The ancestors sometimes send me signs in dramatic ways. For instance, when they wanted me to go see The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago at the Brooklyn Museum, they made sure I heard about it thrice in 24 hours. This, after I'd planned a visit to the museum to attend a talk by an Egyptologist that I was finally not able to attend!

There was a reason the ancestors wanted me to visit the installation. I needed to meet the ocean of memories circulating between, connecting us, contained within the radiating center of our yonis. I was filled with awe and reverence for Chicago's own reverence and adoration for these ancestresses, amazons, leaders, creatrixes from her western civilization. I realized she/they were pointing a way for me—a trail that had, with hard work and sustained love, been opened. I've set out, too, to reclaim the sea of female lineages in South Asia. My walk is my own, but these images in the collective waters of memory feed me.

Then there was the time when—moonbathing by a glinting, silvered ocean—I felt myself in complete alignment with Nature. I felt myself alive in an immense, intelligent, loving cosmos—right there with Yemaya. I let the ocean submerse my womb. Then we walked towards the embers of a dying fire on the beach: two witches gleaming in this new time, time of possibility. And an ember leapt into a small fire. The ancestors came alive for us and warmed us.​

Like in the book, Uprooted—which I first thought was about a wizard named Dragon—the story really turns out to be that of the witch learning to find her way amidst the brambles, in the forest. It does not serve her to follow rigid instructions detailing "proper" magic. She teaches the wizard how to work together, she reminds him that he can collaborate with the more "feminine" ways that are messier, synchronistic, guided, intuitive—and bring about a shift that is somehow more in touch with the whole.

There is always a way. It may take faith. It may take cunning. It nearly always takes the help of our benevolent, protective ancestors—and our own faith in ourselves when we don't hear them responding well to get us to call out to them to do their job. It takes wisdom. Wisdom is the wheel of the goddess, always turning, always in rhythm.

​Of course, finding the story(ies) of the witch, the mother(s), motherlines is just the beginning. The task of changing inner and outer structures (and flows) begins now. That we may live as the highest and most fully expressed embodiment of the values of justice, nurturing, healing, self-sovereignty, and love. She would say, I want that.

The West Coast Village was at Pantheacon, introducing kontomble medicine and offering a community voice divination ritual. Many of us kontomble diviners are finding that the little people are coming in more strongly than ever before, responding to the urgency of these times. The medicine of memory is awakening. The sweet, sacred waters are so needed: water is life itself, but water is also memory. To never forget that there is a stream of continuity we are riding upon: the love and courage and resistance and resilience of our ancestors. Of the goodness of our very hearts! For in our hearts we center again and again the entirety of all times: all the pasts, presents, and futures that arise for us.
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Let us continue to trust that there is deep healing to be released in going through the current crises. Let us continue to build evidence -- and actions -- that support and engender and announce that healing.
This grid of the earth, wherever we are: may we offer a drop of water to get in touch with the never-drying, always-replenishing wells of healing.

Holding a banner at the NoDAPL Standing Rock Action in San Francisco, I found my body involuntarily gathering herself in a warrior stance, a stance as old as the warrior ancestors of history and myth.

​To be a warrior is to always be circulating between the inner and the outer, bringing back from the reaches of the heart the spill of the truth that shows up in the world ardent and potent.

It is about finding the alchemy where our vision is guiding the certainty of our steps: the borderlands where we give birth to the world we have always known in our hearts is possible. May we long for it. May we act for it. May we flow towards it.

It is with delight that we are introducing kontomble medicine at this year's PantheaCon!

Who are the kontomble? The little people of course! Kontomble are elemental beings that brought culture to the Dagara of Burkina Faso. They wake us up to remembering purpose and gifts, bringing wisdom from Otherworlds. There will be a short talk on kontomble - who they are in Dagara cosmology, how we experience them in the West, and how we work with them. Those gathered will then have an opportunity to speak with kontomble during a community voice divination ritual, bringing questions for which guidance is desired. 

I am offering 15 and 30 minute divination sessions via phone or skype for the new year. Or come by to my San Francisco hideout for an in-person session! Reach me at (731) 393-9390 or book online using the button below. 

​To schedule a more in-depth hour-long personal reading, or a group divination, please contact me separately. I also offer relationship divination for couples. 

Finally, you may schedule a personal divination with me at The Sacred Well - Oakland. Call them at 510-444-9355!

