I didn’t think I’d get to take a birthday nude this year. My husband has been very ill. All of my time is spent taking care of him, our household, and the business we own together. Besides, I had already done 25 birthday nudes. It’s a good number to hang it up on.
But the world is teeming with life. Spirit guardians and the cosmos seem to conspire toward giving me sensual gifts. Rays of sun through stained glass windows. A warm autumn day with a moment to spare. A rare lazy morning without pain.
The 26th birthday nude then: an homage to my iconic portrait set in my home, a tip of the hat to a title once given to me a long time ago. XXX Pornsaint.
Birthday gifts: new friends surrounding me. I don’t feel so isolated in our tower of glass. I find myself surrounded by people who need healing of the body and the spirit. I feel called to step into this role but sometimes feel woefully inadequate, humble, and grateful. I am open and willing to grapple with what I do not know. I am happy that I am still discovering new things about myself. Thank you! 🙏✨
On our first Christmas at the church, we invited our friends Beaver, her boyfriend, and their pet parakeets to join our family for dinner. It had been snowing for days prior and I fired up our kitchen making a bean feast: soaked cattle beans baked for a day with pork, molasses, and spices. The warm aroma mixed with the crisp fragrance of an 8-foot pine tree hung with Christmas lights and toys in the living room made the gothic structure feel like home.
On Christmas morning Jay made shepherd pie while I simmered spiced wine on the burner. Beaver braved the blizzard and brought frozen fiddleheads she had harvested from her family’s farm last spring. I sauteed the greens in butter and served it up simple, a little taste of spring coming eventually. For dessert she had made a blueberry stollen but was completely upstaged by my kid, at 20 years old, who baked a psychedelic seed cake so light and enchanting like it was made by fairies.
We sat by the Christmas tree basking in the joy of togetherness. Beaver played her flute, Jay sang and played his acoustic guitar, I sang and played ukulele, the parakeets chirped happily. We exchanged presents, then Beaver and company drove home. Jay and I continued to sing and play more songs.
During a moment of sleepy contentment, we heard a knock on our front door. I opened the pointed arched door to a young man, big, dark blond hair and mustache, dressed all in black.
“Are there services?” he asked. “We heard music.”
I looked at Jay and our 20-year-old kid. I contemplated the possibility that we might have a troublemaker asking to enter our home. Jay is a fierce protector. I rely on his instincts.
He asked, “Are you a musician?”
“Yes,” the stranger answered.
“Then come in,” Jay invited.
Another stranger joined the man and they both entered our home. The second one was older, balding, and had a dark scruffy beard. He had a brick red shirt underneath his coat, jeans, sneakers.
I could feel the nervous energy. We’d just let in two strangers, grown men, into our home at nine o’clock on a winter night. If they had malicious intent, could we defend ourselves?
The men looked around. From the outside our home looks like a church. We have a steeple tower and tall stained glass windows, but inside the space is filled with our hodge podge of antique furniture, books, designer toys, and music instruments.
Jay strapped his electric guitar on. The first stranger sat at the drum kit. The second man sat and fiddled with the electric bass. They were horrendous. Jay knew what he was doing, of course. It’s his instrument. But the man on the drums was making an awful racket and the man on the bass guitar made halfhearted strums.
‘Tang ina, I couldn’t bear it. “May I?” I asked for my bass guitar. The man turned it over to me.
This prompted a switch around. The first stranger got up from the drums and asked if he could play Jay’s guitar. Jay sat at his drum kit. That was more like it. I played bass to Jay’s beats, and the man surprised us with pretty awesome blues riffs on the guitar. It felt good bumping to the beat as I thumped on those fat bass strings. Everyone was in their element.
“You’re a hot bass player!” the second stranger said. Then he started ranting like he’d been waiting to front a punk rock band all his life.
I wish I could have recorded our jam session on my phone, but I didn’t dare break the spell and change the mood. We kept playing, laughing. We couldn’t stop. It was a moment of pure liberation.
“Are you guys angels?” the second man asked in a pause from his rant.
I was thinking they were angels before he asked it. Later on, Jay told me he was thinking it, too.
1 The two angels came to Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gate of Sodom. When Lot saw them, he rose to meet them and bowed himself with his face to the earth 2 and said, “My lords, please turn aside to your servant’s house and spend the night and wash your feet. Then you may rise up early and go on your way.”
– Genesis Chapter 19
Never mind the rest of the chapter. The rest of it is fucked up and one of the reasons why I rejected the Judeo-Christian tradition when I was twelve.
But two strangers came to our door asking for services and we had the most fun jam we’ve had in ages. As we quieted down, the men fixated on our kid’s euphonium sitting on the large bookcase, unplayed for years. They took turns attempting to play the horn, prompting our kid to clean it and blow beautiful low notes himself to cap our Christmas night. By ten o’clock, the strangers were gone.
I’m going to file this along with the other strange visitations. An auspicious omen for the coming year. A memory that makes me laugh wildly.
Jay and I played music at an open mic in Maine on New Year’s Eve, then packed the car and drove south to Miami to take our kid back to college after the holidays. We brought the winter with us all the way down to the Carolinas. In South Carolina we stopped for some catfish. I played the piano they had in the corner of their place.
We’re back home now and ready for 2025:
Write my memoir. I’ve been talking about this for ages, it seems. Write madly, furiously, “like I’m running out of time.”
