The Queen of Bohemia Lives in St. Croix

थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया

2011-11-12T14:52:00.000-08:00

थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया - बॉडी मेमोइर्स, थे मेमोइर ऑफ़ माय कोच्चय्क्स

The Queen of Bohemia in Monte Carlo - June 2011

2011-11-12T14:32:00.001-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia in Monte Carlo - June 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Corsica - June 2011

2011-11-12T14:28:00.000-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia in Corsica - June 2011

The Queen of Bohemia in Buenos एरेस

2011-11-12T14:21:00.000-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia in Buenos Aires - August-December 2011.

The Queen of Bohemia in Grand Central Station - New York City, New York. July 2011.

2011-11-12T14:19:00.000-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia in Grand Central Station - New York City, New York. July 2011.

पोर्ट्रेट ऑफ़ थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया अत आगे २२. बौल्डर, कोलोराडो 1989

2011-11-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

Auto Retrato of The Queen of Bohemia at age 22. Boulder, Colorado 1989.

थे कुईं ऑफ़ बोहेमिया इन पलका दे जों मिरो - बार्सेलोना, स्पेन सप्त. २९, 2011

2011-11-12T14:13:00.001-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia in Placa de Joan Miró - Barcelona, Spain
Sept. 29, 2011

Body Memoirs: The Memoir of My Feet

2011-08-19T08:37:00.001-07:00

Body Memoirs: The Memoir of My Voice Part I

2011-08-19T08:36:00.001-07:00

NOW ON WITH THE STORY....

2011-04-28T11:21:00.000-07:00

HERE ENDS BOOK I: THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA CLEANS HER OWN HOUSE AND BEGINS BOOK II: THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA LIVES IN ST. CROIX.

TO BE CONTINUED.......

TUNE IN!

Independence Day

2010-07-24T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Queen of Bohemia has voyaged to the Great City beyond the desert kingdom. She loved it and her hair looked great. Such a new life, such a new beginning. She was oh, so well-received, the chariot stops along the way were sublime. She was overwhelmed with the art, the culture, and good architecture and soul everywhere. She drank a magic potion, she at the super foods. She has gotten super healthy and her body is transformed and her Queenly outfits new and fresh. Her transformation is complete. Yet now, she misses her children. She misses the King. She yearns to tie up her work in the Great City and continue on the journey to the final place of complete healing – home – to the place before the wounding, and to return to the land far, far away on the other side of the world.

I have been on the east coast for nearly a month now. Having arrived in New York City on July 1, it was a whirlwind of the great city, its art, food, culture, museums, theatre and walk-ability. The King and I had an incredible time, and I slowly let go of old clothing, old pain, old things that remind me of Colorado and the past. Ounce by ounce, the new me emerged, as I shed the heavy weight of yesteryear, the dead energies. I felt it in my body, I felt it in my soul. I don’t have the low-grade anxiety that I felt in my body in Colorado. Surely it’s the change in altitude, the energy, the dry wind and brown prairie and memories that caused it. Now I am free.

New York definitely is not Buenos Aires. You can still feel the edginess, the competitiveness. The buildings have that hard edge and the people are pushy and disconnected and you can detect the corn syrup lodged in the fat cells of their puffy bodies. Everybody is into psychic readings and street portraits. I visited Connecticut and Massachusetts for the first time in my life. Visited Yale campus and saw with my very own eyes a copy of the Guttenberg Bible. New York City was a cooker for the fourth of July, immersed in a heat wave. But it was truly a symbol of independence. The kind of independence that yoga brings and when you are so unbelievably happy. When you are truly in love. When you stop identifying with the ego and firmly root yourself in the transcendent. Everything becomes magical and possible. And so very peaceful. Nothing the outside world can dish up can affect the inner realm, and you just observe the outer world going by like a river. Sat Chit Ananda.

I taught at Kripalu doing my Storytime Yoga kids camp. It was a delight and a joy. Effortless being and feeling complete and whole. Feeling valuable and content. I have arrived. I am home. No place to get, nothing to do. Just be and be with the children. Kripalu wants me back for next year. What a great thing! Currently I am in a coffee shop across from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where I am staying with my friend, Francie, before heading back to upstate New York to the Omega Institute where I will give a teacher training. Then it's back to Colorado for a short stop of tying up still lose ends and letting the kids say more goodbyes.

Above all, I miss my children. I call my kids and regularly talk to them on Skype. Such a wonderful tool that makes science fiction of childhood science fact. There’s not too much to do in San Antonio, as their cousins are older and not around. But they help out at their grandparents and uncle’s house, mow the lawn, eat a lot of barbecue. Their late father’s mother has terrible Alzheimer's and just got out of a body cast from a February car accident. Their grandfather at 82 isn’t supposed to drive but still does and I warn them not to get in the car with him! Considering that San Antonio is suburban hell with no where to walk to to be at any sort of anywhere with a there there, TV is the norm, however, they are also forced to read and play Scrabble. They are learning Spanish from the home health aide, which is a good thing. I also reminded them that their grandparents may not live much longer, so enjoy the moment. And you can always practice yoga, I told them.

I asked them to send pictures. My son sent pictures he took from around his grandparents' house. He sent me picures one by one of our wedding, of our family together when their father was alive, pictures of when they were little kids, big smiles and fat cheeks. I called him to see if he was happy. “Yes,” he said. “I’m sad that Dad died, but still good things happen because of it.” I was delighted at his intelligence and my heart melted. I congratulated him on that piece of wisdom, realizing how adolescents need guides for this part of life to answer questions. I reminded him of the Shipwrecked Sailor story, you cannot judge life. It just is. That is yoga, to see life as it is, and watch the mind and open up to the true mind between the thoughts. How exciting to teach youth at this age. How wonderful to have a child grow and learn to live in the world using yoga and story.

My ex is still trying to wiggle out of repaying his debt to me through bankruptcy. I told him I want my car back. I just let the lawyer take care of it. I have learned to navigate the difficulties, not let anything bother me, mostly. It takes a lot of mindfulness and letting go. Sometimes the demons slip in at night, or I talk it out with the King or a friend, but awareness certainly disintegrates the demons on the spot. Like Kali does to the demons. The blood from the demons don't have a chance to sink into the earth and sprout more demons. She prevents this by licking the blood up with her tongue. A daily sitting meditation and yoga practice does wonders for this. It is freedom. Salvation. An ocean of bliss.

At Kripalu, I ate organic, mostly non-dairy ayurvedic food for 11 days straight. I did at least one yoga class a day. Upon leaving, I was shocked to be in the outside world again. I stopped in a convenience store to ask directons. I was overwhlmeed and amazed at all the junk food packaged up. It was so alien. Cotton candy in a plastic container. In Buenos Aires I remember an old man still making it fresh the old fashioned way at the Sunday San Telmo fair. In the store it was a disconnect, an oddity. What is this? Food? Lots of crinkly packages, pork rinds, processed death in waiting. Francie eats gluten and dairy-free, so when we stopped in New Jersey near Bruce Springsteen’s home town, it was hard to find anything to eat on the menu besides a lot of dairy, barbecued wings or bread. We had some salmon and I ate a salad with blue cheese and bacon. The next morning we both had diarrhea! When I told the cashier at the health food store in Swarthmore about it she said, "Oh, you can't eat anything in Jersey."

At her house in Swarthmore, I returned to the healthy diet. Learned to love kale, quinoa, beets and daikon radish. It’s gotten so much easier to do and I can’t imagine eating the old crap, even if it means I can’t eat out much. Everything becomes so clear and free. My body feels great, it’s tone returning and I’m sure I’ve lost 5 pounds or something as my clothes are getting baggy. We shall see how this all holds up abroad! I did find a few vegetarian and health food stores in Buenos Aires. My daughter was thrilled about eating kale, beets and lentils, but my son less so. We shall see! I'm also excited about homeschooling the kids. To really focus on teaching them and un-schooling them by just showing up somewhere outside the US. Obama's race to the top - what a mess. That is not learning. That is competition and more neurosis disguised as education. I will also be happy to be away from the culture, where America thinks murder is funny. "Sunny with a chance of Homicide," is some show, a picture of an orange stabbed and bleeding on the side of New York buses. Angelina Jolie in Salt is the image for gun culture gone girly and unconsciously joining the ranks of the death cult our society has been in for the past 200 years. I finished reading "Bachelor Girl, the secret history of single women in the 20th century," by Betsy Israel. Required reading for all women. How men and the media try persistently to destroy women's power through the ages, yet wome prevail. I understand my mother, the war they waged against her to be anything but a stenographer or wife. And now they still try to destroy us with gun toting media whores. Yet we ignore it an move forward despite it, remarkably. Durga protects us. I had a dream of a lion chasing some people. So we are fierce! I also thought that the black women who were the sales women at Macy's were in credibly strong, to stand around all day surrounded by images of white women and culture. They still have their pride, their peace inside despite all this infantile crap.

I haven’t watched much television in seven years. I did watch the 2006 Olympics and the 2008 presidential elections. I thought I'd protect my kids from TV, but then Hulu and You Tube came along. I am aware of some things that are on TV because of reading the world’s newspapers every morning online. But I’ve never seen a reality show, don’t know what’s popular on TV or who half of the blondes in wedding gowns on the magazines at the grocery check out lanes are. But I did watch a little TV at Francie’s house last night. On the Discovery Channel we caught the end of a show called Hoarders. I was fascinated that other people live in the shame that was my childhood. Buried alive in things. I contacted the network, as they are looking for participants for the new season. I told them my father’s story. His migraine headaches, my mother, the war. I told them he wants it cleaned out before he dies. We all want the house cleaned out. The final psychic journey of the body, the heart, mind and soul. Really leave the past behind. Because it’s still in the body, still in the tissue. Getting it all out is a miracle, a healing extraordinare. We shall see if the producers call.

All in all, it’s a new life. The seven difficult years are over. The first half of my life is over. It seems like a dream the past, or a bad nightmare. I survived. I persevered, by sheer will power alone. The demons have made me strong, courageous and powerful indeed. The journey continues and I’m not afraid. The Queen of Bohemia has done a good and thorough job of cleaning her own house. And she has told her story. Now onward for the next journey.

THE RETURN AND BACK AGAIN

2010-07-08T05:28:00.000-07:00

The Queen has left the desert kingdom forever. She boarded the chariot; she took the iron horse. Now her final ride on the great eagle awaits to whisk her off to the great city. Far, far away she is going. Leaving behind old memories, a battlefield of dead demons, and a dry climate that leaves her coif with very bad hair days.

She said good-bye to Prince Pepe, left with King Albert the Good until she can send for him. She spent her last days saying I love you to so many friends and family, before finally paying a visit her court body worker to wring the stresses of her last visit to the desert kingdom from her body.

As she watched the flat, brown prairie roll by her chariot, she remembered the golden swan that helped her make it to this point. Despite the time away from her new home in the kingdom far, far away, she made it though with the help of the golden swan and voice of the King.

For Independence Day, The Queen of Bohemia will be in New York City.

I sat at the gate waiting for my flight to NYC. I awoke this morning with anticipation, realizing it was fourth of July weekend and it would be very busy at the airport. My friend, Wendy dropped me off at us air with my luggage packed for my teaching and training at Kripalu and the Omega Institute. I was ready to leave Colorado, where I have spent 36 of my 43 years of life.

I learned from my earliest travel abroad experiences in college that you have to carry your own stuff. I had it down with one large suitcase containing my Storytime Yoga bag and clothes, and two carry ons of my business and laptop, cameras and IPad. When I arrived at the vacant counter of US Air, the airline promptly alerted me that the flight was actually with United. I had to lug my heavy bags to the other side of the airport at the east, not west terminal. I was determined to leave Colorado for the fourth time! Nothing could keep me here!

United’s counter was crazy bad with a line six lanes deep. I had missed a plane four years ago spring break getting through the process of my children set up in Texas while I go to the gathering of the Joseph Campbell Foundation at Esalen. But it was so crazy I missed my plane before I could get my kids off. And I never heard from the Foundation again.

I felt panic, seven years of panic and rush swell up in me. I remembered that I am sustained by the grace of Lord Shiva. I chanted the Maha Mritunjaya mantra. I called the King. He said he would send some sailing magic my way, and that this final obstacle would not prevent me from leaving or reaching my goal.

I asked the attendant who was directing people why it took so long. Just
heavy fourth of July traffic, she said of her automated, meaningless job clothed in her drab, uncomfortable uniform. The price you pay for independence, I thought as I waited, breathing in and breathing out and observing the present.

Just then, an announcement blared over the airwaves that curbside check in was now available. Saved! I wasted no time undoing the tethers of the cattle ropes hear they use on the public at airports and lurched my way outside again to the curb. Short line! Hallelujah! Big exhale. Squat, too. Thank you King! But, oh, no. Oh, god. The man behind the counter says that my big check bag is too heavy. 62 pounds $100 fee. “Oh I'll pay it! I don’t care! Just get me on a plane out of here!” “Sorry, can't do overweight baggage at curbside.”

I said I will never fly United again as I lugged my suitcases back to the long line. I had lost my place and it had added an extra line! Doom! I thought. Just then, I received a flash of insight. A lot of the weight is my Storytime Yoga bag filled worth my mysterious objects to entertain little children with during yoga and storytelling class. It’s a heavy leather bag that was my late husband’s. We bought it in Florence in 1996 on a trip to Europe. It was one of the best times of our relationship;

After his death, I used it. I liked the weight of it and the fact that his hands held it during business trips. I kept its little lock of which I do not know the code and I kept the United Red Carpet Club red tag with his name Frank Q. Solis III scripted on it.

I stopped in the middle of the airport, unzipped the giant bag, and took out the Florence bag. Zipped up again. Bolted for the curbside check in once again. Saved! Both under weight! And the attendant checked me in all the way to New York City. I thought I had to have another step at the self-serve kiosk from there. I was so happy I could have kissed him. I smiled and thanked him so much and proclaimed loudly,” I wish you a very wonderful day, sir!” And he looked happy that he could find meaning in his automated, meaningless job he performed from his drab, uncomfortable uniform.

I made it through security no problem. A woman and her son were ahead of me She said, cute skirt and shoes, where did you get them?"

The man behind us laughed as I proudly announced that the skirt I bought from a thrift store in Boulder, a triumph of in my Bohemianesque fashion.
I said the shoes were from my friend Wendy who I stayed with before I left Colorado. She gave them to me at the last minute because I was going to the Yale Club of New York City as the Queen of Bohemia and the dress code required closed-toe shoes and covered shoulders. “You will be watched,” the Yale Club website said. I thought I’d give them something to watch!

I did not want to leave Buenos Aires and return to Boulder. Once back, it was like I had been in a dream. My hair wilted under the dry air, leaving it flat and choppy. Oh, no! I thought. I must get back to a humid climate just to have good hair! I returned to Colorado to tie up lose ends. Primarily to finish moving but also to do the third annual Mythic Yoga Story in the Body retreat at Blue Window Arts in Rollinsville, Colorado, which Wendy owns.

This year we made staffs and wands. The prior years were masks and shields. I told the myths of ancient India and contemplated them in our bodies as we did yoga and meditation. We listened to our bodies to find a symbol or myth that it was speaking. What was coming up or needed to be heard or told or dealt with. I coached them individually in the fine art of oral storytelling against the backdrop of beautiful nature around Boulder, Colorado and Wendy’s place.

One participant's story had an old man. Something about that image of the old man stirred me. A wise old man, the father, the hermit, masculine. During yoga practice this came up, as I listened to my body and asked questions.

Wendy led us on a hike in the forest. I found several sticks. I ended up with three. A first the father - a heavy, tall one that felt good in the left hand, which I painted Aboriginal with my left. The second the mother - a tall, slender one which I wrapped with rigid rap and still remains unfinished, but I thickened up the core, symbolic of that are I need to strengthen and move from more, rather then my shoulders and upper body. The third was a small one, the child. I painted it and turned it into the magic wand, wrapped with an I-Ching coin leftover from a candle as well as two wire bands, honoring a dream I had of them recently. I sculpted a little golden swan from clay to perch on a short branch that came from the stick, a memory of the faith I felt in myself in Buenos Aires.

I realized that the masculine, the transcendent, the father, Shiva, Krishna presence was always with me. A masculine support system I had never felt that everything will be OK. I don't have to carry the whole world myself. The father will provide. The Father and I are One. Always making me feel secure and sustaining me. The fear was gone. My faith complete. Holding the big staff made me feel secure. The wand manifests my unconscious desires. A wonderful retreat indeed.

I tied up lose ends moving. I no longer have to worry about Speer. My assistant runs the business end of things and I get to create. I sold my car to Wendy’s husband and am so relieved of not owning a car. Also, my ex decided to declare bankruptcy and get out of the $30k he owed me, half of which was my pre-marital Toyota Sienna Mini van that he drives around searching for real estate business in a bow tie I bought him. I saw him twice before I left. Once while I was riding a bike. And it was such a great bike and such a beautiful day, when I saw him I just couldn’t be angry. I was so happy that I was leaving for New York City, so I just gave him a big, sloppy wave and a smile. Nothing can disrupt her peace inside. Or so I have Shiva and Krishna to remind me otherwise.

I did have to hire a bankruptcy lawyer because of it and I didn’t have the money to pay my final month’s rent so I used my big deposit, clearly outlining to the landlady what repairs it should go toward.

She flipped out, threatened to evict me while in Argentina. She posted a three-day demand for rent, telling the boy across the street who was my son’s neighbor friend that he shouldn’t come around anymore because we were being evicted. I went to Argentina. Nothing was going to keep me from there. And I didn’t want to engage in that emotional pit with her either. I wished her well. Sent her calm letters in the face of uncertainty. At some point I suggested she carefully reread my original letter and she calmed down after that. Her tone changed and I figure she misunderstood something or maybe she read my blog. I don’t know.

I didn’t clean the house, or the carpets. I was too exhausted moving. I left my late husband's heavy desk that I used as an art table. I let it all go. I locked the keys in the house, and drove down the hill. So excited to reunite with my children down the road, to find the healing before the wounding. I visited Jeff Pontillo, body-worker extraordinaire, for his amazing session and helping me understand my uddiyana bandha and open my heart. It has been a return and now I am back again.

I will be with my children and do our yoga and education while traveling the world. I visited my sister at the Denver Krishna temple. They are now running the restaurant, Govinda’s. We talked about family, children, service. How mom didn’t do anything with us. She read books, wrote poetry. But she didn’t show us any basics, like cooking or how to clean something.

We both love doing those things. She said that service of children is everything. That feminism is about family. We were told in the 70s and 80s to be the super woman, when all we really wanted was a choice. We were forced to be mothers. And our mothers didn’t want to be mothers. Our mother wanted to be a journalist, not a stenographer, and our grandfather had her taken off for shock treatments to break her of her desire. But the big mistake was embracing the market economy. Motherhood, education, health, art, science. Those things have value beyond a buck. Children, life, home, good food, music, art, making love, laughing, teaching, cooking. Life is really simple and so beautiful. You just have to stop everything else and make it a priority. You have to stop the machine. And then you will learn to live and then life is just one awe-struck moment to the next.

THE QUEEN OF BOHEMIA LIVES IN BUENOS AIRES

2010-06-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

By
Sydney Solis

This summer, while the prince and princess are visiting with the family of their late King father in a the land of a single star, Prince Pepe is with the Queen's father, King Albert the Good, frolicking in a large yard in the country and chasing a new cat.

Meanwhile, the Queen has been on a long journey, far, far away from the desert kingdom. She has gone to a place on the other side of the world. And although she misses her dear prince and princess and Prince Pepe, this separation has allowed her to resurrect her life. Too long she has felt the pressures of the desert kingdom closing in around her, sucking her body and heart’s energies, choking off her creative flow. She has visited the Great Tree again, became the High Priestess again, dipped into the well again and removed a toad that was blocking the well and a rat that was gnawing at the roots of the tree. Life is real and joyful, flowing and peaceful and rid of the shadows past. That’s because the Queen of Bohemia has found her true home. Like an ugly duckling that sensed something terribly wrong about her prior kingdom and battling a thousand demons, she realizes there was never anything wrong with her. It’s just a matter of geography. She realizes now that The Queen of Bohemia Lives in Buenos Aires.

I can almost see Eva Peron’s grave from the balcony of my ninth floor apartment. She is dead. Long dead. But I am just beginning to live.

I have been in Buenos Aires for over two weeks, and I feel so at home. I have been staying in a little apartment with a balcony that overlooks Recoleta Cemetary where Evita is buried among the dead generals, presidents and elite of centuries past. Every day and night their elaborate-tombed metropolis of marble and concrete scattered across four blocks reminded me that they are dead, and I am alive.

I spent the first week in a whirlwind of getting used to the city and its plethora of sites – statues of winged angels and horses, stunning art deco and turn-of-the-century architecture richly engraved, curved and ornate, all exalting the human spirit. They settle in like seeds planted in the human soul to sprout great ideas and imagination. And a new future. Like something is being reborn. Like the lingering era of military and men murdering monstrously in their fringy uniforms is finaly being snipped away, like dead hair on the stylist’s floor.

There is a different fashion sense in Buenos Aires. Of course I love it, whereas before I had to shop in thrift stores in the U.S. to find anything worthy of my Bohemianesque-esh-ness. Of course it's winter, everybody is bundled up in scarves and hats and gloves. I feel it’s rather balmy, like a decent Colorado day in Spring. The people are into coffee, tango, the World Cup, psychotherapy, art, music, books and opera. It’s the city with the most psychotherapists per capita in the world. People aren’t ashamed to get mental health like Americans are. Bookstores are everywhere, and not a Barnes and Noble to be seen! Very few chains or imports are here at all, as everything from food to underwear is made within its borders. Everything is original and artisan, from handmade chocolates and pastries in the ubiquitous cafeterías and coffee shops on every corner, to hand-made shoes, hand-knit multicolored sweaters, artisan pasta. Buildings mostly were designed by French and Italian architects, and the best apartments are the old ones, crying out the many stories and songs that the stories in its rooms - with high ceilings and long windows shielded with shutters - have heard.

Surely the landscape saves my soul. Artists and colorful buildings flourish, and my soul was warmed by the Bohemian clatter in San Telmo on Sundays in the outdoor antique fair, with tango dancers, artists, musicians, performance artists, food and the incredible act of being alive.

Bohemian Me. That is my ancestory. Card-carrying of the boat. It’s not about the stuff, but what kind of music the stuff can create. That’s our motto. Give me life or give me death, and not some plastic thing. In my life I have been the ugly ducking, with a European father who survived a concentration camp on Java during the war, and nobody could share that story. It was so far away from anybody’s shore. It was shut down and silenced under the taunts of wealthy girls in shirts with alligators over their hearts. And over my heart I wore a flower embroidered over a grease stain on a dress bought for a quarter at a garage sale.

In Buenos Aires the stain is beautiful. It’s so beautiful it clicks with every step on the pavement, every flicker of conversation in the shop window. Here I am like the ugly ducking, Cinderella, finally finding out how beautiful she really is, and that she was never ugly, she was just stuck in some really ugly places with some equally ugly people don’t even uglier things to each other. I realize that I was just misplaced and separated from my tribe. There was an error in cognition, an affliction of the mind, causing delusion of the true Self.

After so many rebukes of who I am, I have found my tribe. That’s why the Queen of Bohemia Lives in Buenos Aires. Horns are honking. Argentina must have one another game in the World Cup.

I remember my late husband, Frank. He scolded me if I cut my meat and used the fork in my left hand to eat it. He bought me a book, Emily Post’s Etiquette. After dutifully reading it, I realized that I was eating the European way, the way my Dutch father modeled at the table when I was a child. The American way is to cut your meat, then pass the fork to the right hand, as opposed to saving the step and keeping it in the left hand. I remember he scolded me if a flake of instant oatmeal spilled onto the counter from out of the little paper serving bag it was enclosed in while being poured into a bowl. He criticized me if I chomped on a chip too loudly, and when a funny voice or expressive face came out he’d say, “Why can’t you just say something normal? It’s like living with Carol Burnett.”

I remember, a KOA campground, somewhere maybe in California, 1977. I am 10 years old. My older sister, younger sister and I go to brush our teeth. It’s busy with other campers in the small women’s public bathroom. We wait our turn in line to go to the sinks. We brush our teeth. I brush and brush and brush. I have a blue, plastic toothbrush shaped like a gun. Toothpaste foams all around my mouth, dripping down my chin. I brush and brush and brush. Women standing in line to use the sink look at me funny. I don’t understand what they are looking at. The foaming mess all around my mouth. I am just brushing my teeth, lady. I use my hands to wash away the foam with the running water. My hands become a cup to catch the water and rinse my mouth and spit. The funny looks get harsher. Because we didn’t have a towel. We used our pajama sleeves.

My sisters and I leave. My oldest sister whispers, “All those ladies with their neat little cups to wash their mouths out. We don’t need any of that.” Our mother never taught us to brush our teeth. She never taught us to comb our hair, or dress ourselves, or carry a towel or clean anything well or correctly. But she did teach us to travel, to go for it and explore.

Perhaps my sister said that to protect us. Us rag tag children in old garage sale clothing. The Six Straubs from Boulder, Colorado packed into a little fishing camper trekking to California for a family camping trip. Baptized Catholic but have a Jewish grandfather who died in a force labor mine outside of Tokyo, and a father who espouses reincarnation and a mother who writes poetry when she is not screaming at you in the middle of the night or embarrassing you in public. Driving the long roads across the West, we hear the news on the little AM radio in the truck cab about Elvis’s death while on the road somewhere in Nevada. We snap pictures from a little film camera at every monument. We are having fun. Even though we are different. Bohemians and smart Dutch Indonesians. Even though we don’t have much at all, we have fun anyway. Because we are survivors and surviving has taught us how to live.

Everything is a bit worn in Buenos Aires, very authentic, Bohemian. It’s not perfect. Not made yesterday and not requiring a car to drive. (The Gulf Oil spill is still gushing, glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.) There is the gentleness of antiquity here and a wearing down that softens the harshness of the world and lets you rest. It makes me feel at home, even though my childhood home was squalor and clutter, and my grown up home is funky, eclectic.

I cringe at the new strip malls and asphalt parking lots that overtake the Colorado prairie. I was horrified to stop by my assistant’s apartment near the Flatiron’s Mall to drop off materials before I left. My father called the mall, “The Last Mall of the Kali-Yug,” and I understand now why. This old model is from the Old Oil Regime and kills the human spirit. These neat little planned commercial hubs have proletariat housing units surrounding them, which I liken to Communist China housing blocks. From the highway they look rather decent. They were only built 10 years ago about. I drove around lost in the labyrinth of grey streets and beige buildings and wondered if I had taken a wrong turn and had ended up in Iraq instead this Suburbistan.

I found her apartment complex. One of three towering, enormous buildings that each look exactly the same as the other. Everybody’s home but nobody is there. You could walk for a while through nowhere, but you don’t bother to, so you drive in your car instead to beige mall or chain convenience store in the shape of a box to buy some kind of packaged, corporate food and bring it back to the cement compound to consume in front of a television.

The only other human beings I saw besides my assistant among these three massive compounds were some Indian women in pink saris near a doorway. There were some enormous courtyard areas of green grass. It begged for a community garden, park benches, street musicians or somebody selling candy, maybe even a child playing or I'll take screaming, ANYTHING remotely HUMAN or giving off life signals that was not herbacious. The hallway reminded me of movies I’ve seen of New York tenements. Ok, so she may be upset that I write this, but I’m doing my best to break her out of there! But this is what I was escaping, lest I die. Maybe many of you live in a city with great public transportation and works of art and amenities near you, but I have never had that. I’ve always had to drive and survive.

What I like about Argentina is that it’s inexpensive. I can live sustainably here and everybody pays cash and that's good because I'm on a cash basis now. The country went through an economic collapse in 2001 so they already know how to deal with life’s unexpected curvature shape. Here I can live in a great city and be able to rent an inexpensive apartment with everything included, like cable, phone and maid, what a deal! You can ride the bus for 25 cents. I got a nice haircut and color for $50, including tip, and my brows waxed for $2! Plus, food is fresh and all grown within the country. No hormones, antibiotics or factory farming!

The second week I settled down to do work, writing in coffee shops, meeting expats, connecting with community and possibilities. This afternoon I taught a meditation class to the social entrepreneurship called Programar. It trains 17-25-year-old slum residents to fill the IT jobs that abound in Argentina. I went to a fundraiser there recently and was so impressed. All I want to do is serve, so I got my chance. I did it all in Spanish! Even told a joke and they laughed! I hear everywhere that my Spanish is great. It feels good after all my obsessive years of hard work with language and sounds.

Earlier this week, I took the bus back to San Telmo. An indigenous man walked by me with the usual hippie, backpacker look. However, I wasn’t afraid when he started talking to me. He was from Peru, and going to sell his flutes and seed necklaces at the street fair. He said that when I walked by he could see my aura, “like a comet went by. I saw a trail of light and sparkles like a comet behind you.” We talked for a while. I could understand his Spanish very well, as I’ve spent time in Peru and Ecuador, and it was refreshing, since the Argentine accent is difficult for me to understand. And there were three policeman next to me by the time we reached the street corner. We talked for a long time, about the indigenous shamans, intuitive knowing, connecting with the cosmos. It was great to connect. The indigenous, like he, are so connected to the depths of the soul and the body.

I had to say goodbye temporarily, as I was expected at the Programar fundraiser. I hooked up with him again afterwards and he gave me a Mayan astrology reading. We went to an internet café and he looked the reading up with my birth date. I’m KA, the color is white, and it was pretty accurate in that I’m a writer, and to inspire people. It’s good to remember these things. Or be reminded. The Queen sometimes forgets and those little doubts and fears slip in. He wanted to do another reading about getting stuck energy out of the body, but I begged off, saying I was tired (I was, and I’m not used to humid cold so started sweating in the café.) and that I wanted to get to the Puppet Museum before it closed. I’m glad I did, as my inner child delighted in the small, dark theater filled with the pattle and murmur of children and parents voices, which massaged the heart of my neglected childhood down to a laugh in the belly.

A few days ago I went to the Finca Ecologica Nueva Vrindavana in General Rodriquez, about 60 kilometeres outside of Buenos Aires in the country. It was pouring rain and cold. I had intended to stay two nights to get a feel for the place and see if I could bring my kids later. But after a sleepless night on a hard mattress in very rustic conditions listening to roosters at all hours, and after freezing by a small wood burning stove and being reminded that I just survived one of the longest, coldest winters in Colorado history and that I had come to Argentina in the WINTER, and there was a warm, soft bed waiting for me in Buenos Aires, I left early.

But it was not before enjoying the place immensely - the calm of nature, the French, Portuguese and British young travelers working at the farm. I toured a very soggy farm the next morning with a regular staff member who was Argentine. I looked at the cool crops growing in the vegetable garden, of cilantro, broccoli, and cabbage. They grew onions not to eat but as a pest repellent. Roaming cows, geese, a cat and neighboring chickens and roosters blow any Disney theme park away. I took an interesting yoga class, listening keenly for new Spanish yoga vocabulary, watched the movie What the Bleep do we Know for the 5th time in my life, and ate some serious vegetarian fare, a respite from the heavy carbs, confections and carne in the city.

I also got to visit with Krishna. We went to the temple. It was great to see the deities, Krishna and Radha, and be reminded that Krishna – that divine presence - is with you always. He’s that transcendental reality, the supreme reality behind your dualistic thoughts that produce this illusional reality. Connect and identify in that realm, then all fear, all karma, drops away. It is moksha. Like Christ there with you, you are never alone with the divine presence. You just wake up to it one day, and never leave that house of love again because it fits you like the skin you bathe in the morning, glistening in the sunlight.

I was so grateful for my experience. I came back to a sunny Buenos Aires and a warm, soft bed and heated apartment! How poor people suffer! I don’t want to, and I feel they shouldn’t either! Now I have been writing in coffee shops and showing the street to my kids via SKYPE. I’ve been working and practicing yoga. I’m in my groove. It took all this time to decompress from the states, find myself without my children around, which is pretty much 24-7, and really connect to my creative self. It took a little time, but it was there all along.

Now I leave on tomorrow evening. I am a little sad because I already feel that this is my home. I will be sad to see the brown prairie at Denver International Airport when the plane touches down. The dry air will probably kill the body that my hair has here. I got the best haircut of my life here as a walk in! But I have my mythic self to defend me from the upcoming pressures and final details of moving and arranging things. But I am so looking forward to my Mythic Yoga retreat, Kripalu kids camp, Omega training and more. As I have been re-inspired by my own dream. I just had not been able to look at it in a while. It's amazing what you can accomplish when you don't have vampires draining your energy and time.

I am determined to return to Buenos Aires with my children in the fall, (their spring) so that they can experience what I have experienced and to continue what I have set in motion. In the meantime, I am ready to return to Colorado, for I know myself.

So the Queen has found herself. She touches her crown with the blue jewel in it and she's ready for transport. And although she is a bit nervous to come back to the desert kingdom and tie up loose ends, she has a secret talisman. She was given a golden swan on her journey by the townspeople of Buenos Aires. She carries it in her pocket wherever she goes. The golden swan gives her the courage to return to the desert kingdom and put the final demons to rest with the final battle. For all she sees in front of her now is a bridge. A bridge that she is crossing over. She does not look over the edge of the bridge to the perilous depths below. She just looks to the other side of the bridge. She feels her feet and heart moving steadily toward that side. She will surely arrive. She will surely arrive home.

The Queen in Bloom as She Sheds Her Stuff

2010-05-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

The Queen is in full bloom. She hiked up to her mountain with Prince Pepe leading the way and proclaimed to the mountain, “Let freedom reign!” For all her work as the High Priestess has prepared her for now. All the trials and errors, all the struggles, indeed they have made her strong, courageous and powerful. She has listened well to her mermaid, half-fish, half-goat-with-wings guide.

The Queen is very unhappy about things that are going on in the village outside the kingdom. That little children and women and the elderly and the disabled are getting the shaft, while the Evil Vampire Empire sucks the life out of the people. The Queen has learned to rid herself of the chains that she was unaware of all her life. She cleaned out the castle of excess stuff that was planted by the Vampires. She got rid of its draining power. And even though sir-Fraud, the ex-king, still tries to rip her of her crown jewels, she doesn’t care. For those things are of the earth, all of it is. She’ s OK to let every THING go, because she is all the more powerful because of it, and she has the blue jewel from the Princess in her crown and she knows where those came from and how to get more. Prince Pepe winks in agreement.

I filled my Prius with two loads of donations and drove it to Savers down the hill. It benefits children’s and epilepsy center charities. They were so glad to have all this stuff, the so-called rewards of capitalism – books, clothing, household items, art work, things.

I had a garage sale last weekend. I think I put out two-thirds of what I owned. So much of it was still from my life with my late husband’s, believe it or not. I set it up cute, like a funky re-sale shop – an eclectic mix of antiques, funky women’s clothes, furniture and odds and ends, a lot of intellectual books – John Donne poetry, photojournalism books, plants, art books, best short stories for the decade of the 90s books. I put out my antique camera, box and doll collections. I called it La Boheme – funky, thrifty, chic.

I put out my late husband’s cuff links. About 15 sets, I had stored them at the Arvada house and picked them up last time when I was showing the rental property managers the place. I saved the silver ones, and Hondo picked out a couple to remember his father by. One that said “hot” and “cold,” like little faucets and another that had Roman coins on them.

My son is selling his air rifles, because he wants the money. I never thought he’d do that, and I definitely don’t want to export these arms! We are leaving weapons of mass destruction in America!

