SpiritMaa

well, i made it to new orleans! after a hella time packing up 15 years of my life (and all the markers of my psycho-spiritual process) and saying goodbye to san francisco (and all my favorite nature spirits), i got in my car (packed to the gills), and started driving. i knew it would be a long trip, but crossing 3 deserts and the whole state of texas! seriously? the whole desert thing was so bleak and desolate it felt kinda like a death/rebirth experience... i made a skull offering to the moj...

so much energy, so much power my body is shaking when i stand up to dance in front of the other women in the group. we are asked to move sensually, almost in slow motion, but i want to just cut loose, let the energy go wherever it wants... why not? why not let kundalini ma have her way with me? i don't understand why the facilitator calls me to source the energy in my womb... so hard, so hard to bring it down.... but the second time in front of the group, i do. i keep going back to the womb...

all souls day meditative concert/ritual... as jennifer berezan sings her prayer, she calls 2000 people to chant with her: the audience, then the chorus - first in the foreground, then in the background as other singers step up: korean temple nuns, tara chantress, african spiritual voices, dakina ...

this one was different than most of my holotropic breathwork experiences. maybe because it needed to be? maybe because my right arm was injured and needed to stay immobile? sure there was some outward kriya movement, at the beginning especially, but less than usual. and my arms were at mostly at rest. however, i felt pulsations from an early point along my left arm, and focused in the palm. i also experienced internal vibrations, and they reverberated from one part of my system to another...

i've got scorpio in the ascendant, and venus and pluto in my house of philosophy - does that explain this sometimes exhausting focus on love and death i've experienced from an early age? maybe it has to do with family dynamics, and/or being socialized with the 'original' love and death story as a catholic? or, perhaps, past lives coming through?

everyone has lost someone they love (for me it was my grandmother/heart-mother when i was 12), but by the time i was in high school i was wri...

drums, two trumpets and a tuba, rhythms so good, the crowd gets bigger and bigger and we take over canal and bourbon, dancing the electric slide in the street...thunder and lightning don't matter, we just keep on dancing... the joy theater sign accompanies us as we walk to marie laveau's final resting place. a city for the dead... xxx's all over the walls of her tomb... is she still there? or is that her palpable presence at the voodoo shop altar we visit? a beautiful dark woman with neon ...

somebody from my michigan hometown in the corner store... somebody from south texas staying in my guest house... someone from the bay islands talking to me on the street.... new orleans just keeps circling around and around the signposts of my life... and yesterday a huge painting of kali ma in the local healing center.. Ma is here too???

the huge blue sparkling sculpture of yemaya with eyes staring back at me was more what i expected. or the multi-skull painted fence as i walked ...

early saturday morning in new orleans. walking to congo square - we hear the drums calling up the ancestors... the ones who sang and danced here every sunday during slave times (and birthed something new)... will they help us with the ritual today?

everyone in white, sun beating down... we gather to send love and healing to the ones who died in the middle passage - the ones who jumped overboard and the ones who perished in the hold - and the ones who somehow survived and made it possi...

dreamtime: i'm standing outside leaning on a fence with a building in the background. it's a sunny day... there is a raven sitting on the fence, and i think it's going to fly away, but instead it hops over and climbs on my arm. then starts pecking at my watch, flipping the circular time piece onto the ground. after the raven has made mincemeat out of my watch piece, i realize - he's not just a raven... i hear a name in my head: san geronimo....

when i wake up i wonder if that name ...

her eyes were so intense... her gaze so direct. i had to turn away from her (and i don't turn away from many - knowing kali as i do... ) i hadn't been sure who i was coming to see that sunday afternoon driving down to half moon bay. just that she was one of the 13 indigenous grandmothers that were prophesied to come at this time on our planet. the time of consciousness shifts. that they are here to do ritual and pray for the people, the planet and all our relations - that we may come back...