1.
This story starts here when I was nine and my mother was pregnant with my youngest brother. She was having a baby shower at the beach, on a street called Longfellow because at Longfellow there was a swing set on the sand for us kids to play.
Though I was in the ocean by myself that day, making a little game with the waves. I’d swim out to the zone where they were just about to break, and then position my little girl body with soles facing the horizon and belly to the sun, and while holding my nose and eyes closed, let my form- feet first like a breech birth- slip through the little mountain of moving water. If I was in the right position at the right time, the wave would have the perfect amount of strength & pressure- not enough to take me with her (crashing around in the washing machine I knew well by then) but just enough to ripple over my body, pulling my hair underwater & caressing my skin. My game with the waves was so natural, so innocent, so romantic. A precursor to my future ecosexual awakening perhaps- before the womanhood hormones kicked in.
But on that day with my pregnant mother in her beach chair surrounded by friends, and me getting quietly loved on by the ocean, I met my first dolphin.
I’d seen them from a distance time & time again, and I had a Lisa Frank dolphin notebook while my older sister had this amazing Christian Riese Lassen dolphin art folder. However I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel like I’ve really met somebody until I look them in the eye.
I’m not sure what drew me upward from my usual missionary position in the wave- was it voices on the beach calling out his proximity? Or was it just the feeling?
But I lifted my gaze and shifted to a wade in the water, turned to my left and caught my breath- I just remember a wall of shiny dark gray skin, and the big black eye staring into mine. Time seemed to dilate. In my memory a small eternity passed between us. I was awestruck and confused, then brought out of the mini reverie by my fear. This fucking creature was huge and really close to me and did not look like the ones on my lisa frank notebook. The wave crashed and I swam straight to shore.
Some years later I recall someone telling me that if a shark is threatening someone in the ocean, sometimes dolphins will appear and swim circles around the human, in order to protect them. Perhaps they had read this 2004 article, or had learned of the behavior elsewhere, but hearing this lended a more peaceful flavor to the memory and disarmed any lingering fear. The respect for the dolphins remained, while the intrigue lived on in the periphery of my awareness for the next 12 years.
And the womanhood hormones came. Early, because I prayed for them. Maybe that was because when I was only 10 my baby brother was falling asleep on my chest and I absolutely loved it. Or maybe it was my ruling planet, Venus, orchestrating the expansion of my sensuality, or the suffering that came with being a preteen, wanting to catch up with my sisters, wanting more connection with others. Or maybe it was Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale, or maybe it was Shannyn Sossamon. Or maybe it was both of them but holy shit did I want to be a loving woman.
And I came barreling into the experience with all the naivety and carelessness of a skin-covered chemical comet, burning across the sky of life, years before the ‘me too’ movement & carrying with me generational suffering, senseless religious dogma and shame, unmet needs for connection, care and attention. And somewhere deep inside, seeking freedom- not from, but through my growing fountain of sexual energy. Sensing it was a key.
But in a culture lacking rights of passage, and in a social environment lacking guidance and protection, my growing body took on one sexual trauma after another. Steeped as I was in the tea of a sick society, I knew no other way to go about becoming a bona fide love-making grown-up lady. So I tumbled violently through the process like being swept into a crashing wave, holding my breath until I reached the surface.
2.
Just after turning 21, I was living nomadically in Northern California with a boyfriend who recommended I take a 10-Day Vipassana meditation course, at a center near by. When he told me it was donation-based I applied and in December of that year I attended my first course.
It was a silent experience and unique, challenging. I slept through the morning meditations mostly and struggled to hold still. But the technique and the field of presence around me began to affect my consciousness, and I found myself oscillating between observing sensations and practicing what I was learning, and talking to myself or getting lost in imagery. Some of it foamy nonsense or murky in the drunken mindless moments, but as the days slowly passed, a clarity and spaciousness began to breath life into my thought process.
