I awake to a small face breathing over me. We engage in our usual banter: “Ugh, what time is it?” I ask. “9:37,” the child answers. “Time for you to get up.” I sigh, “Yeah, you right. Isn’t summer vacation, great!?!”
We climb over John to get out of bed and onto the stairs of the loft. There they all are, staring up at me expectantly; three pit bulls of various sizes, two grey striped cats, and one orange corn snake. All hungry and eager to start the day (the snake is actually fine, just joining in on the staring for fun.) I can’t help but smile.
As we head to the kitchen, I stop in the bathroom to pee. They all wait, staring at me. What I wouldn’t give for 5 minutes peace. I sneak the water onto the stove as Vivian makes her requests, usually eggs and toast or oatmeal from the stove. Something that still requires my help despite the fact that she is seven years old. I enlist her to feed the animals as I make our breakfast.
Food for her and coffee for me. I breath it in deeply, and promise myself that I won’t rush to do anything else until I’ve enjoyed this one perfect creamy sweet cup of liquid. It’s always gone too quickly… And then I’m off to deal with everything else.
First things first: lighting the candles and the sage, clearing the space, kicking the demons out of the house. It’s crazy, the darkness that can descend in just one day. I’m like a magnet for this shit. Once the air clears, I sing. This is a newer thing. I only know a few songs on the harmonium. I chant them in Sanskrit. For me, its less about the actual words than the intention beneath them. I feel myself plug into a vibration that has been resonating for thousands of years, and I download some new information. I give myself 20 minutes, before I move on to movement.
I wish I had all day to dance around the yoga room. But I usually try to cap it at an hour, not including my daughter’s interruptions. Some times she joins me. But today she is busy in her own room with the key board. I begin with the most basic leg stretches. And then some core stuff. I listen to my body, maybe lay on blocks if my shoulders feel tight, maybe just start flowing if that’s what my body suggests that it would like.
I am always preparing to teach; doing poses that are connected to my focus of the week. But also doing me, poses against the wall, to stabilize my knees and align my lower back. I always end with some inversions, savasana, and a ten minute meditation. It’s slowly becoming slightly less agonizing…
And then we’re off to take care of some business. We take photos for a new flyer, get the oil changed, run across the street to the bank to get a check, and drop some herbs off to a friend. Then we stop at 5 different food stores and farmers markets to pick up all our our favorite things before heading home to make lunch, drum with spinach salad. It is so fresh we only need a little bit of lemon and salt and pepper to season it.
Pookers does the dishes while I pick up the front few rooms. I have a client coming over in a few minutes. Today we’re doing a combo session, Thai massage and the bars (acupressure points on the head to clear the mind). I am blessed that most of the people I work with are friends. Vivian sits with us as we discuss where in his body he’s holding tension today and what we’d like to destroy and uncreate. Just taking a moment to set some intentions for the session. She decides to color as he lays down on the floor…

My day might be half way over…. Still a couple more classes to teach. Diner to eat. Stories to read and write, before snuggling my baby to sleep.

Promethea wakes with a start.
“Shit! It’s 11:30! One of these days I’m going to get the hang of slaying demons all night and waking up promptly in the morning to start my day off right….”

She steps out of bed and stumbles to the bathroom. The cats and dogs are on her full force: stretching and yawning, licking and pawing, eyeing fiercely.
“I know, I know! You’re starving.”

She quickly fills the kettle and starts the water to boil before she begins to scoop their food into their bowls. They writhe and wiggle, sit and shake, expectantly. They are so happy! A t least she’s doing something right.

Once they all finish eating, she lets them outside and grinds the coffee. Then the water is ready. She pours it lovingly over the fresh grounds, closes her eyes, takes a deep breath in and sighs. It is the little things, the simple pleasures, that make life in this miserable world tolerable at times. And coffee is definitely one of those things.

This 20 minute period that Promethea grants herself at the beginning of the day is priceless and sacred. When the weather permits, she sits outside to drink her coffee and tunes into what is going right, the clouds in the sky, the flowers, the butterflies. She tries to give them her full attention, if only for a few moments, and to thank them for being the beauty in the world.

And then she’s off, for a full day of training, studying, and answering the calls of others. Thank goddess for the ability to fly! It saves so much time! Promethea created a special harness that enables the dogs to go with her. (She tried to include the cats, but they weren’t really into it.) So the first stop is always her favorite spot by the river. It’s about two hours outside the city if you were to drive by car. The perfect distance where the voices begin to quiet unless they are really important!

