Tea with the Muse podcast

Medicine Woman poem

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This is a reading from my book, Tea with the Midnight Muse, Invocations and Inquiries for Awakening. This one’s called Medicine Woman, and it goes way, way, way, way back to when I was 30 years old. It was at one time published inside of the Mother Tongue Publishing We Moon Calendar.

And today I am painting with Havi Mandel, co-director of Red Madonna. And you are still invited to join us for a 13 moon journey in the sacred feminine where you activate your medicine woman. Okay, ready? Ready?

Medicine Woman

The wild one lives within all women.

She is known as Medicine Woman.

She holds the tools for healing in her magic basket.

She sings her prayers, you know.

Medicine Woman knows stars and sums.

She listens between worlds.

Medicine Woman cannot be domesticated at all, ever.

Even when we don’t recognize her, she is always here.

She has blue butterflies and red roses in her hair

and golden boots with wings.

She’s at the movies with teenage girls on Friday night.

She gets a tattoo of the Guadalupe

on her left bicep in San Francisco’s Mission District

and the Sacred Heart of Jesus on her right bicep.

You may catch a glimpse of her silver striped leggings

as she roller skates through New York’s Central Park.

She teaches workshops on right brain, left brain,

the critic and her lover, the muse,

or the geometry of numbers or raw food

or revolution for breakfast.

She pays for everything with cash.

She paints glitter on her toenails, fire engine red.

Just don’t think you have her figured out.

She will always surprise you.

She shows up in a crimson dress

sewn with a white dogwood bodice and a bay leaf hem.

She is the sound of bells.

She may let her armpit hair grow.

She is the place within all of us

that wants it all and wants to give it all up.

She swims naked in the ocean.

She rides motorcycles up the coast.

She paints and writes and dances and dreams

and she has multiple income streams.

She is medicine woman. She heals the unexpressed in us.

She asks the question, who are you not being?

Her life is her own.

She is on her own and she likes it that way.

Don’t be surprised if she asks you to miracle tea

and you find yourself drunk with aliveness and honeycomb cake.

Shiloh Sophia

Today I wish to dedicate this to three incredible members of our team

who have shown up in extraordinary ways this week. And many weeks, but in

particular, right now. The one and only Curate Kelly House.

Co-leader of Sacred Echoes, Isabelle Guzman Stark.

And live streamer, Vicchi “V” Oleski Thank you.

You are all medicine women to me and to our community. And I love you.



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