Growing a Goddess

One of the most literally miraculous (is there a such thing as “figuratively miraculous”?) aspects of bringing a child into this world, is the way they reunite people.  Even without inhabiting a body, the gravitational force of a yet to be born soul’s love is profound.  Serena’s presence in my life has been an immense catalyst for reuniting and healing.  I bow to her Holy influence.

But that’s not even what this piece of writing is about!  Too bad, huh?… cuz what a wonder-full topic to expound upon!  I get such a charge out of “breaking the rules” of writing.  Because REALLY, who made them up in the first place?… and why are THEY the one who like a smirking jailer, holds the iron key-laden ring to a fractaling multitude of cells, crowded with way too many suckas who think they are “better writers” for anally affixing a “main idea” to their “opening sentence”?  Yes, I DO believe that it is a useful strategy for drawing the reader IN… and giving you an idea of the linguistic river ride that you are invited to glide and bounce along upon.  But not every poem must rhyme the last word in each line.  Sometimes the rhythms and rhymes are slanted and erratic and squiggly.  And sometimes any rhyming would be binding and trite.

Alas, we find the mouth of this rushing mind river, set upon the the bank of a dribbling creek.  Six months pregnant, I am seated upon a white, plastic patio chair, on a pebbly, parched creek bed, reconnecting after a steep twenty-someodd years, with my childhood bestie from first grade, Mary.  We (especially shamelessly ravenous, pregnant me,) feast upon queen-sized bags of Tostito’s lime flavored corn chips, and impossibly addictive, GMO kettle corn, which is entirely climactic unto itself, but inconsequential to this visionary essay.  It is a bright, sweltering afternoon in late july, and I am probably slippery with sweat.

Mary, now having three children of her own, confesses that when she found out her third child was a girl (her first), she cried!  Struck by this confession, I ask why… for I would have cried if I found out I was NOT having a girl, which fortunately was not the case.  (Note to self– write the dismal, cloud-cover story of your ultrasound one of these days…)  She says, because she immediately fretted for all of the painful passages her girl would make, and Mary would hence relive:  struggles with friends, boys, body image, self-esteem…

Golly, those dimensions of the journey had never occurred to me.  At least in the way she portrayed them.  Hearing her perspective magically illuminated my own.  I realized that I had an equal amount of energy as she, but mine equated to enthusiasm, purpose, and vision.  Whereas she felt plagued by all that she had endured as a girl in this world, I felt equipped, and eager to use my [excruciating] trials as a source of empowerment and transcendence for my burgeoning girl, and all girls.  And THAT statement, ladies, gentlemen and the no-so-civilized among us, could be construed as the “main idea” of this writing spree!

I *really* struggled to grow into the goddess that I have become.  You’re probably familiar with the saying, “Not all who wander are lost.”  Well, I was a lost and tortured wanderer.  I was a classic case of “ugly duckling”.  But now look at the elegant and wild swan I have become.  No.  It was not easy.  Yes.  It hurt a lot.  Will Serena have to go through that?  I hope not… But no matter what she must live, I will empower her to encounter it ALL as essential steps on a heroine’s journey through Holy Lands, expanding into ever greater and more masterful embodiment of the Divine I AM that she already, always IS.  So help me God.  Yes, I want to protect her from low self-esteem, severe acne, heartbreak, mean girls, feeling lost… I suppose every parent with a heart must want to protect their child from the pain of Becoming…

Take our homeboy Siddheartha as the prime-est of examples.  His parents wanted to keep him imprisoned behind opulent palace walls for his entire life, so that he would NEVER need to encounter sickness, death or suffering of any flavor.  But ultimately this cush, sheltered life left him hopelessly bathed in malaise.  Out of immense love for their Prince of Perfection, they had to release him to the arduous journey of Becoming, that we are each here to surmount.  Sigh… I guess I will release Serena from the suffocating confines of the palace walls of my narrow and skewed, but wholly well-intended ideas of loving.

All hale checks and balances!!!  Because I equally contain a mature strain of brave, awakened love.  And a knowing of all-pervading, unescapable divine perfection.  My daughter will never live ANYTHING that is not in service of her eternally expanding journey of sacred illumination.  Nor will any of us.  This idea requires a bottomless well of faith… which is a tall order, in a world where so many suffer.  Sometimes I go to my well, send the bucket down, and only come up with a few modest drops of liquid faith.  Just enough to wet my lips… so that I may keep whistling Amazing Grace, as I trudge up steep hills, in pursuit of unknown, though purely compelling, elevated states of Realization and Service.

Are you still there?  Yes, YOU, whose eyes wander in wonder, word by word, through the world revealed through vision-driven finger tips… Please… Give me your hand!… Like a negligent child’s stray balloon, I have floated up, up, up into the gay stratospheres of beatific idealism.  Pull me dowwwwn.  To the ground, where I have a noble and life-long job to accomplish.  Raising my daughter with intention, attention and devotion, such that the Goddess is free to reign on earth once again, and Love explodes in harmonious, healing rays from EVERY HEART.  And I mean Every Heart.

I’ve witnessed enough young children to know that it really isn’t what we SAY, as parents and trusted guides, but what we DO.  With riveted attention, our littles watch our every move, drink in every word (except when we are preaching exhausted, disembodied gospels to their time-dulled, wisened ears).  This is a call to slow down, drop IN and rise to new heights of integrity.  No pressure. Grin.  Yes, it’s a tall order; an invitation to fail many times over.  But I am willing to flail, fall and simply get up again, aspiring to be bright beacon of intentional love and sacred responsibility for my Tiny Goddess to emulate.

I don’t have it all figured out (like duh…). But after clambering around in the dark for the first thirty years of this life, grasping for something REAL, substantial, fundamental… I found it.  Seriously, I BEGGED God to tell me the meaning of Life.  And God said it is Love.  This pure, potent and totally knowable Force, around which to order, organize, inspire and inform all choices, actions, words, relationships.  I may make mistakes… but Serena will bear witness to a woman who loves her own heart with fierce, unrelenting and tender persistence.  Yes, come what may, I will always be one to pause, put my hand over my warm, pulsing, deep feeling heart, breathe deep and say to the tremulous and pure One in there, “I love you.”  ALL OF IT is worthy of my unconditional love:  fear, anger, disappointment, hope, desire, peace, passion, insecurity…  I may not be able to shelter my daughter from the essential storms of life, but I WILL give her the tools to weather them with Love’s immensity.  After all, she IS a little Mrs. Grace.

