MY NAME

What is that?
I did not choose it.
It was given to me.
It has implications.
My parents named me after another
And yet, a name has mystical value.
Meaning that is not always apparent at first glance.

Two names we are given.
One chosen by others and a family name to carry forth.
First, it was my father’s.
And then it was my husband’s.
And then when I remarried, STOP!!!
No more aliases.
No more identifying and branding.
Enough is enough.

I am not to be known by my father.
I am not here to bring forth a his-story.
I choose to do something different.
I choose to name my own vessel.

I went to Court to file a petition
Asked by the Judge to state my grounds
This is the first step towards ultimate goal
of emancipation from the Patriarchy

It is who I am, It is my name
He signed the order & shook my hand
I never met a Goddess before.
I smiled - a Goddess gave birth to you.
She just had a different name.

Doing Something New

Every year for my birthday, I challenge myself to try something new.

When I turned 37, I needed something truly different to set the tone for my year. I decided to jump out of an airplane and skydive. I thought it might give me a different way to look at things. At least shake things up and yank me out of my comfort zone.

Birthday weekend, WSM Noah and I got into the car and drove about 2 and 1/2 hours away to Lake Wales, Florida. The professionals at Florida SkyDiving Center were so friendly and nice. After we waived our rights and signed our names approximately 47 times (Noah asking: Are you sure you want to do this???), we were outfitted and instructed and ready to board our craft.

We hired videographers to have the whole experience for future viewings. We were led onto a teeny airplane where we sat on a bench facing the exit door and seated backwards from the direction of flight. We then got strapped into or securely attached to our instructors for our tandem dives.

The freefall portion of my tandem skydive was an exhilarating 60 seconds of 120 M.P.H. freefall -until the parachute opened. The freefall was awesome, amazing, exciting, terrifying, loud, complete sensory overload, inspiring and quite windy - like flappy skin pulled back to your bones and downright chilly and eyes tearing through your glasses windy.

With a snap and a whoosh, the parachute opened and we launched back up into the air. All of a sudden the deafening noise stopped, the wind became manageable and we started to FLY. Whee!!!

Floating ontop of the world, gliding by the clouds, talking to the birds and taking in the scenery. Watching our airplane land below us as we spiraled to the left and to the right, we came in for a really smooth landing.

And once you have tasted flight, You will walk with your eyes turned skyward,
For there you have been,
And there you long to return.

-Leonardo da Vinci

I remember feeling so small and humbled by my flight in the clouds and the beauty and size of our universe. And yet, I felt larger than life and invicible - WOW!!! What things I could accomplish now that I had done what was for me previously unthinkable.

Birthdays are a great time for me to stretch myself beyond my own boundaries, explore the unknown and see what surprises it holds for me.

Doing something new and different and overcoming and going through my fears helped me see myself in a new light. And it did wonders for my self-esteem!!!

BY THE COLLECTIVE FOR THE COLLECTIVE

THE "A" LIST

I have an amazing friend called WSM Zeberofsky. He and WSM Noah went to the same school in Israel 25 years ago. After all these years, they are still in touch with one another. Their deep bond and friendship truly inspires me.

One of the many gifts that Zeberofsky bestows upon us is himself. He entertains me with all the versatile ways he has of saying ALO. I love receiving messages from him on my answering machine because he is creative and imaginative and inventive - his messages make me LAUGH OUT LOUD.

Zeberofsky a/k/a ALOMAN has a great appreciation of music and movies. He shares with me what I lovingly call the "A" list - media that has passed his high standards and are definitely worth checking out.

Aloman shares his resources (knowledge), network and compassion and is a true "LOVECAT" as described in Tim Sander's book, Love is the Killer App.


The movies recommended are fantastic stories that have given me valuable lessons to contemplate and absorb and apply. As for the music, it resonates in my bones. Play it loud and play it proud.

Thank you Aloman, my brother from another mother, for just being you.

Keep on shining your light.


"A" LIST contenders (click on the pictures to check them out):

The Simplest Teachings

Words of Wisdom (WOW)

in the most unusual places and
spaces tend to resonate in my heart.


These gems were found on Bumper Stickers and T-Shirts.

Walking into the courthouse last week, a man was wearing a handwritten note taped to his T-shirt:

I AM IN MY HAPPY SPACE

Walking in Philadelphia (city of brotherly LOVE), a man wearing a T-Shirt which read:

TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED

In California, we spotted a bumper sticker for a local AA chapter:

YOUR EGO IS NOT YOUR AMIGO

A bumper sticker adorning the wall of my Goddess Studio and re-minding me of who I be:

WHO SAYS I WANT TO FIT IN?

And this one which helps me re-member the basics as I stretch and isolate muscles on the Pilates reformer.

Amazing what a few well meaning words can do. Things that make you go hmmm...

Brisket & Limiting Beliefs

Brisket Just Like Bubbe Made It

"A young Jewish mother is preparing a brisket one Friday for Shabbat dinner Her daughter watches with interest as the mother slices off the ends of the Brisket before placing it in the roasting pan. The young girl asks her mother why she did this.

The mother pauses for a moment and then says, "You know, I'm not sure. This is the way I always saw my mother make a brisket. Let's call Grandma and ask her." So, she phones her mother and asks why they always slice the ends off the brisket before roasting.

The Grandmother thinks for a moment and then says, "You know, I'm not sure why, this is the way I always saw MY mother make a brisket." Now the two women are very curious, so they pay a visit to the great-grandmother in the nursing home. "You know when we make a brisket," they explain, "we always slice off the ends before roasting. Why is that?"

"I don't know why YOU do it," says the old woman, "but I never had a pan that was large enough!"

I love this story. It always makes me think of what other beliefs I carry blindly. In fact, Don Miguel Ruiz in The Four Agreements writes that: "as children we didn't have the opportunity to choose our beliefs, but we agreed with the information that was passed to us from the dream of the planet via other humans." In fact, nothing about us is our own, including our names.

So, I started to explore things I had never questioned before.

An ARTIST, me? Couldn't be. I always had a belief of what it meant to be an ARTIST. ARTIST as defined in most dictionaries is: "a person who practices one of the fine arts, esp. a painter or sculptor. " My grandfather's artwork was always displayed on the walls of our house. He was and is an ARTIST.

Now, I can't draw. I just recently started painting (and not canvases, just walls). And for a long time, I didn't even see myself as creative.

And then I saw this:And, it shifted my perception and belief about who an artist can be or what an artist can do.

Tis a beautiful thing to learn new truths about yourself.

I wonder what other self limiting beliefs I need to re-examine?