i live with the moon ::

This savage season of the waxing moon, she tears me apart right now. Her keening darkness, light-edged and yet oh-so-dark, casts shadows on my “wild gypsy energy that refuses to be tamed,” as Marion Woodman puts it, and those shadows are the shape of my bones.

eclipse. light and shadow.

My darkness wakes with me. She isn't underworld darkness but otherworld, a womb-shaped mystery.  I didn't know it would happen like this, with my own awakening, and I’ve resisted going there until now.

::

I am guest-posting today at the lovely Gypsy Moth Sol. Please join me with Katelyn to continue reading! 

giveaway winner ::

Thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway for these gorgeous earrings! I am deeply moved by your comments and beautiful souls. <3 I want to tell how I chose the winner because I like to do things a little differently. I've used random number generators in the past but sometimes that seems so impersonal. So instead, I wrote everyone's names on little bits of paper, infusing love into each one, with extras for those with bonus entries. I placed them in an envelope. After midnight, with eyes closed, I felt around inside the envelope for three entries which called to me, which grew warm in my hands, and drew them out. I placed them on my desk and asked softly, "Which one?" My hands covered two and revealed the third, the name who will receive these handmade earrings. I believe this is truly meant to be.

To see if this is you ...

wild gypsy soul :: (+ roots and feathers giveaway!)

Edit: giveaway now closed.

my beautiful friend who lets me dress her up and lay her down in railroad beds.

My gypsy and I, we gaze through wary lashes, I can see her in the mirror, and can we talk? she asks. She is beautiful and dark, powerful and irresistible, I am under her spell, can barely breathe. She, the source of all that is restless and warrioress and knowing, I think she curses me? But she speaks with the voice of God: I am your life, she says, all gentle and firm. Your fire. Your healing river. She is in my bones. She grips me; I cannot move without her, and maybe, because of her, I'm still alive? Yes, she whispers, and it is her that rises deep, planted in the so(uls) of my feet and bursting into sunlight.

She canalizes through women. If they are suppressed, she struggles upward. If women are free, she is free. Fortunately, no matter how many times she is pushed down, she bounds up again. No matter how many times she is forbidden, quelled, cut back, diluted, tortured, touted as unsafe, dangerous, mad, and other derogations, she emanates upward in women, so that even the most quiet, even the most restrained woman keeps a secret place for her. Even the most repressed woman has a secret life, with secret thoughts and secret feelings which are lush and wild, that is, natural. Even the most captured woman guards the place of the wildish self, for she knows intuitively that someday there will be a loophole, an aperture, a chance, and she will hightail it to escape. ~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

I write a new story now, days watered with unknown longings, fierce passions, unfolding mysteries. As long as I remain divorced from my feminine soul and the wild gypsy who lives in the breath of my being, I remain only half-alive, colorless, one-dimensional. Wholeness and healing culminate with invocation, with free-ness, with unity in flesh and soul and spirit. Why must my head override my heart, and my heart betray my mind? There is a way for them to dance into oneness, to become one flesh and one heart and one mind. The soul journey of life is about that, for me.

Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayermaking, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them. ~ Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves

artwork by Messy Canvas

Returning

Everything in my life leads up to now, this point, and I can't explain it, but it's pivotal to me. I want to mark this moment. Fleetwood Mac sings,

So I'm back, to the velvet underground
Back to the floor, that I love
To a room with some lace and paper flowers
Back to the gypsy that I was
To the gypsy ... that I was.

There is something about a return to innocence, a return to why you were born, a surrendering to what you were made for and what nourishes your life, your spirit-blood, that begins to make sense once you listen to the wild calling of your soul.

She is made for home. (Home)ostasis home. She knows how to get there. The soul knows how to heal herself. Listen to her. Whether home is in the wind, on the high plains, in a dark shadow valley or a dry and dusty riverbed made for dancing, the gypsy finds her soul-home within the wildness of her spirit, by daring to let all the fragmented parts of her be drawn to the magnetic siren of her soul, and be made whole, healed, and alive.

Take a deep breath. Don't be afraid of the dark. Sometimes the richest treasure is hidden in secret places.

::

Giveaway!

:: To celebrate a return to our feminine souls and setting the wild gypsy spirit free, I want to give away something from my favorite designer, Laura Mazurek from Roots and Feathers. These beautiful gypsy earrings are perfect for the sojourn. May they remind you to be true to your soul, to be free! To enter, see below.

