No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.
― VIRGINIA WOOLF

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trigger warning:
If you prefer my softer, more enchanting vernacular, or if, like me, you love the Moon so much it hurts, or if you have been harmed by unscrupulous men and don’t want to read more ab…

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In the name of the Fire,
The Flame
And the Light:
praise the pure presence of fire
That burns from within
Without thought of time.

The hunger of Fire has no need
For the reliquary of the future;
It adores th…

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Greetings to Every Glorious Emotion You’ve Ever Felt~

I am with the Ocean now, within and without. Walking with her everyday at Dawn. Getting re-Sourced after a harrowing few weeks and a…

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The small man
builds cages for everyone
he
knows.
while the sage,
who has to duck Her head
when the moon is low,
keeps dropping keys all night long
for the
beautiful
rowdy
prisoners.

—HAFIZ, 14th c. (trans. Dani…

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The ocean is a woman and she is me.
LINDA MARIE VAN TASSELL

Greetings to the Ocean Within You~

Those wild waters that want to liberate you, and all you meet, from anything less than heaven on earth. Yea…

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We carry the river, its body of water, in our body …
I mean river as a verb. A happening. It is moving within me right now.
— NATALIE DIAZ (excerpt, The First Water is the Body)

Greetings t…

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Know thyself.
— THE ORACLE AT DELPHI, c. 6th century BCE

Beloveds,

I write you from one of those perfect, …

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Song of a Spirit

Over the springing earth I dance
with lilting laughter, nimble steps;
I tease the buds and kiss the blooms;
I stir the sap! I bring a thrill!
I am Wind! I am Wind!

After the …

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Let the Beauty we love be what we do.
— RUMI

Greetings to the Many Callings Alive in You~

In this fourth episode of my Spring-into-Summer audio series, Heaven on Earth, I’m sharing 3 distinct yet interconnected types of callings I’ve observed in my years guiding rites of passage and in shamanic healing work. Personally, they’ve become the shining stars I constellate my own life around, always watchful for the images and gestures they make when seen as one image.

In their love affair with each other, these callings bring me more alive while deepening my participation in the world. Both helm and ship, they carry my life forward and reveal my eternal nature. When women learn to trust this ancient, call-and-response dance between her deepest, submerged, and surface callings … heaven on earth is 10,000% the result.

Heaven on Earth is free until I finish it (there’s just a few more episodes left I’d like to make). After that, it will become a signature line of soul-lingerie available for purchase. You can still listen free to the first few episodes right here.

Episode 4 // 3 Types of Callings

Here are the most potent signs an initiation is at your door~

You sense or know there’s more to who are and why you’re here, and that it’s not about self-improvement. It’s about remembering something, revealing something, drawing up and out a wild woman of power roving around, deep within you. Big power & potential move through you at times, but that struggle to be what you can see and feel is an invitation to initiation.

The desire to know and embody your medicine, your soul’s gift, to commune with your deeper life’s calling feels urgent. You may feel beside yourself, outside yourself, intensely frustrated, even trapped… but hang tight because this is normal during initiation.

A vision (for what you’re meant to do or how you’re meant to live) whispers constantly at the periphery of everyday life, but you’ve been afraid or unsure how to say yes. The whisper is growing louder… before long, it will be a howl.

An old way is ending. A way of being, role, career, relationship, world view. You just cannot do it the way you have anymore. There’s a this is not it feeling about one or more aspects of your life, or generally. There’s a new way forward, but first the old way has to be given a good death.

You feel increasingly distant, different, apart from or uninspired by loved ones, old interests, familiar places and ways of being. It won’t always be this way, but hermitage~ the deep need to leave the mundane and head for the enchanted woods alone~ is a key function of initiation. Luckily, you can do this without leaving (or blowing up) your daily life… but you do have to trust this calling towards differentiation.

A series of strange, synchronistic, unfortunate and/or fortuitous, stuff-you-can’t-make-up has been courting (or accosting!) you. You may even feel an ancient lineage reaching out to you. A particular calling, a big life change or a loss might accompany all of this, but there’s something beneath the obvious happening, too. Of that, you’re sure. Mmm, this can be bewildering, but magic is afoot always at the threshold places in our lives.

The Wild Becoming Immersion was designed to hold women, specifically, during these threshold moments, so they can see through to other side of what’s calling out to them. And that’s exactly what it’s done for over fours years running now.

