Hello, I’m Alana, and I have been on quite the journey 🚂.

I became a professional songwriter and performer for many years, with a record deal, a publishing deal, and an international team, which took me around the world. It was an incredible ride... but it also took me straight into the mouth of the patriarchy that is the entertainment industry.

I met some amazing people along the way... getting to record an album with Grammy-winning producer Ken Nelson (Coldplay), and co-writing with folk icon Sylvia Tyson are deeply beautiful highlights of my life.

The thing  I began to realize about the entertainment industry is that it has forgotten that art was meant to be shaping the spaces where decisions are made. 

What I began to intuit is that I am a Bard.

A minstrel. One who walks with a bone memory. I began to uncover in my heart that the vedic hymn writers, the exquisite Islamic poets, the Christian mystics, and my Bardic ancestors, all knew they were here to live at the fertile edge ... in the intertidal zone... to be threshold dwellers.

To work with what is, (what is actually often called an "opus" in alchemical terms!) and put every ingredient into the cauldron of the heart, and make beauty out of impossible things. ⚗️❤️‍🔥

I knew songwriters weren't here to just be machines born to sit in some artificially bright room in Nashville churning out tunes. There's nothing wrong with hit songs... (in fact, sometimes, the ones that really stick have a mysterious depth and timelessness about them), but I started to realize something about the process of songwriting... that  the process itself is part of what gives shape to innovation in and of itself, beyond established, often stuck, systems. Songwriters are process practitioners in a consistent rhythm of accepting that the only way to draw something down to this earthly realm, is to go under. To unknow. To surrender. 

I’ve been a seeker (be which I mean DEPTH-HUNTRESS), for as long as I can remember. I recognize depth when I see it. And have come to realize that as an Emotional Projector in Human Design,  I may very well be part mermaid 🧜‍♀️ ... plunging beneath, and trying to find delivery modalities (like song), to share what I’ve found down there. 🎶

What has been my biggest trouble in the past is that I expect everyone to plunge down there with me. This has been the trouble inside of the mermaid myths, and the siren myths...  that "the song" represents a luring out, into the depths... depths that are so oceanic... people often never return. But I have come to learn something in my experience as a guide... a wise songstress or storyteller comes up to the surface with their boon... and offers it in a way, where the listener is taken through just enough depth to arrive back on shore, transformed.

A story:

It is a funny thing... how insidious a thing can be. I literally jumped from right-wing patriarchy of church experience, to left-wing patriarchy of the entertainment industry. Just couldn't seem to catch a break from that energy and domination.

I knew I was leaving the music industry the night I was standing poolside on a Los Angeles hotel rooftop with the Hollywood sign in the distant Beverly Hills. I had just performed to a packed house at the famed Viper Room, and I remember Harvey Weinstein was standing directly to my right. I was underweight, and sad, and had no idea how to extricate myself from the way things were.

Really... I burned out from the music industry at the point when I knew I wanted to be a lover and a mother... and at the time, the record industry culture was mainly supportive of men who toured "free" as birds, while their wives raised their children at home. At the time there was no support for women who wanted to explore balance of motherhood, and their gift as a performer.

So I began the journey of disassembling my team, devastated to the point of being stunned, and at the time, I was the most alone I had ever been... even in my personal life.

I eventually found myself hiding out as a volunteer at a Benedictine Monastery, chanting the Psalms, and living in rhythm with the women.

Part of this process was recognizing I needed to reconcile some deep spiritual wounds and hang ups I had about my own past. I would walk the grounds and climb a grandmother tree by the river, and let myself be held by her branches. In my mind's eye, I caressed moss-covered Celtic crosses in my motherlands. I ached to be embraced by lands indigenous to me. Which, as someone born into a neophyte nation state on top of lands held by the first peoples for thousands upon thousands of years, felt like it could never be. I couldn't "go home", and I would never be "from" anywhere. (I didn't know at the time that there is a gift in accepting that. All I felt was the ache.)

My little “cell” where I slept, was adjacent to the monastic library, which to this day in my memory is an illuminated, silvery, room that smells deliciously of musty books.

