Imaginal Journal
Imagination is Medicine
Radical Roots with Michael Meade
I had the great pleasure of attending a speaking engagement with renowned mythologist, Michael Meade, drumming up some old ideas for a radical response to become agents of change in the current state of affairs.
Ama Hugs
I recently had the honor of my first visit to meet the hugging guru, Ama who was on her annual tour through LA. It was quite a large production that I had not anticipated and I found this doll of her as Ganesh and couldn’t resist getting it. Curiously the mantra she offered me was the cooing my own mother made to her babies. I nested my new doll with my collection of Peruvian worry dolls.
And Still I Rise: Maya Angelou
The remarkable story of how this resilent soul overcame her trauma and bore her gifts to the world.
Oahu Medicine
Blown away by the potent energy and natural beauty of the Hawaiian islands. I had the extraordinary privilege to tour the private estate of a true renaissance woman, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the heart and soul bearer of the Kamehameha royal line and directly experience the essence of this huna magic.
Births by Pablo Neruda
Births
We will never have any memory of dying.
We were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note—
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
Nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.
It’s well known that we are born.
It’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.
It’s well known that we were all born.
But of that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.
The only thing you remember is your life.
by Pablo Neruda
(from “Fully Empowered”, translation of “Plenos Poderes” 1962)
Gabor Mate on the Mind/Body Connection
Gabor Mate's powerful take on the nature of being bio-psycho-social creatures, the effects of trauma and the need to having relationships, a relational home, that can help us hold our pain.