Friday was brisk. People picking through stuff like crows in the field. There were lots of early birds. People said I had great stuff. I saw my whole life in things spread around the garage and driveway. I knew I was letting go of heavy chains.

It was busy in the morning, and a guy almost walked off with the Romeo y Julieta Cuban cigar in a nice metal container that my son wanted to keep of his father’s and I had forgotten to put way. People who were artists really liked my art. I had it spread out like a gallery in the living room among the plants for sale. A lady liked the Polaroid transfers I did and thought about purchasing them. I told her how they don’t even make Polaroid anymore, or are trying to bring it back. And that it’s a Sydney Solis and will be very valuable one day! But she didn’t come back. People didn’t go for the antiques or the $200 bronze Buddha that I bought for $90 in a funky San Francisco shop in 1996. I’ll just keep it and store it.

A thin, tall elderly man with a slight slouch came in and asked about antiques. Something told me about “dealer,” so I thought, “goody, I may be able to get a good price on some things!” He was interested in the Curtis prints, and we talked about the stage house books that used to be on West Pearl before The Kitchen restaurant moved in. I purchased them there with my late husband. He said the owner is now dead. I showed him my mother’s dolls. Old things from Bohemia and my grandmother, and a doll from the 50s replete with silk stockings and pierced ears!

He liked the Queen Mary passenger lists and luncheon menus from 1955. When he balked at my price I said, “Well, it was my mother’s,” and that I would use them for art. I like the 1950s designs, interesting print and text and since it’s paper and I’m a publisher I wanted to keep it. He said to look at the signature on the back of the card, John G. Gould. I could barely make it out, from Rowayton, Conn. So I’ll Google it and investigate it. Somehow we got to talking that his wife had died recently, and you could see he was still cut up about it. We talked a while about death, attachment, life. I shared with him my husband’s death. I told him about the Hospice of Boulder and how important it is to get grief counseling.

In the end I kept everything because he didn’t want to give me much money, but I did sell him three Ray Charles albums that were my late husband’s for $10. They had great graphics and were probably worth a lot more on E-bay or something. But I parted with them. Practicing non-attachment and good will. (Although that gets me into trouble, a la ex-husband fraud, but I surrender and give it away anyway. And I go back to using Raja yoga to nix any negativity associated with those thoughts!)

Then there was the man from Vietnam who liked my Wyang Kulit puppet that I got from a second grade class I used to tell stories at as a Spellbinder volunteer storyteller. He didn’t want to give me much for it so I figured I’d use it professionally eventually and kept it. Ok, so I keep a few good things! We got to talking about all the stuff and the American system. He said, “Every country is corrupt. But in Vietnam, people get to live and be happy. But in the states, people are not so happy, and they have to participate in the corruption.” He said how Vietnam wasn’t stupid and get mired in debt like a lot of countries and have all this consumption and hooked up to the corporate machine. He said in Vietnam, guns are illegal, there aren’t fat kids and nobody has a lawn. “Lawns and fat kids. What is that all about?” he asked. I have no idea, I said. And dreamed of the yoga eco farm I’m visiting in Argentina soon and can't wait for my son to learn eco-building and my daughter is dying to learn to sew.

Another woman came by who said, “I heard there was a woman who was selling beautiful clothes at a garage sale.” I told her about my going to Buenos Aires. To seek out economically and environmentally sustainable living and to give my children a global education. She told me about all the loser men she had dated in life. I said I know all about that! But now she was married to a nice guy, but who was a perfectionist and didn’t like to travel and do adventurous things. I said she should just go anyways! But something seemed to hold her back and she talked about how she had these perfect parents who loved each other, and I said maybe her bad past relationships and marriage were compensatory because of that fact. We looked around at my different clothing I had for sale, including a vintage dress. We talked and looked at clothes for her for a long time. In the end she didn't buy anything. After she left, my daughter said, “She needs therapy!”

Saturday was disappointing and very slow. I just listed things on Craigslist and wrote comments online to articles in the Denver Post and Wall Street Journal. I have the Prius listed and am excited to be car-free, as I think about the British Petroleum holocaust happening in the Gulf of Mexico right now. Seeing the fragile wings of spiders and dragonflies dipped in oil, as well as the oil's blackness staining the wings of white pelicans gave me the horrible feeling that this struck at the very heart of life and the survival of Mother Earth. So I can no longer participate in this. How free money and credit and dollar reserves suck other peoples and nations dry of their resources. We are the Romans all over again, there's no doubt about it. And how the privileged classes do anything to preserve their way of life!

I realize that my humble childhood, as crazy as it was, had good intentions. My parents weren’t into status and hoarding money, but what it could bring in the ways of education, experience and artistic expression. My late husband, Frank, always made me feel shame that I shopped in second-hand stores, but he didn’t realize that’s where my style and originality came from. My mother taught me the original thrift. But he taught me to get trapped in the white man’s game, squandering the earth’s resources on things. I remember my son as a child. Frank insisted he be dressed in Tommy Hilfiger. While at Fiesta a man walked by me as I held my son in my arms, who was dressed head to toe in it. A man walked by and said, “Hello, Jr. Mint.” I remember a woman who was one of my husband’s clients who said, “You get to drive around in a Mercedes!” I looked at her fake boobs and wasn’t sure how to explain to her the embarrassment I felt when I drove up to my job as an English as a Second Language tutor at a poor school. I really just need some transportation to do my work. I don’t need an identity. But my husband needed otherwise, as a Hispanic trying to make it in the white man’s world. His mother bought him his first suit at 18 and said, “You’re my little dividend.” And somehow my husband convinced me that my way was wrong. "This is how people live!" he'd exclaim in our starter castle that he got for a good price because the builder was hurting. And I figured, "I guess it is." And that's how they do it. How they hypnotized us all into the biggest Ponzi scheme of them all. The American Way.

But what a lie our culture makes us believe, that these things give us any worth beyond our own being and divine center. Growing a tomato, working with my hands, educating my children, that is what is most valuable and worthy of time. It's all so simple, and our world is so complex. People are so stressed, pulled in so many directions. I feel it too. But it’s all coming down now. What a lie. The stock market is tanking, or artificially manipulated every evening to bounce back up. And we keep buying into the illusion. But now the gig is up. The whole outer world just falls away. You can’t hold on to anything! And the best part about it is that when you do lose everything, you do gain yourself. And that is worth it.

I had so much left over that I thought about having a sale the next Saturday too. Eventually I ruled against it, thinking, "It's not worth it!" I have so much more to get rid of and donate. What I don't get rid of, I simply will pack and store. This has been an extra deep cleaning by the Queen. Her house is cleaner by the day, and all the lighter for it. There is nothing but art work in my house and furniture now. I gave most of the plants to my father. It's bare bones. It's an incredible psychic lightness, this cleaning effect. My daughter said, "We should have lived this way all along!" So we shall. It's never to late to start!

The Dissolving of the Kingdom and Entering the Gates of Heaven

2010-05-07T17:08:00.000-07:00

It’s time. The Queen is ready to go. She has surrendered and let go of everything. She has let go of fear and negativity. She has a strong court she cares dearly about that surrounds her and supports her. There is the mermaid, with horns of a goat and the tail of a fish to guide her on her journey.

And now that the outer world and the kingdom walls are falling away, she has more confidence in herself than ever. So much confidence, that she now radiates with gold. Her gold is heavy in her body and grounds her with its golden glow. She feels it in her body, in her breath. All the terrible and crushing trials of time past have given her the strength, the courage, the wisdom and the persistence to bring her to this moment. Because the visions as the High Priestess and the love and encouragement of the King have shown her the way and cemented her in her certainty.

The outside world is waiting, as the winds of change have come, and its time for her to come out of the darkness and shine. It’s a new era. The Queen passes dissolves the walls of the Kingdom, walks through the High Priestess’s gates of heaven and is reborn in the World.

The Queen of Bohemia is simplifying her life and getting ready to travel with the kids and Storytime Yoga abroad.

This summer is going to rock. I’m selling most of my possessions, storing the rest, sending the kids to Texas for two months to be with their late father’s family, then by August taking the kids abroad on a nomadic tour to some places around the world with Storytime Yoga.

I’m heading for Buenos Aires June 2-18, then have the fantastic annual Mythic Yoga the Story in the Body retreat here in Boulder. Then I'm working on the East Coast with the niños at the Kripalu Kids Camp July 9-18 and I’m at the Omega Institute for the Storytime Yoga Children’s Yoga Teacher and Yoga Play Therapy training July 25-30. By August I may be in Mexico City with the kids for a training I’ve been invited to do, but afterwards I’m planning to stay several months in Buenos Aires, so that we can bring our little black-and-white duality dog, the most Honorable Sergeant Pepe (Prince Pepe don't forget he was promoted). Esme the cat will stay with Opa. From there I imagine I'll come back for a little while. I’m not sure, or perhaps to Lima where I have been invited to train and of course it is my life’s dream to serve and teach the little children of Latin America and take my children abroad to learn and be a yoga family and speak Spanish and oh, my! I can’t wait! I have surrendered and have no expectations, only to be present and joyful.

I would go stark raving mad if I were around my kids 24-7 because as a widow they are around constantly,and that's the hardest part. So I will have some local help, but I’ll be schooling them with a public online school. I’ll be creating yoga home school curriculum for my kids as family yoga with stories, yoga philosophy, peace and character education, writing, reading and oral projects, asana, local geography local cooking and culture, children’s ayurveda and service. Whew! Do I love learning and teaching and yoga or what? We’ll see which ones we get done or how it all ultimately turns out. I surrender and most of all refuse to feel pressure, for I want to go back to that space before the wounding. Before my husband’s suicide, when I was a stay-at-home mother, who cooked carmel-corn from scratch and had a gorgeous raspberry patch, sewed her children’s clothing and taught them at home and told them stories and practiced yoga.

I’ll be blogging about it with You Tube. My Storytime Yoga blog, The Householder Yogini, will cover my Storytime Yoga Children’s Mission, as well as the Queen of Bohemia Cleans her Own House with Mythic Yoga, using yoga, meditation, journaling and mythology for adults to work with life’s challenges for a peaceful, present and powerful life. All this and Storytime Yoga lesson plans of the above are all available when you subscribe to the League of Yogic Storytellers. Certified Storytime yoga teachers are also keeping their own blogs about how they use story and yoga in their lives, families and communities.

Many of my friends ask, “Why on earth are you doing this?” There are many reasons. First, I’ve been expecting the meltdown of the world economy for a while now, my father has been prophesying it since I was a kid, and everybody thought he was nuts, but he did survive Ambarawa 7 and everything he’s told me has been very accurate. The only real difference is that he says we are all going into the fifth dimension and the UFOs are getting ready to reveal themselves but the evil empire keeps holding on with one last gasp and disclosure is thwarted every date that is predicted for this event and I’m never sure about that even though I wish it were true to save us all and Star Trek and Buck Rogers worlds really do exist and are not just my fantasies.

I think the US is going to be a dangerous place, more than Argentina, which was one of the IMF’s first victims and has already been through an economic collapse. The King and I have been researching it for a while now, and Buenos Aires is my kind of town - more psychotherapists per capita than any other place in the world. They love old book stores and opera and naturally the soul of the tango speaks volumes.

I believe that with all the terror threats and our heinous war on Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan there will be strikes in the US. Redneck militia are already coming out of the woods previewing a civil war and there will be more nut jobs crashing into IRS buildings and scapegoating immigrants and Muslims as citizens acquiesce to loss of Constitutional freedoms at a rapid clip with state sponsored terror and propaganda and spiral into fear and chaos and sociel disorder. Greece will look like a TV show compared to what's coming in the Greatest Depression. What’s happening in Arizona is downright nefarious and it all looks like Germany 1933 to me, as we fuel narco war in Mexico with our US arms sales over Arizona’s borders. I’ve seen it all before because of all my father’s concentration camp stories. And just watch Adrian Brodie in The Pianist. It’s heinous. This stuff happens. Americans couldn’t believe it can ever come here. My eighth grade social study teachers in 1980 didn't know what I was talking about when my mother insisted I tell my teachers that my father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp during World War II. But it does happen. I know. Lives change horribly and forever when one day soldiers are knocking at your door and telling you to pack only essentials before hauling you and your little children off to a concentration camp to starve and be tortured and they murder your husband in a forced-labor, Mitzubishi tin mine outside of Tokyo. It lives on for generations. And I have children to protect.

But not to fear, my time is here. It has all fallen into place. Time to get into action and go out on a mission. I’ve never felt so confident and clear of vision and purpose. I envision myself as the Queen of Gold, as I believe gold has been suppressed like Cinderella in the dungeon for a long time, while the ugly step-sister dollar charades around as the real value. But she’s really what’s valuable. And gold and silver will be re-monetized as the economy can’t hold up as the evil empire can’t hold up the debt charade any longer and has lost its grip so our gold comes back center stage. Out the Queen comes! And she shines! I am that Golden Queen.

Another reason I’m going is that when I was a stringer for the Bakersfield Californian newspaper back in 1996, I used to volunteer for religion reporting. I reported on Cuban ministers who described life under Castro, Greek Orthodox priests and the history of the Church, Hispanic Pentecostal revivals on Delano’s skid row, and old ladies who ran Bible classes for retarded adults.

I also did a story on a Mexican priest who was traveling around California and Mexico with the tilma of Juan Diego, who was visited by the Virgin Mary on the hill of Tepeyec, (which was built on top of the obliterated shrine of the indigenous earth goddess Tenotzin.) She appeared to him and told him to build a church on the hill, and sent her image emblazed on his cloak with a whole lot of live roses in the middle of winter as proof to the priests who would not believe the indigenous peasant.

After the telling of the story, the Father asked if I wanted to be blessed with the tilma. I said, "Yes," and he draped it over me and said his prayers. I prayed to the goddess, “Oh, may I be of service to these people.” I have always loved the poor people, especially the indigenous and children. How close they are to nature and spirit still, their folk customs and rich lives, yet oppressed and persecuted with great injustices.

I always loved languages and I married a handsome Tex-Mex trying to make it in a white-man’s world and gave birth Hispanic children. (He said I was Hispanic by injection.) I had spent three months in Ecuador in 1994, and befriended a little girl. I had promised to bring her to the US, as she had been abandoned by her mother and was living with her aunt in a potato chip factory that employed retarded children to package chips in the northern border town of Tulcan, Ecuador. Her name was Carmen, and I spent a lot of time with her and other children doing things together because I hate to see little children suffering. It’s an abomination really that it is allowed at all.

But when I returned to the states, I got busy, working in journalism, making plans to get married. Later I found out that Carmen had committed suicide by eating rat poison. She was only 12 or so, or maybe even 10. I can’t remember. But my remorse and shame was so great. I have always felt the desire to serve children to redeem myself of failing to keep my promise to Carmen. And to be guided by the mother to care for those children who suffer. If we can help them to ease their suffering and educate them for health and literacy with the tools of yoga and story I think the world will be a better place. And we should end war in the name of children, for how my father suffered and how it is an abomination and must be stopped.

Another reason is that I have a minor in Spanish. I love speaking Spanish; I love language. My latest book is the Spanish version of Storytime Yoga Teaching Yoga to Children Through Story – Yoga Con Cuentos – Como Enseñar Yoga a los Niños Mediante el Uso de Cuentos. Published by The Mythic Yoga Studio, LLC. (I finally got an LLC, seven years after starting the biz.) I love traveling and cultures and have been envisioning this since at least 1991. So there is destiny involved with vision. And I want my children to have that experience abroad, outside of the Geography of Nowhere America and suburbia and mythless society trapped in consumption that strangles my lonely soul. I crave a plaza filled with people, art and life. To be in rhythm and connection with nature and the mystery. To rediscover Christianity as well as pagan, indigenous roots and live in community (I will be visiting an eco-yoga farm in Argentina.) I’ll study with my kids the Bhagavad Gita and Yoga Sutras and connect them to their Judeo-Christian roots, while understanding our Muslim, and other religions and applying Buddhist meditation and philosophy. I will not regret leaving the dry, cold, windy, brown Colorado climate I have tried so many times to leave and all its sorrow, but I will also return a lot because there are so many people that I love who still live there.

So I will be on the Storytime Yoga Children’s Mission. Wherever I find some place. I hope you donate to the Mission and support me! As I am sustained by the grace of Lord Shiva. And it is an act of faith and deep love for children and the divine.

I am getting ready to move. The Queen of Bohemia is really cleaning her own house, because I am letting go of so much. Letting go of all the antique collections, artwork and yoga knick-knacks. Selling the Prius (La Gata Negra) so I don’t have to participate in hideous oil dependency that is killing our planet in the Gulf of Mexico as I write this . I am getting rid of about two-thirds of my possessions, but keeping the books and pictures, a few sentimental objects and the yoga props and educational materials. As that is my focus. And it has become so much ever clearer.

I have discovered that the more you let go of your possessions, the less anxiety you feel. You simply stand in the present moment, free of the distracting pull of objects and attachments. To have a simple life and release from the shackles of complexity our culture requires. All you have is your body, and the sensations of the present experience. I’m not sure how I will live without my I-Phone, but I’m hoping to get an I-Pad for educational purposes to fill that gap.

It was terrifying at first. To uproot myself, stir the pot. Oh, the cycle again! Here I go again, creating chaos! I begin to second-guess myself. But I feel pulled always, toward my destiny. The invisible hands massage the heart forward. So I’ve been gentle on myself. Sitting meditation every morning to stay peaceful. Packing it up slowly. I was pissed at Gilbert for putting pressure on me to show this house I’m vacating, for he popped up with little notice of showings while I was in the midst of packing and culling and complained of my artistic temperament and decor. It’s bare bones now, and hope to move a lot this weekend to get ready for the garage sale.

Today I went to get so many art objects and antiques stored at my father’s house to sell at the sale. It was as if I symbolically were finally getting out of my father’s house. I spent the day with him today to get the stuff and also to drive him to oral surgery for a wisdom tooth, since he is 77. It took longer than usual because they couldn’t numb him because he takes so many heavy medications for headache and back pain that he’s tolerant and it took a while to desensitize it.

I will no longer be a part of that filthy house, the desperate trap of despair. I am outside of the house. I am outside of the concentration camp. I am not a prisoner. I am free. I shine for myself, not to care for somebody else and support their dreams rather than mine, which I have done all my life. All this stuff and weight of the past are ready to sell at the big garage sale Friday May 21 and Saturday May 22, 9-4. Many neighbors are having a sale too with me! It will be quite a cleaning, physical and psychic.

Things I will be selling:

Edward S. Curtis original completion prints (5) Gorgeous, turn of the century Native American photographs, but I need the money for a new shopping cart on my website.
Taos pottery and other original artwork, prints from black tie silent auctions I attended with my late husband.
Sydney Solis original artwork. Rare and very valuable.
Antique doll, book, magazine, camera and salt-and-pepper collections. (Keeping the pin, magnet and weaving collections. My Oma started me collecting as a child: rocks, shells, coins.)
A jungle full of plants of assorted sizes. To loving homes only.
My son’s air gun collection (I told him the Xbox and Halo stay in the US)
A bunch of assorted antique bronze yoga knick-knacks, Buddha statues, etc.
A ton of books, art books, literature, poetry, travel, and some library discards given to me by my librarian sister.
Zillions of picture frames.
I never want to spend another winter in Colorado so out go all the winter clothes except the Ann Taylor long black coat, the Saks Fifth avenue wool wrap my late husband bought me on our wedding and the Sorrels for when I do come back and visit periodically and walk in the fresh snow and try snowshoeing or by chance need them because I’m caught in a the cold or blizzard.
Girl’s 4-piece bedroom set of fine wood, although my daughter destroyed it with pens and paint and her one-time step-sister burned holes in it in envy, but we spray painted over it and it looks great.
My son’s bunk bed and desk.
Cute rare pink color Buddy 50 scooter with low miles. Includes basket and helmet.
2005 Black Prius 74k miles
Hammer Dulcimer (Gave up lessons shortly after its impulse purchase while vacationing in Manitou Springs with the kids.)
Kitchen stuff
Kitchen table and four chairs
Lots of CDs (I-tunes is great!)
Shelving, nice chair, kids skiis and bikes, helmets
Clothes. (Gave the vintage dress collection to my Hare Krishna niece.)
Horrifying thought. I have a bunch of stuff at my Arvada house. I will have to contact the tenants to get it out and get rid of it. I was there recently and got my late husband’s collection out, but there is much more stuff, like a 1950s module stereo. It’s really cool!
God, so much crap to get rid of! How to list it all! Just show up! It’s all going! The scary thing is that this is my third garage sale of getting rid of stuff in the past 7 years. I remember my mother, always shuffling around piles of crap from one end of the house to the next in our messy house, throwing things down the basement steps and bringing other things up again. Buying crap from garage sales and getting rid of things in her blue Subaru, most of which remained in the blue Subaru.

I’m also going to have a party, and you are invited, so stay tuned for details when I confirm the date.

Finally, I cannot tell you the weight of a ball and chain that is removed from my heart. I drove to Denver Wednesday and handed the keys, leases headache EVERYTHING over to a property management company for Speer and Arvada because I decided I cannot depend on Gilbert and I need dependable people who don't piss me off. Two upstanding young men will deal with the late night calls, the undependable handymen who don't bring back toilet seats, the deposit of rent checks and the utility billing and collecting the laundry money. They can learn some Spanish and instruct Miguel, Sr. on the exterior painting that I had him get started. I wrote four new leases this month and had Gilbert fill the 2-bedroom. One girl is getting married so that's why they are leaving. I tried raising the rent on the nursing student in the one-bedroom but she flipped out, started crying, and I felt bad and gave the increase to her as a scholarship. She was very grateful. Thank God I don’t have to be pulled in that direction any more. I saved myself from certain death by exhaustion and dread. By clearing my plate of financial management (gave it to my bookkeeper) and running my business (gave it to my assistant, she rocks,) dealing with ex-husband crap (I gave it to my lawyer who filed garnishment of wages and until he files bankruptcy, like he keeps flapping his lips about there is nothing I can do except hold onto the piece of paper judgment that says he owes me $30k at 8 percent interest.) I have plugged the drains of energy. It’s a wash financially, but I was never a capitalist. It’s all dealt with now and I get to live my bliss, the most important thing. Maybe US real estate will tank even more. I got my Arvada property assessment notice, and the value is unchanged. Speer was underwater last year and I haven’t received this year’s value, Speer’s in a hot area so maybe it will improve. But I can’t worry about that. And considering the meltdown, I think it’s pretty much time to surrender and never think about it and leave it to the pros and the combinations of planets at certain times.

So this may be one of the last times I have a free blog, as my assistant insists I give away my best stuff for free, and she wants to make money because after all, this is a capitalistic society we live in, (heavy sigh) and that’s fine as long as children are not suffering and it doesn’t appear to be working right now and that’s why we need to do something about it. (something tells me that on Monday everything is going to change with economic collapse and all these plans could very well change. Such is the lesson of non-attachment.)

OK. That’s enough for now. I'm going to do some yoga and focus on creating a stable pelvis and my uddiyaya banda. It’s a Friday, and the Queen is going to start moving stuff to the storage unit tomorrow and is getting ready for Mother’s Day weekend. Because we honor the mother, that divine energy that is bringing balance back to the earth, putting the heart into the machine, and awakening the kingdom of heaven right here in this moment in this body on this gorgeous, incredible experience of being and love. And I will rejoice in the love that I feel for my children and being their mother. Hallelujah, says the Queen. Amen.

Freedom from Things

2010-04-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

The Queen hiked up the mountain with Prince Pepe today. She has been very tired with all her preparations for her big journey. Being out in nature is the healing salve, as is spending time with friends. And the Queen realizes, because of her High Priestess nature, that she must rest. Rest indeed. Rest a long time. Even though it’s spring, it says to rest on a different level. Resting within her own kingdom and family.

Of course my father is the original and most serious wounding. That invisible vampire hiding from the mirror. And each time I go for it, the sucker of my own self doubts- returning to the filth of the house, why is it so tempting? I was going to store some of my things at my father’s. My bookcases and bed, so I’d have a place to stay if need be. Ultimately I was thinking, I’m crazy, it’s so filthy, I’d rather sleep on a friend’s couch. He was going to take Pepe and Esme. I was going to build a fence. Then he went to his therapist, Marsha, whom I used to go to and recommended to him. He said it would kill him to empty out the ham radio room to put my bed there. All his pack rat stuff. He’s right, and that’s fine. Perhaps Marsha is this invisible hand preventing our disastrous unconscious drives of doom.

Of course that realizes my inability to have somebody to depend on. They say one thing, but ultimately back out their support, just leave you hanging mid air. You thought you were secure to take the leap; they said they would be there. But then they are not.
That is always the challenge. How do you trust anybody? What they say? Always keep a back door open, make plans on your own to fall back on. Never give yourself away again? Is there always some boundary that is necessary in order for true love to exist? Love for yourself and love for the other?

Gilbert had Lance clean out the garage and all the mouse poop. It looks great, reorganized. I’m always horrified how I just lump and throw things in the garage. Like my mother, a mess. But I just have the help now to get it cleaned up. We artists are eccentric; anyway, that’s where the genius comes from. Where Gilbert complains my upstairs is a mess and the art area in the garage is a mess, Lance says it looks great and cool. ‘You’re an artist.” And so the Queen is! (And also the High Priestess in secret.) But it is relieving to get rid of things. It’s liberating. It’s that packrat that’s been on my back, holding on to loss. I used to be so free in my youth. Then lots of adult loss builds up on your back and pulls you down. But getting rid of it frees you.

I know the cycle well. Stir things up, move, chaos, stress and worry and too many things to do. But the monotony of otherwise would kill me. The monotony of my living situation, the lack of community, the dying for a need to grow plants that I cook and eat, the intense desire to teach my own children, to practice yoga, to live as simply as possible. I am more compelled from something deep within. It’s the world, it’s the mother or the pulse or libido of the universe that makes me do it, so I just surrender. I saw the coloring book of Siddhartha that I had given my kids. I looked through the half colored pages, rummaging for some to salvage. But there was the start black-and-white picture of the Buddha EXHAUSTED, crawling up from the river bank, to sit under the Bodhi Tree. Giving up. To release and let go.
It is like a mission of mine. To go out there in faith. To know I am supported by not only the divine but my own positive and powerful thoughts. To feel in my body when I do warrior pose, that I am DURGA, I am that which is hard to access, that nothingness that is everything, and I only need to remain there. Meditation is my tool. That regular practice to get up. To sit. To reside someplace else than my terrified thoughts.

But the thought of returning to the place of healing, the place before the wounding. Like the Oklahoma City Bombing. How it was like 11:59 a.m. before the bombing struck. To get back to that place. To clean out all the stuff in the middle. To return to mothering, teaching, simplicity, the home arts. That is where my heart is. That is all I want to do. My children mean that much to me. It’s to precious to lose. It has so much meaning and love for me in it. And it will set us all free.

The house has a new feel about it. Lighter, less cluttered. There is a sense of freedom. To really narrow down all your possessions to a little bit. It is easier for a camel to get through the eye of a needle than a rich man to get to heaven. Because it’s all spirit. It just lights up in front of you on a regular moment, and all you can do is enjoy its rapture and depth, blazing in the sunlight.

The Third Level of Cleaning

2010-04-10T20:16:00.001-07:00

The Queen of Bohemia, when she doesn’t have her duties as the High Priestess, is back to cleaning her own house. This time it’s a deep clean. A purge, in fact everything must go. For the Queen is preparing to go out on a mission, and she must leave everything behind. All her castle barbecues and hoards of things. There she is cleansing deeply, from the inside out. And the more she strips away and cleans the outside, the more the inside is cleaned out, and the more powerful she becomes. Because the less material objects she has, she finds the more faithful she is.

It has been a whirlwind of activity. The spring has activated seeds long over due for germinating. I have spent the weekend tackling the dirty house, not just cleaning it but purging it. I have to get away from this complex American life, the traffic jams, the junk mail and spam, the mediocre pop culture, the stuff. Gilbert gave me a stern come to Papa talk about my packrat mentality. I defended it as an artist’s life. He said I was like my father.
Irked, but still firm in my artist self, I ruthlessly culled old books, bronze Buddha statues, my late husband’s items, corn on the cob dishes, clothing. I never want to spend another winter in Colorado again so out with the coats. I can’t believe I rearranged and reorganized completely my art space in the garage. I was aghast that mice had snuck in this unusually hard winter and gotten into the bird seed. And of coruse into the house. Hondo won’t sleep downstairs anymore.

I seriously plowed into everything, spurred on by the bird seed in the garage. The mouse poop covered a lot, and I thought, am I my mother? Is my place just as filthy as my father’s with the black mold in the basement? I had to let go of things. Just strip them down to basics. I want to live as simply as possible. Only the essentials. Not needing to upkeep furniture or dishes or things or most definitely not to upkeep a car. I want to walk to get my groceries, cook only with fresh ingredients. Live in a community. Where in the world could that be? Hardly in America. But I have filled the garage with tons of stuff for a future garage sale. I am making arrangements.
Tonight the kids and I ate out for the first time in a week since the return from the cruise. I had been getting used to eating only what was on hand in the house to use it up. All shopping will be around these food items. To actually practice some home economics and cook around staples.

I never had a mother to really show me how to eat. My mother’s cooking consisted of microwaving eggs, Doritos, boiled beef in a bag, or Banquet frozen fried chicken. For a while I was really into cooking for the whole family when I was a teen, but it was just things from a recipe book, nothing consistent and focused on a few staple dishes.

Slowly we have been eating better. As you pare everything away, if you get rid of all the stuff, there is very little to focus on: yoga, meditation, eating right, teaching the kids and being with them as family, love, travel, friends, gardening, art and music and literature and stories. How those simple things really make my soul sing, and also ache for that which has been lost in our wasteland of capitalism.

I’m exhausted. It’s truly the big purge, the big cleaning of the house. To finally be free of all the clutter, all the stuff. I’m thinking to do my Kripalu and Omega workshops on the east coast July, send the kids to their late father’s family in San Antonio for a few months, then we all go to Mexico in August where I have a training, maybe spend a month or so there, then head to an eco yoga farm in Argentina. And the winter in Montserrat.

I picked up a homeschooling book on giving your kids a classical education. I think, why not. I can be close to my kids and educate them in yoga and more, bring out the teacher in me. My sister Narada homeschooled four kids. Of course she’s a Krishna, but she’s very inspiring. I’m going to take the kids to visit them all tomorrow and go to temple and dinner.

I also have been thinking a lot about Jesus too. Like I’d like to incorporate Jesus into the yogic homeschooling. Joseph Campbell says you tend to return to the religion of your childhood, the first myth you were indoctrinated in. Usually I cringe or am afraid to say the word Jesus because it has so many horrible implications, especially with the sinister and sick Catholic church pedophile scandal. Evil! And naturally by being in Latin American countries you can get into the rhythm of the seasons with all the holidays and festivals, usually placed over indigenous traditions, so why not make them have an even bigger new-agy Jesus twist. It would be nice to focus on the life and acts of Christ, his personality traits and being a good human being, rather than the morbidity and torture of his death. Of course we teach that you are eternal and identical with Christ and ever lasting life, a sentence that could get you burned at stake years ago, but that’s the facts, Jack. Of course we’d have Buddhist meditation, Sufi poetry, and plenty of science to doubt all our mythology so that we may have the most perfect of faith.

I’m exhausted, but exhilarated. Spiritual transformation is about losing everything and gaining the soul.

I can’t wait to be rid of everything!

THE HIGH PRIESTESS

2010-04-07T06:13:00.001-07:00

The Queen is no longer a Queen. She is a priestess. The journey has transformed her. Upon the return to her castle, the Queen had a sacred ceremony and met with the Tree. She slipped inside the door and there she was initiated. The roses overflowed and thier scent filled the garden.
Her mother was there. Giving her her crown, weapons and wand. And she gave her her charge. To move to a cottage in the country near the kingdom, but also to move out into the world. She was to find all the demons of the world that are terrorizing the villagers, tame them with her powers and might and turn them into her footmen and palace administrators. And the world will be a better place for it.

I had a fascinating dream last night. I dreamt of my late husband. It
was the first time in many years. He looked a little different, but he
was his same go-getter self. It turns out that he had faked his death.
I followed him. I thought, what does this mean? Will I have to pay
back the insurance money? There was something double-headed about my
late husband in the dream. And at one point in a car, I realized that
I had the power to influence my dream to turn out how i want.

I have had the dream of my late husband faking his death many times.
Sometimes those dreams were about something dishonest, hidden, he was
double-crossed. It makes me think of his friend who drowned in a lake recently on a golf course in New Mexico while walking his dogs who had run out on the ice. Once I had a dream about him that he came to visit, and I was happy to see him. I said, "Look, here are your
children!" and it seemed he was too ashamed of what he had done to go to them.Each time the faked death dreams were a feeling of, he's back and I'm with him again and not sure I want to be, and that of do I have to give the insurance money back.

I started reading Raja Yoga on the Kindle on the cruise. It teaches in lessons that you realize, that you are the center of the universe, your own sun, and that you are a sphere of
power and influence from that point, that axis mundi, your own world
tree. You wake up to the illusion of the maya that is the matrix of
the cosmos. You really start to see things as a dream, which is
vedantic, however, the trick is that you see yourself in the dream
state, getting better at being aware of yourself dreaming in the
dream. What you are doing in waking consciousness is having an effect
on dream consciousness. They are weaving back and forth, which is
tantric. The indigenous of Costa Rica say that a female shaman is a
butterfly, because her two wings go in and out of each state of
consciousness.

So we can really start to wake up in both dream worlds! This one and
our dream one! But which one is a dream? You may ask! That reminds me
of the Chinese story of the man and a butterfly. A man dreamt last
night that he was a butterfly, but then he thought, maybe I am a
butterfly now dreaming that I am a man.

Where is the real you if we are dreaming in both states of
consciousness? That center point, the transcendent, the depths behind
everything. You are able to step back and observe your self, and that
point from which you observe everything is everything - the totality
of consciousness and energy, which is projected outward from that point.

You can influence your environment if you practice like a magician, or a high priestess and work with dreams, and pass through those pillars of duality into the transcendent. It is your God-given power. I focused on the fact that that space I'm in is also EVERYTHING. Every evil drug lord in Colombia who horribly abuses exotic pet animals, every baby burned with a cigarette, every cherry tree blossoming in spring, every high-pitched laugh of a child. You have to accept everything. Love they enemy for the enemy is you! All the stuff you reject, that is rejected in the world. It should be reconciled in paradox, so that peace and paradise prevail rather than anxiety and neurosis over the split.

I've forced to work on snippets of dreams that I dismiss as nothing and irrelevant or useless. It's like the story of the King who every day received a piece of mud from a monkey. Every day the King dismissed it as useless and threw it behind his throne, only years later to discover that mud had fallen away from thousands of jewels inside.
If you have a hard time remembering dreams, don't ever stop trying because the whole
act of reminding yourself to dream automatically does something
regardless, self-observation and developing will. Our will is a
powerful thing. find it and use it! The Queen is! That's why she is now the High-Priestess. BUt she's aligned with Durga and Kali. There is a lot of letting go necessary. A lot of slaying of interior demons and negative aspects.

