Dear Ones,
Are you looking for your tribe? You may have found us. If you are feeling like your wild woman wants a place to call home in the company of other badass mystics and misfits - then you are in the right place. Come on home with us. It all starts with choosing your life as a LEGEND. Here, we do a once a year creative deep dive ritual of becoming - you can find it RIGHT HERE.
Also at 9am pst - and it is recorded - you can join us live here
Many of us, especially women, are looking for their tribe. The place that they can be themselves and feel seen and heard and valued. The place where they can receive contribution from otherwise wild ones. and also to contribute their own innate knowing and shape the story of who they are becoming. Our stories, because we are storytelling humans since the beginning of time, shape our actions, our relationship choices our chemistry.
They shape our identity often in unconscious ways. So much of who we, air quotes, end up being, so much of who we end up being is a result of the framework that we were raised up within, and then how that framework guided us, knowingly or unknowingly, into the relationships and the work and the kind of thinking that we have today. We may or may not encounter a tribe whose focus is the shaping of identity, such that we have an opportunity to change our story and change into who we're becoming because it's not like you have to invent a self. It's more like you reveal the self that you've always been, that you've been moderating and cloaking over in order to accommodate the situations, relationships, and choices that you find yourself in today. We contort ourselves into cages of our own making,
We think in order to fit in, to not be found out about who we really are, and also to be loved. We've all done this. There's likely no exception, no matter how wild you think you are and how authentic you feel you've been or how unique you've tried to show up. And some of us even doing that in the form of being rebels or Even resisting the norms and being a rebel in your family or your school or your work is still a reaction to the systems that were set up around you.
To find a place, a tribe, a culture, where you can actually become, it is rather rare. I knew I wanted one from the time I was younger and I did not fit in no matter how hard I tried. I was never able to pass. I finally stopped passing at about my senior year in high school, but wow, everything before that was kind of a shit show of just trying not to stand out too much. I had wild people in my family, martial artists, astrologers, Witches, queer people, we were not normal. I was told by other kids I came from a broken home, that I had lesbians in my family, that I looked like a poor person because some of my clothes were handmade. Kids, it can be so cruel. We moved all the time, and so I just kept inventing new selves with my mother's encouragement. But kind of no matter what I did, I could never pass. And so I stopped trying.
Stopping trying did something beautiful for me because suddenly I had a little tribe, a little posse. We were called the Rage Club and it was made up of my first real group and it was all the kids on the outskirts, all of the pimply kids and the two tall kids and the kids who were gay and didn't know it in a school where that would not be allowable. It was The semi-edgy new wave punk kids. It was the kids in the sweatshirt hoodies with strange bands printed on the back. It was the kids who didn't make it into the sports. The kids who did not want to play sports.
The kids who hid themselves and wrote poetry at midnight in their journals. Kids like me. The first class I taught when I was 17 years old is how to walk down the hallway without inviting attack. I noticed how the kids that became the rage club there was a way that we tried to hide and so our way of walking our apologetic don't see me way actually created more attack and so we practiced confidence we practiced henry david thoreau's it is a great art to saunter we practiced not being a victim or not hiding
I found I had so much to say about it because I'd experienced a lot myself and I literally demonstrated walking. That was the beginning of the tribe. And over the years, I've called many different tribes and many different women into being in relationship with the idea of the tribe. We call it the cosmic cowgirls.
Women with our feet in the good red earth and our head in the stars and our hands in the clay, in the paint, in the kneading of bread. All the mediums support wild women in remembering our wildness. guide us to shape our own identity and to shed the skins of oppression of our upbringing and a lot of our spiritual dogmatic material. But we are not just a group of people. We're the cosmic cowgirls, yo. And what that means is is that we are not just a tribe that doesn't have a culture. We have a culture that we've created over many, many, many, many years.
I've been doing my work of gathering women for over 31 years. And the core of that work came into a class called Legend, The legend course over the years has taken on different themes. We do it about once a year in our community, and this is the last time I'll be running legend like this. It may go on in some form, and maybe I'll be a guest invited back to teach it as other women take it on. a curriculum that was shaped by myself and Stella Mack and my two moms, Karen and Sue. Affectionately, my mom, Karen, was called Mama Cloud because we all have handles. And Sue was called Bayou Starbutch.
Mary McDonald was called Stella Mack. And I am Chief Laughing Cloud. Chief meaning the CEO of my projects, and the laughing cloud is a name that came to me while I was painting a drum. We have a culture here, and we have a lineage, because these visions and ideas were passed from hand to hand and heart to heart since the 1930s. Sue Hoya Sellers, who co-parented me with my mother, she had a mentor, a guardian named Lenore Thomas Strauss. You can look her up. She used to work with the Roosevelts during the New Deal, the Roosevelt administration during the New Deal Arts. And she was given the opportunity to create a multi-year funded work of art. And what did she decide but to carve the preamble to the Constitution in stone. Years and years with jackhammers and power drills shaping we the people in stone. Written in stone. Equity. Justice. Justice.
The visions and the philosophies and the practices of our lineage go back to that time in 1930, and also the time of my grandmother, Eden McLeod, who was an artist, a carpenter, a storyteller, who made my clothes, my blankets, my sheets, my nightgowns, and taught other women how to work, how to sew, how to build, and how to do it with love and beauty. So you see, joining us for projects like Legend, it's a project of an identity becoming, isn't just a pop-up idea of a girl who wanted to start an online business. Quite the contrary, I didn't. But I did anyway, so I could find you. we went online.
We led our first online legend in 2009, I believe. And so it starts about a week from now, and I just can't believe how excited I am, even though I've done it for so many years, every single year, to shape a new identity because my life is changing again,and the painting is this symbolic beauty which holds the image and the story of who I'm revealing myself as, a combination of fact, and fiction, and as much poetry as I choose. It's the work of badass mystics to make a painting and a story that calls into being who we're becoming and how we're shaping ourselves into this curiously uncertain future. And we do it together. About a hundred women will gather together for a week but you can do it in your own time, anytime. We'll be gathering live at MUSEA Center for Intentional Creativity and Consciousness in Sonoma, California.
I'll be surrounded by incredible women flying in to spend the week with me and with us, especially Amber Cooley-Mailani Benici of Woman Unleashed and Na Quarle, director at Musea. This is an opportunity to join not just a tribe, but become a part of a lineage where we pass intentional creativity from hand to hand and heart to heart.
And those of you who want to teach, What we're teaching you can join us for Color of Woman, our intentional creativity teacher training. Also the last time I'm doing it live. So this is a call to tribe. A call to a culture created by women and a call to becoming and revealing the most you that you can be. Because that actually is the answer.
To be the most you that you can be in any given moment, in any given situation, in any given relationship. That's what to do. That's who to be. You. And that's what we're here for. To guide and experience. an adventure which has it become so clear through the mystical veil, just who you are. We can't wait to welcome you as we molt and shed on the dance floor of life and become, behold, legendary women, badass mystics with an attitude that won't quit We will not be undone by these times. We are gatherers of misfits.
This is us. We are Cosmic Cowgirls.
Shiloh Sophia
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