Autumn Equinox and Harvest Full Moon

Happy Autumn Equinox and Harvest Full Moon weekend. This is the last of three traditional harvests in the old calendar. This is a time to make-merry, celebrate what you’ve created, tie up loose ends, do what you need to do to come into balance.


The energy of the plants goes into the roots. We harvest the roots at this time. We are about to collectively go into a period of more personal, spiritual growth, introspection and a deeper desire to create harmony and an awareness of ourselves.


The energy of October is about to fill our lives with electricity, a reverence or longing for those who have past and a stronger connection to our intuition.


A great time for divination, making changes, setting boundaries and learning about ourselves and others in a deeper way!

The Fiddle and the Harp

I'm DJing tonight on The Fiddle and the Harp for our Fall Pledge Drive between 5 and 8pm ET In Provincetown. Send me your Irish music! If you are a local musician email me and maybe we can get you on the radio. Peachtpandora@yahoo

I take requests: 508-487-2619

Does screen time cause ADHD? Does today's addiction to social media create a breakdown in communication? Has our technology created adverse changes in behavior and communication? Speech language pathologist and University of Massachusetts/Amherst Associate Professor Dr. Pat Mercaitis weighs in this morning at 9am ET streaming at WOMR.org

International Women's Day 2016

Our theme at Outermost Community Radio for this year's 24 hours of International Women's Day programming is Untold Stories/Amazing Legacies. We are celebrating with original programming (and Democracy Now) and all women DJs.

This is our tentative schedule thus far. I belong to the 3-person core IWD Committee. I'm super excited to be bringing educational and diverse women's voices to the radio for a fantastic day!

In addition to the schedule below, several 5-Minute Cape Cod Women’s History Segments from Susan Lindquist will be plugged in. Women are underrepresented in every sector of our society, in every institution. From government to the music industry, there is a huge dearth. The climate for women in those places is largely toxic and exploitative. In our small way we hope to bring women's history and stories to the forefront, because the more we are seen and heard, the more empowered we become, and the greater personal and societal changes can be made. Women's stories and history is systematically suppressed and buried in our cultural narrative.
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12am – 1am "Babes in Boyland" with Anne Levine
Description: Anne Levine will play clips of comedienne pioneers including Belle Barthe, Joan Rivers, Moms Mabely, and Phyllis Diller.

1am – 2am “Funny Stories with Amazing Women” with Michelle Crone & Guests
Description: Michelle Crone interviews three feminist comedians and they share funny stories about what it is to be a woman.

2am – 3am “Bite This Rossi Marathon” with Chef Rossi

3am – 4am “Celtic Beat” with Dinah Mellin
Description: DJ Dinah Mellin shares music and history on Celtic music’s signature sound.

4am - 5am “Immigration into New York City” with Pia Young
Description: Immigration into NYC and immersion into an English-speaking community.

5am – 6am “Christine Ernst Stand-Up”
Description: Comedian and spoken word performer Christine Ernst tells Dinah Mellin her outrageous stories. We also play spoken word clips.

6am – 9am "Brand New Day" with Kathy Tarr

9am – 9:30am "Talking Back" with Paula Sperry

9:30 – 12:30pm "Roots n' Offshoots" with Carol Courneen
Description: "roots" music and history with Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Etta James, Wanda Jackson, etc, and those current artists who have been influenced by pioneers. Guess the artist call-in game.

12:30pm - 1pm “Name That Tune” with Char Priolo
Description: 60s women vocalists and their history.

1pm – 4pm "The Latest Score" with Canary Burton
Description: Women's classical music through the ages and a phone interview with a composer.

4pm – 5pm “Democracy Now” with Amy Goodman

5pm – 6pm “What is Feminism for Today’s Youth?” with Siobhan Hemeon-McMahon
Description: Student Voices and Modern Pop Vocalists

6pm – 8pm “Female Poets in World Music” with Sandra Hemeon–McMahon
Description: Latin American and World Poets whose poetry has been put to music.

8pm – 9pm “Mama Africa: The Pioneering Women of Modern Latin Music” with DJ-B
Description: DJ B Explores the African roots of modern Latin music.

9pm – 9:30pm “Helping Girls Soar” with Brenda Conlan
Description: Prevention Specialist Brenda Conlan discusses helping girls stay sober and avoid tobacco use.

9:30pm to 10pm “Out Late” with Diana Di Gioia and Melody Massi
Description: Diana Di Gioia and Melody Massi discuss gender identity and sexuality over their life times and play three songs on the topic.

10pm - 12am "Soul Infused History" with Catherine Graciano & Pandora Peoples
Description: All-Women Soul and R&B bands. Archeologist Vicki Noble’s Top 10 Little Known Heroines. Native American Women’s History. Transmedia performance artist and cult classic Phoebe Legere presents her Top 10 Little Known Heroines.

Healing Wisdom This Week

Singer songwriter Jordan Renzi gets spiritual with me on Thursday at 9am ET at Womr 92.1 fm in Provincetown and WFMR 93.1 fm in Orleans.

