Following the Stream

Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash
Cascade Falls, Blue Mountains, Australia

Following the Stream

written by Derek Claiborne

The sun dipped below the horizon, painting the sky with deep purples and fiery oranges. I sat on the edge of a sandstone cliff in Australia's Blue Mountains, feeling the vastness of the world stretch out before me. A cool breeze carried the scent of eucalyptus and the distant hum of cicadas. For the first time in weeks, the weight of homesickness and uncertainty began to lift from my shoulders.

Beside me, Dee gazed silently at the panorama. "These mountains have a way of revealing secrets if you listen," she said softly. "You gotta tune yourself out."

I nodded, absorbing her words. "It's strange," I replied. "Out here, all the noise in my head just...

“Fades?” she added

“Yeah, it’s like there's so much more to life than I've been missing."

Two weeks had passed since I left home, grappling with the decision to step away from everything familiar. The initial excitement had given way to doubt and isolation. But today felt different—like a turning point.

Earlier that morning, Dee had picked me up in her battered LandCruiser. "Ready for an adventure?" she'd asked, her eyes gleaming. The vehicle groaned as we left the city behind, each mile marker peeling away layers of my apprehension.

As we drove into Katoomba, the landscape transformed. Jagged peaks rose against a backdrop of endless sky, and the air grew crisp. We stopped at a quaint café, where Dee introduced me to meat pies and the ritual of dunking Tim Tams into coffee. Her easy laughter and the warmth of the place made me feel, for the first time, that I belonged.

Back on the road, I mentioned a flyer I'd seen about a cable car. "That's for tourists," Dee chuckled. "We're after the real gems, the ones off the map."

We arrived at the untamed trailhead. The path was steep and overgrown, but I welcomed the challenge. As we hiked, my senses sharpened. The crunch of gravel underfoot. The rustle of leaves. The distant calls of wildlife. They consumed me—my worries vanished.

"Ever think about what you'd do if you got lost out here?" I asked.

Dee smiled. "I'd find a stream and follow it downhill. Nature has its own guidance if you're willing to trust it."

Her words lingered, touching on more than survival.

A faint whistle broke through the stillness. We exchanged glances. "Someone might be in trouble," Dee said, concern shading her features.

We followed the sound, deviating off the trail. Tying my red bandana to a tree as a marker, we plunged into the uncharted brush. We found a woman trapped between rocks, her ankle twisted at an unnatural angle.

"Are you okay?" I asked, scrambling down to her.

"My ankle... I can't move," she winced.

Dee and I crafted a makeshift splint from twigs and my t-shirt. As we worked, a realization washed over me. Here, helping a stranger in need, I felt a sense of purpose I'd been missing.

The trek back drained us. The woman leaned on our shoulders; our legs wobbled, muscles screamed. Physical strength faded, but something deeper pushed us onward. With each step, the storm inside me faded—I was a lifeline for another.

"Bravery and survival aren't so different," Dee said as we paused. "Take it one step at a time."

I thought about her words, recalling a book I'd read about resilience in the face of insurmountable odds. The idea that the human spirit can endure, even flourish, when we surrender to the struggle rather than fight against it.

By the time we reached the trailhead, the sun was low, casting golden hues across the valley. Exhausted yet invigorated, we drove the woman to a nearby clinic. As she thanked us, tears of gratitude in her eyes, I felt a profound connection—not just to her, but to the world around me.

Outside the clinic, Dee looked at me with a knowing smile. "Didn't go as planned, did it?"

"Not at all," I laughed.

She nodded. "Life's full of unexpected turns. It's how we navigate them that shapes us."

We decided to visit the cable car to the tourist lookout after all. Standing there, beers in hand, we watched the sun set over the mountains. The sky blazed with colors, as if the universe itself whispered its last secrets before nightfall.

"Dee," I began, struggling to articulate the shift I felt. "Today...it changed something. I've been so caught up in my head, but now...there's so much more."

She raised her bottle. "To new beginnings and the roads that lead us there."

Derek Claiborne

Derek Claiborne is a former United States Marine Captain whose journeys have taken him from the New England coast to the deserts of Afghanistan and the mountains of New Zealand. His adventures across the globe have cultivated a deep sense of empathy within him. Now living in Maryland with his wife and three children, Derek draws on his experiences to write stories that explore the complexities of the human spirit.

"Cheers," I replied, clinking my bottle against hers.

As darkness enveloped us, I felt a quiet peace. My uncertainties hadn't vanished, but they no longer felt insurmountable.

Maybe it wasn't about the destination but about the transformations—the challenges, the detours, and the people beside us.

As we headed back, the stars emerged from the dark sky, one by one. They shone steady as a guide. I didn't know what the coming months held, but for the first time, I was okay with uncertainty. I was on a downhill path, following the stream.

Intuition Saved My Life

Intuition Saved My Life!

Written by: Kaveh Naficy

When I came back to the United States to attend college I started to have a feeling that I should not go back to Iran after my graduation. I could not explain this feeling to anyone rationally. After all, my parents were from two of the most prominent families in Iran. Our family connections extended from the royal family to every part of society. At the time Iran was the second highest oil producing country in the middle east after Saudi Arabia and awash in petro dollars. 

The shah and the government of Iran had encouraged and sent thousands of young people to universities abroad to be educated and to return to fuel the amazing modernization and development that the country was experiencing. We thought of ourselves as the generation that would be remembered for accelerating Iran’s entry into the next wave of developed economies and comparisons were made to the tiger economies of southeast asia.     

But something was not right.

The nagging feeling I had inside me to delay going back got stronger and its inner voice louder.  “You cannot go back. You have to do everything in your power to delay it. It does not matter what job you take or who you have to get on your side, you will regret going back there…” and on and on it went.   

I recall being on a ski trip in Colorado with my close Iranian college friends.  We were having the time of our lives.  The ski conditions were perfect.  We were blessed with beautiful sunny days and deep powder.  We were carefree and returning to our country with plenty of opportunities and our families waiting for our return.  So proud of their U.S educated son or daughter.   We had wonderful conversations and roaring with laughter (Persians have a wonderful sense of humor and Persian jokes are nuanced and funny).

Yet every so often in the midst of this energy a dark and morbid feeling would start in my stomach and work its way all of the way to the top of my head. I would become quiet and anxious. The next thought was, “You can’t go back. Delay as much as possible.

My friends who were counting the days to go back would ask what is wrong? And when I told them they broke out in laughter and would say “What is not to like about going back?” 

And as the universe would have it, once one of my friends saw that I was serious, he shared the name of headhunter who found me a way to delay my return.

I enrolled in two consecutive graduate programs to delay my return. A masters in industrial and labor relations from Cornell and a masters in business administration from Boston College. At the conclusion of my MBA, I found a search firm (through my ski trip friend) that specialized in finding trainees and interns for multinational companies that were looking for educated local citizens of countries they did business in.

The strategy was for these young interns to spend a year to 18 months (the maximum length for a U.S training visa at the time) learning their corporate culture and business and to be sent to their country of origin as future leaders and executives. In doing so these companies wanted to bring back their expatriate employees and replace them with permanent local hires  thus reducing their cost and being able to place them in other parts of their global franchise where they were needed. When I was presented with such an opportunity I did not hesitate. 

The initial training was for 6 months. However, at the conclusion of my 6 month assignment my sponsor extended it to 12 months. He and I had a good relationship and he believed that I had the potential to some day head up the operation in Iran. Bill was a “good old boy” from the south. With a heart as big as the Grand Canyon. He was fascinated with my culture and experiences and invited me often to join him for lunch and drinks.  He loved backgammon and every Persian has backgammon in their blood.  So we would take breaks and play and chat. Bill was tall and slim. He parted his distinguished white hair in the middle and combed back. His deep blue eyes always seemed to have a spark of energy in them. He dressed as everyone did those days in the financial district. White shirt, suite, ties and black shoes.  But with him you always felt there was a person behind the uniform.

He said “If you are going to be the top dog one day you have to learn about all of our lines of business and not just the personal lines (as opposed to casualty, etc.). 

Of course I was delighted. My sense of doom in returning to Iran got louder by the day.  

I was especially worried about the two year mandatory military duty that was awaiting me. I could not explain it rationally. The regime ensured that after the initial basic training all college educated draftees, particularly those graduating from schools in the U.S or Europe, would complete the remainder of their military obligation by working at an organization or in academia. And since I would be pledged to AIG’s operations in Iran, it was almost guaranteed that I would be placed as a mid level executive and continue my career as planned.  

But the feeling only got stronger. At the time I was seeing a wonderful woman who, like me, was in training with her company. One day she asked me why I looked so worried. I shared my sense of doom about returning home. She completely understood and told me she sees me as an intuitive person and it was one of the reasons she was attracted to me.  

She had strong intuitive intelligence. And she listened and acted on it. For example, being Jewish, her parents had admonished her for wasting her time with an Iranian muslim. They asked her, “What do you think will come of this? He is just going to use you and leave you.”  She looked them both in the eyes and told them “I don’t care about what will happen in the future. He feels right for me and I am going to let it go where it will naturally go. And wherever that is I feel is where god intends me to go and there will be something there waiting for me.” Her parents thought she had lost her mind and decided not to talk to her about it again. They were convinced that she would regret her decision and come around.    

She said to me,  “Listen, if it gets louder and your company does not keep you here, I will marry you so you can stay here. Then we see if we want to stay with each other. If it doesn’t work out it is what is meant to be…”  Tears poured out of my eyes. I could not believe the spiritual awareness and purity that she embodied at such a young age (she was 25).  I embraced her and told her how she continued to amaze me. I told her I felt she has a soul that is years older than her physical age.  How rare it was for people to feel their destiny in their body and even more difficult for them to listen to and act on that intelligence.   

Then came the smile which is entrenched in my mind for the rest of my life. She looked into my eyes with those big almond shaped eyes and the most peaceful and beautiful smile formed in her face and she said with total conviction, “What else is there?”  

And in that moment my soul understood exactly what she meant and, they were the perfect words for me.  

What she meant was that since we are each uniquely wired for a purpose and on earth for a relatively short period what else is there other than that which our souls instructs us to do. 

