Healing at the Yoga Farm St. Croix

Living largely isolated and among nature in St. Croix can reap profound healing .

I did it! I healed myself at the Yoga Farm St. Croix. It’s the culmination of many healing things during the 3-year journey I took with my children to live abroad.

One of the most significant healings I experienced, in which I wrote about during this blog, was to cure myself of cervical dysplasia. I’ve had nearly four years of irregular pap tests, which I had about every six months, caused by high-risk HPV in my system. I had a colcoscopy that tested with disease in September 2012. I elected to do a Yoga Farm St. Croix natural healing treatment and see what happens in six months.

I had been avoiding the test that was due this March. Only after I saw the nurse midwife at my kids’ school play mid April did I finally make the appointment. I had dread that I’d have to have another colcoscopy followed by her suggestion of medical treatment of some sort if I still had a problem. I had googled treatments over cervical dysplasia and learned about natural healing, but also heard horrible, painful expensive outcomes. I didn’t get health insurance in the U.S. Virgin Islands at all as a single, self-employed person, (Obama care DENIED to adult U.S. Citizens here for pre-existing conditions! Argentina had GREAT, cheap health care!) I started dreaming of a medical tourism trip to Thailand to visit a friend and afford to have the procedure done cheaply.

I opened a letter in in the mail last week with the results that said, Pap test NORMAL. High-Risk HPV NEGATIVE. It was a joyous day, and I walked along the Frederiksted pier, giving thanks, watching the local fisherman that glorious early morning.

I attribute my healing to several factors, of which I will go into more depth of each in subsequent posts. I believe that people can heal themselves. The trick is that you have to BELIEVE you can heal. (That's why they call it Make-Believe!)  It is not an easy task. It requires discipline and deep work to tell the truth about ourselves and let go of attachments. But I do believe women can work with cervical dysplasia using alternative healing with confidence and trust in themselves and bodies for a positive outcome. The process is actually part of the empowerment factor, and gaining trust in one's self as a woman and her powers to be self-determined and healed.

Here is an outline of 10 curing factors: 

"Van Gogh's Dream" 2010 by Sydney Solis

1)   Moving to a new place.  I left Colorado and moved to Buenos Aires and ended up in St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. I got away from the stress of U.S. Mainland culture to live a simpler life. I also lived out a life-long dream to live abroad with my children. I loved the diversity and culture of St. Croix.

2)   Slowing down my pace of work. Putting my business mostly on sabbatical and focusing on being a mother and taking care of myself and children first. I returned to the place before the wounding, before my husband died, leaving me a young widow with two small children.

3)   Giving up alcohol. I stopped six months to cleanse the liver and boost my immune system. I could not, however, resist Tonio's hand-grated coconut Coquito drink at Christmastime.  I did drink occasionally afterwards, but I do abstain from alcohol for long periods.

4)   Taking lots of vitamins and consulting with an ayurvedic physician (something I had been doing continually for seven years.)

5)   Connecting to, growing and cooking my own healthy food from my backyard garden and connecting with nature. I frequented the local farmer's markets with joy for fresh, seasonal local food and aligned my body with the rhythm of nature.

6)   Yoga, meditation and breathing. Something I’ve been doing for more than 20 years. This time it was more restorative  and gentle yoga and deeper breathing. I practiced my Mythic Yoga work and I worked especially with the root chakra and noting mis-alignments in my body, including spinal issues and scoliosis.

  7) Expressing myself and letting go of grief and fear. I finished a memoir about my late husband’s death that happened more than ten years ago. I also did a lot of artwork and had a one-woman show at the Maria Henle Studio in Christiansted. I told stories about my body and what happened to it, especially the lower half.

Labyrinth at the ruins of Mt. Washington, St. Croix, USVI.

8) Dream work and Ritual. A life-long lover of dreams, I had an incredible twelve weeks of dream work with Nancy Ayer at Mt. Washington and its Chartes style labyrinth. I have always been guided by dreams, including a voice that said, "Spanish vegetables will heal you." I took that as my favorite soup, gazpacho I drank lots of! I do other personal rituals as well.

9) Having a good support group of friends and attending the Christiansted noon Adult Children of Alcoholics meetings. My parents never drank a drop, but the dysfunction caused by mental illness and the scars of war influenced my early life and haunted my adult life.

10)    Resolving long-term emotional issues around sex, men and self-esteem. I had been displacing my power and projecting my animus on men of certain character.

Pompeii, 2011 by Sydney Solis

The nice thing is that my kids are happy and healed too. My daughter, who struggled with several learning disabilities including dyslexia, auditory processing delay and ADHD, is finishing the 6^th grade and has high school level abilities in most areas. She’s bright, happy, artistic and healthy.

My son discovered himself in theatre and filmmaking. The rote barren educational landscape of our past living in the U.S. was erased with living abroad and attending a good school. Among other things!

I do have a happy, healthy and very close little family of 3! Now we say goodbye to our wonderful life here and return. Moving to DeLand, Florida June 5. I hope to continue doing what I used to do in Colorado, Storytime Yoga for children and families. They will be introduced to the Queen of Bohemia now. The Mythic Yoga work continues with my continual deep reflection of my life through contemplation of myths and the body, to bring awareness of my issues intuitively by listening to the body and my personal stories, choices and perceptions.

St. Croix has been difficult to do business in and raise children, and the loneliness and isolation of not being around old friends or family is difficult. So I forewent business and mostly focused on relishing in being a mother and raising my kids. I gave time to myself to write, make art and heal, all the while enjoying the nature, quiet and rediscovering myself through art and yoga and all the wonderful things living in the Caribbean had to offer. All that can be healed has been healed.

 I can feel the completion of the cycle. A new beginning awaits. My kids are older now and it’s imperative that they be more independent. Living in St. Croix served its purpose for healing and the Mythic Journey, but it is difficult for kids to be independent here. In DeLand they will be able to walk out the door to an old-fashioned downtown, farmers markets and more. The library is a block away from the house, as is a skateboard park and other niceties. They will be able to ride their bike to school. It's back to the madness of gun-crazed U.S. and violence and bullying... but they are prepared and confident in self with the stamp of experience and self growth during our journey.

Yes, our mythical journey abroad is finished. We descended into ourselves, confronted hell and rooted ourselves in an identity deep beyond the temporal world, which enabled us to bloom again on the surface. It’s time for the return. Share the gifts. I’ve started to pack I do expect to return and live here half the year in time and offer healing retreats. I have so many wonderful friends and have a special place in my heart for the nature, farmers and other people in the beautiful island of St. Croix. It is a Healing Place! DO VISIT!

 The Story in the Body online classes are amazing, powerful, transformative. There REALLY IS  a whole world waiting for you within! If you DARE! What is your story in the body? Dive into your own depths with the healing power of yoga and story!

Visit the resurrected MythicYoga website too!