I have been meditating and focusing my will, that things work out, and creating this picture of what I want in my mind. I use some physical techniques of crossing my ankles and hands and arms while lying down, and meditate to manifest! And meeting with my assistant today, she reminded me of Robert Johnson's work Owning Your Own Shadow, to get that dark side out. I wrote down some things today that were hard to face. I'm messy, scattered, impulsive, can be a cluttered person, and can be difficult and combative. Like the landlady is really starting to piss me off. Gilbert said I could get out of my lease early and he's been showing the house and getting it ready, and I had sent a letter confirming it and she freaked out saying she didn't approve such a thing. SO!

I have been trying to settle my debts. I spent all day yesterday and much of today in an arduous process, having business credit cards excluded. And then I've been trying to set up everything online for payments, and naturally there is a problem with the site and spent hours in customer service on one account on the Speer mortgage only to not get it resolved with evil Bank of America. So things are making progress, even thought it's still difficult. Like I do have to break down and cry every so often.
But then I pull myself up pretty quickly now, practice my Raja Yoga and exert my will and I'm happy again. How I miss the King! That tends to compound the difficulty, since I miss his presence and moral support, as it's awfully difficult doing things all alone.
I have been very into Raja Yoga, perhaps all my life. those were the
first yoga books i read of my father's.
I have been reading a book on Raja Yoga on vacation, and I would cite the title and author, but it's on the Kindle and I can't find it now.
I've been de-cluttering things, getting ready to have a garage sale in May. Doing lots of busy work. Things are really starting to pop and crank wonderfully. It truly is the power of waking up to who you really are, the Divine Self, and believing in it rather than the ego.

My Hare Krishna niece and her family are going to check out Speer, which has a 2-unit is coming up vacant soon. Ideally her husband will manage it. I had visited the property on Monday when I went to visit a business lawyer. I talked with Miguel, Sr. They were maybe going to move upstairs, but it's too expensive so they will renew to stay in the basement. I will feel guilty raising the rent! We spoke in Spanish. I've typically had a hard time understanding everything in Spanish spoken from local people who are not newscasters on Univision, but it's pretty much agreed that I'm bringing by a Home Depot gift card tomorrow for him to get cement and fix the problem why their basement unit floods when there are heavy rains, and start scraping and painting the place. It's a cute place. The two apricot trees are blossoming and they are gorgeous. My will will magically transform Speer from the dump Justin left it to the most charming rental property in Highlands Square. So be it, says the Queen, (who is secretly the High Priestess.)

THE QUEEN IN LOVE AND DEATH

2010-03-31T13:16:00.000-07:00

The Queen has been away on a long journey. She has sailed the seven seas and gone far from the Kingdom. Disguised as a commoner, she sees new sights, new worlds, new possibilities. The old Kingdom seems to disappear; things shift. Dark cobwebs do not have any power over her any more. In fact, their power has lost its grip completely and any demons have vanished. The Queen remembers the court astrologer telling her one time, “Your Karma is done here.” Although she misses Prince Pepe dearly, something calls her to keep traveling, keep moving far, far away from her old world, and venture into the other half of her life in a new Kingdom far from the maddening crowd. This power she has achieved, this trust and having survived so much difficulty with the demons, she now realized that they were doing her a favor. Her battles with the demons have made her strong, so very strong and brave and fearless. She thanks the demons. She loves the demons and tells them so. They have taken her by the hand and have led her to the doorway out. They led her to a new Kingdom, to the Kingdom of faith and everlasting life.

I am at sea on a cruise ship, heading back from Cartagena, Colombia for Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. We have been on a two-week cruise. It was a much-needed escape. The winter was indeed hard and long. I was so grateful we missed several heavy snowstorms and I danced in delight in the warm, humidity on the first day of spring when we were in Mexico. My hair has body, my skin glows, my nails grow. Such earthly paradise!

There was so much moist green in Mexico, Guatemala, Panama and Colombia. Things grow here in abundance. Such a contrast from Colorado. Truly I feel an energy shift. It’s powerful. Like a release. I am free on an inexplicable level. Could it be the haunting of the past must be left behind? My traumatic childhood, my husband’s death? My ex-husband’s looting me? To let that all go. Pack up and leave. I feel reborn, as If a second half of life is opening up. And having the King in my life makes such a difference, too. A companion, a confidant, a lover. I don’t wake up panicked and stressed. There is someone by my side. This makes me feel more confident in myself than ever, as I have been alone most of my life, and now I am not.

Strangely, I have this intense urge to rid myself of possessions and wander freely. All the loss from my ex-husband’s real estate shenanigans, even ending up with my property, it no longer bothers me. What is loss? What is gain to the sage? In my life I have seen so much come and go, it just keeps coming and going, but I’m still here above to keep coming and going and be. You really don’t need much in life at all. The American Dream is a lie, a con, a farse. The materialistic capitalistic world cuts us off from our inner dimension in which everything is provided in joy. What power a wandering ascetic has, to own nothing, but his faith. Even a man on the corner, who lost his job, his sign reads, “Lost everything except my faith.” How I have been there several times before how true. Those demons and difficulties, they make your strong, faithful and powerful. Everybody should be so lucky as I to lose everything, for your find yourself in the process.

I realize how hindering it is to have things, keep up with them and keep them up. Before I married my first husband, most of what I owned fit in the back of a car. He convinced me otherwise, that it was a mark of success to own things, have a big house. With marriage to him my possessions exploded – furniture, tools, hardware, books, gym equipment, kitchen gadgets, cars, and all the stuff you need to maintain them. When he died I had a massive estate sale, got rid of half of it, but when the movers moved me to a tiny house they still said, “Lady, you have a lot of stuff.” I was horrified. I got rid of more stuff, But the handyman I hired to remodel the place called me a “clutter fuck,” I knew there was something wrong. Then I remarried, and a lot of my possessions were stolen by Justin or his mother and sister, which whittled things down a bit.

I realize now that most of my stuff is collections. I have this fascination with artistic artifacts that decorate my house: antique salt and pepper shakers, antique cameras, antique pins and buttons, antique books, indigenous weaving collections, a collection of incense burners which I gave to my father. Stamp and coin collections, magnet collections on the side of the fridge. Antique doll collections. And then there is my artwork and books, and family photos. I’d keep those. Put them in storage. But the collections can go. The furniture I’d give to my father or Krishna sister who moved back from India. She can use them. I’d be free. All I need is my laptop. I’d home school my children, go and see the world and teach them by traveling. And really, the US feels a lot like Germany 1933, and its only a matter of time before the dollar really crashes and the nutty militias who have been loading up on bullets and homemade bombs start coming out of the woodwork. I’m dreaming of a yoga farm in Argentina. I’ve already contacted them. I’ll visit with the King and see, and naturally hang out in Buenos Aires! I’d do anything to get out of Beige-istan, Colorado. I’d do anything not to have to drive I-36 anymore and see nothing but big box, suburban hell. It strangles my soul so much. I need life!

For death can be lurking around the corner, and I no longer can bare to live in Colorado. Something compels me to leave. To see the world, my biggest remaining desire. My children are bored to death in their schools, the budgets are being cut, and after watching Bowling for Columbine again I realize the schools, and American culture period, are not safe.

I no longer can participate either in the American way of life. I want to ditch my car, not consume oil, but walk. I am tired of the endless drone of media that speaks nothing of the outside world. I am tired of my countries terrorism in other countries, its terrible foreign policy that I am apart of.

As for Speer, I have Gilbert managing the place. The hairdresser couple skipped out on me, leaving the place a mess. Gilbert got it cleaned up and filled again. The neighborhood is in high demand, thank goodness. I will have the people in the basement start painting in the spring to make it look better and slowly raise the rents over time. The King helped me catch up on the mortgages and I am so grateful. I had been living off the mortgages and paying off some medical bills with them, because since October I had to slow down and take care of myself and children rather than work because things were just Oh, too stressful with Justin letting the house go into foreclosure. I can’t collect from his realtor insurance, despite my lawyer’s best efforts. Next we will try garnishing his wages.

I will be able to hire a manager for Speer and afford it by living abroad, where things are cheaper. I stopped paying my credit cards since I couldn’t afford them any more and since Justin isn’t paying me back the $30k that was to go toward paying them. I am making deals with my creditors to pay them off, and I will save up money for that living abroad. I won’t have to declare bankruptcy. Regardless I will still be self-sufficient, make my business work. Believe in myself, for after all, I am the Queen. And by practicing yoga and meditation and by studying Raja Yoga in particular, I realize once again the power within. That the outside world is an illusion, a game for you to play. I realize the power of your will and mind. You can do anything. You just have to believe it, and amazingly by being outside of Colorado and that harsh climate, the energy has shifted and I truly believe I have that power. Something in Colorado held me back. But now, nothing is held back, especially my love.

And what is life? I have lived 43 years, done pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do, so now I will travel. And also I will teach children. How poverty and ignorance bothers me. I will make my business into a non-profit and start the Storytime Yoga Children’s Mission. I will serve children, teach them the peace I have found through yoga and story, so that they can be peaceful and end the wars, end the madness. Somehow I feel my father’s childhood war experiences will be not forgotten, but remembered as to prevent any more suffering.

Because I believe death is around the corner. I will live a long life, but death is always right there. It’s a good friend. About a month ago, all in one week the Chile earthquake hit, my in-laws were in a terrible car accident in San Antonio, I spent the day at urgent care with my father who was severely ill, and a friend of my late husband drowned in a lake. Another friend came to visit; her mother had died suddenly. It was as if death was coming to remind me of something; life is short, what are you going to do with it? Sit here in this bland culture or are you going to free yourself, go out and explore the world, teach your children about the world, and do something to serve children around the world?

I will go wherever people invite me to teach, put on a training, visit. I will wind this blog down and start on another one, penning my insights on the vast world, its stories and customs, to share with people. I will write my memoir, what to call it? Memoirs of a Yogini perhaps. Because the Queen is very happy. She has found that faith inside her, that everything has had its purpose, to bring her into complete faith, complete surrender, and to learn the power of yoga and storytelling. That she is sustained by the race of Lord Shiva, and he’s asking her to go out now. Go out into the world and journey, teach. Have a mission. And that mission is love. The great love I feel for the world. Even though it seems so horribly shrouded by evil at every turn, there is just as much love. The love I have for my children, the love I have for my King. The love I have for the divine. It’s a great sense of trust, of adventure, of fulfilling destiny. Yes, The Queen must take a risk. She will let everything go, and she will follow her heart, wherever it leads her.

Sergeant Pepe the Duality Dog, and the Tree

2010-02-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

Today the Queen of Bohemia went up a different mountain on the other side of the Kingdom. She hadn’t been there in a while, and she wanted Sergeant Pepe to be off leash for he had been promoted to Prince Pepe. For you see, Pepe had been groomed at the Penelope’s Pet Palace outside the Kingdom. And although for the castle and the court he was fluffy and lovely like a black-and-white pom-pom on four legs, truly he has the wild side along with his master the Queen. He’s out again in nature and the mud to get dirty, but he might as well show off his new do to the other big dogs, chasing them vigorously before happily catching up with the Queen out of love, his territory claim marked as yellow snow among the big dogs.

My dog, Sergeant Pepe, is the trickster. I manifested him. The black-and-white duality dog is he. Years ago I had envisioned a set of children’s stories with characters that imparted yogic wisdom. The dog character would be the trickster, based on the black-and-white Zuni clown. So Pepe showed up at the humane society one day when I was looking for a dog. This half Papillon, half border collie cutie. We called him a “half-ion,” or a “scrap-ion.” I never made the children's book characters, but I have Pepe now, and he gets me out to walk.

We walked this time up near Devil’s Thumb. From the South Mesa Trail in Eldorado Springs the rock formation looks less like a thumb but rather a penis shape, which was obvious on all the school hikes up there, but left unspoken. Pepe is pretty well trained, however, sometimes he just won’t come. Reasons are usually when he sniffs something intense in the woods, which means it probably was bear, coyote or mountain lion. Another reason not to come when called is to eat certain types of poop (Yuck!) or chase after prairie dogs (Panic! Is there a ranger watching?) At other times he is just the trickster and times unpredictable. That’s the trickster’s role; to let you know that just when you think you’ve got everything in life under control, he comes along and pulls the rug out from under you. Such is life in duality.

So when I walk, it’s a matter of training and suspense. Pepe’s gotten good with his off leash skills in the open space. So when a dog approaches, I’m no longer chasing after Pepe who is in pursuit of the dog and its owner for a quarter of a mile back down the trail. And I don’t have to constantly carry treats. He just naturally has his fun with the big dogs, being like the rabbit at a racetrack for the dogs to chase around and show off this hilarious Papillon spin to him.

Whenever I see a dog ahead on the trail, however, I still get this feeling of, ”Oh, no. How is Pepe going to behave? Is it going to be chaos? Or calm?” For the other day he decided he didn’t want to get back on his leash and I had to chase him across several people’s yards in the snow for ten minutes before I tackled him.

I figure life is like that. I can be content in the moment, but every time I see something coming ahead, I don’t have to feel anxious. I’m just in a calm state of quiet alertness, ready to act, but available in the moment to seek options and alternatives to the problem. It’s a trust in the moment that the answer will arise and the problem solve itself. I've learned that the tiger is content because he knows he has everything he needs in the present moment. I’ve been at it so long, now I really realize the secret is not reacting to anything in the first place, which leads to suffering. When you’ve suffered enough, you are like the rat from college psychology class movies that has endured zillions of shocks for the cocaine and finally realizes this hurts and it’s not worth it! Such is evolution. I now feel am calm and confident that I will figure out what to do with the sight of each dog coming down the trail. Sometimes it is luring Pepe with a treat, or chasing him for half an hour, and most of the time he just behaves because he loves me and wants to please me so returns to me and continues walking.

I had my father over for lunch the other day. I made a fresh avocado and lime soup. We sat at my house and talked. We talked about the coming economic collapse, and he assured me not to worry because we are all going into the fifth dimension and the UFOs are going to make disclosure soon. He forwards me newsletters via email about alien disclosure, and how the disclosure date was moved because Obama still won’t reveal the truth and how disappointed everybody is. Waiting for the savior! That myth keeps popping up every millennium or so. I figure, why not UFOs? They've been in our psyche for a long time now. I think Star Trek might as well be true, I mean the I-Pad is out! Jung said that the imagination is real. It exists in energy, and in the Yoga Vasistha there are myths that echo the idea that things are created because somebody thought of it. Like in the novel Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaardner. Or like Shopenhauer, who said that the universe is being dreamed by a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream too. And then there's the Aboriginal dreamtime. Might as well make my own dream time and believe in it!

Also, we had a rare event of my kids and my younger sister and I taking my father to see the movie Avatar. I saw it for the second time, as did my son. I can’t remember ever seeing a movie with my father. I feel the movie acts on a subconscious level, drawing us toward the psyche’s need for balance. Jung said that Americans are incredibly one-sided, completely ungrounded and weren’t ready for yoga because they were not in their body. This movie pretty much sums it up, how cut off we are from nature and the feminine functions of the psyche and our body. So nature corrects itself. Mother is pissed. Durga! The machine is stopping.

Avatar is a powerful myth for our time. Man as the machine, heartless, murderous, plundering and pillaging for profit. As if we finally need to confront our past that we have been in denial of for so long. The history of Western colonialism -- murdering natives, enslaving them for capital gain and keeping us triumphant over nature by denying mother and death and to acknowledge (root meaning of the word confession) those nefarious deeds. A Reuters article recently reported a study that proved that luxury actually makes one more selfish. But if we are selfish and separate, then we are alone. So terribly alone. That terrible fear, like a story from the Upanishads. Even the divine, once aware of itself, was afraid of being alone. So it divided itself into all the creatures of the world. So that it could play and love and not be alone, yet it is also still one. That’s the beautiful paradox. We embrace the paradox. The dark stuff isn’t so scary any more. It’s just playing its part in duality. Like Bush ushering in the destruction of America. Somebody had to play that part. Maybe the devil really is the most beloved angel of God, like the Muslims believe. Or like the dogs on the trail. They just keep coming. No need to fear them, just accept them coming down the trail, and be prepared to draw upon your training and experience. Epicurus said that tempestuous storms make skillful pilots.

Avatar inspired me into the heroic life. What is it to really give yourself over to something? In The Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Denial of Death, he says that the biggest problem young people face today is that they have no call to the heroic life. Death is denied in our culture, however, it is facing death that creates heroism. I remember I heard that when I worked as a stringer for the Bakersfield Californian. I had the northern Kern County beat. I regularly covered Delano, where the Cesar Chavez grape strike started. I also volunteered to do religion reporting and stumbled on a story of these three sisters. They owned a bar and restaurant on Delano’s skid row, but they had an experience with the Pentecostal movement and realized they were contributing to people’s sin and suffering. So they stopped serving alcohol and put on these parking lot revivals on Friday and Saturday night. I remember the sounds of the distorted voices through the bullhorns cutting into the darkness. I remember the Hispanic women and migrant workers standing and waving their hands near the stage, giving themselves up to something. The man I interview told me, “If you haven’t found a reason to die, you haven’t yet found a reason to live. That was Christ’s message.”

Living the heroic life. Find a good reason to die, what else is there? Haven’t we finally learned to believe in our eternal nature? What is there to lose? Just our egos. Physics tells us energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We are identical with the powers of the universe. The Mayan believed that the world tree was actually the Milky Way. This tree that connects us to the cosmos. This tree that is us. I think of my nervous system like the branches on a tree - reaching into the ethers and sensing the divine energy flow, conducted through the tinier branches. They say that on December 21, 2012 is when the center of the galaxy is lined up with the earth. Maybe we don’t space travel linearly but by consciousness itself, manifesting bodies at will, manifesting what we need across the dimensions of time and space. And we are at one again with the universe and are in accord with nature, not against it and alienated from it and only consuming in it, but participating in it. We are participating in the myth, and that makes all the difference because we give ourselves to it whole-heartedly. And besides, it's a hell of a lot of fun that way.

The Queen thinks, what does she want to do? What is this life about? She decides that it is to really follow her bliss, put on some clothing in disguise, leave the Kingdom and the castle and set out to explore the big-wide world. And do something wonderful because it makes her heart feel so good. Sergeant Pepe agrees.

The Optimist Queen and her Transvere Abdominus

2010-02-10T15:10:00.000-08:00

The Queen hiked up the mountain today, but alone, for Sergeant Pepe was getting groomed for the ball and to go as Prince Pepe instead. She hiked up, footing skillfully the ice and snow. She remembered her mountain goat self, her steady, rocky ascent uphill. And she remembered her reptilian tail, her fishy, watery instincts in her hips on down. She felt the bird bones and she was quite comfortable there as they propelled her on.

She wore her crown, with the big sparkly blue jewel in it, and she sang her song the Shaman gave her and the feeling that was in her body swept over her. It was a lovely feeling. When she reached the top, she did her usual proclamation to the big, blue mountain, and she said, thinking there should be something to affirm or overcome or wrestle or struggle with and instead she said, “I am at peace.” There was just the moment, and the moment was perfect. Even though the King was still at the bottom of the earth, she knows and feels the shift. He turned the corner, he is headed north again. Her heart is so relaxed and full at that moment it touched eternity looking at the mountain. The Queen’s court called just then. The King’s heart was at her Castle Door! “I’ll be right there!” And the Queen hiked back down the mountain, mindfully but very excited and with a quicker skip to her step.

The past few days have been nothing short of remarkable. It’s amazing how the more you surrender and the more you love the more things fall into place. I think it's because the mind is in harmony with the body and the body is in harmony with the environment, and that's when the boons come. That's what purpose myth serves. Then synchronicities show up. Because you live the mythic life. Things have their own meaning, their own story. You start with today and now and shape it the way you want with the ritual of images and words and intention. No wonder witches were burned at the stake. They were powerful!

I spoke at the Boulder Optimist Club today. It was good for me to go, even though I had a little bit of an upset stomach for some reason and felt a little sluggish in the morning and less than optimistic. I was invited by the 80-year-old widower, Carl, across the street. I had gotten him and my Dad together for lunch at my house to talk war stories no long ago. I like hanging out with old people. They have such great stories and history. So when he asked me I said yes, even though I don’t get paid.

I had a dream a few nights ago exactly standing and talking to the group exactly as I did today. In the dream I was giving a presentation, but said I didn’t have anything prepared. The dream was initially anxiety over the upcoming speech. I needed to think about it and pull it together. Finally I decided to just tell them about the dream! And not TELL them about yoga and story, but just ALLOW them to EXPERIENCE it. So I told them the Buddhist story of the Spirit Who Lived in a Tree, although I didn’t tell them it was Buddhist, and we talked about what images they saw. The Tree. The movie Avatar’s Tree is so powerful too. As if this basic life force and mythic image is erupting full speed ahead! The mother! Most people were senior, and one man was in a wheel chair from a stroke. I taught them how to breathe deeply and rhythmically and watch their thoughts. Then we just stood there in mountain pose, getting into our bodies. Just standing there in our bodies and noticing them and feeling them. I got the feeling that this was the first time for most of them they ever paid so much attention to the sensations of their body. Then they did tree pose, very simple, using the chair if required. I sat them down and then had them close their eyes for meditation and relaxation and told them the Christian story of Jesus on the water, although I didn’t’ tell them it was Jesus, just a master in a boat on the water with his 12 students.

It was nice to just be with people. Hear their stories. Old people like to tell stories. It’s nice to have somebody to listen to them too! Especially those old war stories. He made a point to tell my Dad's concentration camp story as an introduction. A woman bought my DVD. I thought, this was nice. I taught people to breathe, to notice the present moment. It was quite a joyous experience. It goes beyond any measurement our culture can come up with. For it’s measured in the depths of being, of the heart, and that’s where the alchemical story is taking place. As things transform, awaken, emerge. Truly a renaissance is happening to me, and to my heart and the person I love. And as much chaos erupts in the world, the reconsiliation of paradox takes place and there is just that much love, awe and wonder taking place. It’s all taking place in the heart and it’s fascinating. The joyous and loving feeling I had at the ceremony takes over, it lightens the heart, opens the throat. My bird sings, it’s joyous and flowering and so very, very new. Like the birth dream I had not long ago. The baby was coming out fast.

I’ve been having wonderful synchronicities with the King. As he has voyaged to South America and to Antarctica, to the bottom of the earth, to the fierce storms and winds and water, whales and iceburgs. While he was having his epiphany and turning point, I was having mine that same day. Yesterday, I knew it because our symbol, twin birds, showed up.

For in that day’s Shambhala meditation class, Contentment in Everyday Life, this woman I was paired with wore these gorgeous, Mexican twin bird earrings! I shared that last class was profound, as I felt the effects of meditation assisting in my mythic and heroic journey of getting over myself and the mire of struggle and relishing the freedom revealed.

It reafirms the natural goodness, the gentleness and openness of the human nature, not that there is some mistake, something must be fixed. That's how I felt my whole life. No longer. There are tools to assist us in life’s trials, but they are nothing to be of conttradition to each other to the joys of life, but to live in the paradox, and balance those out. Lessen the tension between the two opposites. Undo the complexes and patterning we are born into and are in this organism infused with energy and life force. How we undo the patterns and complexes to purely and simply bask in eternity.

We had been working with emotions last week. Seeing how they arise and working with them in meditation. I shared how this week I didn’t flip out and get my body worked up into a hot, angry fit filled with victimhood, self-righteousness and the need for justice when all in this just one week Speer tenant’s going to skip paying rent and use their deposit instead without my permission issues, repressed landlady who won’t let you paint your daughter’s bedroom something other than stark white issues, slimy ex-husband who isn’t paying you back the judgment you received because he allowed your house to go into foreclosure and not pay you $30k issues and other emotional issues reared their head.

The woman I was paired with wore lovely artsy clothes of red, and the twin bird earings. She’s a painter and a teacher. We had to share the feelings of trust and confidence we had in the past and now and how we may have had mistrusted or feelings of deceiving someone.
I told how the world wasn’t safe for me, didn’t trust many people, didn’t have much intimacy with people because of an isolated childhood with a violent schizophrenic mother and a concentration camp father. The present moment wasn’t safe. But to have the trust, love and confidence in myself that I have gained from showing up in the present and not identifying with my mind allowed a stability and a grounding to take place that my trust and confidence was found experientially through my body and awareness. And I found that the more you surrender, the more you align. And it’s very hard to do, that surrendering, but surely somehow it seems that the universe all along was doing all that icky devil stuff to you just to get you to give up on your ego ideas and point you to the light. And that ever since my ayayuasca ceremony it gave me the shift and incredible vision that I can never forget. The past is past and all that story gone. All I have left of it is a work of art in honor of all the love I have for it and the people in my life of past, present and future. Her story was interesting because she had the opposite, provided everything from her parents and had everything done for her so it created a terrible insecurity about herself, but that she is at peace with her artist self that even if she never sells a painting at a show that's not what it's about. it's about he making art. I really connected on that. We artists just need to create art. We do it for art's sake and because we have to! Hence my showing up at the Optimist Club or creating anything at all! And there is no clinging to an old story, no digging in the past anymore, but rather a starting from where you are.

The rest of the class was an Oniki traditional monk eating lunch. We brought each three bowls, each smaller than the other. We ate in meditative silence, and two women served simple food from bowls, tempeh, sesamea seeds to sprinkle on, mixed vegetables of asparagus, carrot and squash, brown rice. The second third pass was for condiments of tamari, salt or pepper and the sesame seeds. The third pass was for tea in the third cup. I had put food in it not knowing! And had to clean it out of the soy sauce!

We ate in silence, enjoying each texture, the sound of your neighbor crunching, of the different tastes and sensations. It was magical, so present and glowing reality.

Then a woman gave a demonstration on Japanese Ikibani, flower arranging. The two main stems, heaven and man, then the flower, earth. The stillness and arrangmenet meant to stop you in your tracks and point you toward eternity. It’s a doorway, a symbol that juts you beyond time and space and wakes you up to the now. Somehow I find lately everything is doing that - mountains, trees, chairs, flowers and art. Children's faces and even war and terror.

Later I drove to have lunch at Chipotle and conversed with the women in Spanish for my lunch. I stopped off at Guiry’s for art supplies before heading to my body work session.

I was blown away by this session and the depth of knowledge this guy, Jeff, knew. I had met him the weekend after my ayahuasca ceremony. Feeling self love gushing, I went to get a hair cut. I was early to the salon so I ducked in next door for a 10-minute massage for the pain in my neck I had from doing all the hot yoga classes and stretching the muscles so deeply only for me to stop taking the classes due to getting busy with kids and life again and for the muscles to cramp up severely and cause agony in the spot in my choulder from my car accident was 17 years ago and was nagging me all through the movie Avatar. So I had decided to do something about it and that's how I met Jeff.

I learned about my transverse abdominus muscle and how pregnancy separated it and was causing the destabilization in my pelvis and my organs and issue in my ascending colon because of undigested food! The work he did was hard to pin down, he had such an interesting style but I was so impressed with his deep knowledge of anatomy, the nervous system and how the body functions. I did decompression breathing, deep breathing all the way to the nerves in my head and slow exhalations, five per minute. He held the area of my udyaya banda and wehre the abdominal muscles separated and it was an incredible feeling. Like a psychic hole that was leaking out energy had been closed. And as he said, “You will be like before you were a mother.” Like a virgin again! So there is something to that process! It is an energetic feeling at the uterine, abdominal level. I also felt in one position as I looked down my body from the position on the table as if I were back in the hospital giving birth at one point. So powerful is the body’s memory. It was very real and huge. I felt so calm and peaceful and aligned after leaving there. And I naturally Googled everything on the muscle and what to do about it and look forward to more sessions because it’s so healing! I swear, all my health problems related to that issue! And I had no idea! And my son will be 12 this month!!!

And the Bohemian Bombshell never has felt more comfortable in her body, even thought she is plump, by Goddess she is full, FULL! Full I say! Full of life and it courses through her body, her breasts, belly, thighs, hips and arms. It just radiates life and all the good food of the earth moving through her in grace.

The Queen returned to her castle and found the King’s heart there. She knew that it was only a matter of time before the King’s body, mind and soul caught up and were here completely at the castle. And she’s so exited about that. But the Queen is at Peace. She’s at peace with everything right now. And she’s ticking down the days until the King finally arrives.

The Big, Blue Sparkly Jewel

2010-02-06T20:06:00.000-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia went up the mountain again with Sergeant Pepe to the village science complex where there was also an art gallery. It was a pleasant walk up. There was no rush, no pressure, no where to get but there when she got there. Her heart rested, as if a hand that squeezed it had finally released it from its strangling grip. Each step is slower than usual; she pays attention to it and yet also notices the spruce trees, low-growing rosehips and wild strawberries in their winter modes. The Queen now hikes further than before, or at least in a very long while. She’s a little bit tired of doing other forms of Queenly exercise, so just hiking uphill gives quite a clearing to her head. There is a peace, a quiet that is in rhythm with the step, in rhythm with the moment and the depth that is there and where she meets all of creation. Where everything sinks down and melts into one.

The Queen was delighted in all the art and felt positive that among these dark ages brought about by the Dark King Bush, there will be a renaissance of science, art and learning once again! She took up making quite a bit of art herself, as the King sent some amazing materials to play with and she passes the day until she can see him again working away. And she feels like life is just beginning.

With the King in my life things have changed for the better. My loneliness and struggle have subsided. My heart can rest. I sleep better and dream profoundly every night. I trust the universe, and I trust that the last seven years are up. The intense difficult times are up, or at least a phase of them. And I honestly believe that because of my shift in this thinking, and from the ceremony experience and vision that I received, that good things are now ahead and not disaster. That let’s my heart go. All the post-traumatic stress melts away. The present moment is a safe place to reside. There’s no explosions, terror or upset to pull you out of the moment again, fray the nervous system. There's just this amazing moment and contentment. Regular sitting meditation does wonders to reprogram your nervous system and make deep grooves that are alert, aware, pleasant, and rooted in regular daily rhythm. Time does change things. Regular ritual, that repetio materi descendi, repeatedly descending into matter. You really do create your own universe just by showing up to it. And it’s amazing how the universe just irons itself out and works out well once you get all those self-imposed obstacles out of the way.

My older sister, Narada, came over last Saturday. It was completely unexpected. Her daughter, Radhika, called and said she had some rehearsal in Boulder so she’d drop her mother by. I was hiking with Sergeant Pepe at the time and quickly called my father. Since everything was so last minute – that’s how Narada had announced she was moving to India – I had the excuse that I’d have no special Krishna food prepared! What a relief! Naturally once at home I pulled out what I had, inspecting the gourmet cheeses for evidence of Rennet, pulling out the organic blueberries and mochi.

It was wonderful to see my big sister. It had been so many years. She left when I was in the eighth grade. She was six and a half years older than me; she really was the one who mothered me. Yoga, religious, gardening and vegetarian cooking passions were passed to us early when we were young through our father. That’s what we did together growing up. And only so often would Mom interrupt us with her insanity and her blows. Nancy was her name when we were young, and she took the brunt of Mom’s blows. Small wonder she ended up a Krishna. Years later I confronted the grief of losing her. For the years following her departure were marked by growing up alone. My younger sister would be removed by social services from our home, my brother would join the Navy, and I faced high school alone with my mother ranting about my siblings. I became a bulimic, raising myself alone and becoming the family cook, prepared by Nancy’s vegetarianism and by a 6-month stint as a 16-year-old working as a cashier at the 28th Street McDonald’s.

But now Nancy’s back! As Narada, and it was just her. Not her husband, Sri Raga, whom my mother always called Sri Rag Mop. Quite frankly I don’t like him either and was actually glad he was not there. Narada seemed relaxed and free. We talked about the food issue and she said it was Sri Raga, too strict, and I nodded my head in fierce agreement and vindication, at last! She told stories of India, roaming peacocks at Mayapur, the Bengali people. How I loved arm-chair traveling that moment and would love to make a trip to India one day!

I made her raspberry tea with agave syrup. She wanted honey and I felt guilty I didn’t have honey, for it was crystallized. It made me realize how often I feel I have to feel guilty about some mistake, some issue about me or anything. I think my kids know this and manipulate me about it. I’m always trying to cover up for some perceived error, some mistake. Chogyam Trungpa talks about this in his works. I still go to my Tuesday morning meditation class, Contentment in Everyday living, and I do believe I feel more content, in the moment, accepting of all things. It’s just that the difficult parts have evened out finally. It’s more balanced.

But Trungpa says how Western Judeo-Christian mythology expounds original sin, something wrong with us. And Buddhism emphasizes natural goodness, openness and experience. The west has this feeling of guilt, and children are taught from what’s wrong with their work, using guilt to improve. Rather than what’s right.

I still wrestle with that for me and my daughter. I struggle to perform for the machine of public education and do the worksheet homework at night with my daughter teaching Colonial American geography and map skills. It’s frustrating because she doesn’t know basic things, even though she’s in the 4th grade. But I can’t show it, because it mangles her self-esteem the way it did mine when I was her age in school and didn’t understand what was going on. What's wrong with her? What's wrong with me? What crap. i just want to be happy and good!

My son has moved downstairs and is happy there. I have to be firm though, because his teachers say he’s not turning in English and math work and has an attitude about it. Gilbert took him boxing once, and I’m trying to get him to go to gun club with him. When Narada was over he had fun looking through an airplane and war book with Opa. Guys need guys!

That night my daughter snuggled with me in bed. It’s so fun to have a 9-year-old daughter. We had fun playing a spelling game in which you make up a word based on the last letter of the word just said. Elephant, tomato, octopus, Sergeant Pepe. We laughed in the darkness and we said, “I love you,” to each other. Then she said, “I remember when I was little and you’d say, “’I love you,”’ to me and then I’d say, “’I love you,”’ to you, and then I’d feel all happy inside and see this big, blue sparkly jewel.”

That was everything for me. That moment. It was a Big, Blue, Sparkly Jewel. All of life is one. The simple joys of life. It’s everything. It’s so simple and so clear and wonderful.

Before Narada had left and when Radhika came to pick her up, I heaped lots of presents left over from Christmas that I didn’t get to give them and other stuff. Clothes, books and games the kids had outgrown; we rummaged through my closet and I just pulled lots of stuff I’ve had for years and didn't use. Funky beautiful clothes that I've performed in but rarely wear. There were clothes that I didn’t fit in anymore just hanging in the back of the closet. They needed to be cleaned out. The Bohemian Bombshell is never going to be a size 4 dress again and doesn’t even want to try, so out of the closet it went into Radhika’s arms. I gave Narada some wool coats and scarves for her adjustment to Rocky Mountain winter from Bengai India, and some blueberries I had. The house and my heart and psyche felt 100 pounds lighter.

She wrote me an email thanking me.
Sydney, Thanks for the photos and thanks again for the earrings, blueberries and so on. I plan to wear the earrings on Gaura Purnima and other special days. I used the blueberries in some muffins this morning and offered them to Krishna. The family loved them! I have extra batter and will bake more so that Kamesvari can take some muffins to school in her lunch bag.

I thought about you this morning. It is true you are also a devotee of Krsna...in your own way. I am really happy thinking about that.

Love from,
Narada (priya)

Life is a miracle, an offering, a grace. When you get to the source of the background of anxiety that plagues you like a sick ghost you wear around your body, you can be free. That it’s just the mind and the habit of the mind, but when you meditate you create a new habit of a place to hang out in. To identify there and exist there, untouched, unstruck. The heart rests, the intelligence of the Buddhi mind, rather than the Manas mind, radiates through. And there’s no rush, no hurry. Truly you have arrived. You have arrived in the present moment, and all of eternity is there too.

The Queen of Bohemia now wears the Big, Blue Sparky Jewel. right in the middle of her crown.

