BEING & BECOMING

It’s mid-May now.

…

I have been trying every day just to be. At least for a few minutes here and there throughout the busy-ness of the waking hours. It’s hard to just be sometimes. My cat, Hecate, is a really great coach on just being. She lays on top of me, in front of the journal I’m writing in, the book that I’m reading, the tea I’m sipping, the words I’m typing on this laptop. With her weight, and her calm but insistent gaze she says, “It’s time to just be now, Artemis. It’s time to be a human being. Not a human doing. Just be with me. Look, here’s how you do it. Purrrrr…” I’m learning. Slowly and somewhat reluctantly.

It’s a new type of spiral to weave, just to be.

Speaking of spirals, it’s hard to write a book. A memoir. It’s a humbling process. Actually, the stories flow with relative ease in my journal. Writing in slow time there is where most of the action happens these days. And with this slow down, I do also want to celebrate with you that I recently completed writing the first 100 pages in the digital manuscript.

!!!

I celebrate. And then I remember there is still so much more of the narrative to search through in the folds of my consciousness. It moves at a humbling pace through my body.

Being humbled in this process is tenderizing, and the tender bits feel quite tender right now. I feel resistance to the tenderness creeping through my limbs, winding their way around my muscles and tendons, stirring in my bones. I try to spare myself these difficult bits, but then the tenderness just finds a new way to creep through.

Last night I finished reading the ancient Sumerian hymns of Inanna, from the collection Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth by Wolkstein & Kramer. Inanna’s husband, Dumuzi, is pursued through every corner of Ancient Sumeria by Ereshkigal’s Underworld demons. You know what will happen… Dumuzi will need to accept that the demons shall not spare him to rest. They will. Eventually. Reach him.

One of my favorite songs to listen to this past year has been “The Way Through” by Deca. It’s been a constant comfort. Messages from a fellow traveler who has seen the way through with his own eyes, and has shed many layers along the way.

I think the way through means unveiling, shedding many masks. Revealing. Inanna had to do the same in order to reach the depths of the Underworld. And there she died. And there she was later revived.

I feel many old selves, patterns, and behaviors expiring. It feels like a kind of dying to allow this process to unfold. But it’s expiring in order to become something new. Becoming…maybe a fuzzy, colorful moth…a creature drawn to the light of the moon.

(The Way Through):

The light should shine through your eyes. The light should be spoken through your words. The light should be felt in your deeds. There is a true purpose of our being on this earth, to uncover the light, and let it shine brighter, and brighter.

Deca’s work reminds me that the only way out of this tender moment is indeed through. I think the way through needs to be met with extreme tenderness. I’ve tried to muscle and battle my way through, but that has only increased the resistance felt from the other side. The other side of whatever is next.

I try not to think ahead too much to what this project will one day become, because the whole point of the book is to allow the becoming to unfold. A bountiful blossom unfurling.

To unfurl. To blossom. To bear fruit. And to accept what takes shape. To just let the story be what it will be. What it is. And what it will become.

I am here for your becoming as well.

May 16, 2024

Artemis Divine

FINDING MY VOICE

I have been devoted to my writing project, Becoming the Sacred Clown, and am proud to say I now have 60+ pages in the manuscript. As a person who has for so many years identified as a visual artist first, it’s been an emotionally scouring, humbling, and purpose-filled undertaking to step into the writer’s seat and discover my own voice within the written word realm.

This project draws out the most personal voice I have ever offered, and I have the discipline of this newsletter writing practice to thank, in part, for the birth of this work. Thank you all for continuing to read what I have to offer.

In the spirit of gratitude, I thought I’d offer you a few paragraphs from one of the most recent chapters I have drafted, Clowned by The Moon:

It’s the beginning of Pisces season, the moon is waxing gibbous somewhere in visible orbit around my pocket of a partly cloudy evening sky in NE Portland, and I’m recalling a dream vision I had over a year ago about a phenomenally reflective first quarter moon. It was a few days before Halloween 2022, and a little over two weeks prior to my father’s passing from vascular dementia and covid-related complications. He had been in hospice care at a memory care facility for nearly five months at this point. We knew he would pass sometime soon. He would try to tell me things during our visits, but he was barely taking in any fluids and his words just came out as dry grunts and unintelligible whispers. Messages from the realm just beyond the veil, I assumed. On Halloween, I went and visited him, for what would end up being the last time before he passed. Every visit felt more and more heavy in my feet and my heart as the months had progressed. I treated every visit as though it might be my last with him. 

My dad and I had shared our dreams with one another over breakfast many times when I was growing up, he dreaming of being a warrior and a time traveler from other parts, and me dreaming of hills resplendent with colorful soda cans or being stunned by a skeletal witch-bride on a dark, tree-lined street. We each generally greeted our dreamworlds with enthusiasm, and that space to share was an anchor I felt lucky to have as an imaginative and curious child. So, of course I felt inclined to share my recent lunar dream vision with him on this visit. I drew a chair up to his bed, and leaned next to him, holding his pale, tired hand, and shared what I had seen…

March 4, 2024

Artemis Divine

MORE SUNLIGHT

This time of year, this year especially, feels heavy with loss and grief. Grief and strife across the seas, here at home throughout many parts of Turtle Island, and within our own hearts. January is a long month, both in duration and in feeling. As it is my birth month, I really try my best to find the sweetness in it, but this time of year is an undeniably strong, bitter medicine. I respect how the energy of this time in the Northern Hemisphere holds strong and neutral to it’s limited resources, which we may experience as austerity that is severe and unfeeling. Nature gives to encourage growth and expansion, and in flow it also limits in order to encourage rest and restoration.

