2020 is the YEAR of WOMANIFESTATION.

This photo was taken sometime back when my dear friend Heather Fisch asked me to be The High Priestess, an archetype close to my soul. To me The High Priestess, along with The Empress, are the archetypes of womanifestation. They create/ birth as extensions of the fecund earth, dancing in the non-dual union of dark + light - tending the compost and the garden, alive in the underworld womb as well as the topside world where we eventually (sometimes after years) harvest the flowers + fruits of our labors. Its good magic, whole magic, humble magic.

As i came upon this photo today, I remembered the long-ago story of the necklace I'm wearing in it. Its made of typewriter keys, and was given to me, wrapped in newspaper - by a grunge girl wearing all black, on a bus in Seattle around midnight when I was alone and lost; she had placed the bundle quickly into my hands before rushing out the door. She was my angel-witch; who'd been wearing it earlier when I had stepped onto the bus without enough money, feeling shakey and scared as I asked how to get where I needed to go and whether she and her friend could give me some change (they did). I had told her how beautiful the necklace was and did she make it (yes she had). The typewriter keys are metaphors of the Word, and of speaking one's truth. That gift gave me all the hope i needed, that I wasn't lost after all out in a big city alone at night. I found my way to where i needed to go. It remains with me as a symbol of Feminine power + resilience, crafted by the hands of an unknown woman.

THIS is womanifestation. Other women + femmes + people holding space for, cheering on, lifting each other up. It exists in contrast to the obsession that New Age white-washed culture has with "manifestation" - one that reeks of privilege, light-polarization and isolation: the idea that if we as individuals just think good thoughts, all will go our way. Womanifestaton is rather about honoring the mystery of life, of the Divine Feminine and inter-connectedness. Its being a conduit of sustenance and reciprocity. Because when she gave me the necklace, it was healing for me. But it was also healing for her to give it. It was an honorable giving and receiving.

As we approach the New Moon in Aquarius, its time to clear my desk, my mind, and set new intentions for this next cycle. The High Priestess has all she needs, not just within herself, but with the fruit and seeds of the Earth (held in the pomegranate), and with the Great Book of the World/ Her Life in her left arm. Wearing good witch magic around her neck.

There is a lot to become womanifest for me, for Rites of Passage in the coming months. For some folks, it seems like an impossible task. That's because it is. Its impossible for me to "make it all happen". The only way it can happen is through the union of sincere effort/ intention, magic + surrender, with a little (or a lot of) help from my friends (and kind strangers)! Reminding myself of this now as i prepare to step through the next portal.
​
Thank you Lisa Vollmer for this photo, to Heather for the invitation, and to Kifu Faruq for introducing me to womanifestation! Its an honor to womanifest with you, and with all the other incredible women, femmes + people in my life right now.
#womanifestation #2020vision #faith #resilience #sustenance

A 20/20 Anthem for 2020
This is the time that they'll speak of us in the future, saying:
"They Remembered".

We Re-member Ourselves Now
as whole-bodied, soft-fleshed water people.
We reclaim our hearts,
and our tender, round infant-faced memories,
from empty pre-packaged promises,
from the ache of isolation.
We steal back our freedom and our future from the numbed fists of black-oil gods,
from the digitized world we mistook for reality.

We breathe new life into the places we've ravaged in our relentless quest,
in our rest-less-ness.
We come Home, finally to Rest.
Right where we are
with the great weight of the Grief of the World.

We save the seeds that have been passed on to us for thousands of years,
And plant them, water them with our tears,
seeds that have kept their own wisdom of how to grow in places that've become thirsty.

We learn to speak again words of Beauty and of Kindness,
To value what's alive over what's dead,
in a world that's far slower,
where joy is commonplace,
and each of us is sovereign.
Where the land remembers itself green,
and our multiplicity begins to mend its way back from the edge of extinction.
​
Let these be our teachers now:
Flowers. Mycelium. the Forest underground + canopy.
The infinite family of our extended relations.
We are not alone.
We are the Once and Future Vision
Of Our Ancestors

https://www.ritesofpassageproject.org/2020vision
thank you to Janine Strong for this photo:)

​

It’s with a big deep breath, that I announce at long-last:
RITES OF PASSAGE: 20/20 VISION!!!!!!
is clear sight into our Collective past, our present and our potential future,
Revolutionary Art, Activism + Initiation for the New Century.
By Women + Femmes of Color
Live: August 14- 23, 2020
ritesofpassageproject.org/2020vision
For those of you who experienced the first Rites of Passage in 2013, this is the next evolution. 20/20 Vision was born out of my need to speak to a broader scope of the feminine experience in America, with a focus on the voices of WOC, with all NEW "Rooms of Cure".
Now is Our Time.
Creating this project involves learning how tp embody the radically beautiful values of this Project. How do we truly CO-CREATE a living village - to sew together our losses and our triumphs, our tender broken places with the bright red threads of healing that we each are carrying: You are my teacher. I am your teacher. Together, we are learning. And THIS is Rites of Passage 20/20 Vision: 80 women of color + allies from around the US. Creating a potent space for the stories that have gone unheard, and for the Medicine WE ALL NEED.
In the words of one of my personal heroines - with whom I share the same ancestral homeland, and love of eloquence + rebellion:
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.....Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”
- Arundhati Roy
Ultimately Rites of Passage is meant to speak to all of us, regardless of our background or gender. We all need to nurture new cultures of remembrance on the Earth, and community containers for initiation.
This website is a work of art itself that I'm so excited to share with you. My hope is that it, and this project, can be space for us all to remember the Resilience we each carry.
Please feel free to share the project in your circles. 🙏🏽 We welcome all kinds of support: a HOUSE, artists, production folks, volunteers, MONEY, artist housing. It takes many webs of support to build this:)
Thank you for reading, for sharing, for breathing in this new world together.
#ritesofpassage #2020vision
#wearetheonceandfuturevisionofourancestors

