Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everybody! May we continue to bring healing, creativity, laughter, increasing awareness and shifting consciousness in the new year. May we overcome the most difficult of challenges for ourselves, our communities and for humanity at large. May we have the courage to be our most soulful, authentic, and deepest selves and find a continuing and expanding support we need in our local and global communities to do so. Blessed Be.

Full Body Milkyway High, the Ley Lines of Our Collective Anatomy, and Sloughing Off Spiritual Lochia

A good book makes you pause and think along the way about interesting concepts or your fundamental beliefs, but a great book has you held captive, internalizing every bit of the journey, conscious of both your own journey and the journey of the narrator and living in the space where the two intersect. Squirming, weeping, gutted, and scraping yourself off your butt with a spatula, only to take your book with you to the bathroom, to pee, like a new mother does with her just born infant glued to her breast. Wiping lochia from your raw, stitched, bleeding vagina, hovering with a wadded up tissue by achy quivering muscles over a salty stinging sitz bath, spasming painfully, half numb from frozen menstrual pads, wondering how your life could possibly carry on the way it had before, the previous day, the way it had in the previous years since your own emergence onto the planet.

I had to put Wild by Cheryl Strayed down at page 169. I have a child who needs my attention and my own writing to do, but I will finish it before the other six books on my nightstand.

From Dogtown to Helltown and not a decade too soon...
Took a walk with my dear family on the beach and realized I am in fact a beach person. I have had this realization again and again in my adult life, but it never ceases to surprise me. Growing up on in a one bedroom apartment on one of the busiest, dirtiest, most congested streets in America, I feared going outside. It meant contending with sarcastic hoots and hollers from teenagers peeling in uproarious laughter, sneers from men who liked little girls, and confusing conversations with lost foreigners seeking directions to destinations all across town. When I was my son's age I had a lemonade stand out front and someone hurled a large Gulpie at my head from a car while the traffic backed up in front of me. I couldn't see whose deep adult voices laughed joyously through my tears. When I forgot to lock the front door, strangers would walk in asking to use the bathroom or the phone. People would leave their Slurpies and hamburger wrappers on our front step. Over the years we called it our front porch, first in earnest wishfulness, grateful to have found a place to live after years of couch surfing, squatting and house sitting. Later we called in our stoop in irony until the irony faded and it was a porch to us again, even though it was just a concrete slab.

Our step was public landscape, like a curbside or a park bench on which to sit and put on shoes, to scrape dog shit off on, on which to lace up inline skates. We were there to serve the needs of beach-goers, to bribe parking spots from, to entertain, to steal planters, geodes, and garden ornaments from. At night men would yell at their girlfriends and call them whores as they argued out front. Occasionally, there were gunshots at night, sometimes I was home alone glued to infomercials like a lifeline to the outside world. Often coworkers would pass by sloshed and someone would vomit in front of our kitchen on my mom's desert rose in the middle of her succulent garden. By day, sandy families in soaking clothes wrapped in equally drenched towels with diarrhea dogs in tow, would drag their empty coolers and boogie boards, propping them up against my front door while they loaded their cars and left piles of trash in the sand all across our beach in their wake. In the 80s you couldn't walk three feet without stepping on tar, a syringe, a used condom or a cigarette butt, usually all four.

On Venice Beach, I scurried down the boardwalk like a scared mouse on quads, darting around the manic tourists stuffing melting slices of Ray's pizza in their mouths as they gaffawed at homeless pirates pushing crafts and street performers escalating willing crowds' applause with shrill crescendos or base hip hop beats. Vying for pocket change and cash money in swaggering jumpsuits, naked in chains, or dressed like a Gandhi ninja walking in a James Brown like ecstasy over glass. The smell of perfumes, churros, nag champa, and overflowing dumpsters filling the air and mingling with cheap orange chicken kabobs or Italian sausages drowning in watered-down relish splatting on the hot bubble gum and firework stained asphalt street below.

