www.marybethbonfiglio.com

it’s gonna be the same but different. different but the same. i’m offering a few services and will definitely be blogging more regularly. feeling grace for my new home.

not sure if anybody is even here anymore. but if you are, pop over and say hi to me ‘cause it’s a bit lonely still. it’s not really actually done yet, but it’s almost there. enough that i want to share:)

marybeth xoxo

ps- shortly this sight will be down and all the best stuff from the past 6 1/2 years will be transformed into a wee e-book to download at my new site:)

While I’ve been working non-stop, this holy trinity has been playing over and over again in my head and I figured it was something I should share. Or at least I figured I better share something.

Infiltrate. Go straight into places you previously thought you did not belong. Cross the Do Not Enter Sign with a wide ass smile and your sexiest strut, dreadlocks, quartz crystals, open heart and paradigm shifting ideas. Rock your spiritual gangsta: do not go undercover. Bring exactly who you are to the table (perhaps it’s the opposite of whatever these places have ever seen before and it’s exactly what they crave). Don’t attempt to create a person you think they are looking for. Don’t create a product that you think they need.

Instead, infiltrate every over-dusted corner of ever over-rated system with the pureness of your creation, with the absoluteness of You. Do not try to strategize or plan a way to be seen or heard just because everyone else before you has gotten what they wanted by this method. They may have gotten what they wanted but lost who they were. Infiltrate fears and insecurities with that fire, with the reason you came to this earth and shift that place inside out. You will not believe how welcomed you will be when you roll straight up as you are and create irresistible stories from those roots.

Just can’t push this shit. Things take time. You can’t authentically press your forehead to your shins after a day of yoga practice. Sometimes forward bends take up to a decade. You learn to exhale like a mastress and wait until your spines are ironed out by the subtle force of air + patience. You can’t push a baby out of the body before it’s ready to come. When you try, it hurts, it feels counterintuitive and your flesh just rips and tears. Sometimes that baby just won’t budge under pressure and you are working like a horse for nothing. And if the baby is born from force, you don’t get to experience that amazing quiescence, the space at the Station of the Source, the happening right before your body decides to do the work minus the mind. Don’t push your magic before the journey is done and at the same time: you can’t sit around with a baby in your vagina forever. Eventually–scary as it may be— you have to tell yourself to give birth.

Always choose your art first. Don’t forget your voice while crunching the numbers and scheming marketing plans. I went around for months looking at successful models of the writing business I thought I should be creating, scrambling desperately to keep me + money in the same moment. I’d come up with several of my own versions of what other people had been putting out there, tried to create a Brand around me and then obsessed about a plan to sell it. Well, I say brands are for jeans and really nice evening gowns. Instead the writer, the life capturer, the inspirationalist who just wants to be heard and to serve their community must tell the continuously evolving, wild and crazy, ordinary, messy, perfect story. That is the ever-living brand of your soul, of your path. That is The You that everyone wants a piece of. Stop wondering how to present yourself and spend time with the flame-on and fire spinning. Get the rhythm going hot and steady. Write your story every single day and find that golden strand that is always there. That will be the essence to share, but first, write it out, or dance that shit out naked on the beach at night under a red moon and wait to see what words rise from the surface of those waves. That essence is the seed. Plant it by taking the risk of sharing it. Personal luminosity and fearless brilliance is the brand. A willingness to turn inside out and share what works, what doesn’t and what turns your hot self on. This action is the catalyst for alchemy. Alchemy is what transforms us from what we think about becoming into simply Becoming.

