Get Your Goddess On in Ptown

Looking forward to my shoot with local Cape Cod rocker grrl, Diana Di Gioia and her wife Melody in two weeks!!
You can see more at http://getyourgoddesson.blogspot.com

All but two of my models have never modeled before. In fact, a majority of these Cape Cod salty dolls have never worn lipstick. No exaggeration. Beauty is one thing, connecting and conveying a story is another. In this series I hope to capture alchemy with the spirit of the sacred feminine inside resonating with nature. These women are talented in their fields and jobs. They are mostly moms. They are also really really really nice gals with dreams, vision, and magic. They live *hard* in the *real world*. They don't drink Peligrino shit and get table service under cabanas courting the underworld and trying to outplay the Patriarchy for a living.

My goddesses are not objects, nor are they subjects, but Creators. They are: a horse trainer, a fire fighter, a librarian, doulas, a secretary, a hospice worker, a farmer, a landscaper, a historical society manager, restaurant and store owners, shop managers, dancers, herbalists, nurses, acupuncturists, a banker, a writer, Zumba teachers, and the like. There's a lot of character development that goes into this, but we can't rely on being cerebral about it either. It's much more energetic. The scenarios, vignettes, and oracular meanderings I toss around like hot potatoes and gold nuggets are infusions of earth poetry, like rain begotten by a trance dance from a feathered leathered greasy lizard-eating rain dancer. It's not about beauty. It's about channeling Spirit and the Depth of Archetypes. It's alchemy. It's shamanic. It's transcendental. It's release. It's a process that gets us there: starting with music, sharing our lives like women are so oft to do (even with strangers), a bit of ala carte costuming, a bit of whatever makeup will be tolerated, some improvised hair styling, listening to atmospheric music, I may read poetry to them, they may indulge in a shot of my special vodka mint julep specialty, and a big heaping helping of Vibing with Nature.

Women who are NOT models have to unlearn everything they learned about how they fall short of the ideal. But, on the other hand, they never thought they would attain an impossible ideal perpetuated on magazine covers and strutting down runways, so within that there is a freedom and an acceptance of Self. Genuine and authentic self. Self that goes far far deeper than the surface. Those qualities tend to outweigh insecurities. Supermodels hear: "Work it Girl, Make Love to the Camera." It requires a suspension of disbelief. Forget that you're courting Death, strung out on Bull urine, and partying with Premature Osteoporosis and Starbucks Adrenal Fatigue. Every ting-aling-aling that they started to sing so fine...Who needs sentence structure.

Forget that you have been bopping around in embarrassingly hideous clothing that looks like it was constructed by shrooming elfin shoemakers in Stanford-Prison-experiment-like conditions, since you were ordained 'your mother's meal ticket' after you slippery-popped from her vagina onto a beauty pageant stage during the Oops-I-Did-It-Again-Heyday.

The women I have invited to participate in my series do not undergo digital surgery, or rituals of humiliation and intimidation, and neither do the women who have booked photography sessions with me. Their bodies don't change shape at the whim of a photo editor or an agenda. I'd like to think that I foster, and that we tap into a limitlessness and timelessness of who we are as souls and who we are as egoic creatures, setting aside the mundane and sinking into a deeper sense of knowing while expanding into hat Mary Daily called the Outercourse. I don't know anything and we make it up as we go along, but it seems to be working out all right. On the other side, I have reached out to a variety of women who possess a variety of looks and expressions of femininity. Often women say they don't feel beautiful and aren't ready. As the series progresses, we are going to see a broader representation of femininity.

I always imagined I'd take up photography in the right place. Growing up in Southern California with it's endless droughts, miles of stucco boxes, burning asphalt and paved over dirty LA river oily and snaking under bridges and past chained linked fences and families of Snark hunters. The high desert and perpetual sun and surf didn't do it for me. Sure, El Matador beach in Malibu is gorgeous, but it was already teaming with women posing for designers and products. The native sycamores, California live oaks, walnut trees, white sage and sage brush are close to my heart, but I preferred to run the trails and drink their essence in to snapping photos. I always dreamed of living in a four season climate that would take me places. So, a year after we moved here in 2012, I bought a camera and started this series. The fact that other people find it beautiful is icing on the cake. I want all women to feel like Goddesses, and step into their power, grace, soul's purpose, self-love and maybe some sultry Cape Cod salty sass.