Venice Beach was in its afterglow, with its noisy steroid-induced hubris. The chaos of oily Blue Blockers-clad, banana-sunblock-smothered tourists sweating through their headbands and leg warmers in slow motion gaping at hanging T-shirts with Bart Simpson catch phrases and swarmed by MC-Hammer-pants wearing Alladin Jedis on skateboards. Crisscrossing through stoned window shoppers irately yelling nonsensical tirades strung together by expletives.

By my 20s the beach was cleaner and I came to meditate there, soaking up the beauty of an empty beach in the middle of the night. Now, even living a mile from the beach might as well be a landlocked mountain range to my mermaid soul. If it weren't for my connection to the ocean, the constant presence of constellations and the moon's rise and fall, I might never found the angels or been initiated to this work. The sumptuous fluidity of the undulation like a belly dancer's abdomen, the evocations of heaving rip tides like mini Bermuda Triangles, the crashing of waves like shamanic exorcism, all coexisting in an elaborate rhythmic dance.

Sometimes, all it takes to heal the body or spirit is immersing your self in the moonbeams or the darkness, the churning ocean waves, the inimitable sands. The vast wisdom and oneness of the universe permeates the pebbles, imbues the air with a holiness that is deeply enlivening and fortifying to the soul. The earth is truly our mother. This becomes obvious when you lay face down, half-orphaned, half-broken, on the naked earth. She holds you, siphoning away sorrow, cradling you to her bosom. Three deep breaths of her ionizing sea air and one primal moan into her stony sand, may lead to a sedated state of bliss. Ten minutes buried in the sand, or floating on your back gazing at the tapestry of heaven may be all you need to remove suffocating ropes of despair or a gnarly web of sticky disenchantment from around your sacred human vessel.

Tomorrow night I do my monthly deejay spot on Ptown's Outermost Radio. I plan to venture into more pop diva territory. May even go experimental Puddles Pity Party on your ass. So tune in to 92.1 WOMR-fm in Ptown, 91.3 WFMR-fm in Orleans or streaming at womr.org from your electronic device. We have now partnered up with Radio Free America, so you will be able to hear my Pandora's Jukebox shows at anytime pretty soon. Watch out, it's a creeper.

Adopting the Chanukah Fish and Loving Grandma Chicken

Around here, we celebrate Chanukah, Winter Solstice, Saturnalia, and Christmas in the ritual bath houses, oracle caves, and underground grottos of the ancient temples of Cape Cod. If you celebrate holy days from all world traditions, then there is always something to celebrate, and most often the holidays are interconnected and related to earth seasons and astrological events. The global cultures of our brothers and sisters on this planet each have unique flavor, stories and art. Just as each region has beauty in its flora, fauna, geography and people. Celebrate what you want, and celebrate in love.

In between my channelings and writing our family has been honoring the holy days. We've been baking cookies, singing carols and playing Christmas tunes on our new 'electric piano', and frying latkes. I organized the bathrooms, bookshelf in my son's room, and set up the fish tank. Bought my son a Chanukah fish, which pleased him so much, he is over the moon for his armored Plecostomus. Managed to make a bunch of jewelry (some manly works among them) and I fixed a bunch of my old jewelry. I have weird necklace karma, because I always manage to break necklaces immediately regardless of what materials I use, twine, string, metal, hemp, and a plethora of latches. This always leads me to the conclusion that I must have been beheaded in a past life, because what else could it be? Couldn't possibly be my lack of grace or finesse. It's the obvious conclusion, right?

I like to bake and stuff chicken at Christmas time, because it reminds me of my Polish grandmother. She didn't bake chicken herself, but she always felt like one. She was more of a Campbell soup casserole and Jello mold queen. She liked when I slept over, because I would sleep next to her under her electric blanket and give her a back rub. First, she would take off her wig, and what remained was a tiny bird's nest of sweaty brown hair. She would wash off her painted on eyebrows and take off her weighty beige bra, revealing hanging mounds underneath her translucent blue nightgown. She'd lift up her nighty, exposing her ice cold gooseflesh which I'd rub down down liberally with Tiger Balm. Don't rub too hard or the skin might detach! Every time I got the feeling you get seeing a drag performer for the first time, shock and awe. Maybe even fear, of this stranger, like a troll who has unmasked her disguise.

