Tea with the Muse

This is just a little check in from me to you… a word of encouragement

Cosmic Cowgirls Creed 

We are

Women Between Worlds

transforming Lives into Legends

and these are the 13 stands

of our community

We are

Inspired Revolutionaries

We do our own work,

choosing to do whatever it takes

to be truly who we are now

and who we are becoming

We are

Cosmic Connectors

We have been called to gather

in red thread circles,

trusting that our paths have led us

to one another and this circle

We are

Mysterious Muses

We are feisty seekers,

living from a space of muse-led

inquiry where we gather insights

and take inspired action

We are

Intentional Creatives

We choose to consciously create

through unbridled self-expression,

moving ideas and energy into form

We are

Everyday Alchemists

We embody our capacity

to be at cause for transformation,

collaborating with quantum potential

in art, poetry, dance, song and ritual

We are

Dangerous Thinkers

We create our own innovative culture,

challenging systems and paradigms

We are both pattern-breakers and

pattern-makers who stand for

freedom for all

We are

Generous Visionaries

We transform our stories into

teachings, seeking to uplift the.

mythology of our kin,

our families, communities, beloveds,

and Earth

We are

Courageous Rebels

We dance between worlds,

weaving the irreverent and the sacred,

taking our own mighty stands

and respecting the stands of others

We are

Blazing Peacemakers

We believe in justice, safety, equality, equity

and care for all living beings

We encourage a global inter-generational circle

that is spiritually and culturally diverse

We are

Unique Individuals

We hold true that each person

has their own information

and a sacred responsibility to their

own piece of the red thread

We are

Legendary Weavers

We are badass mystics, edge-walkers

and mavericks living in the mystery,

who choose to author our own futures

we claim a chosen lineage

We are

Radical Sovereigns

A Cosmic Cowgirl chooses individual insights

and her own creed to live by

We are a community that does not require complete

agreement in order to stand, dance and create together

We are

Wild-Hearted Women

We are born to love!

We choose to be fully self-expressed beings

in this rodeo of the soul!

With our bare feet on the red earth,

our heads in the stars and

our hearts on our sleeves!

And we all said, YAHOOOO!

Dear Ones, Today, February 22nd at 12pm PT, we honor the works of our Legend Students during our LIVING LEGEND GROUP EXHIBIT presented by Musea Intentional Creativity Museum in connection with the Intentional Creativity Foundation 501(c)3.

Register for your Complimentary Ticket Here.

Join us at 10am HT | 12pm PT | 3pm ET | 9pm CEST | Next Day 7am AEDT | 9am NZDT

We will unveil 14 years of the Cosmic Cowgirls' LEGEND course and the artwork of over 100 women showcased, including an amazing display of over 100 legendary images!

The Cosmic Cowgirls have been serving up Legendary Lives since 2008 with thousands of women taking the course around the world. This is an opportunity to witness the archetypes of women who accessed their true voice and story through a framework of living their most epic Legendary life.

These paintings will have a huge impact, expanding your mind, heart and ability to consider what is possible for your own life, should you choose to claim a new story that you create on your own terms...

Admission is complimentary and we look forward to gathering in community for a truly Legendary event!

The White Birds of the Bone-House

I want to light a spark

in the darkened

bone-house of being

I want to look around

with golden eyes

that see in the dark

To see what is here

that I haven't seen

inside the cave of me

there is story

waiting to take wing

I hear that there is a cage in us

with a thousand

white star-birds flapping

against their constraints

waiting for us to open the door

My ancestors keep

pointing, their long fingers

extending

past the gossamer garments

they wear now

"look here, now here

CHILD! There it is

Can't you see it - ?"

But....But...I complain

Sometimes I don't want

to be spoken to

in grey-misted mystery

Sometimes cage and bird talk

don't make me feel good

I want plain speak that shows

a clear path and guidelines

of how to stay on track

I want you to be with me

I want to feel you near

I want some tea time

with you near enough

for me to smell you

I want to complain

and have you listen

as If I was laying on your

softened lap with heaps

of embroidered pillows

under my sleepy head

Why didn't you tell us -

You can choose

consciousness

and open the greening portal

to the inside world

where the red poppies grow wild

I don't remember you tellng me:

You can design your identity,

just open the treasure box

with the broken lock

Why didn't you teach us

to summon the self

and change our identity

by showing up for the

festival of colored lights

and that broken down nights

will only last so long?

Did you tell me

and I missed it?

Must we discover

everyting ourselves?

