Seven Veils

All bets are off today, Dearies…

I just remembered that today is the day to ship off a smallish volume
to my favorite author,  the man that wrote  'skinny legs and all'.

What?! 

Have you not read it?

Not for the faint of heart or the inelastic of mind, but certainly bound to liberate you
from needless seriousness so you will have room for better and truer things...

" Egypt?" he would say, feeding chickpeas to the grinder.  " Egypt is as hot as a gypsy honeymoon..."

How do you know if you're a Gypsy?

Well...sometimes you don't!

This is a favorite...and true...story...Enjoy!

My Gypsy Sis Katherine divined her way into my life by way of a pendulum
suspended over the yellow pages of a phone book...
She needed a massage therapist and I needed an ozone practitioner.
Thus we were destined to meet...

She was just passing through but we became fast friends in our brief
time together. We have stayed in touch through her many sojourns.
The last time we got together, we embarked on a road trip to Chicago.
On that trip we discovered that we each had a huge fascination with
gypsy wagons. Not only those ornate treasures, but all things gypsy!
It’s not often that you run into someone who shares such arcane interests.
One topic led to another on that long drive and we revealed our secret
gypsy selves to each other.
It turned out that we both had wardrobe trunks filled with dancing costumes,
Indian jewelry, bangles, scarves.
When no one else was around we would dress up in our strange finery.
Every Halloween I would take on that persona in public. It was rapturous!

I was beginning to discover my real self...hiding under my plain exterior.
Soon after that discovery, I looked for any opportunity to play the gypsy.
Katherine had played a gypsy fortune teller at a benefit recently. I envied her.
I was a dance gypsy, following the folk dance circuit, living out of a suitcase
as often as possible...living for the sheer joy of the dance.
Half-living between times...

She and I had both been known to pick up and move home with our
few possessions on short notice.
The ease with which we did this mystified us both at times.

Wherever I travelled I sought out Gypsies.
I was inordinately attracted to them wherever they could be found...
on the streets of Sarajevo...on the edges of Sofia...the sea Gypsies
in the south of Thailand. But I digress...

We finally arrived in Chicago after dark...near midnight.
We headed for the lake on a beautiful and sultry summer night.
By the time we arrived all of the white folks had gone home
and the lake shore belonged to the immigrant families.
There was music and picnics, small fires. Perfect!
We found a place to park and got out to stretch our legs.

As we approached the lake shore, a small child glanced up at us.
A little boy, not more than three years old.
When he saw us emerge from the car and walk toward him,
his eyes went wide with wonder and he seemed transfixed by what he saw.
The child ran to his parents and clung to them in great excitement
and urgently whispered to them, eyes bright and shining:
Look! Mommy! Poppy!!
LOOK !!!

GYPSIES !!!”

On being Gypsy

Being "Gypsy" is a quality of heart and mind and body...and Soul.
You need not be born a gypsy to possess these qualities.

Being Gypsy is also a paradigm...a useful and rich perspective that
can help you know yourself...what you are and what you are not.

It can call up the best in you.

It is perfectly alright to try it on for size and see what gifts it brings.
Most likely, you are an amalgam of many things.
No need to live in only one room of the house that is You!

Giving yourself permission to be can be one of the most challenging
of life's sacred tasks.

So...as a facet of one's self, there is much to explore! It has great depth.
It is both playful and serious, ancient and modern, encompassing all
cultures and terrains.

It is the unsettled element in you that refuses to die,
though you may have long tried to subdue it.

It does not 'fit'...it doesn't have to.

It will rise when it is most needed to bestow life on those
whose lives are being crushed in the machinery of modern life.

The week-end is coming... Why not break with the things that society
urges
on you for a few hours, an evening...though the entire day or weekend
would be best.

Can you free yourself to have no other plan then to enjoy today
and to feel yourself free and unencumbered.
No agenda, no phone, no attachments. Complete and precious freedom.
All you have to do is sink down to the earth, breathe deeply, and be...

It is enough... You are enough... This was always your birthright...

Release everything that is not of you...the heavy mantle of seriousness,
sorrow, consciousness of time.

Drift a little distance away... No one will notice... Create space...

When the weekend is over and it's time to drift back, cast a longer line
back to shore, stay clear of the rocks...

Put back on only what is necessary.

Be sure to add something colorful to remind you of your gypsy soul...

