freak

I am participating in an exciting project, the first ever Freaks of Asheville calendar, which will be out for 2010. I have already had my freaky photo shoot, and now I have to submit a freak statement. I just wrote this declaration of myself, and I feel particularly glad that I wrote it on the solstice, a holy day during the wheel of the year to which I am seeking to connect more, and particularly poignant since the last time I blogged was at the equinox. I am sure this statement will be cut down dramatically in order to appear in the calendar, so I am sharing with the world the brand spanking new, editor's cut of my personal, freak story. Enjoy.

Justina. Statement of freakhood. Summer solstice, 2009.

I suspect I am not alone amongst the “freaks” in remembering that even as a young child I always felt different, felt like I didn’t fit in, felt always alone in a crowd. In high school I did it all: made great grades, smoked cigarettes, excelled in sports, did drugs, performed in theatre, had sex, sang in chorus, got in a car chase with the cops, got a scholarship, and did this all with a wildly shorn mop of dyed black hair, lots of piercings in my ears, and carrying on a punk rock meets flower child aesthetic to which neither the punks nor the hippies could relate, let alone the nerds, jocks, or stoner kids. I felt like a freak long before I learned to revel in it.

During those alienated high school years I discovered that my love of nature, my passion for justice, and my deeply primal urges to be a wild, earthy girl actually connected me to the Wiccan tradition, and I decided the minute I learned what it meant that I was a witch. To this day, I remain a witch. My pagan spirituality is inextricably intertwined with everything I do, and everything I do sets me apart from the mainstream, supposedly normal values of our culture. As a witch living amongst the forebears that burned my ancestors, I have been the freak.

I believe it is my responsibility to serve the earth and her creatures - human, animal, and plant beings alike – thus, I have lived that by gently birthing and mothering my own children, serving other families in the ancient tradition of midwifery, raising and rescuing animals, growing, wildcrafting and using herbs as food and medicine, protecting the land, protesting for peace, and attempting to live compassionately through my every choice from how I speak to my neighbors to where I buy my goods in hopes of diminishing my support for sweatshop labor, disposable products, and the many profanities of capitalism. As an activist whose purpose is to serve the planet living in a fast-food, throwaway society, I have been the freak.

A powerful tenet of my belief system is that all acts of love and pleasure serve a higher purpose. My joy, my delight in my actions, my delicious orgasms make the world a better place, not just for myself, but for all. My soul is awakened and inspired by art in every form, particularly by music and poetry. I perform raw, radical poetry as a way of sharing my art with the world and expressing my individual perspective. Like a shaman starved of otherworldly experiences, I devour deep, guitar-heavy, rock-n-roll and electronic psychedelic trance music that transports me. I dance ecstatically, stomping my prayers for peace and transformation into the Earth’s sacred ground. I make love to my partners and to myself as though sex were an ancient form of worship for all creation…. because it is. I permanently alter my body with decorative piercings and colorful, tattooed artwork, each blood-let, needle-carved alteration a chapter in the story of my journey, so that even my appearance becomes part of the giant, collaborative art project that is human existence. Amongst other artist/performer/participants I help create ritual festivals to showcase our creations in temporary societies in which the art is the focus, ceremony is part of every waking moment, and at the end of the day we burn effigies to release all that is unwanted through a spiraling inferno that itself becomes the performance, the art that is our intention. As a unique creatress in a society that values homogeneity and as a woman who always dances like no one is watching, but all the while hopes that everyone is watching, I have been the freak.

My path as a witch and a scholar has taught me that the sacred feminine is every bit as valuable as the sacred masculine, which our culture exclusively exalts. I have studied women’s herstory, have learned of the power imbalance between women and men, and I know that gender is a societally created construct that serves to control men and women alike by binding us to strict but narrow definitions of who we can be. Yet, I am a large woman, a loud woman, an outspoken, forthright, powerful, independent woman who loves the touch of another woman’s skin upon my own, and I am a soft woman, a stay-at-home mama who loves being barefoot and pregnant and tending to children, a cook, a baker, a homemaker, a hearth tending, nurturing woman who loves the feel of a man’s strong hand on my body. As a feminist living in a patriarchal society, I have been the freak.

As I grow more into the tradition of service to humanity I have sought to expand my skills as a healer. I scale ivory towers to pillage knowledge I can return to my people and use for our mutual evolution. I have learned to mediate the dissent between others, facilitating the high art of communication to prevent the schism that its absence creates. Currently I am studying in a Masters program to become a mental health counselor, and simultaneously I am learning to counsel others in a way that intrinsically honors each sacred path, and I am building a bridge of understanding between the hallowed halls of academia and the oft-maligned underground of the counterculture. As an outlandish but overachieving student performing excellently in the whitewashed world of graduate school, as a self-appointed ambassador declaring the weirdo perspective is valuable, too, I have been a freak.