​This photo’s caption should read: “woman with her hair on fire.” I have a big reveal coming…Its kind of like being pregnant (note kind-of, hence I am NOT pregnant) when you don’t tell anyone until the 2nd trimester, because you don’t want to jinx it. Can a woman be pregnant with something other than a child? Yes: alternate fertilities. Right around the time I finally felt ready to become a Mom to a person, the Universe said “no, we’ve got other plans for you kiddo, you know just what they are – so get to work.” I guess I’m pretty fertile, (though right now I feel unfit for either task). I haven’t been ready to share, or known how to, and so have been in a very prolonged early gestation. We say this is Leo rising: its never been done before in this way, she doesn't know how to do it, and doesn’t even try to obtain permission to do it. Add to this, she’s actually pretty shy and self-conscious about doing it at all. She just does it because she must and because she wants to. At best: trail-blazing. At worst: trial by fire. In Shamanic Astrology, we say that the true nature of Leo rising is “the playful 2-year old” – creating anything she desires because she can. A friend once wrote of me that I am “sort of like a woman with her hair on fire. She has no choice but to do what she does with her whole heart and as fast as she can. She is her work, and her work is her growth.” (I think this is part of the answer as to why my hair is so white! (maybe you were wondering;) But the REAL question for any such person as myself is: how do i be a channel that is continually nourished? How can I “do” while “be-ing”?

I can't afford to be so fast anymore. I need to learn to slow down, put out the fire out in my hair, but somehow keep it alive in my heart. Nature creates, and we are part of nature, and so must create. Yet that drive to create can suck the very life out of us, if its not also flowing back into us. Much like a woman making a baby, and then feeding that baby, its easy to become depleted. And being alive and creating life is a kind of long-term lease we have with the Universe. As a wise woman recently shared with me - we pay a price for wisdom, of which white hair and wrinkles are outward metaphors. We pay some of our youth, our innocence, so that we might know eternity and grace. Aging is a blessing. But what these last years have taught me, are teaching me - is that without my own sanity and well-being, without my own continuous prayer which is pleasure, which is rest, then the reason for "making" becomes obsolete. And without nurturing my own healing, what can I offer others? This beauty created outside of me, doesn't need to be. In all honesty, I haven’t mastered how to create my work and feed myself adequately in the process. The way I used to create wasn’t sustainable. I know I can’t do things the old way, but I don’t yet know the new way. Its too easy for me to stay up till 3am writing. And rest is foundational; I’m working on my foundation. My journey to Peru was one in search of soul-body-mind replenishment. As a pre-requisite, I had to relinquish my notions of a “self”, including as a maker, and just be in a long rite of passage. Much of that time wasn’t peaceful; it was often lonely and difficult, but immeasurably precious. Yet while it’s a blessing to have a moment of peace in a remote cave, one has eventually to enter fully back into the world of Samsara and remember what it is to be inside that cave in the middle of the crazyiness.​

So, its been nearly 7 years since I decided I would make ritual + theatre my primary avenues of service and craft. I've broken through, broken-down, burned bright, burnt-out and journied far beyond the edges of my “self”. I used up all the golden fuel of my 20s on a dozen different lifetimes lived in that decade alone, as an anti-establishment rebel with a cause: i.e. lover of Life, Beauty + Resurrection of the human heart, at-tempting solo bicycle tours and generally getting myself in a bunch of unwanted trouble. I don't have any money, awards or fame to show for all this. But I do have some beautiful memories of crafting Beauty out of my own and our shared grief. If so much is dying that’s worth grieving, then I needed to grieve it and create ways for us all to, as well as somehow lift up our hearts in a world that’s often times rather dissapointing and cruel. If we are so separated in this modern compartmentalized world, I needed to feel intimacy with others in that “village” way that only ritual + theatre provide me. If my heart could give birth, it would create art in adoration of the Erotic that refuses to die by capitalism, convention or fear (my own and that of the world.)
 
Now, I'm called once again to create; this time something more size-able than what I've attempted before. And even my Leo Rising is terrified at the thought of it; meaning I don't know if I have what it takes to do this. I seem to have lost the blessing of the care-free-ness of youth and a certain un-daunted-ness by what most people regard as “impossible” or at best “un-realistic”. I've always set out to create something, and trusted (more or less) that somehow it would happen, and it always has. So this must be another test of faith. In moments I doubt my capacity to be a channel for pure magic: like pulling rabbits out of hats and pushing babies out of vaginas. (Because we are talking about metaphoric babies really, not just rabbits.) I mean something that could possibly LAST beyond “me” or my lifetime. For this i will need abundant universal energies made manifest into 3D: i.e. grand hither-to unimagined sums of money + un-paralleled real-time support (and a lot of generous people have helped me over the years, I don’t forget you. And here it is, all over again: hit the refresh button.) I ask myself “Will I listen to the voices of fear and doubt, or will I go the way of faith again, because it’s the only real thing? Do I believe I’m worthy of abundance? Do I believe this creation is worthy of support? Do I believe its simply the future memory of my ancestors coming into form, and therefore, its fruition inevitable?”
 
I don’t feel ready, but like they say, you’re never fully prepared to have a baby. And its been calling me a while now, and I don't want to ignore it or postpone it forever until the moment years from now when I may actually be ready (because in that sense, tomorrow never comes, tomorrow is never promised.) Is this because I'm stubborn or because of destiny + dharma? The more I am alive, the more I get hip to the fact that I’m just an instrument through which my ancestors breath desires to flow. A good instrument though, requires care and re-tuning. My creations are best when I am in full communion. I become me. And who is me? But the ensemble, or the river, or the wind, or the full and empty rooms of a house overflowing with eloquence? 