Don't forget to dance...

Elizabeth and the Psychic

Now...
Elizabeth, a fellow gypsy, was one of the most gifted psychics I will ever meet.
But she had this blind spot when it came to her love life or, to put it a bit more
truthfully… her sex life.
Now surely she wanted both those aspects in a relationship. but…if she had to choose just one when the other was lacking, she'd go for sex...every time...
ever hopeful that she could magically inspire love through her generosity
and sensual charms.
Given her high level of intuition, she could sidle right up to a man
and get inside his head, his soul and body in no time at all.
I wouldn’t want to say that she was misusing her gifts,
but a few men might argue otherwise…
Elizabeth became quite the chameleon, transforming herself again and again
into the woman of their dreams.
Yet, with all of that, her relationships always fizzled out pretty quickly.
This went on for way too many years, decades of disappointment and rejection.
Her search for love was painful to watch.

Finally… she, of all people, decided to consult a psychic.
She wanted me along for the ride.
So off we went to a psychic fair. Elizabeth paid her money, we went inside
and scanned the room trying to choose the best psychic for her.
There was one woman that stood out among the crowd.
She looked like an African queen wearing a magnificent turban,
dressed in extravagant, brilliantly colored robes.
We both agreed that ‘she was the one’.

Elizabeth approached her and the woman motioned for her to sit down.
Then surprisingly, she beckoned me, as well, to be part of the reading.
My friend asked a few random questions, too shy to pop the real one.
I gave her a look that said ‘Get on with it. That’s not what you came here for.’
She took a deep breath and asked in a voice filled with all her sad history,
a tremulous voice that sighed “When will I find my soul mate?”
The African queen closed her eyes, folded her hands over her stomach
and leaned way back in her chair for a very long moment, as if to nap.
Finally she came to herself, opened her eyes and looked with a penetrating gaze
at my eager friend.
She spoke in her richly accented voice…

“My daughter… you are surrounded by your soul mates!"

She laughed in loving amusement. “Don’t you see?! They are all around you...
This friend that came with you today… she is your soul mate.
Everyone who has ever helped you through life is your lover, your soul mate.
The child or the stranger that bestows a smile on you is your soul mate.
You have countless lovers…
You can feast the whole day!

Why do you make yourself so unhappy waiting for ‘the one’!?

You block all the others with this insistence on one.
You blind yourself to all the love that is here for you every waking moment.
Only open your eyes a little, my darling.
Relax and let all your soul mates in.
They have always been with you…
You will never lack for love… Never!
Only see life as it truly is… ”

valentine's day rant

The other day I was at the drugstore and I saw those cute little boxes of old- fashioned valentine’s day candies …you know… the little pastel hearts with the messages ‘sweet talk, darling, charm me, love story,’ etc.

I sat for awhile and remembered what it felt like to exchange those earnest little candies with the other boys and girls way back when...

I remembered the high drama that was created around the giving
and receiving of those little tokens of ‘love’.
Our cherished hopes, our vulnerable little hearts wide open,
the unbearable pain or high exhilaration of seeing who picked who.

The hurt and dashed hopes when our ‘true love’ picked another…
or when we, the sincere, were elbowed aside
by the more aggressive game players…you know…the ones
who stole hearts for sport and broke them with ease.

We were trained early on to hang our entire future happiness
on the hope that some fine day we would be loved, we would get married,
hold a baby and all that went with that.

They acted like that was the only game in town…

Well, it wasn’t...
but we were not supposed to know that or to figure it out for ourselves.

We were herded in that direction all the way from the crib
to the schoolyard and into adulthood.
For some strange and sinister reason our society demands that
we must all suffer this experience, suited to it or not.


I, for one, didn’t really want to do any of that...
It just didn’t attract, much less excite me.
It seemed rather boring and simple-minded. It moved way too slow for me.

It was like ending life just as you were embarking upon it!
I would much rather discover the world...experience more...
experience everything!

It surely didn’t seem like ‘the big prize’ they made it out to be...
Not compared to being free ...to grow, to travel and learn
or figure out how to make the world a better place.

But in our society ‘nobody gets out alive’...rather cult-like...
unless you're willing to make quite a nuisance of yourself and
disappoint all kinds of folks. And then there is the unfortunate
business of the silly labels they might assign to you because
you are a little bit different.