Promethea swims with the dogs for a about 20 minutes. Again, trying to concentrate on what is going right, the birds and the trees and the water. Then she dries herself in the sunshine on the shore and begins her training. It includes yoga poses and breathing, climbing trees, jumping and swinging between branches, and it ends with chanting, calling upon certain vibrations and frequencies and then meditation, receiving their guidance and wisdom.

Often the messages are fuzzy and a bit unclear. If they require further research she heads to the most appropriate library, the secret ancient text section of one of the nearby universities or museums. All the professors and curators know her now, so it’s pleasant coming and going. At first they were very stand offish, like she didn’t deserve to be there, like the knowledge in the books was intended for them alone.

She tried telling them which Gods, Goddesses or mythical creatures had come to her in her dreams and asked her to learn their stories. But they weren’t impressed. That made them look at her like she was crazy. So instead she began to look into their hearts and listen for the soft whisper of their worst fears. When she repeated those back to them, they always stumbled back stunned and let her pass. She always tried to find something in the books that she could share to sooth them as she left.

Usually about this time of day, as the sun begins to set, the voices, the prayers and pleas intensify, and she knows, it’s time to head back into the city to serve. Some say she was blessed with a gift, a superpower, in her ability to hear the thoughts of others. For most of her life, she felt like it was a complete curse! Can you imagine, the horror and intensity of feeling what everyone else around you is feeling all the time. It will rip you in a thousand different directions! It will make your head spin!

But now a days, Promethea is pretty sure that everyone can access this state of awareness. We are all connected, after all! If you’re not too scared and selfish to be present, you can hear it. For her, it is no longer a choice. She hears all the voices at once, all the mumbles and murmurs and complaints. And she goes to whoever needs her most. It isn’t necessarily the loudest, but it’s always the most heart felt and desperate.

But it isn’t what you think. This isn’t a fairy tale. She isn’t rescuing maidens in distress. She’s really just interrupting patterns of duress. She’s startling all participants. Giving them a moment to take a breath. To be in awe of her all knowing presence. To choose to do something different. So for the most part, all she has to do is fly in and hold the space. Let all parties know that they have been heard. Suggest that there may be another way.

Honestly, it isn’t the “victims” she comes to rescue. It’s the people that have gotten so low they think their only choice is to hurt and take from others. She gives then hope! And sometimes a suggestion or direction towards a meal, a teacher, or a job. She’s come to know a lot of people through this work, fulfilling her calling. She feels like she knows everyone.

I was raised in the woods by wolves, while my mother, the Martyr, was at work and my father, the Madman hid in plain sight. Well, really it was just one old white wolf with only three legs, named Gus. He was my fierce and silent protector. A stand in for my father who couldn’t really be there. Gus followed me obediently as I tottered around, and I felt safe to go anywhere. He only ever woofed in warning right before I was about to fall or right before he was about to pounce.

We were often accompanied by our kitty cat, Cinder. She lost half her tail one day when she escaped a demon from another realm and emerged from the darkness into our world. We all instantly became inseparable, a tight knit pack, a family unit. Unbeknownst to me and Gus, Cinder carried five tiny lives within hers as she merged with ours. But we weren’t really surprised. She was the quintessential mother, a survivor, willing to do anything for her sons and daughters, but always dignified.

We made our own world in the gully between the house and the highway. It was complete with stone walls and long forgotten waterfalls, with bridges made of fallen logs and castles made from abandoned cars. I brought my baby sister down there to save her from the screaming, hoping that she would find peace within the safety net of leaves and trees. Other children joined us at times.

We were busy, building our reality, calling it into being with our stories. Everything was really important! We were saving the world! First taking care of the new born kittens. And then rescuing baby birds and chipmunks from the jaws of those pesky little cats as they grew bigger. We nursed them back to health and tried to keep them as pets as well. But it never lasted long. As soon as they were better, they were gone, back out into the world. They belonged to themselves.

Just like each of us, me, Cinder and Gus, all still 1/2 feral. Fierce and silent until ready to strike. Capable of defeating demons from other dimensions. Always kind of alone, even when caring for others.

