The Thread Woven by itchy-O
From performance art to embodiment, with the drums marking the threshold.
What if the thing that finally returns you to yourself is not quiet?
What if the next chapter doesn’t arrive as clarity, but with a beat?
Where in your life are you still standing behind glass, watching yourself become?
For the past few weeks, I felt like I was army crawling through the matrix.
That was the line I used in a post the other day, not metaphor for the sake of metaphor. It is the closest language that I have.
Everything has been tense.
My faith being tested in all the ways faith gets tested, not in the cute, growth-edge-with-a-journal-prompt kind of way, but in the teeth-clenched, nervous-system-on-alert, please-let-this-door-open type of way.
And the strangest part is that I knew I was held.
I really, really knew.
Not as an affirmation taped to the darn mirror. I knew it in that deeper place.
I can feel the web moving beneath the visible surface. I can feel the field arranging something I can’t yet see. I know there is timing I could not force.
This is, after all, the resurrection I had clocked a few weeks prior. Not as a grand mystical concept, but as the deeply uncomfortable rearranging of an actual life.
The women who traveled with me in Egypt have been feeling it too: Isis holding us while Osiris rearranges us. Not gently, exactly. But precisely. The old form loosening. The pieces being gathered. The next shape not yet visible, but undeniably underway.
And maybe that’s why the search felt so tight.
I wasn’t only looking for a house. I was trying, once again, to squeeze myself back into an old reality I’ve already outgrown. Credit scores. Income boxes. Linear proof. Acceptable numbers. Systems asking me to shrink myself into legibility, while everything in me is expanding beyond the old container, beyond an old reality.
Don’t put baby in a corner.
Don’t put this lady in a box.
And still, the threshold is mighty uncomfortable.
My intuition had told me to wait until June 1 to look for a house.
But honey, I didn’t listen.
The looming deadline and presumed pressure of “I’d better get on it” inevitably won out.
I started looking in May and found myself tossed into the little hell-mouth of urgency. Tightness. Doubt. Fear. That feeling I needed to find something, secure something, make something happen.
Then June arrived.
The House Appeared
And on June 4, the house appeared!
I found it almost immediately. I saw it, felt it, knew it. I put down the deposit as soon as I walked through the house because every part of me already recognized it as mine.
Sight unseen to my daughter.
Which is not nothing.
This is her next chapter too. Her room, her home, her threshold, her own precious becoming. But something in me knew with total certainty that I could trust the yes before she had even stood inside it.
It looked too good to be true. An upgrade in every way.
More beautiful. More spacious. More aligned. More held. For only a pittance more than I pay now.
And after all that crawling, after all that tension, after the long squeeze of not knowing how the next chapter would open, the door is suddenly here.
Not forced open.
Here.
Radiantly, absurdly easier than I could have imagined.
The same damn day I put down the deposit, a friend invited me to a concert.
The same glorious girlfriend who had been with me at Puscifer at Red Rocks, another night that turned into ritual before either of us knew what we were walking into.
Apparently, she and I have a knack for accidentally entering portals disguised as concerts.
Because, baby, the field is not finished speaking.
First it handed me the house.
Then it handed me the drums.
Then Came the Drums
The band is itchy-O.
If you know, you know. And if you do not know, I don’t actually know how to fit Itchy-O into a sentence without putting them in a box they are built to break open.
Calling them a band feels grossly insufficient. They are less like a band and more like a percussive organism. A moving ritual. A masked, drumming, light-flashing, body-rattling eruption of human aliveness.
Jessica and I said afterwards there was nothing more human and more alive than what we had just experienced.
And I mean that literally.
The drums moving through the crowd. Bodies pressing close. Lights flashing. Rhythms rearranging the air. At one point, strings of confetti began to rain down over us.
Not pieces.
Strings.
Long strands falling from above, dripping over the crowd, landing on our shoulders, our hair, our arms, between the bodies. And I danced. The string would catch me and inevitably pull the person next to me.
