Author: Dana Stovern

The Forbidden Fruit of Female Pagan Baptisms

By Dana Stovern
Written October 7, 2022
Moxee, Washington

I experienced a six-week-plus fantastical and beyond-imagination Initiation in the autumn of 2022. Although much of it was beyond words, I attempted this piece as a way to create landscape about what I lived through.

When my Spirit Team came walking to me
through the eastern hills of Washington State,
calling me to forgive God
through the fields and tan ridgelines
that cut across blue skies above,
I cursed. I wailed.

They said, “Things will go a lot better for you if you do forgive him,
and let go of control along the way.”

I was already driving to the God Squad Shop
when this message landed.
I was already doing what I’d been spiritually instructed to do.
Wasn’t that enough?
But no, I had to bring my pet peeve of forgiveness and allowing
along for the ride.
That was too much.

So, instead, in tears, I argued with Jesus and God
about sheer loss, deep trauma, the effing patriarchy,
and the unfairness of it all,
including being a woman in a God-forsaken land.
I argued my case to two patriarchal Biblical figures, 
like I was going to win THAT argument,
while I drove into a Christian town
that would probably rather hang me
than welcome me.

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Let Go of the Garbage

By Dana Stovern
Written October 3, 2022
From July 28, 2022
Yakima River Valley, Washington

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I used to live in a beautiful, brand-new townhome overlooking the Selah, Washington river valley. There were sweeping blue skies with regular angel-wing clouds in our vista. Ridges embraced both sides of the valley like mountains. The Yakima River easily grooved below. It was pretty much a dream spot . . .

. . . as long as I could overlook the barrage of construction, incessant village traffic, socially unintelligent text messages from the property management company AND the commercial sized garbage dumpster beside my unit.

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Today, the story is about that garbage dumpster because me and that dumpster had a “relationship.” The way this relationship went is that at first it was fine. That dumpster minded its own business because the weather was cool and the tenant numbers were low. The once-a-week garbage service kept up with the village garbage dumpster needs.

But then, our “relationship” changed. The weather warmed up and more people moved in as units were completed on the property and one day, as I came out of my townhome door, I found myself living next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa of garbage. The thing was overflowing and stacked to the hilt with village garbage. And it was beginning to smell. I was horrified at the lack of recycling that was unavailable (Eastern Washington is living in the Dark Ages concerning recycling) AND the lack of consciousness in how people literally dumped and walked away.

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The Magic of Dragonfly Shadows

By Dana Stovern
Written July, 26, 2022
Moxee, Washington

If you traced the lines of river water and irrigation water flowing out of the mountains in all the places I’ve lived, you’d be able to infer much more about my life than most. I believe I’ve spent more time beside this flowing water than I have with people, learning about the sounds, the smells, the sights of the seasonal flow of water and all that goes with it. It takes time to come into the fold of this knowledge, but once you have it, it never leaves your skin, your nostrils, your ears, your line of sight. This is a knowing that comes of practiced walking in these places over decades. And on one summer day, all the walks of my life along these water lines met in one nostalgic tide-pool of time, held up for me to see in the dance of the dragonfly.

In the face of all the change, I am nothing
until the sun shines on dragonflies in flight
above watery canals and sun-burnished grasses.
Tiger. Gold. Emerald. Blue.
They are flitting. Full darts. Probing air and water.

And below the dragon’s flight
the banks of green canal leaves lisp whispers
tracing lines in wetness, telling secrets.

I’ve walked this place a thousand times and more
through dozens of fields
where water shed from mountains
canters through canals and feeds the fields with the magic of moisture.
I am home here. Always. Even when I have no home.

My soul is this pulse of mountain water
given to chamber lines of earth
filled with glistening watery diamonds
to the braids of rows, raising plants.

Yet, as well as I know this in my being,
today is different. I’m suspended.
I’m held in the cast of the dragonfly
flying in front of the sun and shrugging off
fleeting shadows unlike any other:
Dragonfly shadows shattering into the grasses below.

How can that be because
dragonflies are the light shiners in darkness.
How can they cast a shadow from the sun?
But they do. They do. Special shadows
that weave time, turning warps
like water eternally braiding in the fields,
sinking into earth.

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Deep-Pocketed Sheets

By Dana Stovern
Written May 9, 2022
Selah, Washington
From the Autumn of 2021 to May of 2022

I was living full-tilt through the meltdown of my life with a divorce, house sale, and move. My life had dramatically shifted from the COVID-19 hermit inertia of two years to everything blowing apart at the seams. In the middle of the daily swirls, I began dreaming of the “freshie” that my new living space could be . . . somewhere, out there on the horizon. To help keep that dream alive, I allowed myself the luxury of browsing for “freshie” new sheets on Amazon, because nothing says a fresh start like fresh sheets.