Story of Origin

They say we are each born twice in this life time. First as helpless little babies dependent our parents to meet our every need. And then at some point, through choice, we are born into who we were meant to be.

The first time I was born at sunset on a perfect spring day in early April. I came two weeks early and my mother labored quickly. They say I was a happy baby. It scared the shit out of my parents the first time I slept through the night for 8 hours straight. I was just six weeks old. Apparently this takes some children years to learn to do, as we saw later with my sister.

I was an easy going child. Always saying hello to everyone, making them smile. Taking the hands of strangers, and guiding them down into the grass, to check out my wonders; ants building a pile or a caterpillar munching a leaf. It was always the little things that caught my eye and made me smile.

I basically lived in the woods as a child. My dog, Gus, the three legged white German shepherd followed me where ever I went. All the babysitters and mailmen were afraid of him, even most of our close family friends were afraid of him. But he listened perfectly to me, despite the fact that I was tiny. It was pretty much telepathy and because of Gus, my parents never worried about me wandering off into the gully behind the house.

Springfield, where I grew up, is a city, so the woods weren’t very deep. If you strained your eyes, you could see the highway through the trees. But it was a vast and glorious universe to me as a child of three. At the edge of the yard, the trees began to thicken and descend along a gentle slope. There were three stone circles, the remnants of a man-made waterfall that was abandoned long ago. It was full of leaves and kind of stinky, a great place to catch frogs. Or to sit on the stone benches at the bottom and stare off into the murky water, up at the trees, or out to the sky beyond the house.

When I got bored with that, I would wander past the stone wall, deeper down the ravine to the tiny little stream that ran along the bottom. There were always fallen down trees to practice balancing. This is where I found my cat. She was black with one tiny little white spot in the middle of her chest. She only had half a tail. She walked out from under a bush, right up to me and Gus, meowing like crazy. I picked her up and brought her home and that was that. My mother was not thrilled since she was at least 1/2 feral. But we had already become inseparable, so she let me keep her. I named her Cinder, after Cinderella, not because she was black as soot like all the adults thought.

She turned out to be pregnant and had five kittens in my bedroom closet, four black ones that looked just like her and one little grey stripy guy with six toes on each paw. They lived in a play pen in my room for a while, until they began to escape. They started chasing mice and moles, squirrels and chipmunks around the yard. Then they began to catch them. This upset me greatly because I never wanted any body to get hurt. (I literally felt bad for eating food; not just meat, vegetables too.) So I gathered other children to help me save them! We would literally pry the chipmunks out of the kittens mouths. They usually weren’t hurt too bad, so I would keep them in a box in my bedroom and feed them milk with an eye dropper to nurse them back to health. One day the kittens found the box, knocked it over and began chasing the chipmunks around the house. My mom wanted to wring my neck. The cats were adopted out soon after that. All except Cinder and the stripy grey guy with six toes.

A year or so before all this, my little sister, Callie, was born. I wasn’t jealous like some kids would be. I was ecstatic to have my very own baby! I wanted to dress her and bath her and didn’t even mind changing her diapers. I guess I was a born nurturer. I was hyper aware of other people’s wants and needs. I was eager to please. These tendencies served me well as a child, and as a gymnast which made my father proud.

But making him happy was something that grew increasingly difficult throughout the years. It seemed like my mother was always at work and my little sister was always crying. Something dark descended upon our house as we children grew older. It took root in my father. He kept strange hours. Sleeping all day and watching TV all night. We had to tip toe around so as not to disturb him for if we did, he would descend upon us in fit of rage, swinging and screaming, demanding that we clean up the mess he’d been making all week or make him something to eat. I started to feel like Cinderella. But it was always easiest to do what he was asking, to make him a couple eggs, do the dishes and then take off down the gully. Rather than start a battle with a bully twice my size.

I was born the second time at 12 years old when I suddenly awoke fully into myself within this madness and I was fucking pissed! I quit gymnastics. It was like a switch flipped. I was done people pleasing. I was done agreeing and going a long with what made everyone else comfortable. It was like I suddenly realized that my life was for me, that I could be free if I was willing to go for it. And after that, it was on. My poor father, I was a whirl wind. Spinning through the house, kicking up dirt, standing up for myself and everyone else; I wouldn’t let anything go. And when it got to be too much, I’d take off down the road.