El Renacamiento de la Reina del Corazon

2010-01-22T15:13:00.000-08:00

Vino de las estrellas
Tan Bella es Ella
Tan Bella es Ella Como sola Ella puede ser su misma
Se Coronó su misma
La Reina del corazón
Tan Bella es Ella

She came from the stars
So beautiful is she
So beautiful is she like only she can be of herself
She crowns herself
The Queen of the Heart
So beautiful is she

Song the Shaman sang to me

The Queen of Bohemia went into new territory today. She went up the mountain and then over it. She started scaling a new mountain. And finally she paused, there was a valley, and a the gate before the next spread of mountains. That was far enough of a new beginning. And it is a new beginning.

She lifted her fist to the mountain and spoke the song that the Shaman gave her, and she believed it with all her heart, all her body. “I am good, kind and beautiful Queen,” she said. “I am beautiful of heart and deserving of goodness. And may I be of service to children and to people. I am so grateful for everything” And then she walked all the way back, her body feeling wonderful, relieved, her heart aflame with joy. Her rebirth in an ocean of conviction she feels down to her core, and that is the most important thing.

Last Friday night I had an ayahuasca ceremony with someone trained in Peru. I did the grandmother ceremony, which was done all night and in the darkness. I did not realize that I had done the grandfather ceremony of San Pedro years earlier in 1994 in Ecuador. I was with a Peace Corp friend. You went into town and knocked on the door of this little shack. To the guy who answered the door you said the code, “I want to rent some horses.”

We ingested it at night. Daytime would have been better. My friend had a bad trip. He revealed the grief of his mother dying at age 9. I baby-sat him and I don’t remember much else except the scent of jasmine that filled the night air. A woman at this current ceremony said, “The grandfather gives you exactly what you need. You’re a mother! You needed to mother him during tht trip!” So I realize I mother a lot of children.

As I prepared fasting, I was a little nervous about the experience and having to confront yet another unknown demon of my unconscious needing some light shed on it. I was ready for it. I’ve been battling one thing after another for most of my life. Bring it on.

We had to say our intentions out loud. Mine was for healing, to remove any remaining obstacles, and clarity. As well as whatever the plant consciousness wanted me to experience.

The first thing I noticed was the humming in my head, the music I heard. It was like the rainforest. And I remember the rainforest sounds. The way the shaman sang his disconjointed notes, moved his cigarette in the dark like a bird, shook a rattle.

I remember being in the Amazonian basin of Ecuador, four hours from Tena by motorized canoe. This semi-aculturated tribe grew coffee and we visited a Peace Corp nurse. There was a Shaman there, who said there was a medicine in a vine. I was interested, but not enough (SADLY!) to meet him back then. He kind of lurked in the background, doing his own thing. In my periferal. The nurse told me a story that there was once a really sick girl, and the visiting doctor couldn’t help her. She was dying. They said call the Shaman, and the Shaman healed her.

It is the belief and the ritual that healed her, I believe. We believe in what happens to us during a ceremony. It’s an experience. A shift in our otherwise mundane and profane worlds. And that shift and feeling in the body is so great you are not the same person you started with. Our society doesn’t offer much of a ritual. The old rites don’t give us any meaning for our modern problems.

So at the beginning of the journey my head started popping and the sounds of the birds made me think of my totem animal, the Raven. Bird is my animal. My symbol and spirit guide. My heart sprouted two wings and La Paloma Blanca said, “Sing your Heart’s Song.”

It was opening my heart, opening my chest and singing my song. Not anybody else’s, but mine. I eventually came to a rooftop of a house, and out of the chimney appeared my mother’s face, which was immediately replaced by this witch puppet. This puppet was purchased in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1970 when we lived in Albuquerque. It’s a piece of Mexican folkart and part of a slew of characters, like La Dama a pretty girl, El Borrachero, a drunkard, and La Bruja, the Witch. My mother hung it on the front door of our house growing up. It was like a talisman, and it really looked like her, exactly like the Queen/witch in Sleeping Beauty.

Then the witch turned pretty, as if it were I. She showed up to a little girl in a suburban neighborhood and said, “This world needs some enchantment!” And explained to her how she’d take her under her wing and apprentice, they’d work invisibly, bringing kindness and magic to the world, brightening everybody’s modern, mechanical and meaningless lives with ancient rites.

I traveled back to early, early childhood. Albuquerque. Four years old. My toe getting stuck in a tricycle and bleeding. My mother’s abuse and the painful words she told us. The frightening screaming and hitting and pounding our self-esteem into the ground. Her bag lady clothing, used, torn and ripped. Her unkempt hair. Our worthlessness, undeservingness.

I remembered little things, like a doll named Rosebud who smelled like roses.
I remembered kindergarten at Heatherwood Elementary in Boulder, Colorado. 1971. Standing in line. A boy, Jed Maletz, just turned around and punched me in the stomach for no reason. He turned back around again. Nobody saw it. Nobody did anything. I just doubled up in pain. Why did that happen? For what reason? Did I deserve that? I suffered in silence. And the class moved on.

I remember the third grade. Playing four square at Douglass Elementary. Some bully fifth grade girls stole our ball. Narrowed me and another girl into a corner. Saying things to us like we were ugly, stupid. I was so bold to try and punch the ball out of the girl’s hand to get it back. But it failed. She grew even more angrier. She hurt me, and when I cried she said, “You deserved it!”

What did I deserve? To suffer? Do people deserve to suffer? How I felt I was undeserving of happiness, of fulfillment, of letting my star shine. So put down by many, so feeling shameful. Did I bring on my life’s problems expecting suffering as all I deserve?

Then that all changed. That I was beautiful, that I am deserving, that I am good and worthy and talented. Storytime Yoga is beautiful. It has great value and merit. I deserve happiness with my King, to have all my wildest dreams come true. Why not reach for it? Why not step into it. You deserve it! You’ve worked hard for it. You are a good person with a good heart. Of course you can be fulfilled and happy! Take it!! Love and be happy! Serve as the Mother with the Storytime Yoga Children’s Mission. Stand in your glory!

The Shaman called us up one by one for individual Limpias. He sang the song above to me in Spanish, and it was profound to hear that. As the Queen, crowning herself. So beautiful is she, like only she can be. She crowns herself I took that as my need for self-love, that assertion and conviction that I was worthy, deserving, beautiful and my work great. That it was OK to let your star shine, to sing your song to the world. And that I was to spend my life with the King as my partner in love and happiness, travel, do good work together. Things I have dreamed of my whole life. He also drove energy into me, for me to be a little selfish, have boundaries, put energy into me too, not only for others, taking care of others at my expense, as I have my whole life. We spoke in Spanish, and being rather rusty, I was amazingly fluent. After the singing and the personal ritual the Shaman said to me, “Now do you believe that you are not ugly, truly surely from this experience?”

“Yes,” I said. I truly believed it.

Afterwards I thought of other people, my ex, my late husband, my children, old boyfriends. My father and his tight shoulders. To let that all go. To ask forgiveness from them and healing for them. Everything happens for a reason. To be grateful for our difficulties for they bring the most profound results on the other end. You just have to hang on and show up, take the roller coster ride for its ups and down.

Then the vision subsided. It was enough. Things were normal again. My mind raced and raced, but my body was so tired. I did not sleep the whole night until the ceremony was over in the dawn.

In the morning we had garlic lemon water to re-alkalize the body. We talked and ate. I was finished and needed to get back to my children by the later afternoon, but people were going to continue with San Pedro and do the grandfather ceremony.
One thing too, is that you vomit a lot during the journey. You hear others vomiting all night long. It’s quite intense, but also very purging. I vomited so hard sometimes I peed my pants! But it was cleansing and I got all that negativity and old crap out. Whenever fear came up, it usually came up with the feeling of sickness. It made you stay present, listen to the Shaman, the singing, the present moment and release stuff.

And now a week later things have shifted so much. I’ve integrated the experience and cemented it with plans the King and I have made for the future, and with long walks in nature. I am relieved, less tense. It’s wonderful to have somebody in your life. Somebody who has your back. Somebody who you have his back for too. His heart.

I did have my obstacles removed, my demon confronted. Only I was surprised that he demon was so gentle. I was only afraid of myself. Of my own capacity for love, just for myself. To love myself. That can heal everything and shifts the whole world. It is not a terrible place where I will get pain, but a joyous one with expectation of beauty. And it’s not something that happens with just talking about it. You have to have that kind of an experience. It’s a psychological and somatic experience. It was the ritual. One ayahuasca ceremony can save you decades of therapy. A vision is that powerful.

I don’t wake up in anxiety anymore. Just love and gratitude. Excitement too, because the vision was so clear, so profound. It was guidance I never received my whole life. It’s still in my body that feeling of love and joy and happiness. Whenever I feel those old doubts that creep up, the feeling instantly replaces them.

I show up at the Everyday Contenment class at Shambhala Center on Tuesday mornings. It feels good to sit and meditate in the safety and peace of the present moment. It's good to be among friends and community. I like what the instructor said, that meditation is like putting your children on the school bus. Your thoughts will be gone for a little while so you can meditate, but they will be back! Don't worry! You'll see them again, so just make this time for quiet meditation!

I met with the therapist at the Mental Health center. I told her everything. She was happy for me, helped me to cement it in the outer world. I’m working on getting health insurance so that I can have my own therapy, and so that somebody else who is down on their luck and in need of help can receive it. I said I was so grateful for their help. Whom do you turn to if there is such despair? Thank god for Social Services. That’s what makes a society great. That we care for everybody, without judgment regardless of income or circumstances. That every human being has inherent worth and dignity and deserves help and respect. Sadly these services have been cut way back. Whole centers closing in East Boulder County.

I don’t know what’s wrong with this country. Where is its heart? It’s scary about what happened with the Supreme Court ruling today. I’m very scared for this country. The machine, the artificial body, the CORPORATION, has taken over for sure. And the people allow it! Maybe it’s the fluoride. Where is the capacity for outrage? We are not the UCA, the United Corporations of America, and it’s eating everything in sight, most of all your rights and democracy and freedom. Welcome to the Machine! Ruling with money and power to influence campaigns and candidates. The propaganda machine for the masses. For what? Alienated consumers and the machine of expansion. The movie Avatar is a perfect metaphor for this. The Father machine killed the Mother Earth and its creeping around colonizing again with its path of destruction and inhumanity. We live in this stifled matrix of society, way out of balance with nature, and it’s self destructing.

But I think there is going to be a Great Awakening. The Goddess is back. She’s showing up in green technology, medical marijuana and a return to organic gardening, compassion for people in Haiti. The Machine will Stop, and soon. Things are breaking down fast. But that’s OK. For the greatest amount of darkness means there is just as much light as its opposite. That means it’s a great time to be an artist, thinker, humanitarian activist in this age, because your number has been called. The Journey has begun. It’s Showtime! Because you can’t stop the heart. You can’t stop life and you can’t stop the soul. There’s a rebirth going on, so get ready!

So is the Renaissance of the Queen of the Heart, AKA the Queen of Bohemia, who cleans her own house and really loves the King.

And Still the Heart Dances

2010-01-11T15:20:00.000-08:00

The Queen is fasting after realizing that the sludge of holidays needed a bigger kick at leaving the kingdom, and she took Sergeant Pepe for a walk. Moving in rhythm with her body once again up the mountain, up, up she goes, forgetting the mind, just being with the body. She was, however, a bit distracted, lots going on in the castle and its interior realms, workings and people and she didn’t like the cold so decided to turn around. Sergeant Pepe resisted, pulled her on. The Queen did continue up the mountain, reminded that she had forgotten to proclaim herself. “Thank you dear Pepe!” she said. Pepe winked.

Finally at the top she stood there, looked at the mountain and said, “I am the Queen of Bohemia, and it’s happening! I can do it myself! I believe in myself! I see a solution!” That and with a lot of great people in my life I can do anything!” And then she walked down again with Pepe leading the way.

The Queen has a very fine court. HER court, no more dreadful TRAFFIC courts. She is driving the speed limit, and she has to admit, it feels good to slow down. But the Queen still had to rev it up it a good 10 MPH in certain spots in the country where she rolls her eyes and can’t figure out how possibly on earth anybody with a brain would post it that slow and which village nitwit was it?

The Queen has been gathering the HEALTHY advisers around her and they assist her in her decisions. And just by waiting and breathing in and breathing our rather than jumping to impulsive actions or freaking out and panicking and grasping in terror, she realizes that she can make it through the tension and come to some good solutions as she gathers the information over time from advisers and makes a decision all on her own. Why Queen Elizabeth would be jealous.

The village people are freezing in the rental cottage on Speer and want out of their lease early. The Queen quietly contemplated the situation for a full three days and after doing some investigating, decided what she shall do. She feels great. Calm, and by George she feels LIKE THE QUEEN.

I’ve been working with my chest lately, the throat. The hot yoga really gets in there deep, works things out. I’m among all these young people at the Core Power, and a lot of the time I’m doing a variation for my personal benefit to get deep in my chest, deep in my shoulders as I see fit. Hell, I'm 43 and I don't care. There is an expansion in my chest I haven’t felt in a long time. I can breath deeper, it’s in the center of my chest and it goes up my throat. I like a lot of back bends, something I've always resisted, they open these up. I can do the deepest backbend ever, which is huge for my usually so inflexible spine because of two herniated disks. Just as the cadaver lab teacher said, "The thoracic spine is what makes the heart dance." So it is happening.My heart is dancing. Once John Friend touched that spot behind my heart when I was in urdhva dhanurasana and said, “There’s your stuck spot.” I can never forget his touch at that spot. The back of the heart. In my chest, with the fear gone, the shoulders can slide down the back. I focus on my tail bone and relax. I am grounded and speaking from my heart, not my head and neck.

So the spine dances the heart, the heart opens. My chest spreads and my throat opens. My bird in the tree wants to sing, breathe deeply, make music, tell stories, be free and expressed. And my bird is happy. She is content. The jaw loop is engaged and it helps the shoulders go down the back. I focus on the tailbone and everything drops down to the floor and I am centered in my heart, relaxed, ready and alert, witnessing the miracle of the present.

I remember my feet, mulha banda, the pelvis grounded, my core my refuge, my shoulders to be relaxed. It opens the chest. I can gain the stillness of the moment. The peace of not grasping, not needing to grasp because you don’t have to worry about survival, that you won’t starve, die, be murdered like your ancestors.

I think it’s the root of my fear. Besides the uncertainty as a child that was programmed into me that at any moment that my mother was going to start screaming and doing something terrifying to me. It’s an ancestral fear passed down generations. Fear of annihilation. My father, who survived a Japanese concentration camp on Java as a child, his terror and grief subconsciously filtered through to his children, to me, to my children. They carry it too. A massage therapist who works me and my kids said that we all as a family have tight neck, shoulders and backs of legs. My father has the same thing. I massaged his shoulders and neck as a child. Our body patterns follow. The lingering unconscious influence of the parents’ psyche. But my story isn’t very different from others. How about somebody who is Jewish and their grandfather was only one of eight children to survive the Russian pogroms. Or a Native American on a reservation who doesn’t trust a donation of fine fingernail polish because she suspects that there is some poison in it because they want to exterminate them. The world is filled with some very sick people who start wars and kill others in a self-righteous rage.

The fear becomes less with stillness. With grounding in the body. Slowing down, being in sych with the world and being PRESENT, being PART OF IT. Surrender to how the body feels and moves in every moment. It's a form of safety.

With less fear in my life things become more and more clearer. They are much simpler. I am down to the root chakra where I know what I can and can’t do. As I always do too much and I typically do it all myself. But my work and future projects are very clear. It’s simple, manageable. I don’t have to rush around. I have people who help me in my work. My family life is balanced. I have time to take care of myself and have hobbies other than my hobby of work. Like cook, garden, read, go to the theater or a movie, hike and travel. Slowing down to the rhythm of nature just moves you through the heart. There is a definite trust. All you have to do is really learn to be patient and wait things through. I’m typically impulsive, the first to say, "I Love You." I’ve matured, seeing what waiting actually does. It provides a great foundation of being and knowing that this is the right choice so that you can proceed unencumbered.

I’ve been gathering information about Speer. A friend is helping me make some choices about it. Things are moving forward. I just let the creditors call. Thank you for different ring tones! I’m waiting to see if I can get my money from the house. I’ll forge ahead with my passions and my work. Despite the fact that tenants want to move out of the cottage before the end of their lease because they are freezing, since it’s been abnormally cold here and Justin did such a shitty job on remodeling it in the first place. Not even the insulation I installed helps. Ah, well. Such is life. And still the heart dances. Still the Queen lives in awe and beauty of such a fine opera. And her flowering tree with a little bird in it center blooms in winter. "Caw! Caw!"

New Year

2010-01-07T18:54:00.001-08:00

The Queen had to go to Court today. Not HER court but THE Court. TRAFFIC Court. Somehow on the road at a certain point her carriage turns into LA GATA NEGRA and transforms into a wild black cat and it gets her into trouble on occasion. It just happened to be in COMMERCE CITY, of all places. Is there anything IN COMMERCE CITY besides the power plant that as a child looked like the city of Oz to her? The Queen was confused. “What? I can’t just write my check and be done with it? I have to GO TO COURT!” She was horrified, aghast. “It’s so unbecoming of a Queen. AM I GUILTY?” she wondered.
Among the masses of bad drivers, delinquents and indigents, she nervously confessed her penchant for speed to the Big Wig who seemed not impressed and figured her being from Boulder had some cash to plump up the city coffers, and who merely lowered the fine but only by a little dispite her chirping about “a lot of stress” when the Big Wig asked her “IS THERE ANYTHING YOU’D LIKE TO SAY.” Overall the Queen felt the day was wasted, however, she did get to visit a friend and get some work done at the same time and praised the technological advances that so discretely allow her to cheat and fill the dreadful time that is supposed to be, she guesses, punishment. She drove in her carriage the speed limit all the way back to her castle like a good little girl, but she knows the desire will return down the road. One day.

There is a rhythm that one can align with. It’s the rhythm of nature. It’s a synching, and aligning. It’s a slow process, one that doesn’t let you go without some kicking and screaming. But it’s the good sort of kicking and screaming. It’s the type that cleans you out. Because you need it and by George, it seems the only way because really you just don’t get it otherwise so it becomes necessary by all means.

The new year is off to a good start. An amazing shift of solstice energy, dying and then being reborn into light – has proven powerful. Wonderful surprises, realizations and also painful ones. It was a pleasant enough time with the kids. The Festivities, the good friends and food, and then the purging of the house. Getting rid of all the gaudy tinsel and clutter which makes me can’t stand a shred of Christmas the day after, my birthday, so out it all goes and I undertook a massive cleaning and reorganizing of the house. The Christmas tree is outside, ready to be chopped up for fire wood. It felt wonderful. And then a shift and clarity in my work and naturally surrendering to its process. Not being afraid of waiting, not being afraid of the uncertainty. Just sitting there with everything and enjoying the moment anyway.

We opened our presents on Christmas Eve with my father after lunch of lox and bagels and homemade carrot ginger soup. My younger sister, didn’t show up. My older sister, who has just returned from India, didn’t make it either. It was a bit disappointing and lonely for some reasons, but also wonderful for others. I put their wrapped presents in the closets and didn’t cry.

Of course with my sister’s it’s a source of old pain. That same old story. What are you doing for them? You set things up nice, and they don’t show up. Pretty typical. Pretty disappointing. I didn’t let it bother me. I shifted my focus on my kids and did fun things like sledding and going to movies and making lots of artwork. It was offensive, though, that my older sister demands thing. Like that I should prepare food for her. As a Hare Krishna devotee, she demands rigid food. Both my sister-in-law have run ourselves ragged in years past to provide fine vegetarian food for their demanding and austere pallets, only to be snubbed when her husband won’t bless the food or it was cooked in the wrong pot or, God forbid, was made with KARMIE HANDS. I remember nearly three years ago when she suddenly announced she was moving to India, drove up from Dallas and she showed up the day before her flight. I had surrendered and not prepared anything, knowing it could not pass her satisfaction. She seemed offended. “I should have called ahead and told you what to make me!” I felt terrible, ran out to Whole Foods and bought wonderful vegetarian items. But once I returned she said, “Oh, my God! Syd! I forgot to tell you! Today is a special day! We have to fast front grains! I’m so sorry!” So half of my purchases were useless. Thank god for my niece, who I call “Krishna Lite,” said, “I’ll eat it. I don’t care.” Needless to say I get a long with my niece. But I sense some kind of redemption. My older sister coming home. What needs to be said? Reconciled?

I know it is about my value. I remember my mother. When I was a child, calling all us girls whores and dirty bitches, screaming at us, beating me with a stick. Am I worth anything? I had given birth to my daughter. I had been home from the hospital less than a day. I sat with my baby daughter in my arms on the couch and my mother shuffled in. She had a crumpled up paper grocery bag in her arms. Her hair typical and matted and unkempt, her clothing torn and ragged. She thrust the bag, my daughter’s birthday gift, into my husband’s arms and announced to me, “I’m ready for a pizza. Mushroom.” I didn’t cry. I just breathed in and out. I was never allowed to shine. It was always her. Or my father. Or my sister, or other sister or SOMEBODY. It was never about me.

I remember her gift. What was inside that brown bag. The gift from my mother to her granddaughter. My daughter. Me. 1) a sample of a Kotex, opened. 2) a bracelet of coins, broken, from a garage sale purchase 10 years ago. I remember it from her jewelry box. 3) two clipped coupons for Knox Borden condensed milk to save 10 cents. 4) 5 apples, with worm holes, from their backyard apple tree.

So I realize, what is it about me that is unable to see my own value? My own worth?

But I do see it. This New Year. The grinding of the wheel one more time. To face oneself in the harshness of winter. It’s very cold again. Bitter cold. It’s been icy. Things have not melted as usually promised in sunny Colorado. Al Quaida seems to be penetrating deeper into US territory. It’s getting at things. Putting a mirror up, rooting things out. A numerologist once told me that I was supposed to learn about taking care of myself. Standing on my own. I didn’t want to believe it. But it’s always that way. You set it all up for people. You get little in return. I’ve tried ludicrous means of finding my value from other people. Only to be once again disappointed. All along I refused to believe that I could get it met through my own talents, my own worth. But I guess it’s that pressure that cooks up innovation. Maybe I will turn Speer into a medical marijuana grow house and salvage it. I was there today, collecting the laundry coinage and trying to figure out why the hell the new dyer isn’t working. Heavy Sigh. Maybe I’ll just really focus on my work, discipline myself in yoga, build a community of HEALTHY people around me, and watch my own star shine.

I talked to my father today. He had some X-rays for his legs, which are puffing up, causing pain. I find myself caring for him more and more. I do, out of love, but caution. Where is my light? Where is my shine for caring for myself? He told me about my younger sister. Her car broke down – again. She wants my dad and his neighbor to tinker with the motor and fix it. Somebody help her. Somebody help me. That learned helplessness. The Powerlessness. The black mold in the basement. It strikes us all. I recognize it in me. Nobody is going to come to my rescue. I keep putting energy into it, it buys me time, and heartache, and ultimately I do come up with a solution. Why not believe in yourself? Is there any other choice?

I told my lawyer, who is wonderfully, finally, preparing the complaint against my husband to the department of regulatory agencies to try and collect my money from my house he had foreclosed on and failed to sell as a realtor. I’m in holding pattern. Breathing in and breathing out. Showing up now at CorePower Hot and Yin Yoga among all the young CU Boulder student bodies, and sweating and cleaning and releasing and feeling good. Accepting what is, my body, my self, my talents, my life. It has all the echoes of a sweet surrender and a beautiful composition.

I feel more aligned. Slowing down does the trick. So does surrendering. I couldn't whip myself into a frenzy if I forced myself. I'd rather be in balance. Anything else is just too painful. I'll just go with the flow, thank you very much. There is simplicity, balance and presence. There is redemption, fulfillment. Ah, the last thing of my mother. She really visited today in her ghost. I remember reading her letters from Europe. 1955. Her adventurous self. But never allowing herself pleasure, satisfaction. Ah, the guilt, to splurge on a better room, a better seat at the opera. Do I deserve it? Am I worth it? I see how my mother set it all up. I see how I pierce it all and rewrite the story. The flowering tree in winter. It keeps me rooted, keeps me blooming, keeps me present, no matter what.

My father said today that he talks to my mother. "She's well now, you know." I think she is. It's the retroactive healing of the ancestors. your healing heals them all. "I believe it." I told him. Not sure if I believe we are all going into the fifth dimension and that aliens are about to be revealed and nothing will be left by 2012 so don't worry... but I believe my mother is well. And that so am I.

It’s a slight adjustment. A tinkering of sorts. Clean out the last corners. Kick off the New Year with a Bang. Recession be damned, we all know artists will save the world AND our souls. So why not just keep being one. It really doesn’t matter. You just align to your dharma. You believe in it. And that faith and belief is like a strong horse. Once you get on, your destiny’s ride is assured.

So is the Queen’s New Year. 2010 is going to be her year.

The Flowering Tree of Roses in Winter

2009-12-22T10:43:00.001-08:00

The Queen of Bohemia hiked up the mountain this morning with her trusted little dog Sergeant Pepe. For the Winter Solstice, she proclaimed, “I am the Queen of Bohemia. My kingdom is inside my heart. And my symbol is a flowering tree of roses in winter. “ And then she walked down again.

The solstice is my most sacred time of the year. I always feel its pull toward the darkness, and then the imminent rebirth. The most amazing time is that day before, when you just sit in the moment and allow the event. Everything just falls away. There is silence and presence. There is an emptying out, a sacrifice. A sacrifice of the self. Of all my desires, of all my fears. They wait silently while I contemplate the peaceful present.

A daily sitting practice does wonder to arrive at this. A mind can be trained. It can start to identify with that clarity and awe of the present moment. All the demons of my mind seem like little children begging for attention. But the present is so peaceful, so calming. I resist their cries.

I have always been attracted to the image of the Flowering Tree. The Sufi’s have it flowering in winter. The Hindu story is my favorite, one I perform frequently. And then you have Juan Diego and La Virgen, roses blooming in winter on Tepeyac. That metaphor for eternity, the spirit. It can get wounded, it can be healed again. But really it never was wounded, it never was healed. And with that every little action in the moment becomes so amazing. The touch of the keypad to type, the breath, the touch of clothing on my body. The complete surrender to reality and the ability to navigate my mind’s complexities assist in this divine amazement.

You’d think I’d be really pissed about what happened to me. But really it’s all just so beautiful. And the moment too precious to waste any more time or sorrow with it. It just is, the winter. You can flower in it any time. Everything gets revealed in it with the illumination of the heart. All questions and problems are answered in complete truth. All you have to do is wait and have faith.

The Flowering Tree. A tree pose, the pelvis and legs rooted in the earth and stable, the rib cage and heart, yearning for the heaven. That expansion of the Shri Yantra, energy moving toward the earth in one triangle, energy moving away from the earth in expansion. That’s how the planets stay in orbit, amazingly. This perfect balance of tension pulling and pushing. Are we all mini cosmoses? Only to realize this perfect replica in our bodies and the complete harmonizing with the rhythms of nature? What perfect flow, what perfect balance. To recognize that your power is identical with that energy of the universe. All fear drops away. All desires melt into dharma. The serpentine power. The tree, as below so above. And the serpent, energy, winding its way up to the top, and then back down again.

The flowers, the roses. The faith and the blooming of the heart. The throat must be open, the speech and the truth must flow. The breath moves through the body, pumps the heart. Camel pose, cactus pose. Opening the heart, surrendering.

Staying with the center. Listening and alert. Balanced and in tune with the body.
The answer to everything just comes at the right time, at the right moment.

And so the light has returned. The eternal life goes on. It crawls toward daylight of longer and longer intensities. An energy shifts, something new is born. I can feel it, it’s emerging like a bulb in winter. A blooming rose in winter on a tree. Where its branches were broken and leaves torn, they are mended. And the flowers bloom, gorgeous radiant, divine.

The Conceptual Morass

2009-12-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

The Queen once again is happy in her castle. The sun has come out, she was able to be with her community in meditation. The morass of conceptual thinking that plagued her happiness has lifted, the demons have passed. And she’s glad that the demons didn’t get too deep this time. She is finding that the more she practices, the more it bolsters her. The more liberation awaits.

I love my Shambhala meditation class. Meditation really is the cure for what ails you! As my mind can spin me into what the teacher called the “conceptual morass” I can easily liberate it by simply stop thinking about it. To show up in the breath and the body and reality cuts the thinking. To be in the awe and wonder of the now, that is what keeps you safe. The fears and thoughts that plague me disappear. And it’s done by the bolstering of the community. Alone I become fearful, but with others I become stronger and fearless.

I have great compassion for myself. I can beat myself up for some choices I’ve made, but that is life. I accept that I did my best I can accept that I made some choices out of fear, and from now on I refuse to make choices out of fear. Because the present gives you so much clarity, so much safety, that the right choice becomes available and you can choose it with confidence, without remorse or regret. I’m not afraid of things to come. I can just take them as they arise. I will make a choice I can live with on Speer on my finances and on what is healthy for me and my family And that is all I can do. For there is no certainty, no control – those things I crave. But when you just sit with the fears with mindfulness, they disappear. Like the story of the monk in the cave. The demons used to disturb him while he sat and meditated. He swat at them continually, but the more he swat at them, the nastier they bothered him. Until one day he just stopped swatting at them, and the demons got bored and went away.

The teacher said that fear is what sunk us in some grooves, some samskaras that create habitual ways of dealing with fear. But to jump out of those grooves means we must confront the fear. So you just face the fear. You don’t run from it. You allow it to be, until it just disappears.

So there we have it. Liberation from the demons of the minds through the simple act of cutting the thoughts. Forgetting them, and living in the bliss and joy of eternity right now.

The Queen Survives

2009-12-14T09:45:00.000-08:00

It has been warming up outside so I walked in the foothills with Pepe. This is where I usually work out my morning fears that pop up on me from the moment I wake up. These worries made me so upset this summer I would wake up vomiting.
What to do about the creditors who are calling, what’s up with my lawyer and the complaint against my ex Justin Chipman and Keller Willliams about him foreclosing on my house and not getting me my money causing severe financial hardship! And how to keep myself and children healthy and happy while making a living. How to stay healthy and sane while Speer has continual problems that cause enormous stress.

So I walk to forget about them. There was a guy with a dog a little ways ahead of me, and I saw him leave his dog’s poop, neatly wrapped up in a green newspaper bag.

I can’t believe it! I thought. How could he do that? I mean what kind of a person thinks that leaving dog poop behind wrapped in a green newspaper plastic bag is less unsightly than just leaving it there! There are newspaper columns written about this unsightly problem. I thought I can’t just say nothing! I mean, I have walked around with poop on my gloves as not to leave it behind according to the law too! I called ahead and said, “Are you just going to leave it there?” but his dog barked at that moment and I don’t think he heard me.

As I later caught up and passed him I decided to take the nice approach and said, “I usually carry a butt pouch with me to carry my poop. Those things are really handy for this sort of thing so that it’s not unsightly for everybody else.” I’m quite proud of that butt pack. It is black leather, circa 1980. It was my late husband’s and it carries my Pepe supplies of snack, poop bags, and leash. Today since it’s still pretty cold and windy I had my parka on, which has lots of big pockets.

It was meant to be helpful, educational, with a touch of scolding. As I passed by I thought, but what if he decides to rage at me, kill me out here in the open space? Would they find his fingerprints on the poop bag? I really worked on focusing on the out breaths and getting beyond that thought and just enjoyed my walk.

Then Pepe decided to chase the prairie dogs and run a hundred yards off the path. Oh, no! I thought. Now he’s going to say something about my non-compliance with the dog rules! Then I realized that I was obsessing on this thought and got present again. Pepe finally came back and some time later I came to the front of the mountain. That’s where I stop on my hikes – my peak. I proclaim myself as The Queen of Bohemia. At that pause point, that ritual, I usually affirm something. Like, wow, you’re not afraid of anything! It’s a total attitude shift. Just always hang out in the transcendent rather than identify with the duality that is playing before me. I am very aware of the negative sides of life, and accept them. I don’t focus on them, but I know they are there. I create a more positive attitude. A hopeful one. One that is very present and can feel the shift. It’s a complete shift in awareness. To be aware of the eternal now and that you are participating in it. What story do I view it with? Negative, trauma induced that life is not safe? Or once that is safe, life affirming, because one is grounded in being. The radix ipsius, root of itself. That certainly of which you dwell. A matter of confidence due to empiricism and wisdom with age.

Walking back our dogs inevitably mingled. Pepe pounced on his dog, and the man struck up conversation about the dogs. The man was cute! I thought, oh god, you missed your chance at meeting somebody over poop! And I mentioned it. “Sorry about the poop comment. They should have more trash cans out.” And I’m not sure what he said because I was so nervous and couldn’t believe I said that and there goes my chance of dating him. But ultimately I just walked on. And The Queen was proud of herself for just speaking up. She spoke up for what she believed in. And that made her feel good, like everything is going to be all right. Something wonderful is going to happen out of all this. I remembered that the Chinese symbol for crisis is opportunity. Look at the opportunities that all this tragedy and hell of life brings. That’s the big change in myth that I can feel in my body. A positive attitude and feeling coupled with expectation and joy. A certain trust. And my image in my body cements it. My half fish, half bird , mermaid self. Made from dreams, insights, coincidences.

On the way back to the car I saw a dead bird. It had died very recently. It’s left eye still open and shiny, it’s feathers soft and ruffled, as if some animal’s claws or teach, perhaps a hawk, had pierced its heart. I picked it up and held it.

I had held many birds. Many that I rescued from my late cat Chloe who preyed on them. Chloe got her retribution because a mountain lion took her out. This bird I just held. I held it’s little spirit and my connection with birds. I honored its little life and body. I will set it in the garage somewhere to decompose and shrink down. I often do that with natural things around me. My son thinks they are disgusting, but I just think of it as natural science. In my car I have a little diorama in the side of my Prius window with wasps next pieces (I am amazed at the shapes nature makes) and a rabbit skull. My daughter is like me and thinks these things are cool. She found the rabbit skull on a camping trip.

I have had a hard few days, with the weather so cold and a problem again at Speer. The electricity shorted because one tenant girl uses a space heater so much. The wiring is old, Tom has said to me. God, I need to declare bankruptcy just to get rid of this thing. It’s underwater, it needs so many repairs, it takes so much of my time and resources and creates terrible stress. Like have all of this period of trauma from my husband’s death and all of its property and physical memory completely gone. I will start over from there. Something completely new and wonderful and beautiful.

But there is still a fear in me that what if I had no place to live with my children. If I can’t afford rent and were homeless. I was horrified to find out that there is no homeless shelter for women with children in Boulder. You’d be refused especially if you had an adolescent boy, because they can at least take in mothers with young children at the women’s shelter. This was a fear of my husband’s I remember. I asked him what his fears were once, and he said, “going broke and being homeless.” So while he skipped out on us I still survive. In fact, it’s funny, filling up with gas yesterday I was the 2012 movie ad at the pump. The whole city sliding into the ocean, and they you, could get your “survivor” drink. So chief Seattle was right, we are all just in survival mode now with our society at the brink of collapse.

My children are at a friend’s house this weekend. Actually it’s like their second home. Friend’s and their son who were there for me ever since my husband died. It’s great for the kids to be with them. I have enjoyed building my community. It really is the most important thing.

So instead of giving into fear and my endless rambling thoughts, the Queen has to just get back to work. So I’d better do that now.