Capitalism doesn’t encourage rest. The earth does. This is still very much the time for deep rest and retreat, walking in quiet abundance with the previous harvest, we need this time to reserve, reflect, and slow down. Every year for me, something about this ancient earth wisdom feels like a force to habitually resist in one way or another. Something about the forced rest feels impossible to bear, and yet with time it is borne. The potent complex beauty of the seeds we have saved from harvest begin to glow, hum, and buzz in our hands. The sun’s light continues to increase daily.

We just experienced a rough bit of enduring snow and ice conditions here in the Portland area, many trees had their roots loosened by these extreme weather conditions, ending their time above ground, sometimes slicing through homes on their way down. Animals and humans alike are displaced by these types of tree fell events.

On December 27, a few weeks before the storm, I lost a dear tree friend, the Northern Catalpa tree that you may have seen me write about previously here or on my Instagram page. I woke up in the morning to a person in a bright orange sweatshirt shimmying up the main trunk of the tree. I hoped at first that he was assessing some branches to trim for maintenance, but when I looked outside and saw how large the tree crew was, I knew that I was experiencing my last morning with this arboreal elder. I still grieve the loss of this tree. I mourn the loss of the shade and groundedness they offered me throughout a deep period of mourning in 2023, as I also mourn the loss of shelter for the squirrels, birds, and other families of wildlife imperceptible to my eye.

I worked a full day that day at Clary Sage, so I could not watch the entire take down occur, but I was able to salvage a large branch from one of the site workers for my porch garden before I left the house. When I returned home at the end of the evening, there was a large log from a trunk of the tree resting along the sidewalk near where it used to grow. The moon had just been full in Cancer the day previous, and I had done an extensive reading for myself for the year ahead. The roots and branches of that tree had held and supported the wisdom offered to me in this reading. That night, after the tree’s light had been extinguished and I had returned home from work, there was an empty space in the night sky where their branches once sprawled. I sat on their remaining trunk, and gazed at the waning full moon, clouds quickly rolling by in front of her. The opening in the sky is still bittersweet. I have more sunlight in my home now, which my houseplants are enjoying, but I no longer have one of my elders around.

The earth and the cosmos, of which we are a part, can hold our grief. This is a time to hold grief with one another. A time to mourn the retreat of many nourishing ecosystems. And a time to imagine ways to build new, flourishing ecosystems of care for one another, human and non-human alike.

In a numerological sense, 2024 (2+0+2+4) is a Strength (8) year in the Tarot. This is a year for courage. Cor (Latin) meaning “heart” —> corage (French) —> courage (Middle English). Typically, this card depicts a lion, and a femme figure with one hand reaching tenderly into the lion’s open mouth. I won’t offer a deep dive into all the wisdom of this card today. For now, I think it is worth delivering one clear reminder that this card impresses: you cannot suppress your wild animal self in perpetuity, neither can you deny yourself grace and tenderness.

Have heart. Nurture heart-focused healing modalities. Access heart-centered bravery. Operate from loving integrity. Learn new ways to offer yourself love, care, and gentle kindness. Roar. Move with wild vigor in your home, or on the land, to music that encourages your feral spirit to sing with raucous abandon. Get curious about ways to integrate the wild and the tender. The effect of doing this work diligently will help you infuse these qualities in your external relationships as well. Love with a fierce, courageous, and tender heart. We need your courage.

January 23, 2024

Artemis Divine

A TIME FOR COLLECTIVE DREAMING

Timelines are criss-crossing one another with increasing frequency as we prepare to say farewell to one solar cycle, and ready ourselves to greet the beginning of a new one.

This Winter Solstice, as we move from the fire-y energy of Sagittarius season, and settle into the earth bound essence of Capricorn season, we seek ways to ground deeply into the hidden activity. The movements happening beneath the earth’s surface. While much of life appears now to be in that deep slumber of late Fall and Winter months, there is a lot dreaming itself into being for Spring renewal. We need the space for rest. We need the space for renewal. We need the space for dreaming.

If ever there were a time for individual and collective dreaming, it is now. Dreamwork to encourage radical self acceptance, as well as to raise the vibrations of power with and collective liberation, and diminish the destructive frequency of power over paradigms. Dreamwork allows us the space to rest and imagine new worlds, new ways of being. In dreams we invite room for creator spirit to move through us, and move us towards revolution and recreation.

I recently came a across this quote from Grace Lee Boggs in a post on Rowen White’s Instagram feed (an author and indigenous seed steward of the Mohawk nation): A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.

The world needs your dreams, your creativity, and your most vast, boundless, and compassionate imagination. We can get a lot further together than we can apart. Don’t allow this world to fool you into believing you are alone in this work. We are many. We can dream into being the sacred spaces necessary for care, nurturance, and growth. Creation can flourish if we can each remember that we are a part of it.

GO OUT TO THE WOODS

I’ve been struggling to sit still long enough today to write to you all. The dramatic shift in light to dark during Scorpio season here in the Northern Hemisphere, and in the Pacific Northwest specifically, always leaves me restless. And this year it has me questioning with deeper intent why it is that a seasonal focus on darkness is such an emotional challenge for so many of us as earth dwellers.

I think that perhaps the receptive, inkwell black dip of late Fall and early Winter nights disrupts the active, sun-bleached narratives that permeate our psyche for the other 6 months of the year. But if we were always acting, and never reflecting, our days would soon lack the depth and richness that shadows cast.

With slow intent, I am inching my way towards the heavy, velvet cloak of Mother Night, so we can curl up together and swap tales of all things hidden and mysterious with one another. I’m a little scared of some of the things she is charging me to reflect upon and plan, but it’s a good scared. Facing fears that I’m safe to face, but have historically felt too comfortable in the discomfort to hold up really close to the candle flame.