Not to mention that it was easy to see that most of us would
be left holding the diaper bags alone in the end.

We would go on to experience betrayal, fury, and decades of pain
followed by our own foolish remake of the same dumb scenario
with the next ‘mister right’.

Never waking from the trance.

Never getting to do what we really wanted to do with our lives
and our gifts and our time.
Never daring to really see that these sacrificial lives we led
were not sacrificed for any higher purpose,
but were sacrificed in service to a stultifying, mind-numbing
societal expectation that clearly was not working.

There is a natural enmity between women who have followed
the well trodden path of romance and marriage and those that have,
at some point, extricated themselves from the snare
and have dared to live their lives according to the dictates
of their own souls and minds.

Sympathy is offered in a most unsympathetic way...
‘Oh, poor dear...you never married.’
‘So sad! You never had children,’ they intone so cloyingly.

They are eager to let you know what lower rung of society you belong to.
You must be somehow inferior or damaged goods. No one ‘picked’ you.

The truth of the matter, however, is that they shield themselves
carefully from seeing too clearly or feeling too honestly
that their lives are painfully, sometimes horribly, off the mark.
They find that they are caught in a demoralizing trap…
as one woman puts it...’The dance of death’.
Their energies are spent in propping up their illusions
until one of them dies an early and/or unhappy death.
But they are already dying on the inside.

They lack the will, the support or the energy to escape their
unhappy arrangements and take another go at life.
What follows is a very long and deadening trek to the end of life.
One must entertain oneself along the way as best one can
and hope for a few spoils at the last.
Everyone loses and few gain in the end....

Then they dutifully shepherd the next generation into the same trap
hoping that they will do better...that they will get it right. aieeee!

Don’t cry for me on Valentine’s Day.
I have been mercifully spared the aggravation of keeping up the pretense
of being happily married, when in reality one might be shackled
in a ‘till death do us part’ arrangement.

I am spared the thousands of rationalizations that go into keeping on
keeping on.
I am relieved of the endless routine and terrible boredom
that comes from living a trivial and self-limiting life.

Life for me is sweet, simple, authentic and relaxed.
I am content with myself and in love with life wherever it leads.

And, for your information, we are not loveless...

We are free to experience love in its myriad forms, faces, and places.
Love as it is… free and spontaneous and large.
Love that is not bent and pounded into holes that do not fit
for the whole of our lives.

In the end, we have been misled… about love and happiness and
how it all works.

We have been programmed from outside ourselves to live according
to patterns determined by others who took the path of least resistance
to their misery…and many times, our own.


That said, I champion real love wherever it is found...even if it is not 'shared'.
It is genuine. It is what we are...
Don't be afraid to drink from your own beautiful cup...

Each love has a purpose, a season, a medicine, much learning...
I believe that you never have to stop loving anyone that you ever loved.
Never discard, tear up or disdain love, even if it didn't work out
like you thought it should...

Go back, see it in a new light...in the private light of your own heart
and not the dim light of the over culture.

Weep a little, take to yourself some of the sweetness and fun that it was...

Keep your hearts open...say a prayer of forgiveness for mistakes made.

'I forgive you, I release you and I bless you... finally... Be Glad...

early this morning

Much can be said about dream time...
a time of rest, a time of retreat, a time of receptiveness. Our spirits never sleep.

In fact they are quite active. During the day we focus them rather narrowly through our mind with all its big plans, busy schedules and the demands of the over culture.

But when we close our eyes and withdraw from the world of sight and sound and movement, another part of us rises free....to explore, to learn, to catch up on its business.

A dear and very wise friend surprised me with this yesterday:

And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. Genesis 1:5

How interesting that evening followed by morning formed the first day.
Maybe that should tell us something...

Before the sun came up, long before daylight, before awakening, I heard these words:

"Water flows in, water flows out…you will not change nature"

secret gypsy

Our gypsy selves will call to us at times. 'Remember me'... 'Re-Member Me'...

At first, a faint whisper, a body longing, a fantasizing...
secretive and seemingly out of place.
It's call grows a little louder and more forceful with time.

'But I am not a gypsy', you answer. 'What is this longing?'
Yet, it persists and grows...
It will strike fear in some timid hearts. Fear of the dark...the unfettered.
For others, it is a welcome invitation to be fiercely and full-heartedly alive.