Inside of here...

if we can ever figure out

where 'here' is:

There are

many women dancing

and soft pink beds to rest upon

for as long as we need

But the path is washed away

from that last hard rain

You know,

the one that washed away

the two rocking chairs

I didn't sign up for a race

I don't know what this is

but I don't remember

being invited to a competition

to get ahead, be more, do more

There has to be another way

There has to be

something more here

We must be more

than we appear?

You mean,

the instruction manual

is encoded within me

and to read it

I have to learn a new language

made of soil and fur and sun?

You mean the path only reveals

as each foot falls into wet earth?

But wait...you told me all you could

and you love me even if I am

complaining with the tears soaking

your between-world fabrics

I lay with you so long

even the stitches from your

invisible garment imprint

my face

when I wake

When I awake

What I see

amazes me

So today I wrote this

to tell you about it

How each person, opens

the portal through

releasing their

own trapped birds...

sometimes they get caught

in your throat on the way out

sometimes they don't

Look up!

The white birds of

the darkened

the bone-house

are setting themselves free...

with or without me I give thanks

I give thanks

I give thanks

Now to learn how to live

consistent with what is known

while being aware that most of it

will remain unknown

not because it is withheld

but beacuse

we weren't ready yet

Let us ready ourselves!

Let us ready ourselves!

Let us ready ourselves...

the time for expanding our

capacity to love is here

if you write poetry with a firey pen

if you pray with paint-stained hands

the birds will begin to fly

Pray for me! Pray for me!

I too, I will

I will pray for you!

Shiloh Sophia

(painting layer from Tempo painted yesterday - with graphics added)

Listen now | Inquiries into loving more + why anti-racism work might not be landing for white people + story about my mother's inter-racial marriage when I was 8 and more to ponder with your cuppa tea....

Dear Ones! Today I have a potent invitation for you. An invitation to claim your time back from the 7 days a week, 8 housr day, M-F, blah blah time paradigm. Now I know most of us have to work. That said. There is a way for you really be sovereign in how you spend your time and it requires planning. I just spent 3 hours working on my calendar for the next six months, it is a ritual in claiming space for you. Even doing the planning lets your whole self know you are choosing to claim your time.

IF you aren’t in the imusea app and you want to join us you can: search imusea in your app store and you will find us and it is freeeeeeeee…

Here is the audio transcript if you wish to read with a cuppa instead ❤️

Dear Ones,

I wonder if you find yourself thinking about the different worlds that we seem to inhabit as a self, but largely unconsciously. It's almost like we become aware of worlds as we become adults because we've lost some connection to it somewhere between childhood and adulthood. We stopped seeing and dreaming in the way that we used to when we used to have imaginary friends and imaginary worlds.

I can't help but wonder if we wouldn't have a different world at large if children were truly taught to keep their imaginal world front and center as a way of thinking and being. We're not very old, eight to 12 depending on the culture that we're living in, sometimes even younger than that, before we start to create a disconnect, whether that's conscious by adults in our space, I think largely unconscious, or just in a desire to sit into being inside of a structure.

If we don't act like we're present and participating in culture, we sometimes are told we're daydreamers. We're told to stop making things up and stop pretending. We're told to grow up and use our adult voice. We're taught not to use our outside voice inside. But while all this is happening and has a relative level of logic to it, something else is being lost. We don't even know enough about it to talk about it.

Many people have to become adults and be able to afford education in order to start thinking about the imaginal world they left behind as a child. So many people we work with in our intentional creativity community can remember the moment they put down a crayon. That's how significant that moment is. If I ask them what was happening in that day, or even what they wearing or who was there, they often have this almost supernatural vision of themselves in that moment.

We're yet to determine why that image is so absolutely looming and huge in our lives. Why that moment would be so big that we would actually stop creating, sometimes until we're adult. I have different theories about why I think that moment is so significant.

One of them is that, until that moment, we are largely connected with our imaginal world, and move freely and easily between imagination and what others around us perceive as a kind of reality. When someone becomes critical of our creativity, which in many cases is an externalized version of our internal world, whether that's drawing, singing, dancing, playing, make-believe, when that in any way gets criticized, when it had been largely encouraged before, but nobody told us when we were going to stop being encouraged to be imaginative. There was no warning. We get surprised.

In that moment, something happens, a rupture, that it could take the rest of someone's life to repair, if we even know to do it. It's almost like we're caught in the act of somehow not being connected, somehow not being connected to the reality that the adults around us have been enforcing. It's a moment, it's a flash, it's a rupture, and we start to, in a way for many of us, become concerned about ourselves.