To Enter:

I really want to nurture conversation about soul and what it means to be a wild, free spirit. To enter, please answer one (or more!) of these soul-prompt questions in a comment:

What does it mean to follow your soul? To unleash your gypsy spirit? How you know when you haven't honored her, and what does that feel like? How do you intend to begin following your soul?

For bonus entries, leave a comment for each:

~ Follow this blog

~ Follow Laura's blog

~ Tweet about the giveaway 

~ Post about the giveaway on facebook

~ Post about the giveaway on your blog.

I will choose a winner on Monday, July 30th. I can't wait to read your replies! <3

***
Update: Contest is now closed. Winner announced here.

witness ::

light on my lover's skin

i am not a writer tonight. too restless for that. fragrant incense lingers, remnants from this morning, oils warm from summer, dark and sweet and musky. i inhale. i taste. i close my eyes to the aching, melancholy strains of cello.

sometimes i rely on the label artist too much because it is such a beautifully distracting word. writer? painter? journaler? photographer? artist. tantalizing and mysterious. i told my husband tonight that i wanted to be a tattoo apprentice for awhile, to see if i wanted to be a tattoo artist, and there was the word again. evocative and soul-stirring.

this season of the new moon is especially potent. so much to release, to let sit and marinate, to absorb and see. i'm feeling subtle, external pressures to conform myself to boxes i escaped long ago, shapes which don't fit me, and it makes me restless. it makes me want to run away. two things happen when you squeeze something too tight: it slips away, like water in a clenched fist, or it is crushed to death.

::

and yet ...
i am blessed. there are secret places where my soul fills out her shape, where she can frolic in rumi's field. these are dark wombs of love where i am gathered and seen, where my soul shimmers and wakens the way she is meant to, where she is nurtured and witnessed.

such gift.

as i refine my passion and purpose, as i step along my path and shed old skin, witness remains an elemental soul thread: i witness. i see you. i celebrate your soul. i am an artist. i share what i see. this is why i work and persist and survive, really. it's why i'm alive.


soul stirring prompt: 
why are you alive?

for you, beloved souls ::

portrait of a warrioress :: a study in bravery

I adopted the mantra "do brave things" this year and when I think of brave, I think of Amanda King. She tells brave stories. She is a living sculpture of bravery. I hold my breath when I read her words, like these:

__________________________________

All of you women with lines on your brow, with cracks between your fingers... it's been a long winter.  All of you, you are beautiful and so am I.

The thing is, my children are perfect.  I am the grown up, so I'm supposed to show them everything about life.  When they wake up in the morning, though, I stare at them and they're new.  They teach me everything.  They are babies and they teach me what it means to be a person.  It's easy to see that they're beautiful.

I am slow and I am tired.  I am round and sagging. I am harried.  I am sexless.  I am getting older.

I am beautiful.  How can this be?  How can any of this be true?

I don't want my girls to be children who are perfect and then, when they start to feel like women, they remember how I thought of myself as ugly and so they will be ugly too.  They will get older and their breasts will lose their shape and they will hate their bodies, because that's what women do.  That's what mommy did.  I want them to become women who remember me modeling impossible beauty.  Modeling beauty in the face of a mean world, a scary world, a world where we don't know what to make of ourselves.

"Look at me, girls!"  I say to them.  "Look at how beautiful I am.  I feel really beautiful, today."

~ From I am Beautiful, Girls by Amanda King

__________________________________

I want you to meet Amanda because her voice is one to remember. She documents her days with vivid detail, writing about family, herself, and life with all of its sacred and inglorious moments. With raw grit and fierce honesty, she soul-spills:

They came home bigger than they were, before.

That, for me, is the key to loving myself.  It's about getting bigger, every day.  It's about not endeavoring to be smaller or prettier or more fashionable.  It's about not loving my possessions more than my experiences.  It's about growing things, food and flowers and senses of wonder.  I want to grow so big, I can't be stopped.  I want to grow so solid and real, I could hold my own in a forest of thousand year old trees.

Instead of counting my calories, I dig in the dirt.  I go out into the yard with a knife and bring in an armload of kale for my morning juice.  I write myself into a trance, where nothing is real and tiny sentences put the entire world in a shadow. I fall asleep at night next to my baby girl after spending all day in the sun, teaching her how to swim.  I don't lie awake anymore, worrying about how I'll look in my friend's wedding pictures.  I don't wake up and prepare myself for a day of not eating, or of failing to not eat.  I wake up and we have big bowls of strawberries on the front porch while Louise swings and swings and swings.