Dear Grandma Mary and Grandma Salvatrice,

I never met you. Your hands never held mine, my head never laid against your bountiful chests. Your spicy slow cooked pasta sauce with hog hoof and egg or your rustic pork and kraut with Austrian herbs never touched my tongue. We never looked into each others eyes to know the love only a Grandma has for her grand-daughter, to see your son or daughter flicker in my gaze. To know how I hold your baby boys rebel-fire and your oldest daughters unconditional mother-love. It wasn’t easy growing up without a grandma. It’s hard explaining you to my daughters with just names, ideas and stories. It’s pure absence, an absence without even a moment to lean back into, no memories of your bright blue eyes, shiny red lips and black heels with golden flapper buckles, or commands in Italian matriarch, polyester dresses and pointy silver glasses. There are only guesses and thoughts, the warmth of you that I make up in my head, a myth of sorts, but one that carries me on with you in my psyche, in my bones.

I am here to share your voice, no doubt, it comes through more often than not. I am here to live out the dreams, to bridge and heal the centuries, to bring into fruition the work you inherited. The raising of the children alone in the depression on virtually nothing, state assigned clothing, the scrubbing and cleaning and cursing the wild boys who yelped, and smoked and beat on each other. The hardships of the depression, the fear, the mystery of being a woman and mother between the ages. What a moment to come of age, on the fringe of an evolution, with no public voice of your own. Living a gypsy life and then dealing with the cultural misplacement of movement from one country to another, searching for home and security, a place to feed your young and live out a dream. The work of having 10 children, watching many of them die in front of your eyes. The businesses starting and failing. The long hours in the factory. The death of your husband. The face to keep. The new life to create. The lack, the scarcity, the patch-working bits and pieces together to make the family whole. You did it.

I want you to know what I am doing. The work I do right now isn’t for me. It’s for you back then and also for them of the next 100 years. I am here to zoom in on the details and pull out the threads of disharmony, sing them love songs and sew them back in with a different rhythm all together. This is the magic, the alchemy that I know you passed down to me in your blood. This is what I held in an invisible bag around my neck as a child when I buried my head in the soft summer grass and sat against the trunk of the chestnut trees for hours and listened, when I mixed flower petals with water and stared out my window on autumn mornings and saw the energy dance like angels in the clouds. They liked to call it Catholic, but I know there is more than one word for Love and Ceremony. I know it’s winged mother wisdom, mantra spoken out loud, internal prayers of giving, allowing for death and resurrection in every moment, and a howling belief in what can’t be seen until attention is paid. It’s Earth magic and folklore. It’s herbs in honey, spells in vinegar, bleeding into the ground and whispering secrets into the night. It’s Etruscan goddesses birthing the world, catching it with their hands and flowing forth the milk of life. It’s Proserpina who illuminated your shadow sisters and the Willendorf woman who showed you how to claim your space. It’s what your mothers knew and what their mothers lived fully and began the midwifery legacy. We are made of old country magic, of the soil and peaks of the Alps and the volcanic dust from the islands. We are the Parnassus Apollo butterfly and the Peregrine Hawk. I know these gifts are as sacred as the Rosary and the novenas, the assumption and the crucifixion. They are all you. They are all holy water for the soul. And I am nothing but what you brought forth and then some.

I am deeply aware of you in my marrow and not only do I hold you from here, I celebrate you. I honor you. I adore you for walking this walk for my parents, for me and especially for my daughters. You paved my way. You cut back the thorny bramble and chased the predators out of sight. You have given me the match to spark and enhance fires, to give voices where they have been silent or too scared to speak.

Forever you will be small pieces on my altar: a white silk scarf embroidered with the initial M, a worn old photo, stone rosary beads. You will be stories stuck in my eternal heart told by my mother and father and my siblings who were lucky enough to know you. You are the spirit wind that surrounded me as I gave birth to your great-granddaughters, you are the whispering songs during the night walks on the desert trails, you are the flashing lights when I kneel and pray on the wet forest floor. You are the recipe when I stir the herbs into the sauce and the secret ingredient when I cork the amber bottles.