In the morning we'd eat devilishly grown cataloupe and cottage cheese tasting of pesticides. I didn't like egg beaters. Before dawn she'd be watching the news and I'd be trying to figure out how to distract her or myself. At some point tennis would be on endlessly while she tried to teach me to knit, impatient and badmouthing the 'fairies' of pro tennis, or the Winter Olympics. When I showed no aptitude for knitting, she'd drill me about having a boyfriend. It seemed like some sort of punishment for not meeting her expectations. She was worried about me having so many boy friends, when I should be stealing kisses on the playground.

At some point the pinochle deck featuring burlesque dancers would come out. She'd shuffle, waxing nostalgic about her Bowling Championship days, and she'd show me old photos of my grandpa's Egyptian girlfriend from WWII. "The love of his life." My family was no stranger to guilt. She'd ask me to do my Elvis impersonation and I'd sing Blue Suede Shoes with gusto or a rousing rendition of Hound Dog with pelvic gyrations, winding up my shaky right leg with as much machismo as I could put on for an eight or ten year-old-year girl. Afterwards my inner tomboy-ishness felt validated, and she didn't seem to care that I didn't want to act like a lady: fold clothes, knit, sew, and make beds with a pedantic perfectionism. I'd play catch with my grandad before minding the rotisserie chicken out in his succulent garden surrounded by statues of St. Francis. It was my favorite part of any Blue Christmas, because it genuinely made her happy. It even thrilled her.

Hero didn't take me up on rubbing the chicken down for some reason. Not even when I called it greatgrandma and danced with it, singing to it in a rockabilly hiccup. I always save the last dance for grandma.

Rest in peace Sweet Adeline.

Goddess of the Violin: Onyay Pheori on Healing Wisdom

We interrupt your regularly scheduled program for a very important news bulletin. Goddess of the stage, Onyay Pheori will be on a musical addition of Healing Wisdom on Cape Cod's Outermost Radio tomorrow Thursday at 6am PST/9am EST streaming at http://womr.org

Violinist, lyricist and singer Onyay Pheori discusses her latest albums, her new found fame in South Korea, her adventures with the Earth Harp Collective, and more. Fun show! Lots of TMI. Listen in with your morning breakfast.

92.1 WOMR-fm Provincetown, 91.3 WFMR-fm Orleans or streaming at http://womr.org Download the new app!

Z Budapest will be on my show come January 8th, so stay tuned for that. It's gonna rock!

Auntie Poltergeist and the Enchanted Stenographer

My birthday is Thursday and 33 happens to be my favorite number. I dont know where I go sometimes at night, but sometimes I wake up wondering whose life is this any way. It could be some mad-cow triggered early onset Alzheimers Fukushima radiative waste release related senior moment, but I would like to think it is a side effect of my line of work.

Readings have been going exceptionally well this week. The beloved departed seem to be getting feisty and riled up in celebration of the season. Mother Mary is leaping off of my altar, walls are shaking, people are using morse code tapping at my windows, birds are wildly cawing, little old ladies are making wise cracks from beyond the grave at my expense and my clients' relatives are stealing candles. I have so few remaining family members, and this orphanhood adds to the pleasure of meeting my clients aunts, friends of the family, grandparents, moms, dads, sisters and brothers.

Channeling messages for a new client is like getting adopted, doing a wellness check up and being hired to translate for a mediation to avoid going to trial all at the same time. It produces all of the joy of attending a wedding or a family reunion with out any of the drama. In no small part due to the influences of the season, I am feeling honored and overjoyed that this work continues to amaze me, blow me away really. If your heart hasnt wept with another, if you haven't put yourself in someone else's shoes, or allowed your departed loved ones in, you really havent delved into the season's true emotional center. It fascinates me that that the more open my clients the more crystal clear the material comes through for the readings. A person neednt be aware of their angels, only willing to face the deep underlying truths communicated by their guides and eager to explore the wisdom imparted and then boom...names, places, dates, and more importantly, revelations spring forth. Artsy people tend to have the most entertaining souls around them.