THE LONG WINTER

2009-12-10T17:21:00.000-08:00

The Queen’s castle is cold, bitter cold, for the raging winds howl outside and she sits in isolation. The prince didn’t do something right that she ordered, and she flew out her magic spell of rage. So now the Queen is in a funk. The winter is all about that. One long funk.

It has been dreadful cold here in Colorado for the past few days and currently it is two below zero. This kind of weather makes me irritable, makes me moody. I had bad dreams last night, frustrated, carrying too many things around, frustrated endeavors, children. I awoke and found the Butternut Squash Chipotle Bisque and steamed asparagus not put away in the refrigerator as required but thrown in the sink, left out overnight in a disgusting heap. I was so hurt. They didn’t like it anyway. I try and cook from scratch, and it all ends up disrespected and thrown in the garbage.

So this morning I got up and did not do my yoga and sitting practice. But I got up to the mess in the kitchen and I blew up. Frustrated that my son didn’t follow my instructions. I was also furious at my late husband for abandoning us and damaging us so deeply.

It was icy out with all the crunchy sounds of cars and snow when I dropped him and his sister off at school. I told him I loved him, that it’s his behavior I don’t like. His last words were, “No you don’t.”

Later he texted me that he felt really bad. I said I was sorry and I love him. That I shouldn’t blow up like that and say those words. There is nothing wrong with you, We have to break the cycle because those are the terrorizing blow ups and screaming that my mother used on me that damaged me so much. It’s horrific to realize that trait in yourself, just when you vowed you would never be like that, that I would never be as violent as my mother. When I was younger, I vowed that I would have vegetarian children, and after Frank’s death I found them eating meat, frozen foods and junk half the time. Again, everything I ever wanted is the exact opposite. That because of the impact of his death and my stress and the trauma from childhood. But that is changing.

In Montessori, I remember the toddler teacher saying that there is doing something with a child and then there is abandonment. You need to do things with a child. Show them the complete step. You can’t just set them up and then take off and do something else on your own. But I have demonstrated things to them over and over again. They don’t seem to get it. Besides, he’s almost 12. I thought he understood me to put the food away and clear off the stove.

Mostly I need help. And I can’t stand living in Colorado anymore. I can’t bear the thought of another long winter. The climate here is not good for my health. Vata is always out of balance and I just feel better in warmer, more humid climates. So I am determined to find a way to either live in Mexico or India. Or maybe both. Maybe we’ll just come back and visit my father’s house on occasion. I need a change. A major change. To declare bankruptcy of everything and move there to just take care of my kids and raise them and live cheaply and simply and in community. I”ll teach yoga on the side. Do some writing and internet courses. Even do retreats down here ultimately. Get ready for the big economic collapse. With the no public option plan in insurance, what happened to our democracy? Since when does democracy not have a public option? Is there anything for the public anymore? Is there any scrap of a free country anymore with motivations for its people? Or is freedom the greatest myth of the 21st century?

I’m here at a University coffee shop surrounded by students as I wait for my daughter to get her massage. It’s her Christmas gift. I’m giving little things here and there for the whole months, and then they get one big thing at Christmas besides a few little things. I swear giving my kids all that consumer crap has bankrupted me. I’m sure I bought it out of sheer stress release in dealing with my life and grief, and also to give them whatever they wanted to protect them from any pain or suffering. I could not bear the suffering of my childhood and I didn’t want them to ever feel suffering. But that of course leads to dependent, whiny, disrespectful children who don’t pick up after themselves or put away your homemade soup.

I had a dream last night of a restaurant. I was with my children and father. It was a steak house of sorts and they seated us several floors down, rather isolated in the basement. I asked for a different seat. I saw Anusara founder John Friend. He was going to start doing children's yoga. He was going to use a Holly the Hamster character and he asked me if it were going to be a real money maker. I said I guess you have to see where your motivation is. I realize my motivation for my business was two-fold I didn't know what else to do and I can't do anything else or I would die so I might as well do what I love, and the fact that I was traumatized after my husband's death. I started running when he died and I never stopped. I never stopped to feel or grieve until later. Until now.

I had a good massage today, but it was more like rolfing. I’ve been very tight, perhaps since I haven’t been able to get to hot yoga class since Sunday because of sick children and other important interruptions. It was intense, working that stuck psoas and my shoulders. Imagining something is melting in there slowly as I let go and just relax. went today to the Boulder Mental Health Center and set up therapy sessions for my son. She is a Hispanic woman, although I think a man would be better. We talked about his anger, his loss of his father. All the influences in his life. His school grades slipping, his gun fascination and x-box playing. But that he’s a really good boy, gifted, was a subject once for a behavior genetics study at the University of Colorado that reported that he was very advanced. So I’m happy for him. Of course it reminds me that for the children I should be stable, despite the cold and desire to move to a warm climate. Where would they go to school? I just need to get ready for the long winter.

I need to go to the hot springs or something. That does the trick. Soak in the river, go to the Taos Pueblo Turtle Dance on New Years Day. Where they just dance near naked with turtles strapped to their calves under the hoar frost at dawn. It does wonders for you. You hardly notice the cold.

The Birth of the Bohemian Bombshell

2009-12-06T18:03:00.000-08:00

The Queen is born from the waters. Her bottom matsya self. Reptilian, earthy and watery. Her body is remade from the fires of the earth, the sweat of the rhythms and pulsation of life. Her heart opens, and her wings spread and her breath releases a beautiful new poem. A song, a mantra and it mixes with the air and sky until it waters down and fertilizes the earth she walks on.

I am the Bohemian Bombshell. I’m re-sculpting my body. I’m re-storying my Self. No longer do I carry the stories from childhood that were stuck in my body. I am re-patterning that groove in the record. I’m a hot yoga junkie now that I’ve tried out the Yoga Pod. I don’t get the headaches; it’s a shorter class and we do a downward dog!

Slowly the heat and the alignment and movement along with a new guiding myth in my life are re-shaping me. A rebirth. Just like after shavasana, there is something new out of that death period of rest. I have forgotten the terrible worthlessness, the shame. The shame of my house, myself, my body. This terrified little girl, so afraid and ashamed of her house that she could not call the police when she came home one day her senior year in high school and found that her little sister had attempted suicide. So ashamed that she had only herself to comfort her and she did it with bulimia, building more shame, more self-hatred. More hatred of her body, her self.

I will be 43 in 20 days. I have a new guiding myth. The Queen. I love my body. I love myself and I have value. I’m cleaning my house out swell. My body is full, 145 pounds typically. Up 15 pounds from three years ago. It's OK. It's right. Because I feel so good in my body. It’s strong and healthy. It's sensuous, sexy and beautiful. All my flesh, all my wrinkles and peeping gray hair. What a difference. My little girl of the past is OK with it too. She’s healed too. She doesn’t have to be 115 pounds like in her youth. She just gets to be healthy. She gets to be happy, trusting and safe. She gets to be herself. So everybody gets healed. Even my mother and father, sisters and brothers. It’s heaven on earth. And it’s in the body. It’s in the Bohemian Bombshell.

I am the Queen, the feather-plumed serpent, or the mermaid, half goat, half fish. The alchemical toad and bird chained together. I’m finally rooted, my energy balanced and back down toward the lower half of the body instead of rising in fear upward. I have a stable pelvis, that lizardly area, grounded and solid, and flowing freely with the energies of life. The hot yoga gets more deeply into my chest. For now my upper body lifts toward heaven. My heart, no longer a heavy stone, collapsing, pulling me forward and protected by rock-tight shoulders paralyzed by fear, but a bird, light, open and liberated. Free in the breath, present and powerful. And everything ceases. This is where Durga comes in. It’s that presence, unmistakable mother in her death and life. She’s in the heart, that amazing organ that has arteries running from it and to it, giving and receiving. It’s a Shiva consciousness. I can see more clearly my ego self because of the distance that mediation has gotten between me and my ego story. I like to reside in the Shiva spot more. It's an addiction. It’s protection, safety. It’s a silence that is yet so loud with the roar of the cosmos.

In hot yoga, I slow down to the heat and real rhythm of my body, notice every toxin in it. With my deep breathes I can feel every nook and cranny, any mis-alignment. It’s a slow melt, a smeltering, a crafting, as the new mythology kicks in. That I am of value and worthy. For I am the Queen of royal, cosmic blood. And my value does not fit in with the passing economic age of imaginary money, or even precious metals, but my value goes beyond, into something that cannot be measured by any earthly means. The value of my self and my work is not able to be assigned a measurable value, but it is rather unspoken, and connects to every living being on the planet. It connects and communicates with the herbs and the plants and the seas and water and the moon and the stars and the sun. It connects in faith, as it is confirmed and knows that an upheaval is necessary. To rebalance things. The classic Star Wars myth goes agrarian with kings and their peasants revolting. Politicians and proletariat. Corporations and taxyapers. So I’m not too worried any more. I’m excited. It’s time for some good action. We are all assigned our roles and so now it’s show time.

So is Birthed the Bohemian Bombshell.

The Second Layer

2009-12-03T12:31:00.000-08:00

After a rather intoxicating Thanksgiving break, I am back to doing hot yoga. I went to a new studio in Boulder to try it out. Not the straight Bikram stuff, but hot with a variety of poses. The toxins I ingested over the break, not to mention food, really got the best of me. I dripped sweat, but was incredibly tired and stiff. And this was only an hour class! Out of practice. How I crave stability. I felt fantastic, as usual, after class. I’d love to come every day for thirty days, or at least 3-4 times a week. It really does reshape your body, mind and soul. I can fee the muscles in my shoulders begging to let my heart free, my hips and back yearning to really open.

Nonetheless, I realized that you really do have to find the discipline to stay focused on not intoxicating yourself nor getting out of practice. I’ve always been the take two steps forward, one step back, or sometimes two back. Not quite getting anywhere, but nonetheless getting somewhere. So I am back there. I call this my second layer of cleaning house.

The first layer was just getting beneath the surface of things to see clearly. This layer we really see it and how it’s been going on as a major story in my life. As the cleaning in my father’s house has come to a halt. I knew it would happen. I had a dream about it while in Jamaica. That I went to my father’s house and things had been rearranged, headed by this one person who runs a magazine but never acknowledges me. I was very upset in the dream. I’ve had many portending dreams, yet never the courage, nor the desire to heed them much. It seems I can’t resist my desires, even though they head down the wrong direction.

So it was cleaning my father’s house. As I knew that despite my troubles and upset I shouldn’t go there. Shouldn’t change directions. Because my pattern is that when fear and upset arise, I change gears. The trick is to keep going. Work through the fear, stay stable. But I thought I must go home. I can’t afford my debts, I can’t make a living as an artist, blah, blah, doom doom blah.

As a child, I always cared for my father, tried to heal him, protect him from my raging mother. We intellectualized and spiritualized together, but there was no complete intimacy. As he was my father. And our relationship was buffered by the narcotic haze of his painkillers. So I was still very lonely as a child, only books to comfort me, a few siblings to play with for a while. But no visitors to the house, no dinners or get togethers. No extended family or neighbors. Just me. I was intimate with myself. I became a community of one.

That’s how it’s been most of my life. Relationships with men who used me and let me down, and although I wanted intimacy, I was not able to give it. I was loyal to my father.

And so it’s natural the cycle repeats itself. That my dad over Thanksgiving talked with my siblings, and doesn’t think it’s a good idea for me to move home. So that is that. I pull myself up by my bootstraps, rework my business plan, stay the course, stay put, and look for stability in myself.

Which brings me to the person I am in love with. He is married. I knew that. We both had our needs. We could help each other. I don’t have much time for a relationship, besides, my kids don’t like somebody else competing for attention with me. I am in love with him, but I can’t tell him that. For what is there to do beyond that claim? He is married, he has his wife to return to, and I have no one. Each time he leaves, the hole in my heart is more painful, more devastated, awash in sorrow. The loneliness and the loss. And I wait for a period of time, sometimes months, to see him again.

How I do crave intimacy, just when we are getting going on talking about interesting subjects and making love, he is gone. I can’t call him, text him, mail him. He is like a father, older than me, it provides wonderful togetherness and tenderness, but our relationship is limited. I cannot get what I need on my heart’s level. I am empty and sad. I can have my dreams, but I must stay rooted in reality. I will stay the course. I will practice my yoga, meditate, work, be a mother. Take up the time with the daily life. until I see him again.

I love him. But I am sad because I need reassurance for the future. I do want somebody in my life. I do crave deep intimacy. Somebody there for me at all times. And he lives out of state. Somebody who is not there for me all the time. And I am into taking very good care of myself. Not my father, not my ex and his kids and other needy people. I just take care of me and my children. My son’s grief and rage, my daughter’s learning disability. Learning to do home cooking again, gardening more, living simply and beautifully. That makes all the difference in the confidence in myself to succeed and not have to return to my father’s house, to it’s destruction and fear. That is no longer an option. And I feel so much better.

This is what the second layer is all about.

Jamaican Queen

2009-11-28T13:51:00.000-08:00

The Queen and her children went on vacation to Jamaica, courtesy of the King, who arrived later. How the Queen loves to travel, get outside her realm, experience something new and different, even though the KFCs and Pizza Huts have spread their tentacles even to the Caribbean. How courageous was the Queen so many said, to manage alone her children through airport security checks, immigration and feeding times all throughout. She loved escaping the harsh, dry climate of the mountain top and revel in the moisture abundant and tropical green scenery everywhere. How she loved having fun with her children and how she loved spending time with the King……

Although she wasn’t very happy about the speeding ticket she got when she returned to the castle.

Jamaica is a beautiful place. I like the people and culture. People are happy here, and Bob Marley’s image, music and presence seems to float over the place like a loving, happy father. I’d love to see and learn more and return. Even do give a yoga and storytelling/writing retreat!

I love the Caribbean, this being my second time here. Like the U.S. Virgin Islands, the breeze in Jamaica is sweet and the turquoise waters softened by salt that supports you as you float oblivious to the world and just stare at the blue sky and white clouds above. I love the humidity and the oxygen and the pressure here -- huge shift from the harsh vata-aggravating climate of Colorado. This is good for my health and my energy. I realize that is probably why I like Bikram yoga so much, the humidity; it holds your body; it cleanses it.

The all-inclusive resort we are at is just that. The Lady Hamilton Grand Palladium, Spanish-owned and rushed to finish. This new place is cracking at the plaster, tiles coming up, but the people are super nice, the food sumptuous. They hand you alcoholic drinks at check-in, and from the boisterous voices of Eastern-European sounding men at the swim up bar that opens at 10 a.m., the drinks don’t seem to stop. I haven’t drank alcohol in a long while, so I thought, it’s vacation! But I imbibed modestly, except for one night. I remember too well the affects of this particular poisoning. I feel so much better without it. Same thing with the food. This incredible abundance of decadence, but one has to remember one’s own power of choice. I choose not to be a pig, gorge on everything. And ultimately feel horrible afterwards! I marveled instead at the fresh fruit and steamed fish. But I have to admit there was so much to try - i loved Jamaican bammy bread and Italian gnocchi - I did start in on the heavier carb stuff and you just couldn’t resist the little desserts!

The kids sure loved it and I was happy to see them happy. Even though when my friend who treated us to all this fun was there for a few days, and I relished in talking to an adult about interesting array of subjects, he left and I was back to the empty fourth chair at meal times. That loneliness of being a single mother. I have to catch myself always with my son, not making him like a parent, talking to him about history and economics, and he tells me how Opa is always telling him about space people coming. That too! I said.

As my daughter stood up from the table at lunch one day I imagined Frank here with us at the table. How would his presence affect us? Are suicides really condemned to stay nearby invisible and assist the loved ones they abandoned and wounded so much? Are their silent presences to be felt to steady you in times of great overwhelm, loneliness and grief? What would it be like to have him here? On a family trip? What would my daugher be like to have her father in her life? Something she has never known? What would it be like for her to have a male presence in her life? A father? For my son? A man like him.

There is a Roman theme about this place, large Doric columns everywhere, if not completed beyond any further aesthetic quality rather than to keep costs low. The decadence is there, yet it seems this resort, opened not to long ago, was built at the tail end of the last gasps of capitalism. As if the credit ran out and they had to cut corners just to get the place open. But my kids love it. Just to swim, eat, do nothing, and watch a lot of TV in the room. (since we don’t have TV at home.) They’d be just as happy in a Comfort Inn in Westminster, Colorado. But we are in Jamaica, and it’s good for them to see places outside the U.S. And if anything they have had geography and history lessons hammered into them and even my daughter knows Jamaica is in the Caribbean now.

I re-read Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place on the plane and by the poolside. Such an amazing author. Such an amazing voice. Her brazen scolding of colonialism, and how she admits not much changed after emancipation. Sure, here the blacks serve the whites in a gluttonous stream. I love how Kincaid implored the rebuilding of Antigua’s library, which was destroyed in an earthquake and never rebuilt. How important education is - literary and artistic exploration and encouragement. How that is society, culture, humanity. Rather than decline or the reclining class lounging in artificial pools when the real prize of nature is but a few feet away at the beach. But then I stopped being so critical and enjoyed myself. I started thinking that this place could be converted into and make a great commune and education center and have a yoga storytelling retreat.

I went to the resort’s morning stretch class and ended up teaching it with yoga. There was a couple from Philadelphia I helped with their back pain, and even the bow-legged employee Smiley I gave exercises to help his condition. I miss teaching adult yoga. Perhaps I will return one day. Grow Medical Marijuana in the basement of my father’s house and offer other herbs and yoga therapy. It might make the right combination.

In Jamaica I could just rest and let go. Floating around in the Caribbean waters, I found that staying focused on the present and letting go of thoughts, and by gaining awareness of old patterns, stories, that no longer serve me I get some distance from the thoughts and patterns, which allows a certain energy to be released, a certain spell to be broken. The traumas and grief of the past are finally gone, a story, a house, let go. Like the house the old man hauled around in the movie UP, which we watched on the plane.

How that old attachment really makes things difficult, hold you down. They really are grooves in the koshas, your layers of being. You have to lift them out of the layers, smooth out the surface again, float around in the Caribbean water and feel your body supported, free, safe. There is a turning point, a new story all together. Like the sun gaining length again after the winter solstice. The shift. Re-patterning really takes hold. The old yearbooks of military history and authority and sorrow have faded. There is peace. You are rooted in being. Grounded in a feeling of peace and safety. You don’t have to be or feel unhappy anymore. You don’t have to be confused or upset. You don’t have to act out the rage that your mother had inside her, the frustration, the powerlessness, the grief and fear. You get to feel at rest, at peace, in balance and aware and it feels great. And happy. I was happy, floating around in the Caribbean sea in Jamaica. And although I knew the moment would pass and I'd be back home eventually facing difficulties and fears, I felt a shift in attitude. Something good and beautiful and loving is going to happen in life, regardless of everything else. Regardless of any old tragedy.

What do you do with the memory of the tragedy? You create art out of it.

I think of my grandmother, whose husband starved to death in a forced Mitzubishi tin mine outside of Tokyo during World War II. How my grandmother survived concentration camps and the soul-destroying hells of war with children. How those scars on the children and mother and family run deep. Generations deep. For I am her all over again, a widow with children.

I see this abundance of food at the resort, the people at my service. I think of my father, as a little boy separated from his mother. My Oma, not knowing whether he is dead or alive for two years. My father, eating snails from the river that was also the latrine to survive. Eating snakes and burying dead old men.

The grief is in the body. It is in the heart. Little by little you can coax them out, just like the mold in the basement, and get a good look. And then we see that it was not really anything, a story, a passage of time, in life. A book on the shelf, a memory, and we return to the present and it’s radiance and it is that radiance that makes us safe and happy.

The End of Food book I read was amazing. We really are headed for disaster. How I am returning to my healthy self again, no drinking, a regular routine. Because it really reprograms you.

Little Heart Openings

2009-11-19T12:38:00.001-08:00

It was a good thing that the Queen was in the middle of a Shambhala meditation class when she foolishly checked her email on her I-phone during the break and saw a message from her lawyer. The ex-King’s lawyer now wants to collect his fees at her expense. Good thing the Queen has been practicing a lot because this kind of thing can send her into a powerful spell of funk.

It was almost miraculous that as the burning upset started to arise, the meditation teacher was talking about just such a thing. How these thoughts interrupt our peaceful abiding if we let them. The breath and the present are very powerful tools, if you are willing to use them. I know how painful it is to have to indulge in the demon forces. The present really is my Knight in Shining Armor. It takes care of me. The demons of the past are held at bay. I have a lot of space between the upset, the trauma and my body is slowly releasing it.

The evil Judge Klein rejected my lawyer’s request for his fees to be paid since I had to take Justin Chipman to court because he let my house go into foreclosure. The other judge was in agreement that the divorce agreement included my ability to protect myself with a lawyer, but it rotated away from her. Now Justin’s lawyer wants to collect on the same provision! There is no justice. It’s insane. I will just have to collect by complaining to the realtor board and collecting through his Errors and Omissions insurance. I think Justin is terrified about it, hence his kindness and “nice guy” act on full on for me. Something I’m a softy for. I thought I could get him to trade what he owes me to help me with the rental properties and my father’s house. But how soon I forget, my lawyer, another knight in shining armor, reminds me. Why would I put myself through the same torture of his incompetency, undependability, endless screw-ups and lies? I guess I’m like the old man in the fairy tale of the Old Man Who Could Make Withered Trees Bloom Again. Always kind, even to the evil do-ers. However, I think it’s a boundary issue. And I tend to attract the types of people who know they can cross my boundaries and I let them. No MORE!

I went to Anusara yoga class today with Jeanie Manchester. She’s so wonderful. Her little story about the monk who keeps falling in the same puddle day after day reminded me of my predicament. I don’t learn from experience very well. To become aware of this is the important thing. My son made me aware that I am always invalidating what he says. It was in a flash at the dinner table yesterday that I was made aware of this. He says something, and I say, no that’s not true. As if I think he is a child and doesn’t know the truth. But he’s almost 12 and very smart. I was shocked at myself. My daughter said, “It’s true mom. You do.” And she chimed in that I’m always disbelieving her. I said I was sorry and would do better. Awareness is key, and the ability to really surrender all of yourself.

So I was aware that little by little, my heart is opening, my chest is expanding. I contribute it to hot yoga deepening my muscle work, and the Anursara for the awareness of alignment. How the inner spiral of getting thighs back is so important to opening the heart, opening the chest. That the tension in my arms, even though I have a herniated disk at C3 from a hit-and-run car accident from there, is from the collapsed chest, the powerlessness. But little by little I am claiming my power. The Queen’s power that she can do anything once the demon groove of energetic patterning are removed from her body and she is left with the present to create and believe in anything she wants and make it come true. After a lot of back bends, I cried in shavasana again. That little by little releasing of all the old stuff, the realization that I am valuable. I am powerful and worthy of respect. Even remembering the hit-and-run car accident, how powerless I felt when I failed to identify the man from the license photos. The failure I felt. The abandonment when not only the man who hit me but the man that I hit with my car in front of me who also fled when I said I was hurt. How the body holds all that in, in the shoulders, the neck. The yoga, the meditation and breath and the present slowly unsnares everything like Drano unclogging everything from the deep.

After class I went to my father’s house again. We had lunch and later we worked on some piles of boxes of papers, magazines, junk mail and bills that were in the living room. I did find a few old Mother Earth News magazines to mull through, and a diary of my mother’s cross-country trip with her sister in 1953. But mostly it was tedious, as we went through every piece of paper in several boxes. I got hasty when it came to junk mail catalogs from 2000. He said, “Slow down!” And it irritated me. I began thinking of the futility of all this. Can I really live with my father? He doesn’t want to move out completely so we could clear it all out, gut it and redo it, we’d just work around him. I should just move to Puerto Rico. But then I want to take care of my father. I want to clean this house out. I want to have another adult around to help me raise my children. I want to have a beautiful garden in the backyard and go back to being a mother and homemaker again. Just without all the loneliness and isolation. We shall see.

Bottom

2009-11-16T19:43:00.000-08:00

The Queen was overwhelmed by the demon Black Mold. It all seemed so hopeless to go up against it. It was down there in the basement. The darkness now has eyes, and the creature has now been awakened. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, just sitting down there underneath the stairs. It’s eyes open and glowing. But at least its presence was made known. Now she can get to the bottom of things. She just might be able to deal with it.

But the demon Black Mold is very powerful. It tells the Queen to go back to sleep. Ignore it. It’s too powerful for her to deal with at this time. The Queen feels sleepy, she fights to stay with the demon, even though she feels overwhelmed.

I was driving down the road this morning when I realized that I had forgotten my yoga mat for Bikram class. I came back to the house, and accidentally left the door open and Sargeant Pepe ran out. “Oh, drat! Now I’ll be late,” I thought, because it's hard to lure him back in. The kids joke that the only thing I trained Pepe to do is to run outside in order to get a treat. So that’s what I had to do. Go all the way back in, get to the fridge and get a treat, lure him in, and dash myself back out again.

I observed the frustration brewing. I had to fight to focus on the out-breaths and get present and not fall into the old trapping of negative emotions. Those old feelings are too painful to indulge in anymore. A gift of about to turn 43. I’m like the rat who finally realized that those shocks hurt, and you need to give some things up if you’re going to survive or evolve and if your children are going to survive and evolve. Wisdom is the gift of age and the gift to the world.

I think it’s old trauma, old patterns related to stress that start to wear on you. It's post traumatic stress. I think about Frank's death. I think about my father. I feel so sorry for all the soldiers returning from Iraq. I’ve witnessed it in my father all my childhood, all my adulthood. How we children of concentration camp and war survivors are affected. How all children are horribly, horribly affected.

Finally back in my car, I was backing out and I had a flash of insight. It was the same kind of insight I had, incidentally, when I was backing out of a driveway when I was on the way to be with my mother dying in the hospital. I had just dropped my infant daughter off with a friend, and backing out I saw an image before me of her as a young woman. I got a call from my younger sister not long after that with the news that mom had passed.

Backing out on the way to yoga, I had the impression of powerlessness. The brutal stamping out of hope. My father as a 9 to 12-year-old imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp for Dutch colonialists on Java during World War II. That experience of horrible atrocities during the formative years, it scars so deep one gives up on affecting the outer world and there is only anger turned inward, its oppression total.

My father told me a story once about the war. That he was at camp Ambarawa 7, which had a monastery and nuns. One of my father’s few possessions was a towel his mother, my Oma, monogrammed for him. One day it was missing from his bed in the barracks. He climbed up high in the rafters one day and watched the nun come in and he witnessed her removing the threads from his towel.

He climbed down and confronted the nun. “That’s my towel,” he said. She just glared at him and said, “No it’s not,” and went back to work. He mustered up the courage to complain again, “It’s mine!” “You’re going to hell when you die and you’re not going to need it,” she said of his protestant soul.
My father wanted to hit her, he told me. “What could I do? Me, a little boy, up against the nun? That’s when I started to get angry.”

That’s what I carry of my father's onto my experience of reality. I react to it with his unconscious pain. That powerlessness I felt against my mother and her illness. It’s my mother, yet she’s raging at me, terrifying me and hurting me and my brother and sisters and my father. You try to take care of them, you feel guilty for their suffering. Because you love her too. She's still in my body. She's in my shoulders and psoas. She’s the blackness.

My father’s migraines, the rock-hard muscles in his shoulders and neck. I’d massage them, give him a head massage just like the nurse Babu did for him on Java. After yoga I can see still where my tension is in my arms, the collapsed chest, the shallow breath. How trauma and powerlessness shut you down. Unable to escape my mother’s prison as a child. Now able to finally be aware and get present rather than dwell in the past. Snake is a good friend.

The Black Mold is just a reminder, an opportunity to wake up. To look here and check this out. My mother's healing too, just like the dream, she's helping cleaning. We're searching every corner of our energy bodies for leftover stories. What powerlessness and discouragement do we feel when stress arrives? What hopelessness? That depression that renders us without courage to face life. We find the courage again and this time its grounded in being.

Shall I move forward on my desire to clean out and fix up my father’s house? Now that I’ve hit the basement and found the snake and the mold and the rot, discovered the rat that gnaws at the tree and the toad that blocks the well. Now that I know the facts and what needs to be dealt with, I can summon the community to help me deal with it. Now the castle can be rebuilt again. The samskaras have been removed from the layers of being and now I am free to create anew with the power of the present. And the community makes all the difference. Something I didn't have as a child, isolated here on Kilkenny Street East of Boulder out in the country with the cows and the corn.

I wrote Dad a letter. I said I could not live there. And that he should consider living with my brother for his health. Today he said he was down there with some bleach working with the mold. Gads! Julia was supposed to be over there today. I hope she convinces him that a Haz Mat unit needs to be consulted!

The Queen and the Black Mold

2009-11-15T12:17:00.001-08:00

I brought a friend who rebuilds houses professionally over to access my father's house. He basically said the house was a health hazard because of two things: black mold in the basement and the mouse feces. He asked my father if he were willing to move out for a month or two to get the whole place gutted and cleaned out, and he said no.

SO! The reality is that the black mold is winning. I wrote my father a letter saying that I can't continue cleaning or coming over with the kids and that he should really consider moving in with me temporarily to clean the place properly or just permanently moving in with my brother as my father gets older and needs help and really for his own health. Having him spend more time among the black mold is not healthy! it gets into the ventilation!

I was aghast, horrified, a bit depressed. But it seems I've been dealing with the unexpected and the disappointing all my life. So I will just stay present and see what else arises. But I really want my father to be well and rescue him from the Black Mold! I even wrote Julia an email asking her to talk to him. He seems to trust her.

So symbolic that it comes from the basement. Something still very unconscious and insidious that does not want to rear its head but is starting to. Perhaps my father does not want to deal with it because of that reason. That it would bring up war memories and horrors that are still too painful for his fragile self to deal with.

But at least now the Queen knows her enemy the Black Mold, and she will figure out how to deal with it next.

The Queen Sheds her skin

2009-11-14T16:17:00.001-08:00

The Queen's oldest sister, Narada, who lives in India, sent an email asking about their father, Saint Albert the Wise. She read the Queen's interpretation of the myth Vishnu's dream and replied that their cult leader said that the demons coming out of Vishnu's ears were the first homosexuals because of their voracious sexual appetite. The Queen was offended by this interpretation, and said so. She thought that personal choice of sexuality should not be demonized and judged wrong.

Her sister immediately got upset and withdrew. "People are always offending me. Now I must retreat from such negative associations," she said. Forgive me, but I don't know why you despise Krishna so much."
"But how can you judge me?" the Queen asked her sister. "How the Queen loves the divine, but experiences it in a completely different reality than you, dear sister." Because all the Queen could feel for her sister was love, because their mother, the Witch of Kilkenny Street, hit her sister the hardest when they were growing up in the ruined castle. That's because she was the eldest, and got the most blows from the witch, who shut her down completely, and a strict cult was the only thing that would salvage her fragile psyche.

I cleaned out my father's house again today. It is as if I have peeled down a layer of stuff. The first level is about what you can deal with, what you can throw away or how to make a semblage of how to organize things. Sometimes I would take a box from the other back bedrooms and start looking through it. I'm looking for the boxes, the obvious trash. That was the first month and what filled the first dumpster run. In one box from the basement, I found an amazing thing. Two petrified garter snakes. One curled perfectly and it's head curling up, its eye hollowed out. Then there was a much smaller one. I saved the big one and gave the other to my artist friend Wendy. I remember when I lived in the basement as a 22-year-old and found dead snakes on my underwear I picked up off the floor. So I thought it was symbolic. I am shedding my skin. A layer of something very deep - energy stuck in my lawyers of body and being bubbling up and getting cleaned out. I feel it's a stage toward rebirth, as you begin to see in meditation that there really is something greater than your ego mind when you finally get some distance between it and can see things more clearly. And you get hungry for it.

This time cleaning I started tackling piles of stuff on tables and tackle its details. Like the kitchen. A particular doozy. Dad and I started in the small cabinet that has 29 years of grease stains all over it from the stove below. Julia had cleaned the stove and it remarkably looks so much better. We pulled out dozens of old herbs and spices, and Indonesian cooking ingredients. duplicate bottles of garlic powder, onion onion powder, basil that was from 1992. There were even some bottles so ld they still had on the paper my mother had covered them up with to reuse the item.
The rest of the kitchen was just filled with scattered items in complete disorder. Outdated food cans my father kept for survival but never cooked. He typically ate out or warmed up some soup from the fridge or ate something frozen. On the table and counters there were bathroom products, bug killer, car oil. I sorted them out and consolidated them into cabinets.

I realized that my father is of the depression era, born in 1931. When it comes to cleaning, I have to have him right there with me because you can't throw anything away. Weeks earlier we had gone through every piece of paper in zillions of boxes. We even had found Liberace's autograph. Now we are going through every screw, button, lock, stamp, zillions of little things and you sort through it but encourage him to just throw it away and mostly he does. It was hard to get him to part with some of the old food. When Julia was here she helped me convince him. You have to go down to every nut and screw and receipt, and pen cap and a pair of scissors parts that lost its central screw and he was going to have it repaired. There were dozens of Nescafe jars in other cabinets that were empty. I know he was thinking he could find some use for them, like fill them with lentils or rice. He held onto it and you could tell it brought some kind of sentimentality. So he couldn't part with it and I said no problem. There is a movable kitchen cart in the middle of the kitchen and I sorted through the layers of food cans that where years out of date, every kind of herb, natural supplement and health liquid you could think of. They were scattered all over the place. So I sorted cans to go into the pantry Julia and i cleaned out (of zillions of cobwebs and dust) last time. And the natural stuff to another area.

My brother, Albert, came over too. I hadn't seen him in so long. He's the workaholic senior software engineer for a big company. He helped Dad sort, which was good. To have other people help him sift it all out too. I was able to work quietly in other areas, taking sneaky liberties of throwing out obvious junk at my discretion.

Earlier I had talked to my father about my older sister Nancy. How she offended me in an email recently and made me angry, and that it seems she has a personality disorder. It brought up a lot of grief around my sister, who was a mother to me. The memory of playing with dolls and making up stories, cooking in the kitchen and growing plants. It made my childhood so happy against my mother's insanity. I remember the sorrow and the helplessness I felt that strangled my heart when my mother was screaming and cursing at Nancy, destroying her sense of self. Shredding any sense of worthiness after being so startled and confused by the violence. Because the violence was jarring. It took you out of your body. You knew your body was not a safe place to be.

Nancy was my buffer to my mother, to all of us kids. And she fought back the best she could, as my father was much of the time incapacitated with migraines and pain killers and unable to help. It's like the Japanese guards' brutal action that rendered my father helpless to act against during his childhood in the concentration camp. Dad to this day feels guilty for asking my sister to leave the house, after she and my mother's fighting was too much and my mother ordered her out. She fled to Alaska and worked for the forest service, only to leave behind the drug scene there and have the Krishnas meet her at the airport in Honolulu. That was the end of having my sister around the house and the beginning of my mother wailing about her and her "shitty religion." I was six years younger than my sister. I was in the 8th grade. That sense of loss has carried with me so long now. Now my sister is coming back from India in July and will be living in Denver again after 30 years away where her daughter and grandchildren live. I wonder if coming home brings some powerful stuff up and that's the cause of the upset. This tension between us is to be resolved and for that she would be healed as well.

I didn't allow my upset to be indulged. That typical rage that I felt when my ex-husband's ex-wife would offend me. I learned that the price you pay for that emotional burning is too steep. I have no bad feelings against my sister. I do not want to engage in an energy drain. It really messes you up. I know from experience that you get what you think about when you're in a negative state a lot. So now I can only send love. I allow her to be who she is, and I minimize the rest. Avoid it completely if needed. But always love her, and heal the pain through forgiveness so that only freedom remains.

