I’m quite pleased to unveil a little project I’ve been working on:
If you’ve ever wanted to try meditative movement but didn’t know where to start, this e-book is for you. A two-week program using daily prompts, each with music suggestions and inspirational notes – click on the link or the book cover above to find out more and download the book!
I have a thing for miniatures. Not once in 34 years has my body been considered unusually small, but in my mind, tiny things inhabited tiny lands just out of sight of the Big Folk. If I were to let myself, and was willing to devote the time and money to it, I’d absolutely get into making faery houses and doll houses and scenes for all my goddess figures to inhabit, just for fun.
Thus, since I am absolutely utterly uninspired to work on what I’m supposed to be working on tonight, I thought I’d give a brief tour of my (admittedly small) collection of Weeities.
A quick definition: A Weeity is a miniature or otherwise very small statue (not a pendant, but something that stands up on its own) depicting a deity, regardless of culture or mythos of origin, who measures no more than 4 inches in height. I have a 5″ Shiva figure that I don’t really consider a Weeity – he may only be about 5″ tall, but his presence takes up a lot of space, so I leave him be.
Earlier today I mentioned having acquired a Wee Green Tara, which I’ve been casually looking for for years; I knew that the right one would find her way to me if it was time to work with her, and there she was, in the locked case at Book People! I posted her pic on Facebook (unforunately a very blurry pic) and a few people asked about my collection, so here we are.
Most of these figures are on my altar, but they do tend to migrate from time to time.
From left to right:
1. A ceramic Goddess I found at the Texas Renaissance Festival. She feels amazing in my hand.
2. Devotion, one of the Windstone Editions’ JourneyStones by Maya Hill.
3. Fertility, same source.
4. A hand-carved wood goddess I bought from a young woman at a festival who was selling her art to pay for cancer treatment; she told me the story of how she was rafting some huge river in Colorado and found this perfect stick, an aspen branch, which she whittled down into a goddess the rest of the trip. I love to just sit and hold this one while I meditate.
Here, we have two of my favorite pieces from Bell Pine Art Farm:
On the right, we have Radiant Health, one of BPAF’s newer pieces.
On the left is Open Heart.
Bell Pine makes a lot of lovely sculptures, but one of my favorite things they do is that their “family” series can be ordered with same-sex parents.
Next up we have the Ganesha Funtime Band – a brass Elephant God in the background, plus a set of three smaller Ganeshettes which I place in various nooks and crannies of my altar.
Now for the Boods!
Four of these Buddhas are placed throughout the house, tucked in cabinets where you can barely see them unless you’re looking just right. I love the thought of all these iddy Buddhas poking out from behind a pile of towels and saying “Pssssst! Psssst! Breathe, you are alive!” and then vanishing again.
The other two stay on my altar; one is for travel, the other for laughter.
Then, of course, we have our Venus of Willendorf, this one made of pure clear quartz, a gift from a dear friend.
Last of all we have the Weeity that inspired me to do this, the beautiful Green Tara I’ve been looking for for years. Not only was she the perfect size and color, with all the detail I wanted, she was insanely reasonably priced, so if you’re looking for a Green Tara about 4″ tall go to Book People (they still had one yesterday).
It’s especially poignant that I found her this weekend, for reasons I’ll be going into this week – that’s right, my posts might include actual substance now that I’m through writing book 4 and am trying to decide what goes to the top of my to-do list. I’m actually considering another non-fiction book, I just don’t know on what. I’ll keep you posted.
But here she is:
Yours truly is featured on Penguin’s SciFi/Fantasy webpage, so check it out (scroll down slightly).
You still have one week to register for the newest round of Becoming a Spiritual Nomad! Registration is $25 for the six-week course. Click here for more info or to enroll. The course goes live on April 16 and registration will be closed that morning.
I made this. Let’s see how many of mine you agree with – then go make your own.