Backwards We Spell Japan

Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters of our names spell JAPAN. We always knew that. We children always knew that our father is Dutch and that he is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. It was during World War II. He was born on the island of Java. Before it was called Indonesia. Before, when it was a Dutch colony run by the Dutch East India Company. One captain Straub was our seafaring ancestor who married a princess from the island of Madura.
The Dutch traded coffee and sugar, quinine and indigo to bring back to the motherland, and tea that grew on plantations cleared from the jungle. My father lived on tea and sugar plantations, with my Oma, his two sisters, and my grandfather Straub, a mechanical engineer who kept the plantation machinery going. He starved to death in a forced-labor Mitzubishi tin mine POW camp outside of Tokyo. I know him only as a charcoal drawing on white paper hanging above my father’s bed.
“Those dirty Japs,” Mom always says. “Thank God for the atomic bomb.”
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp because Mom tells everybody. The people with blank faces at St. Ambrose Church that mom forces me to attend, to my neighbor Leslie’s mother, to Lou the skinny milkman who nods and nods and nods.
“They don’t know about the dirty Japs, Patti,” she says to me. I tell Mom about the Holocaust we are studying in school. Gritty black-and-white films of shriveled corpses bulldozed into pits, Jews’ hair made into rugs, their skin into soap. “Tell your teacher your father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says. I do. My teacher stares at me bewildered.
“Is your father Japanese?” No, no. I shake my head. “Is he Jewish?” No, no. I can’t speak. I feel it stuck in my throat. My family is in the wrong concentration camp.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We go to the K-Mart, Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. With Mom, who chases down blue-light specials for cheap blue-and-red plaid shirts.
“Come on, kids, hurry!” she says running.
It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. August 6, 1976 in Boulder, Colorado. We stop at the snack stand for white hoagie sandwiches with ham and lettuce and mayonnaise. Mom orders water, but Nancy pleads for Icees, and Mom thinks, and then says OK. We hold the waxy Icee drink cups with polar bear triangles on the side that Albert cuts out and mails in for free cheapo gifts. The Icee cups full of red slush that make it easy for Nancy and me to shoplift red fingernail polish in.
“$4.95,” the girl behind the counter says. She is bored, with blond-feathered hair. She glosses her lips with a sour grape Bonnie Bell lip smacker. She stares at Mom’s nose, broken in 1943 when she was kicked by a horse. Plastic surgery wasn’t too good back then and now her nose looks like someone mashed a wad of silly putty on the tip.
“Do you know what today is?” Mom asks. The girl shrugs. “It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. When we bombed the Japs.” I press my face to the glass, watch my nose leave a crescent of steam.
You know, my husband is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says, fishing through her big, black secondhand handbag. “If we didn’t drop the bomb, none of these children would be standing in front of you.” We suck our Icees, bite the straws, shoulders hunched, backs turned. We disappear into our own fantasy. We are not here with Mom. Not with this moment.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says. Mom can’t find the money. She can find the car keys at the bottom of the bag, along with the broken lipstick containers, cracker crumbs and dried lemon slices swiped from restaurants. She can find the coupons, the dry felt-tip pens, the spare Kotex that will catch her diarrhea that suddenly comes on out of nowhere, because she ate too many tomatoes or drank too much black coffee. The diarrhea that drops in small brown bloodstains behind her after she quickly pays the girl, then shuffles to the bathroom at the back of the store.
Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. We wolf down our hoagies sitting in the yellow and orange snack booths waiting for Mom. Nancy is the oldest, older than me by six years. Then came Albert, ten months later. Irish twins, my father says. Then came me, born late, the day after Christmas, 1966. And then Jeanie, two Februarys later. Mom says we were accidents. Four 10-pound accidents. She could have found somebody rich, married Liberace, or Onassis, or somebody else, she says. But she asked our father to marry her, and she got us.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We are packed in our house together, like the thousands packed into the concentration camp, in the monastery at Ambarawa 7 where Dad lived for three years as a little boy. We are packed into house that has no dining room and no family room. Jeanie and Albert are together in one bedroom, Nancy and me in another. Then Mom and Dad in the big bedroom. But Mom is everywhere. She is in the oversized painting of fishing boats washed on the shore, mysteriously without fishermen, hanging crooked in the living room. She is the collection of pen-and-ink caricature drawings on the wall, her oversized head looking like a young Johnny Cash with long hair, her hand posed with a writing quill. She is the innumerable scattering of out-of-date books, astronomy, chemistry, world encyclopedias and communist China film strips grabbed from the free box at the Boulder Valley School’s discard sale. She is the neighbor’s trashcans that she digs through, searching, pulling, hauling things back to the house, old wood, broken mirrors, or locks with no keys. She is the popcorn-yellow paint in the kitchen laced heavy with gray cobwebs and pork sausage grease splatters, the pork sausage grease saved in a coffee cup that smells up the kitchen, smells up the house, fouls my heart. She is the cut up clothing laying all over the floor, on every floor, in every corner, heaped like refugee rag dolls, along with the piles of records, ripped up hand bags, old cans of blue paint. The blue paint she painted the outside of the house without finishing the job, the blue paint that streaks the back of the bathroom door, that is all over the porcelain toilets, all over the scuff marks on the tips of her shoes.
We know our father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp.
“Scrape your plate,” Mom always says. “I should put you in a concentration camp and let you starve.” That’s what Mom says at the dinner table while we stare at the trash piled high on the fake wood table -- the elastic cut off from Dad and Albert’s old underwear, the coupons glued together with spilled milk and mold, the thimbles, newspaper clippings, nuts and bolts, the unwashed dishes, dirty knick knacks from garage sales, the dusty plastic flowers falling out of a dented aluminum tea kettle.
We eat Mom’s cooking, eat chipped beef that was boiled in a plastic bag, or chew green peppers stuffed with white rice off of chipped plates and drink from faded, plastic glasses that once had pink and green beach scenes on them. Mom found them last week at a garage sale for a quarter.
We hold Mom’s cooking in our mouths, peppers stuffed with rice with no flavor. We wipe our faces with paper towels when she’s not looking and unload the mouthfuls in them. We slink under the table. We try to escape. I pick through the broken cookies at the bottom of the wooden cookie jar, brushing off the tiny bugs and old crumbs clinging to them.
We know our father was a child survivor of a concentration camp. How he starved. A 10-year old boy, taken from his mother and sisters and put in a camp for old men and adolescent boys. The Jongenscamp. Surviving on clothing starch, snails, grass or scraping the ultra-thin layer inside a banana peel, or filling his belly up with the compressed straw that was for the guards’ pigs, or drinking from toilets in the dark of the night, or crouching by the bamboo fence and waiting for something to eat, for something to crawl under the fence and into the camp – anything -- rats or snakes that he grabbed by the tail and whipped to break their backs and eat them raw.
“Look at this!” Mom cries. “Look at this last drop of milk you have wasted! Sit back down here and drink it. People are starving to death!” Her mouth is a rectangular slot of false teeth lined with shiny wire, clenched, carving lines deep as dry old cheese into the corners of her mouth. All I see are her waxy pink-gummed false teeth that slide out of her mouth and sit in a glass of water that is never changed. The glass of water on top of the rusting medicine cabinet in the bathroom that Mom, using her zigzag scissors, pasted over with sticky contact paper of sailing ships. I see the false teeth, yellow hunks of food stuck between the teeth, floating and trying to escape. They sit in front of the mirror dimmed by years of white toothpaste splatter where I stare at myself brushing my teeth with my blue gun toothbrush. I am thin, thin, skeleton thin, knobby elbows, tall for my age. My Dutch white face, heart-shaped with wide Czech cheeks and a pointy chinned, is shocked by my dark brown hair that I hate, stick straight like Dad’s. With my green-brown eyes I stare. I don’t think. I don’t feel.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. I see Dad sitting on the rattan couch that was once new from American Furniture warehouse, now covered with layers of unsewn, unmatched tattered fabric that was on sale at So-Fro Fabrics for 35 cents a yard.
Dad sits alone on the couch listening to Madame Butterfly. The part where she finds out that Pinkerton has a new wife. A cone of sandalwood incense burns He has taken pills for his migraine headaches. The headaches he gets every day to some degree. Sometimes bad. In the middle of the night, waking up sweating. From remembering something. Or thinking of it. He takes codeine, amatriptaline, bottlesfuls. Their yellow-brown plastic containers sit next to his bed on the bed stand next to the picture of Jesus that glows in the dark. The empty containers fall, roll under the bed. Some tall and thin, other fat and big. With long pills, yellow pills, round white pills. When the headaches are really bad he goes to the hospital and they stick a needle full of Demerol in his neck and he sleeps for days.
Tonight the headache is bad. Dad took many pills. He is slow. I walk up behind him and without a word gently place my hands on his head. I ask God why. Why? Why do people suffer? Why did my father have to go through hell as a child? Why did he survive?
My hands run like seeping water through his hair, gray, greasy, limp. My hands pull his hair, just like the nurse he had in Java. She knew just where to twist and pull a section of hair to make a headache go away. I pull his hair. Pull out the tigers and snakes roaming the jungles of Indonesia, when it was the Dutch East Indies. Pull out the pain, pull out the war, pull out the headache that will leave Dad in bed with a wet washcloth over his eyes. Unable to move, drenched in tears and sweat, unable to hear in the darkness of his room or go to work at his job as a mechanical engineer beneath fluorescent lights in a yellow brick building in Boulder.
My fingers push on his muscles, the bulging tight muscles in his neck that connect to his head, that surge into his eyes, forcing them closed, unable to watch Star Trek or Buck Rogers or the Project Blue Book episodes that we have seen so many times we know the dialogue by heart.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says, searching for something, alone in the kitchen as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them. “Rocco moco poco pup. Shit, dog house.” My hands pull Dad’s hair harder.
“Shake your hands,” Dad says in his thick Dutch accent. “Shake the pain out of your hands. Get rid of it.”
I shake and I shake.
“Cat, rat, trap, dog dump,” Mom says as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them.
At midnight, Dad vomits in the bathroom. Vomits in the toilet that is always clogged with Mom’s diarrhea that is caused by her weak bowels. Because the doctors cut her fistula when she delivered Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie, all 10-pound children.
“They ripped my guts up,” Mom tells the woman at the K-Mart check out counter. “Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters spell Japan.