My dear friends, David and Rosy have a daughter who turned thirteen last year.  Reviving the entirely necessary, and recently misplaced Rite of Passage, they created a women’s circle to celebrate and initiate their budding goddess into the delicious (though totally overwhelming at times) Ocean of Womanhood.  I was blessed to be invited to co-create this powerful cauldron of holding, wisdom, love and sharing.  God, I wish for every girl to have such an intentional and blessed emergence…

Witnessing this no-longer-girl-child, yet not-quite-woman, I was flooded with aching and bitter memories of the confusion and pain of my own listless, unanchored, sprawling drift into womanhood.  As was each of the women who sat in circle, sharing pertinent morsels of their own grueling tale of Becoming, in service of empowering young Eva’s unfurling story, and implicitly, all of HerStory.  What struck me, is that we were all left to grope, alone, in a dark and stark world, until somehow, through the grace of the goddess, we managed to find something of true value and substance Inside.  It was the exception to the rule that someone wise, loving and steadfast took our hand and powerfully guided us into the vast, undulating world of womanhood… let alone a circle, a village, or an entire choir, sung from the radiant feminine hearts of a sane, healthy and connected world.

We were all taught to loathe our bodies and our blood, and hence, never touch the latent miraculous power therein.  Over the course of my own single-serving-struggle, I have come to love the blood that flows from my womb with every moon.  And too, I realized that my body IS the temple through which I worship the GodLove in Everything.  Granted, we each may need to struggle, ache and break, as we make the brave pilgrimage through the earthly lands of our Destiny… but WE DO NOT NEED TO FEAR OUR BODIES, OUR BLOOD, OR OUR SISTERS.

I will teach Serena to revere and devotionally care for her heavenly body, and to trust its innate wisdom.  I will teach her that her sexuality is a sacred portal to endless dimensions of divine communion, not to be squandered, diminuated or bartered for a cheap, hollow imitation of love and acceptance from an external, and hence perpetually unsatisfying source.  May she know, that SHE IS THE SOURCE.  And Sorceress…  I will invite her to honor and learn from the power and mystery of her goddess blood.  I will allow her to retreat Within during that sacred moon time– to meditate, journal, rest, pray, dream… And to invest her Self in the coin of indestructible Sister Love.  Competition among women must be a contemporary capitalist plot.  Our power awakens in our Joining.  Alone, we are false, and therefore weakened.  As women, we are the keepers of Mother Love on this planet.  Mother Love, by nature joins, for it IS the luminous, intelligent, compassionate and beautiful web of Creation.  Though to our divine delight, we seem individuated on the surface, if you close your earthly eyes, and look through the Eye Within, you will surely see that beneath the ever-creative, intricate lila of dancing surface waves, there is One united force of pulsing, creative love, giving rise to all our lives.

It is one thing to “know” of these ideals… And quite another matter to LIVE them.  But this is what I strive to do and BE… for myself, for my daughter, for all women and men, for our selflessly, endlessly generous Mother Earth and all Her miraculous, essential inhabitants.  God, please bless my every step on this life-long, essential mission.  In the name of Love.

 

An Interview with ME!

Hi!  I just took myself through a powerful process… I soul searched some deep questions that I wanted to explore and clarify within myself.  And then I threw down in an interview!!!  Initially, I just intended it to be for me… not to share.  But when I watched it, I was moved by the power and sweetness of my authenticity and soulful sharing.  I felt moved to share it… just incase you find value in witnessing my soulful expression.  Perhaps it touches something deep within you… I offer it from my heart.

Grrrrrr…. Youtube sucks.  This is the second time I’ve copied and pasted my vid link, and it’s put up the WRONG video!!!!  And I keep trying to do it over and over again… with the same results.  (You can’t solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it!!!!  Thanks Einstein.)  Well… it’s on my Youtube channel.  It’s called “An interview with myself”.  I hope you watch it.

Athena Graceland is morphing into new dimensions of HALLELUJAH!!!
Yeah, I’m in love with video now.  My intention is to raise YOU up!!!!!

Are you ready to explore new frontiers of ecstasy, delight, gratitude and wonder?

If so, you have come to the right place!!!

Let the SHRI resound through your sweet slice of infinity within!!

 

It’s Time To Rise!!

Do you want the good news or the bad news first?

Well I’m gonna give you the GOOD news, because it is so good.
The messiah has returned to earth!!!

And now for the bad news:
Haha tricked you, there IS no bad news. But the news that could be construed as “bad”, by the lazy and the cynics among us, is that the messiah is YOU. And I’m not just saying that because my poetic license is glamorously up to date. I am saying it because this is becoming so blatantly obvious to me. We are each capable of manifesting the unlimited stream of goodness that is always flowing through us right NOW. We are not victims of circumstance or the past. And if we think we are, it is simply because we have not forgiven.

Do not be fooled. Forgiveness is NOT for the “fallible” he or she who has done you wrong. Who suffers for the burdensome grievances you choose to slog along as you trudge down the road of Life? Yep. You.

Listen to me. EVERYTHING is forgivable. Everything. You would not begrudge a tiny child for the myriad times she falls as she learns to walk… so why begrudge any of your brothers or sisters… for we are all but amnesiac divine children stumbling in the dark, that we may find our way Home. When you hold onto an image of another, based on their past behavior, you are confining both your own consciousness and theirs to a prison fabricated by your own misguided imagination.

Of course you can argue with me. And surely you can find ample evidence to illuminate any and every view point you could possibly choose. But honestly, would you rather be right, separate, miserable, alone… or at peace? Will you now choose to know yourself as the Source of Love? I come to Athena Graceland today with fire in my belly and a vision of peace for all wo(man)kind.

I don’t follow politics. Nor do I aspire to. But I know that some bullshitty stuff is going down in Syria. And I know that the U.S. is starting to bear our fangs and thrust war cries in that direction. On Sunday, I was at Stinson Beach with my most excellent girlfriend Deirdre, and we saw a dismal-spirited man standing on the corner with a wilted american flag and a sloppily scrawled sign that begged us to stop behaving like tyrannical infants, and WAKE UP. (Yes, those were my words. I have a proclivity to vivify and summarize.) And YES, I think waking up and collectively choosing something other than war is a fantastic idea!!! I am so enrolled. But here’s what I noticed- that man looked pretty unhappy himself. How is one slumped and scowling man, standing on a street corner in a breath-giving northern california beach town going to save the world? The answer is that he’s not. Nor are any of us who rage against the machine, angrily marching with signs. Because, duh, what you resist, persists. Where attention goes, energy flows. Do you really want peace? Then BE it.