A phrase by Clarissa Pinkola Estés from her 1981 classic Women Who Run With the Wolves, has been resounding in my consciousness throughout today: “Go out in the woods. Go out. If you don’t go out to the woods, nothing will ever happen, and your life will never begin.” I used to have this quote scrawled on my studio mirror years ago, and it helped me get through many dark passages with willingness, curiosity, and bravery. It’s time to heed the call out to the woods once again.

This time to begin a project that has been percolating for awhile now. I recall saying back in the Spring or Summer months that I’d revisit my writing on the archetype of the Sacred Clown here, but what I have since discovered for myself is just how very rich I find this topic. So writing about it a little more in depth for a newsletter or blog post simply would not be doing this subject proper justice. I need to write a whole book about it. I’ve known for awhile now that there was a book beginning to form in my practice, but it wasn’t until I decided to plan my retirement from stripping that the project began to reveal itself.

So now I simply have no choice except to step out into those woods. I am unsure of all that I will find there, but I do know that the reason the clown is so very good at smiling and laughing is because they have also known great sadness and tears. That feels so elementary to say, but it took a long time while for me to realize in my body that if I wanted to write about the clown, the fool, the trickster, the edge walker, then I’d need to address what made them feel cast out along the realm of the in-between in the first place. It will also be my job to hold that container for others who wish to share their own relationship to the Sacred Clown for this project. Because it’s more meaningful to clown in company. Because there are many clowns who have come before us to pave the way through the hidden underbelly of human existence. This is a lineage, and it deserves to be honored in good company.

***

And also I’d like to acknowledge here that there are many deeply upsetting events taking place locally and abroad. I am hoping the PPS educators here in Portland can come to an equitable resolution between their union and the city soon. And abroad there are so many concerns, but my heart is with all people who support a ceasefire in Gaza. Call your representatives to make your voice heard. Listen to a few podcasts to educate yourself on the history of the conflict; the one linked here was shared by my friend, Kim. Shine a light on activists that are shining a light on the movement for Peace and Liberation for Palestine, adrienne marie brown is a mycelial web of connection here. You do not need to agree with my values here, I only ask that you respect that they are my values, and ones that I choose to share. Silence will not serve our relationships at this time.

Artemis Divine

November 22, 2023

SLOWNESS

Welcome to Autumn. Everything in the ground is slowing down. More dark than light in the skies now, every day until we greet the Winter Solstice in late December.

The zinnia and nasturtium blossoms in my garden are still growing and blooming in response to sporadic solar appearances - still doing their thing, but at a slower rate. And the leaves on my marshmallow plant are actively yielding their chlorophyll. Those broad and once bright green, velvety soft solar receptors now yellowing and curling inwards, as the juiciest solar information from the summer months is sent downwards as currents of sugar toward the roots. The most exciting events are now taking place beneath the soil. 

This is the time to celebrate the root medicine, and make a journey with the darkness. Fall is the season in the Northern Hemisphere to harvest everything sweet that was nourished during the Spring and Summer months, and savor it all at a resting heart rate beat. It’s time to look beneath the surface of what was yielded. Scrape and dig beyond the crust. What has been waiting there for you to uncover, gather, and tend to? I’m uncovering a different way to listen as I tend to the parts of me that move…very…slowly…

Listen: the pulse of the solar party has slowed and become no more than a muffled bass beat resounding in a distant, neighboring chamber. What subtle, pleasing sounds greet you now? If the increasing dark of Fall were a vast cave, what sparks would you bring along to light the way for the journey deep within?

The Hermit is the archetype in the tarot which plays companion to the astrological sign of Virgo. So while we have progressed beyond the Virgo passage in our 2023 solar journey, I find comfort in picturing myself as The Hermit during this season, hard at work, studying away in my mountain top cave. To paraphrase a visualization of this archetype that my friend Jess Funaro intimated to me last week: The Hermit is illuminating the journey through the dark one footstep at a time, casting light only as far as their lantern’s flame will allow. We can’t see everything, but we can see as far ahead as we need to to guide us toward the next step. 

Step by step. One foot in front of the other. There is no easier way to make the human journey. 

Artemis Divine

October 5, 2023

A PRACTICE OF SPIRIT INTAKE

A constant that I invite into my multi-disciplinary practice is change. Change and transformation. I studied painting and drawing for my graduate and undergraduate studies. As a result, every new creative process I engage in feels a little like starting a new painting. Every time is like learning to paint for the first time. A mentor of mine, Shayne Case, feels creatively connected to the flower essences she makes, just as she does to the poetry she reads every day. They are both workings for the soul. I feel similarly about my relationship to channeling and divinatory session work. They are paintings, songs of the soul. Each session is an opportunity to listen to the notes of a new story. How do they get translated? It’s a new adventure in learning and unlearning every time.

Part of my medicine is to be fully present with clients - to hold space with great care and respect, and do the deep listening. If you are undergoing shifts in your world that are rearranging awareness, perhaps it’s time to call in an assist. We are each born into this world with specific gifts and tools to help one another see and be seen with a greater semblance of connected ease. The willingness to allow change to occur on deep and subtle levels is a key component to embodying the healing process.

In a session, it will not be me doing the healing work for a client. I am a benevolent guide, a witness, another traveler making the journey alongside yours. As an example, I go to my personal trainer every week. I devote this time to show up for myself, and train my body to change and grow stronger. I am putting in the work, and my trainer guides and encourages. That's very much how I see the spiritual and divinatory work that I do with clients. They show up to do the work to heal what concerns their body, nervous system, heart, their spirit - be that manifest as grief, discomfort, anxiety, sleeplessness, stagnation, etc. I am present to listen, encourage, reflect, and channel connection with the guides, ancestors, and plant friends that wish to collaborate on the healing walk through this life. 

