What a strange life I'm living. After spending three years as a classical actress-in-training, then four years as a hardcore ashram-living, guru-adoring granolahead, then seven years as a serious lycra-wearing, bartending, X-dropping hedonist, followed by another seven as a seriously hardcore Barry Long-loving , emotion-shunning, all-stimulating-substance-avoiding-including-coffee-and-sugar-and-fun granolahead, I then proceeded to rack up $65 grand in student loan debt in tribute to the god of unsmiling science.

Now, I drift.

I have several credit cards that are in rotation. I make a couple or few hundred each week heading up the shamanic journeying class for 10 bright, deep shamanic-healers-in-training, as well as doing shamanic healing and soul retrievals for four or five people a week. I still have a grand left over from the salary I made during my five week stint as a mental health professional, down from three grand left over from the final student loan I took out back in August. My sister gave me a hundred or so pieces of designer clothes (given to her by the wealthy women that she works for cleaning their homes) that I'm proceeding to figure out how to unload on ebay.

I do about 25 or 30 hours a week of straightforward work each week. About 5 more hours "jobhunting" for things that fit with the degrees I now have, those letters that now follow my name when I list my bio. Another 10 or 15 spent doing reading and research on all things shamanic. Fire In The Headanyone? But as a single woman with no children and no mortgage and therefor no other consistent demands on my time other than taking care of two weasely kitties, albeit one that receives a double daily shot of insulin, mostly I drift.

This drifting. Drifting to see where the tide takes me. This waking and sleeping based on cues that signal from deep inside of me, that leads to 6 hours of sleep one night, and 13 for another. Random baths with mineral salts steeped in jasmine and sandalwood during the day smack dab in the path of the setting sun. A Doing of Stuff based on what needs to be done, the rest of it falling away with the fervent repeated mantra known as "f*ck it".

Some hours it feels like a crushing weight of nothingness where I find that I want to cry from how little I am needed or seen or desired, how passion has vamoosed for younger and thinner and more enthusiastic pastures. Other hours it is a soft, full, warm throbbing that is the tide of Nothingness, muscles vibrating gently, this burbling heart of mine gentle and sweet, the hum of Life a distant vibration in the silence of Yes. Sometimes it unfolds as a lusciousness that leads to 9-mile bike rides of circular routes to get a coffee, pick up my master's degree diploma from my sister's mailbox, buy a bottle of wine, as I play frogger with pickup trucks and SUVs on Shipyard Blvd. Othertimes it is the odd pastimes I've taken up.

What is this purchasing and studying and drinking of wine I've become enamored of? Especially now that my income is so limited? But great joy is found with a bottle of shiraz, ecstatically sipped in between bites of three kinds of whooshing, bitey cheddar and thin slices of black Arkansas apples, and really, who can argue with that? Or how many hours a week I sit in front of my computer, taking advantage of the major networks' full-episode players they make available to we cableless souls as I sew moss green alpine fleece and leather medicine bags for the people who come for soul retrievals each week.

Sometimes it's the creation of playlists on iTunes comprised of Rufus Wainwright's soaring "Across the Universe", James Blunt's "Beautiful" where he says "f*cking high" instead of the sanitized "flying high", Jason Mraz's version of "The Joker" and how hilariously he says he speaks of the "pompatus of love", Mika sucking on his "Lollipop", Stuart Davis climbing our "Ladder" of DNA and singing of the one hand slapping in "AC/DC", Madeleine Peyroux laughingly insisting that she's "All Right", and "Mad World" by both Tears For Fears and Gary Jules.

It's heading into the backyard to throw balls for Hoochie, the red labrador, and Bosley, the six-month old pitbull, and Lola, the fat-bellied chihuahua. They lick my face and leap into the hammock to snuggle with me, and not a whiff of dog phobia is on the wind. I take them on walks and agonize as the walk turns to a jog, at the bummer that is boobs grown as obese as my belly. It's the flopping down in the front yard to hang with Granny Myra, the 12 year old tabby, or Oscar aka Orange Crush, our neighborhood tomcat Cassanova, whose freckled face makes me smooch him until he gives me the paw of Cease and Desist.

It's doing my laundry in the small nautical washing machine here in my apartment and then hanging the clothes to dry on the oversized rack I set up in my bedroom, turning the ceiling fan on high to combat the humidity that is coastal living. Or lifting weights, 15 minutes at a time, my back, the vertebrae, cracking and popping back into place. Or making essential oil batches, each more witchy than the last, to bring into the soul retrievals, add to the medicine bags. Or eating organic, Nature's Path toaster pastries with big frothy glasses of locally produced whole milk. Or spending an entire morning researching raising chickens for eggs and meat and all sorts of whatnot.