Later as a way to test my own intuitive understanding, I asked her if my interpretation was accurate. She first said it did not matter what she meant so long as my soul had interpreted it that way it was the appropriate interpretation. Then she said,  “Look, I know you are anxious and worried about what to do with your life and what decisions to make. So I will answer your question because I think you are really going to have to listen to your feelings and this might give you a dose of confidence. Yes, that is exactly what I meant.” 

I told her how much I appreciated her offer, but I also knew the pressure that would put on her relationship with her parents and her community. I told her I would try every other avenue first. If we ever got married, the first condition would be that no one would know and the second would be that we would get divorced as soon as my green card came through. Because being with her was more important to me than any legal attachments that might complicate things for her in society. And she answered with the second smile I will never forget. When we are in an intuitive connection words are not as necessary.   

After a year of training, my sponsor Bill took me to the side and said. “I like you and you have done a good job. Legally I can get you one last rotation for six months and then immigration issues move in. It is up to you. I can understand if you are getting homesick and want to return to your country and start your life. And you have been trained on about 75% of our products and services. There is about 25% which has mostly to do with following our insurance agents and brokers in the field to get a really good sense of what they do and how to sell. If you are interested I can push so you can get that experience too.”

It took me less than a minute to tell him to count me in. I told him what is six months more when I can get such a valuable experience and thanked him effusively. He was a little taken back with how quickly I made up my mind. However, in no way was I going to discuss an intuitive gut feeling with a multinational insurance company executive based in Manhattan New York in the 1970’s. He would have immediately changed his mind about me and would probably have questioned my ability to make rational/no nonsense decisions in my future roles as an executive for one of their fastest growing and profitable operations.

As it turned out, the last month of my training coincided with the Iranian revolution of 1979. The shah of Iran was deposed and left the country and many multinational organizations such the AIG operations were nationalized.

My father who was revered as the founder of technical education in Iran and numerous other contributions to the country was put in jail on a complaint made by an under performer. Someone who saw the chaos following the dissolution of the shah’s power as an ideal opportunity to oust my father. In order to take over the private technical college he had built as the final and the crowning achievement of his career.

Kaveh Naficy

Kaveh Naficy is an executive coach, located in the Raleigh Durham North Carolina area and the founding partner at Lakida LLC.

Kaveh coached/coaches numerous CEO’s, C suite executives, board members and top next generation talent across industries, genders and ethnic backgrounds. 

Executives who have worked with Kaveh say that his strengths are his intuitive ability to move past words to detect root issues and signals that lead to underutilizing strengths and/or interfere with optimal performance.

Kaveh is a “coach of coaches.”  He founded and created the Rutgers University and American University coaching certification programs.  He has trained nearly 1000 coaches during his career and has been recognized by his students and both universities for his knowledge, partnership and contributions.

A partial list of Kaveh’s cross industry clients include: Nokia, Polycom, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Engie, BP, Lending Tree and Capital One

Importantly, the Iran Iraq war coincided with the exact time I would have served in the military. As opposed to the previous regime which recognized the importance of placing the newly minted western educated workforce in important and urgent positions. The Ayatollah and his cronies saw anyone whose family was of prominence as a threat and made a special effort to send their children to the front where most perished.  

My intuition had guided me to delay my return until the last possible moment. Seeing the operation being nationalized, AIG pulled out of the country. Since I had by now been trained in all aspects of their business model they felt they could get a return on their investment by applying for a green card for me and putting me to work.   

The revolution caused much pain and sorrow. And my family had its share. However, my intuition led me to choices which literally saved my life.


A Crone with a Silver Crown 

A Crone with a Silver Crown 

written by: Shayla Malek

I can trace back to almost the precise moment I decided to take a different turn in my spiritual journey. The moment I was ready to become who I had long been  dreading. The time had come when I couldn’t keep fooling myself any longer.  When no amount of hair dye or hangouts with 30 and 40 something year olds  was going to keep up the delusion that I am their age and not in my early fifty’s—calves deep into the next stage of my life. It was the moment I was ready to claim my place in the world, albeit natural and exposed. After almost thirty years I was going to let my grey hair come out of hiding. 

That moment of surrender to the inevitable happened around the beginning of  June 2023, right after the last great purple phase and right before I chopped it drastically short. I knew doing so would age me at least ten years overnight but I was finally ready to accept my fate and jump fully into being a middle-aged  woman and everything it implied.  

You may be thinking what’s the big deal? Way more women now are showing  their grey than ever before. And while that’s all well and good for them, it still terrified me. Somewhere buried deep in my bones was the message that if I wasn’t young and beautiful then I had no worth or value, and therefore I’d be  unwanted, alone and unable to survive. 

I don’t know who decided to perpetuate the lie that silver/grey hair was  something to be ashamed of and hidden. The lie that I would become invisible  and irrelevant to society because I was no longer objectively sexy, commercially  pretty, or could bear children. But for as long as I can remember it was the  message I was given. Despite the many examples I’d been shown throughout  my life by a multitude of incredible mature women claiming their middle aged sovereignty, with every bottle of color I applied, I clung on tighter to the illusion  of security. 

As much as I’d like to think it was just a story I was making up, that message is still spread in mainstream culture today. Unfortunately it’s not just me being  influenced by social media, advertising, TV or movies dictating our self worth and their interpretation of a feminine identity over 40. 

Like many other people, I watched the Barbie movie last year and loved it. I loved it for the sheer volume of truth it dispensed and the way it pulled back the delusion of equality that we women have been laboring under all this time.  

So imagine my disappointment when even in a movie about empowering women there were no middle aged Barbies at the dream house. Nor were any invited to the dance-party sleepovers. There were no Grandma Barbies in Barbiland. No divorcee or silver-haired widowed Barbies depicted in molded plastic, aging gracefully or proudly. There were no Barbie crones. 

The word crone has typically been associated with haggard, hunch-backed,  grizzly women, who have a propensity for cooking errant children in gingerbread  houses and owning cauldrons and cats. Let’s be real, it’s not a flattering word. It  implies that the woman has aged out beyond beauty, beyond grace. Beyond use  or worth. She is in the last phase of her life and while some lucky crones may be associated with ‘wise’ there is always the diminutive ‘old’ associated with her title. 

It is never a beautiful crone that is described in fairy tales or parables. She is  never a strong, resilient and resourceful crone. She is never lauded for her  bravery, tenacity or leadership skills. She is never shown as sexy or  accomplished. No. Instead a crone is depicted as something to be feared, pitied, avoided or even despised–and that really pisses me off. 

My maiden years left a lot to be desired and I never got to be a mother, so fuck it, I’m all into reclaiming the title crone and along with it, the final phase of my life as a woman.  

Despite my initial hesitation, I now actually love my short hair and am embracing the new streaky silver/pewter tones I never before let see the light of day. I’m  becoming accustomed to the loss of elasticity of my skin and have come to  peace with the creases around my eyes and the deep furrow of my brow.  

What I can’t come to terms with though is the idea that the best part of my life is  over. Instead, I am living into the belief that all the tears-soaked work I did to get  me here has paid off, allowing me to unlock the potential of all I can be.  

So what shifted? I hear you ask. Surprisingly, it was thanks to reality TV. 

Last May, my partner and I were sitting down to watch the one reality TV show  that ever gets airtime in our living room; a survivalist challenge called Alone.  We love Alone. It allows all our latent armchair-prepper tendencies to come to  the surface, mixed in with a healthy dose of schadenfrauder, as we watch the  participants dropped off in the middle of nowhere to contend with isolation, the harsh elements, predators and their own demons; with only ten survival items  and some cameras for company. And this time, it was finally set in my home  country of Australia. 

As usual ten contestants were left to fend for themselves, to build a shelter and  find food and water, seeing who could last the longest and win the $250k prize. Amongst them was a 52 year old woman called Gina Chick. 

As I sat watching Gina, for the first time I personally understood how much  representation matters. Seeing someone who looks just like me, talks like me,  swears like me and is the same age as me–literally surviving by doing something hard and incredible–lit up my mirror neurons like a Christmas tree  and filled me with excitement and hope for my own possibilities. 

I know, I know. TV and movies are filled with white women doing white women  things. But how many of them are sassy, greying-haired Australian hippies testing their limits, knowledge and skills, while sharing their wisdom, grief and endurance? 

When Gina shared during the show about the pain she felt about losing her  child, I felt that pain with her. While I have not lost a child, I have lost both my parents and my ability to have any of my own children. My heart recognized and resonated with that level of grief. And like me, she had come through it. 

When she talked about needing her community and missing her people, an  echoing chord of vulnerability chimed deep within me. I have felt that pain too. I have not been isolated from all humanity, but I have still felt that heart wrenching  isolation of distance being on the other side of the world from my support  network, with the dull ache of knowing that the people who are precious to you  are living their lives and you are living yours. All the while the streams are not able to be crossed. 

In Gina, I saw all the things I was missing from the Barbie movie. I saw a version of being middle-aged that was empowered and resilient. She, like me, had been  through trauma and found a way through to the other side. I saw a woman fully confident and independent, not afraid to face the world alone. I saw a woman showing me not just how to survive, but that I might even enjoy it! She was striding around and totally at home in the harsh Aussie wilderness, barefoot and crooning to nature. Gina was in her element and at the same time taught me that I could find mine. 

Thankfully Gina is not doing all the heavy lifting on her own. Along with her  account (@gigiamazonia), when scrolling through Instagram I’ve found other  women like Gail McNeill (@Fiftysister), and Luisa (@thesilverlining_1970) who are carrying the baton of being a role model for someone like me aging proudly and powerfully. They are willfully ignoring the negative comments and hate mail about their natural hair and wrinkles, and instead keep forging forward, making it easier for me and others to follow in their footsteps. 

Shayla Malek

Shayla Malek grew up in the outer suburbs of Melbourne, Australia during the 70's and 80's when kids were encouraged to get out of the house and explore the neighborhood with nothing more than their siblings, their dogs, and twenty cents for an emergency phone call, just making sure they were home in time for dinner.

Always an adventurer and never wanting to be home for too long, Shayla was a natural traveller and first ventured to fantasy realms within sci fi and romance novels, before setting off in her mid 20's in the real world for the UK, Europe and later the USA. It was on her travels that Shayla ignited her love of photography, documenting the world as she saw it. 