​photo credit: Janine Strong

​This is my dancing, singing, seasonally-flowering uterus. It’s also my crying, raging, mourning uterus. It holds deep, almost unbearable, ancient pain – memories still surfacing from the wounding within my lineage, and of lives beyond this one – memories of the power to create life and countless births, memories of the losses of life and of countless failed and purposely aborted births, memories of babies taken from me against my will – memories never spoken yet never fully forgotten. Who else will remember these stories? Who else will bear/ liberate this pain? Who else but me remembers the agony of my mother’s uterus during our Cesarean Birth when she was numbed and unconscious? Not my mother who chose the necessity to stay numb. I remember. My womb, my uterus remembers. My uterus re-members itself from the fractured disaporic herstory of my peoples, of our shared peoples. These are the stories I carry. Such stories, we carry. Who else will bear/ liberate this pain than us – wombmen and womb-bearing beings? Who else will unknot the centuries of oppression? Who else will bear forth the future of the human species – to renew Creation again and again through the eye of a needle? Who else will reclaim our powers of creation and death? Who else will choose to dance and sing anyway – even in the face of great ignorance – because we have the privilege and the responsibility to – entrusted to us by generations of women who could not dance or sing at all? The challenges facing us as now are not new, yet we are closer to a Shared Liberation. Let us not forget in these times of Transition, that we are but the next generation in long lines of women and beings who worked to remember and who forgot their own power, and whose powers were repressed or manipulated. We are the ones our ancestors are praying for to wake up – we, the children of lineages seeking to remember our own origins within an inconceivably vast Cosmic Womb. Let us not forget that we are connected inseparably beyond the boundaries of contrived nation-states, in a Womb-Wide Web. That the majority of countries still find it acceptable to regulate the bodies of women: abortions are illegal (or illegal except in extreme situations) in much of the world. Let us not forget that the forces of ignorance are still present, that the last vestiges of a dying order are grasping for power. Yet, let us not forget that they will inevitably lose this false power. And that the only true power is beyond “us” – the Power that created my life, your life, all Life, and that we as womb-bearers are the perennial guardians of this Power within the human species, and that no man-made decree can change this. Let us not forget that the forces of ignorance and fear live within all of us, and that without compassion, liberation is not possible. Today as I bleed, cradled by mountains older than these struggles of our human species over creation and death, I remember that all is not lost. All is not a fight against, but rather a continual Collective Birthing towards Truth. We are the Earth and the Earth will always be victorious. In the words of Starhawk: “We are the rising of the Earth. We are the shifting of the ground. We are the seeds that take root, when we bring the fortress down.”

​http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-where-abortion-is-illegal/

I am learning to love, learning to say yes to love even if it hurts. It’s a lifelong learning of course, and those of us willing to learn to love fully must also be willing to experience much heartbreak and death. Its been a long hard winter and spring for me – as some of you know – and, though convinced as I was that it was the end, love eventually came back – like a boomerang. Love came back in the in the form of a human being – a man, and forced me to work at telling a more Whole Story. Not just my side, but the other’s side, and the larger archetypal stories. This play – Flowers Falling –  has everything to do with women and men – specifically how hard it is for us as women to trust men, and how hard it is for two people to love each other in the context of patriarchy – of hundreds, thousands of years of conditioning – of being taught who our enemy is. I believe that the origin of all war, all domination, exploitation and separation of any kind – finds its origin in patriarchy, in the split between genders and the false hierarchy constructed between them. It often feels almost impossible to me in partnership to “meet in the middle” as a man and woman. How can two his/er-stories so long-estranged from each other once again speak a common language – find coherence, resonance, peace? How do you make love with your enemy? I originally began writing this play from the place of my own heart-broken-ness, and over the months it remained a question: what IS this all about?! In the last couple weeks, the play has taken shape, has morphed, has surprised me and my own ignorance – into becoming a kind of elegy of hope for love and peace in our world. Hope – I don’t use that word lightly  I mean hope in the deepest and most profound dreams of my and our own souls – the longing for love, for peace, for remembrance, for joy. The longing to be fully human again. The longing for an end to the seemingly eternal conflicts, wars, and displacements. The longing to see in the other – whether man or woman or whoever – the beloved, and not the enemy. What began in winter with death, now blossoms in summer as a radical offering of myself. An offering that each day deepens and finds more truth in the words and gestures I’ve chosen to speak.  Words and gestures which I was not even ready to bring forth on opening night. Words which must be spoken though – both for my own healing, and because there’s so much more at stake. Because if I can’t make peace in my inner world, or with my beloved, how can there be peace in our larger world – between communities, nations, women and men? “How can I expect you – America –to make peace with the world, when – just like us – all you’ve ever known since your inception was war?”
 
I’m reminded again of that beautiful song that sings: “I ain’t gonna study war no more.” 
Instead, we study peace, we study love and compassion. But what does that mean really? Justin clarified for me yesterday how when Tibetan Tantric Buddhist traditions speak of “love and compassion”, its the union of the masculine and feminine pathways to liberation that they’re talking about. They’re talking about the same thing my lineage talked about – non-duality and Both/And – and that most all indigenous Nature-centric cultures practiced – the union of opposites, of polarities. We don’t get to peace through more separation. We create peace by seeing the other as a wounded lover, child, being – as wounded and estranged as we ourselves are. “Love and Compassion” is radical revolution, and its not always soft.  Its surely ruthless. Both in this play and in in all of life, flowers are to me the most heroic symbol of love and compassion – the union of both/and. I am learning give up my weapons, my armaments. This play teaches me everyday. This play lives inside me. In that same way, Love teaches me everyday. Love is that benevolent but ruthless force that wants to break me open into being fully human. Compassion is what allows it all to happen.

For two more nights (tonight Monday, and now Tuesday as well) I’m offering up my inner world for friends and strangers to come watch me be a fool for love, be radically vulnerable, be present with my own wounds and ignorance, and commit to my own longing. I invite you to come not only to watch, but to participate – to receive and commit to the same for yourself – for your life, for our shared world, for all the war that’s happening now and that’s been happening. This is ritual theatre: provocative, edgy, gentle, hard, soft, pungent, wild, tender, fierce, strange and familiar all at once. And like summer strawberries, its only alive for a short time.

7pm Sheffield Covered Bridge

​photo by Krysia Kurzyca

​Today I want to tell the story of how and why I began making the kind of theatre I do. My story begins with Jack Kerouac, tantra and hicthhiking alone around the country, and how I went back to India for the first time as a young woman and discovered the multi-colored world of ritual performance. What I found on those travels – and what found me – would change me, and put me on the path I’ve been on ever since.
 