The effectiveness of my plant medicine formulas operate in part on a practical, physical action level: mugwort helps your digestion and eases your ability to get to sleep and stay asleep. But the ritual, energetic components are just as present as the physical actions: mugwort connects you with wise, deep knowing parts of your spirit that travel beyond the realm of your intelligent, but limited, ego self. I have explicit trust in the relationship I have with the plants involved in my practice. Not everything I make works for every body. That's why I have a library of formulas available.

I do not believe that we are meant to escape grief or discomfort - loss, struggle, and obstacles offer us great teachings, and they deserve seats of honored respect at your table of transformation. Learning to tone yourself to challenge in this way shifts the vibration of the stories that play and re-play. We can learn to trust that our higher self knows the way to navigate our whole selves into healthier patterns.

And this work needs to be fun as well. There is space for laughter, mischief, and the trickster clown. Play in learning needn’t be exclusive to childhood. There is great wisdom in activating play while we learn new habits; we learn faster and more concretely when play is involved. There will always be laughter present to help activate sustained, healing growth in a Radicle Pleasures session.

Let’s make a painting of your story together.

September 7, 2023

Artemis Divine

REST, RELISH & REBUILD

Welcome to the final third of our summer season in the Northern Hemisphere. For many with school age children, or those who work in education, the beginning of Virgo season may bring tangible indications that summertime is rearing to a close…

…I too can feel the shift quickening. Breezes are once again picking up, rustling the leaves and ripe seed pods in the great Northern Catalpa tree outside my window. And still this half of the globe holds warmth close to it’s chest for a spell longer.

Wherever, whenever, and however you can, make time now to sway between the ebb and flow. There is much happening earth wise everyday that could take us down into the spiral of overwhelm, but we can’t let the massive shifts which are unfolding keep us down. We can remember our inheritance as warriors for balance between tender rest and wild relish for life.

If being a warrior feels like a heavy lift today, just remember the diligent dedication of Spider. I have a lovely brown garden spider who has set up her web between a potted begonia and a full moon night light at my kitchen table. Sometimes when I am sitting near her web and busy at work with preparations on my plant medicine offerings, I forget she is there and accidentally knock her web over. But she just waits until I am done stirring in her corner, and she begins to spin a fresh, new web for herself. With indifference for the work it takes to rebuild, she carefully dispenses her silk one row at a time. She zen, meditative diligence me think of the Eight of Pentacles, the card of apprenticeship towards mastery. The Eight of Pentacles is also assigned to the first decan of Virgo, Sun in Virgo, which is the 10 days of the year where we dwell presently, August 23 to September 2.

Spider first showed up in my dreams over eleven years ago just before I first started stripping. She was a mischievous trickster, flying and dropping like a yo-yo toy from the hanging sculptures I had suspended from the ceiling in my combination bedroom and studio space. I learned from her big, furry presence how to stop being afraid of every spider that crossed my path, and started making space for her in every home I’ve lived in since. So far, I have seen the spider in my kitchen shed two exoskeletons. What an honor to witness another being become a new version of themselves!

Right now, I’m meditating more, and also allowing myself to indulge in the seasonal guilty pleasure of a Hostess pink Snoball. I’m making room for spacious breath, and room for minor hedonism. Space to feel compassion, empathy, and grief for all those who have lost homes or lives to climate crisis or conflict. We make space to remain in the body during overwhelm. Space to be in the present moment, and respond from there with love, pleasure, joy, gratitude, and humility.

It may feel heavy for me to acknowledge this as we thunder into our Thursday morning routines, but we don’t get out of this life alive, so we might as well live as fully and bravely as possible while we still have air in our lungs. Let gratitude fill you up today. Give more hugs. Acknowledge doubt, and dispense more laughter and irreverent wonder anyway.

Invite the sun to kiss your forehead.

- Artemis Divine -

August 24, 2023

trust the subtle medicine

In the midst of the season of the cosmic Lion, the effects of intense global heat move our water bodies to respond.

How will we respond?

It can feel challenging to look within for equilibrium in these moments of intensity.

Take a beat. Just one to start. Listen to the soft, quiet voice of wisdom within for guidance. What does it say to you?

To me it says, trust the subtle medicine.

You are learning the deep and transformative power of walking softly and deliberately, with trust, toward the subtle medicine.

I trust the subtle medicine. I am learning to trust the subtle medicine. Everyday, I am walking myself toward trust in it’s guidance. This is a lifelong trust walk.

And I’m walking a little bit of it now with you.

________________

Every time I write, create new art, make plant medicine, or sit in a divinatory session with a client, I feel that I am transported back to making my first trust walk through the thick, dark quiet of the forest at Camp Adams as a summer camp youth. I step with care, searching for the shape of things. Is the earth ahead of my feet level? Does it dip down? Or climb upwards? Is it soft? Squishy? Wet? Dry? Tangled with weeds? I listen for the footsteps of those ahead and behind me, because I am not alone. I am walking hand in hand with those that have walked before me down this path, as well as with those who are to follow.

The subtle medicine for me last week was making a flower essence with ripe mugwort blossoms from my mom’s garden. She thought she was growing Icelandic Poppies, but I knew with delight that she was actually growing one of my most favorite medicinal plants, Artemisia vulgaris, a.k.a. mugwort. And the best part of this flower essence’s medicine story so far is that not only am I finding it helpful for my own divinatory work, my mom is also finding it helpful for her to connect up with the source of her own greater knowing.

Flower essences are subtle, but potent. Like the hand of a friend giving your palm a gentle squeeze in the dark to let you know there’s a bump ahead in the path, or the pull from someone behind, urging you to slow down. My trust in their medicine is vast.