I would bet EVERYTHING that if YOU offered your whole-hearted commitment to the purification of your mind, heart and body, such that when you closed your eyes and looked within, you saw an exquisite, endless expanse of softly smiling stillness and perfect, limitless love…

I’m not exactly sure how to finish that sentence. Because I have NOT perfected myself as such. So I can not speak from experience, but only from keen intuition. It is time to stop festering with all the horrifying symptoms of our collective forgetfulness, and dive straight to the ROOT. The root is within YOU. You are a mainline straight to Source. Choose to forgive all. Choose to recognize your small, calcified, limited, separate self as the colossal sham that it it is. Come on. Let’s not waste another second!!!

This morning, on the phone with Ed, he told me that tonight he is having a ride-along with a reporter from the Oakland Tribune. He did not sound too thrilled for this. On the contrary, I bet that if I had’ve checked his diaper in the moment, it would have been filled with warm, sloppy poop! Haha!! But this is no slander on my Sweetheart’s character. It is a useful caricature of an aspect of your own consciousness. And mine. You see, he told me that he wasn’t sure WHO this person was, or what they wanted… hence he didn’t know if it would be a “good” experience, or a “bad” one. And in that moment, I saw my own small, self-serving reflection. And I saw that when my consciousness is surfing that channel… living inside the question of “what can I GET from this other, and from life, itself,”… I am condemning myself to unhappiness.

So I invited him to stop waiting for the world to show up according to his narrow slab of conditions, hopes and expectations, and BE THE GIFT. Be the one to declare unconditional love, to offer sacred, penetrating presence and bottomless kindness FOR ITS OWN SAKE. If we wait for others to bend over backwards and break in order to convey a fabricated demonstration of worthiness, we might be waiting for a loooooooong time. And WE suffer for this.

To put it in the most remedial terms, it feels awesome to be nice.

And I’m not talking about pink-Betty-Crocker-frosting-out-of-the-can, nice. I’m talking about rooted-into-the-center-of-the-planet-and-the-blazing-core-of-the-galaxy-powerful-beyond-measure nice. Nice because you are acting from deep, unobscured alignment with that which you ARE at your core.

This takes practice. Lots of practice. But the good news is that you have an entire human life; an incessant stream of opulent opportunities to practice. Every single day. Right NOW.

Live,
A

Entering the Fire in my Heart

If I had one wish… it would be to be a pure, living embodiment of Truth/Love.  Come to think of it, I musta already tossed that coin into the ravenous, slobbering mouth of the world’s deepest and most unapologetic wishing well.  But mostly, I have lived in a state of pathetic though sweet amnesia.  Beautiful and Beloved Lord Krishna, please take my hand and lead me swiftly to the glorious day when I am entirely willing to release ALL paltry, conflicting wishes, that I may dance naked in the grace of Self Realization.

 

The goddess Kali.  Most people want to tiptoe by this fierce embodiment of Divine Mother, who dons a garland of bloody skulls, a skirt of human arms, and dances upon the corpse of Shiva.  I don’t freaking blame them.  I mean can’t we just skip over the whole creative destruction facet of this game of life?  Well the answer is no, so I might as well get right with the fact that she is storming the gates of my safe and comfy little world of delusion right now and thrashing and slashing all my treasured nothing ness into a thin, snaily wake of shimmering dream shine.

 

Holding on only causes unnecessary suffering.  But it seems that unfortunately, letting go is not something I do but one noble time and then am free.  It is a moment to moment discipline.  A rigorous strength training… which is ironic, of course… because how in God’s magnificent name can it take strength to hold on to nothing??  Well, I suppose that “nothing”, is truly the heaviest burden to carry!  It is fully releasing nothing, that is the goal to which my heart aspires.  And dog bless america, if life isn’t so lovingly and generously giving me the opportunity to let go and let go and let go some mo.  At first glance, my circumstances seem “undesirable”.  But this is only because once upon a time, I subscribed to a thought system built on a foundation of smoke, mirrors and the illusion of separation.

 

If only I allowed the heirloom quilt of cobwebs and thick, greasy smear to be wiped from my eyes, Love would be entirely free to look through me.  I’m trying.  I really am.  And now, I’m leaning into you, my smiling eyes burning into yours in a moment thick with candid intimacy, as I confess that it is *REALLY* helping me to write this all down today!!!  It’s like sorting through the rubble of my habits of mind, to discover and claim the heavy, pure gold nuggets, gleaming within the ugly, chaotic mess.

 

Lately I have been wishing too often that I was living a different life; comparing myself to those who *SEEM* have it easy, who *SEEM* not to be struggling.  Wishing I was a fucking soccer mom from Danville (not really, but who am I to pass up an opportunity to luxuriate in benign dramatism?!).  Fuck that!!  I’m Athena Grace LMNOP, a fierce, unrelenting Truth Seeker, whose heart is carved deep with ache to serve this world and reveal LOVE where once was a veil of darkness.

 

Do you think that a lump of lead is super jazzed to be hurled into  the scalding cauldron that will consume its valueless essence in the sacred fires of purification, that it may become a glowing, golden puddle of divine perfection?  Ha!  I guess lead doesn’t give a shit.  But what I am driving at, is that I really want to be not only a “good sport”, but the BEST sport, as I come undone.  Because… POP QUIZ!!!  Complete the following statement:

 

Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing _________________.

 

How’d you do????

 

 

 

Well, if you said, “Nothing UNREAL EXISTS,”…  YOU WIN!!!!

What do you win???  You win a the only prize with any REAL VALUE:  your consciousness has come a step closer to the Realization of and reabsorption AS Truth!!!!  Sweet, huh?!

 

And now, ladies and occasionally-gentle-men, let us take a mini vacation from realms abstract and conceptual, to the gross, explicit and concrete!  I am going to give thirty day notice tomorrow and move out of my GORGEOUS, light, spacious apartment nestled on beautiful, urban Lake Merritt. Why?  Because I’m sick of fretting as the end of each month nears, and I am figuratively sweating salty, toxic drops of worry as to whether I will be able to pay the rent on time, while meanwhile, I am stagnating in a well-worn rut of low level soul boredom, vague purposelessness and stagnation.  Something INSIDE is calling up to me from way deep down in that aforementioned wishing well, which is nowhere but within my very own bottomless Being.  It’s a classic case of Heroine’s Journey.  I am answering the incessant, screaming whisper within my heart, which some would mildly describe as “the call”.  Shrug.

