Tag / spirituality

The greener, the better.  For a wildly creative woman who experiences powerful emotions, let me assure you, the greener the better.

There are lots of reasons to eat, but one of my favorite is karma.  Without going into it all, I think the important part of this sandwich to get is that it’s green.  And green things grow close to the ground or near the water’s surface.  Green things continue to grow after you cut the edible part off.  Green things have a neutralizing effect on karma.  Kind of balances all the other extremes out.  So this sandwich is kind of the epitome of sustainable karmic health for a person like me.  Packed with minerals, nice food combining and balancing energy this recipe.  Plus I actually put together a bunch of other recipes I wrote up, so it’s like I’m a chef now officially doing fancy things.

It’s just a sandwich, people.  A raw vegan sandwich.  And by default, it’s also a bunch of other complicated concepts like gluten-free, lactose-free, low-glycemic, organic, slow food, local food, super easy to make, dishwasher-free and waste-free – yes, not a single piece of plastic, glass or metal was purchased to hold any of the ingredients that made this sandwich.  There is absolutely no garbage karma in this food.

To your soul’s health, the Green Karma Sandwich.

GREEN KARMA SANDWICH

• 1 slice of soft, raw olive bread (made thinly)
• 1/2 Haas avocado
• 1/2 early girl tomato
• 4 slices of (soy-free) raw vegan tofu
• soaked arame
• two leafs romaine lettuce

* all ingredients raw, organic and sources locally

Make soft onion bread as a thin semi-soft slice of bread.  With a fork, squish the most perfect avocado you can get your hands on right onto the bread.  Sprinkle with pink Himalayan rock salt.  Place two ripe red tomato slices side by side on squished avo.  Slice raw vegan tofu into strips about 3″ long by 1″ wide.  Cover with arame seaweed.  Place a thin stripe of Sea Clear across the top like a far superior mustard.  The top of the sandwich is two fine crunchy pieces of romaine lettuce.   Here’s to your Green Karma.

My travel partner and I do partner yoga standing bow posture on the Winter Solstice Sun rise at the Elephant Nature Park, Thailand.

City standing bow here.

Welcome home to your vacation.

I put them in the day before my first STOMP show. My dread locks were to be a time line of my life in STOMP, but after 3 years, I left the show, but the locks stayed.

I mean, why go through the nappy dorky shoulder length look just to cut them off when they start getting guru lovely long? And little did I know, dread locks are not a hair style, they are a lifestyle. A spiritual renegade lifestyle I am glad to have fully learned the lessons of in our 11 years together.

How obsessed with sterility our culture is: white paper, white flour, white sugar, bleach cleaners and chemical “beauty” products we rub all over our bodies as if smelling like “floral scent #12″ is more desirable than smelling like our own beautiful body oils. Dread locks taught me my world is just plain not that menacing to me! I’m a part of nature, made to thrive in nature and as long as I don’t start inflicting unnatural things upon my body, it will self-clean, it will self-disinfect, it will take care of all the natural part of living like every other animal and plant has done over the entire history of evolution. In fact, it’s the white sugar, the white flour, the bleached white fabrics and papers – it’s the disinfectants – that my body doesn’t know what to do with. I was healthier for having dread locks and trusting my body.

Why are Western culturals so afraid of their own bodies? Why are we suspicious of the way our bodies move, or look nude in public, or smell – why are we ashamed of the good oils, fluids, sweat and tears that keep us healthy and human? Was there a potato famine somewhere in our past that freaked us out so about nature we tried to begin killing it’s life force every turn of the way? The poor adulterated cane plant. What a nutritious, entheogenic teacher it is – but not when we’ve dumbed it down and stiffeled it’s intelligence with refining and bleach. My world is not harmful to me. My dread locks taught me how strong I am.

When you don’t wash your dread locks, your dreams, your thoughts, your hopes, your experiences all accumulate in them. They become saturated and alive with YOU. When I did perchance to rinse them out, I always felt empty afterwards – like I couldn’t remember my spiritual essence – it wasn’t so close to me. I thought of soft haired folk as being empty almost all the time. Some people washed away their dreams every morning! Perhaps we are afraid of our own souls.

Sometimes I thought others were afraid of my soul, too. Every day at least 3 strangers would walk right up to me and grab a dread lock as if I were a doll and they were examining me. I began grabbing their hair right back to show them how it felt – everyone (especially in the city) needs some personal safety space. They were cautious, but curious about my soul. They must be cautious and curious about their own, too.

Dread locks are thought of as a natural hair style, but for a straight haired white girl like me, soft hair is actually “natural”. I’m hoping to find a natural way to care for my naturally and newly soft hair. And I’m hoping that people, instead of picking at me like an art piece/science experiment, they might now touch my head with love and run their fingers through my soft locks. My head wants to be touched with love.

