La France calls me back. My first visit to the country was for a family reunion when I was 21. The following year, after I graduated from college, I lived with my uncle and his family in Paris for six months while I undertook an apprenticeship in alchemy. I have returned more than half a dozen times since. When I...
Six summers ago, on the eve of my mother’s birthday, she faded with the dimming evening sky and rode a receding sunbeam over the western horizon as the sun set. I was left behind holding my baby, a motherless mother crying out for my mama. Like my own infant daughter each time I was momentarily out of sight, I desperately searched...
“Home.” When I vocalize the word, it resonates in my throat and chest. I elongate the central vowel sound and the tone grounds me in the place where I am writing, the place where my imagination is wandering to an unknown destination, home. Four letters, a single syllable - H O M E - brings to mind a wooden, hand-painted,...
Baba Marta – Grandmother March – dwells deep in the forest with her two brothers Little and Big Seshko (January and February). Like three bears, they spend winter dozing in their cozy den. While the snow falls silently in the woods and all is quiet and still, Marta and her brothers snore through the short, dark days. When Father Sun returns...
HEKATE’S DESCENT - PART 1 Hermes walked solemnly behind me and the parade of shades followed at our heels. When we reached the gates of Hades, I turned to admire Hermes’ eternally youthful beauty before we parted. Lust, longing, duty; in an instant much passed between us unspoken. Then he led the dead back into the earth and I walked on...
PART 1 - ANTHESTERIOS On the morning of Khytri, as has been our private tradition for many, many years, I woke up in Hermes’ bed. His warm breath on the back on my neck roused me to day breaking on the third day of Anthesterios. Hermes’ typically swift-running, golden body lay resting in deep slumber upon the stone floor of his...
My mother was raised Catholic. I was not. Her childhood was Northern Californian suburban bourgeoise. Mine was not. After attending all girls’ private Catholic schools - through college - my mother came of age in the 1960s in the San Francisco Bay Area at the moment of “turn on, tune in, drop out.” (Timothy Leary) My mother fled the Church...
One summer day, a female mountain lion climbed down from her den in the costal hills of Northern California to walk along the seashore. Foraging in the wet sand at low tide, she ate her fill of crab and jellyfish. With a full belly she felt her heat – the hunger of loneliness – in her womb. More than anything,...
In the Sumerian myth of Inanna’s Descent (c. 4000 BCE – c. 3100 BCE), the goddess of love and war goes below ground to the Underworld to visit her sister – or shadow aspect – the dark goddess, Ereshkigal. As she descends, she discards the objects and ornaments of her authority. She is then flayed, and her skin is hung...
“Culture is its own limitation. Culture represents a particular adaptation, a particular level of psychological maturity. What happens when the capacity of the individual to expand the framework exceeds the cultural capacity? The two come into conflict. Where the individual potential for development exceeds the cultural limit the need for new meaning erupts.” (D. Stephenson Bond, 1993, Living Myth, p....