I browsed Amazon, dreaming of richly colored auburns in bamboo to carry me through autumn. I dreamed of downy flannel, all cozy in deep blues with bright white snowflakes to wrap around me for warmth in the depth of winter. I dreamed of crisp white cotton flowered up with blossoms to enliven me in the spring.

As I dreamed that most wonderful “freshie” dream of sheets, a phrase kept popping up on the Amazon descriptions: deep-pocketed sheets. Deep-pocketed sheets. Deep-pocketed sheets. I wondered, “Hmm, what is this mystery of deep-pocketed sheets that I’ve never heard about before?” You see, I’ve been retail-deprived living on Colorado’s back forty and just don’t pay attention to these things. As it turned out, I was living so deeply in my “freshie” sheet dreams that I easily fell into thinking, “I must have these deep-pocketed sheets” because they just sounded so delicious. And the deep pockets of sheets became part of this freshie dream about sheets. Never mind I had no idea what that meant.

Do you hear the Universe laughing? Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it.

Shortly after I planned out my seasonal purchase of “freshie” sheets, a nice and tidy package arrived on my doorstep just in time for me to label the box in big bold letters, “NEW SHEETS!” and I tucked them away in storage. I didn’t pull out even one of those sheet sets. Nope. Not one. That package was for the other end of the dream when it was time to set up my “freshie” bed set.

With a great deal of faith, I sent my box of “freshie” sheets with all my other belongings into the maelstrom of the moving industry that exists in our country today. I rolled the dice, hoping and thinking everything would be fine, and played Russian Roulette with my personal belongings. Two months and lots and lots of drama later, I miraculously received my personal belongings after sleeping on an air mattress for that amount of time, rolling around in very old sheets. I was not, I repeat, I was NOT living the “freshie” dream I had hoped.

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The Alpha & Omega

By Dana Stovern
Written April 5, 2022
Selah, Washington

In a world filled with the chaos of change, here’s a passage to help you find your center:

Yesterday was a powerful day of THE ALL of the past, concurrent and future threads of our lives coming together at one nexus point of THE ALL held in THE NOTHING held in THE ALL —

As we were the very vessels that the cosmic winds wove through the eyes of our universal needles, cleansing us of lifetimes of debris, transmuting to the ethers what we no longer need to continue forward.

Yesterday was our very personal, yet global, experience of weaving our Alphas and Omegas, like Grandmother Spider, in gleaming gossamer light threads to birth this spring into a New Earth over and over and over again.

So, today. Go forth gently. Let the complexity of the spirals of your DNA breathe and catch up with the great inner clockworks of your life. Stand outside and say, “AHO!” to the sun. Hug the wind. Tell secrets to a tree. Dance when the bird sings and listen for the shaker music within the Earth. Paint water on your face.

This is how we intermingle with the Earth who birthed us from her depths, and will take us back into her breast when we are only bones.

Let our souls know this story of our Alphas and Omegas that we are casting on our skies be our best lives.

Dana Stovern is founder and coach of The Magic of Somatic Money, and author of the blog Along the Learning Curve of Life. Even though her profession is body-based money relationship coaching, her first love is words, writing and exploring the depths of the human conscious (or unconscious) condition in body and soul development.

Under Construction. Literally.

By Dana Stovern
March 18, 2022
Selah, Washington

When you make a commitment to launch into the journey of dramatically changing your life, you’re saying to the Universe, “I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I’m willing to live through, to the best of my ability, whatever curveballs get thrown at me.” This has definitely been the case since my dramatic life changes that began in September 2022. And the Universe definitely has a sense of humor about it, even if I can’t quite see the funny-haha moments about it when it’s happening.

Even though I’m living in a bit of insanity, or the hell of my mess, or the miracle of my life changes, depending on what kind of morning I wake up to, the irony of my surrounding environment is not lost on me.

Halfway through this week, as I tried to focus in my office on rebuilding and relaunching my business, I was abruptly interrupted by loud metal-to-earth scrapings and “KA-KA-KA-KA-KA-KUNKS!” and diesel engines throttling at the back of my townhome unit.

When I went to my bedroom on the second floor and pulled back the blind to see what was going on, I was directly met with the large metal bucket at eye level from the backhoe that was now there. It was paired with a dump truck, and four construction workers were talking in animated styles about the project they were working on, which was all about building the retaining wall at the back of this property.