Witch. Midwife. Homebirthing, breastfeeding, homeschooling mother. Activist. Pacifist. Animal lover. Environmentalist. Poet. Performer. Rock-n-roller. Ecstatic dancer. Sacred whore. Psychedelic shaman. Burner. Tattoed. Pierced. Queer. Feminist. Healer. Scholar. Mediator. Counselor. Ambassador.

This litany of mismatched descriptions names me as I am. I am a freak, the unifying quality of being exactly who I want to be in a world that wants to standardize, minimize, and tame me. I push the margins even as I am marginalized. I am a freak.

dear blog.... some poems for spring

Dear blog,
I miss you. Grad school is totally kicking my ass. I swear I will be back someday soon. In honor of the vernal equinox, I am leaving you with a couple of poems from the days of yore, when I was still able to write poetry. These were written during the childbearing days, so now date back to the mid-nineties. Wow. I have been a grown up for a long time.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This first piece was written during a wonderful writing workshop, the only I have ever attended. It is a letter to my then very young children, written at a time when I believed that my youthful wild days were over. I have been very pleased to learn they are not.

I am not fat.
I know I may look that way, but I am not.
I am not old.
I may seem that way, but trust me, I am as young as you.
I am not evil.
I may scream and bark and harp and swear, but I am good.
I have feelings and needs like yours, you know.
I once walked topless on a beach in Washington State, and
another time was topless in the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.
I won't do that again, probably,
but it's OK with me if you do.
I am not a housewife.
I am not anybody's wife, except maybe spring's.
When my years reach the century mark,
which I duly hope they do,
Remember all of this:
I dug deep holes for garden beds (I've done that topless, too).
I climbed to the tops of trees.
I carried many, many pounds of feed bags to cows and
many pounds of babies to birth.
I sang and danced and acted on stage and
had sex outside, even in the rain,
walked up steep mountain paths on dark moonless nights
to get to kegs of beer or
swimming holes
or lovers awaiting my touch, and
I've climbed steep, dark paths of my heart
to get to feelings indescribable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


This piece, I think, pretty much speaks for itself coming from a woman who conceived three times in five years during her early twenties.

I am fertile as the crescent moon.
My ova hang in clusters like grapes so ripe
they burst through their taut skins.
I conceive like nobody's business,
am forced to will away conception days and days each month.
Hormone levels soar exacerbating yeast,
Yet even in my itchy, juicy, sporishness
I feel like bread dough ever ready to rise.

(for Melanie)

shameless

Sometimes I feel invincible,
and for all that human frailty may try to keep me back
I am gonna just spit in its face,
'cause the fount of feeling that wells up in my breast,
the hurricane, thunderstorm, cavalcade, concerto
of overwhelming emotion that bursts forth from my soul,
Constantly,
is powerful as nine hundred million nuclear reactors on the face of the sun
and I simply must use this power for good.

I am omnipotent,
Able to accomplish astonishing feats like
Coaxing the unwilling to learn to love,
Overcoming internalized oppression so I feel really good about myself as a person,
Communicating remarkably well, all of the time,
and consistently being a considerate human being
while striving, aggressively, toward my dreams.

I am unabashed and unwilling to take no for an answer.
I can and will do it all,
Experience every raw moment this raucous life presents –
I will guzzle everyday miracles like a baleen whale sucking saltwater in the sea,
I will let life shove my face full of sweetness like she is my merciless newlywed,
I will nurture and tend like the thousand-breasted Artemis, and
I will ride life bareback like she was my bucking rodeo pony.
I will use the thorns of the Joshua tree soaked in cuttlefish ink to etch life’s pedigree permanently under my skin,
I will study like a scholar in an ivory tower and obtain the highest degrees –
Just you try to stop me!
And I will wail the cries of every widow war ever made, brokenhearted under the stars then
Like a Jedi on Dagobah I’ll levitate my spaceship above the murky abyss that tries to keep me from soaring light speed through the universe and
Turn even the most heinous of events into lessons I will be grateful to have learned.

I refuse to accept any assessment that I am
Too big, too loud, too wild, too proud and
when those words come toward me like bullets
I will pluck them delicately from the air
Pulverize them,
then blow the dust back in the faces of non-believers till they see…
There is no one as powerful as me,
No one as powerful as any one of us who insist
We live life by our hearts
We submerge ourselves fully in the complexities of existence and
Never ever apologize for what we are or
Who we want to be -
We who are shameless in our insistence that
We are fucking remarkable beyond belief.

