branches up, roots down

Things have been moving around in my house, so of course, things are moving around in me. Over the past years, I’ ve come to accept that a core part of my priestessing is tending to this house built right before the turn of the last century. This means being actively involved with listening to it. The bones of the house come from what use to be ancient redwood forests to the North, and as a youth, the house survived the 1906 earthquake and the fires that raged for days. Sometime in the 1920’s the second floor was lifted from the first floor and another flat inserted like sandwich filling and a stucco front was slapped on over the wood in front. In the backyard there is the original stable, which was emptied last weekend of over a hundred years of assorted junk. Empty of the stuff, the spirits of the house have stretched out and there is a pleasant spaciousness to the energy here. For the first time, I can recognize the old wallpaper that was put in on the walls of th...

In many ways, I’m still recovering from the party that was held here last Saturday night. It turned out, as the best parties usually are, to be a bigger piece of magic than expected. It was a party for prana , a party for the life force, and had a silent auction as a component, raising money for my friend Jeremy, who wants to try some experimental treatments for his cancer. I live in a huge Victorian with two large flats, the other being owned and occupied by my friend Ilyse. Like Jeremy, she’s worked for an assortment of organizations geared around envisioning and transforming bad things into good things..or at least sustainable things. At the moment, she works for MoveOn . We filled our flats with flowers and greenery, and we both put huge cauldrons on our house altars, which called to be filled with green. Money, that is. Our goal was to raise $3000. At the end of the party the cauldrons held $10,000, with another $3000 said to be still coming. Thirteen thousand dollars!...