When I was 17 years old, love confused me – much as it still does today – and I found myself restless with a devoted young farmer man, and needing an escape. In high school I had read On the Road, by Kerouac, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins. I was living in Massachusetts after my freshman year at Simon’s Rock. The year was 2000. My closet friends and I imagined ourselves as the newest generation of beatnicks, and Inside my bones, secretly, I wanted to be just like Sissy Hawshank. In the summer of that year, I hitchiked around the country by myself – which was also sort-of an accident (I didn’t have enough money for a train ticket.) What I found as a 17 year-young woman – who didn’t know she was anything close to beautiful or remarkable – was a lot of stares (you can imagine) a lot of attention, from a very white blue collar America (many of whom had never come so close to an Indian woman in the flesh before). I met and made many unlikely friends, including a lot of truckers and a few hippies. Over and over, I was asked about my “Indian-ness” my ancestry (which I had all but tried to erase in the 13 years prior), with questions about “that red dot you wear on your forehead”, about tantric sex, and Hindu goddesses – questions to which I had no answer. Moreover, I ended up with dozens of stories so strange and beautiful and precious, that I felt completely unfit to tell them, unfit to do them justice. All this led me to decide that I needed to return to Kerala – to India – in order to learn how my people told stories. I needed to learn about and reclaim my roots and my language, and I needed to find ways to answer all those awkward, penetrating questions. The following year, I embarked on a 10-month quest dedicated to learning about all the ways my people told stories. Around this same time, I saw my first clown performance at college. It blew my mind and heart wide open, and I knew that there was something there I needed to know and embody: I wanted to become a clown!
 
Armed with an adoration for stories well told, clowns, traveling, and the mysterious and wild origins of my own ancestry, and equally loaded with ignorance, modern arrogance and a complete lack of skill in my own mother tongue, I went back to Kerala. I went back to a place whose language was impenetrable to me, nevermind it had been my first language. For months, I would hear sounds that had no meaning. I would look at the writing on the walls and on the buses, seeing an elaborately curled script that I was sure would never be known to me. I went back home to have my soul completely broken for the first time as a grown woman by the crude and hard ways development hinders the human heart. And would feel profound unbelonging in the one place I wanted more than anywhere else to belong to, while also not being willing to do what It would take to fit in. Everywhere I went, I was stared at. And rightfully so. I didn’t look like anyone else, even though my skin was brown. The world I first entered into was depressingly stale and flat – the world of my relatives. I knew there was more to Kerala – that I had come for – but how would I ever find it?!  I had only one contact into the world of performance to begin with, and that ultimately served me very well because It led to one thing, which then led to opening a door into many many things and people. It took months before those doors opened however, and when they did, I ran straight through them.
 
In 2001, televisions and electricity were still reaching the most rural parts of Kerala. There were no cell phones. But even then, the television was fast replacing the the role storytelling and performances once served. (Why spend 21 nights watching an archaically slow re-telling of the Ramayana, when you could watch it from the comfort of your own home on the T.V. with a lot more glitz and glamor?) But back then, one could still walk through paddy fields in the pitch dark without any light to find some ancient Devi (Goddess) temple where there was an all-night long ritual. One could still find a Kavu (sacred forest grove). One could still see an ancient snake ritual in tact. One could still find real magic, there were still performers who carried a spark of something beyond our comprehension. They performed for the Goddess in earnest, not just for show. I’ve been lucky enough to see the old ritual dramatic forms of Kerala before this present time when they’ve been bankrupted by modernity, florescent lights, loudspeakers, cell phones, and alcohol.
 
I – who had grown up with television as practically a surrogate mother, who learned English by watching cartoons and forgot Malayalam by the same – was now exposed to nearly ever kind of ritual drama/ storytelling form we had in Kerala at the time, of which there are over a dozen major ones (and hundreds of variations within them.) I was graciously let into the homes and lives of many elders who loved the arts, and many performers whose families had been dedicated to their art-forms for uncountable generations. I want to take this moment to thank especially Venuji and all the work he has done within his lifetime to save the last vestiges of the dying arts – Kudiyattam in particular – and to his wife and my teacher Nirmalaji, and to the Tolpavakoothu artists – Ramakrishnan and Lakshmanan, and to the Mudiyettu family – Murali and all, to the Padayani troupe in Kadamanita in the homeland of my father’s people and the late Vasudevan Pillai, to Rajagopalan for showing me my first Serpumthullals, I bow to the dozens of Theyyams I watched and give thanks to Jayaraj to who helped me see many of them, and to the late Kathakali master Ramakrishnan Ashan – the last of his kind, and his wife Narayanikutty who welcomed me and helped me begin my oddesy from the start. I also want to thank the late playwright and director Kavalam Naryana Pannikar, who saw in me what I did not yet see, and who like a mischievous wizard, pushed me onto the stage to dance in my utter embarrassment. Thank you. There are yet many more to be thanked (but names are no longer remembered). All these experiences over many months, showed me like layered ancient tapestries, what was stored in my lineage, and that the way my people told stories and transmitted magic and consciousness was still in tact.
 
Even after this journey, I came home to the U.S. with a greater love for stories and for ritual and my roots, but I didn’t imagine I would be making theatre. I did learn, slowly, how to be a clown. And I became more immersed into the performing arts, but not deliberately. Originally, in college (and still now) I became involved in “theatre” because of the things we did before we ever got on stage. These practices of exploring the body, mind, and nature of being were as close as I had to shaman tools. Indeed they are shaman tools (if properly understood and used), and the ritual traditions of Kerala, the archetype of the clown, and my own yearnings to liberate myself, brought me into the theatre through the back door so-to-say. I never wanted to be on stage. Never intended to direct. I was a shy awkward girl, and am still an introvert. Yet, some other part of my nature – along with forces beyond me – propelled me outward into cycling journeys and spotlights.
 