When she isn't writing, she is studying to be an Integration Coach and teaching emotional intelligence skills or roaming around exploring and photographing her Seattle neighborhood with her dog, still making sure she is home in time for dinner.

To learn more about Shayla and her writing, check out her website shaylamalek.com 

It’s these women and all the others doing the same that I’d invite to a sleepover at the dream house. And while they are glimpses of the woman I want to be, that’s just the start. I’d like to see every flavor of middle and elder-aged minorities represented in Barbiland and beyond.  

I want to see crones of every color and creed, every sexual orientation and  gender, every type of disability–all standing tall and strong and leading by  example, sharing the tips and tricks that helped them survive along the way, lighting the path for those who are treading it in the dark. 

I want to invite them to join me on this quest to embrace this next stage of life  and all the gifts that come with it, instead of living in dread of what we might  become. With deliberate acts of defiance at imposed societal norms, I will continue to challenge my limiting beliefs about what being middle-aged means and hold my head high with my grey hair shining, and demonstrate my active choice to step out into the world as a proud crone adorned by a silver crown.

Cremation Journey

Cremation Journey

written by: Meg Gibbs

I walked to the back of the office with one parent by my side to let go of the other. We moved through doors usually labeled “do not cross.” This was a threshold moment for all involved.

My mom’s cold body lay wrapped in grandma’s quilt. Or great grandmother’s quilt, depending on who you asked. Her mouth was shut, her body prepped, and my stepmom and I stood nearby. Not close enough to touch Mom’s body, but close enough to know she no longer had life coursing through her veins. The body was separate from the Spirit that lived within it. It was her no longer.

Scared to speak knowing one wrong sound, even before forming a whole word could knock me off center and out of control sobbing. I held my breath.

My stepmom and I, Mom’s life partner of twenty plus years, came to the crematorium with smiles on our faces and a feeling of joy at this next step.

It was the weirdest thing. Immediately after Mom died there was a time of elation. Of freedom. Of unexpected energy and space. We’d been her caregivers for weeks, months, years at this point. This process took every ounce of my being to just keep waking up every day to get through everything. There was no thriving, just depletion and anxiety. We reached a level of honesty you only reach when everything else has been ripped away. 

We held a deep desire for peace and relief, but unfortunately  we were not in a process that gave us that. Even as a family unit formed around helping Mom create “a good death” we were about to face the unthinkable…

Living beyond Mom. 

Officially becoming the left-behinds.

Nothing made sense, and it made even less than zero sense how my body was responding to her final passing. Smiles, and new energy? No one had prepared me for this part. Of course I understand now, looking back, we were finally out from under the harsh pressure of death. Crushing every moment like rubbing a piece of lavender between your fingers to get every last ounce of its essence out.

Mom was free. And so were we. In some form at least. It would take a few days to “come back down” and for the reality to set in. But in that moment of inexplicable sadness we had peace. We had kindness, and new aliveness to face the future.

Then we did what most people don’t, and when I say most people, I mean I’m not totally sure this was legal. But the crematorium lady asked, “Do you want to be a part of sending your mother off into the fire?”

“Of course!” I said confidently, “Also, what does that mean?”

She explained that we would be allowed back into the room where the body lay, to say our final goodbyes. We could be a part of this process to the very end, and let Mom go one final time.

So the following day my stepmom and I showed up ready to do ceremony.

Holding drums and rattles, we chose a song to sing over Mom’s body as she went into the fire. Sitting on a conveyor belt of sorts, head towards the flames, I could barely look at her. I closed my eyes and sang with my chest, through the tears. I felt the heartbeat of the drum as we played. 

Standing there I stifled my own laughter as my stepmom tied a blanket around her shoulders like a cape. This was a specific blanket we used a lot through Mom’s illness journey. It had a jaguar print with piercing eyes. Singing loud and passionately, the staff stood by. I remember some wiping tears, others definitely wondering what they signed up for that day. One man held his hands behind his back, looking like a soldier with a noble stance, honoring the dead.

After a couple of songs and prayers, Mom’s lifeless body waited on the belt “ready to go.” The crematorium owner asked if we wanted to “hit the button.”

“Yes,” I said immediately.

“You go ahead,” my stepmom replied. She stood back and sobbed as we said our final goodbyes to Mom’s physical form. We removed great grandma’s quilt and I hit the large orange button. 

A metal door opened and the body moved down the conveyor belt. I could hear the bellow of the flames brewing. And she was gone. Behind closed doors, they told us they’d take care of the rest. 

“Thank you for sharing your ceremony with us. I’ve definitely never seen that before.” Said one attendant, wide eyed but with respect.

“Thanks for letting us send her off that way.” I can’t imagine how strange that was for them. But I felt that freedom again. That ease in my chest, like the weight of caring for someone had almost fully left my body. There was still a whisper of responsibility left.

What is there to do now? We drove home to tend to some more of the logistics of death. 

We cremated Mom that day, with our songs, our words, sadness, hopes and fears… It felt like all the human emotions wrapped in the threads of grandma’s quilt. So thankful something beyond us had the capacity to hold all that. Because I sure didn’t.

Meg Gibbs

Meg Gibbs is a Somatic Spiritual Guide, Certified Coach, and Author. She has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, LGBTQ+ leaders, and creatives over the last 10 years. She helps people get in touch with their intuition, body and Spirit. Meg has studied shamanism since she was young, which has led to a lifelong journey of spiritual exploration with various healers and teachers from the US and South America. When not contemplating the mysteries of the Universe, Meg loves dancing, having deep conversations over high quality ice cream, and spending time with her dog. For more information: www.meggibbs.com

I needed something “bigger than me” in that moment to attend to the impossible… moving forward. What does that even mean? How can it even be?

And maybe that’s it… it wasn’t actually about moving forward or moving through anything else at that moment. It was about being. Fully being with the release after so much time. 

We stood emotionally full. Strong. Exposed. Gifted. And loved. We got to walk out of that building with more than Mom’s ashes. We had been given our lives back, to do with whatever we wanted. I knew at that moment, I’d just survived the hardest experience of my life. 

There are some moments our brains can’t truly process or comprehend, so I went looking for some other form of support. I went outside and lay on the Earth, asking her to hold me until I knew what steps to take next.

The Breakthrough: A Decision to Stop Struggling

The Breakthrough: A Decision to Stop Struggling

Written by: Kat Houghton, PhD.

Death, it seems, is an amplifier. It took my beloved from me while simultaneously intensifying the internal struggle already present. I was raised to not talk about anything emotional or spiritual, obviously that included death. I was trained by Western Psychology to believe human consciousness is generated by the brain, so when we die, we are no longer thinking, feeling, remembering, hoping beings. My upbringing, my training and the prevailing death-phobia in our culture left me entirely unprepared for the sudden death of my partner-at-the-time, Tyler.

Before Death visited my home, I had managed to keep my spiritual and professional lives separate. Thinking indeed that they were two lives, independent from each other, each getting along quietly with their own business. My doctoral research with children with autism had not required me to explore how consciousness exists outside the brain and beyond death. Meanwhile I happily floated along outside of Psychology exploring an animist spirituality which had me talking to trees and speaking aloud prayers to my ancestors.

Then Death came along, opening the door to my home for a tidal wave of grief to pour through my body every day. In those first few days after Tyler was killed suddenly in a motorcycle accident, I wanted nothing more than to reach him in some way. I wanted to know he was okay, yes, I understood he was dead, but was he okay? It was that yearning to be in contact with him that brought to light the internal struggle I’d been managing to avoid all those years.

I could feel him around me. I sensed his answers to my questions, that yes, he was okay, and he loved me, and he was sorry he left so suddenly. And almost as soon as I received these messages some part of myself would jump in and say,

“That’s just wishful thinking. You’re making this up to make yourself feel better. He’s dead and gone, you just need to accept that fact.”

My whole world was upside down, I couldn’t tell what was real or not. Was it possible that an entire human could just vanish off the face of the earth in moments. His body was not still present I understood, although I never got to see it, but that wasn’t him, where was the essence of him? To me it felt clearly that his essence was somehow around me, reading my mind. All this of course was simply more fodder for that part of me trained in the Western scientific worldview, my Inner Psychologist to say,

“You’re in shock. It’s understandable that you’re making things up to try to make sense of this. There is no sense, it’s just a tragic accident and he’s gone.”

But I felt him.

A couple of weeks into the daily inner battle I decided to seek outside assistance. I didn’t go to a therapist; I went to a medium. She told me that Tyler was very much still present with all of us he loved and yes, he was sorry he left so suddenly, and he loved me and yes, he could hear me when I talked to him. The experience was affirming, and my Inner Psychologists kept saying,

“She’s telling you what you want to hear, that’s how she makes money. Every bereaved person wants to hear the same thing.”

Then my friend Nikki who had worked for Tyler went to see a different medium. During her session she asked for his help finding the code for the safe in his office, knowing that’s where his will was stored. The medium described to Nikki a particular draw in his desk, in it an old blue notebook and under it a folded piece of lined paper. She said the code to the safe was written on the folded paper. Within an hour Nikki had confirmed that indeed that’s where the code was written, and she was into the safe! That blew my mind. Of course, the Inner Psychologist told me:

“A fluke, lucky guessing! Would a randomized trial produce the same results?”

At the time I asked myself that question I took it as another nail in the coffin of my hope that Tyler was still with me in some way. It was asked in a sarcastic tone with the assumption that of course not; a randomized trial would prove it to all be nonsense. That is what I had been trained to believe. In that place of deep grief, I didn’t have the capacity to argue with myself about it, I stumbled along swinging between feeling these loving, uplifting connections with Tyler and telling myself I must be losing my mind.

Then one morning I had a dream.

Tyler was laying on the road dying. All I could see was his head and neck. His soft, brown, shoulder-length hair was falling back from his face. The crocodile skin pattern of the black tarmac framed his face. I was thinking the road was dirty and oily and he should get up before he got covered in it. He looked at me softly with his big almond-shaped, dark brown eyes. I knew I needed to be fully present with him, he was about to die.

I watched his eyes close then his mouth fell slightly open as his neck muscles released. His head flopped to one side, and I woke up suddenly, aware now that I was in bed. I heard the clear message,

“That’s what it’s like to die.
It’s just like waking up from a dream.”