I hold all of that forever and pass it on in words and beads and walks gathering plants in the woods. But it’s time for me to let go of the other stuff, the stuff that’s been carried on into me… branded in my cell memory, into my nervous system, and the particles that do not serve me or you or the future. I let go of the hardship, the poverty, the un-belonging in a foreign land. I let go of the survival and suffering. I release the dogma and the guilt. I let go of the stuff that keeps me poor, angry and not believing that I can create my own life. You have already done the dirtiest work for me. Because of you and your lives, I freely thrive. Create. Make beauty plentiful and serve it on a crystal platter to my many circles and beyond. I receive everything, not only what I need but a few things that I might want. I release my past, kiss it goodbye, and I let go of your past too, because I know you are floating on the cosmic cloud of the consciousness and you have no past anymore, you are just all that there is.

My dear, wise, perfect grandmas, thank you for housing me as an egg in my mother as you held her in your womb. Thank you for pushing her out, which pushed me out. Thank you for standing behind me as I sing my children to sleep at night and for passing me nutrients from beyond as breastfeed three daughters. Thank you for taking the risks, embarking on grand adventures, seeking a dream so far off you didn’t even know it was landing right now on my lap. Thank you, grandmothers. I wish I knew your lips kissing me goodnight, but I still know your voices, I hear your songs. They are clear. And I hear them harmonizing, telling me I am free. Thank you my strega noninnas for your permission to liberate from what no longer exists. Thank you for this life.

I didn’t mean to call in Kali for her birth. But it happened. Four years ago she came through and it was atomic, Earth folding inside out, it was oceans turning to flame. Everything I thought I was or had or knew was gone, alchemized into rising smoke from a pile of skeletal remains and a heap of clothes that no longer fit.

As she enter she cleared me, or at least began the cleansing process. It’s not a fast or easy task or one I was even aware of in the moments but knew that with every breath and every cycle something was very different. She would be the one that would shift my opinions and beliefs. She’s the one who would force me to reveal my secrets and my vulnerability. She’s the one who made me change my story. It was her windy passion offered the gust to such wild places full of jungle animals and electric freedom and over-grown and untold stories that I never knew I had the ability to share.

She is the one who screamed in my face that I can do whatever the fuck I wanted. That we all can.

We carry ancestral programming in our limbic brain; we hold the memory of colonial wrongdoing. We hold the shame or the guilt, the walls and the rage. We are our ancestors. We are the only ones who can heal the lines that go backwards. Sometimes we just don’t know how to move on. This child quickly pressed fast forward after a hard-core rewind. This is the one who looked me in my eyes and said: LET GO.

Birth is always a good purifier, reminding us that not much of anything but love means anything. Her birth took me to the edge of life. The edge is where she walks daily. When her head pressed against my cervix and from inside I could hear her Echo from places of shadows and gates of mystery. She was coming through, reborn with a voice. And so was I. She came to claim change. When I held her in my arms after catching her from between my legs and she was against my skin looking up at me and we had eye contact, we both said to each other at the exact same time: That was big. That was BIG.

Her birth was my start line in a marathon in untraining and unschooling, gathering myself back the mother and creator, the person that I was when I stood in partnership with the divine and signed the contract for my Earth life to BE who I came here to BE.

Thank you, Echo. Thank you for giving me the gift of re-birth. But the gift of your every day beauty and raw power is bigger and better than anything imaginable. Loud. Bold. Singing in the rain. Screaming on the floor. Snoring in the bed. Laughing in my arms. Kisses on my nose and eyes and ears and forehead and lips every time I leave your presence. Your passion is sometimes more than I can handle, the love so strong and so present I am overwhelmed and often I fall to my knees and fail to receive it all because I’m only learning to be as Big as you. I am brought to tears knowing you and your wild bird nature, your profound love for magic and earth; you carry close your animals and plants; you use them and pass them on. You hold such a golden light for me to see at night and i the early morning before the darkness has passed. You walk far too close to the edge for me, my daughter, and sometimes it scares me but it never scares you and for that I am so full of pride. You are brave. You have wandered dark places solo and held high reign in the forces of light. You have shown our whole family not to have fear. You are fearless. You are Fearless One Singing Bird. Your name is spoken. May it vibrate through the heavens and deep in your soul.

