Dreaming Into Being

Gypsy caravaning up to New Hampshire to teach a workshop for the transformative supermoon. It's a Get Your Goddess On Full Harvest Moon kinda Saturday, leading up to the powerful lunar eclipse on Sunday.

Goddess Kirtan. Sound Journey. Group Art Play. Harvest Potluck.

We're playing dress up and enjoying an aromatherapy Sacred Spa with healing medicinal teas and oils. Just like the Monoian priesstesses of yor. If some chica doesn't get bare breasted and hold a fist full of snakes...I won't have done my job.

No One Can Prepare Themselves

No one can prepare for the inevitable unenviable position of being an ailing elderly parent's caretaker, but the weight must fall on someone's shoulders. The role reversal might bring up pains from your own childhood, it may cause grudges between siblings, tremendous guilt. You just finish emptying your nest, and now this? Join me this week on Healing Wisdom as my guest Dr. Katherine Arnup and I chat about her book, "I Don't Have Time For This". Hear her personal journey and professional insight this Thursday at 9am ET on Cape Cod's Outermost Radio, 92.1 WOMR-fm in Ptown and 93.1 wfmr-fm in Orleans, streaming at WOMR.org

Homeboy Tennessee and the 15th Anniversary of the Kern County River Rapids Expedition

REPOSTED FROM SEPTEMBER 1st 2013:

I took my husband to see A Cat on a Hit Tin Roof. Tennessee Williams plays are like salty lips lathered in strawberry balm, beaded with brandy, a burning shower in peach Ciroc aftershave and a slap in the face, a frantic shuffle to undress in a tight space that leaves bruised lovers unsated, huffing and puffing.

With our country pushing us further into WWIII, it seemed perfect to be celebrating in the town that is the fist, of the flexed arm of American chutzpah. Packs of short, small-boned, heavily-cologned, twenty-something-men in brand new flannel shirts, skinny pants and thong sandals smacking bubblegum converged outside karaoke bars and night clubs that seemed like Disneyland, if Disneyland did "A Las-Vegas-style Seventeenth Century Seaside Villa in the Green Zone". Wild-eyed short-haired lesbians on beach cruisers rode straight down Commercial Street, almost hitting us, and chortling. With laughs like batting eye lashes and rose perfume.

We drank Chamborde at a galley-like dive bar festooned with rusty anchors and lobster trap buoys. A Dutch-angles-state-of-mind created by the slanted floor boards and the octave-and-dimension-surfing refrains of Roy Orbison on the jukebox. If ghosts were there, they were busily ignoring the living, twittling their hair, like mermaids contemplating land-lover careers as burlesque dancers. The drinks were weak, and ungenerous, from the youthful hands of the the seasoned older blonde bartender, business savvy and cold to non-natives. Her face was white like a mermaid at war with oxygen. She's a sharp-as-a-tack shapeshifter, who can wear her years like a horsewoman, and peel 'em away in a flash of her smile, in the snap of her fingers. The vespertine atmosphere is like that of The Specs in SF, if The Specs was a ghostship that ate mushrooms and melted deep into the earth, Chernobyl style.

The blanket of rough, broken shells on the shore met with the black water and black sky sisters, holding up the small narrow boats that looked like glass slippers and wooden clogs, wobbling side to side in the lapping Kahlúa sea. The angels were out on the water, twinkling, lilting, and bending beams of light. Hubby and I darted with the herons along the shore and under the wood pillars of docks and houses, before we barefoot climbed between darkened houses, along wood beams to a crushed abalone-filled parking lot at Angel Foods. Pure coincidence, mind you.

My Eternal Jukebox Versus the Flags of Other Peoples' Dreams

In my own way, I'm married to the Goddess. Maybe you could even call her my wifey.

As much as my Eternal-Summer-loving Los Angelino spirit denies it, it's high time for the depth of night to envelope my soul. It's time I was overtaken by the resolution of ruddy Autumn. That I lay, chilled and blanketed, surrounded by the simplicity of disrobing trees. Injuries and vindications, triumphs and tribulations, zeal and ecstatic revelations, all cast downward in a freeing display of surrender. The summer distractions will be replaced by the action of Autumn...the contemplative hunter will confront the teeth and claws of the bear, before he can take his medicine. The proverbial autumn kill will sustain us through the hours of quiet creation Winter affords. Autumn is the Odalisque of seasons, while the summer is the Quaalude of reasons. A time of sober judgment in the wake of pratfalls and the seductive rapture of August. Battles fought in heat, leave sidewalks lined with pretty sorrows like lingerie that will never look quite the same again. Reparations reside in melancholy melons and squishy squash, moaning autumn breaks us away from the freedom of summer heat.

This summer was the first summer I enjoyed a true vacation in years: floating in the ocean and the ponds as light as a mermaid who has had her way. Slowing down to play with my son, be with him, and be there for him in ways I can't during the school year. Taking him to the beaches, having picnics, using our imagination, building forts, teaching him about art and history. Subservient to happiness.