The subtle medicine for me today is remembering that I can be a good elder for my nephew, because I am present with him, not because I have all the answers. While in the spiral of time I was born to walk before my nephew as his elder, I know that he is also my elder. I allow him to teach me how to remember the wonder and challenges of learning, growing, and becoming an ancestor. So as we learn from one another, we learn to walk together.

I don’t have all the answers in any realm as an individual. But as part of a greater organic and cosmic whole, I do implicitly trust the deep wisdom of the subtle medicine we make when we are present with one another.

I’m so glad we’re here together now.

- Artemis Divine -

August 7, 2023

Some Thoughts on Pleasure, the Erotic & Earthlings

Some Thoughts on Pleasure, the Erotic & Earthlings

Stripping and sex work have taught me so much about the pleasure realm. For a long time, I held an untenable tension: an embodied appreciation for the pleasure principles as healing service within the sex work spectrum, while also holding tight to pieces of personal shame around my own sexuality, pleasure, desire, and eroticism. It has taken a long time to learn how to better discern which stories are mine, and which stories were never mine to hold in the first place. This is an ongoing process.

I know this experience of shame is not entirely unique to me. It has been culturally and ancestrally embedded in many of us to hold tight to expressions of shame. But shame prevents many of us from connecting with one another more deeply. It also hinders personal growth and understanding. If you are reading this essay, you are aware that your own shame has been, or is, holding you back from progressing in your own human experience.  You are not alone. It is up to each of us to discover our own why for holding so tightly to shame. We are here to help one another get free from these cycles. This is part of my own story of liberation through pleasure, the erotic, and an expanded definition of what it means to be a human in relationship to non human entities, earthlings in relationship to one another.

I’ve experienced a rich cascade of shift over the past ten years, and the past six+ months especially. I watched my father’s consciousness slowly deteriorate from vascular dementia over a painful ten year period as well as processing his death in late 2022, subsequently changing my name, accepting my non-binary gender, and working consistently with entheogenic medicine to help me break free of the binary tension of sensuous embodiment versus shame. If the binary no longer served my personal experience of gender or pleasure, then perhaps it no longer served any part of my life. Once I realized the walls were all a fabricated construct, the possibilities became vastly permeable.

Simultaneously, I knew I had to learn new ways to overcome the seasonal heartbreak, an archetypal journey as psychopomp through the underworld of an especially gloomy Winter. I know a lot of Portlanders wondered right alongside me if the somber cast of this past Winter would ever finally lift? Spring took a painfully long while to truly arrive here this year. Once the long awaited and soft warmth of the sun finally reappeared, I realized that I was done identifying with the dying paradigm, at least for this cycle. I knew I wanted to really live again, and that I did in fact feel very alive. Vital, and buzzing with purpose and will. The corporeal proof outside my northern windows: bright green leaves bursting forth at last from the meandering branches of a big, old guardian catalpa tree. I had been praying for this scene since late February, and had almost lost hope that they’d ever re-appear. It was time to emerge from the cyclical tunnel of judgement, shame, and limitations - hallmark characters in an underworld journey - to love and accept myself as complex, healing, and abundantly resourced.

There is still a lot to untangle within all of this, so these topics are going to take awhile to unfurl and bloom in a more deeply embodied sense. This carefully considered investigation is a slow homecoming into a more sovereign and authentic devotion to pleasure in all forms, in all realms. It is the season to study, observe, act, enjoy, and simply be. 

It is here, in the realms of vitality and enjoyment of the sensuous life, that I would like to establish a connective thread back to the topic of pleasure and the erotic within the world of sex work.

Studying and learning from the careers, writing, research, and scholarship of other sex workers, i.e. Jo Weldon, Annie Sprinkle, Viva Las Vegas, Elle Stanger, and Susan Shepherd has enriched my appreciation for the vast spectrum and history of the craft. Of all these personalities, Annie Sprinkle appeared to me first, while I was a confused, young art school kid in my undergraduate studies at Small Town Cow College USA (a.k.a. Oregon State University). Annie’s practice was the first bright spark to speak to the sensuous, pleasure-besotted sense of self that was wrestling within me to get free - the parts that desperately wanted to get truly weird, flirty, luxuriously languid, playfully ridiculous, wild, and commanding with what sex and allure could look and feel like for me. Concepts I could intellectually grasp, but that took many years to marinate within my body, consciousness, and heart. If you’d like to learn more about Annie’s practice, begin with her A Public Cervix Announcement performance series, and go from there. Her work is generous, sweet, and transgressive.

Another key moment of realization during my undergraduate studies: I had no idea that I could flirt, but a beloved theater director at OSU, Marion O. Rossi, who had cast me in a Summer Shakespeare review for our goofy theater department knew this about me. I had received a role with very few lines, Audrey, the goat herdess, and I really had no clue why I had been cast in this role. When I asked Marion, he said, “No one can flirt like Tyler”, (my given name, and the name I still used at the time). I truly had had no idea of this up to that point, but when he said that to me, it was a big “Aha” moment, and so many interactions throughout my young adult life suddenly made so much more sense…I just thought I was being playful with people. But, um, news flash for younger me, that’s part of what flirting actually looks like. After that, I decided to dive into the role of Audrey with abandon. Did I intentionally steal some scenes to get a laugh? Yes. Do I regret it? Not really. Insert evil laughter here…

As a result, my general approach to this day when I am onstage, is to flirt with the audience by playing with them, being interested in their response, and proceed from there. Flirting in this way is collaborative. I allow play to become an erotic and humorous encounter with the body, a collaboration with the music and the sphere of energy the audience offers. I have also learned a lot about stage humor from watching my coworker, Maggie Magnolia, at Mary’s Club. She has a gorgeous, trained dancer form with hilarious body humor skills and a keen sense of comedic that timing are exceptional, and it’s an honor to witness her perform. 