I make things.  I cut and I sew and I rip with my teeth.  Instead of trying to be beautiful, I make beauty out of the air.  I feel beautiful with a measuring tape around my neck and pins clenched in my teeth.  I feel beautiful when I create something that didn't exist before.   

~ From Getting Bigger to Get Beautiful

::
Amanda inspires me to be authentic in my writing, but not only my writing. She inspires me to be alive. I read her words and I taste things. Hear her babies laughing. Ache with desire. See them eat strawberries on the front porch and I feel the wind on my legs as we swing and swing.

Until I was seven years old, I lived in a trailer park on the outskirts of a coal mining town in Pennsylvania. The children who lived down the hill from us didn't wear clothes. They wore underwear and nothing else. I used to stand on the front porch of our trailer and watch them squatting in the street, their naked torsos bent over long, naked legs, flipping over rocks and collecting worms after it rained. Those children didn't appear to have any clothes or a mother, either.

I had a mother. She was pretty and blonde and had yellow green eyes that nobody else picked up on their way out of her belly. All four of her children had eyes that were so dark that you could almost call them black, except in the sunlight they were brown. My dad had brown eyes and he passed his darkness on to us.

 ~ From I was Born in a Trailer Park

Maybe it is the darkness that makes her brave. I don't know, but darkness has a way of doing that, of carving bones into the shape of bravery and hammering out strong feet and forging souls of both gentleness and steel. I asked Amanda to write something for The Sacred Life, and it is dark and beautiful:

Magic 
by Amanda King

I live with the roots of trees.  There isn't a sky.

I was nothing, once.  So small, I floated here on the wind.  I fell, and then I waited.

There is some magic in being nothing.  There is nowhere else to go.  You have only the choice to be what you are, and long for something other.

When you are compact within yourself, an impenetrable thing, light reaches you in feathery fragments.  Some shifting of the soil might gain you a breath of clean air or a glimpse of something living, but mostly, you hold yourself against the decaying matter that holds you.

I hold my bones together, to keep them from breaking.  I hold my femur to my shin.  My tendons and muscles would tear otherwise, under the pressure of seconds ticking by, silently.  It happens that I fall apart, that some piece of me will suddenly snap and vanish, leaving a curling tendril of promise in its place.  I have lived with my head in my hands, my spine rounded and shoulders slumped.  Every moment of my existence is exquisite and tender, like a glistening pink mark where I've been burned.

The mark is where my body will split.  I don't know anything, a tiny thing in the dirt, but I will grow.

::
Yes. She will grow, and so will I. So will you. Sometimes it feels like we are all tiny things in the dirt, covered and warm, and then miracles happen. We just need to have faith. Be brave. Let it be.

About Amanda: I turn seed into food.  I birthed slippery, beautiful children.  They were covered in my blood.  I cried and my tears made pools in the canals of my ears.  I am not a stupid girl, and I am smart enough to know what beauty means.  I make beauty out of the air.  I eat beauty for breakfast. I am not what you think a woman is. I grip at roots and veins in the muck of existence.  I vomit and crawl.  I bleed red like rust.  I am a person of the world. 

Read more at www.lastmomonearth.com. A great place to start is a list of her own favorite posts.

::
Read about the Portraits of a Warrioress series
View past portaits

i'm okay with not being careful ::

“I feel more alive than ever, and like no matter how time unfolds, I’m going to be okay. I’m okay with not being careful, if I’m chasing what I believe to be the mysteries of God and they are stirring me alive. I’m telling you, I’m breathing fresh air.” ~ Mandy

 
I'm working on a project right now, one that has the potential to be Big. It stirs my soul. It's something that keeps me up late at night. I lose track of time over it, I forget to eat over it, I grow frustrated and elated over it. And while I'm sketching out details in my Moleskine, to the flicker of candlelight, sometimes I hear in my head, “Now let's not get too carried away.” 

And I want to know, who made up that rule?

I'm okay with dreaming big dreams then waking up to write them down, flesh them out, make them happen. I'm okay with getting carried away. It gives me momentum to carry through. And it made me think of other ways I'm okay, and then I read Mandy's words above, and things clicked. 