(This piece inspired in part by a shameless scorpio beloved, a silver super sonic rock star, and a Death Cab for Cutie song I got turned onto by said silver rock star. The artwork above, also titled "Shameless," is by an amazing artist I just discovered named Stephanie Metz. She is a felted wool sculpture - wow. Please click to see more of her work once you have read my post, of course. Thanks Stephanie.)

rhetorical flourish

I am friends with a young fellow who I'll call M. M is four years old, tall for his age, blonde in a Dennis the Menace kind of way, and uncannily clever. He has a way with words far beyond his years and has a gentle, sensitive, inquisitive nature that often disarms people. He is so amicable people often do not know what to make of him. He is one of my favorite people.

One of the most delightful things about this young character is his penchant for describing and naming things in fabulous detail and with words you'd never expect out of the mouth of a four-year-old. A few weeks after Halloween he pointed out his family's forgotten jack-o-lanterns wasting away in the yard, and told me that those pumpkins were "decaying." Recently his mom told me a story about him explaining to her that he wanted to share his "loves" with her and then described his loves according to the colors and degrees of sparkliness as he saw them.

Today, while playing a game in which he attempts to surprise his mom and she is supposed to act scared, she overdid it and yelled out. M told his mom that her reaction was too loud and that he didn't like it. She asked him how she was supposed to act scared. "Maybe you could just cower," he told her. Yeah mom. Duh. Just cower next time.

But a different incident recently topped them all.

I was visiting with M a couple weeks back, and he wanted to show me one of his robots. He is quite into Transformers (one can hardly blame him; those guys are badass), and he introduced me to a battle worn robot he called Rhetorical Flourish.

"What?" I said, and looked to his mom for confirmation.

"Rhetorical Flourish," M said, with literal flourish. "This is Rhetorical Flourish and he likes to......" and whatever it is that M went on to tell me about Rhetorical Flourish I totally don't recall because I was in shock that I had heard what he had just said.

"What the hell?!" I asked his mom.

You see, M's parents are pretty serious Obama supporters. During the election they had the TV turned to MSNBC most nights taking in all the punditry they could in anticipation and hope for Obama's election. M was there, listening passively, and began endearingly referring to Obama as the president before the election ever happened. At some point M must have picked up that phrase and decided it was an apt name for his Transformer. He shocked his mother, though, the first day he asked her if she had seen Rhetorical Flourish. She said she reacted in much the way I did, asking "What?" with her jaw agape.

So yeah. Rhetorical Flourish. There's not much more I can say to compete with that.

my face in asheville

I am participating in a fantastic project that I am excited to share with you. The lovely and talented Jen Bowen is documenting the people who love Asheville and call it their home. The project is called Faces of Asheville, and I encourage you to check out her beautiful and well done website about this inspiring undertaking as soon as you are done reading my blog post!

Faces of Asheville is a two part project. The first part is comprised of portraits taken of any and all Asheville volunteers who were willing to come and be photographed, holding a single item somehow representative of themselves. My boys and I went and were photographed individually and together. L held his guitar, of course; G held a stick and wore a mask for his individual photo, and I held a puppy... ;) We also did a family portrait. We haven't seen our pictures yet, but there are great examples of other people's portraits in the website.

The second aspect is for each participant to share their Asheville story. Jen asked us to write about what brought us here, what keeps us here, and what do we hope for our future in our city? Plus she asked us to include our thoughts on the a few more questions regarding Asheville:
1) In the immediate present, what do you like / dislike?
2) In the immediate future, what would you change and what is sacred that should not be changed?
3) In the more distant future, what is your vision or hope for Asheville and the surrounding region?

This was my answer:

I originally came to Asheville in 1992 to attend Warren-Wilson College. As soon as I visited the area I knew I wanted to be here. I loved Warren-Wilson, but at that point in my life I was not sure I wanted to be in school. What I really wanted was to be a mom. I had just turned 19 years old. I had some fun at WWC, and in the meantime I discovered a local herbalist named Whitewolf with whom I started my first holistic herbal studies. I decided I wanted to pursue this training and carry it over into studying midwifery. Asheville seemed like a great place to do that.

Then, sort of accidentally on purpose, I got pregnant. Yay! It was during the amazing blizzard of '93 in which my partner and I got stuck out in Swannanoa. He worked in the kitchen at the restaurant in the Holiday Inn on Highway 70, and the management put us up in a room at the hotel so he would be available to cook every shift for all the hotel patrons trapped in Swannanoa, too. We were there for three days, and during his few hours off of kitchen duty, we made a baby.

