The eighties gaudy neon extravagance, big hair and anti-intellectualism stumbled into the nineties. It was the summer on Venice Beach, when the morning maritime fog roles in over the edges of civilization, before inlanders would make a lazy mad dash to stake their claim at a jacked up parking spot, a patch of hot sand, and all the Ray's pizza and churros they and their families can stuff down before dragging broken baby strollers and lawn chairs over fireworks-and-old-gum-stained cracked sidewalks on their smoky exoduses home. Their backpacks full of Bart Simpsons t-shirts, Blue Blockers, Bob Marley buttons and nag champa.
Little did they know of the marine layer and quiet of dawn, not of the fresh ocean winds that their ghastly stalling cars, Banana Boat tans, and cheap cologne vanquished. They came for the spectacles: homeless veterans beat boxers with psychic pets, old gypsy quad skaters in bikinis, drunken piano players, hip-hopping glass-walkers and the skateboarding torso man. I was in fifth grade, going into sixth. So skinny, I could be mistaken for an adult woman at a distance. Before my chubby awkward phase and my sexual awakening, before I adored anything BUT BBC period films, Motown, Arthurian era romance, Shakespeare and Baroque churches. I'd read The Witches by Roald Dahl, and I was pretty sure I was one. It would be a year before I wore a bra, but my breasts were hardly bigger than they are now. I caved when boys became fascinated with my resistance to doing the things pubescent girls do. The stinky boys who smelled like morning breath, gym socks, old pee and Tide, insisted on discussing my nipples with loud voices amplified by the stucco walls that defined our unconventional basketball court. Hate is a strong word. My dreams always kept me sane. Corinthian columns, Rosetta Stones, stained glass Cathedral windows, the Globe Theatre, the Louvre.
My mother was away the day I woke up in a gooey, mess of brown clotted menstrual blood. It looked like a lifetime of repressed vitality thickly coating utilitarian pastel underwear, hard to imagine coming from a girl of eleven. My father insisted amid my panicked screams that I had shit myself, and that my intestines weren't descending through my vagina. After being informed that I had bled from my vagina, I was euphoric. Much less shameful that shitting ones self. I was just doing what every woman who had every lived had done before me. I felt I had inherited some legacy, something richer than gold. My body was healthy and it possessed knowledge beyond my understanding, beyond words. My mother helped me to feel proud and lucky, against the jeers of grown men, the creeping lurkers eyeing young girls on every street and the mean, stinky boys who seemed to have inherited canned attitudes about women and their bodies from dark 1950s men's clubrooms. I had to confront with new autonomy when I returned to school for 6th grade.
Rites of passage had intrigued me. I was spellbound by Coming of Age traditions in National Geographics articles. I decided to create a ceremony, based in Celtic tradition and went to work researching and casting the parts among my mother's friends: High Priestess, Mother, Maiden, Crone, et cetera. What a blessing it was to be empowered in a circle of women, in Magu State Park, on that August day!
Ceremony is so important, for it acknowledges the mystical, magical ways of our Universe, and honors our place in it, our unique and collective paths and gifts. Continuing in the tradition of the grandmothers, I am happy that my path has helped me to reconnect other people, women most especially, to a space they are awake to their creativity and soul's purpose. The culture is so fragmented, cynical, adversarial, divided and devicive that claiming our birthrights as spiritual, intuitive, loving and compassionate beings is quite an accomplishment!
I am excited to offer Goddessing Ceremony next week at Birthwell LA!
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