Things have definitely cleared out on a noticeable level. I've been really happy. I broke my health kick this weekend, but it was like a ritual. I really notice the differences in my life with the shedding of the old stuff. That those negative thinking grooves are finally but ghosts in the distant sky. This regular groove is very present, and relaxed, and content. Things in our household are going so well. Like my daughter's schoolwork -she's grooving math - and the overall functioning of the household. Thank you maid! And more friends in my life! There is harmony it seems, and all because I've slowed down. I practice yoga and meditation daily and they ground me in their ritual. I think the future is going to be even more amazing, because I have no desire to know what it is at all because I am really just so in love with the present.

I will be back on track come Monday, because the magic of the yoga drives you on. Snake is pretty powerful. In mythic yoga practice, the heart is opening, chest is expanding, my wings are stretching out, and I'm firmly anchored in my snake, fish tail bottom, my reptilian hull.

Maybe it really is the return of Quetzalcoatl.

Meditation is a wonderful thing

2009-11-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

The Queen loves to meditate. Somehow driving to downtown Boulder and sitting in Shambhala meditation with others is just the ticket she needed to calm the demons that overtake her mind with busy thoughts of doomsday, loneliness, children's doctors and orthodontics appointment and ten thousand other things.

But amazingly, meditation puts some space and distance between those thoughts. And also the Queen is tired of thinking them and feeling bad with them. It's so easy to indulge! the thoughts cry, but every time she practices in the morning or with the group, those anxieties and fears tend to slip away faster. They don't have much power. Demons begone! Amazingly they slip away, defeated. Meditation leaves such clarity, openness. But you do have to practice. So every day now, the Queen has gotten up early, gone down stairs, lit the fireplace and practiced. Amazingly, all she is left with is the present. And the present becomes delicious and powerful. As if those grooves of the past the demons carved are finally lifting, the demons are bored and are packing up and going home, because the Queen doesn't pay any attention to them anymore.

Even though my ex-husband let the house go into foreclosure and it's looking pretty dismal that I will ever see my $30k i was owed, I'm not feeling that bad any more. I refuse to be pulled into the past or worry about the present. Meditation is pretty powerful, and I'm convinced that something will come out of this by being so present. Like I'm pulling out of my long depression since all this happened (and since the King left on a long trip.) And thinking that, well, I can maybe pull through. Gloom and doom and bankruptcy are not the only possibility. I might just be able to be inspired and sit down and write something creative again and get the creative juices flowing and reapply myself to my work. Because I have been doing not much more than lots of yoga, meditation, tending to the children's myriad needs and pumping myself full of wonderful ayurvedic herbs and vitamins. Sabbaticals are sometimes a good thing. The creative well springs up. Especially when you slow down, take good care of yourself and children. Not much can get done if you are not well! So healing does happen. All the deep grief, unfortunate events, you can finally pull ahead of them and look back and say, "ha!" What an experience! Sure glad that is done!" and you can revel in the present moment. The creative present moment and look ahead, as if one chapter is really, finally closed, and there is new life ahead. And the possibilities are endless.

I went to regular Anusara class today. My psoas is still killing me, and it seems like I am more tight from all the Bikram yoga, that did get deeper into my muscles, but because they use the same poses over and over again, I am weaker in the regular asana routines! So much mother came up during practice. The "Waterfall" of thoughts as the Buddhists call it. But it's the practice that helps. All of her negativity and rage. It has been helpful also to practice agnosticism. There is no "god" or "karma" to gloss over the pain of life. You just accept it. I don't have to go boo hoo, why did I have a violent schizophrenic for a mother? Because you wonder about those Ft. Hood soldiers. What did they do to deserve a massacre? Or the women murder victims of the crazy man in the Ohio house. Life is ferocious. The idea of God puts such a buffer on things. But it also gives you a crutch to stay protected from your pain. Because really when you accept it, you are happier. There was an article in the paper about a psychology study of people who had this procedure in which their bowels had to be on the outside of their bodies. Half of the patients were told that there was the possibility that their bowels one day could be put back inside of them and they would be normal. The other half were told that this is what their situation is and there is no other possibility. The people with "Hope" suffered more, putting their life off in the future. The people with no hope, were actually happier. They accepted their situation. So we don't put any hope for God to save us. We just accept life. And somehow it actually becomes more beautiful, more amazing. You just love your story, your past, your demonic mother who is actually helping you amazingly to clean yourself out. Clean all the last drops of whatever is holding you back.

Deeper Cleaning

2009-11-10T19:12:00.000-08:00

Two nights ago I had a dream about cleaning out my father's house. He wasn't there, but other people were there to help. It was great having the help, and even my mother was there. But then in the dream I realized, my mother's dead, and asked other's if they had seen her there and they said yes.

The next day I went to my father's house and began cleaning again. I removed the junk I had taken out of the back bedroom that my mother used to occupy and threw it in the dumpster. Most of it I threw away: an old rusty trunk, old newspapers, ripped up clothing covered with cat hair, ripped up old suitcases. You could hear a music box chime go off. It's as if it were here from the dream, helping, approving, chiming in. My mother was always collecting music boxes from garage sales.

Her bedroom was finally cleared out of mounds of junk for the first time in 35 years. You could see the floor finally - old yellow shag carpet. This was my mother's bedroom and it reminded me of before she died she would just urinate over the side of the bed. Or throw her used leenex over the side and they would pile up. Social services finally stepped in, because my father could not deal with her, guilty as he felt. But my mother was so beligerant that no public geriatric, psychiatric nursing home would take her, except one far down in Englewood. I had other memory flashes as I threw stuff out. I threw out old pictures, a broken glass, travel books that where 20 years old. Crash it went into the dumpster. I remembered the time we sat on the edge of her bed after a particularly big screaming fest when I was a child. She said she was sorry, and told me about her electric shock treatments as a 19-year-old in 1949 when she had a nervous breakdown because of her violent father. She said it was like a piano falling on top of her head.

I started pulling up the filthy carpet. It could tear like tissue paper it was so old and dusty. I stopped, sneazing. I figured to take one step at a time. I needed to empty out first.

Later, I went to a Bikram yoga class. The layers of emotions can be peeled away by doing this yoga, as most yogas. A big memory of Frank's suicide note came to me. "Now she's going to have to work." I remember being so traumatized from being penniless that yes, I have to work. How stupid of me to be dependent, to trust anybody. To be abandoned so terribly. I started working and never stopped. And now in Shavasana after the yoga, I cried. No, I don't have to work. I can relax now. I can just take care of my children. I can heal myself. I can go back to the prima materia, before the wounding, and be a mother. I am cleaning out my father's house, cleaning out my emotions. I will go back to being a mom, cooking, gardening, and taking care of my children and my father now. There is a huge relief.

So yesterday my father's friend Julia, the maid, showed up. What relief! Just like my dream. To have others helping me. Because every time the dust and dirt and memories over whelm me. The bathroom mirror, dirty and stained with toothpaste from our childhood. The mirror I looked into as a teenager, getting ready for a date. And any boy who came over never came over again.

And later, more friends showed up at my own house. Dreams do come true. Because old stuff does get cleaned out. Ever so slightly, it really does. Even in meditation, you get further and further away from those disturbing thoughts. I had a meditation class today. Even though it was irritating to sit there. My psoas had frozen up in the left leg. It's been terribly painful for about a month. It's letting go a lot of stuff. A lot of trauma. Things do get healed. You just have to let go, let go of all the resistance, and most of all let go that there was ever anything wrong with your life. It's just one great beautiful story. And it's healing. I believe my mother gets healed by the cleaning of the house. That's why I dreamed her.

The dumpster was filled up. I called to have them haul it away, and my father said it was all taken away. I feels so much lighter now. All those emotions are gone. Because they dissolve in meditation, dissolve and leave the body, and they have gone physically as well.

The Queen of Bohemia Cleans Her Father's House

2009-11-04T13:01:00.000-08:00

It has been a while since I have written. Not out of lack of substance, but out of lack of capacity to express what has occurred in the past month.

I started cleaning my father's house. The house I grew up in. I also started taking Bikram Hot Yoga classes. Somehow I think the two are related. The house and my body.

I was at the Cordillera Spa and Lodge a few weeks ago in Edwards, Colorado giving a workshop, and I had a wonderful massage, swim, whirlpool, and I decided to sit in the sauna. I usually am reluctant to be in saunas or hot rooms or anything because it makes me irritable and claustrophobic. Somehow this time I loved the heat, loved the sweating. I felt like something deep was melting away. The detox. And the spa place was so beautiful. Ultra luxurious, but a not conspicuous. Just nice, remote, even though I could not help but wonder what the heating bills were on these monstrous houses dotting the landscape that remained unoccupied!

Unfortunately, the drive back was so stressful because of snow, overturned trucks on I-70 and I feared they would close the tunnel and I'd be stranded. Worse, it was return traffic from the casino towns. Major bummer. It took me all day the next day to recover. But then I started cleaning my father's house.

He said it was time. That I would be able to come and live there if need be. He has a third acre in east Boulder. A nice bit to grow a lot of organic food, our favorite past time. But of course I would have to tackle the mess that is his house. When my mother died, I helped him clean it out. The piles and piles of old clothing, junk in every corner, the clogging of the entire house, buried in stuff. That on top of it that it had not been cleaned in 30 years.

He said it would probably make his migraine headaches go away, let everything go. That and maybe the big blockage at his navel area. A large weight held there, probably from emotions but also too much chocolate.

We started in the hallway, where he uses cardboard boxes to fill up each with old bills, magazines, junk mail, odds and ends. He was afraid to throw anything away. So we went piece by piece, paper by paper. I had ordered a big roll off for all the stuff. We just started dumping it, and recycling some, because he says he gets credit for the weight. But we filled up the recycling bin in a matter of hours, and it only comes once every two weeks. So piece by piece we went. I even found the Liberace autograph my mother said she had and had not found the first time I cleaned out the house when she died.

I had made a box of items that could be stored. My father's biggest problem is simple disorganization. Zillions of items just scattered around the house. I went in this storage area to put the box there. Mice had gotten into his end of the world food supply or wheat and what not that was there. It has been there since 2000. I saw two dead mice in traps, screamed, and dropped the box I was carrying, which upset another, untripped mouse trap. The box fell to the floor, which was covered in mice feces. I screamed again. I wondered, am I able to really clean this place out? It's so overwhelming the mess, the filth. The emotional layers there.

I went to my first Bikram class and made it through. I dripped with sweat. I felt dizzy at times, but did pretty well. Afterwards I was exhilarated, like the best high i've had in a long time. Natural, gorgeous. My skin was glowing. I had energy. I signed up for the two-week special for $25 bucks. Price is right. So I went again, felt better and wasn't dizzy. Again, dripped off sweat, like layers and layers of emotions and negativity and fear. Afterwards, felt great again. It was impossible to feel negative. I could deal with my father's house. I had to.

I came to my father's house again on Halloween. It was all abuzz with a friend of his who was a professional house cleaner. She was helping him go through tons of stuff. I was amazed they had cleaned out the back dining room area, which used to be the living room before the garage was made into the living room. But the back room was just tables piled high with tons of papers and stuff. She removed it. you could see the floor, which was previously covered. You can now see the original orange and yellow shag carpet from 1973. Although dust fills all the corners. Julia, the housekeeper, vacuumed up the dust, which I'm usually covered in when I help clean, sneezing the whole way through. Huge progress was made.

Trick-or-treaters came by and I dished out candy. I was amazed that kids come up to this house, since it's so run-down on the outside too. Maybe they think it's spooky, or dare each other to go up there, or maybe they are just greedy for candy. A Rotor Rooter truck was outside on the driveway too, blocking the way, because sadly the concrete in the back sank down so much because of a lot of rain and because the builder was cheap and didn't set the concrete correctly and it crushed the sewer pipe. So the toilets were unusable. Julia and I thought it was symbolic. THE SHIT CAN'T GET OUT.

So I went to a Third Bikram class. Sweated out some more. I haven't drank alcohol in many weeks either in a gung-ho attempt to cleanse. Went to a Shambhala meditation class. I can look at the shit clearly. I can see things arise in my mind. I know it's there. I can choose to get swept up in the shit, yes, I do sometimes and I pay dearly for it. And other times I can let it go. Is that what being human is about?

Somehow, though, seeing reality can be intense. It can also get a little boring. Or am I covering it all up again? Do you ever break through? Are you ever completely cleaned out? Or would you be dead? In reading Becker's The Denial of Death, it's about realizing how intense life is, that we are really half earth and half angel. Our bodies complicate things, even horrify us. We make up myths and religions to get around the death thing. But die we do. And to face death, and reality, is heroic. And that our society doesn't really offer us, especially youth, any opportunity to be heroic, as we barely face death anymore. We just watch it on TV and gawk at the body count piling up in the headline news. We cowardly wait in the shadows at some horror of life, hoping it won't happen to us. But it does happen to us. All the time. And somehow cleaning that out and really looking at it, to not deny anything of yourself, the filth in your father's house, the gunk in your body, that is good. You love it all. Every dark corner of it.

I wonder what the next hot yoga class has in store. And when I will find the courage to clean my father's house again.

The Memoir of My Body

2009-10-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

My soul experiences existence through my body. As my body, I feel the energy of the universe pulsing through me, entering from my pelvic floor, moving up the spine, through the chakras, into the heart, into expanded awareness and vision from the third eye and transcendence in consciousness.

All because of my body. It houses me and my Beloved. It is my vehicle, my house, my companion. It is my experience, my art. My story.

This is the memoir of my body.

When I was six-months old I was admitted to Dover General Hospital in New Jersey for a spinal tap. I had a high fever and the doctors didn’t know why.
“There is something toxic in her bedroom,” test results showed.
My father found the culprit in the Shell pest strips used in 1967 to catch flies. It’s long, brown curl was emitting nerve gas, hanging next to my crib. I was in an incubator for a week.

“You almost died, baby Sparky Patti,” my mother said, retelling the story many times during my life.

There has always been this low-level anxiety within me. I noticed that anxiety subsided when I was rolfed in the psoas. There was no longer any upward pulling tension. I was grounded. I was safe.

A recent New York Times article explained how some babies are wired for anxiety and grow up as anxious adults. But it’s that anxiety that makes them such good workers. Controlling their environment, planning ahead. Ready for anything. The yoga sutras say that even the sage feels fear. So I knew fear from the very beginnings. My body entered the world anxious.

I had always thought it was because my mother was the wire monkey mother. That famous Harlow and Harlow experiment about how monkey babies who were held by their real mothers were well adjusted. The wire monkey’s who got a mother that was a bunch of wire with terry cloth on it turned out sort of normal, and those with only the wire monkey mother were psychotic.

My mother didn’t touch me much. If I leaned forward to hug her, she would resist, saying that she was afraid that I would “pull on her earrings,” and rip them out of her ears. The only time I remember her holding me was when I was about 6 and I had an earache and was crying and she held me and rocked me until it was time to go to the doctor appointment.
Although she gave me books and religiously took us to the library, my mother went to her own stack of books and she never read to me. My older sister by six years, Nancy, taught me how to use my fingers to flip through the card catalog and search the metal stacks for home making books. I read by myself.

My father’s body was always wracked with pain. He was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp on Java during World War II. No he is not Jewish or Japanese. It was the Dutch East Indies experience under Japanese occupation. That whole experience was still in his body, the post-traumatic stress, still in the muscles, that were always tense and giving him severe migraine headaches. The dark-orange prescription bottles of heavy narcotics overflowed on his night stand, rolling under the bed where somewhere he lays incapacitated for days in the dark, a washcloth over his eyes and the whole world shut out.

I would massage his upper back. His neck and shoulders. I gave him Indian head massage, like Babu, the Javanese nanny from his childhood, who could pull the hair in the right spot and relieve a headache, or give some Jamu for his health.

In his head massage, I imagined pulling out the pain, pulling out the memories, the snakes and tigers, volcanoes, airplanes and gunfire, death and violence. The death of his father – he starved to death at a Mitzubishi forced labor tin mine outside of Tokyo. We know the story by heart, for my grandfather’s picture watches from above my father’s bed.

"Shake out the pain from your hands," my father instructed me. It didn't leave my body. It just lodged itself in my heart.

Still, today, as I sit here and write this. I feel his body memory. The fear, the pain, the expectation of disaster. Of a mother blinding you with the light in the middle of the night, threatening to cut your hair off with scissors because you dared to groom the dog. And you thought she wouldn’t find the evidence buried at the bottom of the kitchen trashcan.

I am aware of some grief, some deep and distant collective wail. All the families who have suffered a body trauma, be it through war, cruelty, insanity, domestic violence - there is that anxiety in the body, pulling you up and out of the body, away from life. But it's a part of life that is raging on inside you. The shadow, begging and wailing and crying to be seen and loved and not denied. So we look at its story. We look at the story in the body so that we can see that the Devil is truly God's most beloved, and be at peace.

The Queen's Eyesight and BODY MEMOIRS

2009-10-08T10:57:00.000-07:00

The Queen realizes that without regular contact with the King she experiences a great deal of anxiety. That aloneness overwhelms her. That’s why she has the Queen’s Court. Who is there for her? This community and connection with others is so essential to her well being. To share in life and be intimate and care for one another -- friends, family, neighbors. It really does take a village, and what really is missing in the Queen's life is a village. The King sent her pictures of Italian Plazas with people congregating for no other purpose than to congregate and EXIST rather than to purchase something and go home alone and consume it in front of a glowing TV shrine with flickering Gods and Goddesses programming them about what to purchase and consume next. The Queen yearns for plazas and her soul yearns to start gardening again and eating with the village people. Yes, she’ d really like that.

I was reflecting on my eyes last night. I am so left-eye dominant, even though I am right-handed. The right eye is significantly poorer in sight. I photograph with my left eye and take pictures with my right hand. Inwardly I see my left half of my body lighter and brighter, and the right side dark and more gross and unaware, more solid. I lay in bed last night with my left arm over my left eye. I used to be the opposite, my entire life. I'd spend a lot of my time looking with just that left eye!

My left eye is smaller than the right, a little droopy. My daughter has the same characteristic and has been going through special education testing. She’s had trouble reading and writing despite intervention the past three years. Although as a child I excelled at reading and writing, I continued to fail math. I realize that I have the same problems as hers. Could the eyes be key to this issue?

We don't learn by auditory alone and we have poor short-term memory. It’s hard for her to grasp syntax and thus read and write. She is getting the info real fast, but processing it and understanding it are hindered. She is very visual.

I heard Carl Jung had the same problem with math. Are we so far into the right brain that we are in danger of falling into and being swallowed up by the unconscious? Like Pollack and Plath? I find it no small coincidence that Jung’s Red Book is being published now. Indeed, Mythic Yoga is an intuitive and collective grasp into his thinking and experience and is a continuation of his work, without my having ever been fully educated about his work beforehand. I have been a hobbyist Jungian ever since my psychology 101 class at CU Boulder.

I will be working on developing my right vision more. What is the story behind it? As a child growing up in the 70s, my six-years older sister, Nancy, wore glasses and hated them. I did palming exercises with her. By sixth grade I purposely flunked the eye exam so that I could get glasses. But then by junior high school I was so self-conscious and wanting to be pretty I stopped wearing them and couldn’t see the leaves on the trees anymore. It was just a Monet blur. But I could read so that was OK and in school I just squinted to see the blackboard by putting my index fingers to the edges of my eyes and slanting them Chinese-style.

I suffered through contact lenses into adulthood, having gotten some at age 16 and was amazed I could see the leaves on trees again. In my young adulthood I developed a conjunctivitis disease in which I could no longer wear soft lenses, because I slept in them so much. I endured the pain and irritation that comes with wearing hard contact lenses when of dust and dirt slip in. When my husband was still alive, I had Federico Peña help me search the dark floor of our box seats at the Pepsi Center during a Disney On Ice show of the Little Mermaid for a popped-out contact lens. I’m sure I was rubbing my eye or sucking on the lens moments before because of irritation, watching the show with one blurry eye.

I read Aldous Huxley’s book about his healing his eyes, and had prayed as a child that one day my eyes would be healed. I did eye exercises, palming. I wonder if my eyesight was an unwillingness to see the world ahead of me. Not to see the clutter and squalor and emotional chaos that was my childhood home. If I have a headache I focus on the eyes where a lot of tension occurs and make them relax deeply.

I remember when I had Lasik surgery on my eyes. I was told I had such extreme stigmatism that it would take longer with the laser cutting in my eye. I remember the smell of my eye under the laser. I remember the healing, protective eye gear during sleeping and around my then 1-year-old daughter.

Just yesterday while snuggling with my daughter she looked up at me and said, “I can see your third eye,” and she pointed right in the middle of my forehead. I had never spoken to her about that before until she said that, and I explained what the third eye was. I swear she has psychic abilities. We’ve played games where she guesses exactly what you were thinking. And a few days ago I was trying to place a movie actress and couldn’t verbalize it but had a picture of Sandra Bullock in my inner body. She said, “The lady in the Miss Congeniality movie.”

My daughter is getting the great team of educational help she needs. Yet the transition has been hard on her. She came to bed with me last night and cried how much she missed Creekside, her old school. She missed Lindsey, the after-school computer club teacher. How perfect I had childcare every day after school until 5 there, I also lamented. She misses her friends and knew everybody there. At the new school she likes her teacher a lot but is slow to find friends in established groups. I agonize with her all over again as I remembered my childhood experience of feeling on the outside. That deep emotional inferiority that arises. To really trust the self and have confidence. Sounds like I need to do a little yoga practice to affirm this new belief and myth in my life. To trust the self and remember my value and worth as a human being.

I told my daughter that her old school she wasn’t getting her educational needs met, as there were a lot of kids there not getting their needs met. How important it is that she must learn. And learn now. I must say it’s a disgrace that the children at lower-income schools don’t get the help they need like my daughter is at the high-income school. Such a disgrace. I had a dream once when I still lived in Arvada, because the local school had poor test scores. The poor woman in front of the school said, “What about my son? Doesn’t he have the right to education too?”
And as I teeter on the edge financially myself, is my child to be labeled poor and suddenly undeserving of education after falling through the monetary floor during the recession? The poor neighborhoods very well shortly be flooding the streets and starting a revolution, demanding health care and education for children as a focus of priority in this country and the world.

As I get ready to leave for Pine Ridge and a long week of travel, I must remember this. We shall see.

Bear

2009-10-04T15:56:00.000-07:00

My son said he recently saw a mountain lion one morning biking to school, and that it was as big as a couch. We have deer poop in the backyard, and my dog, Sergeant Pepe, is extremely interested and alert over another strong, new scent there. There was a black bear on our neighbor's driveway last night. The sheriff came around, the lights swirling in the darkness as if there were some arrest. It dawned on me that this time of year, living so close to the foothills, that the apples mushing on the ground in our back yard were attracting bears. As is my compost experiment of just chunking food scraps into the bushes.

There is something deep about all these animals appearing at this time of year. As the trees put on their gorgeous cloaks of red and yellow leaves, and the chill fills the air, I sense and feel a different energy. That dying and going within. Something transitioning, something coming up from the darkness that is emerging as it hybernates. And this energy connects me with all things.

I remember my body as container and as a protective shield. That being so deeply sensual, present and self-aware of how my body is feeling at all times puts me in tune with the now and with nature's rhythms. I walk a lot in the foothills of Boulder with my dog, Pepe. To be in glorious nature is my church, and that brisk, full alignment of the body walking is such great yoga. And to be out with nature there is the edge of sublime. Truly nature - trees, rocks, animals - they put you instantly in touch with the spirit world because they connect you instantly with the deepest archetypes of being. They point to the depths and you get in touch intuitively with that great beyond. You feel it moving through your body, as you, participating in duality. It's like the High Priestess card in the Tarot. I understand the dark side, the negative feminine. I accept my dark side and integrate it into me. I don't reject it. And once you do that you are whole, and you can pass through duality to the transcendent easily on the royal road. And then you become the Magician, in full power of all nature's forces. Whatever your psyche is pulling up from the unconscious is done with great awareness then consciously projected and manifests. But then there is other stuff that you can't quite control, that keeps coming at you.

In yoga practice, I have opened my hips considerably. Tight upper inner thighs are opened with extreme stretching and a good block. Tucking the tailbone and really achieving Mula Bandha opens you up and lets the heart come forward. I do snake pose and mermaid pose, in honor of that heaven and earth union. Then the bird poses, that heaven, and squats, the frog. I am totally into sitting on my sit bones. Even in the car (how those things take the spine out of you!) You really have to make an effort to sit up straight, but that makes all the difference. That and deep breathing. I am really into the legs, janu shirsasana, upavishta konasana. I can actually get my head to the floor, although I know the heart should be there first. But something is opening. Something is changing, transforming. It's the root chakra really connecting again to the body, to nature, to the container and the energy there.

But bear is big now in its presence. I remember I had a dream once of my mother, what was wrong with her? I asked. In the dream I saw her seated at a table and a big bear came along and swiped off a chunk of her head. I interpreted that dream as the powers of the unconscious - the bear in hybernation and its powers, and how my mother was swallowed up by it - in the head with too much thinking, insanity. So somehow the bear, with its eternal cycles of life, hybernating, awakening, has a message for me. This time of year, all the dark stuff can come up from the unconscious. Like you have to accept the most disgusting aspect of yourself. Today walking on the trail Pepe pooped twice, and I had only one plastic bag, already filled. I scooped the poop up with the bag, and had to carry it. It was messy, disgusting. But there is nowhere to dispose of the plastic and it's so damn unsightly on the trail, as people do leave their plastic-wrapped poop on the trail but I could not bring myself to do it. So I carried the poop. I thought poop is sacred too, so the natives even eat poop to say all this is of the creator, of Shiva. I certainly wasn't open to eating eating it so just carried it. I thought about the movie the Matrix. How Neo knew that everything - even Mr. Smith - was part of him. All the dark parts. So carrying the poop was just that too.

All around me on my walk the natural world was so pristine, I could not dump the dog poop not even in the man-made cylinder guiding a flow of the creek water. I just walked with the poop and I forgot about it eventually. Pepe reminded me of duality - his black and white body, the trickster. He comes when I call him 50 percent of the time. The other half you are not sure what to expect of his behavior. Isn't life like that? You just never know what is going to happen. Even if you are conscious. Sometimes you can predict, other times you cannot. So you just surrender to the moment and navigate from there. And you sense the energy changing and make a choice.

Picking up my daughter today at my father's, my father said he hasn't been feeling well. In his gut area, the third chakra. He has begun to throw things out again. That's what's blocking him; to really clean out that house. It came up again that I would have him live with us a little while, enough time in the next 9 months to gut the house, clean it up, start massive gardening on his third acre for our food and self-sufficiency, and we'd move back in by the time my lease is up. So we shall see. We shall see what bear has in store for me this fall.

Focus on Humanity, not Caesar's Coins

2009-10-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

I remember a friend of my father's; He was a concentration camp survivor, yet he hesitated to have his wife call an ambulance for fear of its expense when he felt chest pains. He died while his wife was driving him to the hospital.

Late one night my daughter had a fever and she had trouble breathing. The bumps on her looked like chicken pox and I thought she should see a doctor. Yet I paused.

I'm a self-employed widow and I have a $5,500 deductible on my family’s health insurance policy, so really everything comes out of pocket. If you’ve ever raised kids then you know how expensive it can get as kids get sick all the time. So I hesitated. I hesitated between life and death of my child because I feared I could not afford it. She was OK through the night, and in the morning I took her to the doctor and it turns out she had a bad virus.

Like me, millions of American have to hesitate or live in fear simply because they cannot afford health care. There is something fundamentally wrong with a society that does not allow for the well being of all of its citizens. Liberty and health is denied to American’s who are poor, self-employed, elderly or have pre-existing conditions. Here is where the true death panels exist – in health insurance companies.

The sign of a great society is that which focuses on humanity, rather than its material profit. America, once the home of the brave and the land of the free, is now America the corrupt and home of the greed. Corrupt is a rupture of the heart, a misguided system and wrong priority. Life should not be about monetary gain of Caesar’s coins but about the rapture of the heart and living and being in community. When health and education is for all, then the and arts and sciences will flourish again. But we live in this dark age of the former, and our world suffers because of it.

My son has flat feet and he has great pain in his knees and feet. He cried when he couldn't play football. The CAT scan costs $2,500 per foot to get orthotics. I was going to pay the non-insurance, self-pay rate of $1,245 per foot, but the administrator reminded me that if there is something really wrong with his feet and he needs more care, the insurance company could deny coverage, as then it would be a pre-existing condition. I wondered if that would be considered extortion. I wondered if this could be some plot to eliminate liberal artistic types like me who tend to be self-employed and can’t afford a lot of health insurance. I left without getting my son the scan and wondering what to do.

Weeks later I rebooked the appointment. My son is in pain. I don’t care if I have to use every credit card or declare bankruptcy I will get my children the health care they need. My daughter needs tutoring for special education. Whatever it costs it will be paid. I will find a way to pay it. We have to find a way to pay for health care and education in America because that’s what every man, woman and child needs. That’s what makes a healthy society and that’s what makes a society great.

It’s time to focus on the human, not the profit. When our society once again is community-based, rather than profit-based, we will then emerge from the darkness of the past and shine in the renaissance that this country will experience.

Free health care and education for all people.

In The Cave of the Heart - Anahata

2009-09-30T15:41:00.000-07:00

The Queen suffered a terrible sickness when the King left. It was a terrible wave of grief and loss. It is a very odd hollow echo of pain that came from much deeper within her heart. But this morning the Queen picked herself back up again, went to yoga class downtown on her pink moped (free parking!) and felt much better. She breathes and recognizes that Durga's name, hard to approach, is just that.

In the cave of the heart is that which swallows up all thought. It the event horizon of a black hole that swallows everything up, it's the anahata heart chakra- unstruck, it enters eternity as just being exists and is the only focus. It cuts out everything, like death comes through with a scythe to cut your life down at death. Isn't armageddon our own death? The death of the ego and the world it has spun out of its conditioning and storytelling? To cut everything, surrender, die. È più.

I've noticed that because of yoga practice and really working the inner thighs back, my lower lumbar spine I really released and I sit regularly on my sit bones now, right over the mula banda point. I'm just starting to figure out just what it means to get the thighs back and why, and it changes your whole relationship to your core and your alignment. It keeps you connected to the earth all time and this is a very safe feeling. To be so rooted in your own being, that radix ipsius. It's quite an awakening. It's as if I have finally learned how to release and remove those old grooves and patterns from a dysfunctional childhood by relaxing into it. Something else has woven deep patterns instead on the heart and body. The goodness and vibrations are ritualized through yoga and story. Awakening emerges from the heart as images and dreams, and we put it together with meaning and out pours a poem of the body.

I realize that my mother reacted to pattens of fear deeply engrained in her body. Overwhelmed by grief and loss and traumatized by her father and electro-shock treatments, my mother resorted to withdrawal from us children to cope with the overwhelming demands of a mother of four children. My father sick from post-traumatic stress, how does one raise children all alone with few resources, especially money, which plagued my mother terribly. I remember clearly my mother screaming at us that we "didn't even move a plate," or "turn off the lights!" Those are the exact things that my children don't do. I can feel myself mirroring her patterning, the fear, the overwhelm. How those patterns and feelings in our body compel us to repeat it unconsciously, no matter how hard we try not to. It takes effort not to give in to the pattern. To really end it in its tracks, end of story, and create a new reality, a new energy pattern in the body. Yoga reconditions the body's energy to reset patterns. Creative imagination, words and stories reinforce it on a symbolic level to our mythic aspect of our existence, the psyche.

So Durga myth resides in me now. Her energy to shut it all down, stop the thoughts, the pain, the sorrow and just remain in being and bliss. She is the mother that devours all that and let's you rest in her bosom. She lends me her weapons to keep battling the demons, and keep living as the Queen.

The Feet and the Breath

2009-09-24T18:35:00.000-07:00

I was talking with a Mythic Yoga participant in Mexico by SKYPE today and her feet came up in the discussion. I work with my own feet quite a bit, putting yoga to work in mindful, brisk walking in alignment as a great practice among nature. I spread my toes and all four corners of my feet. The peroneus muscle fires up and I feel rooted in the earth and I feel a safety, a surrender, an exhale. Before, instead of being centered over the vernicular bone in my foot where the mula bandha point hits the earth, I tended to lean back, as if not to take in the world. Balancing over that point also is essential to mula banha through proper alignment of the pelvis and the pelvic floor, the pubic and coccyx bones and that pubiococcyx muscle, that spanda of our bodies, that pulses in the energy up from that point and into our bodies, up our spines to the heart and then hits the pineal gland to make us super aware, super conscious. I think that's what we're all becoming. Super conscious beings, and that the earth changes are all part of a greater archetypical evolving psychology. Like some upcoming events are about stripping away an old psychology all together and shifting our awareness to a different level. It is almost like an ascension.

Then there is the breath. The breath affects the adrenal glands, which affect the kidneys. Deep breathing and saying yes to life with great optimism and expectation is essential to reprogram one from samskaras from past negative thinking, grief and shallow breathing. Those samskaras are the deep grooves our mind's energy seared into our energy fields of the body and psyche, they are like the toad at the bottom of the well blocking it from flowing wine; or the rat gnawing at the roots of a tree that used to have diamonds for leaves. The breath is like Drano, that loosens up whatever is lodged in the darkness of our unconscious. Allowing it to break up slowly and float to the surface to be examined and then sifted into reality up top here in our waking projection. And the breathing really slows the mind, it slows it all down and into the body and into deep connection with everything around you.

On the home front it was great to bring my daughter's tutor my father's home-grown tomatoes. She is going to make homemade sauce for us. The kids and I walked Pepe down to the school. It was drizzling out but much of that gorgeous part of fall here in Boulder near the foothills. We have a wonderful support system!

The Queen picked some more apples today from the backyard trees and will make a fine elixir for the visit of the King. And the house keeper is coming to deep clean tomorrow at one o'clock and she is beside herself with joy.

So that is Mythic Yoga for today.

The Queen of Bohemia No Longer Cleans Her Own House, or, Quetzalcoatl Returns

2009-09-23T16:30:00.000-07:00

I went to yoga class today with the divine Jeanie Manchester. How incredibly healing is yoga. How very essential to the core of well-being. And to have a wonderful teacher is also a gift. And to socialize with the kula. It's really essential, this kula, the community. It is the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. So important. I think it's the community that brings about my healing as well. That the Queen of Bohemia No Longer Cleans Her Own House. She just hired off of Craigs List Boulder to clean her house and do housekeeping (GOD the laundry, next I need a cook) a 30-year-old Czech woman who wants to learn English. The Queen showed her the "Ancestral Wall," of Grandma Tichacek dressed up in traditional Bohemian folk couture and used the few words of Dobje (good) kutchka (cat) and smetak (dustpan broom) on her.
The Queen also finally took the handyman's advice and let him have Lance mow the lawn and get rid of the tons of cardboard and trash that was in the garage, and keep things running smoothly in the house, even though it costs money.(CASH! I'M ON CASH BASIS! SCARY!) And the Queen met with the special education teacher about her daughter, and they are having her tested, and she's so grateful for the help, from the school psychologist to the principal to the teacher to the tutor. And today her daughter got to go to the farmer's market with another adult. A lovely, theatrical woman named Libby who will be spending time with her. It really takes a village, an entire court.
It seems modern society has really taken a turn for the most isolated. To cut ourselves off from community, family, and now mostly alone with our own televisions and I-Phones. But the Queen has a wonderful court, a wonderful community, and it allows her to focus on more important things, like her children, her creative work, and her King. What a delight that is.

