What is a love ninja?

What is a love ninja?

It all started a few years ago in the days of the Bronson House. A group of my brilliant artist friends and family lived in an old hollywood hills mansion house together. It was like what the OM hOMe became in Venice, but within the walls lived film makers & photographers instead of musicians... and it seemed to function really really well.
My friend Wyatt lived in the back house/garage area.
It was about the time that 'Alice and the White Hair' - his vision of an Alice & Wonderland rendition through the eyes of an LA burning man-vibed artist, took life!
Everyone in the house worked on this short film in one way or another... Producing, acting, camera operating, editing...
I remember getting a screening of the almost complete film for about 8 of us in the Bronson house one night. It blew me away.
I bounced up and down and asked for more more!
Dave brought in a music video he had just made for Edward Sharpe & The magnetic Zeros - a band I would come to love and who would play a part in inspiring my entire house full of musicians to become what they are.
All I knew at the time, was that Dave had created an eerie, magical and of course insanely inspiring piece of art for a dark but somehow liberating sounding "desert song"...
Everything these guys created made my heart sing and my head spin.

Before my husband and I split up, we spent basically every weekend at the Bronson House with our tribe of inspiring friends - getting artistic and weird- going for nature walks at night under the Hollywood sign and basking in the love for one another.

For years I was inspired to go to the Burning Man Festival. (my older sister Lara went when she was at UC Berkeley and I was still in high school). I was always pulled and especially intrigued by stories and pictures shared at the Bronson House.

In 2009 was I think the second ever Lightning in a Bottle festival. Jamie had no interest in going, but last minute I dove into a car with Ross, our brother and Jamie's future best friend/business partner who actually played 'The White Hair' in Wyatt's film and lived in the big room upstairs at Bronson in those days.

We arrived at this incredible art festival tucked in the Santa Barbara Mountains. (everyone referred to it as a mini burning man in the forest)...
We got there at night and searched for the stage carrying all of out stuff. I think Bassnectar was onstage and Ross somehow lead us to all of our friends who were in the artist camp where we started to pitch our tent and then quickly abandoned the idea and chose to sleep in Angela's tent.
Ang is the goddess of the Bronson tribe- and the only girl to ever live in that house. She was the inspiration for me that it was possible to do such a thing later on down the road in Venice.


I remember Angie's tent was this little nest of love- draping scarves and candles... A total zen zone.
She instructed us to throw our stuff down... Grabbed us both by the hands and we made our way to dance to the dirty dubstep music bleeding out of the Do Lab speakers built into a wooden masterpiece of a stage.
The Do Lab, I came to find out, were throwing the whole event and were who I was camping with.

One morning, I saw Linda. The beautiful European aerialist, dancer, poet and performer coming out of her big mama tent which was next to ours...
Linda and I shared her breakfast, talked about dance and bonded... That night I watched her perform on the big stage in all white with crazy glittering white laser beam lights and a crew of aerial acrobats tumbling through the night sky.

These were magic people.

It seemed that everything everybody created was there for the sake of heightening your experience and causing your jaw to drop onto the dusty festival floor in wonder.

One night, Angela, Ross's two sisters and I were searching through the dark without a flashlight for our camp which at that point was all but gobbled up by a sea of tents extending every which way.

The big oak tree that hung above our camp seemed illuminated for some reason in the pitch black moonless sky.
As we got closer we found, as if by magic, our tent was literally glowing.
Astounded, we sat there forever staring at the tent discussing how and why it could glow... After much deliberation, we definitively decided that it was bat guano.
I was sure I had heard somewhere that it glowed and it seemed the only logical answer (believe it or not.)
Meanwhile Ross's two sisters were already smearing whatever was splattered on our tent with their hands and drawing shapes with the glowing fluid on eachother's skin.

Moments later Wyatt walked by.
I grabbed him and pulled him over to show him the weird magical bat poo.

"Oh. You mean the glow sticks I broke open and poured on your tent so you could find it in the dark? Ha. Bat poo. Nice one."

A typical experience at an event like this.
Everyone is just loving one another. Making everyone else's experience all the more amazing.

The next night one of my best childhood friends, Miss Cary and Sean Tudor, another Bronson house resident, who would become one of my closest friends, arrived and the adventure continued to unfold and evolve like the ever present giant lotus flower towers... Huge gorgeous structures made of wood and fabric that billowed in the wind.

I didn't even know it could get better.

We found these soft amazing swings surrounded by zen zoneness and low lighting. I don't remember what we talked about on those swings but it remains in my mind as a phenomenal conversation.

I think it was that night, sitting by the bonfire at out camp- i was talking about love as an anti-venom to hate and fear, greed and anger.... Recalling how my mother gad taught us girls how to wave and smile excitedly if someone cuts you off on the freeway because they think that they know you and feel badly.
"kill everyone with kindness" she'd say.

Wyatt dubbed me the Love Ninja.

He named me and knighted me on my shoulders and head just for fun. I loved it.

Later that year I'd experience Amma, the hugging guru who has hugged over 14 million people I think.
Receiving Darshan from her was like getting electrocuted- shock-waves of love pulsated through me and out the back of the densely crowded room.

It was such a powerful, reinforcing reminder and personal proof of what I believed in.

I went to Burning Man (sans hubby again) later that summer full of belief, trust and an open heart.

It was on the Playa that year - my first time there- that my world flipped upside-down.
I met a new tribe of people and ended up coming back to reality (or 'the default world' as burners call it) only to part ways with Jamie and fall into a crazy year and a half of music, love, and complete disconnect with any reality at all... Creating the OM hOMe and witnessing the birth of The Mowgli's and The Collective.

We had an intention to create harmony- a truly bodhisattvic desire to lift tue hearts of everyone on the planet- spreading our positive vibration...

We got a little distracted by shiny objects for a while, but once I found my feet on the ground, i had this overwhelming desire to go travel around the world and actually meet everyone... And roundhouse love kick all who needed a judo hug.


So ya... I guess that's the story of how I became a self-proclaimed love ninja.

And what it means to me? Is to be committed to loving with wisdom and finding compassion for every being on earth... Killing with kindness, not killing.
Breaking down walls of anger and frustration and separation - trusting that we can evolve as a planet towards unity consciousness as one... Without violence.

And also remembering that I am a human. I forget. I lose the way and I get distracted... But it's okay because I choose to be surrounded by and attract light carriers who help show me the way and guide me back towards the goal, which is to love, love, love.

P.S. Guano doesn't glow.