gagablog 85: Happy Mother's Day, Mother Monster!

I want to say Happy Mother's Day to Mother Monster and Mother Nature, Mother Earth, the Goddess of Love, Mother of All. Happy Mother's Day to my own wonderful mom. Happy Mother's Day to Art and Music and Magic and Mary Jane. I want to say this before I write the next prelude to exploring "Sexxx Dreams", which will be called "Fantasies, Classic Books, and Dreams" and will be all about media magic / bibliomancy and what I'm learning about the magic of love and art working together even over centuries of time. This is a special day to me, not for selling cards to families, but as a glimpse of the Divine Feminine in a day to celebrate motherhood. As I just indicated, I will consider anything my mother who is willing to mother me, like that bird in the picture book "Are You My Mother?" I'm exagerrating but I'm really blessed to have a number of mothers to be thankful for. I would feel like I am bragging because not everyone has a wonderful mom who loves them and exemplifies the Goddess. I'm so lucky that my mom was always a feminist which kept me connected to ideas of the Goddess gorwing up even in the Bible Belt, and when she became a priest when I was a teenager it helped me discover some of how the Goddess is still alive withing the cool parts of Christianity. But even with that fortunate upbringing, more liberal and goddess-worshipping than most American childhoods up t this point, I still had a strong need for more of the Goddess, more openly, obvliously and magically in my life. I've always believed that it is not just my life that needs more of the Goddess but that the whole world needs the Goddess and that this is precisely what will save us from all the destructive forces within us and the world. I can go on about this but the point is to acknowlegde how mother figures have served this role for me, guiding me and supporting me in my own personal quest to help people realize magic and the goddess for themselves and help save the world.
When I was a kid I left the church because it was not feminist, environmentlaist, pacifist or revolutionary (against capitalism and money in general) enough for me. I turned to The Goddess, who I vaguely understood as Mother Nature. A few years later She found me in the form of Mary Jane, weed, the divine feminine plant of healing, comfort, and inspiration. And smoking weed helped reveal to me how the Goddess had always been with me, secretly, in art and music all my life. Psychadelics helped that, too. Sexuality had always kept me focused on feminine beauty but eventually actually having sex made me more in love with the Goddess than ever before. I fell in love with girls and a cat-girl and witches. I've been in love with one special witch almost half my life and she is the best mother I know, honesty, but still a secret in many ways. I just saw on the news that President Obama called some moms on Mother's Day. I imagined they might be randomly selected, or the mom's of staffers, thanking them for raising good folks. This is a reminder how all good mothers are "our mothers" and we cann all try to honor them. But we also have more mothers than just biologically, we all do, and when some folks biological mom's aren't so great, thank the Goddess for appearing as "real" mothers, in various forms. My especially lovely examples of wonderful mothers in actual people in my family, include my mom and her mom, who we called Grandmother, and my Grandad's second wife, Jean, who was grandmother to me even longer than Grandmother and years after my grandad Pop died. My dad's mom we call Nana and I can't say enough about how much I owe her for raising a loving family as the Matriarch we saw most often. And when I think about it, the tender, compassionate and loving natures of my grandfathers and dad are also "mother-figures" in my life I am very fortunate for. Someone said they don't consider their Dad's second wife to be their step-mom unless she raised them, some, too. I had left home when my dad remarried but I am lucky to call his wife Jocelyn my mom, too. And I had a great babysitter and some great teachers growing up and some other role models who I attribute to mothering me in their ways, too. But even with all of these great actual mothers nearby there was still room, and a desperate need, for Mother Monster, Lady Gaga.
I'm writing this to illustrate how repression of the Goddess in our culture has left us all with this deep soul-need for The DIvine Mother, even those like me who have many loving mother figures and even feminist spirituality to help keep this connection alive despite obstruction. I just heard Labron James thank "the Man Up There" for helping him win the game and redeem himself for past mistakes. I don't want to say anything against "God" right here, just mentioning how accepted that idea seems to be, a God ruling us from on high, yet it is revolutionary to recognize the Goddess all around and within us. With all my good fortune to be raised by loving mothers and discover the Goddess in nature, love, magic, art, music, and sex, I still needed More. I felt supported, or found enough support within, to have Goddess-focused spirituality since I was a kid. But Weed was a big deal to me, a loving mother in her way, too. As I took a break to honor her, the local news showed a picture of a tornado over a long, flattish rainbow. It inspired me to the best way to say this. Then I tapped the bowl out in my palm and amidst the ashes there was a bright spark. I've never seen that before but it was like an exclamation point on this magic.
