This is a true experience I had when I was volunteering at the Krishna Village in Murwillumbah, NSW, Australia. At the Village, I was attending a yoga class every day and wanted to return in time for restorative yoga. For some reason, the time on my phone's clock was glitching and only reset once I left the river area. It was a lovely, strange experience. When I returned to the river again after leaving for yoga, Ticker was no longer there. I began to cry and started frantically walking up a dirt road looking for her. I didn't find her but did find a peacock. 

I was volunteering at the Krishna Village in Murwillumbah, NSW, Australia. I learned so much there and attended a yoga class every day. For once in my life, I could just exist without feeling the pressure to be working towards something. For the first few weeks this was great, my body and nervous system needed the rest. Then I began to feel as though I had no passions in life. I knew I loved writing but I had gotten into the habit of only writing when I was inspired and no inspiration was coming. I had just seen a video of a Lana Del Rey poem and one of the lines said something about writing at the same time every day so inspiration knows where to find you. I realized that as a writer, I didn't do enough of the "writing just to write" practice. One day, I was working on building a bamboo shed with Runnadeer, one of the Krishna devotees, and we were discussing spirituality in the garden when we realized that soul and soil were similar words!

This poem references the Hanged Man tarot card. In the Rider tarot deck, this card depicts a man dangling head down from a wooden post, tied up by one leg while the other leg is bent behind, forming a figure 4. He has a halo of golden light around his head. I wrote this poem on the day that I decided to clean out my car. I was doing my laundry after taking a shower so my hair was wrapped in a towel turban and I was standing in tree pose knocking the sand out of my boot into a trash can. I was struck by how much I resembled the Hanged Man. For me, it's a constant balancing act between being a spiritual being living in my own world of signs and synchronicities and being a human living in physical reality. That day I realized I had been living so much in my spiritual world that I had been neglecting my physical, and I wrote this poem about it. 

A note for clarity: dowsing rods which are most widely used in the practice of locating underground water, can also be used as tools for contacting spirits. One can use them to communicate with spirits by holding rods in both hands and asking yes or no questions. The rods will turn inwards toward each other or outwards away from each other to answer the seeker’s questions. 

At this stage of my journey, my victimhood mindset had crept back in and I was wallowing, thinking everything was against me. But I had also learned that this negative mindset was my fault and I had to break out of it. This day marks a transitional period in my spiritual journey where my rational mind wanted to stay in my old "woe is me" programming but my intuition had been training me all this time to regulate my thoughts and emotions. 

This is a true story that took place one evening by the river in Mullumbimby, NSW, Australia. 

In Christianity, Mary Magdalene has been portrayed as a devout follower of Jesus and was misidentified as a prostitute by a pope in 591AD, he had conflated her with a "sinful woman" described in Luke's gospel. In Gnostic texts, she is depicted as Jesus' confidante who received more in depth esoteric knowledge from him than his other disciples did, much to the chagrin of the male disciples. She played an important role as a transmitter of esoteric knowledge and embodied the divine feminine archetype, which of course challenged the patriarchal structure of Christianity. 

I had read part of “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan, admittedly not the whole thing because it was quite long, and decided that I did not care what people thought of me anymore. I do not care if people think my art, opinions, or ideas are eccentric or strange or “concerning.” Everything in this world is made up anyway. 

A cowboy friend of mine spoke of a cafe/bookstore called Hemlocks in Woodburn, NSW, Australia. He used to work there and said the locals would come in to commune with each other and philosophize with the baristas. I’m in the interest of taking on any side quest these days so I made the trek down to Hemlocks. I ended up chatting with a Woodburn local named Darin who had lost his home to the floods in the area. He told me of the town’s experience with fires, covid, and flooding in that order. I told him that where I had lived in California experienced that same string of hardships during the same time. We talked for 2 hours or so and he ended up inviting me to a poetry gathering at his friend’s house where I performed this poem. 

An ode to the deep feeling, vulnerable women who put their voices out there in the world. 

I had gone to Ecuador a few days before my group trip to the Galapagos Islands started so I could get a lay of the land. I ended up being mugged in Quito and getting my phone and some bank cards stolen. I made a friend, another American girl named Olivia, and she leant me $100. Determined not to let the experience bring me down, I spent $50 on an excursion to Quilotoa, a giant crater lake. Part of the excursion involved visiting an indigenous family’s home in the Andes mountains en route to Quilotoa. I remember making sure to bring my notebook so I could document my experience since I didn’t have a phone to take photos. 

A true recount of events in Hanoi, Vietnam. 

I visited the “art island” of Japan, Naoshima. It was off-season I suppose, so hardly any of the numerous restaurants on the island were open. I had found Tee’s Deli on Google Maps but when I arrived the restaurant was boarded up. Tee himself was outside sweeping and I inquired if he was open. In broken English he told me something about the steep price of rice these days and how it was not financially worth it for his deli to be open at this time. We got to talking and the rest is documented in the story above. 

I visited Italy in the winter and was taken with Italy itself and the Italians’ use of the word “prego” which has many meanings. 

I wanted to get out of Rome and go to the beach. I ventured to Ostia, a coastal town near Rome not known for anything particularly, except for a statue of Neptune on a rocky pier. 