Brazilian Music with Cla da Bossa Nova

Super excited the talented that Rayssa Ribeiro (pronounced Hy-issa He-berro) and Tad Price of Cla da Bossa Nova will be performing on Healing Wisdom this Thursday morning at 9am ET on WOMR 92.1 fm in Ptown and streaming at http://womr.org

Looking forward to my upcoming poetry feature on February 13th at 1pm at the Brewster Ladies Library. Come one, come all. We have live music with guitarist Claudia Wellington and cellist Ellen Waters Sullivan. Carole A. Stasiowski will be the spotlight performer. There will be a music and poetry sign up.

Also, collaborating with some musicians. Hoping it goes well. Inhabiting songs is like channeling ghosts. It can be a quintessential experience of surrender. Like laying in the middle of a Medieval Cathedral and feeling the pensive saints with piercing eyes and the majestic angels in flight. Rainbow sunshine speckling the tears and sweat soaked wooden benches. The incantations and mumbled prayers layered like lacquer from centuries of belief and disbelief. The ecstatic evocations and moans of humanity ascending and descending, inhaling and exhaling. Falling in love with art. Being enveloped by beauty.

Cronos told me that I need to revisit my interest in writing Ophelia as a sword wielding tart. Someday.

Neptune says, if you haven't been to the bottom of the sea and back, you haven't really lived. But he would say that.

Live Music on Healing Wisdom

Live music with guitarist Mark van Bork Thursday on Healing Wisdom helping us to say goodbye to 2015 bright and early at 9am ET. Enjoy a blend of jazz, blues, and funky soul. He will be bringing in a New a Year with his trio VB and the Buzz in PTown Friday night. Mark teaches at Emerson College and studied at Berklee.

Chiropractor Mitch Tishler on Healing Wisdom

This week on Healing Wisdom I speak with Mitch Tishler about his book, "Me Finally: Navigating Life with an Open Heart". We discuss Seeing With the Heart, having a soul perspective, and Cape Cares, a medical relief organization he co-founded. Streaming at 9am ET on http://Womr.org WOMR 92.1 fm in Provincetown, WFMR 93.1-fm in Orleans.

What is the Single Most Important Ingredient to Healthy Living?

My next guest has the answer.

What did Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and Bob Dylan have in common? They all sought out the advice and friendship of my next guest. This Thursday on Healing Wisdom, Doctor of Oriental Medicine author Dr. David Kearney shares his secrets from 40 years of practice.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DUgFpUgEwg

Quantum Physics and the Metaphysics of the Ancient Platonists

Award winning author Dr. John Spencer discusses how quantum physics has its roots with the ancient metaphysical Platonists and the pratfalls of both reductionist science and new age anti-realism. Intriguing, fascinating stuff only on Healing Wisdom. John Spencer's Interview

Red Tent Temple Movement

Next week on Healing Wisdom ALisha Starkweather and I discuss third wave feminism, the sacred feminine, women's solidarity, and the red tent movement. Starkweather will fill us in on the happenings at the Women's Parliament of World Religions' recent symposium in Utah last month. Healing Wisdom, Thursday at 9am ET on 92.1 WOMR-fm in Provincetown, streaming at http://Womr.org

Honoring Your Ancestors with Lozen, Apache Medicine Woman and Midwife

Between Samhain and Dia De Los Muertos the veil between the spirit world and this physical plain is very thin. Traditionally, this is a time of scrying, using prophetic powers, celebrating your ancestors and connecting with those on the other side.

Here are pics from my photoshoot with Juhl. Today we honor the life of Lozen, a medicine woman and midwife turned warrior and protectress of her people. There is a lot of misinformation and mythology surrounding the relations between native indigenous people and white settlers. The cavalry often showed up in the middle of the night and murdered women and children while the men were away, sometimes on Reservation Land, before moving the remaining Natives in the morning to other reservations or prison camps. Lozen defended her people, and used her psychic sense to gain knowledge about the enemy. I believe the collective soul of Native Americans must be healed and mended for all that they endured standing up for peace, justice and the right to their homeland, but I wonder at the collective soul of their tormentors' whose souls will forever be haunted.

In Wicca, it is believed that whatever you put out into the world comes back threefold. The concept is similar to dharma. Gratitude for your ancestors' many gifts and appreciation for their struggles is important and helps souls stay at peace, or find it. Listen to your angels, ancestors and spirit guides, you owe it to them! Vibrate with what is good and holy on the earth. Celebrate life and pray for cosmic allignment, truth and justice to prevail. Pray that light is shed on the darkest recesses of humanity and that consciousness, compassion, humanity and love wins over all.

The Witching Hour and My Mother the Moon

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!

Upcoming Guests on Healing Wisdom

On Healing Wisdom, I hope to showcase among other things, powerful women whose strength and fertile spirits are so firmly rooted in the earth, that one cannot help by feel renewed by deep breaths as a child in the woods. So many of us benefit from redefinining strength, and seeing the embodiment of organic, authentic souls who are ripening and harvesting their creative powers. Most especially, I hope that my show often serves as a reminder that feminine strength can be the heard in warrior cries, the sounds of prana yama breathing, the bending of ancient forests in stormy gails or in the soft melodies of the eternal drum.