Dorothy had a wonderf mom, even though it was her aunt, Aunt Em. They loved each other very much and knew it, which is worlds better than many people have with their biological moms or others, or no one. I'm so thankful for my mom, she is so great, that I don't even want to talk about her, I feel like I'm bragging and could make someone feel bad. But what I want to say is that there are wonderful mom's out there and folks who will be wonderful moms to you even if yours wasn't good enough. But even the best mom's can't be or know everything to someone. Dorothy still needed the adventure to discover companions and the Mother figures of the Good Witches. As good as Aunt Em was, she could not understand everything about Dorothy, and of course Dorothy had to discover things about herself. I use this example because my mom was wonderful, but she could never support me as an artist. It was not in her nature or upbringing to accept that I could "just" be an artist. The message was always that I had to do some "work" and make art on the side, only hoping to survive from it but assuring survival with work. I do feel bitterness and resentment at that, but at the same time I am grateful to have worked and done the work I did and do. I just want to become the artist I knoe I am. And I owe it to Gaga, my Mother Monster, for inspiring me and encouraging me in that way. I can't say enough about it, I love her and appreciate her so much, as the Goddess of Love I have always believed in, for decades, since at least about 1986, I think, looking back on it. Since she made The Fame I have felt deeper and deeper that she is, for me, the Goddess I always beleived in. She made my dream for the world come true by coming true herself, making her art, and she makes my dream for myself come true by encouraging me in this missing way I needed.
Some people don't have any access to nature. I mean, they live in cities with no chances to be in the Great Outdoors, with mother nature. There are places we are utterly destroying Nature, all over the planet, in ways that can't be replaced. We all need to stop this, to reverse these trends. We all need Mother Nature, there is no way to overstate this. But even as a kid who grew up playing in the woods, always partied outside a lot, and gets to hike the Colorado foothills for the last decade on a regular basis, monthly, weekly, or daily, I still have more need for Mother Nature than I get. I love her everywhere. And eveyone should, but not everyone can, and some of our systems threaten her in various ways - we need to stop this. As I'm typing this there is a story on local news about a 8 year old kid, I think, who called and saved his mom when she fell into a diabetic coma. We need to be making, taking the call for Mother Nature. But I bring it up to say that I was charmed in this way, too, with a rich connection to Mother Nature. I've been blessed to smoke weed that has been really wonderful for most of my life, and it gets better and better in COlorado. Yet even with all of these blessings, this culture is still so anti-compassion and snti-creativity that I still really needed a Goddess of Love and art, my Mother Monster, to really bring out the fullness of my soul.
Not everyone is lucky enough to be in love, or inlove with a beautiful, magical, sexy witch artist girl who likes all the same things I like. I am so lucky, have been this lukcy twice as long as I have known Gaga, yet I still really need Gaga for that kind of encouragement, and to really see how believing in art makes it come truw.
Even with all of my lucky exposure to magic, all mylife, I still needed Gaga, my Mother Monster, to show me how it all really comes true and inspire me and others to finally go for it. And even with all the amazing magical music and art, other streams of magic to me, I still needed Gaga to really reveal so much of it in Her Art. I love her and can't say enough about her, but will be saying more soon and focusing more intesnsely on her after this period where I have been kind of holding back - hopefully for the last time.
So Happy Mother's Day to All the Mothers, and the Mother of All, for me the Goddess of Love, Lady Gaga. I love you so much, thanks for being such a fabulous mother to all your millions of monsterlings, "monsterites" I call us, religiously, I dedicated my book "All I Really Needed to Know I Learned from SMoking Weed" to you for helping liberate weed. I'm concluding this to go take advantage of this great state, and "after the break" the local news will talk about how people are calling us the "Silicon Valley of Hemp". You inspire us artistically and for so many causes for justice, and basically just believe in us and supprt us being who we are in a world that seems uncaring and can try to break people down. They are now making plants - factories - to turn hemp into all sorts of things, from biofuel to packaging and paper. This is "the revolution" and that's part of their motto. This is hemp, the "male" side of it, because of course Mary Jane's revolution is really picking up. Gaga just inspires us all to continue, to be our best, to become the stars we truly are. I can't say it enough but I will keepon trying, thanks for sharing and inspiring this love with us, Mother Monster! I love you forever!