottom. She was honored as a “Woman of the Year” in California by the Santa Cruz Women’s Commission for her counseling work with adolescents. Allison is the published author of three books: Conscious Divorce, Ending a Marriage with Integrity (Three Rivers Press), Breathing Room: The Leaving of a Marriage (Park Place) and Empowered Healer (Balboa). Listen Here.

From Artist-in-Residence to Medium-in-Residence

When I was in seventh grade, I had a set of keys to the art room. I would arrive hours before school along with the janitor, let my self into the art room, and set to work on whatever project I had been commissioned or asked to do. But I wouldn't get to work before putting on a garish costume I called "eccentric" and "idiosyncratic", it involved a kimono over an ill-fitting silk gown with a clashing flower print. Today, I discovered that I can wear pigtails again, because I'm finally at that age where you want to look like you want to look younger. Tonight, after a late reading, I put a kimono on over a Navajo skirt, and I realized, I am finally at that age where you want to look you want to look like you don't care. Enjoyed talking to people's passed on parents today. I even thought I heard Robin Williams yelling, "Yippee!!" at the top of his lungs. I have moments where I just wish I could live in a temple or tower somewhere in the desert, just existing...steeping in the essence of spirit...channeling the artists of yesterday into the dawns of tomorrow...with nothing else to do.

I feel like I am so full I am going to burst...that I have so much love and so much to share with the world, that I can't possibly. I feel like I don't have anything like the amount of time I need to catch up with my timeless immortal soul friends. How, can I utilize all of the knowledge gained over thousands of years? How can I help folks to remember the depth and the dimensions of their ancient and multidimensional personality essence? It can feel like such a burden, like the knowledge can be useless and futile outside of the context of readings, clearings and healing sessions. I know how it can be employed, but it takes a level of cosmic awareness that goes beyond ordinary understanding. Mundane tasks can be a welcome relief, but I feel like time is running out, because the world needs major change to happen faster that the speed of light. Stat.

Author David Ryan on Healing Wisdom Thursday

THE POD IS UP.

David Ryan, the author of a short story collection, Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press), will be on Healing Wisdom this week. His stories have appeared "in Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Hayden's Ferry Review, failbetter.com, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, several Mississippi Review Prize issues, Nerve, Hobart, and Salt Hill, among others. His fiction has been anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. His essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Connecticut state arts grant and a Macdowell fellowship, he currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College."

His latest work, Animals in Motion, leaves you feeling restless and uneasy in your own skin, vaguely uncomfortable with humanity, strangely satisfied and piteous of the foibles and shortcomings of characters which seem all at once painfully self-conscious and completely unaware. You want to comfort the long shadows his tin, hapless and often mournful cavernous characters leave behind in their wake, but like naive children who are longingly lonely and yet too thorny and self-absorbed to touch. So you resign to appreciate their sorrows and blunderings at a safe distance. In the same tradition as Raymond Carver, William Faulkner and his ilk, Ryan has chosen to bring the reader into the world of characters we feel awkward and relieved to find sympathy toward.

Books are remarkable places to find private commiseration in darkened mental landscapes. Your compassion for the underdog can't take you down a notch here. Your reactions toward the secrets hidden and the mysteries unraveling are completely unknowable to the outside world. Your morality, your ethics, your sexual desire, nothing is under the microscope. You should be able to read things you don't want your shrink or your diary to know about. You get a free pass to a private non-corporeal experience, no paper trail necessary. The relationship is on your terms, you either keep reading or stop. Sometimes it seems that the longer an author forces you to excavate the wreckage, the more it becomes hard to decipher the contents. More revelations lead to more questions than answers. And sometimes, whispering between the third person and first person narratives, the author, like an imaginary friend who faintly haunts the hours through his darkened corridors seems to be an amalgamation of his characters and your subconscious mind. A companion, a path finder, ever present, yet invisible, and silent in the music of words like notes, and characters like melodies.

Ryan's book explores layers, sometimes peeling inflamed scars back like raw flesh, sometimes plinging you like a pinball into someone's head, sometimes putting a character like a breast between two pieces of glass like a painful mammogram, and at times it's very cinematic. In the tradition of southern short story writers, characters can be downright unlikable, unknowingly unethical, emotionally galvanized, and haunted by former love but exhibiting an admirable matter-of-factness and lack of self-pity. Perhaps Ryan and authors like him are helping readers to expand our minds, wonder about the back stories of strangers, the way adolescents do, before their world becomes a tunnel vision - focused on their daily minutia, insurance, loans. Before their futures become maps, like high-tech weather forecasts of tornado trips to Disneyworld and Legoland and ATMS.

Gotta love books that allow you to be a mute witness to accidents waiting to happen, like an angel in the afterlife, you await the return of the crushed souls, who somehow exhibit a triumphant surrender to the powerful absurdity and orchestrated chaos the universe seems to have foisted upon them.