I knew this was coming because only ten days ago, the surveyors had come through with their tripods and calm air, putting their stakes into the raw earth with precise notations on the concrete and the wooden poles. They left the scene with a few tell-tale neon strip tapes flying from those stakes like flags blowing in the breeze, saying, “We’ll be back. But next time with heavy equipment.”

And here it was, in real life. I experienced the loud sounds and the full view, only yards from my window, of the excavations, the heavy machinery, the levelings, animated arguing, and larger-than-life retaining wall cement blocks.

If you were standing next to me, all you’d hear would be my air-sucking-oxygen and a resounding, “Jesus!” as I dropped the window blind.

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Crossing the Continental Divide

By Dana Stovern
January 3, 2022
Hotchkiss, Colorado

The course of my life has never followed a straight line within the confines and predictable rhythms of the traditional establishment, although I tried with great might and suffering for many years to make it do so — some thirty years plus. When I eventually came to terms with my undeniable intuitive gifts in the mystic arts that had been shrieking to come through for so long, I discovered a steady pulse was living within my soul path, lighting the way. This was my ignition, my initiation, my revelation into a new way of living that the push-pull clarities from the Universe were showing me the way through what had been a muddle of frustration and pain. Thus began my new way of tracking life through intuitive nudges, messages from my Spirit Team (light beings I have significant connections with in “the beyond”), along with strong “yeses” and “nos” out of the questions I asked my pendulum, and billboard signages in the real world used as amplifiers from the Universe. And, believe it or not, a healthy dose of logic because you don’t want to be too batshit crazy and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Over the years, as I honed and integrated a balance of my tools and gifts through life’s storms, they became my trusted allies in determining the absolute best choices I could make at any given time to manage the direction of my life. The reason I use the word “manage” is that no matter how much insight any one of us has, there is no such thing as control. We are always at the whim of the shifting tides of the Universe, no matter how much we hedge our bets. So, when it finally came time to cut my losses in my second marriage, a heartbreaking decision, I leaned more heavily than ever on trusting the living that I’d cultivated: I kept my feet firmly planted on the ground and let the door swing wide open to show me the path of possibility that I might never have considered for myself.

The magnetic power coursing through mountain ranges will change you, especially above ten thousand feet. But this isn’t necessarily what people talk about when they visit and drive through the Colorado Rockies, soaking up one of the greatest collections of fourteeners (mountains with elevations above fourteen thousand feet) in the country. Instead, visitors will usually talk about the magnificent feeling of the spectacular views without understanding the trend of energies right beneath their feet.

For me, the confluence of this magnetic power coursing through mountain ranges is greatest along the Continental Divide, where the elements of gravity and earthly cathedral spikes work together in determining directional flows of snowflakes and water droplets, either east to the Gulf of Mexico or west to the Pacific Ocean. I’ve spent years marveling at the powerful simplicity of this and how it results in the sheer directional voluminous flows of water across the country. While gravity and the silent height of the mountains of the Colorado Continental Divide split volumes of water, it’s also a place that easily rearranges the informational complexity of your DNA anew within the spin of your internal compass — without you even knowing about it. You’ll feel its subtle effects at the time but not recognize the dynamics until after, much like your snowflakes and water droplets that have been flowing east for so long are now flowing west.

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A Christmas with No Bells or Whistles

By Dana Stovern
Christmas Day 2021
Rogers Mesa, North Fork of the Gunnison

I feared Christmas this year because I knew the holiday was totally stripped down for me. I’d have no family or gathering to be with because of the divorce and the Omicron variant of COVID, limiting connection. There was no room to decorate a tree in my tiny space. I was also feeling the blah-humbug of the formality of gifting, which wasn’t a requirement for me this year. And trying to formulate how I’d cook for myself for Christmas, a special meal? Hmm. It felt like I was living in an involuntary boycott of Christmas, which did give me a certain kind of relief, even while a hollow feeling settled in the center of me.

The hollowness eventually developed into a wad of fear that rolled around inside of me like a wild pool ball having no edges to keep it caged on a table. I did not know how I’d walk through this landscape and negotiate with the layers of emotions that the holiday always brings. Alone.

The closer the holiday weekend came, the more I realized, “Dana, walk your talk with this. Do for yourself what you encourage others to do. Just be present and breathe through it. Don’t ignore, avoid, fight, or hide. Just stay with it.” And that’s what I’ve been doing – breathing through and being with where things “should” be but aren’t. Grieving when I need to and, of all the surprising holy holies, finding redemption, independence and freedom where I’d always had to lean into the yoked harness of the holidays.