Happy Earth Day my dear, dear daughter.

I offer you my voice.

I crack the window a couple inches. Like a vacuum my face sucks the air in. I open my mouth and catch it as it comes through. I’m so hungry for the wet nothing of night force.

To say these roads aren’t straight is an understatement. But the deep curves and twists no longer cause us a panic or pause. Because of practice, intuition introduces us to every corner a hair before it appears and we respond with attention, hugging the line and watching for deer. This does not mean we can’t crash and die. These roads are known for their deathly sheets of ice. But we take the risk; it’s so damn scenic, the journey is worth it.

We are in the center of the forest on the “wrong” side of the hill and we face the “wrong” direction. For close to 6-months, we only get a glimpse of daily light, a small slice of sky might open and if it does you run right under it. The road wraps against the bottom of Chuckanut Mountain, the only place where the Cascades slope down to meet the craggy line of the sea. This narrow valley unfolds into salt water, so it’s not only dark, but it’s wet and when it’s cold, it’s ice.

I’m scared. My body rolls in psychic discomfort and opens the mental door for ghastly visuals to walk in, mostly involving swerving spirals until we reach the edge of something and free fall into flames. I have to go there, though, if only for a second. I don’t know bliss or grace until I juxtapose it completely with gnarly, demonic moments of reason

The voice drops in with the air, rides on the molecules of gas. It’s loud and deep like the original echo of creation.

What are you afraid of?

Death.

Death? You’re scared of birth! Now listen. This year is Mother, and she’s ready to give birth, she’s real pregnant. You go with her, be in her, step over the edge and bring it all back home.

He puts his hand back on the wheel and our elbows touch over the middle console. A song we both like comes on. It’s the one about sunrises being made for people like us who don’t like to sleep. We press our elbows deeper into each other. I look right and can see the stripes of the freeway through the pines, moving parallel with us, reminding me that we could always be going somewhere faster but I appreciate the slower show, icy or not. It’s riskier. I know. But I trust. The road. The dark. The ice. This Mother who brings a birth-like-death, approaching behind me. Ready to bind and gag the hell out of me and force me to surrender to it’s feathery touch so I can slide down that bright light birth canal, open my mouth up like it’s the first time and scream yes.

The Mayans left the space blank. The Bible wants us to know a sea of fire. The Hopi’s say Look! The ocean jumped up to touch the sky.

What could our ancient teachers want us so badly to know? What is so powerful about where we are right now?

It’s creation story time. The story doesn’t create us anymore. We create it. It’s not that the words don’t matter, but it’s mostly actions that count.

Gather the Tribes. Design Fertility and Abundance. Commune and Expand. Give it Up to the Gods. Manifest, but don’t just bring in, you gotta let it out and give it away. Dream the light into Reality. Be specific. Open your Heart even if you have to force your shoulders back down your spine. Practice Simple Complexity. Look between your third eye. Be knee deep in wild burdock. Don’t just inhale. Exhale. Weave deep connection: Me, You, Earth and Beyond.

Christ is not going to return. He is already here, waiting to be unleashed with wild, unconditional love and spicy adventures. The Goddess is not just a myth to be told, she is real, wide-eyed, head thrown back, squats over a planetary pool of turquoise and reds, of feather beds and fields of cotton hammocks under apple trees and pushes. Buddha doesn’t wonder a thing.

The end of the world is a tasty metaphor. Nothing ends; it’s all infinite beginnings with 10,000 paths to choose from.

We re-remember we are spirits communing with the flesh, holding the helix experiences in pure energy within pure energy. That we are limitless life and movement. We are perfection in stillness and vibration in rest. We are morphic resonance. We are spread thick. We make space for what’s to come, we don’t cram ourselves only into a body because finally we see, we can step over and back wherever we want.