I never went too far as a teenager. Just took the bus a few exits down the highway to the college towns that were more trendy. I went to poetry readings and hung out on the streets “spare changing” to get something to eat. Sometimes I took my little sister with me. We’d hang out with homeless people and listen to their stories. This is when I started to become aware of all the lies around freedom and equality and democracy. This is when I started to fit my experience of the patriarchy into a larger social context. And like I said, I got pissed! But I also realized what I was up against. I realized the true nature of my being as a Warrior and how I would like to use my gifts as a nurturer to lift other people up, to guide folks to seize freedom and create beauty in their own lives. This has been my journey every since.

When I first started practicing yoga a Swan River, I absolutely hated the chanting. Just listening to it made me want to crawl out of my own skin. I knew that I had a horrible singing voice and I was really embarrassed about it. I literally had not sung a note out loud in front of another human being in over 20 years.
This was because when I was about six or seven years old, I was singing to myself in the back seat of the car and it annoyed my father. He’s a little bit crazy, so he screamed at the top of his lungs for me to “Shut the hell up!” He said that I had a horrible singing voice, that i was clearly tone deaf, and that nobody wanted to hear me sing. And so I didn’t ever again…

…Until I was in the teacher training at Swan River. If you don’t know Michelle Baker, she’s a little bit obsessed with chanting and the healing properties of sound. The first time she said, “the vibrations clear your energy channels,” I thought she was so full of shit. When I found out leading a chant was a requirement to graduate from the training, I tried everything to get out of it (even throwing myself on the floor and sobbing hysterically). But she would not  budge. She said I had a beautiful voice, I just needed to practice using it, just like everything else.
At that point I was a 28 year old, recently single mother of a two year old, that had just dropped $3,000 on a yoga teacher training. I couldn’t give up, so I had to sing. I bought a harmonium so I could practice at home. I’d never played an instrument before in my life so learning the most basic chants with three notes was painful. When I had to lead the chant in front of Michelle’s class as a student teacher, I was sure that I was going to die. My heart was pounding so loud in my ears that I couldn’t hear the words. When I had to film myself chanting for the final video, it was agonizing to watch. And after the second video attempt, after I passed and graduated, I didn’t chant again for months. I didn’t chant in front of my classes for years.
But then the darnedest thing happened. At some point along the way, I realized I really missed singing. I reincorporated it into my home practice and suddenly I could see and feel all it’s benefits. My words got caught in my throat less. I was able to speak up and be more concise. I was able to listen and remain calm in conflict without loosing my temper, just a little bit more often. And a playfulness and joy came back into my life. I was like a little kid again, and I remembered that I love to sing! My voice isn’t great. But that’s not the point. It just feels good to let it all out through song and sound sometimes. So I invite you to chant with me. If you’re nervous, I beg you to push yourself a little bit and just try it! It might make all the difference in your day, or your week, or your life.

When asked which mythical character I most identify with, Xena Warrior Princess is the first one that comes to mind. I know, I know, she’s a made for TV character that emerged from the WB in the 90s. But this gives you an idea of where I’m coming from.

I saw Wonder Woman last weekend and I sobbed through the whole three hour movie. Why? Because I loved her so much! She is who I want to be when I grow up. Strong and fierce and tough, inside and out. She fights for truth and justice and cannot be corrupted by personal interest. But she’s still kind and loving and compassionate, not to mention gorgeous. She’s an Amazon, warrior Goddess, raised in paradise. But she chose to be in the world with all it’s ugliness and to still believe in it, to still fight for it!

She reminds me a lot of Promethea, another modern Goddess. She embodies creative expression, intuition, and magic. She has her own comic book by the same name and I have her tattooed on my arm. As the story goes, she has had different incarnations throughout time. When ever the world stagnates and needs to be reminded of itself, she merges with and possesses the body of an artist. Her spirit enables them to take their creativity to the next level providing exactly what the world needs to urge it to leap forward into the next phase of it’s existence.

Come to think of it, all of these modern goddesses could be seen as new incarnations of Athena, the goddess of war and justice, wisdom, courage, inspiration, strength, strategy and the arts. The myths and their characters are here to give us hope and remind us of who we truly are, or who we truly want to be. Their names and images may shift to reflect the times, but their characteristics and purpose are timeless. Any one of us could be Promethea’s next incarnation! Or maybe we are all already embodying that energy collectively!

Read the comic!!