MY WEEKLY BLOG<\/p>\n
FIRE AND ICE<\/p>\n
I got home one day, it was 1987, and I checked my voice\u00a0mail. \u201cHello,\u201d a deep woman\u2019s voice said, \u201cMy name is Olympia. I\u2019m an actress,\u00a0and I just finished reading your book, Awakening the Healer Within. I wonder if\u00a0we could meet.\u201d<\/p>\n
I stared at the phone. There was only one Olympia on myradar, the woman who had won an Oscar a month earlier and she was so humble,\u00a0she introduced herself as \u201can actress.\u201d She left a number for me to call and\u00a0when I did, she was at the other end of the phone. I invited her for tea at my\u00a0house and a few days later, there was a loud knock on my door. I would quickly\u00a0learn that everything Olympia Dukakis did was loud. I invited her in. \u201cI was\u00a0moved by your healing experiences in the Philippines. You were so honest, I\u00a0felt like I was there.\u201d<\/p>\n
There was no time for me to be intimidated as we began\u00a0talking like we already knew each other. When the first first fifteen minutes
of our visit had gone by, she had laughed, cried, shouted, petted my cat and\u00a0moved her arms around with abandon. I saw immediately that she was a presence\u00a0that demanded my full attention and the hard cold truth about everything. She\u00a0was fire and ice.<\/p>\n
Our relationship expanded from there. I never met anyone who
was more alive and present in her body. Each time I was about to meet with her,\u00a0I felt slightly nervous because being with her demanded authenticity and\u00a0undiluted honesty. Our visits were like a whirlwind. She asked me to give her a\u00a0crystal healing and when my cat started climbing on her prone body, she\u00a0wouldn\u2019t let me move her away. We ate at a Greek restaurant and she read my tea
leaves. We wrote together. We met in Central Park and walked in the snow together.\u00a0We cooked dinner at her rented apartment and she told me stories about Innana,\u00a0the Sumerian Goddess of fertility, love and war, and her journey to the underground where she was stripped of everything, she was bare bones, until she reclaimed herself and found her way back. Each time I left her, I felt like bare bones, stripped of anything extraneous.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Olympia never stopped acting, it was in her bones, but at
the same time, she dedicated herself to helping women find the strength and\u00a0courage to speak their truth. I helped her put together a workshop for women in\u00a0which she spoke about the silencing of women that had gone on for eons. She\u00a0made it clear that women needed to find their voices and use them, loudly and
clearly. She was the model for that, someone who refused to be silent and who\u00a0loved women so deeply, she offered her time and energy to showing them how to\u00a0find themselves and show the world who they truly are.<\/p>\n
I had a dream a few months ago in which Olympia gazed into my eyes and said, \u201cI love you.\u201d I sent her an email describing the dream and she sent one back that said, \u201cYour dream is true.\u201d That was my last communication with her.\u00a0She taught me so. I was so fortunate to know her intimately\u00a0and when I\u2019m afraid to speak up, I see her eyes, I feel her strength, I see her\u00a0fire and ice, I open my mouth and say what’s on my mind. I think about her\u00a0Moonstruck character, Rose Castorini, that won her an Oscar. Rose was standing\u00a0outside her apartment after dinner with a man who was attracted to her. She
told him, \u201cI can’t invite you in because I\u2019m married and because I know who I\u00a0am.\u201d That was Olympia in a nutshell. She knew who she was and she showed me who\u00a0I am.<\/p>\n
When I think of her death, as much as I miss her, I know that she is
still around. She was far too alive and animated, sensual and hilarious,\u00a0vulnerable and stubborn. It makes me certain that we go on in a different form\u00a0after we die, because Olympia Dukakis can never be snuffed out. She lives in\u00a0every woman\u2019s valiant attempts to be completely and unequivocally heard and\u00a0seen for who they truly are. May she always see the sun and may she rest not\u00a0only in peace, but also in the fiery ball of energy that was and still is
Olympia,<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
MY WEEKLY BLOG FIRE AND ICE I got home one day, it was 1987, and I checked my voice\u00a0mail. \u201cHello,\u201d a deep woman\u2019s voice said, \u201cMy name is Olympia. I\u2019m an actress,\u00a0and I just finished reading your book, Awakening the Healer Within. I wonder if\u00a0we could meet.\u201d I stared at the phone. There was only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1908,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1908"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}