For my birthday my son got the weighted 88 key keyboard he has been waiting for. After his Christmas recital we made a duet of Lila Fletcher's The Birch Canoe, which I suspect is the basis of the song Mad World origionally by Tears for Fears. I have yet to learn any Chanukah song, but the Birch Canoe is sufficiently melancholy.

I try to avoid having my life flash before my eyes around my birthday, but resistence is futile and I need only surrender. Like an orgasm, every birthday is a little death. And rebirth.

Upcoming Guests on My Radio Show Healing Wisdom

Violinist, song writer and shamanic healer Onyay Pheori discussing her upcoming albums.

London stage actress Rachel Handshaw discussing her muses, Shakespeare, poetry and inspiration.

Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, biologist author discussing the interconnectedness of all things, new science and skepticism.

Feminist author and Dianic Wiccan Zsuzsanna Budapest, discussing her amazing autobiography about her fascinating life through political unrest, as an immigrant refugee. Her journey had her fleeing in the stealth of the night from occupied Hungary to Austria via swamplands, to studying improv at Second City in Chicago, acting in New York art films, and starting the women's spiritual movement in the 1960s, a subsequent witch trial and interview with Johnny Carson.

Dr. Seeta Narsai, Ayurvedic doctor discussing motherhood from a mind-body health perspective.

Boston-based Odissi-style belly dancer Kalidasi Burgess discusses this ancient temple dance from India and Hindu spirituality.

Tune in Thursday mornings at 9am EST/6am PST to hear Healing Wisdom live streaming at http://womr.org or if you live anywhere from Provincetown to New Bedford, you can find us at 92.1 WOMR-fm Ptown or 91.3 WFMR-fm Orleans

Dr. Robert M. Siegel on Childhood Obesity

Tomorrow on Healing Wisdom, is Dr. Robert M. Siegel, medical director of the Center for Better Health and Nutrition of the Heart Institute at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and he’s joining us by phone. Dr. Siegel is a professor of Clinical Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati. He earned his MD from New York University. He was a general pediatrician for more than twenty years before joining the Heart Institute and was president of the Medical Staff at Cincinnati Children’s from 2008 to 2010. Dr. Siegel’s research interests include dietary and physical activity interventions in obese children. Tune in to 92.1 WOMR-fm, 91.3 WFMR-fm or http://womr.org at 9am est.

2,400 Acres of Tribal Land Set to be Usurped

Indian Givers! When does it stop? When there is not a single spot of land for the native people of this country? This is not 'uninhabited' conservation lands where only plants and animals and their ecosystems are being disrupted and destroyed, which would be horrible enough. With European settlers' history of creating genocide on the original people of this country, hunting their food sources, battling them until they moved to nearly inhospitable regions further West, and then demanding by death or imprisonment that they pick up their cities and move again, how can this THIS be happening? Whatever happened to the vision of folks like John Muir?

As part of the NDAA, the House passed a bill which steals 2,400 acres of Apache Native American lands and hands it over to a foreign mining company to exploit and destroy. This means that access to all of the traditions and cultural teachings associated with the last vestiges of lands which facilitate the communication of sacred knowledge and teaching of cultural wisdom and identification is being robbed out from under our collective feet. These are our brothers and sisters. This means that the space native people were given to live, practice their ceremonies, have access to medicinal plants, and create community is being robbed from them in the name of national security. Since when did inhibiting religious freedom and creating cultural genocide become part of a defense budget plan? I guess that is a strategy that has been oft employed.

Mother Earth and the Death Culture

The difference between Mars and Venus is that war-like Mars energy promotes conquering, competition, and death, and love-promoting Venus energy promises unification, community, and life. Why do so many people feel betrayed by religion? Why does it fall so short of our expectations for so many of us? We can try to extract the aspects of it that reflect the cultural misogyny, racism, classicism, xenophobia, and other political agendas that clouded the spirituality at the roots of organized religion. Once we make a concerted effort to sterilize old doctrines, viewing them through politically correct rose-colored glasses based on our modern conventional wisdom, what we have left looks very much like the tenants and customs of the old earth-centered religions which centered on creating balance and harmony between plants, animals, people and our planet. When we extract the patriarchal and misogynistic constructions and ideologies of monotheism, purging them of futile exercises in condemnation of our basic humanity, we are less left at odds with our nature, less at odds with one another and more compassionate to the world around us upon which we are dependent.