We are free.

This year we go back to the roots of the Earth, back to the ancient knotted, twisted roots of wisdom and knowledge embedded in the soul of the soil. This year we grow deep future roots. Our feet re-member and our head projects Higher. Our center stays in the moment.

This year we reach high for something saturated in galactic, popping in star shine, pixelated with cosmos, and foggy with nebula blankets. We become the future, the ones who make the leap and then begin to fly.

We are miraculous energetic orgasmic organisms evolving and we can’t do it alone. So we commit to commitment. We practice accountability. We share in the honor of being humans together. We not only manifest to attract, we offer up to freely give, to feed the spirits hunger for our attention. We relieve the Self of the pressure and offer the extra joy to every.single.person we encounter.

The ancients will chant us through the psychosis and doubt; they will restructure our DNA and heal what weighs with ancestral memory. We will feel discomfort and confusion. We will feel alone. In interesting times illusions will try to pin us down and chat up against our ear but we won’t listen. There will be bells and chants, the oms and the hums, the beads of prayers, songs of our children and whistles of the birds that are spilling in every corner of the universe, dark and light. Listen. Hold on to the sound and listen. Things like this will pull us through.

Let’s drip each other with honey and then send each other off to the tomb/womb. We will lie down on jade floors and we will massage each other with pink salts. We will rest. We will watch. We know that there is no time; that there is plenty of time; that time longer matters.

We are born into evolution, a revolving door where inside and outside are love. A space that has always and never happened before. A time we have talked about since forever, since we were born we knew we’d be the ones to hold space for such a shatteringly brilliant spectacle of love and compassion, creation and innovation, wildfire and wild abandon.

We should probably just let death become us all. We need to embrace this apocalypse of the Self.

This is universal Alchemy. Pick your potion. Light your fire. Watch it burn. Gather what’s left. Sprinkle it in your garden. Eat what grows. How romantic is this?

The tsunami comes through us and invites us to get swept away. The volcano explodes and melts us with the molten lava, asphyxiates us with the ash. These stories are here, these prophecies, to remind us. We are the Blue Kachina Star. We are our Judgment Day.

Pay attention. The sky will swirl. The ocean will lift. The wind will whip. Like always. The systems will crumble and be confused, will hold on for life. We can’t run from shelter, we are the shelter. We can’t run from death, we are the death. We can’t be scared to be born, we are crowning already, our heads squeezing out to a world so new and true, it’s only what dreams are made of.

This is the apocalypse people and it’s beautiful, perfectly beautiful.

Autumn in the Northwest is different and the same. It’s the gate between perfect weather and not so perfect weather. It’s your last moments of golden hue and long hours outside. It’s your guide into grayness where you harvest, store, savor, plan, infuse, bottle, ingest. The past four years that I have lived here have been all Autumn, my prolonged season of free-falling, embodying that leaf that just twirls in the air, caught in some air stream or attached to a single spider web suspended above it’s next destiny by a branch.

I have obviously experienced and enjoyed the micro-seasons of my macro, tasting the fruits of summer, freezing my toes in the waters of winter and fertile at first sight of spring buds. But over all, I have been in a Death Season, grasping at what I was: an actively birthing and breeding mother and reaching forward to a new phase that was pure mystery. It’s been a long grieving period, not really want to die or step out of my roles that had gotten comfortable, but also a deep knowing that I can’t rush it the process, that trust is essential to allow the end to come. Trust is essential.

Observing the process I could possibly say these were the most stressful four years of my life as well as the most beautiful; they were searching, serving, longing, receiving, hurting, questioning, moving. They were full of planting seeds and making milk. Of walking wet dark forests and lying against bright lime green farm valleys. Of being washed over by the sea, heated to an amber glow and whipped by fire, knocked down by wild howling wolf wind and swallowed by brown, wormy, muddy earth. It’s been interesting to die, to be alchemized and potentized. It’s interesting to watch yourself step outside yourself and walk away from you, saying goodbye.