And he was gone.

My eyes adjusting to the grey pre-dawn light coming into my bedroom window I lay there stunned. In an elegant, to-the-point, five second experience, Tyler had answered the question I had been torturing myself with. Death is simply an awakening to a different reality. I knew without a shadow of a doubt now that he was with me and available to answer my questions.

Soon after that I remembered the question about a randomized trial. Feeling now confident that human consciousness does indeed survive death I turned to science to see what might be happening outside of the mainstream psychology I had been trained in. And sure enough, there it was, multiple randomized trials, more rigorously controlled than clinical drug trials, showing hard evidence for the validity of mediumistic communication. [1]

At this point I realized I needed to make a decision. I could continue berating myself for daring to believe that Tyler was still present with me, or I could stop it and lean fully into the delight of those experiences. I gave myself 30 days. I made a deal with myself that I would live for 30 days as if all these experiences were real and valid and not listen to the Inner Psychologist voice.

I jumped in with both feet. I blew past the 30 days, forgot all about it. At some point a few months later I remembered about the deal I had made and laughed out loud. Apparently, my Inner Psychologist had needed the get-out-clause in order to agree to the deal. It was what I needed to allow myself to explore consciousness beyond the brain, uninhibited by the weight of our cultural worldview.

Ultimately, all it took was a decision. A decision to choose what I wanted to believe, what I wanted to experience and how I wanted to live. Looking back, I realize I was trying to maintain my own personal bubble of spiritual experiences all the while swimming in a cultural river that doesn’t allow for such things. Grief wore down my capacity to maintain that separation. The dream, and finding the research, allowed me to make the decision to climb out of the river, rest on the bank and allow my bubble to expand as it needed to.

Kat Houghton, PhD

Kat Houghton PhD is a Wilderness Rites of Passage Guide, Grief Tender and author of the upcoming book: Grieving for Change: Personal and Cultural Transformation through Loss. Trained as a research psychologist her world was blown open by the sudden death of her partner-at-the-time, Tyler Garrison, and her realization that he was still present.

The book, and her live, online class, explore what science has to say about the afterlife and how this expanded worldview can impact our grieving process.

Find out more about Kat’s book: Grieving for Change

Find out more about Kat’s Wilderness Rites of Passage

I now have a different relationship with my Inner Psychologist. She has re-defined herself as a post-materialist and is actively seeking scientific research on the nature of consciousness and life after death. There is still a vibrant part of me that doesn’t give two hoots for scientific research but actively seeks deep, spiritual connections. These two keep each other in balance in learning to navigate the waters of a materialistic culture.

References:
[1] For example: https://lach.web.arizona.edu/, Beischel, J., & Schwartz, G. E. (2007). Anomalous information reception by research mediums demonstrated using a novel triple-blind protocol. Explore3(1), 23-27, Schwartz, G. E., & Simon, W. L. (2002). The afterlife experiments: Breakthrough scientific evidence of life after death. Simon and Schuster,

Dancing in the Darkness

Dancing in the Darkness

By Stacey K. Guenther, PhD

Just as the Darkness of the pandemic was lifting, Darkness fell upon me, enveloping me in a blackness devoid of light, sensation, and hope.

It was unexpected. I believed I was emerging from my chrysalis, ready to spread my wings in the world and germinate.

That rapid, 180-degree turn into Darkness completely threw me off my center.

The Path to the Edge of Darkness

I have always been a seeker of growth, transformation, and Oneness with the Kosmos. My path intensified after establishing a daily, committed meditation practice more than a decade ago, resulting in awakening experiences that occurred in increasing succession and lasting for extended periods. From these direct experiences, I have been shown what is true, what is beyond, and what is within. Those revelations have resulted in a deep knowing of the truth.

The past ten years have also held their own challenges for me: a series of long illnesses and health challenges, depression, anxiety, and a yearning to find my place in the world. All the things I had known – friendships, work, family – have all shifted during this transition time. This time has been accompanied by periods of aloneness. Aloneness, not loneliness, because I am deeply connected with something much more significant than myself.

When the pandemic hit, I was completing my doctoral schooling and shifting into candidacy to focus on the solo work of my dissertation. It was a time of excitement and anxiety and uncertainty and dynamism for me.

Not too long into the pandemic, I had a very personal encounter with COVID-19, falling ill and then being unable to shake its icy grip on me. It took me six and a half weeks to sit up for longer than 30 minutes. Then, it took me a year and a half before I stopped cycling in and out of being bed-bound and terribly ill. And then, it took me another year and a half to build back my strength, which even now waxes and wanes.

It was at the two-year mark when I left the comfort of my home to go and celebrate my stepson's marriage. It was an elaborate event with hundreds of guests, including my family, my husband's family, my husband's ex-wife's family, and an abundance of the couple's friends.

My sole preparation for the event was getting my body ready to be out of my comfort zone, and I experienced great anxiety, knowing that my not-yet-healed body would be around many people while the pandemic was still raging. I was afraid. I didn't want to go, but I knew that I must.

What I neglected to do, as I was focused entirely on my physical well-being, was to take steps to ensure my emotional and psychological well-being amidst tricky family dynamics. I left myself unprotected and vulnerable.

As I found myself at the wedding, it became clear that I was completely unprepared for the multiple challenging dynamics I was about to face. And, predictably, I received an onslaught of negative energy, and I absorbed it all. Rudeness and meanness. Public exclusion. The silent treatment. I felt unloved and that I did not belong in any way. I felt cast out. There was a hardness that brought me to my knees. Without the pre-event armoring that I usually do at such family events, I was left exposed and bare and began to believe I deserved the energy I was receiving.

Breaking

Following the wedding, despair and intense grief for what I had lost in the years before that moment found me when I returned home. It all came crashing down. Darkness broke me.

My connection with the Divine, my feeling of never being alone, was gone. Severed. Cut off. I was left bobbing in a dark ocean of grief, terror, and hopelessness. My sadness was overwhelming. The pain, unrelenting.

Part of me believed that this was it. This is what my life would be. At first, I tried to fight the dark, to go on with plans and projects that had started before the Darkness. However I found that willpower and self-management were unavailable through my inner resourcing. I began to care little for anything and anyone. I gave up.

I surrendered.

Surrendering into Darkness

I felt that I had no choice but to surrender into the Darkness, to allow whatever was occurring to occur. I knew from previous growth periods that I was often the last to understand the great Mystery unfolding in me, through me, as me. And with this knowledge, I just let go and invited the Darkness to do what it needed.

In that surrender and acceptance, I felt relief. I was so tired of fighting and trying and efforting.

As I leaned into the relief, I found something remarkable: I could relax and allow the unfoldment to play out without trying to control it or manage it. I just was. Whatever happened happened. And to my surprise, I found that relaxing into the Darkness was a gift.

Transforming the Darkness

As I settled into the Darkness, I began to embrace it. I found that there was something much more authentic about allowing the Darkness than trying to be in the light. And through that embrace, I found light within the Darkness.

"Imagine a black sun at your core, a dark luminosity that is less innocent and more interesting than the naïve sunshine. This is one of the gifts a dark night has to offer," according to author and former monk Thomas Moore. [1]

Moore's words soothed me and allowed me to meet the gifts of the Darkness while letting striving for perfection fall away. I allowed my messy parts to just be. I no longer tried to hide them or cover them. And I found beauty in my messiness. I began to love my messiness.

Surrendering to the Darkness and meeting the gifts that came with it allowed me to embrace my most ugly, insecure, unlovable parts. This practice of allowing things to be just as they were opened me to a new path of radical authenticity, courageously and unapologetically allowing me to be me. I found that without putting all that energy into covering my faults, a new energy began to emerge.

It was as if I was mothering myself for the first time, dancing with my feminine self and with unconditional love. I began to feel a spark of the Divine, but this Divinity was soothing, soft, warm, and gentle. She was encouraging me to just be myself.

Surrendering to the Darkness felt like returning to my more primal nature. There was a wildness to it. It felt like dancing in the darkness under the moon.

True Awakening

We seekers can sometimes forget that the spiritual path is not always unicorns and rainbows. Just as we embrace the light, we must also commune with the dark. The polarity of spiritual exploration represents the yin and yang of our nature. It is natural and whole.

We can try to deny the dark through spiritual experience. This denial has a name: spiritual bypassing. It's also known as spiritual transcendence and going holy early, i.e., we get holy and transcend in order to hide from the full truth of who we are, both light and shadow. Denying the shadow is denying the shadow's Divinity, its gift.

But engaging our shadow material is critical to spiritual growth. Without the dark, we cannot fully be light. For me, fully accepting my Darkness with no intention of fixing or changing it was necessary for where I was in my spiritual development. Without that acceptance of my messy bits, I couldn't be whole.

Darkness follows illumination in the process of spiritual formation. Thomas Moore states, "St. John of the Cross, the master of dark nights, saw them primarily as a process of purification." [2] Following illumination (or awakening or enlightenment), the process of spiritual formation is completed during the dark night, when the soul, according to Rev. Dr. Deborah Rundlett, seeks to find competence. [3] Once that competence is established through communion with the Darkness, it begins a new path marked by union with the Divine.

"Perhaps the dark night comes upon you from inside or outside to wake you up, to stir you, and steer you toward a new life. I believe this is the message of most religions, and certainly it is the gist of Christianity and Buddhism. Your dark night may be a bardo, a period of apparent lifelessness that precedes a new birth of meaning. Maybe your dark night is a gestation, a coming into being of a level of existence you have never dreamed of. Maybe your dark night is one big ironical challenge, just the opposite of what it appears to be — not a dying, but a birthing" according to Moore. [4]

Whether it was competence, purification, or rebirth (or all three) that my soul sought, I know for certain that it was about integration at its core. My soul yearned to integrate and accept the totality of its human essence in order to continue to move closer toward Oneness with the Kosmos.

What the Darkness has Taught Me about the World

While I feel my dark night is, for the most part, complete, perhaps just for now, or perhaps not, I often reflect on what my dark night has taught me about the world in its current state of polycrisis. [5] My dark night mirrored back to me the dark night of our global community.