We might cast a sideways glance at those raven-haired beauties who dare to wear outlandish earrings and garish colors...who swish around alluringly,
who are bold... even brazen, seeking no one's approval.
They hold strange fire that sometimes erupts in wild and ecstatic dance...

Some of us may keep a costume trunk or a special dresser drawer overflowing with all manner of exotic and wildly beautiful things that we would never wear in public...but somehow we had to have them, no matter what the cost.

In our private moments, sometimes the call is so urgent that we lower the blinds, turn on the music and allow our secret selves to emerge.
We put on practically everything, we paint our faces and we transform our appearance into something a little wilder and freer and, for a time,
we slip beyond our usual burdensome and restrictive identities.
Through the gifts of our hearts and imaginations, we reacquaint ourselves with those mysterious facets of ourselves...our hidden dimensions...
and we build a little on those foundations.
We wonder at what has been brought forth...a self so deeply veiled, a self that would be shunned by society...and even worse...by our own dominant selves.
But, nonetheless, a self that is somehow 'Us'.

I have learned and often say to people... "We are all made of the same stuff..."
Like it or not, it is true...
Look around...look inside...you will see for yourself.

We may stuff everything about us into tight suits, tight shoes, tidy lives, above society's reproach....but in doing so, we curtail our aliveness, our color, our fierceness...God-given.

Eventually, if you are lucky, all that stuffing begins to break loose. A few stitches burst and some of that chaos and longing makes its appearance.

There is a lot of unexplored life force in there.

It is not easily or long stuffed back inside.

It will disrupt your life...

That, dear one, is it's Gift to you...

It is the call to real LIFE, not small life as you have lived it up till now.

That is the cause of your discontent, your estrangement, your restlessness.

My advice to you is ever to dance....

Dance until you feel your limbs...your blood.
Dance until your mind can no longer object or judge...
Dance until your mind is subject to your body and the music and your emerging spirit.

Then when we have danced ourselves whole again, given credence to our passionate selves, we remove our now sacramental garments, charged with the beautiful energy of our dance, fold them lovingly and tuck them away again.

Ok!...so what's a Gypsy Ashram?!

The 'gypsy ashram' is one of the nicknames lovingly given by one of the magical young women who turns up here quite often.
Her friend, bearing her own special gifts, alternately calls it 'the monastery'.

I am honored that they come and that it feels like a kind of alternate home where they can hash out just about anything. We've been at it for a few years now.

I am a sort of karmic mother to them... and friend... and mentor.
We have forged a space and a relationship that is multifaceted to say the least!

As they are launching their lives, they are discovering those facets and learning to grow into all that they are. To experience joy and freedom and courage, sorrow, change and knowing one's self .
Learning how to have a foot in several worlds at once.
Learning from dreams, omens, love, loss, everyday reality, spontaneity... all of it.

At some point we outgrow the guidance that has brought us this far in life.
Life begins to hand us a few things that we weren't prepared for....
We encounter layers and dimensions that we were completely unaware of.
We sometimes exhaust our store of friends, self help books, religions and counselors.
They are no longer in tune with us.... not so helpful now.

Our personal reality is changing....
Our insides don't fit neatly with our outsides anymore...
Friends, relatives, partners express concern... or dismay.
Just one more problem we don't need right now!

We are beginning to open... just a little...and we wonder where this ride is taking us....
What will come of it?

Not to worry...
It may take a little while to realize that this is not some crazy delusion.
It might even be part of a wildly jubilant masterpiece....a little of your gypsy soul beginning to stir...

So now that you've had a peek behind the curtain, feel free to dress up and invite yourself inside. Make all the noise you want (except when it's monastery time... just kidding).

All things are lawful. Not all things are helpful.... You'll sort it out.

So many blessings...

what is a gypsy?

A gypsy is many, many things....
But for starters, let's just say that a gypsy is one who approaches life differently than well- organized society.
A gypsy retains some wildness, some naturalness, above all...freedom...no matter what life presents to them. A gypsy lives life guided by the inner knowing of one's heart, one's blood, one's first-hand sense of things.
They are the true adepts, flowing with, or over or around life's circumstances, remembering that happiness dwells inside and is not subject to tampering by ill-willed society
A gypsy is true to his or her heart... That is enough. Understanding comes when it comes, if it comes. There is living to do... no matter what.