Nothing is quite as hold –your- heart and gasp-in beautiful as a deciduous death. The texture and colors and movement are meccas for eyes that long to know the need and desire to Let Go. Because in that there is a hopeful truth: the leaf falls into something great, something that is all that Was, Is and Will Ever Be. Death is so lovingly supported by Earth. As everything falls, we are cradled by the essence of life, all encompassing compostable unity of the broken down. And from there being born is simple.

I think of our world right now in the Season of Death, in the state of Autumnal Magic. What is happening out there is ghostly and evolutionally beautiful. We are becoming a skeleton of what we once were; a memory of what we have been clanking forward, bones chattering, cold and skinless. We are all dying, all around this amazing place. The surrender is the hardest part, the trust that we are going to be supported by our Home, by our Ground, by the foundation we have build for lifetimes.

I hope my dying has been a beautiful expression, somehow it feels that way to me. My prayer is that I am falling into supported ground, a place to gather and rest, and bow down to who has come before me, and sit in faith with the harvest that death does bring. My prayer is that the world’s death is a beautiful as a newborn being born into the hands of a hormonally high Mother and we are loved and nurture as new being ready to Live.

I had a moment of clarity last week. My well had been running dry and I had been tapping into post apocalypse supply of energy to get me through the days.

I’ve been in the closet with the jaguar, eye to eye, no illumination to this practice, no iphone flashlight app allowed. The answer is in the darkness surrounded by the glow of the animals eyes, like daggers they reveal enough of my insides to really question my choice to be human.

As usual grace steps in and saves me. Whapio, my midwifery teacher, friend, and wise elder came over and we exposed my 8 year old and 6 year old placentas (mia and sulas) which had been frozen since their births.

We laid out the fly to our camping tent across my new leather ottoman in my living and first opened Mia’s. I never saw hers at the time of her birth. She was born wildly into the arms of our midwife, and her placenta followed quickly . She had some trouble with breath and while her dad and I blew life force into our newborn, the assistant had taken the placenta and wrapped it in about 15 plastic bags and placed it in the freezer. The placenta then lived in our freezer in Los Angeles until it was transported and lived in two more states and in 7 different freezers. I got to spend time with Sula’s after she was born softly into my arms under the water. All involved noticed what a sparkly little gem of a placenta it was. We made a print of it and wrapped it and froze it. It has lived in 2 states and 5 different freezers.

Mia’s was heavy, weighted, large and it slid out with a thump that sent orgasmic chills under my skin. The smell brought me not only to birthspace, but to MY birthspace, the fresh smell of the human experience once again clung to my air. It wasn’t rancid, it wasn’t foul. It was Blood. It was Life. It was my insides, the place where I held my babies.

{the wise barn owl, her heart leads her, she wears no masks, she is magic}

{so ALIVE and understanding the presence of her very own root system, our connection}

We spent time with it, an hour, moving it, examining it, talking to it, thanking it, but mostly just listening. It comes with a story, the first narrative of inner life, it holds the hieroglyphics, ancients imprints of our internal world, a galaxy of desire and choice, the place were we all have lived, where we all decided to be born. It is the beginning of our egg, it is from the karma of own mother, the idea of the life in motion, stuck to my wall and stuck to her. Nothing short of a fucking miracle, a vessel for godly gas exchange, a tunnel for love and matter, of knowing and mystery. How can we toss it aside as worthless flesh? We listen. It has stories about who we are and why we are here, and where we have been.

