All My Relations, Hallelujah! The world is awakening to the complex interdependence of all forms of life, including the microbiome. According to Carl Zimmer in his NY Times article "Scientists Urge National Initiative on Microbiomes,1" arrogant humans report their fascination to discover ways to "control" and "manipulate" these microbiomes - pursuing policies of unrestrained colonialism in extremis. Human destruction of the delicate balance of life on this planet, and burgeoning awareness of the importance of the microbiome, begs the question, "How can I help?" On this day, I call for a global moratorium on building and industry by our precious water ways and the manufacture of any products that create toxins to any form of life. I re-commit myself to the elimination of stripped white sugar and white flour from my diet, as they poison the internal microbiome and gut-immune system, and are responsible for deranged mood, chronic stress and hormonal imbalances that effect every organ and system of the physiology. While I may not have much personal influence over national and global policy, I do have free will, thus far, over what I put in my mouth and what comes out of it, how I nourish myself and my community through my thoughts, words and deeds. I hereby, with my conscious intention and the sacred witness of the air, earth, water and fire that moves through me and around me, commit to seeing and creating beauty and sowing the seeds of hope and love through my faith and inner guidance system. I invite those of who are guided to do so to make your own commitment to this sacred LIFE. Share here if called, or declare your truth in some other way. By claiming our truth and our purpose, and declaring our intentions around the circle, may we hold one another lovingly accountable. 1. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/science/national-initiative-microbes-and-microbiomes.html?_r=0

Letter to Tall Tree

Dear Sir, I am speaking to your Higher Self from my Most Honest Self. I have been grappling with some pretty big issues since the communication lines went down completely. I have found the need to take back all of my dearest projections onto you. Every place I have condemned you in my mind, I am finding these same defects of character in me. Even a judgement someone else might have shared of you that satisfied some place in me - that too, I've discovered, I could say of myself (were I not hiding my own ugly little truths from my own or public scrutiny). I am owning it all, gathering it all close, and I will tell you it is all too close for comfort. I have been working a trade with a life coach and she has turned me on to some very helpful resources, including a book called Radical Forgiveness by Colin Tipping. It's really a road map for utilizing consciousness to love and forgive ourselves and others. The process is helping me to be honest with myself and tolerate the truth that I had been attempting to obscure, both to myself and the outside world. I have promised not to abuse myself or betray myself or lie to myself any longer; but to love and honor myself as my Creator, forgiving misdeeds of the past. I found I needed to accomplish this in order to forgive you and release all the energy that I had bound up around this you-ness, in my disappointments in your not meeting my needs. When I start to feel judgement about something I've done, I get to apply compassion. It is a really good, if painful, process, and I am learning alot. I seem to need to not be in relationship daily with another person - at this time - in order to see these things and work with them. I am learning what it means to BE the way I want to be, and a person who I would want to be around. I understand now the truth I spoke to you several years back when I said that I wasn't "relationship material." That may not be forever, but certainly while I am engaged with this work, completing karma, waking up, and becoming conscious to the truth I know in my Highest Self but have not been living in an integrated way. In a faithful way. Not fully, anyway. I am seeking entrance to the gates of inner knowledge. I cross the threshold daily, and spend more time there with each passing day. My body and my experiences in the world inform me through reflection and metaphor and all sorts of signs about how I am progressing, point me to parts of the curriculum I had missed or assignments I've attempted to short cut. And I am reviewing my lessons. This letter to you is an assignment I've given myself. To become clear about my choices and make relations with full and total accountability for how my life goes. There are so many ways Life provides for us to hide out in illusion and delusion - Maya! And as many ways we are provided maps and trail guides out of the labyrinth and into the Light of Truth - Satya! It is ALL here for us and all we need do is reach out and grab what we will. What we have the courage for. Truly, it is all in perfection. I see such perfection in our union of these past few years, and am filled with gratitude in a whole new way, coming to see how our Higher Selves, or Souls, made agreement to help one another. Soul Agreements aren't linear, necessarily pretty, or as neatly defined as the agreements and contracts we make on the Human/Earth plane. (Although I think we are learning about the relative ambiguity of all levels of human "agreement" where there is unintegrated consciousness!) The work of Human Incarnation seems to be integrating consciousness of our Divine aspect. This Evolving Consciousness is the Great Work of this epoch, this time we have taken birth and met as "you" and "me." I am getting a sense for how this plays out. In this model, I see that you are highly tuned to the etheric realms. It is this quality that I always resonated to and was magnetized toward. Though the rules of engagement are different on the playing field here on Earth, in the etheric you are a High Being and the Priestess in me recognizes the Priest in you. On Earth, you are like our Brother Coyote, trying to hide from your own true nature, tricking yourself along with the rest of us, as we fumble and stumble along our merry way. Complex and paradoxical! I am grateful that Life introduced us in this incarnation, entwined our hearts, and banged our heads together for a while. I am experiencing immense growth since we parted ways. Your Coyote Trickster Spirit travels around, informing me how to bring what is mine to work with into a more harmonious pattern of vibrating atoms. In the kingdom from where we come, I Love You as I love My Self. We have more in common than I ever knew or could tolerate in close proximity. To the fire! I wish us both great awakening!