I found myself asking myself an important question, and having endless patience and curiosity for the true answer. At the time I was exploring my queerness, my sexuality, and my longings, and in the silence I began investigating my lifelong desire & expectation to get married and have children. I wanted to know in earnest, if this life vision was just a symptom of my conditioning, or if it was an essential longing of my true being. I loved my art making, my adventuring, I loved my alone time. I felt my selfishness, and the magic of having an entire lifetime to explore it- did I really want to give that up some day to raise babies?
I began asking myself this on day 2 or 3. It wasn’t until the 6th silent night, that the answer arrived within a dream.
(I’ve come to appreciate this specific state of consciousness/ flavor of lucidity that I can only describe as such: I am not consciously aware ‘Oh, this is a dream.’ but I am deeply and cellularly present in the experience- so that the vividness of my physical sensations is significantly stronger than my normal waking body awareness. The power of the experience takes me over completely, and wakes me deeply at the same time- by leaving a profound and visceral impression on my memory upon waking.)
In this particular dream, I was standing inside a cave full of steam. Before me, perhaps 7 feet in front & slightly to the left, stood a toddler made of warm golden light. He had long skinny limbs of bright golden light. And My God the WAY IT FELT INSIDE MY BODY. The way my arms ached to hold this little being! The most glorious joyful agony- I could have leapt toward him, but something stopped me: An awareness, now plainly obvious. My eyes scanned to the right, and a bit farther off, were round pools of warm water. In one, I saw the silhouette of a man. I turned back to my sun, and telepathically instructed him:
‘Go ask your father if I can carry you.’
The undertone being: I need you in my womb.
I woke up with an understanding radiating from my body and the question settled inside me. How and when didn’t matter then, at least at the forefront of my consciousness, but a longing to carry sunshine inside me and labor it into the world was set in motion, and would affect my life for the years to come.
3.
The following summer I found myself in a strangers office, a gynecologist. I’d come to him because of pain during sex and found myself with an ultrasound device up my cervix, revealing two large cysts on my ovaries. He recommended surgery but I refused the knife. His alternative was to prescribe me birth control and monitor the cysts. He said my period would stop and the hormone trick would likely take care of it.
I walked outside and had a little cry, before placing the birth control pills in a trash can. I don’t feel any condemnation or antagonism toward that path and the women who choose it, but it personally struck me as crazy to simply hormonally hack and turn off such a strong and poetic signal from the body. It didn’t feel complete or sensical to me. It wasn’t my reality.
So instead I accepted an invitation to an ayahuasca ceremony. And the intimate gifts of love, vision and reflection were confronting and compelling to the crisis inside me. I glimpsed the living metaphor in my experience, and during the entire ceremony I felt I was pregnant. Not with a sunshine love child, but with something made of suffering. I internally referred to my cysts after that grueling weekend as my ‘demon babies’.
And I saw all of the ways I was miserably off-track from my healing.
However I was also blessed to observe a man with a beautiful healthy child, and a beautiful healthy wife, ripe with their second soon coming. He was tending the fire and providing the space for our ritual. I felt a deep attraction to him alongside a profound respect for his marriage & family, and knew that if I ever wanted to magnetize a man like that, I had some serious work to do on myself.
After the weekend commenced, I began to clear my life of all that didn’t feel right in my system anymore. I quit both my jobs, left my relationship, social circle, apartment, my paintings, everything. Looking back it was a bit dramatic, aggressive even. But I needed a clean slate, a fresh & empty space to truly tune into my body & guidance system. I needed to have nothing, to be no one, so I could figure out who I really wanted to become.
By the end of 2015, I was back at my parents’ house, bags packed and ready to leave for South America on January 1st. The plan was to first spend a two month service period at another Vipassana meditation center being built outside of Sao Paolo, Brazil, before heading West for my first month-long master plant dieta with a respected curandera and her two daughters in the Amazon basin of Peru.
On one of the final days before my departure, I took a solo walk on the beach. Thinking and worrying and somewhere inside, praying about the journey that lay before me.
