Dear AOC Friends,

A few weeks ago I had one of those profound dreams that appear about every seven years in my life. My last one was the day after Thanksgiving 2004 when I fell into an elevator pit and lived. This dream was no nightmare.

Plunging to my certain death I consoled myself that the end would come swiftly and painlessly, the lights turned out on my life with a flick of the switch. The dream wasn’t a nightmare, but a sleep moment that left me calm, self-possessed and empty enough of anxiety that I saw the white fluffies appearing on the walls of the cement tomb.

Down, down I plummeted as the white moss grew into a dense web of a white snowstorm in my death tomb. So thick that I could run my hand over it, the moment of enlightenment came with an intense rational sensation that I would not die, and I would hit bottom.

Saved, chosen, spared, innocent … I was falling into a web, a trampoline affair but softer and cocoon-like, a bed of hay made instead of fair-trade cotton or fresh snow, lying to rescue me at the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Hitting bottom I composed my very alive and still-dreaming self and then saw a trap-door in the wall, an exit out of the elevator shaft. Reaching for the black lever, I yanked open the top and bottom sheets of metal, and walked onto a picnic table.

Typing on her laptop was the girl I knew well, the one who dreamed of moving to New York and becoming a writer. In prior dreams, she was older, more my age, a dear friend and sisterly confidante.

This day, she barely noticed me. Looking up, she kept typing on her Mac Powerbook, with barely a nod, let alone a smile. We exchanged brief acknowledgements eye to eye, as I walked across the tabletop, stepping down to the bench, and onto the floor.

The moment was the most powerful one I’ve ever felt in my life. When this little girl and I looked at each other, there was nothing left to say. I was whole and filled with obligations and a pretty long To Do list.

Surviving the plunge into darkness, my life was filled with light. This dark to light vision remains very strong in my memory, and appeared just recently in a new dream I will share another day.

This Week | New Life

This week — seven years later plus a couple — I lost the man I believe understands me like no other, Simply stated, he is very wealthy and I will not give up working and writing to live the life he seeks with me.

Trying to explain the beauty of hearing from Easeamine and what could be accomplished with proceeds from product sales, I enocuntered his frustration with me boiling over in an anger he had never expressed with me in all these years.

So many times we separated and then returned to each other, trying to synchronize our lives on the same page. Crushed by his frustration with me, I also knew that he spoke the truth about my unwillingness to back away from AOC and my own life journey, a determination and need that puts me at odds with our life together.

Multiple Spiritual Engagements

Today’s post is a response to Bro. Dennis and our new column 2Ps in a Pod. The writing represents an evolutionary phase in my personal journey, another falling into somethingness and perhaps an emerging set of priorities in my life.

When I survived my elevator dream I was a self-actualized whole woman, one who no longer felt guilty over my body and love of sensuality. My focus at that time was a deeply personal self-photography project and facing the woman in the mirror — quite literally.

There was an element of refusal in my attitude towards life and society after that dream, a vision that propelled me forward into writing, blogging and birthing AOC. In agreeing now to blog with Bro. Dennis, I am taking on another of the gremlins in my closet, so to speak, and doing it in a very personal, public way.

After maintaining a significant distance between myself and organized religion generally, and Catholicism specifically, I have agreed to engage in fluid, unrehearsed dialog on the topic. I cannot bear the pain and suffering that fundamentalism and orthodoxy heap on women and children around the world, including America. But I also believe that the forces of fundamentalism and orthodoxy will blow up the world and all the women in it.

Recognizing the relevance and need that humans have for spirituality in our lives, I’ve decided to engage in a project — Easeamine — and now writing 2Ps in a Pod as a vehicle for exploring not only spirituality, but also guilt, judgment, right actions and responsibilities, and specifically the teachings of traditional religions about women.

My entire life is about meandering and wandering, exploring ideas without a final conclusion in mind. I am a dot connector at heart, a meaning-maker who sees a great deal of grey matter in values-driven decisions that fundamentalists make black and white. You’re in or you’re out.

It’s a fact that Bro. Dennis-Anthony doesn’t like heights and experienced a bit of trauma when his first post went live Wednesday night. Easeamine president Paul Menard soothed his frazzled nerves and I’ve suggested that someone take Bro. Dennis parasailing so he permanently conquers his fear of soaring amongst sometimes scantily-clad women.

We hold our heads high at Anne of Carversville, this earnest journey to tell women’s stories ‘from fashion to flogging’. Trust me when I say that Bro. Dennis hasn’t arrived to beat us into submission. Quite the opposite, he is trying to harness our energy and engagement, quick wits and deep thoughts on the severe economic challenges that affect billions of people today — and especially children.

Bleeding Heart on Black by Maki_C30D on Flickr Creative Commons

He is not working for Rome here, and I’ll let Bro. Dennis-Anthony explain this institutional landscape as he sees fit. My dedication and support is for his work and Easeamine’s socially-responsible business concept. Bro. Dennis-Anthony, Paul and I — along with other members of the Easeamine team — have a commonality of vision and shared values, refusing to be separated and lose focus on the big picture because of our limited differences.

If Congress operated with the same set of values and committment to joint success, America would be in a far better place.

The Profane and the Profound

Easeamine is no ordinary skincream, as I’ve personally attested. Supporting a highly-effective anti-wrinkle and skin nourishing product collection, owned by a non-profit that funds the mission of the Carmelite and also embraces the sensual rebel that is Anne Enke could appear to be a hornet’s nest of contradictions, but it’s not.

As Bro. Dennis-Anthony wrote to me the other day: “The profound and the profane seem to be a tight rope walk that is part of each of us, though few are willing to admit it. Have fun and give it a shot.I trust in your judgment and creativity.”

Why 2Ps in a Pod?