Next week, we have Dr. John Spencer, author of, "The Eternal Law: Ancient Greek Philosophy, Modern Physics, and Ultimate Reality" discussing how Platonic ideas of objective reality and objective truth are babies being thrown out in the bath water of modern philosophy. He speaks with me us about how rational scientific thinking doesn't rule out the invisible metaphysical world, and how they are in fact mutually exclusive. He talks about underlying fallacies in the New Age community that react against fundamentalist mechanistic dogma. He looks at Greek philosophy and physics through a new lens and shares his insights.

We speak with Pandora Thomas, Co-founder of Earthseed Consulting, whose work expands opportunities for sustainable living for diverse communities. She talks about the intersections between permaculture, green architecture, social, environmental and racial justice.

We speak with Patricia Algara, founder of With Honey in Heart, a non-profit dedicated to elevating the status of bees and creating habitats for pollinators. She holds a Master's Degree in Landscape Architecture, is a professor at UC Berkley and has been working on community empowerment projects creating learning environments, food productive landscapes and much more.

Also, coming up is an interview with ALisa Starweather, creator of the red tent temple movement discussing sisterhood, the sacred feminine, red tents, and The Parliament of the World's Religions.

Falling down and picking yourself up builds character. Falling down and taking in the view gives you perspective.

Home Tidings

As I beautify our home, I ponder the fleeting nature of the seasons, the speed of evolution, and the marvelous half-haunted feeling which defines my human existence. From an early age I felt that a true fulfillment and success was not defined by the accumulation of status emblems nor the sensation of happiness. On the contrary, accomplishment was to be acquired by divesting oneself of need to possess material goods and an aspiring life was marked by a richness in complex emotions and contradictions peppered with pain and bathed in saffron melancholy. Anything truly worthwhile was begot by a condition of liberation from societal values or beliefs which in turn causes a cessation from the limitations of imagination imposed by religious and institutional dogma which seem to perpetuate the greater evils on the planet. Some degree of alienation or a delicious loneliness is indicative of the type of rebellion one needs to maintain a purity of spirit and presence of mind. If your heart doesn't regularly tear like any good muscle from use, why you aren't setting your sights high enough on expansion and development. Thusly, my ideals brought me toil and anguish in good measure.

There is everything and nothing ambiguous about being dead and the same thing holds true for seeing dead people. These days I see the spirits with less stark clarity than I used to, because I no longer live at the beach. I rely on an inner site, rather than on being surrounded by the elemental ocean and sheer blackness to conduct the energy of the Angels. I no longer nest comfortably on the shore, waves lapping at the jetty rocks beneath me, tucked into the space between worlds that at once has More value to me that any mortal occupation, and yet holds the key ingredient to giving my earthly ife meaning.

For the first time that I can remember I am grieving without regret, almost without sadness. The weeping within is a psychic release, almost like the negative space in a picture, or the shadow of a Peruvian cross on the floor of Machu Pichu. But it is not my shadow. I am grieving for my uncle, and for general things...for the loss of innocence, the fall from grace which has led to perpetual global war. I am grievous for the suppression of truth, for the close mindedness, the cattiness, the superficiality, the fear that keeps people from waking up to the happenings on the planet. I am grievous over slow growth, the erosion of women's rights, and the cruel way materialism, classism, hatred and racism have gripped our global morale and policies. I am grievous that the appalling devastation of ecosystems on this planet is not calling more people to action. That people cling to the sort of petty jealousy and greed that got us into this trouble in the first place. we live in a world where Donald Trump is running for president, so we are all suffering collectivelWe live in a world where our children feel unsafe. We live in a world where the trees are dying, the ice caps are melting and the sea level is rising.

I am looking forward to connecting with the angels in the City of Angels under my astronomical home because of how clear they come in visually for me there. For when I do walk among them it is the single most comforting thing to me. It gives me perspective and hope beyond reason. People tend to project an impossible solemnity on their deities and God figures. Angels reflect the spectrum of human emotion and add to it a sense of oneness with the collective consciousness beyond what we can imagine. They are funny and playful. I want find that meditative state of complete familiarity and hominess I had overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the beach which allowed me to visually experience their presence in full technicolor. I spent twenty years of my life inhabiting and traversing that beach, that shoreline, so it is no small wonder that I felt I was as much a part of the topography as it was part of my DNA. I still have access to that sense of security and safety offered by the elemental world from my office, but for some reason, the energy of the Atlantic Ocean and perhaps the landmarks along its shores offer me no solace. Yearning for the familiar expanse that seems to reverberate with heavenly music and native tongues. Surely gatekeepers like Pele hasten weather from archipelagos' tropical primordial forests. The Atlantic seems like an unfamiliar past, whereas the Pacific feels like a familiar future.

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.