16 years ago today since hubby and I had our first date, complements of the seashore. He rowed out into the fog to catch some fish, and he grabbed me selkie skin before I could get away. But he's no mere mortal, he's Mercurius. And, he has a really big aura.

A One-Way Ticket on the Hellbound Train and the Chakana That Saved the World

This is my second go at reading, "In the Realm of the Hungry Ghosts", and I'm much more present in reading the material now. It helps to write in the margins. Why keep books pristine? A great deal lives between the carnal and spiritual text of Dr. Gabor Mate's work. It eloquently uses the stories of impoverished often-homeless mentally-ill drug addicts who are socially confined to residing in a ghetto as a mirror to draw focus to our collective addictions, be they to shopping, work, sex, or food. The poetic sense in his imagery and the poetry you read between the lines offers nourishment to the hungry ghost within. And as I wrote this, my Mother Mary and Kuan Yin are casting growing shadows on my wall. Life is organically magical, when we don't stop it from being so.

Tonight, my talented FB amigo, musician and artist Rumi Nahui, reminded me of The Prophecy of the Condor and Eagle tonight by sharing his Chakana. That story is actually the foundation and bones of two of my screenplays. It plays a more obvious role in the one that features a magical "pet" condor. It's a story that playfully exposes some of the foibles of the pharmaceutical industry. The other one is about a (half) Mayan-descendent who was abandoned at the foot of an Aztec Temple and found and raised by a Quechua woman. It's a Tarzan story, in which the world is saved by the healing powers of the unification of all indigenous people. So, thanks to my friend, I'm thinking about it, and realizing it should be a novel first. And I'll get right to it just as soon as my kid stops puking, and people stop needing curses lifted and demons exorcised ;)

NINA

After a lengthy three hour discussion with my husband, we've come to the conclusion that feminine/intuitive/heart-centered wisdom and the sacred feminine are the only thing that can save the planet.

Author Dr. Dawson Church on Healing Wisdom Thursday

This Thursday at 9am EST on 92.1 WOMR, 91.3 WFMR, and streaming at womr.org, I'm speaking with author Dawson Church in depth about Emotional Freedom Technique and his new book The EFT Manual. Dawson Church, PhD, has edited or authored many books, and collaborated with leading authorities including Larry Dossey, MD, Bernie Siegel, MD, Christiane Northrup, MD, and others. He founded Soul Medicine Institute to research and teach emerging psychological and medical techniques that can yield fast and radical cures. His award-winning book, The Genie in Your Genes, pioneers the field of Epigenetics, explaining the remarkable self-healing mechanisms now emerging at the juncture of emotion and gene expression. He has authored numerous scientific studies through the Foundation for Epigenetic Medicine, and is the editor of Energy Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal. He shares how to apply these breakthroughs to health and athletic performance through EFT Universe, one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web.

David Ryan at the AMP ("amp"/Art Market Provincetown)

Wicked talented short story writer David Ryan is at the AMP (Art Market Provincetown) this Saturday August 16th at 6pm. Enjoy this interview! And come to a lovely reading with him, Michael Klein and others! (If you like David Sedaris and Raymond Carver, you'll love David Ryan) Here is the podcast! The bonus material will be podcast at a later date.

Dr. Susan Allison on Healing Wisdom

Hear my podcast interview with writer, shaman, poet and Transpersonal Psychologist Dr. Susan Allison. We talk about connecting with the eternal essence of those on the other side, soul mates, twin flames, and poetry. We discuss her latest book, "Our Spirits Dance", poems between her and her departed husband Thomas Hinkenbottom. She was honored as a “Woman of the Year” in California by the Santa Cruz Women’s Commission for her counseling work with adolescents. Allison is the published author of three books: Conscious Divorce, Ending a Marriage with Integrity (Three Rivers Press), Breathing Room: The Leaving of a Marriage (Park Place) and Empowered Healer (Balboa). Listen Here.

From Artist-in-Residence to Medium-in-Residence

When I was in seventh grade, I had a set of keys to the art room. I would arrive hours before school along with the janitor, let my self into the art room, and set to work on whatever project I had been commissioned or asked to do. But I wouldn't get to work before putting on a garish costume I called "eccentric" and "idiosyncratic", it involved a kimono over an ill-fitting silk gown with a clashing flower print. Today, I discovered that I can wear pigtails again, because I'm finally at that age where you want to look like you want to look younger. Tonight, after a late reading, I put a kimono on over a Navajo skirt, and I realized, I am finally at that age where you want to look you want to look like you don't care. Enjoyed talking to people's passed on parents today. I even thought I heard Robin Williams yelling, "Yippee!!" at the top of his lungs. I have moments where I just wish I could live in a temple or tower somewhere in the desert, just existing...steeping in the essence of spirit...channeling the artists of yesterday into the dawns of tomorrow...with nothing else to do.