But there is hope. As I learned from my experience dancing in the dark, there is light and hope after complete Darkness. In the final chapter of his book, A Higher Loyalty, James Comey likens our current state of being to the devastation of a forest fire. "But forest fires, as painful as they can be, bring growth. They spur growth that was impossible before the fire, when old trees crowded out new plants on the forest floor," he said. [6]

Darkness seems to "double down" before it lifts. I experienced an onslaught of difficult experiences in the time leading up to my dark night: long illness, pandemic, writing a dissertation. My Darkness got darker before it lifted. May it be that we're also experiencing that as a human species?

If that is the case, we must work together to liberate the shadow of our global society.

I recently spent a weekend in an intensive healing workshop with healer Rob Wergin. There were more than 100 of us in the room, and another 200 or more joining virtually. As we did our work, healing our hurt and pain and loving ourselves, hurts, pains, histories, and all, I was struck by the beauty of the experience. We were doing the work… together. And it became clear to me in that moment of noticing: there is nothing more important right now than all of us embracing our shadows, healing ourselves, dancing in our Darkness. That is how we will heal the world.

Stacey Guenther

A committed seeker, a large part of Dr. Stacey Guenther's past 25 years has been devoted to personal and spiritual development. She is a long-time, devoted meditator and after completing training with Jack Kornfield and Tara Brach, she became a certified meditation teacher (CMT-P). Stacey is contemplative scholar-practitioner whose research is centered on groups and how they can enter a state of magic called coherence and has written a book called Coherence: Cultivating Group Magic, which she hopes will be published in 2024. Stacey is a certified leadership coach (PCC), an organization development consultant, and an educator. Stacey was born and raised in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, and now lives just outside of Asheville, NC, with her spouse and two rescue dogs.

Contact Stacey:
https://www.drstaceyguenther.com/
IG @dr.stacey.guenther
linkedin.com/in/staceyguenther

References:
[1] Thomas Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide for Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. 2005. Gotham Books. p. 7.
[2] Thomas Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide for Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. 2005. Gotham Books. p. 49.
[3] https://www.clgleaders.com/the-leader-as-poet-and-prophet/
[4] Thomas Moore’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide for Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals. 2005. Gotham Books. p. 118.
[5] A term popularized by Adam Tooze, polycrisis is the interconnection of multiple intractable issues that we face on our planet in current times, among them the climate crisis, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, wars in the Ukraine and Israel, growing wealth gap, and others. For more information, see: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/polycrisis-adam-tooze-historian-explains/.
[6] James Comey’s A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership. 2018. Flatiron Books. p.244

Leaning In and Learning


Chapter 5: Leaning In and Learning

Written by Meg Gibbs

A signature story from Meg Gibbs’s book: Spiritually Parented: A Foot in Both Worlds. To view the book, click here.

In college, I sat with a friend going through some difficulties in her romantic relationship, and I intuitively gave her some direction. “Start moving your hips.” Then she began to sway in circles, and tears came to her eyes. As she moved the pain and energy through her body, the stuckness loosened.

I don’t know how I knew to do this, but I went with it.

This is a great example of the foundation of somatic connection—linking the mind, body, and spirit and looking at the interplay between the three.

“Somatics describes any practice that uses the mind-body connection to help you survey your internal self and listen to signals your body sends about areas of pain, discomfort, or imbalance. These practices allow you to access more information about the ways you hold on to your experiences in your body” (Raypole 2020).

I placed my hands on my friend’s heart, we took deep breaths together, and I stayed with her as she swayed. She started to slow down her hip circles, and I felt the energy dissipate. She opened her eyes pretty starkly and said, “You are such a healer.” I was a bit taken aback because I definitely felt like “a student of healing.” I didn’t claim any professional title at that point, and it would actually take several more years before I fully stepped into that identity as a career.

I mumbled something like “thank you,” but then it started to happen more and more. People would randomly share their stories with me, which often led to tears and cleansing. People have cried with me for years, and I’m a big crier, too, so I’m very comfortable with big emotions. One of the most humbling and honest aspects of this path is that healing doesn’t always feel good. I don’t do spiritual work because it’s always a “good time” but rather because it’s a true time. It gets to the heart of what’s going on and helps you make a shift.

The moment I embraced being a healer was during a workshop in North Carolina with Don Mariano Quispe Flores. He is a highly regarded Peruvian shaman my moms and I have worked with for several years. This was my first workshop alone after Mom died. Don Mariano holds a vision of sharing the rites and teachings from the Q’ero Nation of the Andes all over the world.

The focus of the workshop was on the Pleiades—the Seven Sisters constellation—and we received initiations or “rites” to connect each star to a specific point on the body. This is one of my all-time favorite topics because it involves two pieces I care about deeply: the stars and creating an embodied practice.

Each day, we would “receive the rites,” which is a new concept to most, so I’ll do my best to give a concrete example. For one of the initiations, we stood in front of Don Mariano as he knelt at our feet. He took one of his stones that held sacred energy from the Pleiades and one of our stones infused with the star’s energy. He then wound it around our feet in a figure eight, releasing the past and any old, heavy energy that blocked our path. He unwound and freed us for the future we were to step into.

Serene and powerful, his work is rooted in the Divine Feminine and always feels respectful and gentle. After the second day of the workshop, Don Mariano offered each of us a fifteen- minute mini-reading, where he gave us information about which star in the Pleiades we came from or had a deep connection to. Don Mariano only speaks Quechua, but his translator, who spoke many languages, offered to do my reading in Spanish instead of English. I studied Spanish in college but was nervous because I was still learning. His translator and I had been practicing together since he missed speaking Spanish away from home.

In that short conversation, I heard the phrase that changed my life: “Eres una curandera.” You are a healer.

“Do you know that?” his translator asked me.

I knew the word curandera and revered it but had never used it for myself. I literally felt energy trickle down my body and immediately had a sense of recognition. The many times I’d heard the word “healer” in English had never hit me like the one time I heard that word bestowed upon me by my teacher.

At that moment, I truly “got it” for the first time. From then on, I felt comfortable saying, “I am a healer. Yo soy una curandera.”

“That is what you’re meant to be doing,” Don Mariano went on. So, with some hesitation, at his encouragement, I started integrating more ceremonial practices into my work with coaching clients.

To me, my soul and body look very different, almost incongruent. Maybe that’s a universal feeling when your outsides don’t seem to match your insides. I cannot speak from this experience personally, but this is what I imagine it also feels like for bicultural and multilingual folks, where someone moves between both languages or cultures but may not feel like they fully belong to either.

I often felt like I had to speak one language at home and one at school or work. It’s a type of spiritual code switching. However, as a kid, I didn’t know that’s what you’re supposed to do. It took me a long time to learn this through tough consequences, unfortunately. No barrier between the sacred and my everyday experience existed as a child. I think it had a lot to do with how I was raised.

At the age of five, my moms, Red Earth and Dreaming Bear, met but chose to live apart.

Because, as Mom put it, “I’m not raising my child out in the country.” It’s a very “red” place— and for those who don’t know, Atlanta and the rest of Georgia are culturally two very different experiences.

Counter to that, “I’m not moving to the city and leaving this land for anything!” Dreaming Bear made that clear very early on in their relationship.

The diversity, community, and acceptance in the city has generally not bled into the rural areas. And my stepmom is an extremely liberal, radical out woman who has lived down a dirt road for over forty years in this small mountain town.

Mom raised me in a neighborhood in Atlanta near Little Five Points. Down the street from our old house is a park and a small strip of shops. We lived near the original Flying Biscuit Café and only a few minutes from my elementary school. Mom worked from home with clients, wore flowing skirts, and enjoyed eating at local restaurants throughout the week.

Dreaming Bear lives alone to this day and talks to all the animals around her, from the ants to the birds, snakes, and various creatures that come and go. She has a deep love of her garden and talks to the vegetables as well. Imagine Snow White, but instead of a young woman twirling in a pretty dress in the forest, there’s a mountain woman who chops her own firewood with a chainsaw and is a steward of the land rather than the “owner” of it.

The question of either mom relocating never really came up. Both held strong in their values and committed to this long-distance relationship for twenty years. We had a country mouse/city mouse situation driving back and forth, so I grew up in both places.

When in North Georgia, I often felt wrapped up in the Earth and learned to value nature’s pace, especially as I got older. As a young child, I had to get creative with how I spent my time because Dreaming Bear did not have a TV or WiFi. She used to read a lot of magazines for entertainment. Today, this feels unimaginable—no cartoons or distraction—and it blows my mind with how tied to technology we are nowadays.

There is still no cell service there, and I love it. I find it freeing now, but as a kid, it felt isolating, and I was sure it contributed to my internal distress of “being different.” No one at school understood what it meant to spend time on the land or slow down and connect with the Earth. For both my moms, this time to unplug was important. We spent a lot of time together as a family, but sometimes Mom would send me out to play in the woods to essentially leave her in peace.

When we gathered in the evenings, we would listen to the radio and play board games. Often, on Saturday nights, we played Rummikub in the living room, while listening to A Prairie Home Companion with Garrison Keillor. I treasure those memories.

I read a lot when we were up in the mountains. I sat on the front porch in a comfy chair reading until my butt went numb. I relished the accomplishment of finishing a book in two days. It solidified the power of reading and moving between different worlds with an author.

As I got older, my relationship with the woods changed. I no longer thought of it as just a pretty place to go play. It also became a source of wisdom. The woods held the mysteries of the Universe, the energy of creation. A sacred connection to Mother Earth and Father Sky. I could be alone there and scream or sing without losing any privacy. I started exploring how to ask questions in nature and received responses in the form of dreams, visions, and whispers from the Universe.

I learned an important sacred lesson the hard way when I walked to the edge of a clearing one night and asked an open question. Walking into the dark pushed my comfort zone. I put my hands out in front of me and was alone with the night. The farther from the house, the darker it got and the easier it was to see the stars. They were so bright and beautiful, as though looking over us and casting their stories into the night sky.

I always felt connected with the stars and appreciated their light in the darkness. Our Lakota teacher taught us to refer to them as the “campfires of the ancestors.” I love the image of people who have passed over, or souls yet to come back, hanging out around a fire together, watching over us from another plane.