18 years later, my major inspiration and need to make theatre still comes from my roots in Kerala, and from my own lack of rooting. (Of course I’ve also been inspired and encouraged by modern artists who have deep vision like Lecoq and Pina Bausch, the legacy of Butoh, and many others, but my taproot is still the Indian theatre). Yet because the underlying context and intention of these ancient traditions (as well as my own work) is so different from that of the modern Western theatre, I often feel like an outsider artist. The former was born slowly like crystals over hundreds and thousands of years through intricate relationships between specific communities and tribes to their places and ecologies, while the latter is born of a disparate and displaced peoples disconnected from community, from place, and most certainly from Nature. Perhaps the most important distinction - ritual theatre revolves around the sacred.
 
The ritual dramatic traditions of my homeland were elaborate art-sciences of life-renewal and meaning-making – ways of re-membering the human being, the community and the village. Ritual performances were “whole works of art” that simultaneously and ingeniously incorporated dance, theatre, storytelling, music, and visual art. They constantly broke “the third wall” through their immediacy and intimacy which connected not only audience and performer, but the audience itself as one teeming mass of human aliveness. The ancient theatres were the original avante-gaurde. They were always based in the context of a community and the village and were “site-specific” – happening in temples, sacred groves and near agricultural fields – and on specific lunar and astrological dates throughout the performance season. As such, these performances served as annual communal rite of passages – not for individuals – but for a whole family, a community or village. And more than most theatre of our modern and Western realities, they possessed the rare and un-replicable ingredient of Soul. But such magic and liminality didn’t just serve the purpose of “entertainment” as most modern theatre does. It was the way a family, a people, an entire bio-region, stayed knit together – and not just for themselves, but for the welfare of their shared Ecology – the Devi, mother Earth. It was the way consciousness grew over time within each individual, because the stories told had within them the Big Picture, the larger blueprint. All of this I would come to understand in time, but the seeds were planted way back then by patient ritual performers and elders who explained what they could to me until those same seeds could take root within my own mind and heart, and body. In the Indian traditions, we say that the “form” of tradition holds within it the keys to consciousness. While I’m no master at any one form and was never immersed long within a guru-shishya relationship, I nevertheless feel blessed to have received transmission in a less direct way; I imbibed magic and storytelling wherever I could like a hungry orphan who was always asking, “Are you my mother?” After all, its those who were once orphaned who know most deeply the gift of family, the gift of art, the gift of place, and the longing to belong.
 
So, for the past 7 years I’ve dedicated my forces to creating “new ritual theatre” dedicated to place (often outdoors and usually never on a conventional “stage”) that speaks of Nature and our sacred relationship to it, that speaks of an essential erotic-ness of life, and of the politics of human delusions, industrial culture, capitalism, war and displacement, about women and men and love and grief, loss and renewal. Ritual and theatre have been the only ways I’ve experienced real authentic community, and that’s why I’ve continued to create and offer them – its kept my soul afloat and fed. Its also taxed me a lot on all levels, but I guess that’s the way it goes. I was never taught so much. Made it up as I went along with all the blunders and foibles of a young person- arrogance, fear, insecurity and exhaustion. I’ve made tons of mistakes, failed greatly, learned humility, contributed some good remembrances within my community, and succeeded at “making beauty out of my grief”.
 
Being in India again last year, the message was so clear to me, that things are ending there – the old ways, the old cultures are almost extinct. My once-wild jungle homeland is mostly covered over with concrete, even the snake groves, the Goddess groves. My people are numbed-out and lost. My heart grieves for us, even as they continue to feel nothing while the water turns blacker by the day and drought approaches massive proportions. So, here I am: holding a small heirloom seed, a spark, of that original wholesomeness, that magic – and my privilege and responsibility to my ancestors and to the future generations is to continue to nourish and cultivate that here – in this new old world – to craft new medicine and new ritual, to offer beauty and remembrance as I have been, in this strange dispossessed land of America, a place whose people have little roots and no ritual, their Soul substituted wholesale for stuff you can buy at the Dollar Store.
 
Often these days, I also wonder whether there’s any point to creating theatre/ sacred art/ ritual, without a village to honor it. Is it true that perhaps much of my work goes to ears and eyes who can’t hear or see it fully, can’t comprehend, can’t necessarily even feel because it may be too intimate, too real, and too threatening? Because the story I’m telling requires of them to sacrifice artificiality and the false safety of “first-world” numbness. And in the West, the world of theatre, just like the world of “art” in general, (aside from renegade theatres like Bread and Puppet and the like) is one that’s celebrated and reified the more its disconnected from Nature, place and community. The more packaged and glossy, the better its considered to be. The work I create doesn’t fit into the construct of the Western theatre – it doesn’t come from the same aesthetic and affect of disconnection or of the “whiteness” that sells, it can’t necessarily be contained within a building, and is not necessarily reliant on technology or the hyper-post-modern deconstruction of everything. And after it all, I am not white. In the end it is that very browness and “Indian-ness” which sets me apart form America, and which sets America apart from me. While all of this can feel lonely, its also a blessing. It’s a blessing to known one’s roots, to be proud of them, and to come from a place and a people who revered a well told story – through the language of the body and voice. In the end, the theatre I make adores love, and stories and the simplicity of human being in relationship to place.
 
So for now I continue making the art I do, driven like a woman with her hair on fire, to save my own sanity in this lost world, and for my own healing, and also for the memory of my ancestors, as an ambassador of heirloom seeds that may soon no longer be so viable back home. My path has surprised me, and looking back the entire story makes so much sense- is so perfectly choreographed, to make me into who I am.
 
Ironically, my next play talks about tantra (among other things like war and peace), seeking to answer some of the questions posed to me when I was 17!
If you want to support this kind of new old world theatre, if you want to support a brown-skinned woman creating original performance in America, and If you want to support grassroots over gloss, then I invite you to come see my next play. I took a hiatus last season, and now I’m back, with something simple, something brave, and hopefully elegant and nourishing, offered up from my soul to yours and Ours.
 
Flowers Falling From My Mouth
Sheffield Covered Bridge, Sheffield MA
Solstice weekend, June 21.22.23.24.   7pm
All shows $20 suggested donation
 
Pls no children, no dogs
(you’re welcome to bring a blanket or chair.)
(The show will go on as long as its not raining at 7!)

