Jaime Mathis and The Words

Destiny I was born a skeptical nun Devotion for blood Thirst for proof  That could never be absolute So I left The habit draped  Over my shoulders And wandered the desert... Cause after cause Cathedral, candidate, Corpse Standing before a  Rosary of eternity My beating heart And falling before  The lance Of inherent frailty. Calling I can't divorce Fate. A call to serve, Digging past ideals Scraping through skin  Into bone Until the thrum of Humanity silences Party lines, humble pennies And absolute Rightness To baptize me  In Holy Choice. Simply the want  For a better striving. A deeper canyon Between summerland And unending night May swallow all belief, But this remains, Black and white  Billowing around me  In tatters Lifting an olive branch Even as the waters rise.

I taught my body to digest meat in my 20's. It turns out that if you aren't fed animal proteins in meat as a kid, your body doesn't produce certain enzymes for doing the job. Meaning, the second I tried a hamburger, my intestines went into emergency evacuation mode and my "adventure" turned gnarly, pronto.   I took this as a personal failing due to my religiously motivated upbringing as a vegetarian. Seventh-day Adventism had screwed me out of the enjoyment of travel through cuisine and I was upset. And motivated. Bone broths and digestive enzyme supplements took over my home after college. I was willing to do whatever it took to reboot my poor, ethically vegetarianized guts. Slowly, my body began to accept meats without violent retaliation. And then I started practicing yoga daily. In and of itself, this would have only supported my meat-quest, but like the questioner I am, I started delving into the philosophy behind the physical movement. For eating me...

The monkey mind is chattering tonite. It's topic of choice, all the paths I could have taken, the people that were close and now flicker in the distance of time and memory. Sometimes, when this mental noise gets stirred, I try to believe I can drown in nostalgia, in the memory of shadows streaking lines across skin that we swore we'd never forget. I try to anchor myself in years and dates, reaching for the weight I imagined existing in 37 years. Truth? I feel more weightless now than I ever did at 21. Somehow the pinpoints of meaning, coming of age, legal drinking, college graduation, marriage, children, a first novel, became grains of sand in an endless glass. What is a life? The machine is whirring, processing, running amok. Beneath all the leapings I witness the spin. Have to smile. Remember how long it felt like the bottom of the well. Until the day when I punched through the concrete of thoughts, fickle feelings, and experienced the bottomless depths of my own damn sou...

Once, there was a bearded stranger on my flight to Santa Fe. His eyes hid behind black spectacles and he carried an Oxford English Dictionary under his arm. When we arrived in Albequerque, he boarded the train heading into the Sandilla Mountains and beyond them, Santa Fe. He sat across the aisle from me, the OED riding shotgun next to him. It was more than my restraint could handle. I have loved the OED since I was a small girl, its content obviously the key to worlds I hadn't even dreamed. I stood up and walked the aisle to his space. He looked up. Smiled. Motioned to the open seat. I opened my mouth and poured out questions. He left home at 15 to learn about life. Not because home was bad, but because he was curious. He drove the country as a long haul trucker, worked as a farm hand and learn the trade. He could build, transport, politicize and philosophize. He'd come from Portland to Santa Fe after living in a friend's yurt for a couple years while they developed a s...

People pay a lot of money to hear Tom Kenyon in person. The first time I ran across his sound work, he was channeling whales . Yes, you heard me, he was making whale sounds that were most authentic. I'd never heard a person be so whale like before. He can throat sing too. Think Tibetan monks with the fabulous mohawk hats and the deep, bi-tonal, cow-like bellows that echo across Lhasa. There is even a documentary about his sound work and boy, is it unique. He visits caves in southern France and channels earth spirits living in the caves. He chants Vedic mantras while playing the tingshas and singing bowls. He's got to have at least a three octave range. From a musical standpoint, he's got an impressive instrument. He's also a trained therapist and has collaborated on numerous research projects focused on how sound affects the brain. The results are, as you might expect-just as interesting as the man himself. His public speaking manner seems to be a blend of well ...

Some of you may have noticed a flurry of nature photos on my Facebook page over the last five days. Water, moons, horses, trees- all of this adds up to an explanation. I was set free into the wilderness of the San Juan Islands to seek out the sound shaman, Tom Kenyon and a Tibetan healing wizard simply known as Amchi-La. A bit more detail, please? But of course. Every Autumn, it seems that I find myself on a personal pilgrimage to reclaim the singular experience of life as me. Just me, not in relationship to or identifying as, anything other than Jaime. Not Jaime the mom. Not Jaime the wife. Not Jaime the Mathis. Just gloriously anonymous, completely undefined, moi. Usually this involves some kind of travel and learning, since that's what fires up my imagination. And this particular Fall, my pilgrimage retreat took me to the misty isles of the San Juans and the particularly winning, Orcas Island . Fate was conspiring with me. Last year at this time, I found myself h...

It may have been the whiskey the princess and I consumed after he boarded the plane. Maybe the parting words he whispered before stepping on the escalator, “You always take my jokes seriously and laugh when I’m telling the truth-what more could I want?” All these tiny sub-plots shacking up together until our destinies were a tangled mess of co-dependent probabilities.  We were made for loss, the three of us. The opposite ends of the globe conspired for eight weeks to fuse our skins until geographical impossibilities ripped them into separate humans again. A line of happy paper-dolls forced to face the world as flimsy individuals. The universe never holds its breath.  So we ricocheted back across oceans, finding places where the booze ran free and our lungs recognized the air. Still, the ache. Memory became an angel that tortured and sensitized.  The princess faded like Sleeping Beauty, letting silence lull her into a dreamland where everything floated in suspended animati...