While your initiatory journey is between you and The Mystery~ however you call her~ the immersion guides you through 5, mythic tasks (rooted in both ancient & emergent rites of passage work) that help to carry us from where we are across the threshold to where our soul longs to go.

This looks like 1:1 sessions + customized invitations to work with between sessions + a co-designed ceremony you enact about 2/3 through the immersion. We close by conjuring a delicious, courageous plan for embodying and enacting all that was discovered about who you are and what your life is asking for next.

I have just a couple spaces open . .. I’m so excited to meet the next two women I will get to serve in this potent holding…

If you think this might be you… there’s 3 steps to enroll: 1. book a low-cost call to learn more & share your story with me, 2. sleep on it, 3. let me know if it’s a full-body yes.

And for our Next, Collective Initiation in the Wild Becoming Sanctuary…

May you trust the deep knowing as well as the simple pleasures that delight you.

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I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart. I am, I am, I am.
— SYLVIA PLATH

Greetings to The Elements of You~

I’m embarking on an adventure this summer. Do you want to …

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The world is full of magic things,
patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
—W.B. YEATS

Greetings to the Calling Most Alive in You Today,

I’m so deeply obsessed with callings. For some reason beyond my knowing, I’ve always been naturally inclined to trust and follow the glimmering threads of magic from here to there, throughout my life. This has led to all kinds of fantastic disasters and glorious adventures and losses and rare finds. Above all, this strange and largely unsanctioned practice has brought me more and more alive, even as it has necessarily laid to rest (sometimes annihilated) old versions of myself.

I feel sure that if you’re reading this, you’re also awake to The Magic, prone by your mysterious nature to follow its promptings more than most people. Still, it’s numinous work to follow callings as a way of life, which is something very different than the more mainstream idea of “finding one’s calling,” which tends to correlate with a lucky few who seem to really enjoy their profession or life’s work.

No, the callings I’m most interested in (and help women hear and heed daily) are the subtler, seemingly smaller, easily missed ones that continually reach out their hand to show us The Way… a unique path all our own that leads us deeper and deeper into who we are, a life we’re in love with, and a mosaic of worldly participation that is alive, connected and life-enhancing… often (but not always) including, yet not at all limited to what we “do” for a living.

Callings can be big. But on the way to those life-defining ones~ in fact, the pathway to our greater callings~ are the breadcrumbs, magical items, unlikely helpers, intimidating hags, bewitched landscapes, storms and turns of luck, strange synchronicities, omens … initiatory journeys. These are what excite me most.

To live within the time-bending fabric of callings is to step back into an enchanting world. One that does not require you to leave this realm, but simply see it through different eyes. Suddenly, the bus ride becomes the revelation. The library, a vast oracle. The bird that just flew overhead while you asked a key question, a divine messenger. Then your life starts to resemble a real-life fairytale. One that’s very attracted to humans conspiring to birth heaven on earth.

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Blessings of the numinous, unmistakable callings. May you follow the next breadcrumb and then the next… deeper into your aliveness.

Greetings to the Holy Woman Within You~

In today’s episode of May’s mini-podcast series, Heaven on Earth, I’m opening the door to the new Holy Woman ~ she who is arriving rhizomatically, spontaneously and instinctively in many women at this time on Earth. This phenomenon has to do not only with the resurrection of many ancient, once common roles held predominantly by women, but also to do with the painstaking remembering of the holiness of every woman, of the inherently holy nature of woman that has been erased, dismissed or perverted.

May in the Wild Becoming Sanctuary is a masterclass in the unique slice of Heaven on Earth — the Sacred H.O.E. — that lives within each of us. What does she look, sound, feel, move like? What dream does this secret garden of earthly delights want you to make real in the world? Devotional love to this place within us & what we discover there is our focus.

In last week’s Council of the Muse (our interactive monthly class), we turned our cameras off for the entire two hours as an experiment in moving closer to this innermost realm while noticing how we relax, as women, when not “on display,” even to fellow women. We also took a shamanic journey to Heaven on Earth within … instantly and easily one of my favorite journeys ever. The replay is up + companion self-led practices & rituals.

My deepest, 1:1 mentorship container, the Wild Becoming Immersion, has 2 openings… For women who are at a crossroads, a rite of passage, a powerful identity shift, an ending and a numinous and much-desired new beginning she can’t quite see but knows is meant for her. If this is you, I’d love to hear your story and share more about what this rare and potent, initiatory guidance is all about.