I feel like I am so full I am going to burst...that I have so much love and so much to share with the world, that I can't possibly. I feel like I don't have anything like the amount of time I need to catch up with my timeless immortal soul friends. How, can I utilize all of the knowledge gained over thousands of years? How can I help folks to remember the depth and the dimensions of their ancient and multidimensional personality essence? It can feel like such a burden, like the knowledge can be useless and futile outside of the context of readings, clearings and healing sessions. I know how it can be employed, but it takes a level of cosmic awareness that goes beyond ordinary understanding. Mundane tasks can be a welcome relief, but I feel like time is running out, because the world needs major change to happen faster that the speed of light. Stat.

Author David Ryan on Healing Wisdom Thursday

THE POD IS UP.

David Ryan, the author of a short story collection, Animals in Motion (Roundabout Press), will be on Healing Wisdom this week. His stories have appeared "in Esquire, BOMB, Tin House, Fence, Hayden's Ferry Review, failbetter.com, The Encyclopedia Project, Booth, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, Cimarron Review, several Mississippi Review Prize issues, Nerve, Hobart, and Salt Hill, among others. His fiction has been anthologized in WW Norton's Flash Fiction Forward, The Mississippi Review: 30, and Akashic Book's Boston Noir 2: The Classics. His essays, reviews and interviews have appeared in The Paris Review, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature, Tin House, BookForum, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Connecticut state arts grant and a Macdowell fellowship, he currently teaches in the writing program at Sarah Lawrence College."

His latest work, Animals in Motion, leaves you feeling restless and uneasy in your own skin, vaguely uncomfortable with humanity, strangely satisfied and piteous of the foibles and shortcomings of characters which seem all at once painfully self-conscious and completely unaware. You want to comfort the long shadows his tin, hapless and often mournful cavernous characters leave behind in their wake, but like naive children who are longingly lonely and yet too thorny and self-absorbed to touch. So you resign to appreciate their sorrows and blunderings at a safe distance. In the same tradition as Raymond Carver, William Faulkner and his ilk, Ryan has chosen to bring the reader into the world of characters we feel awkward and relieved to find sympathy toward.

Books are remarkable places to find private commiseration in darkened mental landscapes. Your compassion for the underdog can't take you down a notch here. Your reactions toward the secrets hidden and the mysteries unraveling are completely unknowable to the outside world. Your morality, your ethics, your sexual desire, nothing is under the microscope. You should be able to read things you don't want your shrink or your diary to know about. You get a free pass to a private non-corporeal experience, no paper trail necessary. The relationship is on your terms, you either keep reading or stop. Sometimes it seems that the longer an author forces you to excavate the wreckage, the more it becomes hard to decipher the contents. More revelations lead to more questions than answers. And sometimes, whispering between the third person and first person narratives, the author, like an imaginary friend who faintly haunts the hours through his darkened corridors seems to be an amalgamation of his characters and your subconscious mind. A companion, a path finder, ever present, yet invisible, and silent in the music of words like notes, and characters like melodies.

Ryan's book explores layers, sometimes peeling inflamed scars back like raw flesh, sometimes plinging you like a pinball into someone's head, sometimes putting a character like a breast between two pieces of glass like a painful mammogram, and at times it's very cinematic. In the tradition of southern short story writers, characters can be downright unlikable, unknowingly unethical, emotionally galvanized, and haunted by former love but exhibiting an admirable matter-of-factness and lack of self-pity. Perhaps Ryan and authors like him are helping readers to expand our minds, wonder about the back stories of strangers, the way adolescents do, before their world becomes a tunnel vision - focused on their daily minutia, insurance, loans. Before their futures become maps, like high-tech weather forecasts of tornado trips to Disneyworld and Legoland and ATMS.

Gotta love books that allow you to be a mute witness to accidents waiting to happen, like an angel in the afterlife, you await the return of the crushed souls, who somehow exhibit a triumphant surrender to the powerful absurdity and orchestrated chaos the universe seems to have foisted upon them.

Angel Lady

It's official, I'm an incredibly happy woman! I couldn't love the work I do more than I do. I love talking to the angels, giving readings and council, providing messages from people who have passed on and archangels.

Tonight! Pandora's Jukebox

This time, it's for real. Pandora's Jukebox is happening this Sunday night from nine to midnight. Our Summer Pledge Drive is barreling down the highway of the collective conscience, which means it's the absolute perfect time to show me some love. Call in with your bizarre requests and oddly improbably accents. I'll do my best to reciprocate with appropriately inappropriate responses. Someone slurry and apparently on mescaline called me last month, and I pretended it was a call from the beyond. Make this medium happy with your best dead people impersonations, and will do my best to channel the best music from the cosmos. I'll match your altered states of consciousness with my altared states and we'll have a ball. Hey Dubai, if YOU can't afford the membership, I'll assume you're a jailbird. In which case, you really should contact me with a music request. Cape Cod Community Radio is one of the last vestiges of sanity in these absurd, hyperbolic, obfuscated, translucent, barbaric, evolving, transcendent and paradoxical times.