It could be a moment where self-trust is lessened and where we recognize a stark reality between what we think of as our imagination and what we are now crashing into as the reality in which everyone else is living and somehow we weren't. My mother, Karen, used to think of this moment as a time when many people would start to think they were just a little bit crazy and had to hide and pretend to behave in order to fit in.

Over days, months, or years of trying to fit in and not invite that imaginary friend to the lunch table anymore, because now there's real friends to behave and act normal with, we actually start to lose trust with that internal world. And then later, as we go on in education, we're criticized if we're not connected to our creativity and our imagination. We're criticized if we're too structured, too A type, too left brain. And so this tug of war between imagination and reality is set in place and barely ever do we actually talk about it in a way that can be understood and healed.

In the work of intentional creativity, the invitation is to reconnect to the imaginal world while still being connected with the resonant world. I call it resonant world because I don't want it to be an external world from our internal world. External inherent in the vocabulary actually indicates separateness.

If we could move from our inner world to our imaginal world and then into a resonant world, we would be able to navigate what we experience as internal and imaginal, and relate it and bring it into harmony with the resonance of those people, places, things, animals, energies, archetypes, creatures, symbols, and stories all around us. We would have a sense of place in the cycle of things and a sense of our own place. It would be resonant and we would seek for contextual resonance by choice, and our imagination would give us contextual relevance.

One of the things I have to watch myself with when I'm leading circle is when someone seems out of context. In my family's world, context is queen. It means you are conscious of being appropriate to the context. And when someone isn't appropriate to the context, to me, it interferes with the resonance, and I want to smooth it over and stop it. That's my first response. What my mom would call a knee jerk response. It's the first response.

The second response is, how is this important right now? How is this wild moment leading to something else? If someone's breaking out into a dance in the middle of a meditation, should I invite everyone to dance? If someone's making a lot of loud noises or opening a candy wrapper while I'm trying to say a prayer, should I suddenly start to make sounds and invite everybody to do the same? Should I ask the person to stop or should I impatiently wait?

When I lead circle, it's this interesting moment to notice all the sharp bits about myself, about how much I desire a level of coherence. But a resonant world wouldn't necessarily be that everything is the same and in harmony. It would actually mean that everything works in tandem and it's time together, and that there is a place for everything.

What I think I'm really reacting to is what I perceive as a lack of consciousness or a lack of willingness to participate in what I consider the energy that I'm weaving or that's present. That's where the overworld comes in. Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who wrote, Women Who Run with the Wolves would say that this is an over culture, a dominant power over kind of energy that exists at the level of paradigm. Pretty much all of us participate in it, even those of us who lead circle.

For me, when I notice that overworld coming in or have a desire to control for the sake of myself and everyone in the room, because I think it's best for everyone, for there to be coherence, I have to just stop and ask myself, what is the wild one in the room trying to show us? In almost all indigenous cultures, there's a wild one.

There's an emu in the indigenous aboriginal culture. There's the coyote in Native American culture. The trickster exists in so many forms all around the world, and I admit it's one of the places I have trouble. We have quite a few tricksters in our community. You know who you are. And I sometimes am challenged by the context, but that's part of the role of the trickster to shake things up. And what if a resonant field is woven all together with the tricksters?

And what if those of us who are pretending toward consciousness could recognize the trickster as part of the resonance? The trickster, FYI, for your information, is usually one of the highest intelligent beings in the circle because they're actually paying attention to everything that's happening. And for there to be a true resonance, there has to be a true diversity, and tricksters act out when they see there's homogeny instead of resonance.

As I grow up, I'm learning. And I'm learning how trickster is not my own archetype, but how I value the supreme, hilarious intelligence of those around me. For example, on Sonoma Mountain, the land that we revere here in Sonoma County, which is considered the birthplace of creation for the coast Miwok, the creator of the world is coyote. I sigh when I hear that because I'm like, "Ugh, I do not want an engagement with coyote." But I do want an engagement with coyote's children, two sisters - question women and answer women, and they exist often as two crows cackling on a fence.

I think I've seen them. I think I've heard their stories. I think I've heard them laughing at me, with me, beside me, at all of this madness. So I watch my participation in the overworld. The dominant world is something else altogether. An overworld is the way that we try to fit in to structures and circles or insist that other people do. It's largely unconscious, and I'm not saying there's not a place for this overness, but overness unchecked becomes a form of supremacy, and at its worse, domination, and at its very, very worse, a kind of white supremacy which becomes paradigmatic in the consciousness of the individual.