Trust

Entreating God

Lovelorn

Winter Goddess Meets Billie Holiday

Greek Winter Nymph

The Imaginal Realm of Plants

Next week on Healing Wisdom, author herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner of Gaia Studies discusses the natural treatment of Lyme Disease and its coinfections as well as the imaginal realm of plants.

We are rescheduling attorney Lindsey Straus for a following week.

Speaking of plants, plant spirit medicine is a little known tradition. The plant spirit kingdom is seldom tapped into as a resource, but drawing on the healing energy of plant spirits can be an incredibly useful and practical tool to employ. My paralyzing migraine this morning drove me past my house into a neighbors' patch of periwinkle and blackberry bushes where I dismounted my Kia steed, releasing years of suppressed pain in the form of hot blueberry vomit. First, it trickled from the side of my mouth, like I'd been shot. Next, the tidal wave from within erupted. Gaia was forgiving. Immediate relief washed over me, like tropical rain on a cool day. Except instead of litte raindrops it was violet upchuck blowing in a cool breeze across my arms and legs. There is nothing dignified about enjoying your own smurf-colored-bile-Sunday raining down on you. One cannot put on any airs, sliding into a patch of pink waffle puke on a hot leather seat, seeing Dutch angles, and falling out of yourself like a prolapsed organ. It is times like these when the earmarks of civilization, mailboxes painted in numbers, domesticated barking beasts, and car-lined driveways warming up for a commute are a welcome sight. Yell at me for puking in your bushes, sacrifise me to your dogs as a chew toy, fill my lungs with exhaust and call me crazy, I'm just so happy to be alive.

Hey, who drank the fairy berry cool-aid? In moments, the periwinkle pushed my ass back into the car and slammed the door. It drove me to our wild grape vines and pulled me into the realm of the fae. Celandine over mullein bush, the ferns and finches guided my wonky legs. Stumbling through grasses and chickweed, stooping under thorny blackberry boughs covered in new blossoms, tripping through buttercups, I skirted around a wild honeysuckle bend before falling onto our leopard couch where my husband, part Kahuna, awaited to give me the final miracle cure. When you have been with a loving partner for sixteen years, who is part angel, part super hero bandit, he can steal pain away from every muscle in your neck and face and replace it with gratitude...selflessly, expediently, miraculously. Particularly, where there has been plant spirit medicine eager to assist in rapid recovery.

Love is stronger than aspirin. Even ibuprofin.

Heaven is Just Off Stage Act II

It's a book, it's a play, it's a screenplay...It is much better to write in a room full of dead people than to be by yourself, don't you think? To be more exact, it is much better to write with a room full of dead people giving constructive suggestions, than to ignore a bunch of drunk rowdy ghosts full of consternation who have been beating their typewriters or quills against green rooms for decades or centuries. I have been trying to do this the hard way all these years, thinking if I use my superpowers for anything other than my psychic work (and sweet lovin') that I have an unfair advantage. I'm so over it.

I've devoted so much of my life to being in service, and I love being useful. Mediumship fascinates, fuels ans gives my life meaning. Channeling angels and spirit guides in shamanic sound and energy healings gives depth to earthly existence. Helping people heal and helping people reconnect with their own talents and abilities and magic gives me pride and joy.

With every day my empathic/grokking abilities grow, I also feel an increasing need to creatively express myself. It is pressing in on me like stormy seas on levy walls. There is a need to express a richness and complexity of emotions through my body, mind and spirit that can only happen through characters and music. I feel like a big salty sea goddess: sweating salt crystals, salivating to the point of drooling, nauseated by contractions, levitating above the shores and cliffs, undulating with gravitational melodies, raw unbridled hungry, foaming at the mouth rabid, aching and arching with new life kicking to get out.

Welcome to the Apothecary: Please, fasten your seatbelts...

The magic of the Philosophers' Stone is guarded by the Dragon. Genuine alchemy is improvised. It is resurrected from the catalog like an ancient spore found in a leather bound manuscript becomes a forest of primordial mushrooms in an abiding basement. It is regenerated like a legendary yeast lost and found, passed down by loving hands through generations of clumsy bakers and their rebelious teens.