 

And then there’s my Beloved Edward.  Every day my heart sears on Reality’s scorching grill as I sit in the discomfort of not having him how I imagine I want him.  And every day, I have a choice:  I can surrender to what IS, or I can suffer as I fixate on the unsurmountable, seeming gap between what I yearn for, and what is so.  But A Course in Miracles reminds me every day, that peace and happiness are NOT found in illusory projections of future.  They are HERE, NOW, ALWAYS, because of what I AM.  Because of what YOU ARE.  We are infinite, indestructible, all pervading LOVE.  Right fucking NOW.  And there really is nothing else.  But we believe there is… because we can.  And for this we suffer.

 

But I’m gonna find IT.  Because I already AM IT.  All I must do is be willing to relinquish the illusions I once cherished.

 

“The teachers of God have trust in the world, because they have learned it is not governed by the laws the world made up.  It is governed by a Power That is in them but not of them.  It is this Power That keeps all things safe.  It is through this Power that the teachers of God look on a forgiven world.  When this Power has once been experienced, it is impossible to trust one’s own petty strength again.  Who would attempt to fly with the tiny wings of a sparrow when the mighty power of an eagle has been given him?  And who would place his faith in the shabby offerings of the ego when the gifts of God are laid before him?” (from A Course in Miracles)

 

Today, I pray that I may open my wings and fly as the Divine Eagle I am, in Truth.  And in doing so, it is inevitable that you too shall Remember.  Because, duh, we are One.

 

Live,

A

 

 

The Rapturous March Of A Single Saint Thru The Mind Of Athena Grace

All the good seats are taken.  Flies are soaring gaily about, adding an air of third world grime to the dark ambiance of Gaylords Cafe.  The sky is neither committed to grey, nor blue.  I’m pressing right up against my resistance to settling into my linguistic flow.  My mind is a meaningless swirl of random thoughts, sorta like a “suicide” slurpy at seven eleven.  You know, all six hideous flavors mixed together to create a cup of sweet, frozen, black, sludgy death.  Given that, which of these individuated specimens of mind debris shall I harvest for you?

 

I want to tell you that my mom has been reading me a long, meandering and relevant bedtime story… Yep, for almost a month now.  Teeth brushed, I nestle into darkness and covers, call her, and she commences to crack open a thick, heavy, hard-bound book called “Saints Who Moved The World” and reads a few dense pages of the life of my favorite saint, Saint Theresa.  Her soothing, melodic voice is the most familiar thing in the world to me.  And I’m not being figurative just for sweet poeticism’s sake.  I mean think about it, that is the voice that sang to me as the cells of my body ecstatically divided, and divided and divided and became and became and became a cohesive body who has slogged across the frontiers of time and space, evolving as this current rendition of glorious human mash who is gracefully banging alphabet into subjective meaning for your psycho-spiritual edification RIGHT NOW.

 

I love her voice.  It fills me with such peace and comfort that many nights, as she reads, I accidentally drift into slumber as it sings spiritually substantial content into my voracious, truth-seeking mind.

 

In last night’s installment, Theresa, at age 43, finally left her earthy body vacant and motionless, and made a voyage straight into the epicenter of God’s eternal presence.  For those weighty instants, her human form was but a soft whisper from a far away and meaningless dream, as she encountered this potent Presence.  (This pivotal experience of the hallowed saint was portrayed by the author through the worlds most EPIC run-on sentence, for which my linguistically adept mother had very little tolerance.  She re-read it a few times… and with each expulsion, it became increasingly ridiculous, until we were both gone in splashy puddles of laughter.  I wish I could remember it.  In fact, I’d love to memorize it, like a poem.  And spontaneously recite it once and a while just for the slosh and giggle of it… Do you dare me?!  Wink…)

 

So there’s Theresa, naked and bathing in the ecstatic rays of Our Father Which Art In Heaven… and my mom’s like, “how does the author know so explicitly what it was like for Theresa to meet ‘The Lord’?” I was quick to respond, because I’d already been mulling a similar query.  What I came up with was that I really didn’t care how the author knew, or if it was totally accurate.  To me, her story might as well be a great myth.  This story, as all great mythologies, serves to illuminate aspects, archetypes, and unearthed longings of my own Inner Life.  I don’t know that it is even a pertinent endeavor to distill “fact” from “fiction” as we swim along in the riveting currents of daily existence.  What is real, anyway?  Mostly, it’s all a montage of belief and perception and projection, avoidance and hope, shrouding a Presence of unwavering, eternal Isness that we’ve come to define as Love.  Given that the world as we know it is but a glorious and tragic holographic dream scape, who cares whether the histories to which we subscribe are “accurate” or not?!  To me, what is more pertinent and valuable, is whether the story serves to illuminate something within me that awakens Love; the beautiful connection I share with all life, always, now.

 

I discovered Saint Theresa when I was seventeen and traveling through Italy with my high school art class.  My teacher took us to a small church, off the beaten path, where the magnificently skillful stone carver, Bernini, had immortalized her in a hunk of marble, so smooth and lifelike, I honestly felt like I met her that day in Rome, in nineteen ninety seven.   An angel stands over her, piercing her heart with a divine arrow, and the delicate saint rests, broken open in a state of perpetual ecstasy… or “painful rapture”, as the little hand-out I received at the church read.  For the sixteen years since our first acquaintance, I have kept this woman of God’s image close to my heart, and framed on my altar as well.

 

Why?  Something about the experience of being broken open in a consuming Sacred Presence, so intense it defies definition as “pleasure” or “pain”, speaks to my depths.  Sometimes I wish it didn’t.  Ya know, like in those moments when I break open and bleed with pure, unadulterated ache.  When the experience of aliveness becomes so intense it feels barely tolerable.  Yet my paltry human feelings are probably child’s play at best, compared to the celestial spheres of heavenly rapture that swallowed Theresa into the center of her eternal Sacred Self.