Even though I loved the area, I thought I wanted to be closer to my family in Pittsburgh to have the baby, so we moved back up north. Our families helped us a lot, which we needed, but I never quit feeling like leaving Asheville was a mistake. I loved it here so much. But, I was busy having a baby and my partner went back to school and that was what we did for a couple of years. In the meantime, we got pregnant again, and in the spring of 1995 I had my second son just in time for their daddy to graduate college.

We lived, all four of us, at my mother's house in Pittsburgh for one more year, and during the summer of 1996 we returned to attend a friend's wedding at Warren-Wilson. That was it. We knew we had to come back. Though I loved being a mommy and lived in a busy suburban area close to the city, I have never felt so isolated in my life as I did at that time in Pittsburgh. Our move back to Asheville was like a whirlwind. We went to the wedding and were in town one weekend. We picked up a Sunday edition of the Asheville Citizen-Times, and my partner found a job listing that interested him. We returned to Pittsburgh, and he spent the next couple weeks interviewing over the phone, faxing resumes to the company, and lo and behold, they hired him, sight unseen. One month to the day after we had been in town for the wedding, my partner returned to Asheville to start his new job and to look for a place for our family to live. One month after that, on August 1st 1996, our whole family relocated to Asheville, the place where our family, really, had begun.

On the way to NC our very old Volkswagen bus bit the dust, so we were destined to move with no vehicle. He found a place in Montford for us to live, a 2nd story apartment in an old brick apartment quad that seemed perfect since it was walking distance to his new job and to town, and there was a family in the apartment below, a young couple like us with two babies almost the exact same age as our kids. To this day I remain close friends with them, and our kids are the oldest and closest of friends.

So that's what brought me here. What keeps me here is the amazing community. As soon as we moved back, I felt like my whole world opened up. In Pittsburgh I had been an isolated, young, alternative mommy with no peers and no friends. In Asheville there was a thriving, supportive, progressive community of young parents with whom I immediately connected. I made great friends, as did my kids, and I loved living with my babies in such a healthy positive place with so many creative, inspired, loving people. I still do. To this day we have many friends that we have been close to for most of the years since we returned. I can't imagine living without that kind of thriving, conscious, support network.

In the years I have been here things have changed a lot, some for the worse, some for the better. I am thrilled by how vibrant the Asheville arts community has become. Everyday, everywhere you go you can find amazing visual artists, poets, musicians, dancers, crafters, circus performers and individuals doing things you never dreamed of to make this place exciting and entertaining. Unfortunately, with the influx of amazing gifted people, there has also been an element of those who seek to gentrify the town, make it more homogeneous, more upscale, and as a result the racial diversity in town has diminished, and buildings and housing developments have been going up, up, up while dragging the landscape down, down, down. The devastation of our amazing natural resources is by far the worst thing I think that is happening here. The air quality has plummeted since I first came here 16 years ago, and I think the steep slope development, cookie cutter housing complexes and forest clearcutting is criminal. If I had one wish for Asheville and the country as a whole it would be for everyone to STOP, take a deep breath, and to start doing some well-considered urban, suburban and rural planning that would preserve the land and its resources- forests, mountains, waterways, farms, etc. and learn to build sustainably with an eye for integrating with the natural landscape in the places where development and growth must take place.

That is my vision for Asheville and the surrounding area. I want us to create a sustainable haven for individuals and families that wish to live consciously - conscious of community issues such as racism and poverty and oppression and how to work against them, conscious of health and the best ways to live well, conscious of the value of art, music, dance, poetry and the beauty of self-expression, conscious of how to protect the land and the plants and animals for whom this region is also home, conscious of the human need to develop spirituality and seek divinity in a myriad of ways. I want us to learn to truly value diversity and not just give it lip service. I hope we will start taking steps toward this future immediately, so we can reap the benefits of it continually throughout the future of Asheville. Blessed be.

thank you, barack

Earlier tonight I watched Barack Obama speak as he accepted the Democratic party nomination. I am no political pundit, nor am I particularly versed on politics in general. My agenda is generally so far from anything any mainstream American political candidate can muster that, unfortunately, I often pay them no heed. And though I am not naively touting the party line now, well aware of the shortcomings of the Democratic Party and even of Obama's campaign, I genuinely support Barack Obama. Furthermore, even if I didn't support him, I would still honor and respect him if only for his brilliant speech writing capabilities and his breathtaking skills as an orator. His speech tonight was certainly another spellbinding moment in his career.

