Women's Sexuality and Animal Spirit Guides

One of the greatest gifts this past spring was my first group counseling program ever.  Despite opposition from my school professors, and incredulity from my grande dame certified sexuality therapist supervisor, I put together a group on women's sexuality and animal spirit guides.

And the group rocked.

I had five clients for eight weeks, and we explored the ways patriarchy limits women's sexuality, how using animal spirit guides can help us explore our sexuality in new ways, and we made awesome artwork week after week.  We made wildly patterned quilts; we made plaster body casts; we made message bottles with mason jars and finger painted and collages!

As you do.

The fun of group counseling is partly its challenge.  I had Pagan clients and Christian clients and Unitarian Universalist clients in this first group.  Some members had no idea if they could identify with animal totems, and some wanted to find their own personal spirit guide.  Not everyone wanted to finger paint.  Not everyone felt comfortable with exploring sexism.  (Happily, everyone loved bodycasting!)  Yet after a few weeks we were more than a group of strangers; we were a supportive group of friends finding new ways to think about ourselves and our lives.

And this officially marks a combining of my blogs and life!  This puja blog to Bridget and my coaching and soon to be counseling blog all reflect different aspects of my dedication to St. Bridget. St. Bridget has led me constantly in my work in counseling and coaching, whether I walk a client to a disability office on a college campus, or whether I'm helping women explore spirituality.  St. Bridget inspires my art, my work and my worship.

And I believe she would have been happy as can be with my first counseling group.  We were women of many religions, orientations, totems, goals.

But when people come together, I believe St. Bridget is there.

It is Beltane, another fire festival.

Thanks to her path.



image:  sattva,  freedigitalimages.net

Bridget Quilts!

I've been making and selling quilts to Bridget for over two years now!  And two of my small scapular necklaces have been accepted into a local juried show, Lost and Found:  Sustainable Fashion at the Sweetwater Center for the Arts!!

Wow!  I have never submitted, nor ever thought I could be accepted, to a juried show!  So once again, following St. Bridget's path has led me to new places.  (Oh triple goddess that she is, and Irish saint, she oversees poetry, healing and blacksmiths - which somehow in my life includes arts and crafts of all types from weaving to quilting to blacksmithing!)  I dropped off my scapulars this morning at the Center, and am still amazed at how life unfolds when practicing puja.

I tend to be so linear (stop laughing everyone) that I am surprised when life throws me these amazing curve balls - or Goddess surprises.  My entry into the competition comes from a walk with my dogs on a snowy day back in March, and I ran into another doggie friend.  I've known Sue for years, and we have talked dog many times.  This cold and wintery day, however, she suddenly asked me if I were a fiber artist!  Bizarre.  And I said, "yes, I sew and quilt and weave and spin."  She then told me of numerous shows where I could submit my work, and invited me into the Pittsburgh Fiber Arts Guild at the same time. . .  kind of one of those amazing synchronous happenings.  It was a miserable and wet day, and there I found myself seeing Bridget calling.

So I filled out applications and struggled with online submissions and pictures, and lo and behold the juror accepted both my scapulars.  And of course both are dedicated to St. Bridget.  And both go on display this Saturday for a full month.

I continue to write about the importance of puja, of worship, no matter what tradition or deity you follow.  And this is the kind of coincidence that puja brings:  I never dreamed I would find my work at Sweetwater Center for the Arts or be invited to the Fiber Arts Guild.  And now here I am doing both.

In other paths I am working to pull together internships for school, coming down to my last year in the master's program for clinical counseling.   I am later than my classmates at setting up internships, and my advisor is annoyed with me.  Some friends have said, "Just take something and get through."  I am however mindful of my art and sudden opportunities.  "Just taking something" is counter to Bridget's message and the practice of puja.  Daily puja, from prayer to meditation to chanting to sacraments, all take time.  Puja is like my tomato seedlings, needing time to grow.  "Just taking something" won't bring tomatoes faster.  Nor will Bridget's plan for me and her followers be revealed in as fast a time as we would all like.

Puja, like art, like healing, takes time.  I made a lot of quilts for my etsy store, waiting to see if anyone wanted them.  (Oh the happiness when my first quilt sold!)  And making scapulars this winter, I had no idea they would be in a juried show.

What can I say about my Bridget quilts?  Well, mostly come see them.  Or check them out come June when they go into my etsy store.  But most of all I want to say that puja is a path, and following that path requires letting faith take shape and grow.  Faith is knowing that the path will lead where you need to go.

Puja, hard work, and opening doors.

Honoring a deity can become a fulltime job!

This past winter I began my group coaching practice (with a kickass group exploring women's sexuality and animal spirit guides), continued in my counseling program, worked with new clients as a coach for special needs, and built up my etsy store with quilts honoring Maman Brigitte and St. Bridget!  Lost in the work was keeping up with my Bridget blog.

Yet I have kept up with my writing.   I am working hard on my first totem counseling book, and hope to release it this spring.  Since my work as an augur continues (phoebe has been prevalent in my daily walks), I have expanded my coaching to include animal spirit guides as a means to creating better relationships.  The result of that work has been so much fun!

But at times I have been overwhelmed! Advertising my coaching program, meeting new clients, school work, parenting my kids, quilting and weaving, all of this has required some juggling.  (and sometimes lots of juggling!)  In the meantime, Bridget continues to ride my ass pretty hard, with coaching ideas and new paths opening, and an endless push to healing, art and poetry.

Hang your worship on a deity, and this is what you find.  I have friends who honor Allah and Jesus and Buddha, as well as friends who worship Lugh and Danu and Aengus and Isis and Diana.  Each of these deities will reveal a different path to you the worshipper.  Aengus inspires an artist friend with her pottery; Diana draws another friend in to work with rescued animals; Allah calls for daily remembrance and prayer; Jesus calls for us to leave traditional family and pursue a communal good.

Worship can be bloody hard work!

But the results are so amazing.

Just in the past week, casually walking my dogs (I have a little of Diana in me!), I met a neighbor I haven't seen in years.  Her dogs have passed away, and she no longer walks, but the spring weather brought her outside.  As we talked about her dogs and her grief, she suddenly asked me:  "are you a fiber artist?"  When I told her about my etsy store and my quilts and weaving and smithing, she invited me to a fiber arts guild here in Pennsylvania.  She herself remarked, "I don't know why I just had to ask you that question!"

Then a few days later a poet in the eastern part of Pennsylvania contacted me about sharing our poems and some poetry venues, again completely out of the blue!  Since one of my goals this year is to find more forums for sharing my poetry, this was a great - and surprising - meeting!  These unforeseen opportunities are an example of what puja brings in our life.  Yup, I have been juggling many projects and yup, I have felt Bridget riding my ass, but then She presents opportunities and connections that I never would have dreamed up myself.

So if you are on a puja path, and at times you find worship to be hard work, remember that there is that return moment when puja brings an endlessly opening door.  That is what a relationship with the divine ultimately is - a door to worlds we can not envision.

Faith is holding on until the door can be found.



image © weinelm stockfreeimages.com

New life and Marian Grottos. . .

I have been busting my gut at my fall practicum this semester, hence a sparse number of posts on Bridgetsfire!  My apologies all!  But I am here in spirit, because every day at my practicum site, a Catholic university, I pass a Marian grotto on my way to my office. . .  and I always stop to say a prayer to Mary, Bridget, and all the saints.  The grotto itself is gorgeous, and from its hillside site,  I can see off over Westmoreland County to the highest peaks of Pennsylvania's Laurel Highlands.  For a place to start a new journey, the Marian grotto is about the best place to be.

Marian grottos are small caves, often with images or statues of Mary, built into hillsides and gardens.  Grottos can be small or large, contain huge statues or only a small icon, come bedecked with flowers and waterfalls or stand alone in forgotten churchyards.  I have been visiting Marian grottos for thirty years, taking sustenance from the source, the cave, the dark.  If you want to create anew, a cave is a blessed place to begin.

Grottos predate Mary the way Mary predates Christianity. . .  Apollo had a grotto at Delphi; before the Romans, Eileithyia had a grotto in Crete.  Eileithyia, the bringer of life, dates to pre-Indo European times, and by Roman times she was a fate, older than Cronos, time itself.   At her cave on Crete, votives to Eieithyia can be dated to neolithic times.  Goddess grottos thus predate time indeed.

Our connection to caves as humans even pre-dates the wonderful cave paintings of Lascaux, from a mere 17,000 years ago.  The human archaeological record centers on caves, in Africa, in Europe, in Asia.  Our ancestors buried cave bear skulls in their homes, while Lascaux shows us the wonderful creativity and expression of our ancestors. In northern Iraq, a cave still used to shelter flocks today has been excavated over and over, with the latest remains dating back 100,000 years.  In Wales and Cornwall I visited cave after cave dedicated to Celtic saints, where people today still go for healing and spiritual renewal.  Standing at a Mary Grotto, I am reaching back through pagan and Christian traditions, going back to our earliest human meanings.

In Christian times, mystics retreated to caves, and Mary showed up in her first apparition to James the Great in A.D. 39, along the banks of the Ebro river.  As everyone knows, she has been showing up ever since.  Grottos built for her invoke both traditions, the Marian tradition of apparitions and prehistoric traditions of caves and their symbols.  Build a grotto to Mary, and you invoke her; stand in a grotto and you are standing in a symbol of human home, dwelling, healing, creation.  Put the two together and you have powerful magic.

Mary herself, mother of God, is always out in our Western histories rescuing and saving people.  Having Mary on my side at a small, Catholic university, has been immensely supportive and healing for me.  I pray every day at her grotto before going to my office, and I pray again before I drive home.  May in the Middle Ages rescued accused innocents from hangings, wronged neighbors from slander, helped those in need and in distress.  I figure she continues to do so today.  I will solicit her blessing, and left her a holy medal to Bridget back when I begin my practicum.

At the beginning of my new career, I also find a grotto a peaceful place of darkness, emptiness, possibility.  Caves are interior, dark, fertile.  I am not gonna jump on the cave as womb bandwagon, but will go with cave as underground, as root.  In graduate school I find my professors and advisors are all pushing me to choose a direction, to choose a specialty, to establish a map for myself in upcoming years.  And in the grotto at school, I find myself resisting.  Here in the dark, with Mary silently watching, I have a space and time to open to all possibilities.  Growth will come, but right now my own direction is unformed, ephemeral, waiting to choose shape.  In the numinous presence of Mary and Cave, I have time and space to see what and where and who I will become.  I want to continue trying on new shapes and new talents, before I settle into choice.  In a Marian Grotto, I have support and fertility.  No wonder I find grottos sacred.

Marian grottos do not require denominational affiliation.  Pagan me has never had lightning strike me down in a grotto!  I could as easily leave a pentagram to Mary as an offering, as well as a Cornish cloutie ribbon to the grotto itself.  Whatever your religious tradition, in other words, a grotto is a place to go for space, for support, for creativity and new inspiration.  Grottos abound all over the world, so none of us are ever far from a sacred space of new.

We are in mid-October as I write, heading to All Hallow's, time for the spirits to come, and to plant bulbs and bring in the last of the basil.  Grottos fit this interior and darking time of the year.  Numinous support is something we all need and deserve:  find a cave, feel Mary, open to the empty dark.

A good ritual and a good puja.  This halloween, go find a Mary Cave.  Let go of knowing, and see what you create.

Pointers, storms, and soft rain. . .

I am sitting in a rare soft rain, this morning, between full moon and upcoming new, thinking about wonderful conversations this past week with friends. When a biotech engineer and a public defense attorney both call me a "seeker" within one week, I kinda found myself taken aback. A seeker? Me? I've been following the moons and worshipping as a witch for most of my life. At the same time, I have been watching some of my most loved arts programs fall apart under the stress of funding cuts and internalized oppression all summer long, and I wonder how so many of us fall into horizontal violence when times get hard.

And I think this is all related. So much of worship is listening. Listening to rain, to birds, to winds and stars, to new friends, and to inner voices. Listening to grandmothers' stories, to something called God, to angels, spirits, and to crickets singing. Listen, and find music everywhere. Listen and find holiness everywhere. The soft rain of today is a healing balm in this intense summer of heat and storm. For heaven's sakes, even fundamentalist Christians are noticing the extreme weather on this planet, and the message of torrential rain, severe drought, and massive thunderstorms.

In one of my great conversations this week I commented that my children rarely hear soft summer rain anymore, and my grandchildren may never do so. I wonder if my grandchildren will see snow. So one new friend, the biotech dude, is an intense and passionate gardener. Coordinating urban renewal gardening, he is ardent about saving, building and maintaining good soil. What is to argue? But he also referred to himself as a seeker, and talked with me about the difficult problems of inner city gardening - from kids trashing the plants, and neighbors stealing produce to sell, to county government wanting publicity shots for the news but denying funding. My friend felt that his passion annoyed his allies, and that his vision of community gardening is getting lost in petty squabbles.

 As he talked, standing on the banks of the Monogehela river in a garden built by kids at an inner city neighborhood Y, I realized I don't see him as a seeker at all. Instead, my new friend is a pointer - he has amazing skills with soil and he is pointing to a new future where neighborhoods protect and cherish soil and use it to feed so many people without food. His vision is important, sacred even. His struggles to share that vision are inherent to forging new paths - inner city gardeners may be dealing with teen vandalism for a long time.

I know other pointers, people creating new ways of living and being, in tiny minute ways, in our postindustrial, crumbling funds world. Friends at school advocate for foster kids; my neighbors build recycling programs; another friend is starting a suicide prevention hotline in rural Pennsylvania. I know artists teaching children, lawyers helping the poor, and therapists rebuilding lives. We constantly hear that there is no money, and we constantly do amazing things anyway.

Pointers need some soft rain, though. I puja Bridget, and love reading Rumi and Teresa of Avila; my soil friend loves St. Francis, though carefully separates what he reads in St. Francis from the punitive church of his youth; one of the best and most amazing counselors I know works with homeless people and teaches other therapists Mindfulness. Here is worship and spirituality/religion providing people the inner means to go out and point to new ways of being. Yet spirit/religion is never enough. Pointers have to contend with ourselves, and the horizontal violences my soil friend sees with gardening leaders arguing - and the blame game I see in churches and arts groups who have lost funding shows - how much we have learned to act out the very systems we hope to change.


I am reluctantly pulling out of my ten years of volunteering in one organization because I no longer wish to hear that special needs kids are the problem with arts funding, and I am sad to see devout Christian friends - with hearts in the right place - decide paternalistically what special needs children need instead of listening to the kids themselves. Similarly, my Catholic friend in New Jersey who works ceaselessly for LGBT rights and has an autistic son like I, is tired of public school parents endlessly blaming spending cuts on the special needs kids and their test scores. And I told my soil friend to quit blaming teens for the problems with inner city community gardening.

The corporations of the world don't need to police us if we limit ourselves. Wild Woman thealogian Mary Daly calls the ways we attack and police each other "horizontal violence" and names the ways we act for elite interests "token torturing." It is a great analysis for why we so often can not work together. So naming the violence and pointing it out is just part of what Pointers have to do. Simply put, pointers have to be ready to make power relationships clear: teens don't ruin inner city gardening; special needs kids are not causing the cuts in arts and school funding; the LGBT community isn't destroying the church; single mothers on welfare are not causing budget crises; poor family farmers are not at fault for fracking.  Sure, people with little rights can harm each other; none of us, however, have the ability to create these systems that harm us all. We can not build new systems, if we constantly recreate the old.

While talking about pointing may seem a long way from worshiping St. Bridget, it really is not. While I am sipping tea in this lovely soft summer rain today, I am thinking of summer bounty and the rains I hope my grandchildren will hear. But I have appreciated the storms of this summer - strong storms here in western PA that are knocking up people's lives and driving home the point that we as a planet have changes to make. Soft rain can be our Rumi and St. Francis and ecstatic spirituality; and goddess knows we all need them. Yet hard rains are the ways we have to name the violence we have learned and enact on one another. If pointers don't name the ways we need to change, the change will be all the harder.

I believe there will be a day when inner city teens cherish gardens - and in point of fact, I stood in one of those gardens this week. So be you seeker or pointer, I wish you an August of both storm and gentle summer rain. All of our gardens on this planet need both.


  image: growpittsburgh.org

Appalachian dulcimer and the world a-changing

Went to Portage, Pennsylvania, last night, to the wonderful Portage Mountain Dulcimer Day with yearly dulcimer-player Bing Futch.   With a dad hailing from a little place known as Chuckey, Tennesse, I have spent my life running up and down the blue ridge to dulcimer festivals.  And I do love them - but I am often the only nose-ringed and dreadlocked person there!!

Well, not with Bing Futch headlining.  His dreads are awesome (just cut mine); his dulcimer playing even more awesome.  We got traditional tunes, Lead Belly tunes, even Jimmy Buffet tunes. Most amazing to me was listening to Bing put his found love of Appalachian music and his exploration of his Seminole heritage together by playing mountain dulcimer/Native American flute in a gorgeous improv.  With the sun setting over the Laurel Highlands and a perfect late June evening, the moment was magical.



And the times are a-changing.  Here in Western Pennsylvania, a notoriously conservative part of the world, other multiracial families like my own tell me what I see happening - with the election of President Obama, the acceptance of multiracial peoples and multriracial exploration is changing tremendously.  I go down the street in a Black neighborhood in Pittsburgh and African American strangers no longer curse me, but compliment my dreads.  I go to rural Pennsylvania, and not only do the many seniors there greet me with smiles, the seniors are there to see a multiracial, dreadlocked dulcimer artist.  Neighborhoods that used to be all white are no longer; schools that used to be all white are no longer.  Appalachian dulcimer and Native American flute and Leadbelly all go into one performance.

I am not being hopelessly naive here.  Trayvon Martin shows that we have so far to go. Yet I am heartened to think that Appalachian dulcimer is helping change the world for the better.  There is magic in music and magic in sharing music and more magic in sharing old music in new and shining ways.  On a perfect June evening, the sunset shone and the music glowed and everyone was smiling.

The way it should be.

30 years ago I heard dulcimer artist Holly Tannen take the Si Kahn song, "Gone, Gonna Rise Again," and play it on her dulcimer.  It has remained one of my all time favorites:

I remember the year that my granddaddy died
Gone, gonna rise again
They dug his grave on the mountainside
Gone, gonna rise again
I was too young to understand the way he felt about the land
But I could read his history in his hand
Gone, gonna rise again

It's corn in the crib and apples in the bin
Ham in the smokehouse and cotton in the gin
Cows in the barn and hogs in the lot, you know, he never had a lot
But he worked like a devil for the living he got

These apple trees on the mountainside
He planted the seeds just before he died
I guess he knew that he'd never see, the red fruit hanging from the tree
But he planted the seeds for his children and me

High on the ridge above the farm
I think of my people that have gone on
Like a tree that grows in the mountain ground, the storms of life have cut them down
But the new wood springs from roots in the ground


How awesome last night, to hear new music worlds grown from the roots of all of our ancestors.

Happy Summer and Happy July to everyone!

New Moon and Solar Eclipse: a new economy, a new beginning

Eclipses have been shaking up the charts of us Capricorns (and all you Cancers by extension) for two years there, with the last big influence for caps back in the winter.  During that two year pattern of Capricorn eclipses, I began two new businesses, started this blog, returned to three (!) graduate school programs, completed my life coaching certification, and split up with my ex co-parent.  I also found and rented an awesome house, am busy moving there, helped my daughter get into college and took an amazing part time job with an arts program I really respect.  So perhaps that gives you some idea of how important eclipses can be in your astrology chart!!

Today's eclipse is in the first degree of Gemini, and with my Gemini ascendant, it promises to be the beginning of a series of life changes in my future.  Yet with Gemini ruling travel, communication and ideas, the changes don't look as earth-shaking as those in 2010/11.  I love ideas and communcations and travel, so I am pretty open to the changes this eclipse/new moon bring:  bring it on, baby!  Shake it up!

One area I see changing in my life is in the realm of money.  Due to tax problems and money issues, my ex has not been able to support our children as usual this spring, meaning I have taken over everything from the car bill to the costs of all the kids lessons (piano, theater, voice, french horn, drawing, organ), to paying for basics like food.  I do hope at some point my ex will be able to start contributing child support, but until then, I am primary support for the bills.  And though I had been the work-from-home mommy who helped with lesson costs for many years, the move to being the pay-the-water-bill and make the rent mommy has not been the scary switch I expected.  Hardly.

Even when bills are tight, and they are, I find that feeding my kids, paying their teachers, and making the rent isn't just satisfying, it is downright joyful.  I want to feed my kids - which I tell them when they worry about my co-parent's money problems.  After all, feeding my kids, from a special Subway sandwich treat to buying good and healthy food, is central to giving life.  I wanna buy healthy food and fix them healthy meals, and I find myself loving to pay for the (admittedly more and more expensive) groceries.

The same is true for their lessons.  I have always helped with lesson costs, from back when I ran my own in-home daycare, until I opened my online store, and now today with my coaching business and etsy store and fledgling tarot business here.  Paying good piano teachers or good art teachers is also a joy.  I want artists and musicians to make decent, nay, good wages, and my paying is part of building an economy that supports real workers.  Since I pay cash, it is fun, too, to watch my kids when I pay $500 to their piano teacher, for example.  This is what I work for, and this is what they get:  a kickbutt teacher and kickbutt music lessons.  This is the economy I want for them, and they get to see it - in cash.

And as a new life coach, I am also intrigued now that I am selling, well, myself!   During my years of certification training, I gave half off to friends and family for my life coaching -  coaching with artists and with special needs issues.  When I completed my coaching certificate, however, I moved to asking for full rates for my services.  This is so different than my online store and online auctions, where I either put down a price or I put down a beginning bid, and then customers either buy or they don't!  Selling myself, it seems, invites people to bargain with me.  (Or I was conveying that, somehow!!)  In the past two weeks, however, I have talked with three potential clients, none of whom batted an eye at my fees.  I realized at some point that I am like the teachers I pay: people who care about my work will pay me with the same joy I feel when I pay teaching artists. 

I hear more and more moms telling me that they are moving to this new economy - a giving economy that values women, teachers, coaches, healers, artists.  We joyfully pay others for their services, and we expect a decent wage for our services.  The minimum wage service economy of post-industrial capitalism is being transformed into a service economy of respecting professionals creating a world of value and support. 

So what does all this have to do with Bridget?  Well, everything!  Bridget the poet, blacksmith and healer lived in a world where all were welcome to her home, where artists were valued, where healing was part of a commitment to God.  After all, I don't believe in a God that wants day care workers, nurses, teachers, massage therapists, special ed. workers, carpenters, artists, musicians, ministers or any other kind of healer living in poverty!  Nor does Bridget want that! 

Today's solar eclipse brings new ideas, and one idea that is rallying me is the idea of this new economy we are building.  I pay teachers with joy, and my clients pay me with joy.  Service equals growth and wholeness for everyone.  It is a new idea, and it is built on new forms of communication (from facebook to pinterest to meet up groups), and so it resonates with our gemini eclipse.  Puja involves worship, but puja has always been part of an economy of growth as well.  Puja involves money.

Today at the new moon/eclipse, instead of prayer or meditation, or perhaps in addition to, I invite everyone to offer some joyful money.  Pay a tithe at church; donate online; add some coins to your shrines.  Pay joyfully and help build a joyful economy, and that is yet another way to celebrate - and worship - Bridget.

Happy solar eclipse everybody!




image courtesy:  http://gfx.tarot.com/images/feeds/300x300/solar-eclipse-2-300x300.jpg