{Sula’s maternal side, where her and I began this life’s relationship beyond egg and spirit. Her and I have been many places together}

{the fetal side of Sula’s, a wise lil one, a gem, a pearl, a teacher, a gift}

Holding the sacred text of my daughter’s journey as well as my own as her Mother, the villous tree coming together and creating cotyledon villages and timepieces, I learned nothing I didn’t know, but was whispered exactly what I needed. This isn’t about telling the future, it’s about practicing the mystery of the moment. I had regretted all these years not doing something with their placentas, (I ate their sisters) but now I regret nothing. I am so grateful that I still had these, especially grateful to have had all these years living with these girls before experiencing this. It’s profound to watch your daughter give love, authentically and almost meditatively to her own placenta. It is an affirmation that we are not separate from where we come from, that we can’t be denied access to our own wise and well-traveled paths.

{whapio and sula listening}

This day was a slice of life fully courting the paradox and riding the waves of the flux and knowing for sure the Earth, the Universe is the most perfect Home finding it’s way. My daughters’ hands moved blood through the still vibrant placentas, sculpted and shaped their original Twin and it became very clear that this mattered, that The Grandmothers, the Roots of the cosmos, the Eye of the Eternal Omnipresent, somewhere in there, up there, around here, are showing us The Way.

{the beautiful veil we saved. whapio has passed on a ritual of keeping a bit of the veil and allowing it to dry and watch as the stories upon it unfold…}

I hold these stories sacred, personal, some things will be left unsaid. Mia and have a lot of work to do, and we have a long life together to do it in; we are newer to each other but with a important partnership: she truly has crowned me as her teacher and she truly comes to learn leadership. We work on gently massaging each other in ways to untangle the anger and free up the knots. She has many unique gifts and I’m her assistant in finding them. Sul’sa placenta went from looking little turtle shell into blooming like a flower and revealing the most pearlescent piece of her world. She is powerful healer and humble goddess. She is quiet but inside she holds bold beauty, beauty that I know will change the world. I needed to remember that her and I go way back, like far back, from the beginning of time.

{we come from such sparkle and shine, fabulous and divine}

We all are given the medicine when we truly need it. The medicine is Us.

{on a less stream of consciousness note: if you have your placenta frozen and not sure what to do with it, it’s absolutely not too late to make magic and medicine with it. If your children are into it, it’s amazing to include them in the journey. Mine are now soaking in grain alcohol and will be there for another month or 2. Then we will practice alchemy with them using fire and salts. They will eventually, after a process be turned into a more homeopathic type of medicine. But before that I will take a little piece of each and bury them somewhere special. When the time comes, I’ll make sure to share the process. It’s quite easy, yet extremely powerful and fun for the kids, too. It’s something that they can keep with them forever….and keep passing on.}

As little as a dollar helps support the arts and world Love.

We wander the backyard not knowing what’s going to happen and end up being half naked and soaked with the hose. Or finding the chicks just about hatching from their thin little eggs. Some die. Some live. The rhythms of life is learned in such simple, natural ways. Or we just spend days with greasy chips and Rainier cherries on a tiny little beach against a shimmery lake and chase ducklings.

It’s been about movement. The other day I was thinking maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I’m not facing the fact that I should be sitting still. But I am repelled by that notion and keep moving, like a pathalogical need to keep on going, anywhere, everywhere, nowhere. Even when I sit still, I am humming, vibration happens and inspires. Nothing, not even a rock can be still. We all began with the word and the word was a sound and a sound moves and moves fast, low or high or mid-range, but it moves. My husband feeds me thick bread pizza and puts really earthy tasking sake in from of me and says, Sit. Relax. And I can’t seem to explain to him that everything right now is buzzing, swirling, moving. I can’t even find one photo of myself where there isn’t noise.

My kids teach me, as always to slow it. They are expert loungers. They like nothing more than to cut up a bunch of fruit and throw it in some ice water and take their blanket outside with a bag full of Archie comics and be there all day. Sula says to me, Read a big book, Mama. So I get one and I sit down with them for hours turning pages. I sink in the life of my novel, trapped in Joyce Carol Oates beautiful, morbid storytelling, chained and locked in literary prison, one that I happily stay shackled in. And when the urge to get up comes rushing over me like white water, we just go hammock to swing. Swinging is good. I am supported in stillness, yet moving, flying through the air below 2 apple trees and a murder of crows hoping we forgot to close the chicken coop doors.

