(Photo of the author Raven aka Sam)

Life is an odyssey--a meandering adventure fraught with change, with good fortune and disaster, with experiences that lead to fulfillment, wisdom, and sometimes bitterness. Within the larger journey are ten thousand smaller ones. My most recent mini-odyssey, the one that ended with the creation of this blog, started with... Read More

I was raised by a bunch of beautiful women who loved being naked. They practiced yoga naked, they bathed naked together in the stream behind our palapa, they seemed to just always be naked, which, of course, they were not. Their nakedness, however, gave me enormous amounts of anxiety and stress as a child. You see, we lived in a very small,... Read More

Paula and I had no idea how much her story and her photos would touch people in the blog we shared back in July. Today it has 4K "likes" and 43,535 page views and dozens and dozens of positive and thankful comments. I just noticed the other day that Paula's Facebook profile photo now are the words... Read More

I cannot get the image of 12-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick out of my mind, the young girl who committed suicide after relentless on-line bullying. I imagine her in that abandoned concrete plant in Lakeland, Florida, making her way up to the top of a ledge, intent on ending her life. Did a breeze toss her brown hair? Was she sweating in... Read More

Feeling beautiful for me is a practice.

It's not like I wake up every single day singing songs of how beautiful I am to myself (though that would be pretty rad).

I mean, I have 30 years of undoing this chaotic tangle of self-loathing (I kind of remember being 4 years old hating my big knobby feet, my limp hair and the... Read More

My sun sign is Cancer and sometimes I have to bribe myself out of my house with promises of smoothies and iced Americanos. I know so many beautiful people and yet I have few close friends. This woman is one of my closest friends. I introduce to you, lovers of life who visit this blog, my beloved sister-friend... Read More

I just read a new novel, Freud’s Mistress, by Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman. The story is based on speculation that has intrigued historians and biographers for more than 70 years that Sigmund Freud had an affair with his wife’s brilliant and beautiful sister, Mina Bernays, who lived with the Freud family in Vienna for more than 40 years. Freud’s wife... Read More

It’s ugly, unmanageable, not versatile, too time consuming, course, dry…..Curly, Kinky, Coily, Natural Afro Hair: I am not My Hair…

MY PATH BACK TO NATURAL HAIR: I relaxed my hair at age 16; this is the name for chemically treating it to straighten out the natural curls and coils of an afro...

Industries are born on the backs of Women hating themselves.
It's an emotional slavery that milks these women, dollar by dollar,
Like chained dairy cows, Oozing vicious droplets of self-hate
That rot the roots of a woman's inner beauty...

Among my earliest memories is one of my mother’s body hugely pregnant with my twin brothers. I was three and a half, seated on the green bathroom rug with my favorite wooden blocks etched with farm animal shapes: a yellow cow, blue pig and red lamb. My mother had placed me there while she showered. I looked up... Read More

In November 2011, a woman in my community, Lucia Maya, called me a few weeks before I was due to give birth to see if I would photograph her young daughter who was undergoing chemotherapy. I was so honored to shoot Elizabeth Blue yet struggled to summon my tired and heavy pregnant body... Read More

I photographed a gorgeous woman named Paula recently for A Beautiful Body Book Project and not one day had passed before I received this heart-wrenching email from her.

I asked
my
5 year old
daughter
Are you beautiful?

“You are, Mama!”

“Mom, you aren’t a size two, you aren’t light-skinned, and you’re beautiful. I won’t tell you that you have to do this (A Beautiful Body Project) if you feel you can’t, but I would love it if you did. Just promise me they’ll include your psoriasis. It’s... Read More

Once Upon A Time are words of initiation we learn at a very young age. The four words, which initiate us into the world of story, are among our first invitations to open our imaginations and let words and images carry us to faraway lands, imaginary spaces, to new landscapes of promise and potential. Through... Read More

Tiffany 45, Mother of One.

Tiffany’s Story: I tried thirteen times to become pregnant, only three was I blessed enough to say I am pregnant. Those three times I became pregnant I miscarried. Does it really matter how I became a mommie? Sure I underwent fertility treatments, taking the pills, giving myself shots, inserting hormones up my vagina, the ultra sounds, the... Read More

This body has dreamt many dreams… From the beginning it has been tickled, torn, pummeled, pleasured. As a young person it was used as a means in which to repent for my mothers sins, for every strait jacket that my ancestors were bound in, I too bound myself.. An agony... Read More

A dear friend of mine who has had two children and points with her child to her c-section lines!

