Feminine Treasures

A long, long time ago I read the book Shadowland. I liked biographies about movie stars and the woman on the cover looked free and breezy, as if she was out in the wind. The beginning of the William Arnold book describes a place which used to be an army fort and uses words like "monstrous" and adjectives like "grey." It is the scariest prologue I've ever read: foreshadowing absolutely leaks out of every sentence and the work gets darker and darker and darker. Of course I kept reading. I kept reading and felt as if blue fire was erupting off of every page. This is the scariest story I know and reading it back then, I was sure I could never feel comfortable as an inhabitant on the earth. Someone has to write a book about this woman! I told myself. Someone has to give voice to her inner world.

Well, I became a journalist to learn how to research this story, and moved to Seattle to get to the bottom of a truly unfathomable horrible story of a West Seattle girl who wrote an essay at 15 calls "God Dies" and ended up first a movie star and then in the hell also known then as Western State Hospital. I traveled to New York, Russia and Indianapolis to interview people who knew Frances Farmer, and worked passionately on the project in my Fremont home.

One summer away from the newsroom office, I began writing every morning for a couple of hours a day and by September, I had a solid, annotated, 350-page biography. It read well and appeared to be authoritative. And yet, I noticed something highly troubling. All the material which came before me was only about half-right, which meant that my work, at best, was half wrong.

Life has a way of intervening in moments like these. I fell in love with another writer and went to Hollywood for Alaska Airlines magazine. There, I spent a lot of time in the Frances Farmer lore, and returned to Seattle and my boyfriend so opened up. We ended up making love in a way that would completely change my world. I stopped writing, started dancing and studying yoga and visual arts and it would be YEARS before I returned back to writing.

Over this time period, my yoga teacher trained me in the tantric understanding of working with energy, and the ways in which the inner organs of the body can be tended and cultivated like great friends. Ultimately, we worked with Minke de Vos of Vancouver's Silent Ground Retreat on the "feminine treasures." These women taught me about cultivating female sexual energy.

All of this transmuted over the years in my imagination. I became pregnant and wanted passionate to heal myself before my baby came. My healing and the cultivation of my own personal power went on for years and the more I began to know people the more I began to see how much healing every single being needs and how beautiful and complex and longing we all are for divine union.

In the end, I began too see that I could never know for sure what happened to Frances Farmer and that even being told that the movie was wrong about this or that did not take the story away. I began to see that what mattered here was the stories I'd told myself about Frances Farmer, and those were the stories about women which needed to be healed.

Frances: Feminine Treasures will allow the women present to discuss the issues encircling this West Seattle woman's life. We will use art, movement and taoist energetic work to begin finding our own space as women in this world.

Please join me at Me-Kwa-Mooks Park Tuesday July 20 4 - 7 p.m. and Sunday July 25 from 3 - 6 p.m. for these workshops. Each one is a sliding scale offering of $30 - 90.

Call Lesley at 206-552-1177 for reservations and more information.