I used to be very scared of the dark as a kid, and darkness in the mountains was a totally different experience than in the city. Living at the end of a dirt road with no one around for miles meant there were nights when the moon didn’t brighten the sky and I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

One time, I wanted to push my comfort zone a bit and left the house around ten p.m. I walked down the hill past where the house lights reached and felt the chill of the evening air in the darkness. I asked Spirit, “Will you teach me something or show me something?” And very quickly, I perceived an energy body in front of me. It was about seven feet tall, off to my left. I could see it float and move just above the ground. I took a shallow breath. “What’s your name?”

“Geneen,” it said. I got chills because I couldn’t tell what it was, and Mom didn’t do this kind of thing, or at least she didn’t tell me about it.

I asked a couple more questions, watching it closely. It felt like female energy with an amorphous shape. I didn’t know what it was here to teach me or where exactly it came from. I could just sense it was from another realm several layers away. It wasn’t an embodiment of someone who crossed over—I knew what that felt like and could distinguish it. It also felt foreign in that it did not naturally live or generate from this land. It showed itself to me because I asked it to. This still feels slightly uneasy in my body.

When I told this story to my Lakota teacher, she verbally gave me a slap on the wrist. “Don’t ever go asking such an open question like that again. Anything could have happened or come to you. You need to be very deliberate with your intentions and use words that will only call in what you want to connect to.” I got a little scared, like I had messed up. I was always a “good student” and didn’t want to disappoint.

The Teacher checked my energy and cleared any attachments that didn’t belong to me, using sage and a feather. This was the first time I had been reprimanded and felt guilty. But sometimes trial by fire, while uncomfortable, gets the point across extremely clearly. I never did it again.

Since then, I approach Spirit with specific intention and a desire to establish a loving connection, to focus on what I’m calling in and create a field of protection before reaching out to connect with the energetic realm.

That specific energy didn’t feel light and good, but it wasn’t overtly negative either. It just felt off. I learned so much from this experience. I now consciously use the words “the beings who love us” when inviting energy into sacred circles.

I set up luminescent protection around myself before adventuring into the spirit realm. And I release all the energy back from where it originated at the end.

Meg Gibbs is a Somatic Spiritual Guide, Certified Coach, and Author. She has worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs, LGBTQ+ leaders, and creatives over the last 10 years. She helps people get in touch with their intuition, body and Spirit. Meg has studied shamanism since she was young, which has led to a lifelong journey of spiritual exploration with various healers and teachers from the US and South America. When not contemplating the mysteries of the Universe, Meg loves dancing, having deep conversations over high quality ice cream, and spending time with her dog.

For more information: www.meggibbs.com

Sometimes we learn what to do by learning what not to do. Luckily, there weren’t huge repercussions in this instance, but it certainly impacted how I prayed and connected from then on.

I share this to support other spiritually curious folks who want to dive into energy work and are looking for guidance. Choose your words consciously and invite in “the beings who love you.” 




Ayahuasca Anchor

Ayahuasca Anchor

Written by Eleonora Duvivier

A signature short story from Eleonora Duvivier’s short story collection of the same title. To view the entire collection, click here.

My two children and I don’t have a common home of origin, for they were born in different countries and from different fathers. But when I met him, the Vine called us to the core of the forest and anchored us within.

Ayahuasca is a wave, the sea, and the love between them; the freedom to split and the mighty force of return that makes each cease to be for the sake of the other; of their communion. The wave, an inviolable force that separates itself from the source, becomes revealed as the euphoric, gentle foam of reencounter, rediscovery, and freedom for new distinct beginnings.

I will always remember when I saw Onça for the first time. His intensity and inner life sparkled in the photo I’d seen of him online as a tribal leader and made me determined to ask who he was to the other indigenous chiefs I knew. But when I found myself in Rio some days later, Edgar, my brother, managed to contact him on FB and learned he was on his way there to attend events connected with a bunch of rich, local people who were launching a line of clothing inspired by the patterns of what his tribe wore to promote their corporation as green. Onça put us in contact with them, and knowing we wanted to see him, they asked us for financial contribution to his ticket and for my brother to host him during the three days he should be in Rio. Since he would stay at Edgar’s house, it was left to us to fetch him at the airport.

While waiting for his delayed plane to arrive, I thought of his face and the shape of his head, trying to abstract them from the indigenous painting decorating his features and from the headpiece he was wearing in the photo I’d seen at the same time as keeping my eyes on the irritating arrival gate, its noisy, abrupt, incessant splitting open to quickly spit out a passenger it would almost crush like a fly when the two doors of it banged back together behind him or her. That mechanic and noisy movement was driving me crazy, but I still tried to spot Onça through any small breach that gave me glimpses of the remaining passengers on the other side, during the split second someone anonymous was burped out of that space of anxiety where those passengers were clinging to the baggage claim with an air of helplessness and defeat as if the separation from their possessions had also exiled them from their identity. I saw no shadow of anyone that could be Onça among those people.

Edgar decided to check another arrival gate all the way at the other end of the airport, but soon I was able to locate on the other side of the gate through a gap between a corner of the opening doors and a corpulent, exiting passenger, a svelte man, casually dressed in jeans and T-shirt yet distinct from everybody in a very different way. There was a fluidity to his silhouette that gave him an ethereal look as if he were the essence of a perfume about to merge with the atmosphere. Instead of being close to the baggage claim, he was apart and looked pensive, perhaps in synchrony with a reality above the possessiveness that ruled the other passengers’ behavior. He and I recognized each other right away when he finally came out. I was in awe of him. At Edgar’s house, I wouldn’t miss any of his movements. He told us everything about his work of reforestation, recovery, and preservation of native cultures, living with urgency but having the confidence of tranquility like counting on all the time in the world to accomplish his rescuing mission because it had been his forever. He’d already planted two million trees with a team he’d trained and inspired many people with his ecological cause. The rare moments we had him free from the million times he must answer his phone or from the functions he should attend were precious. Besides being the most respected shaman in the country, Onça was already a popular figure in the ecological world, he’d been with the Dalai Lama and with the Pope on different occasions.

Edgar allowed three old friends of ours to come to his house and meet Onça because in those days the indigenous leader was seeing people one on one to give them guidance and administer shamanic healings on them. In the bedroom my brother assigned to him, he saw each of us individually, starting with me. I was so sure he would explain my connection with the spirit I’d been repeatedly seeing in the force of ayahuasca that I told him all about it as we sat on the bed in front of each other. His slanted, dark eyes, fixed on me while I talked, remained as inscrutable as the night surface of a lake and I finally asked if he thought that spirit might be a guide to me. Obtaining no answer to my question besides the stillness of his gaze and aware that he was known for his clairvoyance, I, who’d been feeling tired beyond measure, asked if he could see how close to death I was. Over the years I’d been living in this country, having moved here already in middle age, I was drained by the increasing distancing from people I’d left behind in Brazil, the discontinuity between what had been a recent past and what became my present every time me and my family settled in a different place in a new state, and by increasing marital problems. It had been difficult to see angel eyed, sunny Chris, leaving home for college when we’re living in total social isolation in Madison, and having to wait for when he was almost graduating to join him in Boulder only to see him about to leave again for California. This separation had the effect of a slow-release pill on me, and I was also worn out by defending Mia against Jared’s censorship of her pre-adolescent behavior. His anger at me and skepticism of her when I took her out of schools to which she couldn’t adapt and allowed her doing sixth grade online exhausted me. He’d travel on business very often and I was left with her in the cold Madison winter with no one to look for in case of need as I had to drive her over slippery roads and snowstorms in dark evenings to a private instructor or other things.  It was a surprise for Jared when she impressed the professionals that evaluated her IQ and her psyche, but I’ve always known she is oversensitive and deep. When we moved to Boulder, she reached the peak of adolescence and with her delicate looks and her fairy harmony became as beautiful as inaccessible. She and I had been inseparable, but she started to behave like I were a stranger or like I’d changed overnight from being a muse to her into someone she was embarrassed of, and as normal as it is, it hurt. My elderly inner clock had made me feel abrupt and random a change that took her an eternity of living, for one’s transformation into a new person, in her case, into a young woman, takes place in the eternal. From having a constant and rich exchange with her, discussing movies, books, art, the mentality of people we knew and their contradictions, we began to live like we were nothing but tenants under the same roof, in a new, unknown city, where we were often alone in the house. She’d give me such an unexpected, unknown image of myself that sometimes I doubted my identity, having to stop still to make sure things around me were solid and the place where I found myself was real.

Adolescents must rebel, but I was still unaware of how much more complex my children’s bicultural situation was in a country where their mother is different from the locals and acts almost contraire to the way they do. The awareness of it came to me through these children having to call my attention in minimal things I wasn’t aware of, like not stopping on other people’s way when walking, not infringing driving rules by disregarding street signs (that I never registered) not getting out of the car to talk to the police when they stopped me and not noticing people I knew in the street. In fact, Chris got in charge of making some discrete sign to me when I should say “Nice to see you”, instead of “Nice to meet you”. But if even in Brazil I was singled out as an outer space creature, here, where people act in a more determined, goal-oriented way, were it not for the locals treating me with kindness and an affectionate amusement, I would feel like an aberration. More than affectionate amusement was, according to Jared—who thought that women were always trying to “touch the hem of your robe” in his words—people looking at me like I were some sort of spiritual entity. I was perplexed with the way an unknown man once approached me out of the blue inside a busy, fancy furniture store in the Midwest, to ask me to pray for him because he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Other situations of the kind made me feel compassionate towards whoever was seeing such spiritual power in small me.