It wasn’t hard and it didn’t hurt.
But the connection, the threads, the string… undeniable.
The weaving was undeniable.
The thread so very real.
Something So Alive
I noticed the smell of the man in front of me.
Good god, how couldn’t I?
His body odor should have been unpleasant, maybe in another room, in another context, in another version of polite reality. But here, somehow, it wasn’t offensive at all.
It belonged.
It was part of the full sensory field: smell, sound, beats, rhythm, dancing, lights, sweat, bodies, thread.
The room was not asking us to transcend being human.
It was returning us to the body through every possible doorway.
I was somehow out of my body because, truly, what the fuck was happening. While also so present in my body… how could I be anywhere else?
That is the paradox of certain experiences. They’re so strange the mind has to leave the building, but the body becomes undeniable.
The present becomes the only place left to inhabit.
Oh itchy-O
This wasn’t my first encounter with itchy-O.
They marked another threshold in my life almost a decade earlier.
2017… fresh from divorce, at the far edge of forty, just days before my birthday. It was a new body, a new life, a new visibility I hadn’t yet emotionally grown into.
That chapter of my life was a performance.
Not only performance art, although there was plenty of that.
But my whole life had taken on the quality of performance. I was being seen, received, invited, and admired while some deeper part of me was still learning how to exist outside of survival.
I was being invited into rooms my soul was ready for before my nervous system knew how to walk in them.
I was just barely recovering from narcissistic abuse, gaslighting, and years of hiding. New enough to myself that visibility felt both intoxicating and terrifying.
I’d been diminished. Taught to mistrust myself. Folded into smaller and smaller spaces so someone else’s reality could remain intact.
And then suddenly, life began placing me in the right rooms.
Beautiful rooms. Strange rooms. Brilliant rooms.
Rooms where people saw me before I knew how to be seen.
Brilliant
The dang event was called Brilliant.
And it was.
Not only because of the name, or the museum, or the sheer imaginative force of what Daisy McGowan had woven together. Though let me say this clearly: Daisy is a badass, and she deserves every bit of credit for knowing about Itchy-O and creating the kind of event most people would not even know how to dream into form.
It was brilliant because something in me was being invited into brilliance too.
Into visibility. Into art. Into rooms that saw me before I knew how to fully stand inside being seen.
I was invited to participate as Rock ’n Roll Shaman, my then moniker, in a museum performance called Psychic Barber.
The premise was simple and completely absurd.
I would do psychic readings for people, and then give them haircuts, inside a glass box in the middle of a museum.
Babe, I’ve never cut hair before.
Truly, who handed me a pair of scissors?
But I’m a mighty good psychic.
So I reached for the elder I could touch in that moment: Marina Abramović. The performance artist. The woman who had shown me that presence, endurance, the body, the gaze could become the work itself.
I wasn’t imitating her. I was borrowing permission from an artist who had already stood where performance, art, and life begin to blur.
And then I let the art move me.
There I was, inside this glass box, being watched by hundreds of people. Psychic readings in public are scary enough on their own, but inside a glass box, touching their heads. Cutting away something old. Performing transformation in public.
And bless, Rock ’n Roll Shaman was a part of that too.
A true name, in many ways. A holy little doorway. A brand that gave the electric, psychic, music-loving, myth-making parts of me somewhere to gather.
But it was also something I could hide behind.
A persona. A frame. A way to be visible without having to be fully bare as myself.
The glass box was the container for the art.
But maybe it was also the container of that chapter of my life.
I was visible, but contained.
Seen, but separated.
Invited, but still tender.
Becoming, but still behind glass.
And all while my daughter bore witness.
Mama in a Box
Nine years old, an exuberant little spark of life, showing up in support of her emerging mama, who was somehow chopping hair and offering transformation inside a freakin’ box.
But her whole world had changed too.
