After growing up on a farm, living amongst the exquisite wildness of Cape Town, safari guiding in the bush and then living 5 years in the Amazon jungle studying plant medicine, the last two years in the city have been an initiation on many levels.
I've had to learn to cultivate the space and atmosphere for relationship and re-enchantment with my Earth body that usually comes quite easily to me when I'm living in natural or remote places and especially when my last job was facilitating plant medicine retreats and dietas under the guidance of peoples who hold a primarily animist worldview- kinda cheating, haha
I prefer to trust my own senses and experience- as it appears that both sides also fall prey to their own confirmation bias and in many ways, I feel that focusing all our attention on global climate change and carbon levels is a reduction of a much wider, and possibly more serious problem happening in clear view of us all:
Widespread, catastrophic land and ecosystem degradation and loss of biodiversity (which is also inseparable from climate).
I'm a dreamer and probably a bit of an idealist, I have so many beautiful long-held dreams of how I want to live with this world and all the ways I want to contribute. They are good dreams too, the kind of dreams that could potentially make a real positive impact on this world.
Some of them are near at hand, and some are far. Even very far (like bordering on pipe dream far)...
I often dream of wild untouched places & epic landscapes at night- without any story or content necessarily... Just wandering through these powerful places, soaking them in. Many of these places are familiar to me though I might not know them in waking life & some of them are places I have been returning to in my dreams since I was a child....
Painting with my moon blood is a reclamation practice for me... One of the many ways I have found to change my relationship with what used to be 'the red curse'....
The blood mysteries are the sacred rites of passage in womenâs sexual life cycle. The biological and psycho-spiritual changes of menarche, menstruation, pregnancy, birth, and menopause bestow feminine wisdom, spiritual and physical health, and sexual empowerment through the body. Women healers have long honored the sacred feminine healing powers of the Blood Mysteries, as sacred and powerful life transformations.â Kara Maria Ananda
The icaros are a kind of embodied and melodious prayer that are empowered by the spirits of plants(devas), nature beings, deities, ancestors and archetypal energies in the attempt to weave an energetic container, open doorways to the inner worlds and create pathways/maps for those journeying within.
Plant Dieta is the soul of Amazonian curanderismo, and without a doubt, one of the most invaluable practices transmitted to us during our time in the jungle. How the practice is undertaken varies with each curandero or tribal group. What we discuss here is based on what we learned during our 4-year apprenticeship within the Shipibo tradition of curanderismo and also from our own direct experience and understanding.
There are many forms of âCuranderismoâ (what many of us in the West might call shamanism- a term that actually originates in Siberia) â the practice of plant and ancestral spirit medicine. What we present here is our own ever-evolving perspective and understanding, formed during our time in the Peruvian Amazon, in a full-time apprenticeship with indigenous Shipibo curanderos of the Mahua-Lopez lineage.
You are my wild heart that cannot help dreaming of open plains and untouched lands that speak in tongues lost to all but the quietest of minds, the subtlest of hearts.
Please teach me to walk unheard in this wild place so I may see what you see, feel what you feel.
Please show me how to dreamwalk this world and enter deeply into its many wounds.