In the first years after I moved to this country with Chris, I was identified to my recent past and could like or dislike the novelty of another culture with the independence of a visitor. But the distance from people who were so close to me in Brazil originated a constant feeling of loss that manifested itself as a chronic and debilitating awareness of death. As that recent past dematerialized through the years with my parents passing, the changes nobody could avoid in both countries like the financial decadence of Brazil, the explosion of the twin towers, the wars in the world and the increasing speed plunging people into confusion, fake news, and disbelief, dissipated what used to be references to me in both hemispheres and the ground under my feet felt half-gone. I don’t know if my definitive move, the magnitude of which, when still feeling like a visitor, I could never fathom, will ever be accomplished. We first lived fourteen years in Jared’s original little town in the Midwest, a place where everyone knew everyone else and were judges of one another according to obsolete patterns of behavior and to a hierarchy of financial power. But I was a mother full time and despite being unable to count on my Brazilian family outside my home nor on friends, the childhood of my kids was one of the richest times of my life; a communion of family exclusivity and single-minded devotion from me. Perhaps I couldn’t have it any other way and my immersion with the children fit well the type of socially isolated life Jared liked to lead, whereas he appreciated my efforts. Those years were also the most harmonious time of our marriage. When Mia was born, I devoted to her full time until she could be sent to her first school and to her and Chris when he wasn’t snowboarding or playing out of the house. As he grew up, made friends, met their families, and told me about them, I realized that other parents treated their children with more distance and less generosity than I treated him and Mia. I was more lenient with them than the  parents of their schoolmates were with their kids because I always believed that love and generosity should lay the ground for young people to discover what they’d like to do in life, better than distance and stinginess to arouse lust for material things in them and the need of a job for money’s sake before they have any clue of who they are. I find lust for material things kind of grotesque as a motivation for something as serious as what one should devote to in one’s life, and thought that freer from this lust insofar as I could provide what they wanted with no exaggeration, my children should have the chance to be honest with themselves and make the most of the opportunity to find out what to do with integrity. I would have acted the way I did out of intuition anyway, but my inability to conform to collectivity and be like other parents made me feel like I was going against this whole culture and carrying on my shoulders the huge responsibility of only having myself to justify my way. It wasn’t easy to be this alone, with Jared kind of coming along for the ride and often having heated arguments with me. Between his dry, distant and disciplinarian way of raising children and my instinctive, lenient one, there was no negotiating. No matter where we were living in this country, I was faced with the difficult, inhuman task of making myself absolute because of diverging from what others thought or did, but both Chris and Mia have always been more aware of themselves than those who were intimidated by their parents and distanced from them. There was also more respect and less formality between them and me than I could see between other kids and their parents.

Only after leading a third of my life in the US, distributed by four states and ten homes, I was able to face the fact that as much as Mom, Dad, Edgar and his family missed our coexistence with them, the endlessness of adaptation on my side would be an eternal demand of detachment from me. I never dwelled on the fact that my children’s first culture would not be the same as mine and imagined that after spending a decade here, we’d all be on equal ground. But I became the only foreigner in my little family, often misunderstood because of any slight enthusiasm when talking or the moral indignation I might express in impersonal subjects as if my emotional tone meant personal offenses to them. Jared telling me to not be “so Latin” in these occasions started to get old, but he only stopped when I told him it was “racial” discrimination.

When he and I first met in Brazil, dialogue flowed as if we’d always been living together. He showed no shadow of the Midwest small town conservatism in which he’d been raised or of the American culture’s puritanical inheritance, most people acting as if identifying rule obedience to righteousness and rule ignoring to sacrilege. During the time I joined him in different states of this country before we married, he would be so happy and easy going that I couldn’t see that the fact he wasn’t in his hometown liberated him from the straightlaced context in which he lived and worked. Still, the romantic phase of our marriage lasted a long time for these mercurial days, especially considering that I came to the core of that context in his tiny Midwestern city of origin. Looking back, I can now see that in the same way he loved my informality and unruliness once, he came to conflict with them when his real nature awoke from the slumber of romance and reinstated its love for conventionality and regimentation. I also frustrated his need of control. It was a problem with him the fact that he could never predict what I could do or feel in minimal, ridiculously trivial things like when we once decided to go shopping for a determinate type of plant and I gave some attention to other types. Only now I can see that the anger I’d arouse in him because of little improvisations of the kind, on days we were in no hurry whatsoever, resulted from a desperate need of planning our behavior. He couldn’t stop mentioning my abrupt change of direction in the Magic Kingdom and insisting on the possibility I might in that same way switch my feelings for him to someone else and concluding that living with me was like being on a roller coaster. On my part, I never understood how one could expect to count on the immutability of feelings as if it could be willed by one. I can’t help wondering if people with this kind of expectation ever allowed themselves to really feel anything for the beauty of feelings lies in their happening to one.

Throughout our marital crisis, the depth of Proust’s inexhaustible masterpiece (which I was re reading after the many years elapsed since I first put my hands on it) and the poetic beauty of his otherworldly insights matched the spiritual reassurance I earned from the Vine and helped me to detach myself from the world. As the medicine gave me some peace with the Beyond, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, analyzing finitude and transcending it, became a bible to me. But even though I’d been living with myself, the dog Chris left with me, and the hope of maturing my creativity by writing and drawing the visions I had from ayahuasca, I said nothing about family matters to Onça. Looking into my eyes, he declared I was a medium and should develop this gift to become a healer, “but your husband is bringing you down because he wants to own you and this way it will not work!” he declared. “You survived difficult times throughout your life and managed to make it because you have a lot of protection. There is an angel by your side, but you must develop your spiritual gift. If you don’t want to develop it, I should remove it from you so it will not charge you but if you do, I will give you some of my power” he decided, impressing me with his power to give power.

Months before I met him, I had a profound experience on a particular night I was by myself in Edgar’s house. I’d been thinking about the ayahuasca ritual I’d taken part of in the previous week, and as I fumbled for the light switch in a pitch-dark kitchen, I heard an angelic voice call my name twice from outside a window that was opened to the night and say, “Come along”. Right before hearing it, a state of bliss had taken over me, dissipating the person I had been until then like unmasking a deceit and making me sure I’d been fooled by that person in not being able to see that there was no error with me nor with the world. The justification I experienced of my whole being was a deep sense of absolution and yet a sensual joy, like I were in sync with some final perfection bouncing off everything. Because it was ultimate, it had an apocalyptic quality that brought butterflies to my stomach.

The apocalypse has been described as a vision of heavenly secrets making sense of earthly realities. The heavenliness of the state I was in gave soul to the ground I stepped on, the air I was breathing, and to every second going by as if time, space, inanimate matter, and my heart, were notes of a chord played in paradise. It felt like the definitive and ineffable secret of God’s love had been unveiled inside me and I was immortal. I thought it was obvious I had blinded myself to this love on purpose as if out of guilt or of some atavistic sort of self-blame, and what had been my existence prior to this experience felt so remote and misguided that it seemed impossible to relapse to it; it was history. I knew it all now, though there wasn’t anything to really “know”. Still, I wanted to identify the thought that had been on my mind when that blissfulness first took over me and remembered that I’d entered that kitchen feeling sure of having contacted spirits in the recent ayahuasca ritual I was part of, this certainty developing into a feeling of liberation that was echoed, in a matter of seconds, by the suavity of the haunting, crystal-clear voice calling me outside.

Before finding the light switch, I’d groped my way to the window and asked the night, “Who is there?” I heard no answer, but the darkness outside showed me a row of non-corporeal entities in dispersed lines, led by the angelic being who’d called me and appeared as a mixture of fleeting strands with blue areas scattered in the obscurity. I couldn’t literally join them and was overwhelmed with awe and plain fear.  Back looking for the light switch, I felt the return of the old being I thought I’d disposed of forever, settling back through my body like mud pulling me down. The angst of incompleteness and the void of want reacquainted me with my time-fragmented person and I was back to what had felt gone forever. But by managing to re-experience the certainty that I contacted spirits, hey presto, I was readmitted to heaven for a few more moments.

I never tried to resort to the memory of a certainty I could no longer feel firsthand like I did in that kitchen, but the message of there being a spiritual role I was called to started to build up inside me and I could only feel elated when hearing Onça say I was a medium. His conviction and natural haughtiness were spellbinding, and while he started to perform shamanic healing practices on my head, I couldn’t stop thinking I was a medium. He sucked bad energies from it and after spitting them out the window, he blew smoke on me from a pipe he lighted. He also rubbed some potion of Amazonian seeds and perfume around my throat from a bottle he carried and uttered words in his Indigenous language. When he finished, I asked him how I was supposed to develop the gift of being a medium and he told me to go to the forest for a week. “If you go there I will put you on an ayahuasca diet and teach you” he explained.

I had to ask him whether the artistic reality is not also a spiritual reality to be developed, for since I first took ayahuasca, I started to feel I was growing through my writing and drawing and became more committed to them. He agreed that creativity comes from the spiritual realm but didn’t appear to look at it as an alternative to being a healer, whereas I kept my conviction that art is not just healing for the artist and those who care about it, but is even exorcizing, like Picasso saw it to be. Besides, I wasn’t expecting I’d ever go to the forest by then. Some years earlier, I’d considered doing the difficult trip to attend a musical festival of Txana’s tribe and take Chris and Mia with me. But before Jared’s furious exclamations that I was certifiably nuts for exposing myself and the kids to this venture, I thought twice about it and started to worry about how thin Mia was, her fussiness to eat, the lack of current water in the Indigenous village and the possibility of catching some stomach bug there. To give up something for which I’d mustered so much daring to consider doing demanded from me to find it impossible forever. After all, ayahuasca was self-sufficient to me and I didn’t need going to the forest to take it in the Indigenous ritual. I smiled at Onça’s proposal and asked him what I could do to develop my spiritual gift where I was living in the US. “Look for a trustworthy healer there”, he simply said. His words were motivating, and he became the voice of the truth to me when suggesting I had a path with ayahuasca. To mention the sense of relief I felt with his shamanic praying may sound like self-suggestion on my part, like it happens on the part of people that take placebo instead of a real medicine and start to feel the effects of that medicine. It is more important to mention that beyond shamanism, what was impressive about Onça was his eloquence, his focus, and his unwavering faith. He was polymorphous, looking sometimes like a child, at other times like a determined man and at still other times like the ancestral being he said he incarnated. “A very wise leader of my people who came to help” in his words. “Incarnate healers come from the stars and can access the spiritual world” he explained, when sitting next to me at a restaurant where Edgar and a few friends took us to eat lunch. “Even if they come from different places, when they meet, they get connected forever” he declared, planting his hand on my shoulder in front of everyone at the table and making me feel like I was being blessed by a saint.