I went to the Galapagos Islands and rode on many speed boats. 

This is a true story. Usually when I take a psychedelic, I write about my experience after the fact, but with this one, I’m pretty sure I wrote the whole thing on the plane during the acid trip. Observing, eavesdropping, and furtively scribbling every thought down in my notebook. I was flying from San Jose back to Baltimore to visit my family for Christmas and had a layover in Houston. I remember I was too anxious to try to smuggle an acid tab past airport security so I took it during my Uber ride to the airport, hoping it would kick in right as I boarded the flight, and lo and behold, it did. 

I want to take a moment to apologize to my parents, who I know will read this. I don’t actually think your marriage has no loving spark, I know how much you care for each other and I now see that love and partnership is a lot more nuanced than I perceived at age 20-24(?) when I wrote this. 

I had the day off work so I decided to visit my favorite cemetery with the intention of doing some writing. I noticed a homeless person’s tent set up in the northernmost part of the cemetery. All was silent for an hour or so, but then I heard a man’s voice coming from the tent, he was yelling “Day one! Call the police, it's only day one! Day one! Day one!” He kept repeating “Day one” over and over and I thought, I need to incorporate this into my poem. I’ve always had a soft spot for the people at the fringes of society, especially the ones that seem to be shouting nonsense to no one in particular on the streets. I think they’re tapped into a reality that likely exists somewhere on some other plane of consciousness, that people living in the mainstream reality don’t perceive. Thus, these people are further isolated from the general public and from public spaces.

I saw a bee drowning in the river right in front of me.

This is another true story. I took magic mushrooms at Babinda Boulders, a public recreation area in northern Queensland. The Indigenous Yidinji people called the area Bunna Binda, meaning "water over your shoulder.” It’s a gorgeous natural formation that, in my opinion, has been slightly sullied by the amount of chainlink safety infrastructure that has been erected around it. During this period of my spiritual journey, I was emerging out of my victimhood mindset and coming to the realization that the universe was never “against me,” rather it is me and is with me at all times. Ever since I wrote this, every time I see a plant on one side of a pathway bending toward the other side, I always look to the other side to find its mirrored bending counterpart. I think of this as my way of communicating with the universe, and its assurance that it’s always with me. 

Part 2 is so out there that I feared I would never have a chance to share it. I’ve read Babinda Boulders Part 1 in a poetry circle and a poetry reading but never had the guts to read Part 2. Maybe it’s not that I didn’t have the guts, it’s likely more so that I didn’t have the time and space to explain the backstory and the references so that people could understand it. This is also a true story, from the same magic mushrooms trip as Part 1. 
I genuinely thought I was turning into a fish. It was the psychedelic ego death I often experience where I “forget” I am a person and forget that I was ever separate from the universal source…but Fish Version. I had sensations of breathing through my skin, of feeling like I was wearing a human suit. 
To this day, I am still not convinced that I am not simply wearing a human suit. 

I’ve been writing this piece since late high school? I think? I would edit it once a year while I was in college. Looking back on my adolescence I think I was 1. depressed and 2. perpetually concerned with the bigger picture of the universe and committed to piecing it together for myself. Fortunately since then, the depressed part has changed. I hadn’t read this passage in so long and editing it now, I see that I reflect on the same concepts and come to many of the same conclusions. This work is definitely darker, less hopeful, more entrenched in shame, which was a reflection of this shadow aspect of myself. I had this tendency to fall into shame and victimhood, feeling the burden of humanity and the Earth on my shoulders as a young child as early as 9 or 10. Now, I see the human experience as more of a game with predetermined check points. I’ve developed a more light hearted outlook on existence that is reflected in my current work. 

I wrote this song about my brother who was going through a bout with psychosis. 

It was my time of the month.

I volunteered at the Krishna Village in Murwillumbah, NSW, and was singing one evening in one of the empty yoga studios. A retreat guest named Michael popped his head in the door and asked if he could jam with me. It turned out he was a music producer. He invited me to his home studio in the Sunshine Coast to record original songs free of cost. Butterfly is the second song I wrote and recorded with Michael. I wrote the lyrics and provided the vocals and musical direction while he put together the instrumental and handled all the software and technical aspects. Truly a yin and yang collaboration. I have the audio files of this song but I’ve never done anything with them because I didn’t like how my voice sounded recorded. 
 

A poem about my early life. 

I wrote this poem for the Manor Mill Fairy Trail. I was traveling Australia at the time when my dad emailed me saying he wanted to collaborate with me on an installation for the Fairy Trail. I would provide a poem and he would create a sculpture that reflected the poem. I believe he ended up making a jelly-fish looking creation. The installation can be found along the trail. 

I wrote this during my road trip across the U.S. when I was ruminating on the concept of travel. As I was driving many hours on the interstate highway, passing wooded hill after hill, I was confronted with the thought that if I kept traveling, I would eventually run out of new experiences and everything would start to blend together. The old adage of, you’ve seen one mountain, you’ve seen ‘em all. I learned the lesson of presence and learned to focus on the novelty of the overall experience rather than the similarities of physical landscapes. After all, I can see one crater lake that looks like another I've seen before but I am a different person observing each. I learned to visit what Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Author of Women Who Run With the Wolves) refers to as the barren spaces of my psyche and to spread love there.