Mary Oliver. Artist unknown.

I'm done censoring myself. I'm done second-guessing. I'm done living careful. (Obviously things like safety and common sense are, well, common sense.) I'm done hesitating. In fact,

• I'm okay with following my soul.
• I'm okay with trusting my intuition.
• I'm okay with living wildly free.
• I'm okay with being a little, oh you know, dangerous.
• I'm okay with mystery.
• I'm okay with always having a little sorrow and not having answers.
• I'm okay with both knowing and not knowing. 
• I'm okay with not always having the right words.
• I'm okay with others being frustrated with me. It's okay. 
• I'm okay with not measuring up.
• I'm okay with being wrong.
• I'm okay with being a restless artist.
• I'm okay with rage that rises against fear.
• I'm okay with darkness and otherworldliness.
• I'm okay with being out of the box, and resisting boxes.
• I'm okay with letting go that which serves me no more.
• I'm okay with not being careful.
• I'm okay with getting carried away, and knowing when to release.
• I'm okay with dismissing whatever insults my own soul.
• I'm okay with not being able to help everyone.
• I'm okay with being adventurous and dancing whenever I want to.
• I'm okay with being passionately in love with life.
• I'm okay with tasting everything, shedding old skin, and trying on new skin.
• I'm okay with being tender.
• I'm okay with not wearing labels. I'm okay with making up my own labels.
• I'm okay with the wild loneliness of my sojourn, my own primal, fearless war-dance.

This morning my friend Sara shared with me a conversation that centered around a prayer Ronna Detrick quoted yesterday:

It seems to me…
That we search much too desperately for answers
When a good question holds as much grace as an answer.
[God], you are the Great Questioner.
Keep our questions alive
That we may always be seekers rather than settlers.
Guard us well from the air of settling in
With our answers hugged to our breasts.
Make of us a wondering, farsighted, questioning,
restless people
And give us the feet of pilgrims on this journey unfinished. 

~ Macrina Wiedekehr

“I was chatting with Michael saying how it seems like there's always something around the corner, like there's always something out there, not looming anymore, not negative, just sort of there, and he said, “that is called HOPE” .... OH MY GAWD epiphany time ... so what she says above about the restless feeling, if we wipe away the negative connotations we've attached to restlessness, then it is there, gleaming as the pure embodiment of hope.”  ~ Sara

And I am okay with hope.

::
Soul stirring prompt: What keeps you up late at night and makes you lose track of time? What are you okay with?

the secret life of wanting (or, how to really live) ::

All of the best lives, I think, have a little sorrow in them.

Grief has a way of sculpting you. Of clawing at your insides, tearing you to shreds, hollowing you out. It makes you not the same. It thins you, reduces you to bare. Grinds, pounds, pulverizes; makes you both transparent and obscure, reshapes every holographic cell of you. Sometimes your eyes turn the color of shadows and your bones themselves weep, even when you grieve without the comforting relief of tears.

Louise Erdrich wrote a novel I read recently, the only fiction I've actually read all the way through in years. Her words speak my heart for me. She writes of journey and of loss,

Whenever you leave cleared land, or a path, or a road, when you step from someplace carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath. ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

What grows best, she says. No trail to follow but the law of growth.
That's life, you know? That is LIFE. Twisted, fallen, split at the root, but alive. Sometimes loss presses us into it. The thinning work of grief slips us under whatever barrier we've built to hold the pain of life at bay, and we are thrust right into the heart of it.

Like being reborn.

#secretmessages from a dear friend.

What is it you desire?

I have a feeling Erdrich would understand these words by Alberto Villodo:

When the first chakra is disconnected from the feminine Earth, we can feel orphaned and motherless. The masculine principle predominates, and we look for security from material things. Individuality prevails over relationship, and selfish drives triumph over family, social and global responsibility. The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine. We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality. Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place. I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, “Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest? Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.”

Wet.
Dark.
Tangled
and feminine. The whole beautiful mess of life, dark and voluptuous with her raging fires of passion, hunger, grief, wanting, fear, creativity, freedom, and desire, all begging to be alive with one terrifying demand:

If you want to be alive, you must feel.