In honor of Mother’s Day, here are some reads from the Wild Becoming archives + what’s currently on my nightstand…

On my Nightstand …

I’m known to be reading anywhere between 3 to 10 books at the same time. Lately, the number has been especially high. I’m finding that in writing a book, it’s hard for me to read other books cover to cover quickly. It influences my writing too much. And yet, deep sips of brilliant word weavings from kindred scribes is like water to my process. These are the ones I’m currently sipping on…

I am completely undone exploring Carolyn Hillyer’s exquisite “bone collection” of the Proto-Celtic language… root words and full-on words of a 4000+ year old, European Mother tongue … a chthonic experience to weave into songs, incantations, charms and poetry.

I’ve just started Ithel Colquhoun’s account of traveling around Ireland as a woman many moons ago (she died in 1988), preferring holy wells, haunting monastaries, craggy hills, and Wind of course, over the anthropocene. So far, lyrically something very special, gifted to me by one who knows I am Wind’s lover (and enamored by all things Celtic, especially when it comes to the Land).

I picked up Patrick Bringley’s memoir on a whim at the bookstore recently, about quitting his job at The New Yorker when his brother became terminally ill, and becoming a security guard at the MET that ended up lasting a decade. It’s like Night at the Museum for grown-ups!

Nicholson’s Mystics of Islam, first published in 1918, I picked up for $5 at a book sale long ago. I’ve always been deeply drawn to the Sufi poets, to Sufism, and to the mystic, gnostic arm of every spiritual tradition. Every morning, I practice bibliomancy. It’s my morning love letter from The Beloved. I hadn’t opened this book in forever, but she called out and the passage I was led to gave me goosebumps. Maybe you have an old book like that, longing for oracular touch?

Russ wrote How to Suppress Women’s Writing in 1983 and it both illuminates how far we’ve come as female writers, and also, exactly what to expect should we lean all the way into our more taboo ideas. Since my book has all kinds of taboo ideas in it, I’ve found this vindicating and sobering and also just amusingly written.

Have you read Riane Eisler’s work yet? I’m currently re-reading with a fine-tooth comb both of these underrated classics. They continue to influence my work and worldview so much. She is the academic-oracular-philosopher-queen of Heaven on Earth! I see her work growing exponentially in popularity in coming years. I’m happy to help that along. And truly— my brothers— these are essential reading for men. They will enlighten and likely anger you, at what you, too, have been subjected to.

And… aromatherapy… because, ahhhhhhh. Sellar’s book is comprehensive. In another life, I am 1000% an aromatherapist, working spells and weaving scented charms out of the back of my flower shop. I’ve been using aromatherapy for decades and highly recommend my dear friend, Layla’s exquisite, small-batch company, Lunaroma. (not getting paid here, just sharing the love). Treat yourself or the mama you love!

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Happy Mother’s Day, to the beautiful Holy Women of all kinds…

May you be celebrated today. May you righteously, unapologetically, and creatively birth Heaven on Earth in the way only you can.

Blessings to the Mothers & blessings to the motherless…

I against whom magic has been performed … May my body be purified like lapis lazuli. May [my] features be bright like alabaster. Like shining silver and reddish gold, may I not be dull.

— ORACLE OF ENHEDUANNA
(ancient Sumerian high priestess), c. 1617 BCE

Beltane Blessings, Beautiful Deep-Time Souls,

A Full Flower, Venusian Moon on Beltane has not happened since 1988. Sometimes when I read things like that, I get all stirred up. Like I need to do something with this astro-chthonic vibration. That’s when I take a deep breath…. mmmmm….and return to my yes.

Once I have a real, soul-deep yes on the tip of my tongue, I make a wish. It is enough. So good. I might see a no arising, because the wish quickly reveals its nemesis. And so, there is the technology of ceremony. Nothing fancy. Just Life (where is the aliveness)> then Death (what is in the way of that aliveness)> then Life (make the wish. say yes).

A big wish this past Winter was to break the stand-still with my book. I could not seem to move into the next phase with her. With the help of an on-fire mentor, I’ve had a stunning breakthrough.

Hearing of my beloved time wandering with the Land (literally as many hours I can a week) she asked if I’d ever ritually walked with a chapter, orating. Holy mother. It totally unlocked me. I am that crazy lady talking to herself; I work so much out that way. But I hadn’t thought to apply it to the book. Sacred speech (and sacred rambles) is where the aliveness is for me right now.

One of the sublime and sobering realizations of doing this is how this space of wildest becoming has been asking for something a little different. It’s difficult to write weekly essays, for me, while I write the book. But it’s a hard groove to break, after doing it so long.