Seasonal Changes Bring Great Opportunities to Move Out of Old Patterns and Into the Now

Warm inside my Mission flat while the trees thrash in the downpour on Harrison Street and the night sky fills up with lightening. Autumn is here with her cooling temperatures, fish scale clouds, brilliant sunsets, and showers interspersed with crisp, sunny mornings that get me back on my bike for a visit to the Alemany farmer's market before the next deluge. In Petaluma yesterday the streets were plastered with wet orange leaves the size of a large man's hand, and just now the rumble of thunder sets off a series of car alarms. My new life in the city is an orchestra tuning up, a lively ruckus of constant activity, the smokers on my front stoop, the boomboxes driving by, an alarming quantity of concrete, the constant clamor of humanity. Just five months ago my evening soundtrack was comprised of frogs, crickets and the yipping of coyote pups.

The insistent rain seems to call upon me to flow like water and adapt, adapt, adapt, surrendering all that prevents adaptation. So in response, I dropped a limiting story and took a part-time environmental job to supplement my income while writing my thesis and developing my holistic health practice and a start-up specialty food business. I certainly have a lot of balls in the air, but the attitude I am cultivating is creative and brave; I am passionately playing this game of life: enjoying the rain with the sunshine, the polarity of a hot bath after a long wet day of chilled to the bone.

On Wednesday half-way through a yoga class I realized in all the serious hard work of it I wasn't having any fun and deserved some. The next day and the day after I switched my routine to a gentle home-based stretching practice, rolling around on the pilates ball and some fantastic bike rides thanks to a work-trade client who did some much-needed bicycle maintenance for me. It is a relief to be free of my own inner prison guard, who was shoving me around from one cell after another in the name of my own liberation. Even a yoga practice can be counter-productive if we can't hold it lightly enough. So I am practicing being gently responsive to the signals of my emotional and physical tides. Adjusting diet, pace, approach to fitness, ideas for how I should be earning my keep, and so on, to suit the actual needs of the present moment. And what a relief it is!

I am discovering optimal rhythms for meal times and fantastic new combinations of super, fresh, whole foods. Discerning what teachings I give to all of my clients that could be wrapped into a class or workshop. And watching my clients thrive. As always, transformation is available each and every day.

What do you have to shift, like the weather, to find yourself on your purpose and enjoying every moment?

An Open Letter to the President Who Keeps Emailing Me

Dear President Obama,

I do not understand why you keep asking for money to support your work. You are getting paid for a full time job, I am not. I am one you are trying to get behind. But I cannot support this work with money I don't have. What's with that? I write letters and make phone calls and sign petitions and stand behind my prayers and what I value, behind the truth.