 

There came a point on Theresa’s journey where she had to choose, God, or the world.  Now, I know all you tantrics are like, “God IS the world, silly!”… But listen, this is not about wagging flashy philosophies… or whipping out aggrandized religious riteousnesses.  No, this is more akin to Rumi’s field beyond right-doing and wrong-doing.  This is a parable of one who would settle for nothing less than DIRECT EXPERIENCE OF TRUTH (beyond finite, transitory form).  Come on y’all, it’s 2013 for goddess sake.  Let’s wrap religion in a burning flag and send it afloat down a river whose mouth opens to the Ocean with a capital O, and get on with it!  And to all you tantrics “out there” (myself included, naturally), I say YES, God absolutely IS the world… But that knowing is moot unless it is truly anchored into the deepest pulse of your being, such that your actions, thoughts and words are actually informed by direct and rarefied relationship to this realization.

 

What am I driving at here?  I see myself, tossed about in the frenetic waves of a meaningless world.  I seem to be so endlessly riveted and invested in hollow pursuits.  And I wonder for how much longer, will I insist on being shackled to this shiny pile of nothing… As for Saint Theresa, there comes a time on each of our journeys, when our number is up, and we are ready to give up every shred of investment in illusion, and offer ourselves entirely to that which always IS, that which we name, Love, God, Truth… yet which cannot truly be named.

 

Every morning I sit in meditation, and wait for Grace to show me this magnificent world.  Mostly half-heartedly.  Mostly still cherishing this shallow hallucination I call “me”, and only able to relinquish it for a single breath, if that .  But hey, I am doing the best that I can in each moment.  Will I have to suffer like Theresa, to be initiated into the spheres of rarefied self-realization?  Maybe… Maybe not…

 

Live,

A

Climbing Back On The Unicorn And Leading Us Home

Well, if you’ve lived as long as you have, certainly you are well aware that when you fall of a horse, duh, you climb right back on and keep riding.  At least in an ideal world… and there are certainly no shortage of ideal worlds leaping brazenly in our pallid faces from around just about every projected corner.  Sigh.  The bitter sweetness of those myriad ideal worlds… On one hand, they keep us reaching higher and digging deeper, which is not only bitchin, but essential… and on the other hand, they tend to blind us from the organic, irregular splendor of the perpetually moving sidewalk of Holy Right Now.

 

And now for our official first digression du jour!   Back to our ideal world, where we are all falling off and climbing on and falling off and… but I am wondering= can the same be said for falling off a unicorn?  Cuz that’s what I was riding, until it bucked me off and I ate a strawberry field forever full of dirt!  Yes, I’m referring to my recent tumble from the written world of Athena Graceland.  I haven’t blogged for like a month and a half.  God, sitting here in the maggoty aftermath of that statement, I feel a crying scream as massive as a natural disaster reverberating so deep in the chasm of my gravitational center… I guess sometimes we learn what matters to us by letting it go… For me life without writing has felt like being a forsaken spaceman without an umbilical chord.  Weightless and at the mercy of endless black (with no space-ice cream to speak of, either!).

 

But HARK!  I’ve wrastled myself back into a field of gravity and self-inflicted meaning!  And all from the succulent privacy of my own tousled bed!  Seven fifty four on a sunday morning.  Straddling the strong, white-washed velveteen back of my unicorn as words deluge from my heaving, relieved finger tips.  From my perch in bed, I watched the sky yawn and hurl vast smears of languid electric peach and smoky lavender.  Another day!

 

Another day… Okay… It’s time for me to address the “tragedy” in Connecticut.  I just really don’t understand why THIS loss of human lives is so much more SPECIAL than the fractaling multiplicity of human sufferings and injustice that occur all over the planet with every single privileged in and out breath we are blessed to sip.  I mean… it’s true.  I welled up with tears when I saw the gorgeous, beaming face of the blond, blue-eyed angel who is no more among us… and read the story of the valiant teacher who hid her students in cabinets when she heard the shots and then told the killer that they were in the gym, before he proceeded to shoot her to death.  What a wretched nightmare.   But why is that different from entire, innocent villages being bombed in war zones, or domestic violence or gang warfare or starving children in Africa???  I DON’T GET IT.

 

Okay, I do AND I don’t… It’s like the “beef industry”.  You go to a restaurant and order a “burger” or a “steak” and it’s so easy to conveniently forget that you’re actually eating a DEAD COW.   A dead cow whose life was 100% suffering from day one.  Manufactured suffering and hormones and antibiotics and corporate big business.  A wide and deep brown-eyed, furry sentient being.  Out of sight out of mind.  Burgers taste good.  And I am warm now, nestled in my soy/bamboo sheeted bed, regarding a vase of pink and yellow flowers slowly, imperceptibly decomposing on my dining room table.  What do I know of death and loss?

 

Very little.  Except that if I consider it, I remember that EVERY SINGLE ONE OF US will eventually exit this world… But mostly I am too busy obsessively stalking my own paltry comfort and illusory “success”.  But that’s not really where I want to go with all this… I want to ask you… ISN’T IT OBVIOUS BY NOW THAT WE ARE ONE GLOBAL FAMILY?  Every life is God’s life.  And God’s life is ONE LIFE.  And if the word “God” puts you off, substitute it for any other word that stimulates your inner knowing of the truth which lives silent and ever awake at the center of everything.

 

Is tightening our policies around gun control REALLY gonna mend and heal this broken world of ours?  Pssshhh… NO.  I’ll bet anything and everything on that statement.  I will.  That’s no better that putting a Sponge Bob bandaid on a slashed jugular.  We will NOT solve our collective problems from the same consciousness that created them.  At this point it’s awaken AS LOVE or BUST.  Fuck this “victim and villain” shit– the murderer is “bad” and the bereft families are “good”.  That’s merely live, hollywood theatrics.  It’s masturbatory indulgence at best.  Someone who is sick enough to go on a children-killing spree is MOST IN NEED OF BEING SHOWERED IN ENDLESS LOVE AND FORGIVENESS. I can almost hear you upchucking at this ballzy statement… but I stand fixed in this assertion.  We are all divine children.  Locking another fallen angel in a miserable cell for the rest of their life is NOT going to save our cock-eyed world!  We need to lift our bursting hearts and do a blinding rendition of the care bear’s stare (http://youtu.be/NHjd9oq4Am4) on him until he is dripping wet with Sacred Remembrance.   Don’t tell me to be “realistic”.  I am.  This is as real as it gets.