The point, dear ones, is not that we make mistakes. The point is what we make of them, how we allow mistakes to teach us something about ourselves. And, perhaps, nothing is really a mistake. It is all a trickster reminder for our soul to reassess, to change course, to prevent it from missing out on taking its own shape—from miscarrying its directive in this lifetime. To grow.

I am fascinated with how the unfinished business in my soul has shown up recently. The question I am left with is, how do I continue to stay present with myself as I continue to grow, not turning away from my pain, and not turning away from my own captainship for healing it. Paying attention to the conglomerate of inner figures that step in when my inner child is threatened, and their reactions to the perceived threat, opens up a door to deep self-compassion.

I was telling my dear friends T and M about a fantasy from my childhood, where the child Monica who feels herself to be invisible and powerless is discovered by a powerful media showman. Today I have to choose rewriting the narrative. Choose to remember that the power is not in any other, but within myself. It is I who choose to become visible, or not—I who choose to heal, or not—I who choose to believe my own needs are important, and create conditions so that they are met, or not. I have to choose being okay with the parts of me that are still crying. Choose showing them the big community within me that is always, already there for them. Choose accepting the slow unfolding, the slow unfurling, and all the unexpected ways in which the soul deepens into its longings.    

As a society, as a community and conglomerate of many communities, we are getting ready to flex our own choices, already making choices, about the acceptance and responsibility of our own power. Here is to the days that will come, and the nights that will come. May we be ready. May we sit closer to each other around the fire, may we light the fire. 

​Here is to our big, growing heart. Here is to the world that we are becoming as we become ourselves and choose ourselves. 

Go watch the astounding Embrace of the Serpent—on the big screen if you can!  

The movie has been widely hailed for its mesmerizing black and white cinematography and two-journey mythic narrative structure, both of which prove to be apt vehicles for its central theme: conflict between worlds and spiritualities and how to know worlds and how to use this knowledge. It depicts colonialism-propelled changes in and destruction of biodiversity along the Amazon river, which were accompanied by profound human and cultural losses—the decimation of entire communities and knowledges. 

What I appreciated even before I went to watch Embrace of the Serpent was how it was filmed in ways that were consonant with sacred indigenous worldviews the movie juxtaposes against the destructive impulses of western logic. Director Ciro Guerra talks about inviting the indigenous communities to participate, and asking permission from the jungle to do the film. They did not just show the living spirit of the jungle as a presence in the movie, they honored that spirit in its very making!

...And the shoot, apparently, was unprecedented in its being protected from the kind of mishaps that usually affect other crews filming in the Amazon. Such are the ways of the spirits.

What also struck me in the movie was the myth of the "chullachaqi": that an empty and hollow look-alike of a person may be walking around like a ghost. Karamatake the shaman's idea that forgetting the old knowledge and ways of our ancestors and of nature turns us into chullachaqis, recalled the cry of the Asur Adivasi poet Sushma Asur:

"Now that we have no language 
Now that we have no culture 
How do we call upon you 
With which ritual technology do we remember you"

(Here is my full translation of this amazing poem.)

​This cry is a cry in each of our hearts. Our hearts in modernity are crying out for connection and remembering: that we may remember who are; remember our souls; re-member all parts of our selves that have been lost or suppressed by the traumas of isolationism and separationism, rationalist and materialist thinking, imperialism, colonialism, oppression, neoliberal capitalism. May we remember our connection to the wholeness of life and to the web of interexistence and the power and resourcefulness this belonging brings to us—and rise!

​May we hear the songs of the ancestors. May we sing them knowing that the ancestors wait for us to weave into the songs our unique seeing, voices, healing, heart, earthstar medicine.

Dear ones,

In these strange times when two eclipses have just drawn their breaths cleansing many of our individual and collective stories, I want to look inwards, where the paths I've taken converge with the paths I want to take.

​Here I find many of you walking with me. 

I think about the interplay of water and fire — time and space to let our inward energies shape into birdcalls and blooms within us — time and energy to take these birdcalls and bloomshapes out into the world. The time for deep listening. The time for acting out of the depths of our vision and passion. 

I think about balance, and how to know it is time to restore ourselves by taking in more or less of one energy in comparison to the other. 

May we remember who we are, letting our actions be guided by the fire within that is always looking into its eyes the waters we come from and return to.

May we remember to balance our needs!

As I sit in my bed after three fire days, comforter around knees, my moon cycle has finally caught up with me. On day four, I am finally letting my moon time determine the shores of my waking day. 

I am letting the patience of wind sift through my hair, my bones. 