I'm coming to you today with an invitation to begin to make some distinctions for yourself, within yourself, or the capital S itself. How do you think of your internal world or your internal self? Sometimes what I call the hidden self, because largely we're not conscious of the power it has and the way it operates, yet it's operating all the time. In fact, it operates how you speak to yourself, whether you hear the critic or the muse or some other cacophony. How do you be with your imaginal world? Have you been hanging out there recently? Have you done some healing?

If you create with us the giant paintings that we work on or engage with us in any of our courses, then you've reengaged with your imaginal world because it's absolutely essential to creating a painting and writing a story from the perspective of the painting. We do a lot of healing around the imaginal world in our community.

Where do you see yourself in the place of things from an overworld perspective? In what ways are you capturing and dominating yourself from within? And in what ways are you participating in an overworld that's happening out there that many say is reality, but here we question?

And what about the resonant world? What would it be like if we could work toward a resonant world, which has a diversity of possibility? It isn't all peace, unicorns, and butterflies. It also includes cactus and iguana and the wild ones who refuse to be in context. When I think of the community leaders here at Musea, the reports I often receive where I am asked to step into work something out, the first thing that I notice about the story is that someone has behaved in a way out of context with "How we are here."

And I realize that I too have been a part of creating a culture where there's a certain way that we are, and I want to pay attention to that. Because while I respect that there's a way that we are that includes respect, connection, inclusivity, conscious action toward diversity, and always in efforting toward equity, even though rarely actually achieving it because it's complex and it takes time and people and conversation, I have to question the way that we have created an overworld and to pay attention.

Whenever someone says, this isn't how we do it here, I want to ask, "Well, how is it that we do it here?" And so for today, this is how we do it here. We question ourselves. We visit our different worlds. We look at our assumptions and our dominant behaviors, and we seek to find a resonance. Resonance, which is not about harmony per se, but actually about life living itself.

Humans are so busy trying to simplify and dominate and collate and categorize and articulate that we tend to trim the wild garden. And I don't know about you, but the wild garden is the place where life is happening. In my relationships, in my creativity, in my truly hidden world self, I want a wild garden. I don't want my hedges trimmed and my palm trees topped and the bugs kept out. I want a wild garden. A wild garden has the sound of resonance, moments of harmony, moments of chaos, moments of out of context wildness, and plenty of peace and quiet woven in.

So today, the invitation is to consider your own relationship with your internal world, your imaginal world, your overworld, and with the resonant world. And to ask yourself, is there anything right now that's arising for you? Were you to desire to do a little bit of a deep dive into a territory where you haven't been hanging out? Maybe right now you could close your eyes, enter the realm of imagination and just look and just see, and just ask, what message from what part of my world is arising for me right now?

I invite you to sing about it, to write about it, to draw about it, to be all about it.

with love,

~ Shiloh Sophia

Hi Ya’ll ~ today I decided to turn my letter from the red thread café into a podcast. Discover the super cool things happening at Musea right this minute!

SS ❤️⭕️❤️🍫

A Vigil to Honor My Father

The Greening Side of Things

When I think of you

it is always the deepest color of green

Not the green that the sun kisses

to make it glow with light

The green on the underside of the leaf

where the spider dwells

The dark under the log

where the salamander sleeps

The green on the inside of a tree

where only the elvin ones can see

Once, once I told you

you went wrong

when you should have gone right

You are a poet like my mother

not an outlaw for a Pa

You were a mystic gone wrong

and finally you took the wrong turn

for the l last time

What were you feeling

in those last moments?I hope it was a burst of joy

the one you always left this world to seek

I hope you saw the colored lights

the ancients send out as beacons to the lost

But then perhaps you never lost your way

instead honored your broken

and beautiful greening way.

I think of you often,

with neither anger or regret

and most days

I just wish I could have shown you

that I see the magic too

You weren’t the one who showed me

but I always knew you saw it tooOne day you came to my house

for breakfast unannounced I had prepared a quiche and as you

sat to eat in silence – you said

This is what I really really needed

and I just didn’t know it.

Thank you.I hoped you would see in me

all you hoped I would become

but you never said

You just told me you prayed for me

and I also – pray for you.

I would like to think on you as ancestor

but when I reach in the spaces between

it is only the greening I see

not the identity that was you

You have returned to the soil

and I will honor you here in green dirt

with the passing of each season.

Rest well father of the greening

A message from me at the sea…