There had been a flurry of text messages back and forth between CJ and Janey about what exactly a person was supposed to wear to a shaman’s house for a twenty-thousand-year-old cactus ceremony. CJ, who considered this a big night out without her children and husband, thought it would be nice to get dressed up. “Heels and sexy tops?” she wrote. Janey thought it seemed like an occasion for nice but not flashy workout clothes. Janey looped Ivy into the mix after her cousin asked her to have dinner the night of the ceremony. Janey secured her an invite to come with them instead. At the last minute Ivy texted them the definitive wardrobe answer: Pajamas. Comfy pajamas. I did ayahuasca with some Peruvians at Coachella. Trust.
Janey was enjoying this motley new girl gang of hers. It’d been years since she’d spent this much time with CJ, who had been, rightfully, busy with her young family. And she and Ivy just hadn’t had the opportunity to be close because of their age difference, a chasm that didn’t seem nearly as large as it had when Ivy was a teenager.
“How much does a shaman make?” CJ nudged Janey as they stood in front of the double oak doors of Stella’s Park Slope brownstone on a tree-lined street in the pricey neighborhood. “Like in a year. What do you think the annual salary of a shaman might be?”
Janey gave a low whistle. “It looks like this one is doing all right for herself.” She’d pictured Stella in a funky and adventurous community. Bed Stuy, maybe? Maybe somewhere in Queens. She’d never have thought the shaman had a brownstone in this homogenized Brooklyn enclave where all the young dads wore the same Warby Parkers and zipped around on vintage skateboards and the moms wore a uniform of distressed denim skirts with French striped T-shirts and espadrille sandals from Rag & Bone (with the label removed, naturally). No one wore makeup, but their haircuts cost more than four hundred dollars. Organic food co-ops (don’t call them grocery stores) sold misshapen bananas for triple the price of the chain stores. “Down-to-earth” celebrities regularly leaked their co-op shifts to the Page Six gossip column.
From the outside, Stella’s house looked like another nineteenth-century townhouse, apart from the front door, which was painted a loud pink and covered in purple Hindi characters.
“You know, I met two new shamans this week,” CJ said, tugging on the bottom of her black silk Stella McCartney pajama top as it bunched around her hips. “They were at school drop-off. Bored mommies turned shamans. It’s becoming a thing. Remember five years ago when everyone became a handbag designer? Shaman is the new handbag designer.”
The three women were greeted at the door by one of Stella’s assistants (A shaman in training? Janey wondered) who delivered a warm smile as she handed each woman a small slip of paper that said her name, Moon Child, and explained that part of her training this month involved not speaking a single word and living in complete silence. She bowed her head of red ringlets to them.
They tentatively bowed back. “What do you want to bet she’s from Jersey and her name is Tiffany?” CJ speculated, grabbing Ivy’s can of electrolyte-infused H2BROC and taking a pinched sip.
Inside the floorboards were painted a shiny ebony, covered with beautiful Moroccan poufs and Turkish rugs that Janey knew didn’t come from ABC Carpet & Home but likely the actual Morocco and Turkey. A light smell of bergamot incense wafted through the room. The walls were empty except for one large gold antique mirror over the white brick fireplace.
There were maybe ten other people in the room, and as far as Janey could tell none of them were, at least at first glance, the kind of people she thought would be drinking a tea made of psychedelic cactus on a Tuesday night. Stella was nowhere to be found, but the room buzzed about her.
“She’s just simply the most magical person I’ve ever met,” one plump woman wearing a purple caftan said to a man, a tall silver fox with a day-old beard. He was wearing a three-piece suit, clearly cut by Savile Row’s finest tailors, with a perfect white square peeking out of his left breast pocket. He reminded Janey of Sean Connery, thirty years ago. She watched as he carefully removed his leather brogues and tried to stifle a laugh when she noticed he was wearing sock garters.
He smiled back at the woman in an interested way that made Janey wonder if the two of them were on a date—and not just any date, but a first date. It was an odd choice to be sure, but maybe it beat awkward drinks at the Waverly.
Ivy wandered over to a low wooden coffee table and grabbed a book off of a high stack. The cover was a deep royal blue and featured a blond woman Janey quickly recognized as Stella sitting on top of a mountain and gazing off into the distant clouds and the ruins of Machu Picchu below.
Ivy read the title off the cover. “From Shame to Shaman. Seriously?”
“Shhhhhh!” Janey shushed her cousin as the three women gathered to read the book flap silently to themselves.
This memoir by renowned shaman Stella Bard takes the reader on a journey that proves our darkest moments are the source of our greatest light. She was a world-famous supermodel with a treacherous heroin habit when she fell in love with a shaman in the Peruvian Amazon.
She left her love in the jungle but found herself in the process. She kicked her drug habit, returned home to New York City, got married, divorced and married again, had two daughters, and obtained her PhD in homeopathic healing.
From extracting joy and light out of every day to healing wounds inflicted in this lifetime and before, Hart’s insights are filled with warmth, compassion, and wisdom that bring awareness to every cell of your spiritual being.
“Jesus Christ, she’s the most interesting woman on the planet,” Ivy said. “I mean WOW.”
“I think Lena Dunham is the most interesting woman on the planet,” a melodious voice said behind them. They turned to see Stella grinning with amusement. She was dressed simply, in a pair of torn baggy jeans that fell off her slender hips and a white button-down shirt, unbuttoned to reveal a pair of blue crystals hanging from a gold chain between her small breasts. “My publishers did a very good job of making my story seem as salacious as possible. But, at the end of the day, I let them do it. They told me it would sell more books. I believe the more people who read my message, the better for the world.” She shrugged. “In the end everyone wins. But please feel free to take a copy home if you’d like, that’s why they’re here. Come on up to the roof. We’re about to get started.”
“It’s below freezing out. Is she crazy?” CJ said to Janey once she thought Stella was out of earshot.