Alas, there were moments I was at the mercy of my own tequila-fueled pleasure in the wake of my uncle's mysterious murder. I let my savage brain live in the moment, on ice, escaping the raw secondary emotions in favor of those one might imagine from a sauntering cavewoman who has just discovered tango, or a lone cowgirl a-sail under a charcoal sky animated by constellations. A perfect balance of togetherness and alone time has defined my reverie. After an unnatural and callous Winter, despair lining the vessel of my familial ship, I sought comfort in what I possess, in what is mine. My husband and I began dating each other, and after seventeen years together, that's really something. I called him my boyfriend twice, reminding me of our early days when we'd drive his Plymouth Scamp to 50s diners for all American breakfasts.

There were some kooky events and exchanges that punctuated the vast space of summer, that hit me unusually like fireballs hurling through a midnight cabin or green falling comets that explode into a carnival of fairy dust when they reach the earth's atmosphere and go mostly unseen by those around you. I see ways in which some of those I love have made me invisible and in effect I've allowed this to unwrite me from my own life.

This summer Death has touched me. When I didn't sink, the Skeleton Specter conspired with the Morrigan Fates to test if in fact I am a witch. Despite the Reaper's attempts to abscond with the gold from my heart and the Eternal Flame from my mouth, I remained afloat if in a sea of nectar and salt, while He took the brick road home to his master. Meanwhile his playfellow, the great white banshee, snowy Owl, has been dive-bombing the barn on my prairie. Showing me what I need to change and transforming things for me.

My Eternal Jukebox seems to be playing louder than ever. My need to dance is louder than any sound. My need to sing is louder than any praise, any club. I sing because I must talk with the dead. They confide in me their stories. I must reach out to the immortal ghosts, for they unite me with the elements, with God, with my soul.

Vows, values and pledges spoken in words only, rarely remain intact at the root. I have wandered the monasteries, the ethereal cloisters resounding in hymns, where angels have gathered. I have made like a waterfall into the powwows of the ancients, resting amid grandfather stones to renew my alliances and allegiances. Human vows and human values are written with human frailty. I cannot be friends based on circumstantial evidence of similarity. Rudeness and snide attitude, shallow mindsets and jealous joshing are feminine housewarming gifts I prefer to live without. I would much rather marry into a tribe of deer or cardinals, than make small talk, putdowns and profess opinions written into the cells that defined me at my birth. Living my life impersonal and with more negative space than words, would turn every interested, hungry, curious and incandescent part of me into a Hallmark card. I return to my origins to renew my faith, my fortress, my integral lines with Spirit. The religiosity and team spirit sewn into the brands that form relationships are flags of other's people's dreams. None of that computes in my alien heart.

It is the songs, the rhythms of the Heaven and Earth bridged that ruptures my failing ego and blossoms healing in my ailing wounds.

My gothic threads aren't going to go away. Like Baroque architecture, my structural integrity is here to stay. I can dress it up in secretary chic or gallery wino hip, but whatever its incarnation, this gothic sensibility makes it so that I can't watch TV, give a rat's behind about professional sports, or heed the advice of glossy magazines. I don't want what other people are having. I see the crowd and I'd break shoes and garner bruises, scale a cliff to run in the other direction. I've discovered I cannot pee into a mason jar in a midnight tent, but that won't stop me from waxing poetic about it. Small town life isn't for me, but here I am. All in all, I'm quite satisfied, swimming with the oily Selkie, hearing the silence of dawn, blooming in my own rhythm while helping others in the garden unfurl.

The Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival

There are only two writers whose timeless souls I worship as I do Jesus, the Buddha, the fierce Polynesian Volcano Goddess Pele and the Warrior Goddess Kali whose many arms slay and display simultaneously a demon's head. This is simply because these two playwrights charge forward through rainbow ribboned quantum portals dragging audiences along a ride like a baptism. These writer-Gods driving chariots of fire across an apocalyptic sun-flaring burning sky of righteous indignation. The landscape covered in resurrected sympathies ripe with emotion. Our scabs come undone as we grokk the gaping wounds of the characters before us. Our collective sweat pools, knee jerk laughs free us, our subconscious journeys underneath the stories like river snakes or goffers, while our etheric blood coagulates. We breathe in and sign out the landscape of human predicaments, pain, love, and lust. We stop off at Humiliation and are dumped in peels of laughter, and baptized in clarity that is unique to these two playwrights.

Tomorrow at 9am EDT streaming at womr.org, airing at 92.1 WOMR-fm in Ptown and 91.3 WFMR-fm in Orleans. In the am I will be speaking with Jef Hall-Flavin, the Executive Director for the Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theater Festival, where he directed Eugene O’Neill’s Diff'rent, as well as three world-premiere Tennessee Williams one-act plays, The Parade (2006), Green Eyes (2008), and The Enemy: Time (2009), among many other plays.

Hall-Flavin's recent directing projects include The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire both of which he staged in New Zealand; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Park Square Theatre in his home town of St. Paul, Minnesota.

As Associate Director of The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., he assisted Michael Kahn and Bill Alexander on several productions, directed As You Like It in a co-production with the Kennedy Center, and restaged Mark Lamos’ production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Shakespeare Free-For-All, as well as the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival.