Resembling an iceberg
in that only a very small percentage
is above-the-surface-and-visible-to-the-eye:

Most of me is internal...

Exploring, wondering about, engaging, testing, experimenting with, making various levels of sense of, responding to, generating art about, and seeking solutions for or searching for the fulcrum points which, when activated, trigger the transformative paradigmatic shifts of evolutionary change…

This process, rather than any product, is the overarching motif of my life.

One might say I began life as an artist and then became a life-artist who, somehow, in the middle of that journey, passed through her life as several iterations of a participant-observer experiment, and, coming to the conclusion that human objectivity is fundamentally an oxymoron, chose embracing and embodying the ways and cultures she was exploring, until, forced to abandon the anthropological frame in favor of mythopoetic depth and transformative spiritual activism, she-he-they-we-that-I, that Being,  landed here and now.

I suppose one might also say I was born a mystic. Certainly, for as long as I can remember (which is at least from the age of three) I've openly asked questions most people do not apparently ask and sought out experiences which are generally categorized as “unsavory” or "weird" (I prefer wyrd): lucid and precognitive dreams, visions, voices, a sense of implicate order, a yearning to explore mysteries, a calling to know the dark underbelly of what we are, to know in every sense of the word that which we call God in every sense of the word, to confront and liberate demons, to heal the Ancestors and so many other impossible woundings, to understand and liberate from suffering, to fully and defiantly embody myself.

The only child of two free-thinking parents (an Atheist-Agnostic physician descended from an Indigenous lineage of healers who escaped the Inquisition to lead the Polish Underground in WWII and a Pantheist artist descended from Queen Rebekah on her mother's side and Kings David and Solomon on her father's), I've often wondered if my impossible life is the result of the Ancestors trying to pass on their contributions to only one offspring in the familial generation into which I was born. I've also experienced this as quite painful, feeling for much of my life that were I to choose the "wrong" path, I might, somehow, damage the Web of Creation.

Do all only children feel this way?

Be that as it may, I seem to have lived several lives in one. It remains to be seen if I've been successful at any of them. I've lived them, nonetheless. There's a Sufi saying:

Die without dying and resurrect now.

Perhaps, at the very least, I've become somewhat adept at that.

In the world of form, I started out in public education after which I attended Quaker School in Philadelphia from 4th grade through Senior High. I went on to Bryn Mawr and Bard Colleges for Undergrad, then stepped away from school for several years to try my hand at the wilderness of life. I married, briefly; learned that marriage isn’t for me; and bore a child (with my husband while he was still my husband) whom I raised to the best of my ability and with all of my heart. At age 30, I returned to formal education, earning Masters and Specialist Degrees in Mental Health with a concentration in Systems Theory (Marriage and Family Therapy) from the University of Florida. As a newly-single mother without child support, I wanted a stable career to support my daughter. Life, however, had other plans.

During my first forray into Graduate education, in Mental Health Counseling in the early 1990’s, I found myself closing a textbook and pushing that book as far across the desk as it would go. I was confronted with clear and undeniable indications that my mother's mother's lineage had suffered generations of sexual abuse. As I dove into my own transformative healing, facing for the first time the extent of both my own and my family's trauma, I became fascinated with exploring recursive mirroring between internal and external systems, was diagnosed with an auto-immune disorder, stumbled into the healing power of sound, encountered spontaneous whirling and embodied experiences of divinity which fueled new forms of poetry, and discovered a form of work called, "the Recovery of Indigenous Mind." Somewhere along the way, I ended up counseling and designing life skills education inside the criminal justice system. That job came to an end, in 1996, just as the local Sheriff's Dept took the jail away from the counselors. Our nation was careening into Mass Incarceration. A year later, I was presenting Healing Sound as a modality at Harvard and scooped up by three Dervishes who hand-delivered me "to the Teachers".

28 years have passed since the day I first sat before Murshid Shahabuddin David Less of the Chisti lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan and Pir Sherif Baba of the Marufi R'fai, the "Howling Dervishes" of Turkey. Today, she-he-they-we-that-I, that Being is a Teacher, Guide, and Spiritual Leader of the Message Collective of the Heart Spirit Medicine Project, a prison abolitionist focused on abolishing the incareration of consciousness itself, and a human being with felony convictions for exquisitely non-violent Civil Disobedience in a nation founded on Civil Disobedience with a Constitution that says it’s citizens can be legally enslaved by the State if we are convicted of a crime—a nation with a history of creating prohibitions to incarcerate people. In mystical Judaism, this Path is called "Tikkun Olam.” The Sufis call this, "Shafiyyat," the Buddhists, a “Dharma Calling,“ the Christians, a “Sacrificial Offering” and such an offering invariably requires a Leap of Faith.

Such work has many names, known and unknown to the world, names that stretch back and across and through Aeons and cultures, for those of us concerned with wisdom continue to realize the impossibility of discerning the true nature of and solution to a problem from within the cultural waters that created the problem in the first place. Thus, the practitioner learns to be in the world and yet not of it, steps into the wound, allowing the patterns of the wound to shatter the heart, while simultaneously maintianing the vision of wholeness. And thus, like so many before me, so many hear with me, so many who will come after me, I willingly became a living offering. In Christianity, this is simply called "a sacrificial offering”and “a leap of faith."

There are two poles of justice:
The pole of human justice and the pole of Divine Justice.
The pole of human justice must continue to evolve
Toward the pole of Divine Justice,
or the law will cease to serve humanity,
and humanity will be forced to serve the law.
— Murshida VA

I don't believe human law was ever intended to become a religion, but in the past two decades, many people seem to have forgotten that human law is not the word of God—in any Holy Name or Form. I fail to be convinced that human beings have the wherewithal to know the Will of that which is, by definition, Omniscient, Omnipotent, Omnipresent, and All-Pervading, and I'm quite certain the originators never once intended human law to be confounded with anything burned into rock by the hand of an Almighty.

Perhaps in the place where faiths intersect there is a memory of the birthplace of all religions, a memory of that need, that human yearning for connection, connection with that which challenges us to remember our fragility and our greatness all at once. And perhaps if we can recall that place, we can and will find a viable way to loosen the grip a few of us have on laws that no longer serve humanity, laws like the slavery exception clause in the 13th Amendment of the Constitution.

It will take perhaps 500 years to dismantle our prison systems completely. But dismantle them we can, and dismantle them we must. The alternative is genuinely unthinkable…