A membership is just $50, and a sustaining membership of Healing Wisdom or Pandora's Jukebox or your favorite WOMR show for $156, gets you a pledge gift, a luxurious artfully designed beach towel. Or, you can buy vinyl records from our online store here. There's something for everybody.

Roman All Over Me

It's my husband's birthday. Before I met or saw my husband I heard him laughing. My heart blossomed to this friendly, good-willed stranger from behind a closed door. My dad was helping him carry a couch.

His dark curly ringlets, bronze hard body, primitive work out regimen and voracious appetite for eggplant parm fed into my fantasy. I believed the neighborhood Apollo must be Roman. It turned out he was (Russian) Jewish and really balls-out funny, and never wore shirts, which worked for me, because when he did they clashed with his busy shorts. As his hair grew out, people at work began to call him, The Dude. Most especially himself. Like the mayor of Venice, folks on the street knew him by sight because he was as friendly with grandma as he was with the kids from the hood as he was with Susie Q. He'd make everyone laugh and make everyone feel special. He was the hairy chested Jew with the 'fro and open shirt who ate at the taco truck and spent his three-hour lunch break walking around town. Because of or despite being an urban Thoreau with ADD in loud prints, women would throw themselves at him. Usually women with one thing on their minds. Learning to surf. He didn't actually surf, but his collection of cute Japanese souvenirs from his ex he wasn't over was endearing. Sometimes Aussies looking for a place to stay tried to move in. He often dated women who wound up preggers with the next dude they dated. It's a jungle out there.

He cooked dozens of fried chicken breasts every day, and he'd whip out his gallon jug of oregano and Walmart-sized mustard squeeze bottle to flavor it. He had no need for plates, because he ate standing up in front of a greasy frying pan with a knife. Fuck forks. He'd spend hours doing push-ups and lifting heavy arrangements of chairs after his twenty-mile bike rides. He was the guy perpetually clearing his head. He liked when I called him my mimbo. Yet, he had studied Shakespeare at Oxford, studied poetry in college and had written a Jane Austen parody. Night Call Nurses posters covered his walls and his old computer with the flying toasters screensaver gave way to really tight dialogue. I thought his minimalism was very zen, and he always had records playing. Usually surf when he was writing things for Trimark and Corman, et al. He was a real writer, because he was a hunt and pecker. Boink. He was perfect for me, because he wasn't serious about anything and we never thought it would last.

One phase led to another, and we both became more serious about the meaning of life, work and our paths. That was after we rejected an invitation during a meeting to create a "reality" show based on our TV pilot. The actually real producer hated 'my' character, but asked me to play 'myself'. "You're caustic, abrasive, outrageous, and in my opinion completely unsympathetic. Audiences will love you or loath you." The producer was a visionary. I felt misunderstood. Firstly, she's not mean. She's just honest. She's a sharp emancipated character who won't be held down by societal conditioning. And secondly, it's not based on me. The first draft was written before I came along." "I don't care one way or another. Do we have a deal?" Reality TV? Exploitative drama? Screw that, we thought. Idealists we were. Which accidentally led to a fulfilling and mystical path.

Raven's an adoring, thoughtful and attentive father for which I am extremely grateful. We're well into our second decade, and I Still Forget He's Not Roman. That outta be the name of something you'd find at Toys of Eros in Ptown.

Happy Birthday baby! Love you!

Wolf Girl Marries Off Mom In ShotGun Wedding with Hot Tub Dowry

When I'm not howling, moaning or biting someone's head off...

I'm a bit of a tough cookie, but that's just because I was raised by wolves, who were bad pastry chefs. Did you know a poetic license is not recognized by the state of Massachusetts? But seriously folks, I love my family. And am so excited at the possibility of my mom visiting us! In other local news, my hubby had a margarita and decided "Slut Tub" would be the perfect DBA for a hot tub line. But the name was rejected at the town clerk's office. Because this is Cape Cod. We resubmitted it as the 15th Generation Mayflower Descendents' Red Sox Fans Slut Tub, and we're in business! See, Cape Cod's pretty hip n' swingin'. Go Sox.

And the new prototype will arrive just in time for my mom's dowry gift. Because if you can't marry off a very pretty 60-something well-read, zydeco-loving, fiddle-guitar-and-accordion-playing, Edward-Gorey-admiring, British-mystery-novel-obsessed, painter/photographer/Reiki practitioner/astrologer, BBC-oholic anglophile, art-history-nut who enjoys a hot toddy on Saint Patty's Day and a tawny nightcap with her very own pre-market 17th-century-merchant-ship-shaped Slut Tub(TM) on Cape Cod, well then WHERE oh WHERE?