And Still the Heart Dances

The Queen is fasting after realizing that the sludge of holidays needed a bigger kick at leaving the kingdom, and she took Sergeant Pepe for a walk. Moving in rhythm with her body once again up the mountain, up, up she goes, forgetting the mind, just being with the body. She was, however, a bit distracted, lots going on in the castle and its interior realms, workings and people and she didn’t like the cold so decided to turn around. Sergeant Pepe resisted, pulled her on. The Queen did continue up the mountain, reminded that she had forgotten to proclaim herself. “Thank you dear Pepe!” she said. Pepe winked.

Finally at the top she stood there, looked at the mountain and said, “I am the Queen of Bohemia, and it’s happening! I can do it myself! I believe in myself! I see a solution!” That and with a lot of great people in my life I can do anything!” And then she walked down again with Pepe leading the way.

The Queen has a very fine court. HER court, no more dreadful TRAFFIC courts. She is driving the speed limit, and she has to admit, it feels good to slow down. But the Queen still had to rev it up it a good 10 MPH in certain spots in the country where she rolls her eyes and can’t figure out how possibly on earth anybody with a brain would post it that slow and which village nitwit was it?

The Queen has been gathering the HEALTHY advisers around her and they assist her in her decisions. And just by waiting and breathing in and breathing our rather than jumping to impulsive actions or freaking out and panicking and grasping in terror, she realizes that she can make it through the tension and come to some good solutions as she gathers the information over time from advisers and makes a decision all on her own. Why Queen Elizabeth would be jealous.

The village people are freezing in the rental cottage on Speer and want out of their lease early. The Queen quietly contemplated the situation for a full three days and after doing some investigating, decided what she shall do. She feels great. Calm, and by George she feels LIKE THE QUEEN.


I’ve been working with my chest lately, the throat. The hot yoga really gets in there deep, works things out. I’m among all these young people at the Core Power, and a lot of the time I’m doing a variation for my personal benefit to get deep in my chest, deep in my shoulders as I see fit. Hell, I'm 43 and I don't care. There is an expansion in my chest I haven’t felt in a long time. I can breath deeper, it’s in the center of my chest and it goes up my throat. I like a lot of back bends, something I've always resisted, they open these up. I can do the deepest backbend ever, which is huge for my usually so inflexible spine because of two herniated disks. Just as the cadaver lab teacher said, "The thoracic spine is what makes the heart dance." So it is happening.My heart is dancing. Once John Friend touched that spot behind my heart when I was in urdhva dhanurasana and said, “There’s your stuck spot.” I can never forget his touch at that spot. The back of the heart. In my chest, with the fear gone, the shoulders can slide down the back. I focus on my tail bone and relax. I am grounded and speaking from my heart, not my head and neck.


So the spine dances the heart, the heart opens. My chest spreads and my throat opens. My bird in the tree wants to sing, breathe deeply, make music, tell stories, be free and expressed. And my bird is happy. She is content. The jaw loop is engaged and it helps the shoulders go down the back. I focus on the tailbone and everything drops down to the floor and I am centered in my heart, relaxed, ready and alert, witnessing the miracle of the present.

I remember my feet, mulha banda, the pelvis grounded, my core my refuge, my shoulders to be relaxed. It opens the chest. I can gain the stillness of the moment. The peace of not grasping, not needing to grasp because you don’t have to worry about survival, that you won’t starve, die, be murdered like your ancestors.

I think it’s the root of my fear. Besides the uncertainty as a child that was programmed into me that at any moment that my mother was going to start screaming and doing something terrifying to me. It’s an ancestral fear passed down generations. Fear of annihilation. My father, who survived a Japanese concentration camp on Java as a child, his terror and grief subconsciously filtered through to his children, to me, to my children. They carry it too. A massage therapist who works me and my kids said that we all as a family have tight neck, shoulders and backs of legs. My father has the same thing. I massaged his shoulders and neck as a child. Our body patterns follow. The lingering unconscious influence of the parents’ psyche. But my story isn’t very different from others. How about somebody who is Jewish and their grandfather was only one of eight children to survive the Russian pogroms. Or a Native American on a reservation who doesn’t trust a donation of fine fingernail polish because she suspects that there is some poison in it because they want to exterminate them. The world is filled with some very sick people who start wars and kill others in a self-righteous rage.

The fear becomes less with stillness. With grounding in the body. Slowing down, being in sych with the world and being PRESENT, being PART OF IT. Surrender to how the body feels and moves in every moment. It's a form of safety.

With less fear in my life things become more and more clearer. They are much simpler. I am down to the root chakra where I know what I can and can’t do. As I always do too much and I typically do it all myself. But my work and future projects are very clear. It’s simple, manageable. I don’t have to rush around. I have people who help me in my work. My family life is balanced. I have time to take care of myself and have hobbies other than my hobby of work. Like cook, garden, read, go to the theater or a movie, hike and travel. Slowing down to the rhythm of nature just moves you through the heart. There is a definite trust. All you have to do is really learn to be patient and wait things through. I’m typically impulsive, the first to say, "I Love You." I’ve matured, seeing what waiting actually does. It provides a great foundation of being and knowing that this is the right choice so that you can proceed unencumbered.