I was gathered with some friends and my kids to watch the speech, and as we waited for Barack to hit the stage my younger son, G, asked if he could go watch a movie in another room. I told him no because I thought he should be with us for an important historical moment, the moment that a major political party in the United States finally, officially nominated somebody other than a white guy as the presidential candidate. Even if Barack does not assume the presidency, though I dearly pray he does, I felt this moment was of historical significance and that it was a worthy history lesson, a valuable moment to spend time with family, and if nothing else, an opportunity for the boys to get a good lesson in public speaking.

My friends and L and I watched the speech in rapt attention, and though I wasn't keeping very close tabs on him, G seemed kind of bored, and occasionally I had to stop him from fidgeting with a ball as the noise from him playing was making it hard for us to hear. So, imagine my surprise when we arrived home and G came up to me and said, "Mom, that speech was so amazing. I was interested in it the whole time even though I didn't think I would be. I even got tingles sometimes listening to it. I've never ever heard anything like that."

I asked him if he was glad I had made him watch it. He said, "Yeah," then hugged me and walked away.

Wow. For all that the American political process feels antiquated to me like a coal-fueled steam engine heading over a rickety bridge in the dark of night with no moon to guide, my heart sang for this moment. My children were inspired by the political process; they were inspired by a man participating in this supposed democracy who is doing his job well enough that an aloof teenage boy who would normally rather be playing video games listened with interest and "tingles" to a political speech referencing foreign policy, veterans' affairs, energy resources, tax cuts, the right to choose and same sex marriage. The acceptance speech from the US Democratic party candidate moved my thirteen year old boy to hug me in thanks for making sure he did not miss it, and this is a child who generally does not give physical affection without a struggle. Wow.

Thank you, Barack. Though I know this country and the world need a lot more than one man to bail us out of this handbasket to hell, I am sure grateful that you're hat is in the ring to try to help. Thank you for demonstrating to my sons that compassion, hard work, dedication and good communication are valuable to our society, and thank you for, perhaps, inspiring them to take up their civic responsibility someday soon. I am grateful for that.

I hope you and your beautiful family fare this arduous election process safely and come out thriving on the other side. And I hope I can soon call you the next president of the United States.

first night

(the moon as seen before the eclipse, through the Bone Tree)

Today Burning Man 2008 begins in the Black Rock Desert, and I will not be there. I feel good about that, although of course I would love to be there, because going to Burning Man in the first place was an amazing miracle that I thought I might never accomplish, and now I have been twice! So, to my dear friends on the playa tonight, I dedicate this poem that I wrote about my first night last year during the outstanding lunar eclipse. I hope you all the change the world, one dusty step at a time.


(during the eclipse)


we were bicycle pilgrims in the flat desert night
watched the looming moon disappear into eclipse
the absence of the silver brilliant sheen rendered the scene undercover
like an underground movement of salvation seeking souls.
hallucinated colors orbited the newborn stars of the falsely dark sky
the rust colored orb slowly arced through shifting star trails
and chaos reigned as the effigy burned by arson nearby.
but all around a neon city grew from the bottom up
the bare bones of geodesic domes filled with
towers of speaker stacks eager to create oases of sound.
the moon in totality loped at a timeless pace
we wondered like the ancients if the world was ending
or just beginning
and if we would ever see her silver face again.
our answer was to commence the ritual
fired up the gas generators to start the electric drums
that echoed over the long silent floor of the empty lake bed
now brittle, dry and alkaline.
the boom of the beat drove bodies to move
to shake and stomp and beg for the light
all the while worshiping the dark.
I danced the prayers of a thousand deities into white dinosaur bone dust
felt the mercury moonglow like liquid as it seeped
cold and crystal bright from the edges of the swollen shadowed satellite
witnessed the sky’s evolution from india ink to azure
my own shadow once again cast long on the ground by
the lunar spotlight shining just above the mountain horizon
where she headed for her morning’s rest.
but before the moon laid herself down
the beat belied a hint of brassy
the distant line of the opposite horizon
began to glimmer with a warm edge of daylight.
we were engulfed between cool blue waning
and golden dawn fire waxing
breathing in the powdered shells of trilobites
rising in fossil clouds from beneath our pounding feet
rising as the smoke from the still smoldering remains of the man
who we would resurrect only to burn again
and the music carried us
as our shadows centered into ourselves
balanced
rapturously
between the moon and the sun
in the exact moment
that our day was born of night.


(the man still smoldering as the eclipse wanes)