Ever since I was a very little girl in Kerala, I’ve been searching for moss. Looking in the cracks in the sidewalk where they paved over the jungle that was our home before home was a concrete box. These fragments of Nature would continue to keep me alive through the plastic-coated, sugar-induced nightmare of suburban American life until I was about 17, when I would enter my first real forest in the Berkshires. (It would also be the first time I would encounter a patch of moss bigger than 2x2”.) I knew then, as I know now, that I belong where the moss grows on rocks. But its still the cracks in the sidewalk – whether in NYC or Delhi – bravely bursting with a fledgling banyan tree or other devout “weed”, that’ve taught me the resiliency of Nature amidst of all the chaos and destruction we humans have set our effort too. Nature as reflection of my own and our own perennial natures – that which can’t be destroyed, no matter how overwhelming the assault against its wildness.
 
More than anything else, its these weeds that’ve taught me Faith at times when I almost lost it completely – wrecked in the despair of the reeking, black, plastic-choked waters of my homeland where once there had been alive, green and flowing water. Now waters of death sit everywhere, while the water people drink comes from plastic bottles. Like so much of the world, its the same everywhere. But my whole life has been spent in search of these cracks into an untamable wisdom, and of my own lineage – which despite the thousands of years of Christianity, Brahmanism, war-culture, and the more recent British colonialism, capitalism and Marxism – can still be found, although less and less readily.
 
This assault against our senses – our natural sensibility – is everywhere humans are. It’s the daily message we get from T.V., magazines, billboards and social media – that what’s pre-packaged, exotic, expensive and sleek is more satisfying than what’s raw, immediate, free and natural. Picture the pristine forested mountains of some far-away place in a travel magazine… we’re told that this is this place where we’ll finally feel wonder, ease, joy… if go there on vacation. When we return from these exalted other worlds to our normal lives, we’re convinced its back to a tame life. (Ironically these romanticized distant places suffer from the same assault against wildness that’s everywhere else. Just on the other side of those forested hills are desertified ones, or the ever-growing urban sprawl of development/ “advancement”.) Tragically, what’s beautiful and wild is always somewhere else in the imagination of the modern, civilized human being.
 
Its exactly this that separates us from the wildness inherent everywhere, everyplace – taking the wild out of Nature, and the wild out of us. Instead of going far away to search for something pristine and natural – a continuation of the colonial mindset – its here (wherever we are) that we need to look for and en-courage the wild. If we don’t, then we lose the wild here, and we loose it far away from us as well. Because the destruction of the wild everyplace (especially far away from those with more privilege) is the requisite cost of maintaining the tame modern lifestyles we have. Your comfort here equals black water back in my homeland.
 
What’s at stake within the wild around us – evidenced as the moss that grows invincibly through the sidewalk cracks, or the dandelions on your lawn – isn’t just Nature, its our own soul. Its our original memory of why we’re here – what it means to be human beings that are a part of this planet as opposed to apart from it. Soul is that quality of inherent beauty, intelligence, at-homeness, naturalness and uniqueness. We’ve got to look for that wildness, become really dedicated to appreciating it in the most unlikely places – to become lovers of the wild, devotees of the wild, wherever we are. And its this same quality we’ll also be stalking within ourselves and with others. We’ll be looking for people whose souls haven’t been manipulated into conformity, noticing how they’re twisted in the most beautiful way like the banyan trees that grow out of the sidewalk cracks. Because its not the idealizing of a “Pristine Nature” while we continue to live tame, commodified and sedentary lives that’s going help us survive as a human people, its our dedication to adoring and nurturing the wild within us and outside of us, so that it can do what’s its been doing for millions of years, and come back in full force. Take over more of our concrete and turn it back into the jungle it once was. Take over the colonized, mono-culture, mass-produced sameness of our minds, with its verdant, ever-evolving resilience.
 
Imagine a culture, a world, where we revere what’s wild instead of what’s tame. And where what’s wild isn’t just in Nature, but is also inside us and among us. So that moss might once again carpet this Earth. And so that we could remember that we belong to this Place, (and not the other way around), and that what’s alive, and free and right here, is infinitely more satisfying than anything else could ever be. Those green and sentient rebels growing out of concrete the world over – let them be our heroes, our anthem of resistance, and of hope. 

 ​I want to honor today all the women and feminine beings who don’t have children of their own, or who want to, or who are caregivers to other children not born by them, as well as to all those who in one way or another mother others. I offer these flowers to you sistren. Mother’s Day is not easy for many of us. And the sight of other people’s babies and families on facebook can be triggering for those of us who don’t have children, or cannot have children. I offer these flowers again for all of you for whom this day is not easy. May it be soft with you today, with us.
 
Over the four years that I was a step-mother, (yet unacknowledged as such) I never received a single handmade card or flower. I struggled with that role, being as young as I was then, and also with what it meant to let two beings so deeply into my soul. Even now, (although I have no contact with them) I think of them all the time. I think of those 3 and 6 year-old boys when I first met them – the smell of their little boy heads, the messes they made, nighttime readings, walks in the woods, making food for them – learning slowly how to be a woman who could nurture little people. How shockingly different – and often hard, boringly grown-up, frustrating, and baffling – it was to be in a parent role as opposed to the ever-fun, eccentric, older friend or aunty who visits. They were not my kids, and yet they were my family. And it wasn’t until then that I could have any real compassion or empathy for the  failures and struggles of my own mother.
 
So today I also want to claim my own motherhood – that I have been a mother, am a mother, and will yet be a mother. I offer these flowers today to myself and to my own journey of mothering. Of having learned to fail as a parent of two children, and still wanting to learn. Of mothering my actors and ritual participants over these last 7 years – like a mama hen (who sometimes unwittingly tramples her many chicks!) Of wanting to be a mother some day for my own little one. I’ve struggled so much over whether I could ever be a mother to another – whether I could have what it takes to make that kind of eternal sacrifice – to be always living “with your heart running around outside of your chest.” But I want that – perhaps more than anything else – to be part of and to bear witness to what I feel is the coolest thing I could ever do as a wombman.
 
