I Was a 16 Year Old Secret Agent pt 1

& other surprises from the current confluence of realities 🌀

I have a few things I want to announce before we dive into the vault, so they don’t get lost in the shuffle.

On March first we will be starting a new 40 day Sadhana for the Venus Retrograde (for now it will be the same as always, live on IG & recordings here for paid subscribers).

In addition, coinciding with Sadhana, I will also be holding a small (10 person) plant spirit container during that time, $250 (microdose psilo included along with weekly (5 weeks) group practice/sharing). Don’t wait too long, as I will need to send medicine by February 25!

Drop me a note here or theloveartist@gmail.com (plant medicine in subject line) if you are interested & we can have a chat. I am already half full.

Also I am not officially starting the Devotional Study Hall subscription until mid-March, when I return from Costa Rica, I am offering another free weekend as a Valentine’s Gift to all of you. Next Saturday & Sunday. Register here.

The summer when I was 15 almost 16 years old I was anxious to run away from home, to move freely, to be a star of my design. I had always had older friends. Most of my buddies had graduated in the spring & I had decided to distance myself from my long time english/filmmaking teacher crush who resembled Bob Dylan & for whom I wrote lascivious poems. For two years we had sat in cafes while he “edited” these poems, giving me *writerly* suggestions, poet to poet. I was sick of ever level of confinement in my life. I felt as if I couldn’t bear another moment, not another breath.

A few years earlier I had visited the US Capitol with my class & noticed these young people scurrying around on the floor of the Senate. I did not care for government or politics, I knew already I was born to be a poet but I was inordinately obsessed with power & agency. I knew I was wasting time in my parents house & I felt an invitation to act in the world.

Because I was born a very long time ago 😊 I walked myself down to my public library, an old train station behind the supermarket & I scoured the card catalog (?!?!) until I found the tiniest bit of information about the page program, a legacy of teenage congressional message carriers that (at that time) lived on their own & ran around the hallowed (& often secret) corridors of the nation’s capitol. You needed a sponsor, a representative or senator, to bring you. Not all of them had the power to bring a page. I was lucky that all three of mine did.

I didn’t tell anyone. I hand wrote letters, no resume, no nothing but my utter confidence in my freedom. And I got in.

You already know I am a grandma so I’m not going to pretend or hide the year. It was the summer of 1975. Nixon had resigned the year before. Gerald Ford was de facto president. By the graces of James Buckley (gulp) I was a page in the Senate.

I hadn’t told my parents anything about it but had banked (successfully) on their pride. I completely knocked them out with my brazen subversive action & they were putty in my sweaty teenage palms.

I wish I had photographs. We all sat on the steps surrounding the dais of the Vice President, at that time Nelson Rockefeller, who died several years later of a heart attack in his paramour’s arms. I was long gone by that time but let’s just say, I heard the story from the head of the Republican cloakroom, who was my boss, had become a good friend of mine & who could have become my own paramour if he didn’t gross me out as much as he did.

This was Washington in 1975. Biden was a Democrat hottie in his 30s, Teddy Kennedy was an obvious drunk, Strom Thurmond clearly had dementia, Bob Dole told dirty joke with all of us pages listening in the cloakroom, senator briefcase leaked alcohol & pages were sleeping with congressional leaders.

There was no central residence for pages at that time. I had a room in a local Y & many of my fellow pages had their own apartments. We had a salary (about $30,000/yearly!) & dined in the same restaurants as our bosses, Sanc Souci, Rive Gauche etc. Though I had gained entrance to this portal of my own accord, many pages were hired as the result of political favors. I had a few friends, kids of lobbyists, who were running weed from Mexico in private jets with their parents oblivious. We were beyond free. No one cared what we did as long as we didn’t die.

I never talk about this. But suddenly it seems relevant. Suddenly I am dreaming nightly that I am roaming the halls of the Capitol again. I am asked for my ID & then suddenly I am in the jungle, close to God with the medicine & then suddenly back on the Senate floor. Something is coming through. There is much much more to come. All of a sudden I am bursting at the seams. Omg, thank you for listening thus far.

Oh one last thing. We had unlimited security clearance. The last kids of a generation of parents that believed kids should be seen but not heard. They clearly thought we were idiots. Oh well.

@mystical.kink (IG)

I know this is a lot. I have rarely told these stories but it seems important right now for me to remember. While you are waiting for the next installment, here are a few recommendations on how to keep your sanity:

1. Severance. Severance. Severance (Apple TV). Hopefully you are caught up, but if you aren’t, Season 2 Episode 4 is so brilliant & utterly relevant right now. I will not post any spoilers but please, help yourself to make sense of how the recesses of your mind have ballrooms & corridors that will free you from ALL kind of servitude.

2. I mentioned above that my Devotional Study Halls will be back as a Valentine’s gift next weekend (Register Here). In one of the study halls last weekend, Jody Lewis used her time to create a two sided list, with one side for DIVEST & the other for ALIGN & she used the two hour sacred chamber to list ways she could DIVEST from Empire in one column & ALIGN with Collective Liberation in the other. I was so inspired by this. More to come on this, but start your own, you will feel so much better.

3. This piece of writing MOTHER OF WRATH by my good friend & collaborator Sal Randolph on her FREE WORDS Substack blew my mind. Those of you who were in my most recent SADHANA of CONSTANT CHANGE know that I have been focusing on a new/ancient/awakened view of the mother, the necessity of removing all political/social prejudice from the mother archetype. Calling her forth. This is important. Let this inspire you.

I LOVE YOU SO MUCH 🤍 SEE YOU SOON 🐍