And yet, skills, beauty, and talent alone are not enough to serve some moments. What I mean to say is, not every iteration of audience at the club is a collective and harmonious gem, so sometimes it’s a matter of conjuring alchemical lemonade from a bag of salty, sour lemons. Improvisation and ad libbing skills are paramount to success as a naked, sacred stage clown: Yes, and.

There are magical, *poof*-you-blink-and-they’re-gone moments when a stage performance creates a palpable shift; the frequency in the energy field is raised, and I hold a delicate and ephemeral pleasure before me in gratitude and presence. Some nights, the whole crew and I are in flow, and we make magic with one another, gracefully accepting the flux of clientele. Perhaps for just a few brief hours we can conjure what may have felt nearly unimaginable at the start of an especially dim evening. We are indomitable gamblers, betting with hope, optimism, pattern recognition, intuition, luck, timing, allure, humor, and practiced precision. These are the moments I live for in this work. I believe in this work. But I know a shift is headed my way, because this work is also just work some days. Soon enough, it will be time to transition these skills to other platforms; time to prioritize the other creative irons I am also tending to at the pleasure temple.

Pleasure and eroticism also exist for me within the realm of plant stewardship, communion, and medicine making. Every aspect of the sensuous encounter with a beloved plant or mushroom is an experience of the erotic - awakening, toning, and nurturing my pleasure receptors. My spirit is enlivened by the act of placing my bare feet on the earth, or plunging my nails and fingers into the soil. The sun warming my body, the breeze carrying passing flower petals and caressing my cheek, the juicy wriggle of earthworms that soften the soil into humus…I am in pure pleasure realm here. I am in co-creative flow with my fellow earthling friends. 

My divinatory practice feels related to this conversation, but exists in a realm that at present defies more nuanced description, so I will continue the thread established here between plants, ecology, and the erotic. 

While I was introduced to Annie Sprinkle’s body of work as an undergraduate student, it wasn’t until about 10 years later that I finally got to meet Annie Sprinkle, very briefly, at Portland’s Hollywood Theater. I was in the initiatory first couple of months into my stripping career, and I was a sponge, ready to soak up whatever sex work wisdom I could. Especially if it merged with the art world in ways that felt authentic and sang to my spirit of challenging growth as an erotic being. Annie’s work definitely did this for me.

Sprinkle was presenting to us a retrospective of her career within the intersections of sex work, performance art, queer activism, and ecology. She was especially enthralled, in that particular time period, with her identity as an ecosexual - an individual who is open to sexual, sensuous, and erotic encounters with ecological systems and organic organisms within ecosystems - my definition, not necessarily the definition that you will find if you google the term ecosexual, or search the Ecosex Manifesto definition. If you are curious to learn more, please go check out the book she wrote with her partner and collaborator, Beth Stephens, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover, which was published in 2019, seven years after I attended this lecture at Hollwood Theater. 

At this lecture, I recall regarding an image of her naked body, pale and creamy, punctuated amid a dark, open redwood forest floor, hips thrust and arms outstretched against a fresh mound of soil with earnest and lustful joy. She looked so sweetly at peace, like a baby suckling their mother’s breast for nourishment, combined with the look of someone who is grasping into their lover’s flesh with passionate and urgent abandon. This was an enlightening and enlivening image to experience. My jaw dropped and I giggled with glee. 

I had always loved plants, and was learning to love my body the more that I allowed it to be witnessed and regarded by strangers and regulars at the club. It would take a decade more for me to connect these dots for myself. I was still learning how to be comfortable in my body, and offer it gratitude and prideful care. 

Oddly enough, during this time period, my first months as a baby stripper at Magic Gardens, was the first time I realized that while many lovers had appreciated my body, I had never been present or embodied enough to fully reciprocate this regard with myself. For example, I had never appreciated the way my breasts looked…I had always known that they felt great (long before anyone else was permitted to experience them!)…but it wasn’t until I was witnessed enjoying them with my own hands for an audience, eyes full of passive desire and longing, that I could regard myself in the mirror of the Magic stage (Viva writes extensively about this club if you are curious to learn more) and exclaimed, “Oh, I get it now! I have great tits! Is it silly that I didn’t know that ever?” 

I’m not going to purport that this experience held me permanently in physical self acceptance, it’s more that it helped me better see myself outside of myself. For at least fifteen minutes at a time, I can embody the confidence of the goddess. I serve at her temple, modeling radical self acceptance and love for my body.

I studied ballet throughout grade school and modern dance in my undergraduate studies. Through a study of modern dance I learned the luscious freedom of connecting with the floor and my center of gravity. It was this knowledge that proved most successful for the slow and languid manic pixie dream girl vibe that Magic Gardens ascribed. Playing “Wandering Star” by Portishead in that dark, dive-y Chinatown womb room of a space…*chef’s kiss*. Magic Gardens closed it’s doors at the end of 2015. Viva Las Vegas writes extensively about this club in her book The Gospel if you are curious to learn more.

And now to return to my thread with Annie Sprinkle and ecosexuality. Annie Sprinkle. The body. Performance. Delight. Pleasure. The erotic. The great erotic encounter with Mother Earth: our first mother, our first lover. We are expressions of the earth in human animal form. Annie’s work has appeared and reappeared in my creative awareness on and off for over 20 years now. For me, she is also like a mother, nurturing freedom from sexual shame. I love that her work exists in the world. It enriches my reality.

Around the same time that I met Annie Sprinkle, I lived in North Portland and was invited to be part of these small, 15-20 person performance nights at the home of an artist couple I knew who lived down the street. I would compose these small 1 or 2 song solo dance numbers with tracks by Edith Piaf, Le Tigre, and so on. I danced in my tights, panties, and a top - gliding, rolling, bending, and crawling across the floor, blending my love for modern dance with slowww sensuality and deadpan humor. One of the hosts, Christopher, commented to me after one of these performances that the way I danced reminded him “that we are all animals.” I loved that. Again, I was being seen in a way that I had not had words for at the time. A piece of my creative purpose and expression was being perceived and reflected back to me.