There’s a lot more fun stuff coming up around here in the next few weeks, so keep a sharp eye!
I thought this post needed a smiling puppy to balance out the sad.
Empathy isn’t just an affliction for psychic vampire musicians. It’s a very real thing that strikes when you least expect it, like on a sunny Saturday morning through a window.
Every Saturday I work the front desk at Thrive fitness studio where I take Nia classes. I’ve been doing it for a couple of years now, and it’s always a good way to start my weekend – nothing like riding the energy groove of a class full of happy dancing people to put a smile on your face.
The studio shares its parking lot with a veterinary clinic, so I often see people arriving with their dogs and walking across the narrow street from the lot to the vet’s office. I’ve seen all sorts of canines and all sorts of humans with them.
This morning I was in the middle of marking off class cards when a luxury SUV pulled into the parking lot and all but flew into a space. A blonde woman in her mid 30s and a typical dude-bro looking man got out and ran around to the back of the vehicle. They opened the hatch, revealing a large dog crate.
Right away I knew something terrible had happened. The woman opened the crate door and reached inside…then a moment later backed up, hands going to her mouth. The husband (?) didn’t seem to know what to do, so he stood there patting her back awkwardly.
I realized I had just seen their dog die.
The woman lost it. Completely. Right there on the curb, she went to her knees and threw up into the landscaping, then sat rocking back and forth sobbing for several minutes. The husband ran into the clinic and came back with a cup of water for her. Finally he helped her to her feet, caught her when she nearly passed out, and the two closed the SUV’s door and walked into the clinic together. He had seemed kind of helpless in the face of her pain, but once he figured out practical ways he could help her, he was pretty amazing.
By the time they came out, the woman was calmer, but she had that shell-shocked look people always get when death strikes them out of the clear blue nowhere. They got back in the SUV and drove away much more slowly than they’d arrived, taking their dog back home.
I managed not to break down sobbing while I was behind the desk – there’s nothing more awkward than walking in on a crying woman – but as soon as I got in my car I had a brief but intense moment of weeping for the woman, the husband, and their dog. I felt terrible, not just because of what had happened, but because I felt like I had intruded on what should have been private grief. I tried, in my clumsy way, to send them love – love for the dog, as he or she passed; and love for the humans he left behind, especially the woman who loved him so much she broke down in the middle of a busy Saturday on South Congress.
On the outside these were not the sort of people I would ever have spent time with out in the world. But we’ve all felt that kind of pain, that sweeping loss that washes everything away. I found myself thinking about other people I’d seen that morning. The lady who cut me off in traffic – what if she did that because her dog had just died and she was driving his body home to bury, her eyes overflowing with tears? What about the weird smelling guy at the post office? Any one of the people in the studio at that moment dancing? I know from experience that to dance is to free stuck emotions and break up energetic stagnation, so any one of them could have been dancing out a deep wailing grief just as easily as just having a good time.
Or even when people have been cruel to me, I still have no idea what’s going on in their hearts at the time; I just know that it’s almost never about me. The woman from Pilates class who gives me the stink-eye when I arrive for Nia…it could be that she hates her body so much she can’t imagine loving a body like mine. It could be that her mother died due to diabetes and she feels like her weight was a direct factor. It could be her high school bully was a big girl who taught her to fear large women. That won’t, of course, stop me from giving her the “Can I HELP you?” look, which usually earns an embarrassed retreat, but it does remind me that behind every person causing pain, there almost always is pain – a mountain of pain left to fester and rot until it stinks up everything around them.
You just never know what’s going on with someone – why they look the way they look, act the way they act. That’s not to excuse inconsiderate behavior by any means, but it does give me pause when I get ready to leap to judgment against someone. Just as they have no idea looking at me what I’ve been through, I have no idea what wounds they are nursing, what demons they’ve faced. You just never know.
There’s a quote that’s been on my mind since then, often attributed to Plato but actually traceable to the 1890s and a writer named Ian MacLaren:
(4 years ago)
Once upon a time, I got a snake tattoo.