I am most excited because I've been accepted to do a children's camp at Kripalu while Shiva Rea is teaching. What a wonderful opportunity to create a beautiful children's yoga program and beautiful community. I feel a wonderful energy. In fact, I feel such a wonderful energy that because I am not focusing on the demons and letting them drag me down into their dungeon, because I hear the King's voice and I feel the optimism and I move toward the light and that's all I see. I felt the yoga today down to my bones and down to my soul. Things are looking up, because I focus on the good. I know and acknowledge that the dark is there. Oh, yes, it's there and it's my friend, actually. My dear sister, Ereshkigal, or the devil himself, or any dark, cut off part of myself. All my demons just want my love and friendship. I know they are there. And we play on in the field of time and space and we take duality and we shape it into nice little dioramas and dramas, and how the dramas have played out. But somehow I feel it's the end of drama and the beginning of deep peace. Eternity. And that's where Quetzalcoatl comes in. How eternity periodically renews itself. THANK YOU ELIADE. That as the world and the collective psyche goes through a transformation, things on the surface will change. There is a shift in consciousness. To focus on the good, the truth, the love and the light. Because after the Kali Yug, comes the Satya Yug. Beautiful things are happening. At the darkest point is the opening, the light. Because in duality, after all, all things are equal to it's shadow. However great works are created, just as much darkness. And just as much darkness, so much as wonderful. It's how it all plays out in the world. It's how things hang together.
So Mythic Yoga continues. That continual surrender to the irrational, to balance it out with the rational. I am back to the birds and the serpents. The Mermaids. The Watery deep and the etheric netherworld of air. The instinctual and irrational and the intellectual and the mind. Funny that Jung's Red Book is about to be published. All his journey to the depths of his being. I can't wait to read it! All this is coming out now because it just is.

So the Queen is excited. Excited to do her yoga, excited to live her life and she is hopeful, optimistic. She told her book keeper to take over her finances and pay whatever, do whatever it takes, she just doesn't want to think about it. She just wants to be the Queen, and tend to her children, to the garden, to the world's children and the little animals and play things that make life enchanting, and let somebody else worry about the accounting and business. It's really what is needed. And it makes all the difference. And what makes all the difference is that the Queen is enjoying envisioning a wonderful, enchanted life with a King. And how beautiful is that vision; imagination - your creation.

Demons on 32nd and Speer

2009-09-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

The Queen really has to work hard as not to let the demons invade her castle.
Things have been going very lovely for her, with a fantastic excursion to a far away paradise that the Queen frolicked in and still reflects longingly on.
So no amount of fairy tale will take away the fact that there is still this evil rental property on Speer that hangs over her head and sucks her resources. For the Queen was rudely awakened from her sleep by an angry tattooed tenant about some gas problem and the Xcel army blaming it on some stupid faulty connection to the water heater, so it’s turned off and the tenant also complained about the price to dry his clothes in the dryer. And the Queen was proud of herself for calmly telling him to call Tom or talk to Miguel downstairs and that his complaint was noted. Thank you.

So the old familiar demons love to play with her and tempt her down a dark road and feel the rot. The poor me, life sucks, I hate my ex for getting me into this crap, his sloppy work, lets skulk around and torment my mind. Get rid of this thing! And all it reminds you of is your husband's death up until now.

Already I wonder should I declare bankruptcy now? I hear the dollar ‘s collapse is imminent: BUY GOLD AND SILVER! But when? Are all the banks going to collapse for good now too? I mean it seems like they are just resurrecting themselves as more powerful than before and in just a different Neo-America, post-Bush era with any shred of a Constitution. Do I pay my credit card minimum? Or buy pants for my son and even get the orthotics he needs and continue to pay my daughter's tutor. Or do I stay focused on my work and manifest that which I think about. And to manifest that everything will work out. Despite the demons, there will always be demons. Stay optimistic! But then the trickster always appears and changes everything no matter what. So just be prepared for that too. Maybe she should just surrender all together.

The Queen takes a deep breath in and out. Several actually. She clears her mind. She writes this down from bed, sick, while her cat lies on her chest. Demons be gone. It’s a beautiful moment. Why ruin it with dark thoughts when the Queen can be thinking about a King on a magical island paradise. Yes, that's what she'll do. And so the Queen does.

The World Tree

2009-09-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

There is a voice inside that sometimes speaks only in images, and those images and feelings come up as doves and roses. Once in a while this little glimpse of paradise is available, and often times it also comes up as an image and a feeling of a tree. This flowing, flowering, blooming energy that really does crown within you. When you are really connected and not afraid but linked to the source, it is a lot like a tree. And the tree has roots. Deep roots, that come out of the vagina and reach into the ground and reality. They hold on to the outer realm and make you feel safe. There is nothing to fear.

Anyone who has experienced trauma knows the fear inside. It pulls you up, nothing is safe, not even the ground you walk on. You are waiting for the other shoe to drop. This tree image pulls us down, down, into our bodies and into the earth, Mother earth, and paradise. It takes us to a place before the trauma, before the wounding, to the prima materia, and on this journey we find another mother taking care of us. We find it through the body; the body is like a tree, especially the nervous system. I have often gazed at the mangle of cottonwood trees in winter, and how their delicate branches seem like nerves all bundled up. Our legs are firm and strong, and the feet grip the earth. Our bodies are the trunks, and our heart the heart beat of the earth. So many world mythologies have the world tree. Mayan, Norse, HIndu, Hungarian and more.

The tree is us. It is our body, our container that the spirit visits the material world. Our consciousness arises from the biochemical action of the body and prana. It is the Shakti, pulsing through it. We are going from unity to duality, and bringing creation forth. This is our cosmic dream, and we are participating in it. We don't have to make it a nightmare. The dream can be beautiful. Just imagine it so! Imagination is your power and creation! You really do get what you think about. So think great thoughts. They are coming true!

Once you are grounded again in your own being and can feel the depths and the flow, once you identify with that rather than all the stuff going on up above, once you are rooted in spirit, then you can create effortlessly up top. Things change. Trauma heals. But it was the darkness and the suffering that guided you to the light, it is what makes the tree grow.

Glory Days

2009-08-29T20:32:00.000-07:00

It has been a glorious day. I love living my bliss as I get to teach what I love: Storytelling and Yoga. And what's more is that I get to do it in the name of children.
You really do get what you think about. Your thoughts are projecting creation into the fourth dimension, in which you just need catching up to. So you'd better think positive and get clear of any negative slug dwelling. Those dark places really do pull you down. So get positive!
I've realized how much I blink my eyes when speaking. Have to check our which vayu that is, the one that governs blinking, burping, sneezing. Checked the web just now and couldn't get a consistent answer!
But Breathe is really the key to so much.

It is the end of another day of a great training in the Storytime Yoga method. Today attendees gathered with me at the glorious Samadhi Yoga in Denver to shift paradigms in experiencing life and teaching yoga by utilizing the power of story.

I’m always thrilled to do these trainings because it always involved like-minded people. I call them my “tribe.” Those who are instinctually drawn to the depths where story and myth and yoga take us. To that mysterious realm that involves digging deeply into dark regions, only to find out that there is where the light is. And that darkness and light is what makes us whole.

What’s even more thrilling is knowing that these yogic storytellers are taking it upon themselves to use the power as a storyteller/yoga teacher/shaman/minister/healer to go out and use the high art form of oral storytelling to teach children. And children are our priority. We speak for those who do not have a voice. We are all about educating, healing, helping and making the world safe for children (and the women who care for them and never give up on them.)

Today we discussed the method and teaching babies through elementary! As well as learned the art of storytelling. People are always amazed at how much their creativity comes alive through this process. And the fun they have. Play is therapy!

Tomorrow we will focus on relaxation and meditation and its role in assisting children with anxiety, ADD and ADHD, as well as how to use stories for peace and character education. We will also explore story and yoga as a medicine for helping depression and trauma and preventing suicide by creating personal fairy tales and body myths and utilizing the power of personal story for healing and building community.

There is always more info than I can possibly pack into these trainings, which is why I am seriously considering making Storytime Yoga into a 200-hour children’s yoga teacher training and register it with Yoga Alliance.

Hope to see you at a training one day!

Of Rainbows and returning to the Core

2009-08-26T09:51:00.000-07:00

In Mythic Yoga, I have become aware of my breath and my core of late. Listening deeply to the body, I am uncovering the root of some fears. That nausea I wake up with - no - not pregnancy! Just the stress of my ex having the house being foreclosed on and realizing that I may never get paid and that may lead me to bankruptcy. And the fact that my son needs CAT scans of both his feet, which cost, at a %50 discount for having crappy insurance, i kid you not. $2,500, plus the orthotics will be around $500 and my daughter has an auditory learning disability, and twice-a-week tutoring is $635 a month. Overwhelming? Yes, absolutely. Especially since I'm a single, widowed mother and I don't have another adult to rely on or confide in. But there is a magic key to all this - Yoga. My dear friend and League of Yogic Storyteller member, Kathy, told me, "You are living proof and continually demonstrating that this stuff works!"
Yes, I haven't freaked out too bad, run away, killed myself or anything. I'm just present. I've returned to a more intense yoga practice, drawing back into the core of my body, that third chakra area, building up strength and reliance on the Self. Warrior poses, even Warrior III. Half moon pose, half moon pose with a twist. side angle poses. I want to sweat, move, return to the creator and realize all fear is from the ego mind. Don't forget (and of course I do!) But you return to the core.
And then there is the breath. Always returning to the breath. It's truly relaxing. So Hum. I swear that mantra shuts off any fear and negativity and calms me instantly. The body truly is a container of safety when you open up to it and have a relationship with it. The miracle of doing yoga and contemplating one's story and issues and symbols is truly amazing, the premise of Mythic Yoga. I did boat pose, a wonderful third chakra pose, and the flash of insight came to me that "I am my own Lifeboat." Surely it's true that the Self and Source never leaves you. You are never truly alone. There's that Christian story of about how the footprints in the sand, and then there are none, "Because I carried you."
I very calmly and lovingly worked with my daughter on her homework last night. It's scary how far behind she is as she enters the fourth grade. My son is loving middle school and is self-sufficient there, and I gladly edit his writing and teach him that way. I loved making them breakfast, getting them ready and then walking my daughter with our little dog in the parade of the neighborhood each day to school. I wonder if truly, all trauma is a gift: It forces you to be intensely present. What else is there? no more comfy idleness that allows you to wander into the past or the future. With that, I take great comfort in writing this, working on my own Mythic Yoga, building my core, and finding a beautiful rainbow yesterday outside. As the most amazing thing happened, in that there was an email glitch and I wasn't receiving emails inquiring about my work! And there were lots of them! So despite some intense obstacles, I always prevail. Why? Because I have yoga, meditation, and the ability to tell my story.
AMEN

The Snake in the Path

2009-08-24T19:41:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I was walking with my little dog, Sergeant Pepe. I walk in open space in the lovely foothills here in Boulder, and it’s definitely the closest thing I get to a church. Nature is God revealed in silent poetry of endless life quivering in creation.
However, my mind did get the best of me, endlessly negative about fears of this and that. I can shake myself of it a lot. But other times it’s like a grip of dreaded rot, that clings to my heart and body and mind like a sludge of tar.
On the way back from this beautiful place, Pepe got upset. Sure enough, he warned me of what lay in the path ahead of me. A snake! Huge, fat, coiled up and smack in the middle of the path! I was taken aback and backed up. Was it a rattlesnake? I was not sure. All I knew is that of all the wild creatures who have crossed my paths in life – bears, coyotes, wild turkeys – those little celestial visitors of nature that cause time to pause and celebrate – never had I encountered such a large snake! Of course I have encountered the garden kind and even collected their skin that I found stuck within the tentacles of a French strawberry patch, amazed at the gossamer skin left behind for a new life. But this was different!
I thought, what do I do? Call 911? A snake! Help! Barb wire fence was to one side, the other side of the path was tall grass and I thought, is its companion there too? I was confronted with the fact that I could only do what I could in the moment, and that was to just stand there. I was fiercely present. What was I to do? I breathed, waited and watched. Eventually, it slithered away slowly, and Pepe and I approached and I gathered the courage to watch this mythic creature slowly disappear in the tall grass nonchalant, as if it had no idea it was blocking my path at all. And there it was that this creature of the eternal cycle taught me a powerful lesson. Deal with only what is real and in front of your path! All my fears that can sometimes awaken me early in the morning to vomiting, is just a phantom, unreal, a busy mind that hasn’t been meditating enough! This powerful symbol of the cycles of life, tell me that the river is always flowing, slithering in fact, through life. It is this way and it is that way. It reminds me of the story of the Fabric of Life, Hindu. I will tell that story next for the You Tube. Maya. It can reveal, or it can obscure. The snake revealed something for me. The eternal, and that is where I need to rest and identify, rather than the tremulous mind.

Of course, life keeps finding it necessary to dish out difficulty for me. Lately I had finally let go the last drop of rage I had at my ex, Justin, regarding the lies and mess of the real estate shenanigans he got me into, as well as looting my widow’s fund from my late husband. I finally got over it and saw the part of him that I fell in love with – funny, liberal, artistic, hard working. But there was always some hidden dishonesty about him that betrayed my heart and trust. It was very painful. But I confronted my part – rage, oversensitivity to his children’s problems, RAGE at betrayal. I seem justified! Yet somehow I seem ashamed, but maybe I was just Kali protecting my young. Anyway, we had a nice heart-to-heart last night. It was very sad, and I had been grieving greatly the loss of my marriage and security – to see the house again. This house that I was promised if I put up the funds to finish it. The place where my children rode their bikes to the local school and my daughter trotted a little path each day to play with her best friend next door, Leroy. The two years of living in a half-finished house, nickle and diming my assets only to be pressured into selling it to pay off his debts, and which I refused, and finally, having lost all trust in him, divorced.

So this morning I got an urgent message. I must talk to you and come clear on some lies and what’s really happening, he said. He came over to my house and told me that the 31st street house was foreclosed on. The sale happened last Wednesday. I was in shock. Dumbfounded. He cried. I felt sorry for him. I had always urged him to declare bankruptcy rather than use me to pay off his debts, but he refused. Now it is revealed that he could have declared it, got rid of his debt, and kept the house. What loss. What eternal loss. The snake showed us, just like Buddhism’s first tenant, that all is continual sorrowful loss. Later it occurred to me that he was lying. What a coincidence that this came up the very next day. Was it guilt? Or something else that compelled him to confess. Once again I had the wool pulled over my eyes because I was gullible, loving, kind and giving. That once again I had given in to the con man shuffle of my ex husband. This sweet, funny, big nice guy in a bow tie, is also the source of great suffering and pain, betrayal and loss.

I spoke with my laywer this evening. It’s true, you can’t trust him. I warned the court this spring, the judge EVERYBODY that this was the issue, if we could just talk to the bank itself and know what is going on, because what he says, can't be trusted! you need proof. For months I pleaded. The judge sided with Justin. Gave him another chance. And here we are.

I’m not angry. I actually feel very sad for Justin. He’s a nice guy. Dishonest and undependable, but a nice guy at heart. A little boy that got wounded by his mother and father at some point long ago, and that wounding is replayed out again and again and again in adulthood, our Mythic Yoga waiting to be played out and witnessed by the Gods as we surrender to our Amor Fati and play the role perfectly as all is as it should be. Such is life, the continual cycles and epic stories of love and betrayal, loss and redemption. I will play it out in my body tomorrow, and tonight i will look up to the stars and dream about it all.

The Mythic Yoga Studio with Sydney Solis: The Wooden Sword - Jewish

2009-08-15T20:07:00.000-07:00

The Queen of Bohemia is back in Action

2009-08-15T12:44:00.000-07:00

The Queen had a fantastic summer, traveling to Telluride, Pine Ridge Reservation and Montana for work and pleasure. It was all wonderful and rewarding in every possible way. But every once in a while the Queen gets derailed. Call it life or the snare of fate, things can be just so overwhelming that she is not quite sure what to do. This causes great anxiety, but luckily, The Queen falls back on her yoga practice, meditation and stories to give her hope. She reconnects with God after a short lapse of egoic disconnect and bad habits that still linger from 1388 Kilkenny Street and resumes her duties.

So after talking to two bankruptcy lawyers it does seem that I cannot declare bankruptcy. I am stuck with Speer for the time being. If my ex would just sell the darn 31st street house I’d be in much better shape to deal with the screwy loans and upkeep on the properties, which I do find valuable in the long term, but a massive pain in the short run. I’m not the type to believe in hoarding and sitting on a pot of gold. Of course that puts me in a sticky position. But I feel for all the millions of Americans who have financial problems. It can definitely make you sick.

So I can’t declare bankruptcy because I can’t get rid of the income tax on the equity my ex took out to pay off his debts, in my name on the mortgage and loans! Gads! How stupid could I get! I can only say I was in love, and I believed in him, however, he didn’t come through and that’s the most painful part. I put everything I had into it and I didn’t get anything in return. Something I became conscious of from parenting my father as a child and also my choice of men in the past. I take care of them and get little in return.
Also I can’t declare bankruptcy because I could lose my copyrights to my work! Gads! Now that is scary. So I have cut off all spending to the extreme. No more coffees, no more eating out (ok, once a month for special with the kids, you HAVE TO!) Get the hair cut at Super Clips, eat all the food you have left in the house. But not out of fear but out of this is how we should have been living all along. Since the 50s, a recent Wall Street Journal article wrote, it’s all about my property, my own house, my things and stuff. We really don’t need a lot to get by on. The article said that if you own your own home it shows you are not a communist. Well, I would sure like to live with somebody right now, share meals, work in the garden together, share childcare. We should be living collectively, at least have that option if you choose. So I voluntarily now live a life of simplicity. How I wish I could ditch my car. Such an expense! I love riding my moped. I typically buy all my clothing used, and now it’s just cutting out lots of little things. But I am determined to get back on top of things, make my business work, and get financially squared away. I often think of living abroad with my kids. I’ve wanted to do it my whole life and I want my kids to have that opportunity, especially to learn another language. I can do my work from the internet. We sure could live cheaply in Mexico or even Puerto Rico, or maybe hang out in India for a few months before moving on to Thailand or something and do the home school/yoga thing. Wouldn’t that be a hoot!

But like in all the stories she has been reading and telling lately, The Queen has faith in God. Faith in the present moment, and faith in herself. All thing will work out. She gets to live deeply in the present moment when she is rooted in yoga and meditation. She gets to relish being a mother and feel great love and joy for her children – whether it is preparing an Epsom salt bath for her son’s poor flat feet that went through a grueling two-hour football practice, or prepare a nutritious breakfast or lunch, or grow cherry tomatoes just for her daughter who loves them, or she gets back down on her hands and knees and willingly scrubs the kitchen floor and the bathrooms and the whole house because that is what the Queen does, she is always faithful, always present, and always beginning again and the Queen survives and thrives. And sometimes she has to just clean again to get her faith back, because it’s the cleaning out of the fear and negativity that is key. That she is the creator of her whole universe with her heart and thoughts, so she’d better stay positive and with God, because she really doesn’t want any other outcome other than goodness and joy, so that’s all it can possibly be. Goodness and joy, even if so much is coming at you and it seems hopeless. And the house on 1388 Kilkenny Street she will never live in again, for that is the source of the anxiety and fear that occasionally creeps up. And now the Queen is aware of it, she can name it, and she can gently ask it to go away. Even though in reality there is a mouse infestation at my father’s house at 1388 Kilkenny Street. They got into his emergency survival food. There is also a lot of stagnant water in the basement. I begin to wonder if it is a health hazard. I’d love to airlift my father out of there and have him life with us – as I am contemplating getting a house mate and do have an ad on Craigs List at the moment

But now the Queen is clean and jazzed. She has something very special coming up September 2. And her websites are about to be relaunched and updated, and she will be working with middle school students to teach them Mythic Yoga and even put up more You Tube videos for the work. Ah, release. To be in union with the divine and without fear in any situation, that is the task at hand. I hope everybody can find release from their suffering. That is why we do yoga, that is why we tell stories and that is why we love deeply everything around us. It is a grand release.

Yoga on the Reservation

2009-07-29T19:49:00.001-07:00

I am in Kyle South Dakota, having spent the day on the Pine Ridge Reservation teaching yoga with R.R. Shakti of Yoga World Reach. Storytime Yoga teacher Scottie Bruch, who is from Whitewood, South Dakota, also joined us with tons of wonderful donations she gathered from her community for the needy here.

We set off yesterday at about 3 p.m and ended up in another world around 11:30 p.m. when we reached our destination. It seems that landmarks and road signs disappear when you reach the reservation, and we had to back track several times and even got completely lost in the black darkness with no I-phone service (of which the GPS service on it had lead us astray), nor a gas station or car in sight to seek help if necessary! Luckily yoga has taught me to identify such fears of my mind and its endless of what ifs and not react to them but dissolve them, but mostly it was just so uncomfortable being in the car so long and I thought I would die if we didn’t find the Lakota Prairie Ranch Restaurant and Lodge finally.

This morning we were guest on the local radio station that is broadcast to 50,000 residents on the Lakota Native American Reservation. This is the place with the history of Wounded Knee, the massacre and everything really awful and still denied by our country. Our schools should be teaching what we did to Native Americans along with the Jewish experience in middle school so kids really understand it and get clear of its weight on our psyche. I remember really hating and bored with pioneers and Colorado history that we studied in the third grade. I considered the settlers and miners just a bunch of monsters pillaging and murdering the native peoples and land on a greed fest, and the women were really miserable back then too.

During the radio show the hosts mentioned how many residents are plagued by high rates of diabetes from poor diet, high suicide rates (there was a suicide run given by the families who have lost loved ones, as their biggest pow wow of the year was happening this weekend.) and high crime. There is also a high rate of ADHD among Native American children on the reservation. I talked about how important the rituals and rites of the Native American culture are, which is actually used as a therapeutic tool here. Children need to be grounded in their bodies and souls. They need these rites and myths as a road map into the inner world to create meaning and be present and connected to their environment by participating in it rather than consuming it. The amazing thing is that Lakota cosmology is very similar to yoga philosophy, as I wrote in the earlier blog. In their artwork there are circles everywhere, and they believe in the levels of spiritual, emotional, physical and mental well being. They believe that everything is related, and there is a depth that informs all of the reality on the surface from down below as the Great Mystery. This is what grounds children in their bodies. Those who have experienced trauma and abuse must be able to ground themselves in the safety of the body and their own beings. To have self-awareness of emotions, behaviors, and to be deeply relaxed so that one feels and knows the relationship one has to the external environment.
There is a Waldorf School on the reservation and I’m hoping to come back with YWR in another three months and establish some children’s programs when school is in session.

I taught mostly teenagers and a few adults as well as young children today, and I used story to set the theme. To help them see the inner life, and also to distinguish between their desires and fears I told the Sufi story from my book The Treasure in Your Heart: Yoga and Stories for Peaceful Children, about the heart that no longer moves. How can we be peaceful and non-attached in the face of fear and desire? Joyful and painful experiences? So that we may not suffer. How can we stay centered in our selves and identify within rather than with the mind’s wanderings and entanglements? The yoga practice and mindful of these questions reprogram the body. By the end one teenager was so relaxed during shavasana that she fell asleep.

Afterwards there was a snack and we all talked with some of the participants. We talked about yoga history and where it came from, and again people were really interested in improving their health. We also talked about storytelling. One woman with a 10-month-old baby said she remembers hearing the stories in high school of her people, but has not heard or told them since. But she remembered them as creation stories, where the animals came from and so forth. I encouraged her to find the old stories again and to tell them to her daughter. And then she was to tell them to me when I returned in the fall.

R.R. Shakti then taught an adult class at the community college. The people said they really felt better afterwards and wanted to take more classes, even possibly driving to Sturgis once a month where Scottie taught. Additionally, they really connected with the sense that their bodies and souls were wrung out, as if it released toxins and reenergized them and their chi, and life spirit.

Tomorrow we leave and will talk about bringing a yoga teacher training to the reservation. Then we will go hiking in the Badlands and pay our respects at Wounded Knee. The insanity of the white man drove the spirit of the Lakota underground, but I have a feeling that its soon return is what is going to bring life on the planet back in balance.

Mythic Yoga: Vishnu's Dream

2009-07-25T16:39:00.001-07:00

I spent three hours suspending time and space this afternoon at Samadhi Yoga where I taught teacher trainees about Hindu myths, psychology and yoga. I spoke in images and found what kinds of responses the trainees had from experiencing those images, carried through the symbol of sound and words. It's the conveyance of and the reconnection to the mythic image, the imago dei, or that God within, that are the powers of the spoken word. And we can see that the outer image of our world is also a reflection of the image inside ourselves, and that Tat Vam Asi, thou art that, is really true.

The soul speaks in an image, Aristotle said. God speaks in an image as our souls and we have all but lost that connection to the deep inner psyche and soul that keeps us in balance and harmony with our selves, with our world. We are Vishnu dreaming our daily world into existence, but where is our attention? Is it firmly rooted in the bulb and source of the transcendent, or is it the flower and the fruit on the surface, duality playing picture games and making poetry out of metaphors. Our society is presently very attached to the exterior world and has really lost its way in a labyrinth of economics and politics. Gone are the arts and letter, those links to the soul, and what we have is yet a wasteland and a disintegrating society. But we can blaze a path again into our darkest parts, and just like Persephone, create a ritual to regularly connect with this other half of ourselves and live in balance.

Listening to myths and creating images and symbols within our realm of the body makes us present to the imaginary, mythic and intuitive world. In favor of the intellect, we have rejected important functions of our psyches, intuiting and sensing. Myths, images and symbols connect us once again to this intuiting side that connects us to the unconscious, where the wild, undifferentiated soup of consciousness boils and from which forms arise.

Stories and myths allow us to self reflect in that we see everything as a reflection and examine it. We can view it externally, and then look at what remains - recognition of the Self and ineffable experience that is also bliss and joy of the moksha, release, when one is truly identified with the Self. We see that we are beyond the image, that our divine nature is eternal and untouchable, undifferentiated consciousness. We become rooted in that being and as in the Yoga Sutra 1.3 the mind's cessation allows the true being come forth, as if a light coming out from a cave, or as in the Maha Mritunjaya, like a gourd released from its vine. The true Self awakens because the symbols and forms pointed him to it.

I told the myth from the Vishnu Puranas about Vishnu's Dream. We are all like Vishnu, and we are creating our reality with our minds like Brahma each day, infused with the Shakti of Lakshmi and Saraswati, doing battle with the demons of fear and desire who threaten to make us identify with their false Self. But we remember Vishnu down there and we realize that nothing is happening. There is no Self. It's just everything as Vishnu. Contemplate this and the myth becomes a psychological guide to point you to your own experience of the truth. This knowing, jnana, is a body experience of feeling, which grounds and relaxes you, knowing that there is nothing to fear, as all things are of the Self.

Additionally I told Durga and Kali, examining the mother aspect of life and the reality of death and violence, which is what life is made up of. In Eastern mythology, demons are not to be cast out, like in Western mythology. They are just playing their part of duality, the negative energies in nature and the three gunas. Because we deny life and its reality of death and violence, its suppression is projected onto television screens and newspapers, instead, yet still unconscious in a never ending wheel. Unless a myth, story or symbol can reconnect you to eternal time, give you an experience and pitch you out of this profane realm and into the sacred.

We use Durga's weapons, such as yoga, mantra and devotion, to defeat the obstacles of the mind and the causes of suffering, or kleshas. By constantly examining ourselves we can overcome behaviors that cause suffering. When hearing a story we are able to also identify with the characters and when combined with hatha yoga, the insights or obstacles bubble up to the surface to be clearly made aware of and integrated or removed. Then the true self is unobstructed by the mind, allowed to come forth and moksha and bliss ensue.

Related to death, I told the story of how Ganesha got his head, and how Shiva, hanging out on the cremation grounds, reminds us that among death and destruction is also where life begins. Embracing the dark side of ourselves, making ourselves whole and loving our demons puts us in contact with the serpentine powers of the universe, of which we are identical. The mystical relationship and participation with the cosmos is complete as we create our own heaven on earth, the marriage of Shiva, consciousness, and Parvati, the Shakti and form. And we are so very conscious and aware of it, and that awareness is sheer joy and bliss, which is infused with love and gratitude, as all of life explodes in its reality.

From Telluride to Opa's House

2009-07-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

I spent the week in Telluride with the kids thanks to a dear friend. The kids and I do a lot of road trips, and I set out excited and adventurous and by the time I come back I swear I will never do it again. And this just may be the last tie but we really had a lot of fun. It was just a long drive. Eight hours there from Boulder and I floored it at 90 mph coming back and made it just under 6 1/2.
We stayed at the lovely Mountain Lodge in Mountain Village. The kids did not want to do much more than ride the gondola, swim and hang out. But we did manage to have a lot of nice walks in town and at the shops and parks. But my daughter is a fish (and she bought a mermaid book) so it was a lot of pool time.
The children missed being at Opa's house, so they asked to spend the night. We picked up Quizno's and again I got in the car to drive. It was great to see Dad. I love him so. I appreciated that moment because he is here and alive with me. I never know when my last moments with dear old Dad will be, even though I was angry and blaming him for my life problems while driving back. And I got clear of that too. While driving I looked at my daughter and with all my pressing financial fears I just get present and be in the moment no matter what. Yoga reminds me that nothing is happening, yet love pierces everything. This reflection on the surface that I adore participating in, I revel in it and also let it go. Although I was quite negative in thinking all the way driving back, and I had to work with my mind extensively to think positive and let things go. That I do create the universe with my mind so I had better get thinking positive.
Dad's house has a strange smell to it. LIke the mold or whatever in the basement is creeping up into the main floor. And the kids sat on the love seat and Dad sat on his couch that is filled with piles and piles of mail and odds and ends and there is really no place to sit anywhere else, not even in the kitchen because it is so covered with crap. I sat in the only other available place to sit; my favorite spot to sit, on the hearth and ate the sandwich on my lap.
It's always about working with the mind. All its obstacles like in the yoga sutras.
So I had a nice time alone with the kids at Opa's. Practicing yoga, reviewing for my Hindu Deities and Myth workshop tomorrow. Indulging in reviewing Jung, mythology. I even got to read up on Greek mythology while in Telluride. Amazing. Dionysian rites, using mushrooms. They all connected to that wild divine that we muster up once again in Mythic Yoga. A new cycle is beginning. It's going to be wonderful. The world has renewed itself.

Julio The Pool Boy

2009-07-11T17:18:00.000-07:00

My late husband always said that if he should die and I would get a lot of insurance money I would end up marrying Julio the Pool Boy. Well, I met him today. I humbly took my daughter and a friend to the Eldorado Springs pool because I had free passes for signing up for Eldorado Springs home water delivery at the Wednesday Farmer's Market downtown. I swam a little bit in the pristine water, and my daughter, enraptured by makeup and shaving her legs, swam with her friend who had an equally large amount of red lipstick on. Afterwards I sat out and read the yoga sutras, quietly contemplating space and time as I watched the humanity at the pool. Heavy men with beards and tattoos. Women with body shapes of all sizes that I analyzed and then watched my mind analyzing before I returned to meditation and just looking. We saw kids we knew from school and who knew me and my son and asked where he was. In Yellowstone with his compadres, I replied. I've been having a lot of mother/daughter time without my son, because you know as a single, widowed mother there ain't enough of you to go around, let alone spend one on one time.
My daughter and I went to my friend's cabin overnight and did some art. We got lavender wall paint for her room, although I am waiting for the hovering landlady to make up her mind about the paint swatch. So annoying. I own three houses and must put up with this!
But there he was, talking to me. Little old me with my heavy forehead wrinkles and wrinkle straight down the middle of my 42-year-old forehead. And I'm now hovering around 150 in weight from a strange ravenous appetite that has hit lately. I thought he was Indian or Tibetan at first from his accent, but later he said he was from Mexico City. He was young; in his twenties. He was going to school studying CAD and was a cabinet maker. He came back again and again to make small talk with me in my seat in the shade. We spoke in Spanish for a while. I knew what he was getting at. Here is Julio, only his name was Edgar or Oscar as somebody called him. Who knows. He said he's here all the time. Is this something out of The Graduate? He said my eyes and smile were lovely and asked what I was reading about. I thought, really, he's too late. All the funds are gone. All I have is myself to make money, and things are actually looking up since I just got booked at the Omega Institute. But not wanting to get messy with intimate relationships, and with my daughter and her friend nearby I chose to shake his hand and say nice to meet you.
Was Frank right? Did he know me so well? How trusting and silly I am? To predict, or even , self fulfill, in my wreck of a marriage with Justin and all his real estate shennanigans! He was going to make up trust funds for the kids, because he swore that I would marry Julio the Pool Boy, he's get me mixed up in some house, and then the kids would get nothing. So his words came true. Only in a little bit different drama. Yet the Sutras teach me such peace. It's such a drama. I can see clearer and clearer each day the reality of the mind. I know deeper and see myself as true reality. There is a great peace in all this drama. Failure is the price of success. I know all will work out, and I swear by my morning daily yoga and meditation practice. This makes all this coming and going such a surprise on the surface of the water from which the depths I emerge every morning to take a breath, and then bow back down to the deeps by night fall. And then it all ends up so lovely as words on a page.

The Artemis Club

2009-07-01T20:25:00.001-07:00

I pulled Paloma down the hill on her skateboard as she walked Pepe on a leash toward Bear Creek Elementary. I had been thinking how wonderful this age of eight and a half that my daughter is. I feel so much more closer to her, as we relate to feminine things like clothes and grooming. Alejandro will go to the rifle club and he is off with his friend and his father. He needs that. And Paloma needs me.

I feel this joy in working with this young feminine. La Sirena appeared in Parabola magazine this quarter. Water so fitting, the divine feminine, half fish, half bird, half woman, half snake, from those watery, imaginative depths of creation. So continues Mythic Yoga, as we groom young girls to be sacred warriors who grow into their sex and power. To have the chains of modern woman's soul broken from the bonds of a contorted cultural view of woman to that of one of wholeness and life.

The mermaid, or rusalki in the Russian and Ukranian tradition, was the spiritual world of women and the bringer of the new life. Every spring they came in water to clean out the heaviness of winter. She is the primal goddess, in which as water all life, cleansing and restoration comes from. She is the whole body of creation yet balanced as the opposite of death and extinguishment, a perfect paradox.

Artemis was the goddess of children from age nine until adulthood. She protected the young girls and brought them to her temple to experience one last time the joys of childhood before growing up and assuming responsibilities in adulthood and marriage.

My daughter and I ran with Pepe once we reached the field. Running - a perfect meditation on the body. My mind dips in every cell in the body with all its twitches and kinks and stuck energy I root it out with my breath and attention.

I watched her as the did the athletic course, and thought of this modern Artemis Club for girls. To really nourish my daughter and regenerate the feminine on the planet. Making little mermaids in the Artemis Club.

The Queen of Bohemia Teaches Her Children how to Clean

2009-06-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

I had a dream of my late husband, Frank. I was in this enormous house of sorts, and I saw him. He was dressed up either as the clown in Il Pagliachi or as the Tin Man as a homemade Halloween Costume, but he had the box outfit and a pointy hat and some make up on his face. I was really happy to see him, unlike other dreams in past years where I dreamt he had faked his death and it was "oh, NO!."