... I formed a question of my own in my mind and without ceasing my direct stare I spoke to the wolf, asking my own question: “Wolf,” I said, “your people are hunted from the air and poisoned from the earth and killed on sight and you are outbred and stuffed in cages and almost wiped out. How is it that you go on living with such sorrow? How do you go on without turning around and destroying yourselves, as so many of us Anishinaabeg have done under similar circumstances?”

And the wolf answered, not in words, but with a continuation of that stare. “We live because we live.” He did not ask questions. He did not give reasons. And I understood him then. The wolves accept the life they are given. They do not look around them and wish for a different life, or shorten their lives resenting the humans, or even fear them any more than is appropriate, They are efficient. They deal with what they encounter and then go on. Minute by minute. One day to the next. ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

If you want to be alive, you must not fear your sorrow. Sorrow knows what she must do the way your body knows how to heal. In the same way, you must not fear fear, because, as Jack Canfield writes, everything you want is on the other side of fear. Grief stirs your primal waters. Deep calls to deep, and all the primordial waters of you become a raging torrent, unstoppable and unbearably strong.

You must rise brave. Rest brave. Breathe, walk, crawl, stumble, and quake with bravery. Wanting something so much it hurts will kill you, first, then make you come alive. It is your sorrow and your salvation. It is the way.

For the secret of grief? It hollows you, then hallows you. What else is a hollow chamber full of holy dark, other than a womb? A cocoon, a holding space for life, fertile soil waiting for the seed of desire.

All life begins in the dark. 

::

Soul prompt for warrioresses:

What is it you desire?

Do you know? What is your deepest wanting, your fiercest hunger? Is it so you won't feel so much, perhaps? That the pain will go away? What weeps in your cells, the atoms of you? If you could ask anything, what would you ask? What do you wish to grow in your dark?


::

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”  ~ Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

the secret life of names ::

Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you

where there were only walls.

 — Joseph Campbell

found. #secretmessage

Change is in the air. It's prickly :: alive, almost so much it hurts. These raw days leave trails of tears but winds have turned; the whirlwind spins a fury so holy that it heals, and the full moon sings.

Things hurt more when you're awake. But it's a worthy ache; it means life is vibrant and that I am present like I've never been before, at least not fully. Owning these moments that I live in, aware, awake, and completely committed to now, is a whole new kind of life.

Because this life is so intense awake, I've engaged the process of re-evaluating every aspect of it: beliefs, choices, thoughts and words, even my everyday and how I spend my energy. But most poignantly, perhaps, who I am. Why I exist and what my life needs to be, wants to be.

Through this process, I've learned the significance of naming. Of words and labels, of thoughts and intention. I love how Native American names tell stories, and prophesy. For fun, I sent this link to a friend and asked, What name would you pick for you? For me, Kachina ~ Hopi for spirit, sacred dancer ~ describes both now-me and the me I want to be. What would you pick for you? This little whimsical exercise can reveal sacred inner soul-secrets. What do you want? What are you all about? Where does your heart go when you dream?

Rain is the name I use now, but it wasn't always so. It started as a pseudonym but became very life-giving, and most of my friends use it. I am not the same person I was ten years ago, two years ago, or even last July. Changing a name, legally or not, is significant to the psyche. It creates space. It means we no longer identify with many aspects of the older versions of us, that we have turned a page, created movement, and hopefully healed or grown in some way.

But even if we don't change our given name, we have the power to choose what names mean or don't mean to us. We all call ourselves something, especially in moments of intensity, passion, or frustration. Fat. Lazy. Dumb. Stupid. Inconsiderate. How would you describe yourself to someone you've never met? Energetically speaking, words or thoughts created from intensity carry more power. Hurtful names carry the same effect as a curse.

::
Tonight is the full moon.

It is a time of release and renewal. Change and turning. Are there old names that don't fit you anymore? Labels, painful memories, words you call yourself out of habit? What if you replaced them with something life-bringing? Something fitting for your future as you follow your bliss? Something appropriate for what you want your truth to be?

For me, the name Rain evokes tenderness and mercy. I've lived without the gentle relief of mercy before, when things were dry and brittle and oh so hard. I survived life's wilderness and desert. Rain is synonymous with lusciousness, with softness and a verdant nature. Flowers bloom after rain. Rain is the water of life. Rain comforts, sustains, and nourishes. Rain isn't content with mere survival. She rejoices in her full life. She absolutely and abundantly thrives.

Soul prompt for warrioresses:

What is your real name? The name your heart whispers to you when you dream? What does it mean to you?