I’ve been gathering information about Speer. A friend is helping me make some choices about it. Things are moving forward. I just let the creditors call. Thank you for different ring tones! I’m waiting to see if I can get my money from the house. I’ll forge ahead with my passions and my work. Despite the fact that tenants want to move out of the cottage before the end of their lease because they are freezing, since it’s been abnormally cold here and Justin did such a shitty job on remodeling it in the first place. Not even the insulation I installed helps. Ah, well. Such is life. And still the heart dances. Still the Queen lives in awe and beauty of such a fine opera. And her flowering tree with a little bird in it center blooms in winter. "Caw! Caw!"

The Flowering Tree of Roses in Winter

The Queen of Bohemia hiked up the mountain this morning with her trusted little dog Sergeant Pepe. For the Winter Solstice, she proclaimed, “I am the Queen of Bohemia. My kingdom is inside my heart. And my symbol is a flowering tree of roses in winter. “ And then she walked down again.

The solstice is my most sacred time of the year. I always feel its pull toward the darkness, and then the imminent rebirth. The most amazing time is that day before, when you just sit in the moment and allow the event. Everything just falls away. There is silence and presence. There is an emptying out, a sacrifice. A sacrifice of the self. Of all my desires, of all my fears. They wait silently while I contemplate the peaceful present.

A daily sitting practice does wonder to arrive at this. A mind can be trained. It can start to identify with that clarity and awe of the present moment. All the demons of my mind seem like little children begging for attention. But the present is so peaceful, so calming. I resist their cries.

I have always been attracted to the image of the Flowering Tree. The Sufi’s have it flowering in winter. The Hindu story is my favorite, one I perform frequently. And then you have Juan Diego and La Virgen, roses blooming in winter on Tepeyac. That metaphor for eternity, the spirit. It can get wounded, it can be healed again. But really it never was wounded, it never was healed. And with that every little action in the moment becomes so amazing. The touch of the keypad to type, the breath, the touch of clothing on my body. The complete surrender to reality and the ability to navigate my mind’s complexities assist in this divine amazement.

You’d think I’d be really pissed about what happened to me. But really it’s all just so beautiful. And the moment too precious to waste any more time or sorrow with it. It just is, the winter. You can flower in it any time. Everything gets revealed in it with the illumination of the heart. All questions and problems are answered in complete truth. All you have to do is wait and have faith.

The Flowering Tree. A tree pose, the pelvis and legs rooted in the earth and stable, the rib cage and heart, yearning for the heaven. That expansion of the Shri Yantra, energy moving toward the earth in one triangle, energy moving away from the earth in expansion. That’s how the planets stay in orbit, amazingly. This perfect balance of tension pulling and pushing. Are we all mini cosmoses? Only to realize this perfect replica in our bodies and the complete harmonizing with the rhythms of nature? What perfect flow, what perfect balance. To recognize that your power is identical with that energy of the universe. All fear drops away. All desires melt into dharma. The serpentine power. The tree, as below so above. And the serpent, energy, winding its way up to the top, and then back down again.

The flowers, the roses. The faith and the blooming of the heart. The throat must be open, the speech and the truth must flow. The breath moves through the body, pumps the heart. Camel pose, cactus pose. Opening the heart, surrendering.

Staying with the center. Listening and alert. Balanced and in tune with the body.
The answer to everything just comes at the right time, at the right moment.

And so the light has returned. The eternal life goes on. It crawls toward daylight of longer and longer intensities. An energy shifts, something new is born. I can feel it, it’s emerging like a bulb in winter. A blooming rose in winter on a tree. Where its branches were broken and leaves torn, they are mended. And the flowers bloom, gorgeous radiant, divine.

The Conceptual Morass

The Queen once again is happy in her castle. The sun has come out, she was able to be with her community in meditation. The morass of conceptual thinking that plagued her happiness has lifted, the demons have passed. And she’s glad that the demons didn’t get too deep this time. She is finding that the more she practices, the more it bolsters her. The more liberation awaits.

I love my Shambhala meditation class. Meditation really is the cure for what ails you! As my mind can spin me into what the teacher called the “conceptual morass” I can easily liberate it by simply stop thinking about it. To show up in the breath and the body and reality cuts the thinking. To be in the awe and wonder of the now, that is what keeps you safe. The fears and thoughts that plague me disappear. And it’s done by the bolstering of the community. Alone I become fearful, but with others I become stronger and fearless.

I have great compassion for myself. I can beat myself up for some choices I’ve made, but that is life. I accept that I did my best I can accept that I made some choices out of fear, and from now on I refuse to make choices out of fear. Because the present gives you so much clarity, so much safety, that the right choice becomes available and you can choose it with confidence, without remorse or regret. I’m not afraid of things to come. I can just take them as they arise. I will make a choice I can live with on Speer on my finances and on what is healthy for me and my family And that is all I can do. For there is no certainty, no control – those things I crave. But when you just sit with the fears with mindfulness, they disappear. Like the story of the monk in the cave. The demons used to disturb him while he sat and meditated. He swat at them continually, but the more he swat at them, the nastier they bothered him. Until one day he just stopped swatting at them, and the demons got bored and went away.

The teacher said that fear is what sunk us in some grooves, some samskaras that create habitual ways of dealing with fear. But to jump out of those grooves means we must confront the fear. So you just face the fear. You don’t run from it. You allow it to be, until it just disappears.

So there we have it. Liberation from the demons of the minds through the simple act of cutting the thoughts. Forgetting them, and living in the bliss and joy of eternity right now.

The Birth of the Bohemian Bombshell

The Queen is born from the waters. Her bottom matsya self. Reptilian, earthy and watery. Her body is remade from the fires of the earth, the sweat of the rhythms and pulsation of life. Her heart opens, and her wings spread and her breath releases a beautiful new poem. A song, a mantra and it mixes with the air and sky until it waters down and fertilizes the earth she walks on.

I am the Bohemian Bombshell. I’m re-sculpting my body. I’m re-storying my Self. No longer do I carry the stories from childhood that were stuck in my body. I am re-patterning that groove in the record. I’m a hot yoga junkie now that I’ve tried out the Yoga Pod. I don’t get the headaches; it’s a shorter class and we do a downward dog!

Slowly the heat and the alignment and movement along with a new guiding myth in my life are re-shaping me. A rebirth. Just like after shavasana, there is something new out of that death period of rest. I have forgotten the terrible worthlessness, the shame. The shame of my house, myself, my body. This terrified little girl, so afraid and ashamed of her house that she could not call the police when she came home one day her senior year in high school and found that her little sister had attempted suicide. So ashamed that she had only herself to comfort her and she did it with bulimia, building more shame, more self-hatred. More hatred of her body, her self.

I will be 43 in 20 days. I have a new guiding myth. The Queen. I love my body. I love myself and I have value. I’m cleaning my house out swell. My body is full, 145 pounds typically. Up 15 pounds from three years ago. It's OK. It's right. Because I feel so good in my body. It’s strong and healthy. It's sensuous, sexy and beautiful. All my flesh, all my wrinkles and peeping gray hair. What a difference. My little girl of the past is OK with it too. She’s healed too. She doesn’t have to be 115 pounds like in her youth. She just gets to be healthy. She gets to be happy, trusting and safe. She gets to be herself. So everybody gets healed. Even my mother and father, sisters and brothers. It’s heaven on earth. And it’s in the body. It’s in the Bohemian Bombshell.

