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Moonlady Showcase
Media Coverage Excerpts
Media coverage of SolstiCelebrations and other seasonal events
East Dallas Advocate
August 2005
Caught in the Web
MOONLADY.COM
As a child, East Dallas resident Amy Martin spent hundreds of hours staring at Venus in the sky. When she was 13, she became a follower of Taoism, an ancient Chinese folk religion. Martin became a writer when she grew up, but her fascination with nature and spirituality continued to evolve. Now she combines the two on her website, moonlady.com, which she started eight years ago as a way to both showcase her writing and to publicize different Dallas events she holds to celebrate lunar and seasonal dates such as full moons, new moons, eclipses and solstices. In fact, her last “Summer SolstiCelebration” attracted more than 2,000 people.
“People were constantly e-mailing me for those times and dates,” Martin says. In addition to a calendar of events, Martin’s site has a section, “Earth and Sky,” dedicated to explaining her take on astronomy. She has also started several list serves, including one just for drums, one for seasonal events and her most recent, “Death Matters,” which distributes articles on the topic of death, dying and beyond.
And of course, there’s her writing. Moonlady.com has links to several examples of Martin’s work, but make sure to check out the progress of her current book, “Heart of the Continent: The Divine Feminine of North America.” She’s has been taking pilgrimages to sacred sites of goddesses and divine-feminine figures throughout North America, including the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, as well as sites in New Mexico, Louisiana, Missouri and Iowa. For her last pilgrimage she plans to travel to the Black Hills of South Dakota to learn more about the “White Buffalo Woman of Sioux.” Martin says she hopes to finish the book soon, but for now has been posting travelogues from each pilgrimage on her website.
The Dallas Morning News
December 31, 2005
Ceremonies smoke out bad mojo
Area churches usher in new year with symbolic purging of negativity
By Kristine Hughes
Although the ritual may seem New Age or metaphysical, it has its origins in ancient faiths and traditions, said Amy Martin, a Dallas ritualist and solstice celebration producer.
American Indians send spoken prayers aloft with burned sage, she said, and Tibetan Buddhists sometimes burn written prayers. In rural India, she said, people transfer their bad luck onto a boogeyman's coat and then burn that.
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The Dallas Morning News
June 18, 2003
'Phooning' phenom: It's still-life silliness
Attempt at record poses challenge for Dallasite
Amy Martin phoons because it's fun.
But it's more.
"It's about feeling a moment. Most of what we do is mundane. You live for the 10 percent of life that is memorable," said Ms. Martin, 47, a writer who lives east of White Rock Lake in Dallas.
"The philosophy of phooning is that it makes you stop and capture the moment. It's almost like meditating."
Part performance art, part high school prank, phooning consists of being photographed while frozen in a running position, preferably in an unusual or interesting setting.
There's a Web site, of course.
Phoons.com includes more than 800 photos that depict - to pick a few random examples - phooning at a dentist's office, crashing a wedding picture and posing in front of the Tower of Pisa.
Ms. Martin is planning to submit her own contribution. At the annual Summer SolstiCelebration on Saturday at Big Thicket on White Rock Lake, she will organize a circle of phooners in what she hopes will be the largest collective phoon ever photographed.
The current record is 32.
"We'll beat that easily," she said. "For a peace freak, I'm pretty competitive."
/snip/
Ms. Martin, who has organized the Summer SolstiCelebrations for the past nine years, said she intends to organize the circle phoon as a prelude to the solstice service, an event with spiritual overtones.
But the phooning itself will be nondenominational, and she intends to take a few minutes to show people the proper pose.
"I wanted something for the event that was joyous and fun," she said. She thinks phooning also answers a higher call.
"Anything that makes people stop for a moment is good," she said. "Even if it's not necessarily thoughtful, phooning is very yogic in its own way."
And very democratic.
"I can be overly serious about some things," she acknowledged. "But one thing I like about phooning is that its shows that we're all one. People are different, but everyone can phoon."
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The Dallas Morning News
July 26, 2003
Letters to the Editor
Defining paganism
Re: "Climate forces cancellation of Summer SolstiCelebration," Religion, July 19
Amy Martin's work is to be commended. It seems that most of her efforts - prayer chapel, gardens, places to meditate and pray - are distinctly non-pagan compared with the usual perception of paganism. While I am a Christian freethinker, I am certainly sympathetic toward Ms. Martin.
Since the days of Mayan sacrifices, worship services have become more humane. But do rituals to please a supreme being, however humane, make them any less pagan? I don't consider her activities mentioned above as pagan in a spiritual sense. Anyone who wants to commune with nature, pray and meditate are pretty good folks in my book.