Why should teenagers want to carry on our visions? Why should they even like us? At least, for a while. They have inherited our uncertainties, our vices, our apprehension, our lust, our hypocrisy. Our teens are riding the Life Line into the Unknown, drinking an expensive bottle of Sure Thing. Hissing, fanged, jaded beyond words with old world problems loaded in their teeth and calcified in their glands. They have wrestled the vampires from our worst nightmares and hung them out to dry before they were out of diapers. Our children have grounded, encapsulated and innoculated us with poisons from our fear, parasites of our lazy revelations. They said, "Fuck evolution. It is too fucking slow and everything you believed is wrong. Possibly."

Now, there are holes between their angel hearts and their grandpa's lungs. If in their sobriety, they embrace an imperfect ideal, they may become posessed by the ancestors who require a humble entry point. Stamping their feet, moshing in a euphoric mania starched strangers find disturbing, they turn up their noses to our scars, because they don't pray to armies. They too, can keep their compassion under wraps and well hid. Our children don't want to be our drug buddies. They don't want to inject, smoke or snort illusions to combat other illusions. Use a crutch to find a new crutch. Teens won't rely on us to be the conscientious objectors, because look at the endless global war. We are still responsible. We are naturally at fault. Like children they need us to be true heroes, and like children, we want to be true heroes too, somehow.

Our children will put their heads further into the lion's mouth than we did, than our grands did, than our grand grands did. Sacrifising secrets, fears, family treasures, hopes, amulets, and charms at the Holy Temple to make their own way, and burn back the shadows that created cages. They are further out on the limb, because they want to see faith in our eyes, trust too. They want permission to know themselves, in still water. What if they never fully believe they deserve to be on Mount Olympus? Living their dreams? What if they are talentless schmucks, hacks, who don't deserve half a chance at wordly success? What if they want to be passed up, over, drop out? What if they want to be an anonymous face in the crowd? Children are our best teachers.

The best alchemy lies on the path of least resistance, however, anything worth fighting for is an uphill battle, playing chicken with your fear. People aren't naturally inclined to resist challenges. This is good, because dynamic growth requires a love of that which challenges and stretches. If it doesn't feel unfathomable, you aren't changing and you aren't giving birth. If you are not living and breathing dynamic tension, you aren't living wide awake, surrounded by angels. If you aren't living in an authentic way, you are truly witholding both your divine and your commonplace. Who can trust you, if you are not living as Spirit or as Animal?

Pain begot from righteous pursuits is never futile or in vain. If your will is unflinching in strength and your mind is made up, you don't know the way. Although, some may mistake you for a hero. If your soul is vital and your heart is pure, you will always take pause to question your path. Although, some may mistake you for a fool. Some may confuse purity for ignorance or unconflicted. But those people are so busy hiding their odors, busting false moves and gossiping from the back of their heads, they depend on false signs to ridicule the landscape of their own inner demons, of their own intestinal flora.

If you can't be at peace with your own metabolic waste, how can you accept someone else's? If you can't be reasonably at peace in your own skin, whose skin can you be at peace in? If you can't see strangers as angels, soulmates, house cats, shamans, sages...you aren't letting your imagination open up to reality. Reality is not taught in schools. It is not experienced by the body in conventional space and time in 3rd dimension. Standardization, rules, passivity, fitting in, compartmentalizing, living in a rigid objective physical plane is no longer apropos, and it is downright counterintuitive and counterproductive to surviving the times in which we live.

If the non tangibles, the parables, the spiritual context, is missing...play chicken with your fear. If the sacredness of absurdity is obfuscated by melodrama, there aren't enough characters in your play. You've got to reach for something bigger than yourself, parashoots made of plastic fail on the tempestuous winds of climate change.

If the machinations of suffering are comical and comedy makes you weep, your ego and spirit can play together and find happiness. Or, more specifically, a cocktail of emotions that all evens out to a diversified emotional portfolio that transcends human experience and relishes it, deeply, humbly, and with appropriate apprehension. You are not the only god on Mount Olympus afterall.