Here's what I am working on. I am completing my M.S. in holistic nutrition and strive to help people get and stay healthy and stay out of the hospitals and rip-off health care system that causes so many more problems than it helps. I am uninsured. I rely on wonderful "alternative" and holistic medical professionals for my health care. They work with me on the finances. We do trades. We collaborate and support each other as people. The health care system is a nightmare, and I don't believe that forcing the American population to purchase insurance with dollars they don't have for medical care that doesn't get the big picture is the answer.

I know you are doing your level best to find compromise to overhaul healthcare. I don't know how to do your job. It's a tough one. But I don't know that I would want to buy my way into a crumbling system if I had the cash flow to do so.

I see the future from the present and I am focused on collaborations, community building, buying local and voting with our spending dollars for clean, whole food and well-made products crafted with love and attention, kindness and compassion, practicing consensus and striving for a modest and sustainable lifestyle. Taking care of one another. Supporting the beautiful land we call our home, whether or not we "own" it. Being responsible.

Please do not send me anymore solicitations for money. You are barking up the wrong tree. Throwing your pebble in the wrong pool. Me, I'm just moving forward doing what feels right to take care of myself, my family, and this holy circle of life.

Sending blessings of love and gratitude all around the circle, right to you and yours.

In peace, Maxime Zahra Stadlen

Universe: A Call to Arms and Hearts and Bellies and Brows

Staying in relationships that are unsatisfactory and
choosing disappointment as a response
is not creating what I seek.
It's a downward
spiral.

Hear me-
I am choosing to end
manipulative relationships.
I am now giving and receiving love
that respects myself and reverences the highest potential of God's Love in Light.

Wiping the brow of the holy Mother as She labors giving birth to the Light, I bury all sins of the past. Deep in the coals of the ash fire of last evening's prayers, there is a sign. It points the way home. It warms the breakfast meal now, nourishing and sustaining life. This love of this life is a rapture, a holy thing that grips my chest like a vine. That torrents forth, a genuine bursting thing. Though I fear it will drown me, I confess I will no longer run from THAT. Rather will I tend it gently, keeping the firelight steady and strong, stirring constantly even as I rub my sleep-filled eyes. Even as I stroke the head of the babe. Even as I bathe and anoint. Even upon the toilet. Even at the place I would call work. Even in the bedroom. Even eating peaches, dripping fuzzy juice between the fingers, licking or sucking. It is a privilege to behold. Even barefooted, not surefooted on the spiny and gravelled road. It is an honor still. Listen well. Witness my testimony on this thirtieth day of the month known as September in the year two thousand and eight, as dawn breaks, a pale light slipping into the tiny window above my bed, a morning of fullness lies ahead. A life to live. Awake!

Playing with Fire

Playing with fire is a preliminary obsession. You have to want to heat it up, which isn't necessarily the same, say, as cooking your food. I mean to be both metaphorical as well as literal. One can eat it raw or cook it - or then one can just heat it up: move the molecules around a little, pave the way, digestively speaking. The ancient teachings of Ayurveda acknowledge the power of food as medicine (as did old Hippocrates). You know the Hindus have this amazingly rich pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, right? So Agni is the God of fire. Agni is also the fire in the belly, the digestive fire. It's hot in there when everything's going right, ya? We have all this acid he produces to break down the raw roots and berries. Heating and cooking our food are other ways to pre-digest our food, make it good and ready so we can better assimilate the natural goodness, the nutrient goodies that are the components of our vegetable victuals. I encourage you to feed the God Agni with ginger, a spice that adds heat to our foods, both raw and cooked, and is known as a digestive aid. I am not herein advocating any one way of fixing food for maximum nourishment, though I am a fan of the infinite varieties given us to feed the gods and goddesses, within. Animal flesh is sacred to me, as is the verdure kingdom. And raw as holy as the 4 elements of life itself: air, water, earth and fire. However, when we lose touch with these sacred four we lose our ability to properly digest and assimilate what we consume. Yet consumers are we. And a society sick with a weak digestive fire. Do not mistake the heat of anger for this God, anger robs fire from the gut or inflames with its incense...