On this particular day, the fog was eerily dense. So dense that from the shoreline where I moved, I could not see the lifeguard towers further back on the sand, which indicated which street I was on. Because of this, on my way back I walked too far, overshooting my usual turn on 26th street toward my parent’s house up the hill.
And I approached two shadows emerging from the fog. One was a woman- standing and looking down at the second shape- which sat washed up on the shore.
“I think it’s a dolphin skull.”
I remember rocking slightly before kneeling.
I picked it up- heavy with water and years of decay. Whoever it belonged to had been dead some time. I cradled the skull in my arms and suddenly felt I needed to take it with me.
I asked the woman who had made the discovery.
“All yours.” she told me, and we parted ways.
I walked with the skull upward through the fog, and the lifeguard tower soon came into view, with the swing set behind it:
Longfellow.
I felt a shudder move up my spine. There is absolutely no way for me to ever confirm this, but I sensed that the skull I now held in my arms, against my belly, once contained the big black eye which stopped time when it looked into mine, all those years ago on this very same beach.
4.
What I experienced in Brazil was beautiful. And brutal in reflecting to me how poorly I managed my own energy. I was confronted by an absence of power to hold boundaries, or to be thoughtful and caring about what I was creating and attracting. I could find trouble even at a meditation center. Treasures were the periods of silence, the butterflies and flowers and the friendships I made, and the small victory- an encounter that found me shaking out of a freeze state to tell my waterfall date to please Stop. I was slowly starting to listen to & honor my body. I didn’t even realize how much I missed her dearly.
At the beginning of March I took her Westward on a flight to Lima, then on a bus through the Andes, two share taxis, a few tuk-tuks and a boat up the Ucayali river from Pucallpa to a small Shipibo village called San Francisco. Some of the other gringos and I made dumb jokes about not needing to leave California after all.
We stayed on family land with Maestra Ynez Sanchez and her two daughters Laura and Lila, all highly respected in the world of Shipibo ayahuasca shamanism. (They now have a center welcoming pasajeros for healing or learning dietas and retreats, called Niwe Rao Xobo)
In the first night of ceremony, once the medicine took effect, Ynez, Laura & Lila went around chanting icaros to each of us individually, cleaning and examining what was alive in our personal energy fields. The next day we were prescribed a plant to diet, depending on what they saw. In my consultation, Laura spoke of my ovarian cysts. I had told no one in the group about what was happening in my womb. Laura saw them pyschically in ceremony. I remember the translator Claude struggling to remember the word ‘cysts’ in English. Then she was saying “ellos tienen pelo” and miming to her hair (there are such things as cysts that grow in the body with hair and teeth fragments- though I have no clue if ovarian cysts are known to ever do this.) Perhaps it was the internal poetry she saw; the sensations I had experienced in the previous ceremony several months before. “My demon babies!” I said, half amused and half horrified by the bizarreness of it all.
I was prescribed a combination of 4 different amazonian master plants, and given a tambo to be alone with them, drinking morning and night, writing in journals & making origami paper cranes all day, and tucked inside my mosquito net- dreaming.
Every 3rd night the other pasajeros and I would each emerge from our tambos under the starlight and blanketing buzz of the forest, and quietly make our way to the Maloka for another ayahuasca ceremony.
Over the course of some 10 spaced-out evenings, an arc of an experiential story started to form. It began as a homecoming to the original marriage, the mind recovering his wife within me, sensationally. And in each consecutive ceremony, they practiced ‘inner marriage counseling’, my mind and body. I re-lived memory after painful memory and heard a voice within me say “look what you’ve made me carry.”
But the regret, the compassion, the romantic love of my mind’s return to body burned intensely. The longing to be my own knight, my own king. And the fierce purity glowing behind everything I had thought to be dirty, including me. It was glorious, breathtaking. I remember wondering if this healing inner masculine presence was what the ‘brides of Christ’ have been communing with all along. Being a nun suddenly seeming appealing.