I am the Queen, the feather-plumed serpent, or the mermaid, half goat, half fish. The alchemical toad and bird chained together. I’m finally rooted, my energy balanced and back down toward the lower half of the body instead of rising in fear upward. I have a stable pelvis, that lizardly area, grounded and solid, and flowing freely with the energies of life. The hot yoga gets more deeply into my chest. For now my upper body lifts toward heaven. My heart, no longer a heavy stone, collapsing, pulling me forward and protected by rock-tight shoulders paralyzed by fear, but a bird, light, open and liberated. Free in the breath, present and powerful. And everything ceases. This is where Durga comes in. It’s that presence, unmistakable mother in her death and life. She’s in the heart, that amazing organ that has arteries running from it and to it, giving and receiving. It’s a Shiva consciousness. I can see more clearly my ego self because of the distance that mediation has gotten between me and my ego story. I like to reside in the Shiva spot more. It's an addiction. It’s protection, safety. It’s a silence that is yet so loud with the roar of the cosmos.

In hot yoga, I slow down to the heat and real rhythm of my body, notice every toxin in it. With my deep breathes I can feel every nook and cranny, any mis-alignment. It’s a slow melt, a smeltering, a crafting, as the new mythology kicks in. That I am of value and worthy. For I am the Queen of royal, cosmic blood. And my value does not fit in with the passing economic age of imaginary money, or even precious metals, but my value goes beyond, into something that cannot be measured by any earthly means. The value of my self and my work is not able to be assigned a measurable value, but it is rather unspoken, and connects to every living being on the planet. It connects and communicates with the herbs and the plants and the seas and water and the moon and the stars and the sun. It connects in faith, as it is confirmed and knows that an upheaval is necessary. To rebalance things. The classic Star Wars myth goes agrarian with kings and their peasants revolting. Politicians and proletariat. Corporations and taxyapers. So I’m not too worried any more. I’m excited. It’s time for some good action. We are all assigned our roles and so now it’s show time.

So is Birthed the Bohemian Bombshell.

In The Cave of the Heart - Anahata

The Queen suffered a terrible sickness when the King left. It was a terrible wave of grief and loss. It is a very odd hollow echo of pain that came from much deeper within her heart. But this morning the Queen picked herself back up again, went to yoga class downtown on her pink moped (free parking!) and felt much better. She breathes and recognizes that Durga's name, hard to approach, is just that.

In the cave of the heart is that which swallows up all thought. It the event horizon of a black hole that swallows everything up, it's the anahata heart chakra- unstruck, it enters eternity as just being exists and is the only focus. It cuts out everything, like death comes through with a scythe to cut your life down at death. Isn't armageddon our own death? The death of the ego and the world it has spun out of its conditioning and storytelling? To cut everything, surrender, die. È più.

I've noticed that because of yoga practice and really working the inner thighs back, my lower lumbar spine I really released and I sit regularly on my sit bones now, right over the mula banda point. I'm just starting to figure out just what it means to get the thighs back and why, and it changes your whole relationship to your core and your alignment. It keeps you connected to the earth all time and this is a very safe feeling. To be so rooted in your own being, that radix ipsius. It's quite an awakening. It's as if I have finally learned how to release and remove those old grooves and patterns from a dysfunctional childhood by relaxing into it. Something else has woven deep patterns instead on the heart and body. The goodness and vibrations are ritualized through yoga and story. Awakening emerges from the heart as images and dreams, and we put it together with meaning and out pours a poem of the body.

I realize that my mother reacted to pattens of fear deeply engrained in her body. Overwhelmed by grief and loss and traumatized by her father and electro-shock treatments, my mother resorted to withdrawal from us children to cope with the overwhelming demands of a mother of four children. My father sick from post-traumatic stress, how does one raise children all alone with few resources, especially money, which plagued my mother terribly. I remember clearly my mother screaming at us that we "didn't even move a plate," or "turn off the lights!" Those are the exact things that my children don't do. I can feel myself mirroring her patterning, the fear, the overwhelm. How those patterns and feelings in our body compel us to repeat it unconsciously, no matter how hard we try not to. It takes effort not to give in to the pattern. To really end it in its tracks, end of story, and create a new reality, a new energy pattern in the body. Yoga reconditions the body's energy to reset patterns. Creative imagination, words and stories reinforce it on a symbolic level to our mythic aspect of our existence, the psyche.

So Durga myth resides in me now. Her energy to shut it all down, stop the thoughts, the pain, the sorrow and just remain in being and bliss. She is the mother that devours all that and let's you rest in her bosom. She lends me her weapons to keep battling the demons, and keep living as the Queen.

The Feet and the Breath

I was talking with a Mythic Yoga participant in Mexico by SKYPE today and her feet came up in the discussion. I work with my own feet quite a bit, putting yoga to work in mindful, brisk walking in alignment as a great practice among nature. I spread my toes and all four corners of my feet. The peroneus muscle fires up and I feel rooted in the earth and I feel a safety, a surrender, an exhale. Before, instead of being centered over the vernicular bone in my foot where the mula bandha point hits the earth, I tended to lean back, as if not to take in the world. Balancing over that point also is essential to mula banha through proper alignment of the pelvis and the pelvic floor, the pubic and coccyx bones and that pubiococcyx muscle, that spanda of our bodies, that pulses in the energy up from that point and into our bodies, up our spines to the heart and then hits the pineal gland to make us super aware, super conscious. I think that's what we're all becoming. Super conscious beings, and that the earth changes are all part of a greater archetypical evolving psychology. Like some upcoming events are about stripping away an old psychology all together and shifting our awareness to a different level. It is almost like an ascension.

Then there is the breath. The breath affects the adrenal glands, which affect the kidneys. Deep breathing and saying yes to life with great optimism and expectation is essential to reprogram one from samskaras from past negative thinking, grief and shallow breathing. Those samskaras are the deep grooves our mind's energy seared into our energy fields of the body and psyche, they are like the toad at the bottom of the well blocking it from flowing wine; or the rat gnawing at the roots of a tree that used to have diamonds for leaves. The breath is like Drano, that loosens up whatever is lodged in the darkness of our unconscious. Allowing it to break up slowly and float to the surface to be examined and then sifted into reality up top here in our waking projection. And the breathing really slows the mind, it slows it all down and into the body and into deep connection with everything around you.

On the home front it was great to bring my daughter's tutor my father's home-grown tomatoes. She is going to make homemade sauce for us. The kids and I walked Pepe down to the school. It was drizzling out but much of that gorgeous part of fall here in Boulder near the foothills. We have a wonderful support system!

The Queen picked some more apples today from the backyard trees and will make a fine elixir for the visit of the King. And the house keeper is coming to deep clean tomorrow at one o'clock and she is beside herself with joy.

So that is Mythic Yoga for today.

The World Tree

There is a voice inside that sometimes speaks only in images, and those images and feelings come up as doves and roses. Once in a while this little glimpse of paradise is available, and often times it also comes up as an image and a feeling of a tree. This flowing, flowering, blooming energy that really does crown within you. When you are really connected and not afraid but linked to the source, it is a lot like a tree. And the tree has roots. Deep roots, that come out of the vagina and reach into the ground and reality. They hold on to the outer realm and make you feel safe. There is nothing to fear.

Anyone who has experienced trauma knows the fear inside. It pulls you up, nothing is safe, not even the ground you walk on. You are waiting for the other shoe to drop. This tree image pulls us down, down, into our bodies and into the earth, Mother earth, and paradise. It takes us to a place before the trauma, before the wounding, to the prima materia, and on this journey we find another mother taking care of us. We find it through the body; the body is like a tree, especially the nervous system. I have often gazed at the mangle of cottonwood trees in winter, and how their delicate branches seem like nerves all bundled up. Our legs are firm and strong, and the feet grip the earth. Our bodies are the trunks, and our heart the heart beat of the earth. So many world mythologies have the world tree. Mayan, Norse, HIndu, Hungarian and more.