Some things I know: We are all animals, and I wish to experience pleasure via the realms of erotic expression through movement and energetic exchange on stage, as well as through delightful conversation and kinship with the root and soil bound earthlings of this planet. I believed when I started stripping, and still hold the belief, that everyone deserves access to consensual expressions of pleasure. Pleasure is one of my currencies for connection.       

There is so much more to be shared within these intersecting topics, and I do plan to write more…but it is time to let these stories marinate for a spell.                                                                                                                                 

Artemis Divine 

May 3 and 31, 2023

Portland, OR

Joy

I think and talk a lot about pleasure, but a word that has been emerging more insistently as of late in my personal healing practice is joy. I’m inviting joy to be the candle I light first in my heart these days. Joy is teaching me that once pain has taught us all it can in the grief process, that joy can take on the healing mantle to tend to our grief. Joy can lighten the load. Joy can be a gentle, tender, and loving guide.

Maybe this will seem out of nowhere to some, but one place where I observe joy is in the symbiotic connection. The type of relationship where both entities agree, by biological or relational imperative, that all they need in order to connect is the essential gift they offer simply by existing in space alongside one another in reciprocal flow. For example, I am practicing when I take a walk in the woods, affirming that all I need from the plant earthlings is their oxygen, and all they need from me is my CO2. Yes, there are actually many other things we need from one another, but when I start with this essential symbiotic orientation I can breathe in that space with more relaxed joy and ease. And, yes, there is also something intangible that exists between us: an acknowledgement between earthlings of the power source we are connected to between, and among, the many universal realms.

Joy exists in that quality of present awareness.

When I recognize the harmony that simple presence and acceptance offers, I am in a joyful state of flow and allowance for all spirit to exist just as it is. I joyfully love and accept my connection to spirit exactly as it is, now.

But it can be so very challenging to learn how to arrive, again and again, in a state of flow. The work to find ease within oneself requires exceptional bravery and trust, everyday I still catch myself falling back into old behavioral programming. Instead of shaming myself for this habitual tendency, I observe it. Observation brings me back into the present moment, and there is joy there. Joy in the awareness. Joy in the distance between myself and a habit. An old habit.

It has been helpful to learn how to transmute habit into transformational ritual, to invite the sacredness of ritual and connection with spirit to intercede on my behalf. I would like to say more about ritual, but first I want to say a few more things on the sacred. There is a symbiotic connection that exists between the corporeal realm of our human and earthly existence, and that of the sacred.

The sacred is not some clean and pure state of perpetual nirvana. The sacred is being in the present moment. The sacred is awareness of all that is tangible, as well as awareness of all that exists just beyond words and pictures. The sacred exists in the ephemeral and transitory nature of all we experience and encounter. The sacred speaks through us, so that we may sing songs of meaning, purpose, and connection to one another.

The sacred exists for me when I can sit with a vibrant, tall stand of wild nettles, listening for their song. It exists as well in a clean rack of dishes. The glow of a candle flame. Watching plants grow slowly and steadily as Spring progresses here in the Northern Hemisphere, and grieving the rapid shifts in weather that climate crisis carries across the planet. Witnessing myself age. Training my muscles to slowly recover strength after a long period of rest and emotional recovery. The sacred also exists for me in my time on stage performing; I create a container of joy, pleasure, delight, and desire for myself, and a container on stage for the audience to witness me.

Gratitude is sacred. Anger is sacred. Love is sacred. Mystery and fear are sacred. Connection is sacred. Joy is sacred.

To cultivate joy in the sacred of the everyday, engage in ritual. Begin with a ritual that can easily be repeated regularly, in a space where you feel spacious connection with the sacred: drinking a special cup of tea, playing music or singing, dancing along to your favorite song, soaking in a warm salt bath, breathing with intention, reading, journaling, taking a walk or a skip with the land, and so on. Show up there regularly, with devotion, and gratitude. Spirit and the sacred honor regular commitments made by the devoted. The reward I experience is an embodied, relieving realization that this world needs very little from me.

I believe that we are crafted in divinity just as we are. Much of the energy that we have been trained to believe, within a capitalist mindset, wherein we need to expend and produce in perfunctory, exponential growth for the digestible consumption of others is actually meant to be expansive matter just for us: our own private window into the joy of the sacred that is our very essence. There is very little I may actually need from someone else, but there is much I wish to share with those who are able and willing to honor devotion to, and acceptance of, the sacred.

Breaking & Opening

It’s okay if you feel an overwhelming sense that you have nothing to offer the collective right now. This is what I keep telling myself.

It’s okay if you are not productive. At all.

Or if you are only capable of forcing yourself to be productive in ways that feel very mundane and ordinary (I think the most sustainable magic is built from the mundane bits) : clean your sneakers, make a pot of coffee, drink water, clean your cloth masks, hang them to dry, stretch at least a couple days a week, say a few nice things to yourself, mutter a simple gratitude list to yourself before you get out of bed in the morning, brush your teeth, lotion your face in all the parts where the constant heat of your own breath under the mask creates semi-permanent dry patches, call your dad, feel your heart beat.

This time is hard.

I have hesitated to write again, because I knew that whatever I wrote would stand in heavy contrast to the ebullient optimism of my last post from so many months earlier in the pandemic. I couldn’t bear to lead us further into the darkness. So I waited until the darkest, longest night of this year’s solar cycle had past. I hoped that with the slow and steady increase of daylight that I would feel a sudden and sustained resurge of vitality and hope. I am sensing glimmering, fleeting rushes of something that feels like hope and vitality, but also resilience still feels slippery and elusive.