Read more! Read the masters and classics. (Currently reading Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut) Read more POC authors.
Make clothes out of the handwoven fabrics my Mom brought from the Philippines. (The scarf I am wearing in these photos is handwoven by the Yakan tribe.)
Give myself more handpoke tattoos.
Get my songs on music sharing platforms.
Play music more. Write more songs.
Walk more year round. Swim more this summer.
Spend more time with friends. Get out. Invite them in.
Stay sexy. Stay dangerous. Stay focused.
What are you excited to do in the next 12… uh, 11.5 months?
Welcome to my new home in an old church, illuminated with sunlight filtered through vibrant stained glass windows casting an ethereal glow that breathes life into the stillness of this sacred space. These stained glass windows have been standing here for 131 years, still intact though cracked and sagging in some places, still radiating beauty, a reminder to embrace my flaws and celebrate the light that reflects through me.
I stand here naked, not just of the body but of the spirit. I was born not just to exist but to proclaim my truth. 25 years of birthday nudes has led to this most provocative image: the divine and the profane. Isn’t it the human experience to reach for divinity from our carnal form? Do we not spend our lives locked in a struggle between light and dark, courage and vulnerability, life and death?
At my age, each birthday brings a whisper of death. And as more of my loved ones cross over, that whisper gets louder. I hear their voices inside me now. I take on what was vital in them and keep it alive in me. Like stained glass windows, I am a mosaic of moments, pieces of my beloveds shining through me in every story I tell about them.
I am filled with a renewed sense of purpose: to shine! For the sake of those who are not anymore with us, and for the sake of those of us who remain and need a beacon to remind ourselves that it is okay to be brave and vulnerable and flawed and old and weird and scared. I love you.
Outside the rain beat a percussive song upon the roof, windows, and gutters of our farmhouse. It filled my head with melodies and I hummed along. I am in love with life and nature. How can I fall deeper in love with life?
I ran out naked and bathed in the rain. Ligo sa ulan.
This is my birthday nude this year. Completely nude. No make-up, no filter, no hair dye. Just flowers and leaves surrounding my head, grass and mud squished underneath my feet, and rain rain rain on my skin and hair.
I had a rainy birthday, so Jay suggested that we recreate our very first photo shoot, Rainy Day Girl. He let me borrow his 100+ year old coat tails, handed me a frog umbrella, and followed me around our backyard with a camera. Tracing our steps back to the first time we played with a camera together was as refreshing as the misty autumn air. It reminded us both of that electric excitement we felt when we first started dating and collaborating.
It’s been over 25 years since Rainy Day Girl. We’ve accumulated deeply scarring emotional baggage as well as amazing memories of profound connection. I am grateful for all of it. I open myself up for more. At some point during our rainy day frolic in the backyard I got down on a bed of wet autumn leaves on the ground. Sometimes the only way to create beauty is to get dirty.
When I was five I was Batgirl. Not just on Halloween. I was Batgirl everyday, everywhere. Eventually my Mom convinced me that I didn’t need to wear the costume to be Batgirl. After all, superheroes are still superheroes even when they are in their civilian clothes. I adored Barbara Gordon just as much as I did Batgirl. She is a Librarian, a real hero in my book.
I went into first grade at a Catholic school run by nuns. (I wore a tan uniform on regular days and an all-white one they called our gala uniform for when there was Mass on a special day. But this is irrelevant. Anyway…) One afternoon after school I was snooping around the nuns’ cloister and found a giant fruit bat, the famous flying fox, hanging upside down from the rafters. I don’t know how big it actually was, but six-year-old me remembers it as humungous. I may as well have seen God. I trembled in awe and fear, backed away with my wide eyes glued, hoping the creature does not fix its powerful gaze upon me.
For the rest of my life the Bat owns me. I invoke her powers when I need resonance and echolocation, courage in darkness, rest in uncomfortable circumstances.
Like that time in New York City when I met the Man I would marry. It was the middle of a blizzard. He invited me to his place on Staten Island, a Victorian Mansion haunted with giant ceramic demons hanging from trees, feathered Indians made of stone, and life size Nativity figures looking out from inside the street-level fence. Indoors there were grand pianos, antique furniture piled on top of each other, a billiards table in the basement, and taxidermy birds, fox and a giant elk head mounted on the other side of the wall his third floor bedroom loft was against. By the time I got in his bed, we had already been out three times and I was wondering why he wouldn’t make a move on me. So I kissed him. That was all it took. It unleashed in him the giant wild horned beast just a wall away from our heads. We fell in love.
There was one afternoon when he and I walked from the Mansion to the Staten Island Ferry bound for Manhattan. He stopped me, and bent to pick up a black plastic Batman ring on the snow-white ground. Then he took my left hand and slipped the toy on my ring finger. Realizing what he’d just done, we both became nervous. A strong gust of cold river wind hit us. I pondered it all while the winding winter wind whipped at us. At that time I hadn’t yet told him I was Batgirl. What was going on? Who gave him a clue? And most importantly, did it mean I could hang upside down with him for the rest of my life? The Lenape natives called the large island south of Manhattan Aquehonga Manacknong, “Sandy Shores and Haunted Forests.” Those island ghosts knew.
Decades later, my Elk-Man and I live together in a big old 19th century farmhouse with a barn attic full of antique furniture, art, and toys of our own. I’m still Batgirl and this is where I hang.