The tree is us. It is our body, our container that the spirit visits the material world. Our consciousness arises from the biochemical action of the body and prana. It is the Shakti, pulsing through it. We are going from unity to duality, and bringing creation forth. This is our cosmic dream, and we are participating in it. We don't have to make it a nightmare. The dream can be beautiful. Just imagine it so! Imagination is your power and creation! You really do get what you think about. So think great thoughts. They are coming true!

Once you are grounded again in your own being and can feel the depths and the flow, once you identify with that rather than all the stuff going on up above, once you are rooted in spirit, then you can create effortlessly up top. Things change. Trauma heals. But it was the darkness and the suffering that guided you to the light, it is what makes the tree grow.

Glory Days

It has been a glorious day. I love living my bliss as I get to teach what I love: Storytelling and Yoga. And what's more is that I get to do it in the name of children.
You really do get what you think about. Your thoughts are projecting creation into the fourth dimension, in which you just need catching up to. So you'd better think positive and get clear of any negative slug dwelling. Those dark places really do pull you down. So get positive!
I've realized how much I blink my eyes when speaking. Have to check our which vayu that is, the one that governs blinking, burping, sneezing. Checked the web just now and couldn't get a consistent answer!
But Breathe is really the key to so much.

It is the end of another day of a great training in the Storytime Yoga method. Today attendees gathered with me at the glorious Samadhi Yoga in Denver to shift paradigms in experiencing life and teaching yoga by utilizing the power of story.

I’m always thrilled to do these trainings because it always involved like-minded people. I call them my “tribe.” Those who are instinctualy drawn to the depths where story and myth and yoga take us. To that mysterious realm that involves digging deeply into dark regions, only to find out that there is where the light is. And that darkness and light is what makes us whole.

What’s even more thrilling is knowing that these yogic storytellers are taking it upon themselves to use the power as a storyteller/yoga teacher/shaman/minister/healer to go out and use the high art form of oral storytelling to teach children. And children are our priority. We speak for those who do not have a voice. We are all about educating, healing, helping and making the world safe for children (and the women who care for them and never give up on them.)

Today we discussed the method and teaching babies through elementary! As well as learned the art of storytelling. People are always amazed at how much their creativity comes alive through this process. And the fun they have. Play is therapy!

Tomorrow we will focus on relaxation and meditation and its role in assisting children with anxiety, ADD and ADHD, as well as how to use stories for peace and character education. We will also explore story and yoga as a medicine for helping depression and trauma and preventing suicide by creating personal fairy tales and body myths and utilizing the power of personal story for healing and building community.

There is always more info than I can possibly pack into these trainings, which is why I am seriously considering making Storytime Yoga into a 200-hour children’s yoga teacher training and register it with Yoga Alliance.

Hope to see you at a training one day!

The Mythic Yoga Studio with Sydney Solis: The Wooden Sword - Jewish

The Queen of Bohemia is back in Action

The Queen had a fantastic summer, traveling to Telluride, Pine Ridge Reservation and Montana for work and pleasure. It was all wonderful and rewarding in every possible way. But every once in a while the Queen gets derailed. Call it life or the snare of fate, things can be just so overwhelming that she is not quite sure what to do. This causes great anxiety, but luckily, The Queen falls back on her yoga practice, meditation and stories to give her hope. She reconnects with God after a short lapse of egoic disconnect and bad habits that still linger from 1388 Kilkenny Street and resumes her duties.

So after talking to two bankruptcy lawyers it does seem that I cannot declare bankruptcy. I am stuck with Speer for the time being. If my ex would just sell the darn 31st street house I’d be in much better shape to deal with the screwy loans and upkeep on the properties, which I do find valuable in the long term, but a massive pain in the short run. I’m not the type to believe in hoarding and sitting on a pot of gold. Of course that puts me in a sticky position. But I feel for all the millions of Americans who have financial problems. It can definitely make you sick.

So I can’t declare bankruptcy because I can’t get rid of the income tax on the equity my ex took out to pay off his debts, in my name on the mortgage and loans! Gads! How stupid could I get! I can only say I was in love, and I believed in him, however, he didn’t come through and that’s the most painful part. I put everything I had into it and I didn’t get anything in return. Something I became conscious of from parenting my father as a child and also my choice of men in the past. I take care of them and get little in return.
Also I can’t declare bankruptcy because I could lose my copyrights to my work! Gads! Now that is scary. So I have cut off all spending to the extreme. No more coffees, no more eating out (ok, once a month for special with the kids, you HAVE TO!) Get the hair cut at Super Clips, eat all the food you have left in the house. But not out of fear but out of this is how we should have been living all along. Since the 50s, a recent Wall Street Journal article wrote, it’s all about my property, my own house, my things and stuff. We really don’t need a lot to get by on. The article said that if you own your own home it shows you are not a communist. Well, I would sure like to live with somebody right now, share meals, work in the garden together, share childcare. We should be living collectively, at least have that option if you choose. So I voluntarily now live a life of simplicity. How I wish I could ditch my car. Such an expense! I love riding my moped. I typically buy all my clothing used, and now it’s just cutting out lots of little things. But I am determined to get back on top of things, make my business work, and get financially squared away. I often think of living abroad with my kids. I’ve wanted to do it my whole life and I want my kids to have that opportunity, especially to learn another language. I can do my work from the internet. We sure could live cheaply in Mexico or even Puerto Rico, or maybe hang out in India for a few months before moving on to Thailand or something and do the home school/yoga thing. Wouldn’t that be a hoot!

But like in all the stories she has been reading and telling lately, The Queen has faith in God. Faith in the present moment, and faith in herself. All thing will work out. She gets to live deeply in the present moment when she is rooted in yoga and meditation. She gets to relish being a mother and feel great love and joy for her children – whether it is preparing an Epsom salt bath for her son’s poor flat feet that went through a grueling two-hour football practice, or prepare a nutritious breakfast or lunch, or grow cherry tomatoes just for her daughter who loves them, or she gets back down on her hands and knees and willingly scrubs the kitchen floor and the bathrooms and the whole house because that is what the Queen does, she is always faithful, always present, and always beginning again and the Queen survives and thrives. And sometimes she has to just clean again to get her faith back, because it’s the cleaning out of the fear and negativity that is key. That she is the creator of her whole universe with her heart and thoughts, so she’d better stay positive and with God, because she really doesn’t want any other outcome other than goodness and joy, so that’s all it can possibly be. Goodness and joy, even if so much is coming at you and it seems hopeless. And the house on 1388 Kilkenny Street she will never live in again, for that is the source of the anxiety and fear that occasionally creeps up. And now the Queen is aware of it, she can name it, and she can gently ask it to go away. Even though in reality there is a mouse infestation at my father’s house at 1388 Kilkenny Street. They got into his emergency survival food. There is also a lot of stagnant water in the basement. I begin to wonder if it is a health hazard. I’d love to airlift my father out of there and have him life with us – as I am contemplating getting a house mate and do have an ad on Craigs List at the moment

But now the Queen is clean and jazzed. She has something very special coming up September 2. And her websites are about to be relaunched and updated, and she will be working with middle school students to teach them Mythic Yoga and even put up more You Tube videos for the work. Ah, release. To be in union with the divine and without fear in any situation, that is the task at hand. I hope everybody can find release from their suffering. That is why we do yoga, that is why we tell stories and that is why we love deeply everything around us. It is a grand release.