More and more frequently I find myself in a sort of hyper-conscious reverie where I repeat over and over: thank you Life, thank you, thank you, thank you for this time to let my Doing and Doing and Doing soften, for this unstructured time, for the freedom to let go of Who I Am Not so that Who I Am can make itself known again. Because, really, who the f*ck am I? Do you know who the f*ck you are? And oh how I long for more Who I Am. Don't you?

Two nights ago I awoke over and over and over as the lyrics of "Mad World" circulated round and round between conscious and unconscious mind.

"And I find it kind of funny
I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying
Are the best I've ever had."

While I was asleep, I watched experiential explanations of the wheel of karma, and of exactly what it means to get off of it. I'd been in that place before. So simple to just stop participating in the Doing and it's Almighty Kickback that is Living as we currently know it. It was what I let go of last month - that precipice that I once again walked up to where I saw that I have to let go of the good, not just the bad but the good. That place where Krishna fell down. That place that has kicked many an ass before it got ahold of mine. And how I said, "I'm not ready yet. I see a few bits left and I want to squeeze these last few drops of happy, please, of joy and love with folks who still see me and love the me that radiates behind the weird ticks and vacant smiling and stern blankness that is so often "me" these days, those sweet folks who still radiate Yes for me when I get the privilege of their presence." And I saw how death is my sweetest friend, how it is the calm beyond the storm, the vibration behind my yearning for money and romantic love and success and relief.

And over the past couple of days, the remnants of the monster of To Do dies in the face of this wash of Nothing. And I see that more and more,

"I find it hard to tell you
'Cos I find it hard to take
When people run in circles
It's a very, very
Mad World."

So, not sure if you noticed, but the real absence in my world these days is people. Not much interaction going on these days unless necessary for work, living situation, or day to day living, and even then it's awkward. I just have no freakin idea what the social protocols are anymore. So very, very weird.

I will do a deep, successful soul retrieval, but oh how I cringe at the before and afterward that has to take place, the dealing with money and pleasantries and such. I will pay my rent on time, but how dealing with my sweet landlord/neighbor's social network makes my skin shrink two or three sizes in the dehydrating air of Too Much Freaking Talk. The exception seems to be my family, especially my sis, who get a pass based on her uncomplicated way of dealing with most of her living, her laughing and cutting up and and sweetness and generosity and how we fight, eyebrows raised and ready for battle, over who paid for the check when we last went to the country cooking buffet. Silly, sweet, simple stuff.

As you may have noticed, I don't return emails or phone calls unless I freakin absolutely have to. I barely read blogs anymore. I read no novels, only shamanic tomes. The occasional desire to return emails from friends, engage in a new email friendship asserts itself every month or so, but something always happens to clip it off posthaste, and I drift back into the tide of Nothingness. Noting personal, just doesn't make sense.

It's as if I'm allergic to most human contact. I just want to be left alone to drift. And Life seems to support me heartily in this. What else can I say and still be truthful? If you want nothing from people and they find nothing in you to want, what keeps you together? . . . Really?

It's all just flows out in front of us. We create and live out these rolling energies that are our lives. And then, one day, death says howdy, and off we go, leaving every last single thing and person we've come to know and love and invest so utterly and completely in.

So I leave you with the echoing words of Mika: "sucking too hard on your lollipop, love's going to get you down". Whatever that means. :) It makes me want to purchase a small cache of Blow Pops or at the very least take up dating again. Heh.

Or maybe I'll just keep drifting . . . :)

What are the chances of this being a picture of the rising star in the spiritual publishing world, the hilarious non-teacher, and fabulously invisible, Jed McKenna?

For those of you who don't know, there are these hysterically funny, heart-breakingly ass-kicking, face smacking waking up trilogy of books written by a teacher that doesn't exist. He teaches no workshops, does no sessions. He gives no interviews, sells no bells or prayer mats or cosmic love goggles off of a super-hip, flashmedia site. There is no record of the guy. No pictures, no leaks in terms of bio, no people stepping forward to claim him or rat him out or mistakenly spill the garbanzos. Nada. (at least as far back as I've been googling.)

But because I have mentioned his name in posts several times, people show up here from search engines several times a day searching out info about him, and in backtracking on one of them, I came upon the pic above.

Hmmmmm.