I called him over and said, "Frank! It's so good to see you! Look! Here are your children! Both of them!" And Paloma and Alejandro were standing there, but he was ashamed or embarrassed and didn't want to come over. I woke up crying.

I didn't tell my children about that dream. I didn't want to upset them. I went about my day, which was doing the Mythic Yoga Retreat. It has been intense and wonderful. Doing my bliss. It has been raining every single day and it's wonderful, however, Speer flooded again. I did not call the tenant back but just referred Tom to call them.

Finally when the retreat was over, I packed up the kids to take a mini vacation to Manitou Springs. I packed up and cleaned the house. I instructed the children how to do it. I channelled their father in that he taught me that you clean the house so that you never have to come back to a dirty house. Take out the garbage so that it's not stinking. Run the dishwasher. There was a lot of work to do and I enlisted the kids' help. I said you don't want to end up having a house like Opa's. Alejandro got angry. He didn't want to do it. Paloma stood by my side in the kitchen helping, yet Alejandro continued to resist. I told him he would stay at Opa's if he did not help. He finally helped and got in the car angry.

Time went by before he cried. "I'm just so angry at Dad for abandoning me like this." I can see how at this age of 11 he really needs a male figure in his life. I'm sure he is cursing his life that he lives with his Bohemian artist mother. How I wish he could see that we live here in this Boulder place for him, so that he can go to a good school with his friends. I told him then about the dream. We talked a little about things.

"It is a bummer. But I'm sure Dad is embarrassed about what he did. It's OK. He just had a permanent solution to a temporary problem. I'm sorry he's not in your life, but I am signing you up for the Boulder Junior Rifle Club." I taught him that all that anger isn't going to do anything but rot your heart out, so it's better just to talk about and get it out. It's called house cleaning, I told him. "From the inside out."

And now we are in Manitou Springs, Colorado. Hanging out at a Super 8 motel which is kinda dumpy but it's cheap and we could bring our dog. Kids don't care. They love the pool and the TV and I can sleep and read and write and later we will head downtown for a little bite to eat. Our little family of three.

Of Mermaids and Mermen

2009-06-23T17:43:00.000-07:00

Well. This Mythic Yoga stuff certainly is magic. Some strange psychic energies pour out. Turns out another e-course member had a dream of a mermaid, and then others connected to it too, and our one man used a merman as his symbol and wrote a story about mermaids coming out of the water, returning to the world. Blow your mind!
The myth of the MErmaid came up with by surprise and what the mermaid's message for me is that I get to be happy. There is no story; there is no drama; there is nothing to overcome. All is healed that can be healed. It/s like the 12 swans. The Queen is healed now and she has her court to support her. Things flow easier because everybody does everything else for her. So all she has to do is create.
And even though the Queen went herself down to Speer to find out that the cottage tenants are sneaking in a dog and she went to the front unit to have the appliance guy install the new dishwasher and even though it now turns out to be something electrical that corroded the washer plug and cracked the motor head and the appliance guy won't touch anything but copper wiring, the Queen did not freak out. She just relaxed and got another credit card application in the mail and figured not to worry. Tom can deal with it from here. Everything will work out. And now the Queen waits so that the new house hold help and nanny will relieve the final worry in her life, childcare. So that she can enjoy her children more and more because they will actually listen to somebody who is not the Queen and the house will be picked up and the prince and princess will not be damaged and insane like their grand mother, but actually healthy because they had a nanny who taught them how to clean, and they just had fun with their mother who did the deep cleaning on her own because she is, after all, The Queen of Bohemia and she Cleans her Own House.

The Queen of Bohemia is Half Goat and Half Fish

2009-06-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

I hiked up the mountain behind my house again this afternoon with my dog, Sergeant Pepe. I am most certainly acquired the powers of the mermaid, the makarasana, half fish, half animal or bird. Goats and llamas. Quezalcoatle, half serpent and half bird, and the mermaid, half fish and half beautiful Siren.
I hiked up the mountain and I proclaimed myself The Queen of Bohemia, and I paused, and looked at all the beauty. I felt at one with Shiva, as if I were Parvati participating through my body. The wind blowing the gentle reeds along the path down the mountain.
I knew that all of what I have written in the past is past. It is over. It's just a story now. And I do not dwell. So The Queen of Bohemia left all her sorrow and tragedies and story behind, ran down the mountain and crossed over the creek at the bottom. The creek was lined thick with the reeds, so the path was hard to see, but Pepe led the way, as the Queen found her way to the water.
She crossed over and proclaimed that she lives only in the present and the world view is one of optimism and joy. Like in fairy tales, it all works out for the better.
That's what I expect. Like my dream last night, some women whose emphasis was their lovely brunette hair parted extremely at the side, one said. "To know that one is to live one's destiny."
I remember this flaming gypsy told me to not live my life but live my destiny. What is my destiny?
I like the idea of feeding children and helping women. And we'll see just how well the Queen of Bohemia manifests things, now that she realizes who she is. This half goat, half fish, the powers of the makarasana. Her life, the Capricorn that she is, so slow the perseverance to the top. Late in age, is she crowned her glory, and rests in the peace of her destiny.
She loves her little house, even though she doesn't own it. In fact, she always jokes that she owns three castles but doesn't live in any of them! I guess she likes to move around! And how much the Queen loves to be with her prince and princess, and tonight they are having a sleepover at the castle in front of the mountain and the Queen loves to play cook (for once.) Although she remembers her luxurious life when the King was alive, she does not regret the loss; she does not hold on. She let that all go. She does not feel fear or dread, like her mother, the sad, sick witch, instilled in her for so long. That spell is gone. The insecurity is gone, and what is in it's place is a sense of being held in the body. A relaxation do deep it engages everything around it through the body and the senses. It is in complete harmony with the environment and in the now. It is a different mother and she brings a grounded security. And the Queen is so grateful, for she knows that nothing else really matters. She knows you get to die and start all over again in some other star system of something or whatever you darn choose to create into reality, and so the Queen, she does.

Mythic Yoga

2009-06-17T17:42:00.000-07:00

The Queen of Bohemia loves living in Boulder and thanks God every day that she does not live in Suburbistan. With her dorky black helmet on she loves to ride her pink moped downtown to meet her friend Wendy, whose art made it into the West End Gardener.
That's me. The Queen of Bohemia. She's loving life. Despite all the shit that can rain down on her, she knows it's all still so beautiful. People are walking their dogs, riding their bikes, talking and running, children are living on garbage dumps in Cambodia. Life goes on in all its fascination and I no longer judge, think or worry about it. It just is and it's wonderful as it floats by.
The Queen of Bohemia has a shield. Wendy and I had ceviche at Aji and talked about the Mythic Yoga workshops and retreat we are doing. I talked about the outline of the workshop and how the shield making she would teach at her cabin in Rollinsville would fit in with the story of Durga and Kali that I am telling. I'm creating a mythic body armor for fairy tales that I create for myself to cope with life, as well as the telling in this memoir. This writing of my story, this exhalation of the testament to my life, to my word and experience. I've realized that this is just a story. I can peel my life and who I think I am away through the power of story. And I regain my self in this art of self reflection. And I create art as a testament and relic of my life and my experience. It holds my secrets and my spirit.
A bird is my spirit animal. Last year Wendy and I made masks, and mine was a big, black raven. This year it's shields, as the raven in my heart protects me and i need not fear life. I surrender and this image helps me cope. The grief and pain are lifted, and a bird flies up into the sky. My heart is as open as the night sky.
Wendy saw a friend who was getting ready for retirement and said, "To do the things I've always wanted to do." Despite my difficulties, I'm so grateful that I get to do what I want to do. I'm so grateful to be supported in my life and my work. When you really look at it it's quite a miracle. So I had the image of a butterfly for the symbol at the center of my shield. That all is well.
I went to a bankruptcy lawyer on Monday and I got the options. And the reality is that I have a pretty good situation and if Justin would just sell the house I'd be in much better shape. So I believe that will happen soon. And I will keep Speer and maybe sell Arvada and my finances are actually decent, and I have a promising future ahead that I trust in so risk everything. High risk, high reward, my late husband always said.
I realize that the biggest thing that the Queen of Bohemia does is that she does not focus on bankruptcy, she does not focus on disaster and doomsday and lack and poverty and war and hell and chaos. Her mother and father do not life with her. That is old. This is new. The QUeen of Bohemia has cleansed al that negativity and mess from her inside and out.
She focuses ONLY on what she wants to appear in her realm. And that is a bright and lovely future. A League of Yogic Storytellers and Storytime Yoga Mission. I'd love to start a little yoga preschool in Mexico. It would be free to all. Sponsored by Social Security. Fighting for the betterment of women and children around the world. I got that idea in a little store. I thought it was a yuppy place, lamenting how Boulder used to be, more funky. But there was a charming display of cute toys. It harkened back to birth, babies and young children. The fresh joy of life. i bought a little llama. It's sustainable economics, so worth the $10!
But I wanted to start this mission. What else do you have to do in life? Once you get past 40 it's a blessing. You get authentic quick or die. I remember when I was a reporter in Bakersfield I did a story about three sister's who owned a restaurant in Delano on skid row, decided to stop serving alcohol, and held Pentacostal revivals every Friday night for the people in the streets. I talked to a source and I remember he said, "When you find something to die for, you find something to live for. That's what Christ did." So, my first mythology was Christ, and it sounds a lot like Krishna, the story is imbedded in me so we shall see if this turns out! And then we can't forget Miriam, the first feminist, the water appearing in the heavy rains here in Boulder for the past month, and the water in the Mythic Yoga E-courses.
Maybe that is what the orange florescent mermaid in my dream is. I have had a lot of mermaids in my life lately. The Serapha makeup ad with a sexy young mermaid girl with heavy eye make up on the 29th street mall. I am a Capricorn and I march up a mountain most mornings. Then there is my fascination with Quetzalcoatl. This plaque that caught my eye at Tamsen's house of a crane with a woman let me to Google search that they are......the sirens. And the Siren's biggest power is their SILENCE.

Deep Cleaning

2009-06-16T17:47:00.000-07:00

It has become the Queen of Bohemia's personal ritual to weekly clean the house. For there is a certain satisfaction to getting the dirt, the loss, the shame, the fear and all that goes with it in life's little tragedies, out. It is erased, like sand washing over the hieroglyphs. It is worn away and something new is created.
More so, it's the body that gets in there. The constant motion of the hands, the squats to get down on the floor and scrub into the corners. The mind stops; the heart opens. And whatever needs to be cleaned internally speaks its last words of reckoning and then vanishes like vapor from a tea kettle.
I realize that my father was the biggest wounding. Yes, my mother was a doozy, but he who survived the concentration camp of Java was so disempowered. I think of the seeds I purchased and planted in trays at his house in March. They sprouted, but promptly died from lack of attention. We did plant a few seedings I purchased at a greenhouse in the back. But there is always the lack of initiative. The hope and the excitement of getting ready. Only to be met with disappointment and futility.
I ask him to have the children help him weed the garden. Have him read to Paloma. He does not. They watch TV all day. My father sleeps in his bed.
I helped him get a reverse mortgage for his house before Frank died. And he has taken as much equity as he can out. And now another $30 k in equity will just be eaten up. I cannot understand the reasoning in this. He says the world is going to leap into the fourth dimension and none of this will matter. I do keep myself withdrawn from things, like the Speer property and panic about financials and see this as a grand projection that the Gita epitomizes in this action of life detached. But what the?!?!?!? I get angry. Why would he do that? How selfish! But then he is in survival mode, they say. And I cannot judge. For I do not need anything. The Queen of Bohemia has her own powers to manifest whatever she wishes. I love and forgive my father. The scrubbing lets go. The body scrubs and the body let's go the energy held in it. I am grateful that Dad takes my kids. That they get an Opa. That we have Thai food every week and that he is there for me to cry on when I really freak out about things.
The Queen of Bohemia scrubs away all the self doubt, all the fear and all the poverty mentality. Where she was afraid and thought she needed to move back to 1388 Kilkenny Street and take care of her father, she does not. She does not create chaos in her life any more. For she is settled. She has a lovely court to help her achieve her dreams. She cleans her own house, however, and that makes al l the difference. For there is where her power lies. It lies within.

SAMBAL BADJACK

2009-06-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

My father sits in a white undershirt at the kitchen table and eats Sambal Badjack, a paste of onions and chilies and garlic cooked down into a dark red, almost black, yellow-seeded mash. He buys it from Asian food markets. Along with petis, a fish paste that smells as bad as it sounds, or krupouk, prawn crackers that look like chips of shrinky dink plastic that when deep fried puff up into giant tasty Styrofoam things that tingle on your tongue.
Dad eats Sambal Badjack on everything. He eats it on bread, he eats it on spaghetti, he eats it with chicken, or he takes a big spoonful and shovels it in. Dad cooks us other Indonesian food, like the stuff that Kokki, his cook, made when he was growing up on Java. Like bami chicken, or nasi goring, fried rice, or babi ketchup, pork in soy sauce, or a lot of white rice with diced up hot dogs. He told me that’s all he ate when he came to this country, hot dogs and rice, hot dogs and rice.
When Dad sits at the kitchen table eating Sambal Badjack sandwiches he tells me stories. Stories of the jungles of Java, stories of the concentration camp. I take a seat next to him. First I have to pull the pile of old newspapers, broken roller skates and ketchup-stained rags off of a chair. Then I have to push back the zillions of thimbles, coffee-stained coupons, empty thread spools, rubber bands, textbooks, lace, rusty nails, buttons, magazine clippings and open spilling Sweet ‘N’ Low packets that cover the table with a fine white dust. I make a little clearing, and I put my peanut butter and butter sandwich there to eat.
I watch my father. His light Dutch blue eyes are like sapphires pressed into his dough-white skin, shadowed by a hard forehead streaked by bushy black brows . He stares off into the distance as if he is remembering something. Something. He takes a big spoonful of Sambal Badjack, smears it on wheat bread, folds it and takes a bite. I watch his jaw chew eagerly, rhythmically, and then I see the little beads of sweat, like rock candy, form on his temples and above his upper lip.
“Arhh!” he clears his throat. “God that’s hot! Wheew.” He loves it. He rubs his fingers through his hair. It would be all white, like his father’s sugar head of premature white at 40, if it weren’t for the hair color Grecian formula for men that Mom makes him use. So it’s a peanut butter brown, long on top with sides and back buzzed short.
He leans back in his chair to pull out a white cloth handkerchief from his pocket, keys and coins competing for his hand. He takes off his glasses, dabs his temples, wipes his lip, blows his nose. He clears his throat again, takes a spoonful of white sugar and places it on his tongue. It absorbs the heat, he says, or if that doesn’t do the trick, drink some buttermilk.
I watch. It’s like he’s having an out-of-body experience, like the one he had in the camp.
“Did I tell you that story?” he asks me. “How I died in the camp?” I chew on my peanut butter and butter sandwich. I know the story. He tells it a lot. When he’s 11 years old, about a year after being separated from his mother. When he got amoebic dysentery after eating snails from the river that the locals used as a latrine. The terrible cramps and diarrhea came and he went into the corner of a room where nobody came out alive. It was the same corner that the Japanese ordered him and the other little boys to drag out the bloated corpses of old men by their rubber band wrists and pile them up. Then once a week, to dig a hole outside the camp gates to bury them. Things decompose fast in the jungle, he says.
“I was in terrible pain, with cramps so bad, and then suddenly I saw myself outside of my body. I was looking down on everything, clear as day. I saw my grandmother and some other woman I didn’t recognize.” He is all hot from the Sambal Badjack. He chews a little bit more. “She said, ‘You must go back.’ And I thought. Back there? No way! But she said I must go back. Then I felt this strong pull and I was forced into my body again. The men looking after me said I was dead, but when I awoke, there was no trace of the disease. They couldn’t believe it. I was dead, and then I wasn’t.”
He keeps on chewing. Breathing heavy heat, holding on to a threshold. I’m with my father, in our kitchen, staring at the splat pad, the plastic sheet tacked to the wall behind the trashcan that catches all the multi-colored spit and food Mom launches in that direction. I stuff my mouth with the last of the peanut butter and butter sandwich. The ones I always make myself for lunch and for dinner these days. A big dry lump of peanut butter is still stuck in my throat, it only moves a little bit with each swallow. I think about the bully Vinh Grant in class. This Viet-Nam refugee and his sister Tia whose legs are in metal braces. How in class he reaches for my tit and my head gets hot in anger, and I push him away, but I don’t say anything. I wish he’d have died in his war and never made it to Mrs. Hinkle’s third grade class. I start making another sandwich.
I watch Dad again. Dad’s with his Sambal Badjack, with his hot peppers. The moldy hot peppers he collected from those in the camp who couldn’t take the heat.
“Thereafter, it’s the hot peppers I’m sure that burned out any amoebas or anything in me.” Hot peppers saved his life. But I can’t figure out why he had to go back. Why he had to live. I swallow the peanut butter down finally and it moves down my throat like a bowling ball in the gutter. Down to my stomach without a strike.
My mother walks in.
“Are you still eating that crap? It’s burning up your guts,” she laughs. “I don’t know why you eat that stuff. It’s going to kill you. And it costs a fortune as much as you eat, Albert.” She proceeds to microwave an egg.
My father doesn’t hear her. He is chewing on his Sambal Badjack sandwich. Heating up his body.
I go with Dad to the Asian supermarket in Boulder. Its smell should’ve warned me of what was to come in our kitchen. Dad searches for his ingredients, and I wander the store. There are cans of coconut milk, chili oil, and these tiny, dried fish, their eyeballs staring right out at you, crammed into little plastic packages, screaming, “There is no God.” There are stringy packages of noodles, cookbooks in Vietnamese. I recognize the clear jars of dad’s Sambal Badjack by the funny red writing and the drawing of a red rooster.
A little old Asian woman with a brown bubble perm and bad teeth smiles from behind the register as we check out. Dad has a handful of red peppers and puts them on the counter.
“Are these hot?” he asks her.
“Oh, Thai dragon. Yes, very,” she says, with a half smile, probably thinking what the hell is this white guy going to do with these peppers and is he going to sue me if he dies from eating them?
When we come home, Mom is exercising in yellow terrycloth shorts and a black t-shirt that says, HERE COMES TROUBLE. She has on The Green Berets record full blast and she is jumping up and down. Jeanie has on a blue jean jacket swarming with dozens of music group buttons. She’s swinging her arms left-to-right too, and then starts marching like in the army.
PUT SILVER WINGS ON MY SON’S CHEST. MAKE HIM ONE OF AMERICA’S BEST. ONE HUNDRED MEN WILL TEST TODAY. BUT ONLY THREE GET A GREEN BERET.
“Come on, Patti, dance with me.” I watch the thunderous jiggling of Mom’s fat belly, like a giant slab of pizza dough stretched around her middle and forced to endure a bumpy joy ride. “Help me lose this fat off my belly,” she says and grabs it. She dances on her thin legs, pasty white, racked with varicose veins, blue like the map of a river delta. “I wish I could move some of this fat to my skinny dog bone legs,” she calls out. She lifts her knees, left, right, left. “I hate my skinny dog bone legs.”
I laugh as Dad goes into the kitchen to start cooking. I watch as he chops with precision the garlic and onions and chilies and puts them into a pan of hot oil. “SHHHHHHHH” they hiss as the oil sizzles.
I hear the needle scratch across the record and Mom puts on Eartha Kitt.

I USE MY CHARMS TO DELIGHT YOU, MY TRICKS TO ENTICE YOU, AND ALL OF THE CHARM OF THE WEAKER SEX TO VOODOO YOU. THEY SAY THAT I’M A WITCH AND THAT I WEAVE A SPELL. BUT I’LL BE A SON OF A, I DON’T KNOW WHAT THE… WELL LET ME TELL YOU BROTHER I’D RATHER BE BURNED AS A WITCH THAN NEVER BE BURNED AT ALL.

I come in to dance with Mom. She makes a funny evil face scrunching it together, so that she looks just like the puppet witch from Santa Fe that is hanging on our front door. Our front door that is covered by a white screen door that the spring is broken so it closes with a whack. Jeanie and I start slam dancing off each other, throwing our arms up in the air, laughing, jiggling.
“Hey, be careful, you’re going to break something,” she says. She touches her toes, twists left to right panting. “I wish I were beautiful, kids. Patti, Jeanie, get a rich husband. Why can’t we be rich? We could sail to Europe, move to New York and eat at fancy restaurants all the time. Beautiful, beautiful, BEAUTIFUL.” Her arms are thrown up in the air. “Marry a rich husband, girls. Don’t live in dog dump like this.”
Soon you can really smell the onions and garlic and chilies all cooked up. A heavy haze of smoke fills the house and begins to burn our eyes.
“My God! Albert! Rat, cat, dog shit. Dog tricks!” my mother cries, half laughing, running toward the kitchen. “Hurry! Open the doors and windows! Our eyes are burning up from that crap, Albert!” Dad stirs the onions and the garlic and the chilies. Stirs the onions and the garlic and the chilies, his head in all the smoke.
Jeanie and I throw open all the windows, rubbing our eyes. I can see Brad the neighbor boy across the street watching. Then Mom, Jeanie and I run out to the back yard and are flooded with yellow sunlight, hot rays on our faces. My eyes still sting, my stomach hurts from laughing. We dance. We sing. We smell the Sambal Badjack.

K’NANCY

2009-06-16T17:38:00.000-07:00

I share a room with Nancy. Six years older than me. Nancy, my face close next to hers when we sleep in the big double bed. Her breath and skin smell like a plastic scrubbed clean, her pink nightgown body like a wood spirit, caressed by the long brown hair she brushes 100 times a night. Nancy who is in jr. high school, listens to KIMN radio top 40 under her pillow at night, We had joy we had fun we had seasons in the sun. Nancy,rubs a lemon half on her face trying to lighten the soft brown freckles splashing her face. Does palming exersizes for her eyes so she won’t have to wear glasses one day.
Nancy, who takes me by the hand at the Boulder Public Library, past the smelly, bearded people who are always sleeping in the red and orange chairs, up the big steps to the metal stacks of books while Mom is off foraging through the free magazine pile. Nancy takes me to the homemaker section, books on how to change a baby’s diaper, like she used to change mine, how to square corners on sheets when making the bed. What kinds of appliances to stock in your kitchen, the hand mixer, the deep fryer, a flour sifter. Books to dream on top of our bed together, a dream house. Clean, orderly. Me the baby, Nancy the mother.
Nancy, who I sit with her in front of the black and white TV and bid on the washing machines on The Price is Right. “I won!” She cries, and she’s off to win the trip to Europe and the Broyhill living room set. Nancy, who I watch American Bandstand and Happy Days with and dream of kissing Fonzie, and Nancy tells me that the secret to a driving a guy wild with a kiss is to suck the roof of his mouth with your tongue. Nancy who looks in the mirror and combs her brown curly hair and says, “I hate my hair,” and I look in the mirror and I say, “I hate mine too.” And I do. I hate my hair forever and ever.
Nancy, who opens her yellow, plastic knickknack box. I watch the toy contents, won from gumball machines, spill open. Rat Fink, a little black smiling rat; a tiny book you look through holding up to the light that reads, “love thy neighbor;” a heart-shaped locket with a rose on it; a miniature magnifying glass; a teeny, tiny newspaper. Little things Nancy keeps in her box. Or she tells me stories and sings to me, does hand games.
Oh playmate, come out and play with me
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree
Slide down my rain barrel
Into my cellar dooor
And we’ll be jolly friends
For ever more, more, more more more.

Oh enemy, come out and fight with me
And bring your soldiers three
Climb up my ivy tree
Slide down my gun barrel
Into my trap door
And we’ll be enemies
For ever more, more more more more

Nancy. I watch her play with Barbie and Midge and Ken and Skipper and G.I. Joe. Or she teaches me to write poetry or make God’s eyes out of two chopsticks and colored yarn, or decorate tin cans with string and glued macaroni elbows, or play tennis against the garage door leaving little round marks, or play with her pink clackers that bruise our wrists, or draw house plans together and dream where our bedroom will be and our husband who he will be and our children. How many children will we have? Opening the door to the Mystery Date game. Spinning the knob on the game of LIFE, spinning it so hard because you want to land on TWIN BOYS! So hard that it flies up off the game board like a flying saucer.
“KNANCY!” mom yells, standing in our bedroom doorway. She says K’Nancy
because her false teeth don’t fit her right and she can only say her name as “K’Nancy!” “Come and sweep this floor, Damn it. It’s filthy! Albert! Where is Albert? Take out the garbage.”
Nancy snickers to me, “Knancy! Knancy!”
“Shit! You dirty little bitch. How dare you make fun of me!” Mom’s face is hard like a fist, red, like a wild dog, her teeth thrashing, spitting. Sloshing her false teeth around in her mouth. “Dirty little bitch! You get in there and clean up that kitchen. Damn you!” With each word Nancy’s chest caves in, her startled eyes flash downward in a silent daze. I am frozen too. Clubbed into concrete by Mom’s words. My heart sinks, for Nancy. I want to run away with her, to rest in Nancy’s lap, for her to show me more Teen magazines, to grow more avocado plants from a pit just like the ad in Teen for Isadora and her avocado plant. To write more in our diaries about the boys at school, or to pluck our eyebrows thin, thinner than a pencil line, thin and arched like fishhooks. Or make collages of magazine cut-outs of couples kissing, of couples in love, of babies smiling, smiling in our dream families, with their dream mother, with their dream appliances and dream hair dryers.
“Albert! Where the hell is Albert? Did he run away to the Campbell boys again? He’s got to help too. Shit, dog house. Dog tricks,” Mom says leading Nancy away to the kitchen. And I am alone. Alone in the universe.
“Nancy, Nancy,” my heart calls.

Tamsen's House

2009-06-11T17:15:00.001-07:00

I went to visit Tamsen in Greeley. She is my best friend from the fifth grade. We’ve kept in touch all these years. She is a lesbian and lived for something like 25 years in San Francisco and earlier this year moved in with her sister because she is disabled with MS.
She was rather bored in her room, playing second life all the time, surrounded by 7 puppy mill rescued Bichon Frises. So I came up.
So did Jenny. Jenny is another friend from childhood. We were all pals. She brought lunch and some artwork Tamsen made her when we were in Jr. High School.

Tamsen’s sister’s house is pretty typical, and a lot like her mother’s neat, nursing home décor. I used to admire how neat their house was: a dollhouse, a front room that was spotless. This house is a lot like that, yet it smells bad from the dog urine in the carpet. Milo, the only male of the dog pack, bit my knee. I was on high alert from then on.

Tamsen has had a lot of different houses that I have visited over the years. The first in San Leandro when she was living with her lover from school, Jenny. (another Jenny.) The house was very fine and had about 15 ferrets living with them. But they broke up; Jenny married another woman, and Tamsen took a turn for the worse

I was working as a reporter in Bakersfield when I visited her after that. She lived in a crawl space below a house in San Francisco. There was nowhere for me to sleep, and she didn’t want me to sleep next to her, so the only other space was next to the 50 or so mice crammed into a little cage; the wheel’s whirring would have kept me awake all night, along with the wood chips flying out. So I slept on the sidewalk.

Her next house was better. On Haight Street. She kept a dead rat I her freezer. I hung out there for a couple of weeks before I moved back to Colorado.

Jenny looks great. Like a tennis coach or something, but she’s a voice coach.
She inspected her food thoroughly before she ate it. We ate outside because of the smell. It was enjoyable, as we all talked about our neuroses, yet confessed that that is what makes us so damn fun, so creative and life so alive. People like us for our wild spice.
It was made evident that Tamsen had a crush on Jenny in childhood. Hence the art she made her, and a locket. I never knew. Tamsen said I was her best friend so it couldn’t have been me! Just as well! It would turn out that my first love in high school, Gareth, would turn out gay too! C’est la vie! Amor Fati!

The interesting thing is that people this far back, they knew you when, they knew your mother and father. We talked about my mother and her mother. Mean people who destroyed your self-esteem, crushed it to the bone. But some how you survive and make art out of it. Or at least try to. Her sister said their mother, who was a nurse, always thought my mother had syphillyis of the brain, because of her strange nose. I told them it was because her nose was broken from being kicked in the face by a horse, so the story I was told. Now I wonder. What is truth?

Tamsen’s dog is named Jenny. She said how Jenny who married another woman is having a baby with her. She talked about it three times.
It was good to see her in her house. Friends always help you remember and they also help you heal.

Myths for Grief

2009-06-03T16:27:00.000-07:00

I realize that the steam train rolling over my wagon in the dream is grief. It can really hit you. The grief of life rolls over and busts you up like a steam train crushing your wagon, dragging you beneath. The spirit will always survive, my little dog escaping, but you do have to deal with the grief. It is heavy, dark, crushing. Unfathomable but deserving to be recognized in its own right. That's what it wants - to be recognized and taken care of and then you will be free. A lot like Ereshkigal crying and her sister Inanna coming to hear her in her grief over the death of her husband, the bull. And Inanna was reborn as a result.

I think about my husband committing suicide over the fact that his business went bankrupt. That he had no finances left. I think about him making that choice. I look at my children. I think about if I were in the same situation, and it can always be possible. Would I kill myself over money? It seems to be the American past time these days, if not globally. I was looking out the kitchen window, where on the sill a crystal vase held a giant fuchsia peony from the garden that my daughter brought in yesterday. It is next to a white candle and cobalt blue bottle and a tile from an ancestral house from 17th century Holland. The flood of light came in through the window. Could I abandon my children? There is a Native American saying that a culture is not down until its women are down, becuase the women always stick around for their children.

I thought of all this as I looked over at my daughter near the stove. We were making macaroni and cheese. I taught her how to open the cheese powder package and I told her, "This is your father speaking. He drove me nuts with his neatness, but I can tell you this. If you don't make a mess, you don't have more to clean up later. This is true. You can have a house that looks like Opa's, or you can make life easier on yourself and be efficient." So I channeled her father for her, because she was 2 1/2 when he died. And I looked into her eyes and we stirred the milk and butter in and I thought, this is one fucked up country to be so focused on economics and not focused on life. How can you kill yourself when there is so much beauty and life in the world? You just have to learn some myths for your grief.

My lawyer is on vacation. Justin is wheeling and dealing as usual. Foreclosure, who knows? Will I ever be paid? I have no idea. It rained all weekend and instead of rejoicing in the green that is usually brown Colorado, I worried if Speer was flooding. Miguel called. Yes it did get a little bit wet inside near his bed. They took care of it. Tom was unavailable to deal because his son was graduating from high school. But the big issue was parking. No parking for them. So i had to call around and assign parking and that's all I can deal with right now because I want to focus on the beautiful - my beautiful grief that is a story line of tragedy for the Gods to enjoy. Like the words on this computer and my heart releasing little by little all its broken arrows lodged in its flesh.

HOCHMAN TITTIES, TICHACEK VOICE

2009-05-28T20:26:00.001-07:00

Sydney is the name my mother wanted to call me, because her pen pals and my godparents, Babs and Henry Foster, whom I never met but who sent me a koala bear fur purse and an Aboriginal doll named Bindi and postcards galore that I tore the stamps off of, lived in Sydney, Australia. The Catholic Church said no, no to Sydney, somebody from the village St. Denis, which is really Dionysis, one of two children Zeus had with mortal women. Mom had it all lined up for me to have a man named Art Hyco who had a German shepherd named Mozart to be the godfather at my baptism. But he was divorced so the Catholic Church said, no, no, to that, too and so I got Babs and Henry. Mamma caved in to the pressure, ran down to the courthouse and at the last minute changed the birth certificate from Sydney Patricia Straub to Patricia Sydney Straub. Patricia was the secretary at my father's work.
My mother called me Sparky and everybody else called me Patti, which rhymes with fatty. I hated it. I wonder if Queen Victoria's granddaughter got that treatment. She brought about the Patricia fad. Patricia is long dead.
My mother's name was Agnes. She hated it. She said the Ag rhymed with hag and bag and sag. She changed it to Ann. In Czech, her mother's name was Milada, but they changed it to Mildred. My mother hated it, too. She said it sounded like mildew. Milada's maiden name was Hochman, and from her Mom said she and my younger sister Jeanie get her big titties.
My mother's maiden name was Tichacek. She hated that name because it sounded like a train chugging on tracks the way it was pronounced Tick-a-check, Tick-a-check, Tick-a-check. Our great uncle Tichacek was from Bohemia and was a Wagnerian opera singer. I got his loud voice and it got me on the cheerleading team in the tenth grade.
My oldest sister's name was Nancy. When she became a Hare Krsna devotee she was given the name Narada. Narada was a great sage. Born of Brahma.
My brother's name is Albert. I'm sure he always hated his name, especially when my mother called him Albert Billy, because she really wanted him to be named William. Albert was named after my father, Albert Edward Louis Straub. His mother's maiden name was Haringhuizen. In Dutch it means house of the herrings.
Straub is Swiss-German. Means bushy-haired thief. It rhymes with slob and snob. I hated it. Solis is a Hispanic surname with roots to the sun goddess Sulis of Great Britain. After my husband died, I thought what name to keep. Sun Goddess Sulis, or bushy haired thief. I stuck with Solis.
I changed my name back to Sydney after working at a small newspaper where there were already too many combinations of Pattis, Pats and Patricias.
My youngest sister Jeanie said she wanted to change her name because every girl in the family did. Bistricky, she picked, after our great-grandmother in old Bohemia. I saw Marie Bistricky's black-and-white picture in stern folk costume, white scarf over her hair, hard mouth clenched tight. I said, I'm sure she would hate it.

BODY II

2009-05-28T20:21:00.001-07:00

I am to be showered with confetti at Easter: red, yellow, blue.
Shattered from cascarones; chips of egg shells and colors clinging to a cashmere pullover, red with desire through my skin.
Desire for life, lust, love.
Through the body; as the body; now.

I am to sweat with my lover at night, my body humming with the sound of the fan. And after, the smooth draw of my fingers over his flesh, fingers, face. Breath, blood, blended into eternity, now.

I am to watch young boys scream in joy, dance with bows and arrows, crying for experience of life, limbs, broken destinies, potential powers and heartbeats.

I am to taste pistachio ice cream, glide in a tango step, scrape the ice from my windshield December mornings and cringe.

Ah, the passion of love, the glory of death. All my shadows spun into one stage. One life, pressing into matter shapes of ecstasy, intimacy, hunger and rage. Splendor, fireworks, moon shadows, chipmunk squeaks, newspaper ink. A friend’s shoulder to cry on. A mother’s absence to move me forward, inward, toward myself, toward the other.

My glasses are broken. I don’t need to replace them. Heaven all around. I see it. I see it clear as Her breath on petals at dawn. As ravens gleaning the fields, cawing in rhapsody. As children’s tongues reaching for snowflakes, as jasmine blooming into night. As my sex rushing toward creation; bewilderment; body. How mysterious such life, such joy.

I now know how to stop, look, blossom, expand and indulge – all in one.
Fully expecting it to pass into the shades of memory, as death is already among us.
So why not ravage the moment.
I sense that’s all there is.
Quiet now, or you’ll miss it.

For I am to speak movement into space.
Spread starlight into eyesight
And bring senses into worship.

Story Poetica

2009-05-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

I am looking over poetry I wrote while I was a single widowed mother, before Justin.

BIRTH OF A POEM

Isn’t it enough that women bleed together?
Their cycles churning out blueprints of sea monsters and labyrinths reveal their secrets?
How has heaven been so sly?
I should be but a bug moving across the Lord’s notebook
Sing speckled gecko, what are you waiting for?
It’s only the sound of your own voice.

July, 2005