It is a perplexing and joyous beginning of understanding, this: tending night and day, dreamer and builder, moon and sun, water and fire, feminine and masculine, Shakti and Shiva within me so each may feel honored and appreciated. So each may contribute to the expanding, becoming self that is me.

This is how the heart sees. 

This is how the heart knows. 

Both yes and no at the same time, encompassed in a larger Yes.

Yes! Yes! Yes!

Coal and ash, each one a state of the other. 

The magic of alchemy lies in synthesizing all parts of ourselves, so that we may know ourselves as larger than we have ever done before. 

A trickle becomes a fluid drop of colors. 

It is rainbow that comes together to create clarity. 

In this world of many schisms, my part is to heal the schisms within myself--
so I don't react to and reinforce the schisms "outside" me.

And so I trace my fingers over my scars and let them drop 
love over scars until 
scars change color.

​Anger & love.
Freedom & accountability.
Earth & stars.

This thing of relationship, this ampersand!

The end of last year reminded me that to walk my North Node (soul growth) path of Leo, I must embrace more of the attributes that fall outside my Aquarian South Node conditioned/comfort zone: not hiding in a crowd or a group but shining, playing and sharing my joy — joie de vivre, not staying outside a situation I am not liking but calling on my ability to intervene and make a difference. Participate, not detach! Let yourself be seen, don't hide! All "sun" qualities that it feels exhilarating and a little scary to my water-soul to choose to grow consciously. 

These new parts in me need tending. They need spaces in which to show themselves in all their colorfulness. The inner child needs spaces in which to play with unfettered joy.

Slowly, as I build these muscles and find my way to yet unfamiliar shores, I am realizing it is time to heal my relationship with the communities I had stepped back from. It is time for me to stop feeling and acting like an outsider in the communities that do work that matters to me. The more I look for them, the more I find foremothers and ancestors, elders and peers whose words and work reflect the knowing that activism and healing go hand in hand, that poetry and art spring from the source of spirit, from a sacred place! 

​It has been hard for me to take my place amongst art and activism communities out of a fear that parts of me will be rejected or judged, that my relationship to the sacred will not be understood. These fears, which reflect personal and cultural schisms and wounds, I am slowly realizing, don't need to hang around me anymore—don't need to govern my choices of involvement anymore. I can discern and will discover spaces that celebrate, not just accept, all parts of me! And if they don't, I can still give permission to me to be myself in all my multiplicity and ampersandness.

It is not always easy for me show up when the old stories, old fears, old judgments crop up. The new story I will speak is that I know how to navigate my way back to the love of self (and others), self-knowing, and empowerment by soothing my fears and re-remembering the relational pathways to spirit, where the truth of my being rests. 

Whose permission are we waiting for to know that each part of us—each particle, atom, and element in the cosmos—wants to come into a delicate, passionate relationship with the totality of ourselves?

When dualisms move together in us and not on opposite sides, imagine what we can begin to perceive. Imagine what we can create! New realities, new zones of connection, new functioning wholes, holiness that works us from the inside out and outside in!

There are many models of being a poet, diviner, scholar, activist out there, and better still, I can fashion my own model uniquely suited to me and my life purpose. 

At the borderlands, it is all possible. 

There is an ancient myth about a warrior priestess.

She has been raised in the great forest with rabbits and deer, peacocks and owls, wolves and panthers. She circles the periphery of the great forest, one among its protectresses. She walks with the Great Tortoise, bow slung across her shoulder, holding the primeval meditative sphere afloat.

Cosmos breathes in, breathes out. Fire and water meeting at the center point.

What happens when a handsome warrior appears amongst them and woos the warrior priestess?

When they fall in love, what happens to her, and what happens to him? Often the stories will focus only on her domestication. But what if love's wildness affects his soul as much as hers? What if, instead of one person losing themselves in the other and forgetting themselves, there is a mutual remembering of purpose, a mutual reworking and coming awake of purpose?
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The warrior priestess and the handsome warrior will walk together, shoulder to shoulder. Joined in their new purpose together, eyes focused on distinct goals.

Anytime and always, it is okay for the warrior priestess to come to the realization that home and hearth contain the universe for her. After all, the domestic nurtures the wild, and the wild creates space for the domestic to dance in.

But that is not the only path available to her.

May we open new paths wherever we step. May we wage beautiful wars that overturn preconceived notions about what it means to inhabit our bodies, our genders, our forests—may we swing open the freedom and possibilities and beauty alive in us.