I’d known for a long time the people he saw after me at Edgar’s house, and hearing what he told them about themselves to their faces at first sight, I only became more confident in his vision. Besides having a reputation of healings and opening ways to people with his shamanic practices, Onça was reverenced for his determination to save the rainforest from the rapacity of money-grabbing people in Brazil. When he told us stories that interweaved facts with ayahuasca revelations, myths,  the healings he’d been able to do, the miracles worked by the elders of his people, his ecological mission, and the several times when local lumber men were prevented by angelic interference from doing away with him, it was difficult to follow his words through the long pauses he made, his different way of articulating ideas, and the supernatural quality of what he reported. Because he felt ultimate to me, I couldn’t discredit what he told us, but unable to fully believe in it, I felt bad for not having total faith in someone I found so superior to myself. The conflict between being carried away with him and resisting his stories made me feel incoherent. I am aware I tend to look at people beyond their context and when I bonded with Jared, I never thought that the radical difference between our background could come between us. More than anyone else, I saw Onça as a self-creating being who was above the tradition of his culture and any other type of context. He was fully present and carried away at the same time, steady and under the grip of passion, seeming to live between all and nothingness like walking on the edge of an abyss, only him counting. Unguarded against the future, Onça was the focus of courage, an infinitude of presence that only fits within the hands of God and only works from them. Courage is synchrony with destiny; it is a contact with eternity for it is whole regardless of what follows from it. An act of courage exiles even the irreversibility of death itself to nonexistence. Surviving it or not, whoever responded to its call outgrows the limits of his or her being and is forever a hero.

Onça told us that he didn’t like the cities and in general only traveled to attend ecological events overseas, but I knew that no matter where, I’d take my children to his presence one day.

After a year during which I continued to do my individual, creative work, I also needed to see him again, hoping he might give me a direction or renew the invitation to teach me. I’d found an intelligent, mystical lady in Boulder I had sessions with and don’t include her in the skepticism arousing people whose speech is a mumble jumble of pseudo-physics mixed with spiritual terms trying to transform transcendence into something that can be under control, teachable, and even promising of money, which is referred to as “abundance” in veiled messages of earthly success. When thinking about the inspiration from the real mystics—those to whom detachment from material things, success, and recognition meant communion with God, those who were proud to suffer and survived it by miracle— I thought it made room for a disguised egotism of a mere will to power in Western “mysticism”.

But nothing is more fascinating to me than the encounter of spiritual and human nature all the way from Jesus Christ to artists, shamans, monks, and all those who keep in contact with an essence above all transiency, a nudity before life. The poem If, by Rudyard Kipling, is the best expression of this communion with one’s truth despite the momentary applauses and flops that hide foreverness with fleetingness, essence with contingency, especially in the lines:

“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same”

It was easy convincing the kids to search for Onça all the way in the jungle. Chris is an eternal adventurer with insatiable curiosity and had already visited the Hunikuin tribes when graduating from school, whereas Mia had been wanting to set foot in the Amazon ever since we considered going there for Txana’s festival. Onça’s village was tucked away on the border of Brazil and Peru, and since one of the Brazilian airports where we’d have to switch planes was closed because a fire had broken near it, Chris and I figured it might be easier to reach our destination by going from LA directly to Lima and work our way from there. This commonsensical idea wasn’t grounded, and I never thought that the Peruvian path to Onça was a trillion times longer and harder than the Brazilian. Once we left the main cities, it was impossible to program the continuation of the trip online and Chris had to figure out our way as we got gradually ejected from the “civilized” world like hanging off the edge of the planet by a string. In Brazil, we would reach the nearest community to Onça’s village by a bush plane and from there only take seven hours in a canoe up the river to arrive at our destination. But in Peru, the community of natives where the same type of plane dropped us was much farther from it and we must travel in the canoe the whole day, cross the border with Brazil in the water and still navigate sixteen hours up the river.

It was very hot when we disembarked in the Peruvian community, and I was far from imagining how long we’d still have to go from there. The natives were dressed in poor, civil clothes like in leftovers of civilization denouncing the destruction of their original culture, the thinness of their bodies, and their apologetic attitude. A group of them surrounded our plane when it landed in an open field of earth, some distance away from their homes. Red hot dust came off the ground when we walked and as I took a few steps away from the plane, all the discomfort to come, which I’d been able to push out of my mind that far, felt like a ton of bricks falling on my head after I asked someone where I could go to the bathroom and was informed there wasn’t one. “Things are natural here”, I was told, and it should only be the beginning of the lack of facilities I must endure. The thought of it made my knees about to collapse under the ever-hotter sun, but as I dragged myself close to the kids, all the heaviness pulling me down was dissipated at the instant sight of a rebellious puppy squirming in the hands of a local who seemed to have gone there to watch the plane with a bunch of other people. The little creature was white, cuddly, and comically fierce in its attempts to get free from the woman who was juggling with its restlessness; I couldn’t take my eyes away from it and asked her permission to hold it. But the little animal was determined to be let loose, and when I started to kiss his head—it was a little “he”— accommodating him between my shoulder and my neck, he growled so loud that the contrast between his anger and his loveliness made him even more irresistible. Only innocence can be endearing in wrath, and in joy, it is the joy of joy itself. I fell in love with the puppy. When he finally jumped to the ground, the world was transformed into a stage for grace under his small, daring, and soft paws that knew no danger. All my anxiety with the difficulties ahead disappeared, and by the time Mia and I went somewhere in the shade to wait for Chris hiring a canoe and a canoe man for us, I was sure that if I found a puppy in Onça’s village, I’d be in paradise. The wordless contact with an animal, the silence of love in its scent sends me. I couldn’t stop thinking about the puppy I’d met and was forced to realize that the wish of finding him again in another of his kind had taken over me; I was replacing the need for a shaman’s spiritual orientation by a sudden call that only led to itself, the immediacy of satisfying it being beginning and end at the same time. A completeness that, like an instant blessing, liberated me from all afflictions. I knew that regardless of what may come, I’d find plenitude in the contact with another puppy and the likelihood of finding one in Onça’s village did not leave my mind as if I were holding on to a charm of good luck.

After managing to urinate behind a tree, I reunited with Mia in the shadow and soon Chris showed up to fetch our bags to place them in the canoe. He wrapped them in thick plastic material and put them in the center of the vehicle, behind the bench he told us to sit on when it was our turn to board. I had not expected our transportation to be so flimsy, small, and lower than the shore. Besides having to step down to reach its wobbling, escaping floor one had to be careful to not capsize it while balancing oneself to also avoid falling in the water. After Mia and I settled in Chris took the back seat and the boatman, who was a very old native whose eyes were like two slits between series of horizontal wrinkles, stepped on the bow. While the canoe’s engine pushed it up one of the tributaries of the Amazon River, I was at one with my children over the most genuine, rustic, and organic ground the planet has to offer and felt more rooted than ever, not even minding the fact that our old boatman showed no notion of time nor distance. No matter how many hours we’d already travelled in the river, whenever he was asked how long we still had to go to reach Onça’s village, he’d answer, in a faint tone and with an air of having given it a lot of thought: “Three hours”. His engine turned out to be very slow and every canoe coming our way quickly left us behind. Besides, it appeared he couldn’t see any of the half-submerged trunks of trees he should deviate the vehicle from to avoid a clash with them and a flipping of it over us with the engine working, which could be serious. He was forced to swerve it abruptly when Chris alerted him about those obstacles, and it would end up slamming against the riverbank. In those moments we had to step out in the water to help releasing it before getting back in to continue. Because of these stops, the length of the way, and the slowness of the canoe, we had to spend two extra nights on the way. While we were on the river, Chris played with the idea of setting up some sort of travel agency offering exotic adventures, like the trip we were taking, to give parents and children the possibility of rediscovering themselves and renewing their bond. Only after being back in this country, I became aware of the risks we took by riding in that canoe. While we were away, Jared had talked with an activist who’d been there and he mentioned the possibility of assaults from drug trafficking pirates hiding in the shores and the likelihood of collision with other badly driven canoes coming from the opposite direction. But during our ride, I was leaning on our luggage and merging with the air I breathed. Sometimes, I dozed off, and whenever the old man slammed the vehicle against the bank of the river, I’d wake up with the rush of water that had accumulated in the floor flooding through my feet and behold, with gratitude, the blissful luminosity of the green leaves of trees between me and the bright blue sky above.

I’d sent Onça several messages to obtain his permission to visit him that time but only earned it when finally spotting him on FB and daring to ask yet again if I could do it with my children. After some hesitation, he warned me we had a window of time before a television documentary crew arrived in his village to film a special program about his culture. Because of the closeness I’d felt to him, I was expecting he would even think I’d finally come to my senses by wanting to see him in the forest. Instead, I felt I was imposing myself. But it was July, the only time when both Mia and Chris were free to do that trip with me, besides the fact I’d been living in function of finding the path which a year earlier Onça had convinced me to follow. I’d been questioning myself to infinity and bearing with the restlessness of a spiritual search which is something whose closure always lies ahead of one, like the line of the horizon. To justify traveling all the way to the jungle with no real invitation from Onça, I had to keep remembering Kierkegaard’s assertion that he would go anywhere in this world to meet someone like “the knight of faith” he created in his heartfelt description of a genuine, humble character, capable of receiving whatever comes his way as a gift.

Eleonora Duvivier

Eleonora Duvivier was born in 1953 in Rio de Janeiro, where she attended the Lycée Français. She comes from a family of artists and has held two exhibitions of oil paintings in Rio.  Having studied philosophy at PUC (Brazil) King's College (England) and Boston University ( USA)  she started giving priority to verbal thinking over visual images for expressing her ideas. She has written her books in English but she also contributes to a Brazilian site with  chronics she writes in Portuguese.    

Eleonora has been living in this country for thirty years. She currently resides close to her grown-up children in Southern California. 

To learn more about Eleonora, check out her website: https://www.eleonoraduvivier.com/

The heat of the sun was more intense than I’d ever felt before and we either held umbrellas or, when napping, managed to secure them over our head from the floor of the canoe and still had to refresh ourselves now and then inside the water. But being behind schedule stopped to interfere with my plenitude as we traveled between rows of immense trees standing on each side of the river like protecting angels guarding the way to heaven. Floating on the primordial water of their millennial soil with my offspring and being literally in the same boat with them was beyond sharing a country, a land, a time, or a culture, like we were in the beginning and reason of life together.

Source: https://www.amazon.com/Ayahuasca-Anchor-El...