Those who condemn people like Ms. Martin should exam the true essence of Christianity without the associated dogma and then determine who is the more spiritual. I think perhaps "paganism" needs are more enlightened definition.
Larry Holland, Tyler
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The Dallas Morning News
February 27, 1999
A Change of Heart
Readers tell conversion stories
Last month the Religion section asked readers to write their stories about changing faiths. Converts are an enthusiastic lot, and that was reflected in the number of letters that came in - 46, the most we've received in response to such a solicitation.
The writers have traversed the theological map.
They've gone from Jewish to Episcopal, from Baptist to Mormon, from Buddhist to Christian, from Christian to Jewish, from Protestant to Catholic, from Catholic to Baha'i.
Many are convinced that their new faith holds the unadulterated truth; others remain more conciliatory toward the tradition they left. A few have put faith aside altogether.
The Accidental Taoist
I desperately wanted to be a Christian child. When others at summer camp were off learning archery and other sports, I signed up for the religion classes. I attended Sunday school without being prodded.
Inspired one night by a Billy Graham special, I slipped off to a field where I often went to flee the increasingly argumentative confines of home. Just like Billy told me to, I fell to my knees in the darkness and asked to be saved. But Jesus never came that night, nor any other I tried. I gazed at the stars in the infinite dark sky, conduits to a child's sense of God, and never saw heaven.
Then into my life came Taoism, an ancient Chinese religion focused on living in harmony with nature. It was brought to me by, of all people, my boyfriend's devoutly Baptist father. As a teenager lost in the '60s turmoil, he felt that even if Christianity wasn't working for us, we needed some kind of spiritual anchor. He gave to each of us a copy of the Tao Teh Ching, the slim book of poetic metaphors and aphorisms that serves as Taoist scripture.
In these passages, there was no source of wisdom except the metaphors of nature. This was the late '60s, and I was deeply skeptical of authority and aware of how the truth gets edited to serve those in power. The book spoke of balance as shown in the ancient yin yang symbol. Although it was a religion, it lacked a hierarchy, another appeal to my teen anarchist's heart.
Where Christianity left me with questions, Taoism gave me alternatives. The idea of a personal god never made sense to me - the universe is just so immense - while the Taoist concept of merging with a cosmic energy brought me great peace. I could understand my soul as a life force with many cyclic manifestations rather than finite and forever in heaven. And I came to realize that the eastern idea of transcendental experience was the same thing that I sought in a midnight field asking Jesus to save me.
But more than just being a spiritual path that complemented my own intuitive understandings, here at last was a tie to a community of continuance, that sense of validation that comes from joining beliefs with others. The earth-centered spirituality of Taoism was an anchor that kept me from sinking into teenage apathy and cynicism, or frittering away my life with fads. As my cohorts in the '60s lived fast and died young of overdoses and other disasters, I held on to the silver cord of Taoism.rings an essential peace to those who follow its path just as Taoism has done for me.
Amy Martin
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The Dallas Morning News
March 21, 1998
At Home With God
Private altars help put believers from various traditions in touch with the divine
By Anne Belli Gesalman
Across town, Amy Martin has set up several home altars throughout her house. Ms. Martin, who practices a nondenominational, earth-based religion, adorns her main sacred space with burning incense, a candle, sage leaves and a "prayer bowl" full of pieces of paper containing the special needs of friends or society.
Ms. Martin's altar changes with the seasons and phases of the moons. In the summer, for example, it features more flowers and in the fall more spices. It also contains a compass, so she always knows which direction she is facing.
"I always try to face east in the morning when I meditate because the sun rises there and it reminds me that the cycle begins there," Ms. Martin says.
Though her faith is grounded in individual spirituality rather than a mainstream religion, Ms. Martin's home altars are just as vital to her as the Punhong and Martinez altars are to those families.
"The home altar is the core of all you practice because it is your personal expression," Ms. Martin says. "I can't imagine not having it. It serves as a constant reminder of what I am here for. Even if I just pass by it, I get that message."
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The Dallas Morning News
June 8, 1990
Columnist wins environmental award
Howard Garrett, a Dallas landscape architect and author of House & Garden's weekly organic gardening column "The Natural Way,' was one of three individual winners of a 1990 Environmental Excellence Award from Clean Dallas Inc. The awards recognize individuals, civic groups, businesses and schools who have shown concern and support for the Dallas environment over the past year.
In the same category, Amy Martin, who writes House & Garden's monthly recycling column "Talking Trash,' received an honorable mention.
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