Although we can never feel fully “ready” for what lessons motherhood brings, many of us who have not yet had children of our own are cultivating ourselves to be fertile ground for a small person to take root in, doing the work of healing our inheritance. I honor these fellow wombmyn of my generation who are consciously choosing to ripen a readiness for mothering that our foremothers could never even have considered. I honor that’s its not an easy path for us. We are cleansing the lineage lines, we are saying no to patriarchy, no to our own self-doubt – so that our children won’t have to do this work, so that our children could be free and know that they are loved. Some of us are also waiting for a good man or partner to show up to create that child with (and wondering if they ever will). Some of us – for whatever reasons – had wanted to mother children and never were able to, and still bear that grief. I pray that we all find ways to gift our mothering with others who need it and can receive it. Some of us don’t know whether we would be good mothers, and are still healing from our own mothers’ lack of mothering. So many of us are just learning how to mother ourselves. And still others of us are not mothers’ to children (sometimes by choice), but instead create and offer forth so much beauty, wisdom and compassion to our world. To all these wombmyn, I offer you these flowers. Each of us was once a seed – carried like a dream, like a prayer, in the womb of our grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmothers’ womb…may we be fertile ground for the beautiful creations this world needs, and for the seeds that might one day sprout into the free-spirited children who will belong once again to the Earth, just as these flowers do.
 
I hope one day to have a little being that calls me her mother, “amma”. I pray for all those who want to be mothers to others, to have the opportunity to do that in a good way, in a supported way, in a fruitful way. The world needs more good mothers, more good fathers, good parents, happy healthy children. Just like these flowers – all of Life is always trying to re-birth itself. I offer these flowers then, to all the wombs of all the wombmyn who have been fertile ground for a being to take root in, and for all who – in some way or another – allow others to feel loved, seen and safe. May we take rest in our own inner mothering and that of the Shakti Consciousness that holds all beings in its unconditional embrace. 

​I grew up fighting my Dad most of my life, from the age of 6. I grew up a fighter – hardcore, never backing down – trying to protect both myself and my mother from my father’s broken rage. Disarmament didn’t feel like an option. Being an otherwise soft-spoken person throughout my life, I fought mainly with the men who were closest to me. And just as it was with my Dad – it always felt like a fight for my life. I used to tell my intimate partners: “Don’t fight me because you’ll never win. Don’t fight me because I’ll never stop fighting you.” It was true. And until recently, I still believed I’d always be a fighter, and that there’d always be someone to fight. But in these last couple months, it became unarguably clear to me that the fight outside and the fight inside are linked, and that there can be no peace outside if I’m still at war on the inside. Not that the fighter has died- the fighter in me is still alive and well convinced there's definitely something to defend.
 
I’ve had to face just how much I’ve been at war with my own self, at a perpetual war inside myself – just like our world that’s always at war with itself. My heart has been both a punching bag and a boxing glove. Inside me, there is both the oppressor and the oppressed. I don’t mean this in an abstract, metaphorical way, but in a very real, even physical way. The entire left side of my body, (what I think of as my feminine side) is clenched in protection. I’m aware of this clenching, just as I’m aware that half the world, (if not more) lives a clenched life. The right side is tight too. Underneath most hearts there is fear… a fear of being oppressed, from the memory of once having been so. To “disarm” oneself is not a simple thing. Unwinding this pain, this grief – can take a long time, and I don’t think we can force trust or surrender, on any side.
 
Several years ago now, I became aware of an angry male voice inside my head. It sounded like the voice of my father combined with the voice of some belligerent guy from a Hollywood movie –telling me how stupid I was, or how stupid other people were. I’ve come to think of him as the quintessential voice of Patriarchy, inside me. This same voice had been in me all along, all through my life –  telling me I was stupid, and I had been believing it. And its only been recently that I’ve been able to stand up to it and say: “No. that’s not true! I am not stupid!” Even though its been profoundly difficult, its helped me see just how much I’d internalized this voice since my childhood. When I was in India last year, it came up a lot and through me – as irritation with people in general, as angst about the way things were. And at a deeper level, I realized that this voice was really heartbroken and felt powerless about all the chaos around him, and the only expression it knew was aggression. Over the course of those many grueling months, I came to know my inner oppressor through an intimacy that no longer allowed me to judge the despicable in another person the same way I had. What’s “out there” is also “in here” inside me. Hatred, jealousy, revenge, aversion, restlessness, all of that – what we label as “negative emotions”. Coming back to America – a land with Trump as its mascot – felt fitting. In India, we had our own equivalent in Modi. It’s a shadow we can’t seem to escape – the archetypal “bad guy”, the big villain… who’s up to no good just because. But, the voice of the Patriarchy inside me – and inside all of us – is so hostile and aggressive precisely because he’s never felt truly at home anywhere. Just like my Dad. I try to say to him now, this angry voice when it tries to yell at me: “I see you.”
 
The rage that runs through my father’s line and into me, carries with it the untold stories of centuries of grief and war. Long before the British, and before even Christianity, my homeland had been divided and claimed by a medieval war-culture – a history that my people have both romanticized and hidden. Ultimately, war is still war, no matter its elegance. Some years back, I encountered my own old-school inner warrior: an ancient Kalari warrior from Kerala, heavy with his metal, thick set and broody. He’s been in my life – also since I was a child – to protect me from harm; perhaps he’s been with me much longer than that. But the warrior in me is tired. He wants to put his weapons down and just walk into a field somewhere and lie down on the grass. Just like him, I’ve been “up in arms” most of my life, always on the alert. And I don’t want to be a fighter anymore.
 
The healing of all this – this fighting, this aggression, this constant defense and offense – is up to me, within me. Only I can liberate this for myself. “Please don’t fight me, because I won’t entertain a fight anymore.” I ain’t gonna study war no more… Because I’m exhausted. And because the world needs ahimsa, non-harming. The world needs peace. And peace begins inside of me. I’m putting my weapons down – in a world that’s full of pre-emptive war, guns, violence on all sides. I’m disarming in a world where its not safe to. 
 