And night after night, song after song, vision after vision I felt the love story within slowly blossoming. The icaros and the plant doctors healing me, spirit and body. And the intimacy I felt with nature, the clarity of being so part of her. With every evening more & more trauma slowly being shed from my body’s cellular memory, the more my scattered soul parts returned to their home in human form. And the ecstatic nature of being incarnate inside a body was revealed experientially. I felt a deep romantic love and connection with everything around me.
Then on the final ceremony of that journey, the arc of this love story formed a crescendo of intensity. During a deep effect, I felt a powerful presence come visit me. It was the Divine Mother, and I immediately dropped my gaze, unable in my reverence to look at her directly. And yet, through the crown of my head she showed me her 10,000 faces.
I was overcome by the beauty, the holiness before me. I began to quietly weep. Then she showed me an immensity of suffering. In my heart and mind’s eye I saw thousands of years of violence, horror, killing. I saw that my own traumas existed within a great web of agony and I felt her all encompassing compassion, knowing she has born and continues to bear witness to everything. That she is ever present. The visions of hell on earth seemed to never end. I felt I might break again, from the weight of them. But then a strength arose like a spring within and through my tears, I raised my chin. I looked straight into the horrible thousand petal vision of nightmares and telepathically said to the Divine Mother who was giving it to me: ‘I do not know what I can do to help, I do not know what even to say. But I will not turn away.’
And then in that moment, I had a peak experience that is difficult to describe, though I shall try:
I was flooded with white light. Blindlingly bright. It began in my belly, like it was being pumped umbilically into me and spreading through every cell of my body. The sensation I had was intensely painful- like high voltage electricity. I got the feeling that someone had turned a dial all the way up and I was being electrocuted gradually. On a physical level I could hear myself hyperventilating and screaming. There was nothing I could do to contain it. I felt I was exploding out of my humanity and into infinity. I thought I might be dying, but a calm voice within me seemed to be holding the frequency, welcoming it even. I heard myself saying ‘I will not be given more than I can handle. I have the capacity for this blessing.’ Somewhere between unbearably violent and orgasmic, the sensations went on for what felt like an hour, but must have been only a few minutes. The curanderas had come to my aid and were chanting to me, and putting their hands on my body to ground me. My screams slowly gave way to wimpering, and my electrocution to ripples of intense tingling. The energy pooled in my hands, which were glued together in a prayer formation, though they felt they might split into a million pieces, sparks of sensation. I continued shaking intensely for awhile until finally crumpling into a pool of tears and exhaustion.
I felt the medicine and the entire room holding me gently, quietly cooing me back to a sense of self again, a sense of safety. The gratitude was immense and tender. And then I floated gently into another immersive vision within my own body:
I descended into my womb as astral plane, and it was a lagoon, a spring, a pool of water, inside a cave. Reminiscent of a cenote- quiet, spacious and yet utterly contained. Without struggle or a need to breathe, I slipped gently under the surface to behold it, dazzling: a large oval shaped glowing seed. It shone, suspended under water in the center of the pool. And I knew that the seed was me, my new lease on life, my creativity. That I had a chance to begin manifesting my world of form again, with a renewed sense of purpose, understanding and harmony. I felt intuitively that my womb was both magnetic and life-giving, always creating my personal dream of reality. And that I could do it again now, consciously. With respect to all of nature, of life, of my body and her feelings. And it came with a great sense of hope along with fear; Knowing I wasn’t impervious to my own humanity, or the onslaught of challenges within and all around me, that I could fuck it up entirely. That eerie feeling appeared in my vision as a shark on my periphery. The seed of my new life was in need of protecting. But just as I felt the fear take hold of me, he appeared- my dolphin. And he began gently swimming circles around the glowing seed inside me. I could do nothing then but praise and weep, cradling myself on the floor of the Maloka in a gratitude infinitely deep.
In that fetal reverie of indescribable love and beauty, I offered myself to the divine. I told the medicine: ‘Take me. Take my life. Tell me what to do, where to go. I’ll do anything you ask of me. I’ll stay here in the jungle for the rest of my life if you want me to.’ Then I heard Abuela Ayahuasca gently chuckle and say to me: ‘Go home child, and water your roots.’