If you balance your will, ego, heart and soul, you will always choose rightly. No matter how many barking dogs or boogie monsters beguile the commonly trusted senses, you will walk off the cliff with a goofy grin, knowing you are in good hands. Mercurial. Part angel. 50 yards above a roaring river and a greek chorus of naysayers that want you to eat it.

Consensus is an individual thing. Consensus of the highest mind will unite consciousness and save the world.

If we can get over our addictions, our stories, our plays, jealousy, winning over instead of along with, owning stuff, sex even.

Afterall, beneath every human mask is timeless limitless genderless soul in jazz shoes and black jeggings.

Inside every body is a naked screaming skull, making punk rock Flipper clicks in sonar to Mojo Nixon rockabilly, waiting to do areal tricks and paint the galaxy red tide.

Cape Cod Herb Day

That is right folks. It is International Herb Day, and Cape Cod is celebraing with our third festival. If you love biodynamic farming, permaculture, healing with plants and live music you will delight in the offerings at Cedar Spring Farm. I am teaching an herbal healing for kids class at 10am, and a stories and culinary usage of savory class at 1 pm. Come with or without your kids to enjoy these fun classes. very hands on. Explore the many uses of common garden herbs. Smell, touch, and taste lemon grass, lemon balmand so many more delicious medicines of the earth.

Pandora's Jukebox Tonight

Hello my little Gifilte Fish,
I'm at the helm again tonight at 92.1 WOMR in Ptown /91.3 WFMR in Orleans, and streaming at womr.org
I'm playing some traditional jukebox fair and feeling the tingling of an anti-war set that may come to a head. Keep me moving forward at 508-487-2619 Send a request my way. I love to hear from you.

Pandora

Jennifer Dudley was a child birth educator and doula, until she decided that she wanted to give everyone tools to build successful businesses, families and relationships with what she learned from the birth process. Tune in this Thursday at 9AM et at http://www.womr.org

This week on Healing Wisdom, new paradigm business consultant Jennifer Dudley brings her experience as birth doula childbirth educator, and founding member of the The Sanctuary Birth and Family Wellness Center, to her approach. She shares her shocking pioneer birth story and techniques for creating a thriving business that is sating to your core. We talk about how the birthing process of babies, businesses, artistic endevors and relationships are similar. How can we be better birthers, manifesting in allignment with our soul's purpose?

My uterus is screaming at me, I'm just not sure what it's saying. There are so many things I want to accomplish before we have more children. We dont have the infrastructure for me to be working, in school, singing with a band, while pursuing a writing career and getting back to my early love of theatre while preggers and with a toddler, plus a little boy. My uterus may be screaming at my vagina. My brain may be screaming at my uterus. But whatever is going on is definitely noisy.

I may need to go to another baby whisperer to sort it all out. It ishard to be objective about your own life sometimes. I think there are at least six babies and possibly one hundred that want to be conceived. I dont think sextuplets run in the family. Perhaps some are more patient than others. Whatever the case, I think they just like me because I come up with cool names. Getting parents and getting a name is like playing slot machines. Baby spirits are too adventurous. They can't see beyond the first few years, and if they do it's pure courage. They are like, whoah, nursing, kisses, cuddles, swaddling, every need is met, and all I do is eat, sleep and play. I cant wait, really, let me in there NOW!

Starhawk on Healing Wisdom!

My interview with Starhawk which aired Thursday morning at 9am ET on Healing Wisdom. We discussed Climate Change, the Transition Initiative Movement, Gaia consciousness and the changing times on 92.1 WOMR-fm in Provincetown, 91.3 WFMR-fm in Orleans and streaming at http://womr.org

MY INTERVIEW WITH STARHAWK HERE.

My New Office!

The readings, shamanic energy and sound healings are phenomenal in here!

Healing Table with the altars...

They Can't Take That Away From Me

Lazy early summer snackin' while singing and listening to the Mews Coffee House Night on WOMR.

Doing up chicken 'McNugs'...

Getting jiggy with Sangria...

Shakespeare has become my therapist and jazz is how I self-medicate.

My guides have been talking about selkies for ages, and now I am going to participate in a staged reading of Selkie Girl. The Scottish/Irish part of my soul that weeps at the sea, longing for her true home cannot wait. Power to the Peebles Hayes.