So I let a little Death in. What needs to die here? It turns out, for now anyway, that the story ‘I have to write you a weekly essay’ wants to die. Then I listened for the aliveness, the wish lighting the candle of these bright months ahead. And all I could hear was Heaven on Earth…

A series of transmissions exploring the most compelling, out-at-the-edge, deeply nourishing things we don’t hear enough about the secret garden of earthly delights that lives inside every woman. The part of Heaven on Earth she came here to birth, and the longings, callings, conundrums, impossible tasks, descents and returns, losses and unexpected boons that show up to initiate her into her wildest becoming~ into the one who knows how to bring what is hidden deep into the world.

Of course, this garden is alive in us all. We all have a vital role to play in creating Heaven on Earth. But it is especially fraught for womban, for female-bodied beings. Our allies are most appreciated here, as we reclaim our Sacred H.O.E.dom. The Queendom for which the world is acheing.

My wish this Beltane, in the fullness of the Flower Moon, in the cocaphany of terror, is nothing short of Heaven on Earth.

My wish for every womban is ~ as within, so without. Because what you have inside of you is the future.

Join is this May, as we go deep into devotional love affair with your innermost secret garden. Here for the podcast, or deeply inside the Wild Becoming Sanctuary.

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The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you alm…

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We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognized, those which do not enhance our future lose their power and can be altered. The fear of our desires ke…

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Welcome, Beloved Friends. This piece is necessarily pay-walled after a certain point-of-no-return, because it contains a sacred story from my life, offered here as soul food for any who feel undeniably allured to it, but not for broad public consumption.

Desire School Part II begins next Saturday, April 4.
Forbidden Love: Born to Disturb, Disrupt, Discover Truth. Join us.

WHY AM I CRYING
Am I still sad
because of my
lost maidenhead?

Where in the
dark forever
does she go?

SAPPHO + AMA (trans. by Mary Barnard)

Greetings to the Virgin in Your Spring~

That which you’re touching for the very first time. Maybe it’s a new endeavor, or way of being. Maybe it’s a new relationship or the feeling of no longer being in an old one. Maybe it’s some choice that’s getting you naked in some way you’ve never quite been before.

Spring brings with her the mythos and logos of The Virgin. Courtship cascading into the chase into copulation is everywhere in the natural world, and in humans awake to their nature. Everything wants to be touched anew. All is on the move with pollination, hunger, conception, riotous lovemaking. The first bee or robin’s egg or crocus or warm afternoon ignites some ancient, innocent wonder within us.

Everything is gained when the whole world touches itself anew, or for the first time. No one questions this. The primal desire which instigates Life’s renewal is welcomed and celebrated as a boon. So commonplace is this vast chorus of desire, we almost forget that desire is, without question, what drives Spring’s renewal. Not procreation. Not even an instinct to survive. Holy Desire drives the world to bring itself to life.

Whatever is Virgin for you this Spring has so much life to offer you. But, in our heartbroken culture, it’s common to acutely feel what may be lost, not gained, in taking a new risk. True and worthy risk brings on virgin consciousness: the distinct feeling you will not be the same after consummation.

It’s important to remember, if you’re a woman, you’ve been trained to expect not just change but loss at the sight of making love to something you’ve never before experienced, within or without. Women are taught to fear the worst in every leap of faith, far more than men. In every new endeavor, in every bid to touch the world and let the world touch us a little more deeply, women must meet her fear of annihilation.

Men need only leap and the world embraces them, whether they fail or not. I know the brothers don’t always feel this way. Nevertheless, most men cannot fully grasp how wildly excused they have been for things a woman still faces, to this day, relational, professional or creative ruin.

I’ve come to believe that one, powerful phrase— still fervently in use— plays an enormous role in this expectation of loss in moments when, according to Spring, we have far, far more to gain from moving towards our desire. It’s a devilish incantation. A real sleight of hand. An oxymoron parading around as Sacred Law. It is this:

It may seem a stretch to compare our very human fear of loss at the sight of risk to the loss implied by the end of virginity, but I think it’s deeply connected for women. Despite decades of unraveling the patriarchal condition, the west continues to be obsessed with purity, perfection and poise in women. In fact, there is renewed gusto over this: just look at the Heritage Foundation’s recent-most liturgy against women’s ballooning self-expression.