This name for a blog between a Smart Sensuality woman who flew around the world in private jets with a full-time driver waiting in every city; and a Carmelite community brother, who has undertaken a vow of celibacy and poverty but has the brilliance and moxie to start a nonprofit skincare company called Easeamine makes perfect sense.

Two reasons come to mind immediately:

1) My favorite vacation in life was sailing in a tiny boat in the Ionian Sea. You can’t imagine how happens to your unconscious mind dropping anchor in Ithaca for the night, sleeping in the cradle of modern civilization. The meal that I remember most in life didn’t come at a five-star restaurant in Paris. Rather, it was the fresh bread, honey and oranges I bought for breakfast in Ithaca.

2) It’s true that when my chauffeur arrived with the big limo — forgetting that I prefer a small sedan and hate limos; or wanting to honor my presence with the biggest car they could find— I not only slumped down in the back seat, but in China lay down unseen, rather than power through dirt-poor alleyways in designer sunglasses and this enormous black Cadillac. Mine was an image that I couldn’t bear to project to the world as the gold standard. (Read my midweek reflections on leaving this existence, grabbing back my younger and more authentic self.)

An Ark of Understanding

When Bro. Dennis-Anthony gushed with enthusiasm over the possibilities of our collaboration, many sensations rushed through me. There was a visceral response of fear and sadness attached to my past. I have been judged harshly by the Catholic Church.

Simultaneously, my most favorite essays and videos came to mind as vehicles for expressing the concepts that are key to my own values. Ithaca called to me again, with the sound of our little sailboat rocking me like a cradle in the home of Western civilization and monotheism.

My learnings from Paul Cavalho, who so side-tracked me one night that I never did finish my own personal tale about Ithaca knocked on the door of my mind.

Soon Queen Rania was calling me, reminding me of Edward Hicks: The Peaceable Kingdom, my vision of an ark and purely poetic life on Cuttaloossa Road near Carversville. The recent dream I haven’t shared with you – only with my body psychotherapist Ellen Gayda and a couple dear friends – takes place also in a little boat; and I’m crossing back and forth across a river.

For all the right reasons, I wrote Bro. Dennis-Anthony:

I’m liking 2Ps in a Pod. We are two Ps in a pod metaphorically, but I like what you just wrote about the profound and the profane, and would use that quote. That sort of describes us, too, so the name promotes unity and a mutual understanding of each other. So well said — profane and profound. The pod is nature, but also the ark, the vessel, the setting sail for journey. So that is good. And it’s contained — and I have no idea of why I like that, except maybe it feels safer. 2Ps — I’ve got your back and you’ve got mine, we’re in this life boat together, rather than on separate encampments. We have more similarities than differences. I imagine that other Ps can also be assembled with some thought, so the opposites idea has a creative tilt to it.

And so we’re settling off on a new journey this week at Anne of Carversville. Unique as it is already, we will pick up more passengers along the way.

le congetture di Arlecchino by Jef Safi @ Flickr Creative Commons

Lisa Catherine Brown will be joining us on a more frequent basis (Anne pleaded), and if I tell you a key digital ID in her new life in Holland, Michigan, you won’t believe it: two peas in a pod. Lisa was speechless when I told her the name 2Ps in a Pod.

Lisa’s story A Day of Peace | For 24 Hours, Give Peace a Chance is back in our top 5, with my FB Indian friend Raj Kapoor’s video Children in Paradise, which is in reality about the children of war embedded in its success.

I take all these events as beyond coincidence, representing instead a gathering of dots seeking connection.

Ellen Gayda will also be writing weekly (give or take, knowing Ellen’s busy life) and I’ve released her from her professional confidentiality agreement with me, allowing her to use my history and body therapy sessions as a professional learning tool for friends and readers.

Like Bro. Dennis-Anthony, I agree that the profane and the profound are closely aligned. Perhaps what we so often consider profane isn’t, as is the case with female sexuality and embracing our innate spirituality as sensual women. Ellen and I have discussed this topic in great depth and she counsels victims of rape and sexual abuse.

Bro. Dennis isn’t the only one feeling vulnerable here. In fact, I’ve felt totally betrayed by the Catholic Church, wearing a scarlet letter since I was 15. It was an unfairly-awarded badge of dishonor that haunted me for decades, until I began the self-photography project and deeply private voyage into my authentic self in 2004.

This journey is a core pillar of AOC and helps explain my passion for the world’s women of every class, color and religion.

Ellen will pick up these threads as a professional body psychotherapist, explaining the deep relevance of Bro. Dennis-Anthony’s and Paul’s decision to contact me about an Easeamine collaboration. As long as she is able to take my confessions and tears to a more universal learning platform for others, I’m happy to be an occasional focus in her writing.

Ithaca by CP Cavafy

In closing, let me share CP Cavafy’s poem about Ithaca as key to a profane and profound AOC sensibility, now embraced by 2 Ps in a Pod This video captures the sensual aspect of our journey, one that embraces physicality and the natural world spiritual learnings and simple gifts — not only riches. For better or worse, this video is my own life story, and I can’t watch it without tears flowing from start to finish.

My dear FB friend Rae Alexander Bird shared a Hopi Elders Prophecy this morning. It reads:

The time of the lone wolf is over. Gather yourselves. Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary. All that we do now must be done in a sacred manner and in celebration. For we are the ones we have been waiting for.

I’m not so enlightened as to know everything that was in the minds of the Hopi Elders when they uttered these important words. I do know that Bro. Dennis speaks this way, too.

So on that note, let us blast off into a new mindset that embraces the Age of Aquarius today – since as usual, the world’s great minds can’t agree when it actually begins.

Let it begin now, this instant …because if we are not the ones we have been waiting for . . . who will it be then? Anne

Mythodea for the NASA Mission Mars Odyssey 2001