1:40 In the morning and this little girl and I Are up together while she dances out her Story to the rhythm of my heart. In this scared Shared space, where only I can keep her safe She tells me secrets only we can share. I’ll Carry her high, up under my heart,... Read More

Three Years ago today, my son’s grandmother slipped into spirit world after a long battle with breast cancer. I never knew Carol. She became what the Universe is made of before her son and I met, before her grandson was born. I have heard hundreds of stories from my beloved Alok about... Read More

She stood barefoot with a fresh pedicure showing blood-red toenails on the white paper backdrop in my downtown, air-conditioned Tucson studio. She lifted her loose blouse over her head with shaky hands, tears welling in her honey colored eyes. She was petrified. Not only had she never shown a stranger her most vulnerable secrets that her clothing effortlessly hides,... Read More

Today, equal parts excited and nervous, I photographed my first post-birth mother for my project ‘A Beautiful Body’. It was perfect that this project began with her, really. She is fiercely beautiful and as tender as a newborn baby. You would never know that under the thin layer of clothing that covers her body, she has the most gorgeous collection of stripes on her stomach and breasts in the formation of a sun from some... Read More

I am scared to share these photographs and writings with you. If asked why, I may be tempted to nonchalantly say I have no idea. Except that would be a lie. Deep down, I know why: Because I am a rebel with a cause. Because I want to say fuck you to our society’s view on a woman’s body.... Read More

These are my first thoughts put to paper with a beautifully-perfect 7-pound-and-some-ounces baby attached to me, sucking at my breast. As I sleepily search for words to write to accompany the photographs I took last week when the entire family was in town to meet Sequoia, my sweet 11 day old son, I can not help but pause frequently and stare at the perfection feeding from my body’s milk. Every little sound... Read More

It’s nearly time to part ways now. The honor of facilitating the making of a human body in my own body is nearly over. This belly will never be this exact belly ever again. My Son will never again receive nourishment from his umbilical cord. I will never feel him slowly stretch and move against the inside of my abdominal wall as if her were dancing a sacred warrior dance. These last days... Read More

My life as I know it is about to change: forever. In about 4 weeks, most likely under the guidance & protection of the full moon of February 7th and surrounded by my own tribe, I will give birth to my son.

It’s scientifically proven that happiness makes the human heart grow younger. Happiness is the abundant side effect of being interconnected with those in our life that inspire us and to those we had no idea we could possibly love. Happiness is the practice of forgiving those who have “harmed” us so we may be free... Read More

I was born on an insanely hot day during July in the Sonoran desert. Upon a bean bag chair sprawled on my Mother’s bedroom floor, I took my fist Breath. The midwife was called in the late afternoon and I came out with a cord wrapped around my pasty purple-pink neck by Twilite. ’Jade Twilite at your service’, I said to my wide eyed and innocent 10... Read More

I am in love with Those whom we have learned to judge. I am drawn to Those we are told to hate. I am best friends with the Ones whom we call names in the shadows but smile to in daylight. I am in love with the Ones you might be afraid to fully embrace. I am engaged to Unconditional Love and the Ones whom we... Read More

It’s in west Africa where I feel the most beautiful. There are barely any mirrors in the places I seem to stay and visit. People do not react to my white skin and blond hair. Men easily and vocally appreciate the body which my entire life has been called, “big boned”. People cry when I leave and dance when I arrive. I understand this kind of existence.

My yoga practice has gone out the door. With it has gone rising early and eating mostly raw food. I am 2 months pregnant, unmarried and just today I signed up for the first time in my life for AHCCCS (a state health-care for poor folk) and food stamps.

And yet…

I carried her all the way upriver in my young arms because I wanted her to see my house. I wanted to bathe with her in my secret place in the El Tuito river. I wanted her to listen with me the chorus of jungle birds outside my home which was surrounded by banana and papaya trees. Since her wheelchair could not make the journey up the... Read More

I haven’t always been able to stand naked in front of a full-length mirror and smile. In fact, there are still days that my shoulders slump as I uselessly gaze at myself. All I can see are the soft love handles above my hips and the sprinkle of pimples on the left side of my chin. On those days of useless gazing I have to practice with a... Read More

I learned how to forgive on a dry, windy and pleasantly warm afternoon in Taos, New Mexico.

I started choreographing dances when I was 8 years old on the sandy arroyo bed outside of my familia’s palapa, our hut. I would rally with some pretty intense authority all the kids form my dusty neighborhood. ”¡Vamos, Wilbert, àndale Yeni, apùrate Zujey!” I would enthusiastically yell. ”¡Vamos a bailar!” We are going to dance, I would scream with my hands flung to the cloudless Central Mexican sky.

It can be said, I say from personal experience, that after one feels the swift brush with Death the colors of the world and the sacred-ness of one’s reality seem much more brilliant and tactile and abundant. The flowers smell sweeter on one’s walk to the park. The Golden Retriever dog hair piled up in the corner of one’s apartment seems more like evidence of a precious life instead of a dirty house.