Yoga on the Reservation

I am in Kyle South Dakota, having spent the day on the Pine Ridge Reservation teaching yoga with R.R. Shakti of Yoga World Reach. Storytime Yoga teacher Scottie Bruch, who is from Whitewood, South Dakota, also joined us with tons of wonderful donations she gathered from her community for the needy here.

We set off yesterday at about 3 p.m and ended up in another world around 11:30 p.m. when we reached our destination. It seems that landmarks and road signs disappear when you reach the reservation, and we had to back track several times and even got completely lost in the black darkness with no I-phone service (of which the GPS service on it had lead us astray), nor a gas station or car in sight to seek help if necessary! Luckily yoga has taught me to identify such fears of my mind and its endless of what ifs and not react to them but dissolve them, but mostly it was just so uncomfortable being in the car so long and I thought I would die if we didn’t find the Lakota Prairie Ranch Restaurant and Lodge finally.

This morning we were guest on the local radio station that is broadcast to 50,000 residents on the Lakota Native American Reservation. This is the place with the history of Wounded Knee, the massacre and everything really awful and still denied by our country. Our schools should be teaching what we did to Native Americans along with the Jewish experience in middle school so kids really understand it and get clear of its weight on our psyche. I remember really hating and bored with pioneers and Colorado history that we studied in the third grade. I considered the settlers and miners just a bunch of monsters pillaging and murdering the native peoples and land on a greed fest, and the women were really miserable back then too. I had read how pioneer women in Kansas  and Wyoming committed suicide because of the constant wind.

During the radio show the hosts mentioned how many residents are plagued by high rates of diabetes from poor diet, high suicide rates (there was a suicide run given by the families who have lost loved ones, as their biggest pow wow of the year was happening this weekend.) and high crime. There is also a high rate of ADHD among Native American children on the reservation. I talked about how important the rituals and rites of the Native American culture are, which is actually used as a therapeutic tool here. Children need to be grounded in their bodies and souls. They need these rites and myths as a road map into the inner world to create meaning and be present and connected to their environment by participating in it rather than consuming it. The amazing thing is that Lakota cosmology is very similar to yoga philosophy, as I wrote in the earlier blog. In their artwork there are circles everywhere, and they believe in the levels of spiritual, emotional, physical and mental well being. They believe that everything is related, and there is a depth that informs all of the reality on the surface from down below as the Great Mystery. This is what grounds children in their bodies. Those who have experienced trauma and abuse must be able to ground themselves in the safety of the body and their own beings. To have self-awareness of emotions, behaviors, and to be deeply relaxed so that one feels and knows the relationship one has to the external environment.
There is a Waldorf School on the reservation and I’m hoping to come back with YWR in another three months and establish some children’s programs when school is in session.

I taught mostly teenagers and a few adults as well as young children today, and I used story to set the theme. To help them see the inner life, and also to distinguish between their desires and fears I told the Sufi story from my book The Treasure in Your Heart: Yoga and Stories for Peaceful Children, about the heart that no longer moves. How can we be peaceful and non-attached in the face of fear and desire? Joyful and painful experiences? So that we may not suffer. How can we stay centered in our selves and identify within rather than with the mind’s wanderings and entanglements? The yoga practice and mindful of these questions reprogram the body. By the end one teenager was so relaxed during shavasana that she fell asleep.

Afterwards there was a snack and we all talked with some of the participants. We talked about yoga history and where it came from, and again people were really interested in improving their health. We also talked about storytelling. One woman with a 10-month-old baby said she remembers hearing the stories in high school of her people, but has not heard or told them since. But she remembered them as creation stories, where the animals came from and so forth. I encouraged her to find the old stories again and to tell them to her daughter. And then she was to tell them to me when I returned in the fall.

R.R. Shakti then taught an adult class at the community college. The people said they really felt better afterwards and wanted to take more classes, even possibly driving to Sturgis once a month where Scottie taught. Additionally, they really connected with the sense that their bodies and souls were wrung out, as if it released toxins and re-energized them and their chi, and life spirit.

Tomorrow we leave and will talk about bringing a yoga teacher training to the reservation. Then we will go hiking in the Badlands and pay our respects at Wounded Knee. The insanity of the white man drove the spirit of the Lakota underground, but I have a feeling that its soon return is what is going to bring life on the planet back in balance.