 

And now for the practical application of this gospel:  It’s time to wake up and stop dividing God.  See everyone, and when I say “everyone”, I mean EVERYONE as your Brother and Sister.  NO EXCEPTIONS.  And if you can’t, then fall to your blessed knees and pray for forgiveness to cleanse your perceptions.  We are all the same.  I could riff on the nuances of this ISness for days… but I’ve got to get in the shower now.

 

Just think on this:  How do you treat your Brothers and Sisters?

 

Feel my love.  It is your love.  Feel your love.  It is God’s love.  Feel God’s love it is infinite and ever smiling behind all the multiplicity of appearances.

 

Amen.

The Tale of the Born-Again-Indigenous-Boogie-World

Elegantly gliding through time and space toward the bus stop this morning, my face painted with a faint smile because I was headed to a strain of heaven named hip hop dance class.  My glorious city, The Land of Oaks, shrouded in soft fog.  All of the pavement felt like a hard, crusty shell, firmly embracing a hidden and tender world.  So much motion, this urban existence.  Incessant going.  And coming.  Oh this world…

 

As my eyes fall awake to the light that lives as all forms, I often well up with such a great love as I did as I breathed in the cold moisture of the said moment, drinking it deep into my lungs.  Wonder Woman, was that a beautiful moment.  But so is this one, now that I mention it… and anyway, go-go-gadget masculine directionality of this blog.  Athena Grace, striding in brisk ecstasy and welling up with unsayable love for this world.  This love whose only longing is to extend itself.  Always.  And then the recurring dream of a dance church slid into my mind, as though it were boldly stealing home.  (Hey, that would make a great book title~ “Boldly Stealing Home”!)

 

Yes, this vision has been paying me regular visits for over a decade.  It really wants to be born!  But god, it’s a daunting vision… trying to nut and bolt out the practicalities and realities of creating a sanctuary where everyone is equal in the diverse embodied immediacy of hallelujah in motion.  This church is a place where humanity comes together and actively practices seeing and being seen with and through the generous and ever-forgiving eyes of Love.  Awe!  Grin.  Just as I typed that, the church bells outside began to siiiiiiiiiiiiing!

 

Anyway, back to the sidewalk and the fog and the striking woman bubbling over with a compelling cocktail of child-like hope, pragmatism and conveniently feigned uncertainty… It was then that I realized that I could at least WRITE this vision into existence. As I often love to assert, Athena Graceland IS MY WORLD!  I am a glorious and benevolent and whimsical ruler of this page.  I can bend and twist and straight-up defy the over-starched rules of logic, linearity and even– gasp– SCIENCE!  I see this world!  It is fresh and tender.  Yet, strong enough to be cracking through the sheath of concrete and “progress” we call home.

 

I thought to jot down this inspiration of a blog topic, but instead I just hustled to the bus stop in front of the ornate, antique Grand Lake Theater and sat upon the green, sheltered bench.  And waited.  And waited.  And waited and my bus was a whopping thirteen minutes late!  But I’ll tell you this much- the more I live, the more I am able to recognize a truly infinite intelligence at work within, through and beyond all things.  So rather than holding my breath and knitting my brow about it all, I silently asked my Self what It wished of me this miraculous, white-washed morning.  And it said WRITE*.  (*As well did it say to first get a few essential groceries at Trader Joe’s, and then stop at the pull-up bar and get my pump on and meet this buff brother with a beautiful and starving heart who would lap up the love flowing through me like a purring kitten… but that’s another story.)

 

So here I am, obeying the Small, Silent Voice.  Here I am, appointing myself High Priestess of the Land of Oaks as seen through the portal that is Athena Graceland.  You wanna hear something WEIRD???  I’ve NEVER had a yoga boyfriend!  I’d like to try it some day… I know that was off topic, but it lept, panther-style into my head… and it just seems a little wrong.  But not that wrong…

 

And now back to our previously programmed special edition of Athena Graceland- Sneak Preview of the New World!  We will become “born-again indigenous people”!  Ha!  That’s brilliant!  I mean, I am not any sort of real expert on indigenous people… but in my mind, live some abstract etchings of tribally-woven communities who exist in a paradigm of harmony with, and reverence for the earth and one another; where every person in the village takes active, devotional responsibility for the balance and thrival of the whole.  As my heart wakes up, this seems so obvious… Like DUH, we are NOT separate, and I love you as I love me, and I love me as I love you because we are the Same.  (with a capital S that rhymes with bless that stands for Oneness!) I mean that’s all Jesus was saying… and somehow we managed to invent this whole neurotic religion out of such fundamental purity.  But that’s in the past.  And from the present shines a nobly gruesome, entirely forgivable, dying world.  But shhhhhh.  Listen…

 

 

 

 

Hear the concrete cracking.  Hear the guttural, rumbling whispers of a glorious new world, reaching up from deep within the belly of the earth, like an infinity-winged angel hatching from a massive egg, spinning like an anonymous whirling dervish through a star-washed sea of vast, deep space.  See us all dancing together.  All sexes, all races, all ages and walks of life.  We gather in presence, in the spirit of play and faith and healing and CELEBRATION… We lay down our rancid and calcified stories of being small, separate and afraid, like arms in a world that has never dreamed the dream of war… simply because they bore us and we’d rather boogie!  And so we boogie!  And suddenly, we are no longer deaf to the heavenly music of our own eternal souls!   So we boogie some more, because the music is so smokin’ and it feels so good to move!

 

And in this Born Again Indigenous Boogie World, we are planting gardens EVERYWHERE!  Gardens and orchards… communities are overflowing with an abundance of fresh, nourishing, organic food.  And no one is hungry.  And no one is left to suffer alone.  Who tends the gardens, you ask?  We all do.  Not because we have to, or we’re sposta… just cuz we care.  We all genuinely care.

 

WE ALL GENUINELY CARE.

 

I truly believe that much.  In fact, I’d bet my sweet life on it.  True, we don’t all ACT like we care.  Because we’ve gone to sleep, or built stone walls around our tender, tremulous and holy hearts…. but deep down, and in that endless, beginningless place we all contain, WE SURE DO CARE.  Trust me.  The more you *want* to see that care winking from within every single brother and sister, the more you WILL see it.  I speak from experience.  We always see what we want to see.

 

What do you want to see?