I, (perhaps like you), have a complex story of growing up evangelical, exposed to fundamentalism, and blunt, face-value interpretations of deeeeeply nuanced, contextual, NOT linear, sacred texts. 📜

So it was refreshing and astonishing when I encountered the mystical, contemplative side of Christianity, in that

library. At certain points, when I opened a book, it was as though the mystical author of that book was there in the room with me.

I went on to train in this mystical, contemplative tradition in the inaugural class of Richard Rohr’s Living School, where I met and learned from key teachers in this contemplative tradition... including James Finley, and Cynthia Bourgeault.

I also began training and assisting in rites of passage programs. 

I eventually grew skilled at hosting women's circles and rituals around a fire.

The contemplative training developed into a body of musical work, and I continue to stand by the music I have produced that conveys teachings from the mystical, hermetical, wisdom lineage of Christianity.

Over the past two years however, I have also expanded... I’ve written a folk opera called Cianalas/Tãsknota, (the words for homesick or longing, in two of mother tongues Scottish Gaelic and Kashubian).

Cianalas/Tãsknota is a time-travelling (or really timeless) opus that is about embracing, and confessing, and metabolizing, my entire history, all the way back to the beginnings of longing in the human spirit.

I, perhaps like you, don’t attend church at this point. But not attending hasn't erased my yearning for depth and ritual.

Maybe when we stop treating Jesus like he's Caesar, whether in our creeds, or in our songs, and if we reinstate Mary Magdalene to her rightful place, I will recapitulate ✨

There seems to be a trend of intellectuals returning to orthodox spaces as more and more people are realizing that "modernity" doesn't hold all the answers ... and it's refreshing to see these expressions. For me however,  I can't simply "return", so much as ride the fertile edge, and sense where I am being invited to midwife wisdom, mystery and depth into the coming age. Another reason I can't "return" is because I never really left...  over the course of my lifetime “leaving entirely” has never felt quite right... something in me never quite could simply say “this is bullshit, I’m out”. So with the aid of those mystics, and some good teachers, I have taken a fine-toothed comb to my own spiritual lineage, and gone all the way through, without bypassing any age, to the archaic caves where we seem to sense we had an umbilical cord-like connection with our Earth and with Creator. I've come to see that we are in a story.

A big healing shift for me has been that I have ceased to worry about fitting in, and I now know that being resentful about boy's clubs, or being bitter about who still greedily clutches Christ's mystery keys, is no wise way to spend my one precious life. I have also been deeply healing the "from nowhere" parts of me, as the granddaughter of Canadian homesteaders. For me, my spiritual lineage and my ancestral story is so very deeply connected.

This has led me all the way back to the lands and parishes of my great grandparents in Poland, the Highlands of Scotland, and the West Country of England.

I have pilgrimaged alone to sit vigil in the cave that was the birthplace of Christianity in Scotland.

I have rowed out to islands to sit all day in hermit ruins.

I have explored the history of Queen Boudica, who defended Britain from Roman occupation for nearly 40

years.

I have sat at the foundation of the Temple of Claudius built on British soil in the 1st century, and explored the

reality that crucifixions occurred in Britain in the 1st and 2nd centuries (well before the crumbling Roman Empire assimilated Christianity into itself).

I have received assignments and messages... one hard message being: it isn’t just the age of Christendom that superseded the previous age in a violent way. All the way down through history during epochal shifts, there has been both violence, and an organic trading of notes. Some have had an evolved intuition... that our origin comes from a deep, longing, aching, love, out of which the friction of becoming, wherever misaligned, can cause earth-quake level instability. And some have chosen the "power over" of the day.

Now that we are entering whatever this new Epoch is, we run the risk of forgetting deeply important gifts from all the Ages that have gone before us. But what is SO profound, is that because we're in the birth canal of the new Epoch, ALL of the old dispensations are open to us at the moment! I truly feel ALL the ancestors are present with me. This is a very poignant time! 

I can no longer do "progressivism" in its raw, artless, exiling form. For me, that path doesn't hold healing. I HAVE TO BE CREATIVE!!! AND... at a certain point I had to ask myself: "will you transform this volatile, reactionary history inside, before you pass your ways on to the next generation?"

I am here with a reconciling wand, (which does not mean "going back to the patriarchy".)

I am here with my body.

I groan with the earth for beauty.