By Bonnie Tarantino When I was 24, I began studying with a medicine woman who lived in Woodstock, NY. Each year, a Lakota shaman would visit her, and she would rent a house and hold a workshop for a long weekend. There, we would build a sweat lodge, meditate, walk the woods, and facilitate the […]

By Bonnie Tarantino When Lucia was 5 and Jack 3, we headed to Storrs, Connecticut, where we once lived for two years. I was to attend a Karuna Reiki workshop. While in the workshop, one of the participants invited the group to join her and 50+ other women to disrobe and lay in the middle […]

By Bonnie Tarantino When our eldest daughter left for College Park at University of Maryland, we packed up the car, left her two younger siblings at home, drove 45 minutes, pulled up to a busy curb and unloaded her stuff into three huge laundry-type rolling bins. A few upperclassmen joined in, helping to direct and […]

The Sun XIX I am sunned. When people see me, they have to say it. “Wow, you are tan!” And I am. Although I always stay under the umbrella at the beach and always use 50 sunscreen, I am outside as much as I can in good weather, walking Walter, pulling weeds, and even running […]

When the moon is full, and the fullness of our tide is pulled deep into her body, the shore is left for us to explore in clear light. What will you find that you discarded off the side of the moving vessel of your heart and mind? What did you hope the sea would swallow […]

The Star XVII One of my favorite myths is the myth of Inanna. Inanna is the Sumerian Goddess of love beauty, sex, fertility and love. She represents the deep transformation that women go through as they move through the stages of maiden, mother, queen, crone. The story most often told of Inanna is her descent […]

The Tower While in Iceland, for several nights at 3:30 in the morning, I woke to a cold sheering thought. “Why did we all walk so close to the edge of those cliffs?” Let me be clear. I love heights. I love jumping off high things and feeling the free fall. I love skyscrapers and […]

On my first day back from Iceland, I was greeted by the perfect 83-degree summer day with a gentle wind that demanded to open windows and doors. In contrast, the hottest day ever recorded in Iceland was in 1939, and it went all the way up to 86 degrees.  In the summer, a hot day […]

The Devil The darkest energy I have ever encountered came upon me when I was 13 and with fever. There it sat on my chest, stealing my breath, paralyzing my lungs as I tried with bulging eyes to call out for help. I could not scream, move, nor react but instead felt the sheer terror […]