And it was this morning, as I cooked scrambled eggs, topping them with a bit of a mess of raspberry sauce while enjoying a side of a chocolate-filled croissant, that Scott Simon’s NPR voice took me to a place I hadn’t expected.

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Crickets

By Dana Stovern
October 14, 2021
Paonia, Colorado

Sometimes, a cricket is a little messenger with something big to say about the tilt of life.

Everything about selling a house to break up a partnership and move is counterintuitive. To sell a house, you must clean what was once your home, like madly shining your shoes, burnishing all the corners you never bothered with before. Then, just as people show up, you must drive away; drive away like a strange Monty Python movie. Surreal.

To break up a partnership, you must stop with the tide of habits that stitched things together, even when the relationship was empty and dead, and instead signify that the end is here. Heartbreaking.

To move is to put your life in boxes and label them, as if your life is that label written on dry brown cardboard. Then, you put those boxes away, time-capsuling them to deal with in some other time and place, wherever and whenever that is. Disorienting.

All of this means that a cricket singing from a small, bushy geranium with pink petals filtering everywhere, all over the deranged carpet, the plant littering its musky smells from a clay pot — all of it momentarily saved from the snow — is the singular orchestra reminding you that life is lived through cycles, and that’s all this is. The swirl of showings, the unraveling habits, the growing stack of boxes are part of the cycle of something dying.

And it’s this singular cricket singing its heart, or legs, out that echoes the past chorus of crickets xylophoning their legs into some transcendental phrase from the heat of the grasses that lifted you through the summer that is gone now. This is not that. This is the death cycle clearing the way for some future spring, some future summer, where a new world unfurls. But now, ’tis late autumn with one lone cricket singing courageously in the living room, and the burnishing of the sun fades into the darkness of the longest night coming soon with Dia de los Muertos and the Winter Solstice.

Now the cricket is a reminder to burn bright with inner light through the low tide to the other side.

Dana Stovern is founder and coach of The Magic of Somatic Money, and author of the blog Along the Learning Curve of Life. Even though her profession is body-based money relationship coaching, her first love is words, writing and exploring the depths of the human conscious (or unconscious) condition in body and soul development.

Untangling the Tooth that Wouldn’t Talk

By Dana Stovern
Written September 21, 2021
Paonia, Colorado

Who knew that so much was riding on a tooth?

In the middle of my first marriage, I cracked a lower back molar. At the time, I did not know that the stress of my life and being with an abusive partner were causing me to grind my teeth at night, putting my ivories at significant risk. Many mornings, I woke with achy jaw joints, not understanding why, until a dentist pinpointed the issue as he mitigated the tooth with a root canal and capped the molar with an expensive gold crown.

That was the beginning of a very long journey of awakening to the layered reality of my life that has taken me years, decades, to unravel. The journey has transpired through glorious awakenings of my psychic gifts, heartbreaking truths about my family, tremendous loss, fabulous adventures (especially in nature), uniquely unfolding connections with fellow journeyers, grueling emotional labor to heal embedded trauma, and adamantly persistent insistence to find my professional way in an unbelieving world. It’s been twenty-five years of never giving up on myself, even when the odds looked slimmer than a size zero model during Fashion Week in New York. When I look back now, I revel in the fact that I’m still surviving the chances that someone like me is still making it in the aftermath of this predominately toxic masculine world. It’s a miracle.

And all the while, this tooth, capped with a gold crown, has sat in the back of my mouth, perched on its throne with a revolving need for attention. Sometimes I forgot about it, but always, my tongue would find its way there to trace the semi-natural ridge and test the edge and the tooth base to see if it was still there. It was like I was reaching out to touch a buddy, wondering if I’d still find it, and always relieved when I did. What was it about this tooth?

There were times this tooth ached underneath, a phantom pain mysteriously waxing and waning in a way that none of my other teeth ever have. I see now that an energy was there, trying to work itself out in my body. Yet, all along, I’ve tried to ignore the deeper meanings of this tooth, never connecting the dots between the home of origin traumas with toxic patterning in my marriages. Never connecting the interminable secrets of un-mouthed words I had to keep for the relationships in my life to stay intact. I needed to stay safe and survive. I never made the connection between this cracked tooth holding up a crown and the silence of intimately embedded information that fishtailed around the root, hidden in my gums. That’s where a phantom but very real ache came and went for years.

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