What is religion in the tradition of monotheism? It is the rituals and belief in purifying oneself and absolving oneself of intrinsic deficiencies and acquired sin to be accepted by God in the afterlife. It is preparing oneself for death and life ever-after. The path of the earliest earth-based religions celebrate the cycles of life, preserving the perfection, wholeness and integrity of original self, the global community and the earth. It is preparing oneself for life and living in love. The fear of death and loss of safety makes the status quo desirable, whereas the courage to embrace life and its unknowns requires people take chances and make ongoing changes. When fear is replaced by courage, doubt is replaced by faith, repression is replaced by expression, avoidance is replaced by exploration, competition is replaced by community, free will replaces blind obedience, and a knee-jerk inherited value-system locked into shame, guilt, regret and self-hatred is replaced by beliefs based on authentic experience, kindness, love and creativity thrives.

There is nothing wrong with single parent families, but there is something innately destructive to societal structures that do not honor the feminine as holy and divine, as equal with the masculine. There is something critically fatalistic and futile in a religion that excludes the Mother Creator figure, and renders the only important mother as mere vessels of God's seed, Mother Mary. Is it any wonder Father God is so pissed off and angry all the time slinging around eternal damnation like a cowboy in the Wild West shooting his pistol on the dry chaparral of immortality with no wife to keep him company. All alone and unmatched on his omnipotent mountain in his wrathful and eternal perfection.

Incredibly Distasteful News Brief

Cracking the Pandora Myth: How Women's Pussies Got Blamed for the Downfall of Mankind Which Actually Led to It. Working title ;) Picked up major steam in some fabulous revelations for my book this week.

Fracking for The Cure on Planet Pandora...In National News: Scientists for Surgical Hair Removal have linked depression, low self-esteem & the inability to get a date with pubic hair. For The Cure: Feminists for Cosmetic Liposuction teamed up with Pink Drill Bits for Fracking to create pink EstroBits, SoyGrrrl donuts for moms on the go. 10% of profits from every greasy, artificially-flavored, hormone-disrupting donut wrapped in a leeching BPA-lined plastic baggy, goes to fighting breast cancer.

Our new Pope is so amazinglicious, that he's recommending Christians stop condemning other religions, insisting that there are more commonalities between them, than dogma that separates them. In a bid to win favor with circumcision advocates of the Christian faith, he's endorsing a rabbinical mouthwash for Priests. Brit MilahFresh, in new MetzitzahMint and Maztzoball flavors, from Low Hanging Fruit: Kosher Sauces, Medical Supplies and Environmental Impact Studies for all Occassions. "Choose Brit MilahFresh: Because boys aren't fully clean until their Metzitzah fully clean!" A recent surge in Low Hanging Fruit stock may be due to the increased market for sauces in drier climates, old fashioned circumcisions, and studies on the potential uranium impact on countries who have stuff we want, bad. The incredible claim that Brit MilahFresh mouthwash leaves your tongue and salivary glands Clean as a Whistle and Soft As a Baby's Behind has yet to be undeniably refuted by peer reviewed scientific studies.

Community Spirit Award Day was turned into a massive teleconference due to carcinogenic vog. An award for most creative high environmental impact aerobics class went to Old People With No Blood Relations for their ingenious use of gas leaf blowers in public places. Uncle Sam was quoted in the Status Quo as saying, "It is an amazing how when you stop giving a shit about the future, your whole world opens up and the possibilities are endless." Until that cavernous hole swallows everyone and everything up.

More Sunshine on a Chilly Late Autumn Day

These are from my photoshoot with Susannah. She chose Sunne, the German Goddess of the Sun, as her character.