branches up, roots down

Today is day two of sugar skull decorating at my open studio...an open studio I share with my friends Ivory Fly, Gwydion, and Bart. Strangers drop in to see what kind of art is being created in the neighborhood, and so do old and new friends. It feels a bit like opening day for the dead...their first event of the season. Amidst the art, there always is an altar to them, and of course, the sugar skull decorating. Soon I will be sitting at a table decorating sugar skulls again. I have more names of the dead to put on them. As I do it, the dead draw closer. My favorite moment yesterday is when Kore, Maia and Julian, three children I am fond of, were decorating the skulls. I think the dead ESPECIALLY like skulls made by kids.

A week ago I received a phone call from a friend of a client. She had found my card in his wallet and she remembered him talking about his “shrink”. She called to let me know he had died of a sudden heart attack. I had seen J. once a week like clockwork for well over seven years. He turned fifty a few months back, and we had spent some time reviewing all the events of his forties that had been so difficult, both of us imagining that the fifties would be better. He had worked hard in therapy, and for the last two years he’d been sober. J. was a big man who tried to move thru the world taking up as little space as possible. He was quiet, shy, and uncomfortable being the focus of attention. The very fact that he could tolerate therapy at all was a miracle. Early on, I learned to draw out and encourage his dark sense of humor. He could come across as dour, but laughing, he became a different being. J. had come from the kind of twisted Christian home where almost anything en...

As a child and teenager, death was part of a collective dream. It wasn’t up close and personal, but played on the screen of the black and white television and came in over the radio. I remember my second grade teacher tearfully telling us the president was dead and then watching Oswald being shot live/dead on the screen in my family’s living room. Many more of these kinds of deaths would follow, and nightly the news brought us images of the carnage of a distant war. Church bombings, casualties of war and assassinations of heroes were the backdrop of a childhood devoid of family funerals. Up until my twenties, I don’t think there was one funeral I attended. My twenties seemed consumed by them. In my twenties, death came like an icepick. It hit hard and fast and it hurt. Bad. When I went off to college one of my new friends was raped and murdered. Before I was twenty three I would lose my father, my cousin who was also my best friend, and my grandmother. Death came quick b...

“ I found out yesterday that Jerry Falwell had died and I felt this sense of ebullience. I hate to admit it, but I felt excited. I know it’s not very spiritual, but it kind of made my day.” This is what another therapist, a close friend and colleague of mine, said to me today. He is by no means alone in his sentiments, many are feeling the same way, myself included. Jerry Falwell has been the voice of hate and vitriol for the religious right for many years . I am the epitome of everything he despised. I am queer, feminist, left wing, and a witch. My colleague is a tranny , a gentle gender outlaw that Reverend Falwell would have abhorred. To him, we were both to blame for what happened on September 11 th , 2001. He would be happy, excited, and somewhat ebullient to hear of people like ourselves dying, preferably in ways where we suffered greatly. He certainly believed if we didn ’t suffer in this life, we’d be damned unhappy in the next. It makes sense that so many of us a...

It's Beltane, and I am in the West Village in New York City. The air is thrumming with life and everywhere there are tulips, hyacinths, and blooming dogwoods. Soon I will be priestessing a ritual for a friend who has for many years tended the dead and the dying. She was chaplain on the burn unit in the hospital closest to ground zero on that day that still reverberates throughout this city. She had one initiation years back into the Craft that focused on death and rebirth but was long on death, short on rebirth. For too long she's had one hand thru the veil, helping others pass. It has taken a toll. Today, the focus is on life, on that green fuse that runs thru the flower, that runs thru everything. Today, I've asked her to put her hand on the pole and feel the power as the ribbons wind, that vibration of the joy of connection, the current in the colorful tangle and pattern of life. Here in New York City, the earth is alive. Death is a current that can be felt, and ever...