Backwards We Spell Japan

Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters of our names spell JAPAN. We always knew that. We children always knew that our father is Dutch and that he is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. It was during World War II. He was born on the island of Java. Before it was called Indonesia. Before, when it was a Dutch colony run by the Dutch East India Company. One captain Straub was our seafaring ancestor who married a princess from the island of Madura.
The Dutch traded coffee and sugar, quinine and indigo to bring back to the motherland, and tea that grew on plantations cleared from the jungle. My father lived on tea and sugar plantations, with my Oma, his two sisters, and my grandfather Straub, a mechanical engineer who kept the plantation machinery going. He starved to death in a POW camp outside of Tokyo. I know him only as a charcoal drawing on white paper hanging above my father’s bed.
“Those dirty Japs,” Mom always says. “Thank God for the atomic bomb.”
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp because Mom tells everybody. The people with blank faces at St. Ambrose Church that mom forces me to attend, to my neighbor Leslie’s mother, to Lou the skinny milkman who nods and nods and nods.
“They don’t know about the dirty Japs, Patti,” she says to me. I tell Mom about the Holocaust we are studying in school. Gritty black-and-white films of shriveled corpses bulldozed into pits, Jews’ hair made into rugs, their skin into soap. “Tell your teacher your father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says. I do. My teacher stares at me bewildered.
“Is your father Japanese?” No, no. I shake my head. “Is he Jewish?” No, no. I can’t speak. I feel it stuck in my throat. My family is in the wrong concentration camp.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We go to the K-Mart, Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. With Mom, who chases down blue-light specials for cheap blue-and-red plaid shirts.
“Come on, kids, hurry!” she says running.
It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. August 6, 1976 in Boulder, Colorado. We stop at the snack stand for white hoagie sandwiches with ham and lettuce and mayonnaise. Mom orders water, but Nancy pleads for Icees, and Mom thinks, and then says OK. We hold the waxy Icee drink cups with polar bear triangles on the side that Albert cuts out and mails in for free cheapo gifts. The Icee cups full of red slush that make it easy for Nancy and me to shoplift red fingernail polish in.
“$4.95,” the girl behind the counter says. She is bored, with blond-feathered hair. She glosses her lips with a sour grape Bonnie Bell lip smacker. She stares at Mom’s nose, broken in 1943 when she was kicked by a horse. Plastic surgery wasn’t too good back then and now her nose looks like someone mashed a wad of silly putty on the tip.
“Do you know what today is?” Mom asks. The girl shrugs. “It’s Hiroshima Nagasaki Day. When we bombed the Japs.” I press my face to the glass, watch my nose leave a crescent of steam.
You know, my husband is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp,” Mom says, fishing through her big, black secondhand handbag. “If we didn’t drop the bomb, none of these children would be standing in front of you.” We suck our Icees, bite the straws, shoulders hunched, backs turned. We disappear into our own fantasy. We are not here with Mom. Not with this moment.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says. Mom can’t find the money. She can find the car keys at the bottom of the bag, along with the broken lipstick containers, cracker crumbs and dried lemon slices swiped from restaurants. She can find the coupons, the dry felt-tip pens, the spare Kotex that will catch her diarrhea that suddenly comes on out of nowhere, because she ate too many tomatoes or drank too much black coffee. The diarrhea that drops in small brown bloodstains behind her after she quickly pays the girl, then shuffles to the bathroom at the back of the store.
Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. We wolf down our hoagies sitting in the yellow and orange snack booths waiting for Mom. Nancy is the oldest, older than me by six years. Then came Albert, ten months later. Irish twins, my father says. Then came me, born late, the day after Christmas, 1966. And then Jeanie, two Februarys later. Mom says we were accidents. Four 10-pound accidents. She could have found somebody rich, married Liberace, or Onassis, or somebody else, she says. But she asked our father to marry her, and she got us.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. We are packed in our house together, like the thousands packed into the concentration camp, in the monastery at Ambarawa 7 where Dad lived for three years as a little boy. We are packed into house that has no dining room and no family room. Jeanie and Albert are together in one bedroom, Nancy and me in another. Then Mom and Dad in the big bedroom. But Mom is everywhere. She is in the oversized painting of fishing boats washed on the shore, mysteriously without fishermen, hanging crooked in the living room. She is the collection of pen-and-ink caricature drawings on the wall, her oversized head looking like a young Johnny Cash with long hair, her hand posed with a writing quill. She is the innumerable scattering of out-of-date books, astronomy, chemistry, world encyclopedias and communist China film strips grabbed from the free box at the Boulder Valley School’s discard sale. She is the neighbor’s trashcans that she digs through, searching, pulling, hauling things back to the house, old wood, broken mirrors, or locks with no keys. She is the popcorn-yellow paint in the kitchen laced heavy with gray cobwebs and pork sausage grease splatters, the pork sausage grease saved in a coffee cup that smells up the kitchen, smells up the house, fouls my heart. She is the cut up clothing laying all over the floor, on every floor, in every corner, heaped like refugee rag dolls, along with the piles of records, ripped up hand bags, old cans of blue paint. The blue paint she painted the outside of the house without finishing the job, the blue paint that streaks the back of the bathroom door, that is all over the porcelain toilets, all over the scuff marks on the tips of her shoes.
We know our father was a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp.
“Scrape your plate,” Mom always says. “I should put you in a concentration camp and let you starve.” That’s what Mom says at the dinner table while we stare at the trash piled high on the fake wood table -- the elastic cut off from Dad and Albert’s old underwear, the coupons glued together with spilled milk and mold, the thimbles, newspaper clippings, nuts and bolts, the unwashed dishes, dirty knick knacks from garage sales, the dusty plastic flowers falling out of a dented aluminum tea kettle.
We eat Mom’s cooking, eat chipped beef that was boiled in a plastic bag, or chew green peppers stuffed with white rice off of chipped plates and drink from faded, plastic glasses that once had pink and green beach scenes on them. Mom found them last week at a garage sale for a quarter.
We hold Mom’s cooking in our mouths, peppers stuffed with rice with no flavor. We wipe our faces with paper towels when she’s not looking and unload the mouthfuls in them. We slink under the table. We try to escape. I pick through the broken cookies at the bottom of the wooden cookie jar, brushing off the tiny bugs and old crumbs clinging to them.
We know our father was a child survivor of a concentration camp. How he starved. A 10-year old boy, taken from his mother and sisters and put in a camp for old men and adolescent boys. The Jongenscamp. Surviving on clothing starch, snails, grass or scraping the ultra-thin layer inside a banana peel, or filling his belly up with the compressed straw that was for the guards’ pigs, or drinking from toilets in the dark of the night, or crouching by the bamboo fence and waiting for something to eat, for something to crawl under the fence and into the camp – anything -- rats or snakes that he grabbed by the tail and whipped to break their backs and eat them raw.
“Look at this!” Mom cries. “Look at this last drop of milk you have wasted! Sit back down here and drink it. People are starving to death!” Her mouth is a rectangular slot of false teeth lined with shiny wire, clenched, carving lines deep as dry old cheese into the corners of her mouth. All I see are her waxy pink-gummed false teeth that slide out of her mouth and sit in a glass of water that is never changed. The glass of water on top of the rusting medicine cabinet in the bathroom that Mom, using her zigzag scissors, pasted over with sticky contact paper of sailing ships. I see the false teeth, yellow hunks of food stuck between the teeth, floating and trying to escape. They sit in front of the mirror dimmed by years of white toothpaste splatter where I stare at myself brushing my teeth with my blue gun toothbrush. I am thin, thin, skeleton thin, knobby elbows, tall for my age. My Dutch white face, heart-shaped with wide Czech cheeks and a pointy chinned, is shocked by my dark brown hair that I hate, stick straight like Dad’s. With my green-brown eyes I stare. I don’t think. I don’t feel.
We know that our father is a child survivor of a Japanese concentration camp. I see Dad sitting on the rattan couch that was once new from American Furniture warehouse, now covered with layers of unsewn, unmatched tattered fabric that was on sale at So-Fro Fabrics for 35 cents a yard.
Dad sits alone on the couch listening to Madame Butterfly. The part where she finds out that Pinkerton has a new wife. A cone of sandalwood incense burns He has taken pills for his migraine headaches. The headaches he gets every day to some degree. Sometimes bad. In the middle of the night, waking up sweating. From remembering something. Or thinking of it. He takes codeine, amatriptaline, bottlesfuls. Their yellow-brown plastic containers sit next to his bed on the bed stand next to the picture of Jesus that glows in the dark. The empty containers fall, roll under the bed. Some tall and thin, other fat and big. With long pills, yellow pills, round white pills. When the headaches are really bad he goes to the hospital and they stick a needle full of Demerol in his neck and he sleeps for days.
Tonight the headache is bad. Dad took many pills. He is slow. I walk up behind him and without a word gently place my hands on his head. I ask God why. Why? Why do people suffer? Why did my father have to go through hell as a child? Why did he survive?
My hands run like seeping water through his hair, gray, greasy, limp. My hands pull his hair, just like the nurse he had in Java. She knew just where to twist and pull a section of hair to make a headache go away. I pull his hair. Pull out the tigers and snakes roaming the jungles of Indonesia, when it was the Dutch East Indies. Pull out the pain, pull out the war, pull out the headache that will leave Dad in bed with a wet washcloth over his eyes. Unable to move, drenched in tears and sweat, unable to hear in the darkness of his room or go to work at his job as a mechanical engineer beneath fluorescent lights in a yellow brick building in Boulder.
My fingers push on his muscles, the bulging tight muscles in his neck that connect to his head, that surge into his eyes, forcing them closed, unable to watch Star Trek or Buck Rogers or the Project Blue Book episodes that we have seen so many times we know the dialogue by heart.
“Shit, dog shit. Bobbie rocco moco poco pup,” Mom says, searching for something, alone in the kitchen as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them. “Rocco moco poco pup. Shit, dog house.” My hands pull Dad’s hair harder.
“Shake your hands,” Dad says in his thick Dutch accent. “Shake the pain out of your hands. Get rid of it.”
I shake and I shake.
“Cat, rat, trap, dog dump,” Mom says as she opens and shuts the kitchen cabinets, opens and shuts them.
At midnight, Dad vomits in the bathroom. Vomits in the toilet that is always clogged with Mom’s diarrhea that is caused by her weak bowels. Because the doctors cut her fistula when she delivered Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie, all 10-pound children.
“They ripped my guts up,” Mom tells the woman at the K-Mart check out counter. “Nancy, Albert, Patti and Jeanie. Backwards the first letters spell Japan.