This summer’s garden has to be the most pathetic one in a long time. We haven’t been around much to take care of it; although it’s loved and nurtured by my tribe while we’ve been nomadic, it still knows those who birthed it aren’t raising it. We got everything in late. And then the sun wasn’t present until July. JULY. Really crazy that we had our woodburning stove on as late as the end of July in the morning to warm up the house. This is something I will try hard not to complain about. Every type of weather I am learning to give thanks for. Weather alone is a gift. I want to tattoo that on me arm. 4 summers ago I was sweltering in the desert, unable to go outside without burning my feet on the sidewalk. So this summer, I remember, and I trust Nature’s ways. Echo loves to garden naked. I beg her not to sit down in the dirt with her bare bum. Worms, I tell her,worms. Please. Not worms.

We’re in Portland right now something to do with glass tiles and stone floors. But anyway. I love this mural in the Alberta Arts district. I love this energy. I love the idea of rising up and being ready to let go of everything I have been taught, to surrender to death so proudly and honestly and walk my Path, the one that seems risky. The one that seems hard and genourmous and totally overgrown with sharp things on vines. But to say hey, it’s mine. I’m here. Yes, here I am. Bring it on. Rise.

Also here in Ptown this lovely lady gave me a bit of love on my head, which was pretty wild and crazy. While her hands moved like hummingbirds we spoke of things near our hearts: voodoo, Catholic rituals and Stregheria. When she was done with me, my dreads were so tidy that I could have walked right into a business meeting without making everyone feel uncomfortable.

I lust after the city at night, I am so happy to be here this week. Way past our bedtimes, and the girls are taken care of my others, we fly across bridges and find hole-in-the-wall sushi with the best sake ever and cuts worthy of awards. And then across town even more where we get close and silly and dance. Bass. Skin. Low. Wide. High. Roll. Bend. Dagger. It’s all fun until another dude’s wife decides you and her are meant to be One. But that’s another story for another time.

Last month we were in Montana. That involved a lot of things. Wood. Bears. Black Wolves. Decks. Yoga. Blood. Sweat. Exhaustion. In the end we soaked here, because hot springs heal even the most tired traveler. They are like the earthen nectar, warmed like sulphuric elixir for the soul; a mountain tea infusion for the muscles. A mind pool where you can unleash and release and get all frizzy and wrinkly and drunk on thermal moonshine. Jerry Johnson Hotsprings. You really should go and tell me if you are and I’ll hop in the car and go back there in a flash. I swear I saw the Virgin Mary visit wearing fringed leather and a wolf head, bones necklace and holding a red candle. She smiled at me and told me everything is going to be just fine, that the world is perfect and stop treating it like it’s not.

I’ve been a little off on the blogging thing lately. I have been writing a lot, in other places than here and I am not sure what this is any more for me. But I know what I want it to be for you. I want whatever I say here to affirm something, I’m an advocate of one thing: whatever makes you Feel. Something. You know the something, I don’t. I’ve been skimming through lovely blogs lately and it seems these days people give advice, some kind of considerate poetry and manifestos on the how to’s for your world. Inspiration, I am assuming and most times, it truly is. But I want my inspiration to be real simple. I don’t want to be your cheerleader or self help guru, cause really I’m a fucking mess myself. You don’t need any advice and neither do I. You don’t need any wisdom from me on how to live or write, or sell or speak, or birth or parent or whatever. My inspiration is: do whatever you fucking want. Do what the fuck you want and what makes you Feel and do it with your heart leading you. I don’t know or care if your heart is wide open or slammed shut, doesn’t matter. Just stick your heart, the way it is, out there. Don’t be sold on someone else’s story. Just tell your own, or change it, or make it up completely. Just know you are doing it, and you are doing fine. You are your own Goddess.

We all are.