MARCO MORELLI, CONTRIBUTOR
Who: Tami Simon (founder of Sounds True)
Why: She’s an audio, video and music publisher whose mission to disseminate spiritual wisdom is as embodied in the company's offerings as it is in Tami herself. In Tami's presence, you feel the transmission of the countless teachers she has learned from; you feel her own unsettling authenticity; and you feel the intensity of the Divine itself, which manifests with fierce clarity, humor, and love.

Who: Sofia Diaz (yoga teacher)
Why: Teacher, dancer, Shakti-goddess, Sofi is the Madonna of yoga in Boulder, and one of the precious few yoga teachers who can both twist the body and open the Heart. Downward Dog and Namaste, Sofia IS! [Notoriously anti-yoga Manifest editor Paul Salamone got his skinny ass kicked in a class with Sofia last week and is compelled to agree].



ROMMEL “COOLMEL” DELEON, BLOGGER
Who: “The Bride” from Kill Bill (trained assassin)
Why: Because she kicked and slashed a handful of American and Japanese asses.



MATTHEW DALLMAN, EDITORIAL ADVISOR
Who: Hildegard von Bingen (Christian mystic/composer)
Why: In addition to the major works of theology and visionary writings that she produced, and in addition to being the first composer whose biography is known, the basic truth of the matter is that she composed many of the most starkly beautiful plainchant melodies ever sung. No matter if sung by a perfectly intoned ensemble, or a new age bastard group, her music never ceases to simply and fully take my breath completely away.

Who: Camille Paglia (cultural critic)
Why: An original cultural critic of what is Ken Wilber calls “Boomeritis” [narcissistic multiculturalism –ed.], Camille Paglia is a self-described “amazon feminist” whose rhetorical bite and intellectual heft is matched by few people, male or female. Though she takes strong and decisive political stands, she is somehow beloved in both liberal and conservative circles. In many ways her highly influential salon.com column made her the original blogger, and the classes she has taught at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia have helped bridge cultural and geographic divides in the art world.



SANGIT VAN MIL, DUTCH ILLUSTRATOR
Who: Alia Johnson (Ridhwan teacher in the Almass school)
Why: She's the most impressive woman I met an embodiment of the black essence (Power and Peace), a wormhole into the Absolute.



PAUL SALAMONE, EDITOR/ART DIRECTOR
Who: Andrea Zollo (lead singer of Seattle rockers Pretty Girls Make Graves)
Why: Yeah, she’s cute, and yeah her band is freakin’ amazing (check out 2003’s The New Romance if you don’t believe me), but I look up to Zollo mainly because of her vision. I’m not trying to be trite: her song-writing is anthematic, and for all her studied punk cynicism, you can’t help but smile when you hear a verse like this (from “This is Our Emergency”):

Listen here take it from me
We're gonna do it differently
They'll follow when you start the lead
Strength in numbers is our key
Keep on doing your thing you do now

Fuck, she even (if only intuitively) has an understanding of subtle energies: what else could she be singing about in album-opener “Something Bigger, Something Brighter” with the words “Tonight I want to make it real / Close my eyes feel it ride up my spine / Radiate out my limbs into air” other than the chakras?

Who: Caithlin De Marrais (lead singer of NYC rockers Rainer Maria)
Why: Yeah yeah yeah, it’s pretty lame nomination TWO indie rocker chicks, but if I’m going to mention Andrea, I have to give it up for Caithlin. I’ve probably seen Rainer Maria play live more times than any other band in the world (five times to be exact), and will forever be in love with the strained-voice bass player who named her band after a German visionary word-dude, dresses better than every “DO” girl in VICE Magazine combined, and continues to tolerate the spastic onstage antics of her ex beau, RM guitar player Kyle Fischer. That’s another thing: the two broke the fuck up, and she still kept the band together. I (apparently) can’t even be in the same state as an ex-girlfriend, let alone the same stinking Econoline.

Who: Ani DiFranco (Buffalo-based punk songstress)
Why: It’s even more lame to nominate THREE indie chicks, but in a music genre so dominated by disaffected males, the girls need all the attention they can get. And I don’t even like Ani’s music all that much—-it’s the fact that she’s still keeping it real in Buffalo, NY after all these years that I consider her cool. I used to hear her singing in her chic two-story in the Elmwood District at 2am on my way home from the bars. She would come into my then-girlfriend’s sushi joint, or the coffee shop, or the art movie house, and without realizing who she was I would see her and go “aw, isn’t that little punk rock girl cute? She’s going to be fucking cool when she grows up!” Not only she is she small and easy on the eyes, she owns a very cool record label, takes stridently progressive political stands, and refuses to play the sexual orientation game: “I fall in love with the person, not the gender.”



COREY DEVOS, FUTURE(S) EDITOR
Who: Bea Arthur (star of TV's Golden Girls)
Why: For teaching me what it means to be a man. Seriously.



SAM PALOMINO, FICTION EDITOR / BARTENDER
Who: Remedios the Beauty (from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude)
Why: The fourth-generation child of the novel’s central family, Remedios became the most beautiful woman in the world, and desire for her drove men to their deaths. Not comprehending her power over men, she remained innocent and childlike, until one day she floated to heaven, leaving the novel abruptly. Now if only we could a woman like that here in Utah.



DR. WRATH, ADVICE COLUMNIST
Who: Willow Pearson (psychotherapist, singer, integral theorist)
Why: Now what kind of wrathful advice-giver would I be if I didn’t nominate a professional counselor who likens herself to a ferocious jungle cat? Willow may be one of the nicest and most loving women in the entire dang universe, but her transmission-heavy song-spewing will dissolve your ego faster than cotton candy in a bucket of lye. Whenever the driving rhythms of her show-stopper “Abandon” waft their way up here to the Pure Land, a little piece of Dr. Wrath dies into the Void. This is a good thing.

Who: Nomali Perera (integral scene organizer)
Why: Since we’re stroking the back of the local Boulder integral scene, why not mention this charming, no-bullshit émigré from Sri Lanka who’s kept a fractious Ken Wilber study circle up and running at the notoriously anti-intellectual Naropa University for nearly two semesters, and doubles as a tell-it-like-it-is fashion consultant? Exactly: why not?