She was going through the divorce in her own way, living inside a life that no longer had the same rhythm. I wasn’t the only one unsure of what held me. She was unsure of what held her too.
And into that tender little nervous system came itchy-O.
Wild costumes. Primal beats. Drums that don’t ask permission. A whole room rearranging itself through sound and spectacle.
She was frightened.
And I was in a goddamn glass box.
Unable to get to her. Unable to soothe her. Unable to step out of the performance and back into being her mother.
That ache remains.
It’s not dramatic, just true.
And maybe that’s not my only image of that night. Maybe that was the truth of my motherhood up until then: mama in a box.
So much of my mothering before that point had been performative. Not fake. Never fake. But shaped around survival, appeasement, and caretaking the chaos of my husband.
So much energy went into managing him, tending him, anticipating him, trying to keep the house from cracking under the pressure of his mere being, that I didn’t yet know how to be the mother I’d later become.
I was becoming visible in public, and when my child needed me… there was glass between us.
Meanwhile, itchy-O, playing in the other room.
The soundtrack.
The omen.
The primal pulse marking the crossing.
At forty, I was behind glass.
At almost fifty, I am inside the sound.
Marking the Threshold
This is what landed in me last night.
Itchy-O had returned, not as nostalgia, not as entertainment, but as a living marker.
A decade ago, they were the primal force in the other room while I performed becoming from behind glass.
This time there was no glass between me and the ritual.
The glass box shattered, baby. Or maybe I had finally stepped out of it.
Now, they were the force moving through the crowd, driving arrival into my body.
No glass.
No role to perform.
No haircut, no museum, no spectacle required.
No Rock ’n Roll Shaman between me and the world.
Just me.
The threshold.
The receiving.
The embodiment.
Just drums, body, thread.
The undeniable aliveness of being human among humans. Of miracles landing, and finally being present enough to participate.
Inside the Sound
And this time, my daughter is eighteen.
This time, the threshold is not divorce, but departure.
Leaving the house that’s held us for more than a decade. Leaving the long chapter of survival, mothering, making do, making magic, carrying so much, becoming so much, sometimes with so little.
This time, the next house has appeared.
This time, the upgrade is real.
This time, I’m not trying to prove I can be seen.
This time, I’m present enough to receive what is arriving, to stay in my life while it happens.
Good god, there’s a difference.
Performance was once the bridge between hiding and embodiment.
It let me step into visibility before I knew how to live there. It let me become strange enough, bold enough, artful enough to survive the exposure.
But embodiment does not need the glass box.
Embodiment doesn’t need the role.
Embodiment is standing in the crowd with drums shaking your bones, strands of thread falling from the ceiling, the smell of sweat in the air, and your body moving to a rhythm you can’t even resist.
Embodiment is realizing you are not watching your life happen from behind glass anymore.
You are in it.
You are touched by it.
You are tethered to the people beside you.
You pull and you are pulled.
You are moving and you are moved.
Akasha does not ask you to believe in connection.
It wraps you in it.
Here, Now
That was the miracle of last night.
Not only the music and the spectacle.
Not even the wild perfection of seeing Itchy-O again at another threshold of my life.
The thread wasn’t abstract.
The drums weren’t quiet.
The house wasn’t the whisper of a possibility.
The arrival was no longer anticipated.
It’s here.
And I’m here.
Where are you being asked to step out from behind the glass and come all the way into your life?
If you are in a threshold of your own, this is the terrain of my private mentoring.
We listen for the thread beneath what is changing, and help your body become safe enough to receive the life already arriving.
Art is so beautiful like that but so is sharing the experience to this level of story telling it’s like living vicariously, great story again
“Embodiment is realizing you are not watching your life happen from behind glass anymore.
You are in it.
You are touched by it.
You are tethered to the people beside you.
You pull and you are pulled.
You are moving and you are moved.
Akasha does not ask you to believe in connection.
It wraps you in it.”
Love! 💗 here’s to weaving. 🥂