5.
So I did. I returned to California and I planted a garden of passionflower and jasmine and grapes and the most fragrant roses. I painted the concrete statues of the Virgin Mary my mother had collected over the years. I worked on healing all my relations, starting with my parents. And I swam in the ocean often, to be close to the dolphins.
I also paid a visit to an ultrasound clinic. Knowing what I knew to be true, but something inside me still wanting to confirm it: there was no sign in my womb of any cysts. The demon babies transformed into a sacred nothingness. And they haven’t returned since. My womb has been busy learning to birth a new existence, and to grieve each passing unfertilized egg.
Over the next several years I worked more & more with plants and their spirits. I continued receiving healing from and studying within the Shipibo lineage of ayahusca shamanism, devoting over 18 months in total to the monastic mysteries and alchemical containers known as master plant dietas, and in between, integrating into my life a vibrant remembrance, a resurrection of animism, and an intimacy with consciousnesses beyond and more ancient than human. I focused on developing my creativity and my inner marriage alongside birthright connections with the sun, moon and soil, as well as the astral realms of dreams and their inhabiting entities.
6.
Now, at age 30, nearly eight years following my visionary transformation in the Amazon basin of Peru, I look to my womb. The glowing seed has taken root inside me, and is slowly blossoming into a tree. A tree made for sourcing and dispersing nutrients to and from the web of life in the dark soil beneath, for dancing her branches in the sunny breeze, for birthing forth flowers of beauty, for being pollinated by inspiration and the seductive hum of honeybees, and for fruiting, fruiting, fruiting. No longer needing the protection of a fence, but still glowing in the tenderness of maintenance. I listen within to my creative portal’s pauses and passions. When is it time to spring new shoots, when is it time to prune? I am guided by an iridescent intuition and my gratitude.
And I am visited, in the ocean and in my dreams, by the dolphins. I call upon them to help me clear my womb of attachments and visions I need to compost- and they infuse my days and my creative process with the spirit of playfulness.
I also took the skull to a 3D printing shop and had them scan it, then print a mini reproduction which I sent to a casting house downtown to make a mold and subsequent talisman with. I use it for prayer and divination purposes. (See the Dolphin Skull Rosary & Pendulum)
And I learn about these magical ocean and astral creatures slowly, letting information find and strike me with awe for their beautiful medicine.
For example, I recently learned the nature in which wild dolphins give birth.
In Dr. Marsden Wagner’s book Creating Your Birth Plan, he describes the ecstatic phenomenon:
‘When a dolphin gives birth to a calf, several female dolphins swim in a circle close to the laboring mother. Slightly farther away, another larger group of all the remaining females in the pod circle around the laboring dolphin. Then, even farther away, all the male dolphins in the pod circle around her. The entire collective comes together to protect the laboring dolphin and her emerging calf from intrusion and harm.’
He goes on to relate this to a laboring human mother, who is best supported by a protective circle of love around her. I understand this beautiful truth to transcend physical birthing, and extend to the laboring of light into the world through myriad forms of creativity.
And I feel deeply blessed to sense a powerful pod of love surrounding me. A web of sisterhood and extended soul family. Built over years and only evolving in strength and clarity, I have found and formed true community by following and honoring what is sacred to me. My bonds and relations around the world nourish me deeply and the network of care and medicine and inspiration only grows, as I accept my role in the ecosystem, in the pod of all my relations. They are all my doulas and I am theirs, expanding creativity in a circle of loving safety. And together we are birthing something so much bigger than any of our individual visions could ever capture.
7.
As far as the golden sunshine child of my dream, I trust that he is coming. And until then I shall be tending my garden for reception. And laboring, laboring the light from my ecstatic human womb into this sacred world, full as it is already with beauty and suffering. This is my art, my balm, my offering. And I carry on, forever learning. Lifting my eyes to the moon, then bowing in gratitude, and knowing deeply:
The allies are many.