It occurred to me the other day that all but one of my tattoos are of animals and the one that isn’t is about animals. The butterfly was my “I just moved out of my parents’ house to the big city” tattoo; the spider was a reference to my writing, as Spider has been a spirit…helper, I guess is the word, with my work since I wrote my first book, The Circle Within.
I got the Sanskrit word Ahimsa on my neck the year my cat Cosmo died, both to honor his memory and to announce my intention of becoming vegan…even if it took me the rest of my damn life to get there.
When I turned 30, my BFF and I went to get tattoos together. We both wanted snakes, and both on our arms. This seems strange unless you know that we were co-priestesses of a coven, and we had become devoted to the Dark Mother, whose sacred animals included the serpent. She always appeared to me with snakes curling around Her arms, and She and I danced together in a serpentine way, and it felt right, at the time, to mark my devotion to Her on my body. So we both did, and I have loved my snake tattoo ever since.
It is a reminder of the ever changing nature of my faith – as I shed skins of old versions of myself, new skin emerges, shiny and soft, older and wiser. Given that my sun sign is the sign of transformation (Scorpio, in case you hadn’t figured that one out already), this tattoo will never lose its meaning, for I will never stop changing, never lose my need to peel away my old skins and discover a new woman beneath.
Of course, once you start getting tattoos it’s very hard to stop, so I’ve been gathering images on Pinterest of ink that I liked, to hopefully inspire me toward the two or three pieces I had in the back of my mind: I wanted something on my right arm to balance the snake on my left; I wanted a lotus surrounding the Ahimsa; and I wanted a tree on my back…oh, and I want something written in English as well, perhaps a single word inside my wrist, something like “create” or even “love.”
Even though I don’t exactly have a ton of money right now, as soon as I got my Bipolar II diagnosis I knew it was time to balance that left arm. The snake was a symbol of darkness, and while I have no problem with darkness, if I wanted to bring my life more into balance, I needed to balance the snake with something that to me symbolized light.
I found exactly what I was looking for on Pinterest: a phoenix whose wings formed a lotus blossom.
A phoenix, the bird who dies in flame and then is reborn from her own ashes…that sounds about right to me.
I knew I had to do it, and I had to do it NOW. When my BFF asked me about the meaning of the phoenix and whether it meant my life before, or what was happening now, I couldn’t articulate an answer. Something was driving me toward it, the same feeling that drove me to get the snake. I can only conclude that God wanted me to get the tattoo, and She wanted me to get it as soon as possible.
So I did.
I handed over the design to the tattoo artist, who added a few swirls and flourishes to balance it out; I told him I wanted some red on the wings to balance the red-and-black of the snake, so that’s what he did.
And it is. So. Beautiful.
And yes, it hurt.
It makes me wish I could remove all of my other tattoos and have this guy redo them with his incredible linework. I’ve actually been considering embellishing the snake somehow for quite a while; now that I’m not working with the Dark Goddess anymore it feels like it needs something, something to help it be part of my current life.
Of course, here’s the tricky part: when you get a tattoo for spiritual reasons, spiritual things are going to happen in your life that bring that tattoo’s energy up over and over again. You have to be ready to accept that.
Thus, I got my phoenix both to honor where I’ve been – all the deaths both big and small that have been a part of my path, all the things I’ve risen from even after my life had turned to ash – but also where I’m going, as I take the burnt-out wreck of the last year, the ashes of years of depression, the charred remains of who I used to be, and use them to incubate a stronger, healthier, happier, more successful me.
So shall it be.
Now available, the third novel in the Shadow World Series, Shadow's Fall!
Click here to pre-order from Barnes & Noble
The next run of my six-week e-course, Becoming a Spiritual Nomad, is open for registration! The course officially begins Monday, April 16, and registration is only $25. Come camp with the nomads!