 

Live,

A

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some *Really* Good News

I’m praying for deep purpose to sing up from my bones and rouse me into a lucid state of devotional engagement.  Ask me how many fire-storming moments I have hovered here on this blank page begging the universe within to call me to inspired action?  More than a few full strokes of eternity.  Hot, yet pathetically bearable eternity.  I am losing my tolerance for showing up on the page and flailing my God-given linguistic gift around like I’m a forgetful golden rhinoceros on greasy roller-skates.  Can I just write my book already?  I wanted to fire off a few rounds of question marks, machine gun style because I’m feeling frustrated like a constipated pop-gun.  Shrug.  Maybe my cork is just jammed way too far into my barrel.  Let me flail copious droves of gun powder all about my inner life and PRAY for the angels to toss a lit match into the fertile epicenter of my ness so that I explode into unwavering, ignited purpose.

 

Being a genius… it looks plenty glamorous from the outside… but before you go begging down God’s door to get some, consider this:  It can be maddening.  Because it’s not all neat and tidy, orderly and predictable, like being an accountant.  Not that I would know what it’s like to be an accountant.  (Thank Goddess 😉  But my mom does.  What do accountants do?  Run crunchy addition marathons? Have chains of silent, placid multiple numbergasms?  I dunno.  But I’m putting myself under sacred citizen’s arrest.

 

Athena Grace LMNOP you have the right to embrace Silence.  And allow it to inform your linguistic engagement upon the page.  Anything you say can and WILL be devoured by the minds of the masses.  So put your elegant, slender goddess hands up and let heaven gursh blessing into your open palms that you may then,  through the alchemical grace of Love, take this blessing into the epicenter of your sacred ness and pour it back out in exquisite washes of words which activate, illuminate, turn-on, inspire the masses!

 

Rrrraaaar!  I just stepped outside into the soupy grey morning and did fifty two star jumps (formerly known as jumping jacks, but my english friend RosyMoon called them star jumps the other day, and honestly, why would anyone call them “jumping jacks”, given this whimsically evocative alternative?!).  Yes, I recently discovered that doing fifty two star jumps is a quick and dirty way to encourage deeper breath and move energy.  And for some reason I’m really tempted to feel like a cheesy buttonhole this morning… but really I have way more succulent starfish to sautee.  I don’t want to give very much airtime to my frustration.  That’s not necessary.  It’s just a habit.  A habit that’s expired like rancid milk.

 

Let’s talk about being God.  This is a wildly pertinent topic, since WE ARE GOD.  And really, it’s about time we acted like it.  Twenty twelve is a threshold.  The old world is dead.  And the new world has yet to be born.  You could say it’s a clumsy time.  Cuz like WHAT IS GOING ON??????

 

Well… actually, it is way simpler than you might have imagined.  You are God.  And this is *NOT* a religious statement.  It is a simple fact.  Embrace it and then get on with your miraculous roll through the intricate wilderness of infinity!  And if the word “God” turns you off, DON’T USE IT.  Duh.  God is just a fancy word for “Love”.  And Love is just a fancy word for this infinitely intelligent, unified field of being ness that pervades All with a capital A.  Getting hung up on semantics is useless.  Just close your eyes and get quiet for a few moments.  Enjoy breathing and feel the profound surge of aliveness from which “you” spring.  And you will not deny that you ARE the great I AM.

 

Twenty twelve.  For many of us, it is occurring like just another grain of gregorian sand in the hourglass shaped story of human beingness.  And yet for many more of us, it is a time of profound and rapid awakening.  Last year, I could not have typed the words “I AM GOD” and then continued to glide like a grace-bathed swan upon the cool and euphorically glowing lake of eternal hallelujah from which I am dreamed into being.  I would have sweated.  Or back-petaled.  Justified, apologized.  It would have seemed arrogant or far-fetched or ungrounded or overwhelming or outright ridiculous.

 

But today it is like Levis on a casual friday, or a barefoot walk on the beach.  And I’m not God cuz I’m something special… or different from you or any other breathing treasure of Creation.  No way.  I am God because I am willing to recognize my divine essence delightfully shining back at me from freaking EVERYWHERE!!!  And that’s not to say that this is always easy.  Some people still rub me in frictionally challenging fashions.  But the difference is that I still KNOW who they are, and I praise the opportunity to smooth and polish my perception so that it becomes ever more aligned and attuned to the Truth.  The truth that LOVE IS ALL THAT IS REAL has become way more compelling than being right or clutching at some withered semblance of a small and false sense of self in a dangerously vivid dream world.

 

Oh, okay… maybe I’m not quite to the point of being free from the compulsion to clutch my delusions tenderly to my breast… Busted!  (wink).  But suffice to say that they are way less interesting than they were… in any number of that phat stack of illusory yesterdays.  Let’s talk about NOW.  Oft have I wondered of the deeper meaning of the Hanuman (the Sacred Servant Monkey God of the Hindu pantheon) stories in which he is able to grow and shrink according to contextual demand… I would scratch my head, baffled as various yogic philosophers would spin his stories into a sea of abstract, voracious  and porous minds.  But these wishful lips kept right on streaming the Hanuman Chalisa with a silent prayer of Holy Becoming.  And NOW, in this embrace of OUR divine birthright, it suddenly makes sense.  I can feel myself growing beyond buildings and mountains as I write these ripe words alive for all to consume.

 

Gosh, perhaps I didn’t need to include this little Hanuman Holiday… Is it too hippy-dippy abstract?  Does it dilute the simple truth to which the One points thru me?  If so, than treat this word-stream like a “choose your own adventure story”, like the ones I used to buy from the book fairs at my elementary school, and skip that paragraph!  And don’t give me any of that “How can I skip it, Athena?  I already read it…” business!  Pa-leeeze!  This is twenty twelve and linearity is inexplicably extinct.

 

I had to write the hanuman thing because as sat, streaming these love-imbued words, an image of me, expanding to fill the world, burned behind my eyes… and the understanding was purely somatic abstraction.

 

Inhale.  Exhale.  Now I return.  Back to the utter simplicity that is the ground.  I know who I am, because I know who you are.  Every single you.  And it doesn’t matter to me whether you agree or disagree.  That’s beside the point.  This is not philosophy.  Shrug.  It’s merely the quiet smile that spreads across all existence, regardless of faith or belief.  It does not even matter whether you choose to recognize it in this moment.  You will when you do.  And time is an illusion.  Be glad for this.  Because in one of these impending sacred moments, your consciousness will POP!!!!  Guaranteed.  And you will know what you have always known.  Be what you have always been.