It continues to rattle the overculture’s cage when women get after what they want. And when we really, really get after what we want? The culture is a glutton for feasting on our every blemish and foible, real and perceived. Women are endlessly pathologized for wanting.

Consider that virgin meant “woman unto herself” in the ancient world. Unmarried maiden. She who belonged to no man. Not ‘she who has never had a dick inside her,’ but simply: sovereign woman. She who belongs to her Self.

Consider how this powerful word, virgin: fertile, autonomous, maiden, slowly came to mean unspoiled goods, valuable commodity, sellable. Imagine how, what was once the most ancient spiritual rite— a mutually initiatory gift-exchange— became a valuable object one man could give another to take. This object given, one man to another, was a woman not yet been broken via intercourse. Ah, the pleasure to break a woman. Deeply satisfying to even the kindest patriarchal man.

Only under the largely forced marriage economy could this loss of virginity become a gain, and then, not for woman, but for the man who has “taken” her as his wife. Under this marriage economy, consummation subverted what was once an ancient rite into an act of ultimate possession. Sacrifice of the maidenhead was once a sacred sexual initiation for all, overseen by female priestesses.

It was the goddess to whom the maidenhead was given, and this marriage ceremony (aka sex) did not necessarily indicate life-long coupledom. It was far more chthonic and communal, a binding of humans to the Land, of men to the goddess. Under this rite, much was gained when the two became one. Under organized patriarchal religious rite, this consummation became a literal and symbolic, life-long right to ownership of the female, body and soul.

Of course, times have changed. Most of us do not arrive at the marriage bed, if we arrive there at all, virgins. Most men reject the idea of women as chattel. Many men are waking up from the misogyny-pedagogy. And yet, here we remain: in the manosphere, incel culture, a sex offender happily “grabbing pussies” as US president, the Epstein files.

For men, this “loss” of virginity is an unquestionable gain. Virility, manhood, the capacity to “get the girl” persist. Nothing is lost, save a bit of pride perhaps from his fumbling. Everything is gained. A sense of accomplishment, a confidence he’s never known, a wild knowing washes over the young man who has now experienced the Garden of Earthly Delights. Unwittingly, he has become a thief in this moment, and it leaves an unasked-for slash on his soul he senses but struggles to name.

When woman “loses” her virginity (again, using the narrow definition of penetrative sex here), the vast majority of sisters almost feel the very power of the goddess draining from them. A numinous light within us, just barely beginning to glow, dims. Our brilliance, known to us or not, suddenly thins. Something unspeakably precious flees in the moments, days or weeks after our so-called deflowering. We know not where this power has gone or how to get it back.

And, like Persephone, that is exactly where we need to go to get it back. The reason I know this is because it’s what I had to do, myself, just last year.

What I first thought was an invitation to “do some healing” around sexual trauma in my past became a wild descent into the deep pain of my sexual past. This initiation became a taboo reclamation, a kind of erotic revenge, an alchemical journey not unlike those of Inanna, Isis, Demeter.

It began when the dark memory of my lost virginity began haunting me quite suddenly, and yet in the midst of some really gargantuan revelations about the inner-Predator. For decades, the memory of the night I first had sex was shrouded in mist. Literally, if I tried to approach it in my mind’s eye, it would appear hazy, as if shrouded in fog. My psyche had done this on my behalf. But during this risky initiatory yes to myself I was making last year, a plea to remember it stalked me.

Maybe I finally felt safe enough. Maybe I finally got curious enough. And maybe, just maybe, there was power here. Out of the corner of my eye, something glimmered. A flash of gold. So I went there. I opened my whole heart to this memory. I stalked it back. Any woman who has difficult sexual memories knows how daring a thing this was to do, and how difficult.

I was 15, and there was an 18 or 19 year old Irish boy with wild blue eyes and a pale yellow convertible who I could not resist. And, if there’s one thing 18 or 19 year old Irish boys with wild blue eyes and yellow convertibles can’t resist it’s beautiful maidens who think they are demi-gods.

One of the first things I really let myself remember was that Brian was a gravedigger. It was his first real job out of high school. I remember the dirt under his fingers as we’d pal around town, one hand on the elegant wheel and another gripping a beer, my young hair blowing in the wind.

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Greetings to the Beauty in You, and the Beast~

This Friday the 13th, I’m sharing the tale of The Black Bull of Norroway, the most compelling version of Beauty & The Beast I’ve ever encountered. This e…

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Feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest … to be born... The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.
—ZEENA SCHRECK

Greetings to the Danger Courti…

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