These are the lessons 11 years growing dreads locks taught me. I’m glad I learned. And honestly, I don’t know whom I am now. And for a little while more, I don’t wanna know. I’m not the same woman I was before. Here’s to the Finding Out.

I see you. I see you there. I see you bust through the veil. I see it swiftly close in around behind you. I see the air change with your thoughts. I see energy like it was your breathing.

I knew for some time. I knew and I didn’t know what to do. So I let instinct guide me (the ladies call it intuition). I let instinct guide me and with graduating assertiveness you allowed my gaze. And for the want of that sign, my brass heart has rusted, wanting for just a glance.

I saw it. It’s there. Keep moving. Keep moving. Keep moving.

I’m following an erratic butterfly moth haphazardly hanging on one air current, then another. I’m forgetting what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m remembering a heavy, joyous despair for the fragility of existence and all it’s meaningful manufactured connections. I am wealthy for paying attention.

I keep moving because I see you in the side of my eyes.

Sometimes we artists get depressed. Say it with me, if you know where I am coming from, damn it.

And for any artist, it is complete – the landscape of emotion. If only we could selectively filter the feelings we wished to be expert expressionists of. Instead, we find ourselves becoming expert in depths that weren’t part of our intended life map. But look at us now – so complete. So many landscapes navigated and survived.

Still kickin. This one won’t get me cause I’m a survivor and I’ve survived worse. Carlos Castaneda turned me on to the general spiritual artistic concept that there’s a landscape with three worlds and each world feeds on and expresses a different theme of life. There is a high world and a middle world and a low world. Each one is part of everything you experience every day. What I call the Underworld folk – they actually eat sorrow like it was food. They think a good cry is an appetizer and a collapse to the ground a tasty main course. They eat it, then they transform it into a vital part of living that exists, like it or not: the cloak masquing the sky to reveal a seemingly forever nite. This is the Underworld folk’s energetic career.

When I sob it’s important. It’s nourishment to something. And when I don’t try to hold back my sad, but instead give it away freely like it was a present – my silent contractions, humped shoulders rocking, eyes puffy too much to see much else through – these are gifts not stolen from me, but offered with a spirit of generosity to feed something that can use my dizzy emotional exhaustion for a dessert cherry on top.

Eat this. Take this. Use this. It’s everything I can give right now. Take everything. It’s not mine anyway.

I feel like a pretty free person. Always gauging that one, measuring it up like it was my personal patrol dog responsibility to myself to keep myself free. I dream, I protect my dream, I live my dream and … I’m trapped in this dream.

Dreams can be distracting illusions. I’ve become a dream character. People project onto me. I’m an illusion. I’m not real. I’m not a real person until the dream is reality or gone altogether. When will we really value life for what it is? No dreams. No nothing else. No nothing else.

Do artists think we are better for dreaming? Do machinists think we are better off for not? Either way, maybe we’re just scared this might be it. This is it. That’s all there is. And there’s nothing left to do today, maybe everyday, but live.

Permission To Heal’s Victoria Moon interviews raw vegan athlete and Hollywood actress Tonya Kay, asking the question, “What keeps you inspired?” in segment 5 of this 5 part in-depth series.

Permission To Heal’s Victoria Moon interviews raw vegan athlete and Hollywood actress, Tonya Kay, about young people’s role in the future of planetary evolution. We touch upon Indigo children, the Aquarian Age, questioning authority and asking what is right on a very personal level. This is part 4 of a 5 part series.

Touche is an expression used as an acknowledgment of a hit by one’s opponent.  In French, it literally means “touched”.

I really like that word now that I know what and why.  Isn’t the whole point of skin the nerve endings in it?  Like extra information, this touch thing.  Like another language between yourself and another whom speaks it (well), too.

I still take in my spagyrics.  I still light the lemon grass and trace the open windows.  I still long to be understood and suspect it’s a personality trait.  Dear Goddess, full moon coming; cooling my nights, bringing water to the air, shine down on me and touch me so I become the Touched.  So we can, advancing/retreating, continue this clever, piercing dance of touche.

The touch of an impatient child.

The English word “pagan” comes from the Latin paganus, which translates as “country dweller.” Over time, the meaning encompassed not just the location of these dwellers, but also the way they lived and what they believed, both of which were close to nature. Pagan began to imply a special relationship with plants, weather, seasons and other natural phenomena that “refined” city dwellers experienced less often and less directly. As modern religions swept the European continent (often by force), pagan took on a religious connotation, coming to mean “anyone not Christian” or more derogatorily, “heathen.” By extension, the linguistic and literal attacks on country dwellers—their beliefs and way of life—can be seen as an outright attack on everything natural. Read more…