Archive | Spirit Matters

Enraged and Awake (Born in Flames)

September 28, 2018 in Country Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Spirit Matters

Yesterday’s senate hearings were like September 11. I was talking to people I hadn’t heard from in decades just to make sure we were all okay. A lot of us weren’t. I tried to focus on sending love and light to everyone as traumatized as I was.

To everyone who been hindered professionally by sexist men and preyed upon by male sexual predators. To everyone who had been manterrupted or mansplained. Who had been sexually assaulted or harassed. To everyone on whom the burden of proof had landed on us when they were already experiencing PTSD.

We were watching all this happen to a woman in real time and we wanted her to be ok–to achieve her goals not only because of what’s at stake in the Supreme Court, the body of law that dictates what happens to female bodies, but because our related wounds remain so profoundly unhealed.

How systemic is male privilege? How deeply is sexual assault built into our dating culture? How much denial are men in when they are perpetrators? Enough so that my most serious abuser was posting pious, good-liberal pablum about believing CBF as if he himself did not exhibit this sort of violence. And, of course, getting lots of atta-boys for his efforts. Continue Reading →

Erma Bombastic’s Bruja Penicillin

September 26, 2018 in Astro Matters, Feminist Matters, Food Matters, Queer Matters, Recipes, Spirit Matters

Monday was a full moon, an especially powerful one since it followed on the heels of the autumn equinox. Both aspects were all about conserving energy–letting go of what wouldn’t serve in the long, dark nights to come.

That made so much sense that I didn’t want to waste precious energy talking about it. Actually I didn’t want to talk about anything, which I feel more and more as toxic masculinity holds the country hostage in its hideous, withered talons. People keep saying this is its dying gasp, but if there’s one thing I know about power theory, it’s that those who have power never willingly cede it. Revolution is always necessary for systemic change, and most of us in the second year of 45’s oligarchy are too rundown to be as radical as is required.

To be clear, I don’t just feel this poison in the political realm–I feel it in my personal life, my professional life. My DNA. My pussy. And it’s exhausting. Male entitlement has completely drained me. I feel ill–headachey, dyspeptic, itchy, restless. I check my phone a billion times a day, I toss it across the room a billion and one times more. I’m not hungry, I’m too thirsty. You get the point.

So when I got home last night from a particularly trying day on the front lines of the cockacracy, I eyed that big beautiful moon and my disaster of an apartment (I’ve really let things slide since Beau stopped coming by), and resolved to concoct a special chicken soup. This witch’s brew didn’t heal me all at once, but it infused me with the power and wisdom and charisma of Diana and Sophia and Oshun and Yemaya and both Marys and of course Aretha. Also it tasted pretty good. I woke soothed and energized, ready to rise like a pheonix from this country’s flames.

Here’s the recipe. Continue Reading →