The conclusion that I return to over and over again is that it is okay to be having a hard time. It is acceptable to struggle with finding a way back to an easy relationship with resilience. Perhaps that ease with resilience which some of us had previously known was partly, or fully, an illusion. Accepting that idea as possible fact is heartbreaking, because I want each of us to live lives of easy resilience.

And also, I have learned from previous moments of heartbreak, that heart breaks are also an opening. It is just a question of whether we are aware enough to sense both the breaking and the opening. I think it is helpful for me to remind myself and others that there is no denying that while a vaccine is now in selective and paced distribution, hope still feels far away for so very many of us. I also accept that hope is often bolstered by privilege; for some, resilience has always been far easier than it has ever been for a large number of folks. Systemic racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, other-ism, hatred, fear.

This breaking has created an opening to a new way of seeing, feeling, and behaving. More of us have been forced to take a closer look at the places that light does not touch. It is not so easy to reconcile that our resilience may come at the cost of an other’s continued unease and oppression. Will interest in supporting new systems of care be sustained once Covid restrictions have been lifted? Or will many of us lose interest? For many folks that have always lived a marginalized identity, there is no choice in this matter. I find the breaking more easy to experience if I can imagine the majority of the collective being carried on a current that tends to the opening. But will we? Or perhaps a better question is how can we build a resilience that considers a collective resilience?

Dis-ease and disease. It’s hard to find a way to sit still between those two things, and focus. How can I sustain focus on one aspect of this opening? How can each of us focus on it in our own way? How can we learn new ways to focus when it is so difficult just to sit still long enough to open a book, to read a book, to finish reading a book. I think we are being asked to learn a new-super-power-level of focus and resilience.

Breaking. Opening. Breaking to open. Opening to break again. Keep breaking and opening. It is okay if the opening is small as a pin prick. The opening has to start somewhere. Focus on the opening, tend to the opening, and know that other heartbreaks will come. We are learning new ways to break open.

Power...step inside

Step inside.

Walk through the gate, and step into your own seat of power.

Last week I drew the IV of Disks, also known as the Power card in the Thoth deck, and I just LAUGHED. I rolled my head back in laughter…hahahahaha, “I’ve been pulling this card so much for the past 4 months. I know ALL about this card.” Yeah, right, sure you do…the deck, my guides, and any ancestors present engaged in a huge, collective eye roll. Something my ego had of course forgotten was that when a card keeps coming up in readings, it is an indication that the querent is in fact in need of coming to a yet deeper understanding of the card. I had more to learn, and after my laughter subsided, I remembered this truth and worked to open myself into humble receipt of new information from the card.

The most powerful piece of information that the IV of Disks had for me during this reading was the invitation to walk through the large stone gate which welcomes the viewer into the castle fortress of Power:

Step inside.

This message was a revelation. I could envision a tiny version of me walking through this gate. It brought to mind the gateway into the dark night of the soul that I imagine the scarab/dung beetle takes in The Moon card, and by way of that it also reminds me of the Sphinx Gate that Atreyu passes through in The Neverending Story. Throughout my childhood that scene was always a very tense, suspense-filled couple of moments to watch, “Can he make it? Will he burnt to a crisp by the laser eyes of the sphinx statues?” I wondered. “Be confident!” the other characters cheer as they support Atreyu from parts within and without his own magical realm. It was a nail biter to endure, and also, spoiler alert, an affirming hope-builder at the close.

On the following day I was reflecting on some specific fears I have been holding onto about being seen in my own life, and tried to get to the root of what those fears believe they are protecting. What do those fears need? A neighborhood walk provides the perspective and allowance for my thoughts to wander and wonder, so I went for a walk. What did I discover?

I have understood the mastery of stability, security in boundaries, and balance that the IV of Disks embodies, but to actually interpret the card as a device that allows me to step into my own seat of power was a completely new read. The deeper understanding that I unlocked during this revelatory, reexamining walk that I took the following day was this: a lot of my fears around being truly seen are actually wrapped up in being afraid that my power will be too much, will not be accepted by others, or will be deemed inappropriate. I have been afraid that the gift of my true power will be too much, too weird, too potent for other people to accept.

But I am beginning to understand that my own power doesn’t need external acceptance or approval in order for me to activate self-acceptance, strength, and self-actualized confidence when I step into it’s source. I only need to be brave enough through fear to step into my own container of power. I don’t have to be in this card at all times, but I do need to start creating more moments where I move into my power if for no other aim than to start getting accustomed to learning how it feels to make decisions from a place of confidence through externalized doubt.

While a lot of clarity and relief is welcomed in the clarification of purpose that this card illustrates, it also brings up a lot of the residual fear that has kept me from accessing an embodied empowerment as of late. The fears rest there on the surface like the starchy, cloudy scum that floats to the top of a boiling bath of un-rinsed potatoes. The scummy pattern of responding to an invitation for power with fear is STILL THERE. I feel squirmy, and tense. I hesitate to grow forward. It’s painful to grow, to create new thought patterns. Ugh. Can anybody else feel me on this?

And yet, the card doesn’t care that I am uncomfortable, it KNOWS I am uncomfortable, and so the invitation remains. I will need to start making some pattern shifts through these layers of discomfort. Maybe I could just start small?

What are ways that I can start making more baby steps into my own power? What are some small ways that you can start making more baby steps into your own power? This feels like a good time for making lists. I invite us all to start making more baby steps (or big steps, you do you) into our own power.

What is one way that you can step into the seat of your own power today? For me, it’s sharing this post with you all. Tomorrow it will be something different.

Walk through the gate, and step into your own seat of power.

This container awaits your sovereignty.