 

Live A.

Across The Bridge And Thru The Woulds

And NOW for today’s epic shimmy through the eye of the needle.  Ya know what I mean?  …Or must I spell it out?  Well, I suppose if you already knew everything I was gonna say, I wouldn’t need to spell out a single word.  I would just be a bus driver, or a garbage collector and be done with it.  Wow, I’d make such a luscious garbage collector… in shiny red stilettos… Ahem.  So what I mean is– that the world inside me has more facets and dimensions than the the immensest diamond in the mind of God.  And this blank page of potential is the eye of the needle.  Reaching inside and feeling for what is most electric and raw and ripe…  that’s the job of the writer, proclaims Athena Grace, as a smile spreads her face wide with glow.

 

Inhale.  Exxxxxhale.  I feel dull today.  Dull and introverted.  I sorta wonder why.  I think it has something to do with my recent visit to Reno to visit my dad.  I often forget about the nuanced depths of the unconscious mind… I guess I get easily seduced into the captivating dazzle of all that I see out my eyes and feel in my body NOW… the overt weave of dreams and fears and ignited, soulful aspirations… I forget that the lotus thrives because its root sucks secret nutrients from the dark, unknowable, rich ness of slimy, muddy depths.  Slimy, muddy depths.  I think they got stirred in Reno.  And now I’m not a prismatic, holier than thou vessel of seeming purity.  I’m a glass of baffled mud.  Shrug.  Not much I can do about it, except BE HERE.  So I’m being here.  It’s sunday.  Usually on sunday mornings I dance myself inside out… unless I’m out of town or dead.  But today I showed up to dance… and nothing could make me move.   Everything inside lovingly hissed, “fuck this”.  So I left.  And went home and sat in like a perplexed, oversized potato on my bed.  Now it’s hours later and I’m still a baffled potato.  But I figured I’d at least open the pearlescent gates of my mind and allow strategic letters of the alphabet to scamper single file out of me in hopes of stumbling upon something of myself previously unseen.  Awe, that sounds so deep.  But maybe I don’t want to be deep.

 

Well first order of business is that my mom oft makes fun of me for using the wrong spelling of a word here in Athena Graceland… for example saying, “I want to go live in a log cabin in the woulds”!  Ha!  That’s funny.  No wonder it cracks my mom up.  She says “awe” is the wrong kind of aww.  Hahaha.  I’m tickling myself.  Trying to language this topic is like sumo wrestling the FAT-ASSED externalized authority that is mostly held hostage in a sexy stone tower somewhere in the enchanted northern hemisphere of my brain.  But I’m up for it!  And besides, if you had the choice of spelling “aww”, A-W-W or A-W-E, which one would YOU chose?  Awe, right?  Hands down!  Because awe= an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, etc., produced by that which is grand, sublime, extremely powerful, or the like: in awe of God… what’s NOT to love about reaching in your magic hat and seizing a fist full of THAT?!  Except for the fear piece… I didn’t know that awe could be an overwhelming feeling of fear.  In fact, screw that.  I’m gonna flat out disagree.

 

And now, ladies and gentle men, for the TURNING POINT of this blog, where all of my words become psycho-emotionally caloric and super-charged with meaning!

 

Shards of rainbow are wobbling languidly about the interior of my domestic slab of existence.  It’s nearly four pm and the indian summer light… wow… speaking of caloric!  I feel like I’m a seahorse sized mermaid in a rectangular aquarium filled with an exquisite strain of liquid light.  You might imagine me to be but a girl crying wolf as I profess to be rolling up my sleeves and driving at some sort of weighty essential core of this blog… but the fact that I really am a miniature mermaid habitating in a human sized tank of light and rainbows is the perfect prelude to my impending assertion that it is FULL ON, as we prance collectively into the final, waning moments of twenty twelve.  And I live how everyone is so casual about it!  We’re acting like it’s always been this way, and it’s hella normal. Which, in a way, it IS… But mostly it’s totally NOT!  Listen, I’ve always been the token mouth puker-inner, when someone signs their email, “love and light”… Because COME ON– it’s SO repulsively new-agey.  You might have mistakenly put me in the “new agey” box… but “your bad”… cuz I’m not.  Just cuz I happen to have a delicious glow of contemporary Jesus-i-ness, does NOT make me new agey.

 

BUT WHO CARES ABOUT ME, what I’m driving at, is that the dawn has COME and the technicolor rising of love and light on the horizon of our collective consciousness is so striking and overt at this point that one must call a spade a spade.  Wow.  Not only was that a robustly poetic and dazzling thesis statement, but Wonder Woman, was it SO TRUE.  Something IS dawning inside of us now.  I feel it surging like a broken damn through the bloody birth canal of my own being… and as well, I see it, smell it, feel it, taste it EVERYWHERE.  I can’t leave the house without spotting someone sporting a “LOVE” t-shirt.  And I don’t just mean one of my fellow new-age-freak-holes. I mean even the most unsuspecting ghetto-bootied oakland chick, chillin on her twilight picnic blanket, daintily lifting mc donald’s fries to her drippingly glossy mouth with fingers donned in neon acrylic nails longer than london bridge.

 

And just log on to my Facebook page– everyone is saying the most enlightened things… incessant exclamations of gratitude and love and deep care for this world and all of its inhabitants.  You’d think we were all the second coming of Buddha or something.  Oh wait, we ARE.  But we finally are realizing it.  And it’s cool how natural it seems.  Nobody seems to be making a big deal of it… Like “of course were God”.  Grin.  Like how night melts into day so smoothly that suddenly the darkness is nowhere to be found and the sun is blinding you and it ain’t no thang.  That’s the magic of dawn.  That’s the grace imbued in nature and time and cycles.

 

Oh crap, I’m ready to end this blog, and I don’t feel like groping around in the uncharted reaches of my asshole in search of the most fluid, intelligent exit.  My departure feels reminiscent of attempting to leap off of a speeding train.  Well I’m gonna leap!  And land in a soft, benevolent wash of love and light (wink).  Here I goooooo…. But I shall leave you with this entirely true declaration–

 

Reading these words, you have crossed a bridge.  By the Sacred Power vested in me, I now pronounce you WIDE AWAKE and eternally blessed as an innocent and perfect child of God.  I’m serious.

 

Amen.