Our collective culture so often thinks of “the fight” as something heroic. We laud that all heroes have to fight their inner demons. “Fight the good fight” they say. I really don’t know that there is a good fight. In American history, there’s the myth of the “good war”. World War II for example they say, was a good war, a just war. I don’t believe there’s ever been a good or just war. I think, if we have to fight, its already a bad situation. Martin Prechtel writes about how humanity is in so much confusion because we’ve had so many wars for so long, and we’ve never grieved them. The grief and anger just build generation upon generation, making America a nation of warriors endlessly avenging their ancestors’ grief.
 
I don’t believe anger is a “bad” emotion. I believe anger both necessary and sacred, and that it can be used as a tool and catalyst for positive change if channeled well. I also believe that there are times when we do have to push back, and I stand in solidarity with all those noble guerrilla warriors in our world who have to defend their families against aggressors – like the pink-saried Gulabi Gang in Bihar for example – women who took up sticks against their own drunken husbands after being beaten by them for years. There is a place for the most radical kind direct action, so that the rest of us can protest without weapons. Sometimes rebellion means you have to fight. But I also believe that whenever we can stand in presence without fighting back, its preferable. So, then how do we create peace? How do i lay my weapons down?
 
So often, one side wants peace, but the other side may not be ready for peace. Or perhaps both sides “want peace” but the way forward isn’t clear. Because after all, how do you trust that peace is even possible? Can you ever trust it, or is it just that you become brave? Einstein, who was a proponent of full disarmament after he saw what harm his brilliance had enabled (the making of the world’s first atom bomb) said that the only way to have peace between nations is if one is willing to believe – willing to trust – fully that the other also wants peace. If on the other hand, one is holding onto any doubt that the other doesn’t want peace, then it becomes impossible to have true peace! Being willing to trust is a very brave thing. And to be honest, its not a skill I possess, having been taught through experience to never trust “the enemy”.
 
This is acutely evidenced in my most intimate relationships inside which I have to ask myself: How can I have peace if there is fear of being hurt, violated, betrayed again…on both sides? How do I encourage trust within myself and let go of fear? Surrendering some amount of fear seems foundational for being able to disarm oneself. And by the same token, wanting peace must be reflected in action, not just in sentiment. If you’re telling me: “I want peace not war,” but you’re stepping on my toe the whole time, then its not in fact true that you want peace. If we want peace, then we also need to acknowledge and step back from behaviors that cause harm, and make reparations for them. To repair what’s been broken requires we admit that its been broken in the first place – not by accident – but through our own actions and ignorance. Sometimes in walking toward shared peace, we face seemingly insurmountable blocks and hazards. Yet peace isn’t just something that’s on the other side like a reward; its the quality that permeates the entire journey. We need to choose peace at the start, not at the end if it works in our favor. We need to choose peace now, no matter the outcome.
 
There’s been a lot of debate lately over restricting gun access, but I don’t ever think the conversation goes far enough. Yes, by all means – let’s not guns have in schools, and let’s do the practical legislation – but let’s please not stop there. Let’s call for a moratorium not only on guns, but on all weapons, and on war itself. Its not the weapons ultimately that are to blame so much as the culture of endemic violence that we all live within, a culture of Patriarchy and domination – one that will ensure there will always be weapons to avenge its fear. I don’t care if you say I’m not being “realistic”, because an armed world is also not realistic for our survival as a human species. This means we have to question the fundamental narrative of armament, of war, of fighting. Why is owning a gun equated with freedom? Why does a citizenry need weapons to protect itself from the State, and why does a State get to have weapons to control its citizenry? Why is a stockpile of nuclear arsenal a prerequisite to safety or to “peace”? Can peace ever come through war? I can only call for total disarmament, just like Einstein and the original makers of the atom bomb came to do. I believe that only the total disarmament of all peoples, of all countries, will bring peace. But peace starts with us. It starts with the biggest arms dealer in the world: America. It starts with you. And with me. Inside. It starts with how we treat each other. With how we treat our selves.
 
We can’t fight our inner oppressor. Its not that we get beat up by him either. Its that we choose a third way. This means I can’t fight the oppressor outside anymore either – whether that’s Patriarchy or gun culture, or the neo-liberal machine – just like I can’t fight the men I’ve loved hoping to convince him of my truth. We can’t force anyone to give up their guns anymore than we can force a peace. So I’m choosing that third way. This third way I call “Ruthless Compassion”, and its got its own tools – a barrage of eloquence (well-channeled anger), the poetry of grief, the unrelenting fierceness of mothers who’ve lost their children, flowers – to name a few. Its to be both audible and disarmed in a culture – in a nation, in a world – that’s deeply fissured and armed to the hilt. Its to stand up to the face of all those Americans who want their guns in order to uphold their second amendment rights, and to the entire military industrial complex of billions of annual dollars of armament, to stand up to this and every other government who arms not only its military but also all the counter-militaries, by saying simply in a way that entertains no argument: “I see you. We’ve had Enough. The Earth and its people demand Peace.” Its also being willing to “point the finger” inside at our own unhealed wounds, grief and rage and commit to their healing. Ruthless Compassion means we stand for justice without our weapons – for our own brokenness, and for all those who’ve died fighting in the endless wars, for all the men, women and children who’ve been killed, maimed or displaced through them or through violence, for all the infinitude of broken hearts, and for all the scarred places of our Earth pockmarked with the shrapnel of our heroic indulgence.
 
People still think of the hippies of the 60’s as being naïve, but they were really onto the truth back then. When that young man stood there placing a flower in the loaded rifle of that soldier – I wonder if he felt brave or if he felt trusting? Either way, he knew what he was risking, and what he was saying:
 
“I offer you this flower – dear soldier, my old arch enemy– in hopes you will take it and put down your weapon. I offer you this flower – my inner warrior – that you might quiet your endless yelling and fighting.  I offer you this flower – all the tanks and nuclear arsenals in America, in Vietnam, Russia, India, Israel, around the world – because the world so deeply needs peace, not more war.”