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There were no healthy models of movement around me growing up. Safety in my family meant staying still: sitting, drinking, smoking, numbing. Fixed bodies. Stationary presences. Sedentary. I was raised by people who anchored themselves to the sofa as if the world outside might swallow them whole. I absorbed that atmosphere like a climate. And I did something extraordinary with it, still: all my movement went inward.

This is my truth: standards are standards. Integrity is not optional. Education should not bend for sentiment or convenience. It should teach resilience, accountability, stamina, the capacity to find solutions for yourself: how to live, truly live, fully, as an adult with a brain in your head and blood in your veins. You learn not by comfort, but by facing the field, by navigating the terrain, by figuring out how to get from A to B, and not whining because the path is hard.

Returning to my land this October, I wanted to inhabit it differently. I didn’t want to be swallowed by the pace of visits or the old magnetic pull of familiarity. I wanted to carve out time that was deliberately mine; pauses between encounters, small pockets of solitude amid the density of return. Seeing friends I hadn’t seen in years carried its own tenderness, but also a recognition of distance: we have all shifted slightly on our axes.

This journey unfolded as a complete cycle of initiation. The volcano gifted me primal power; Wolf consumed me and returned me, dissolving and remaking me; the water of the pond purified me; the tribe welcomed me into the rhythm of collective life; the Snake raised me into ecstatic energy, uniting body and spirit. It was not symbolic alone. It was visceral, embodied. My clapping, howling, stomping, and humming brought the vision into flesh. This was not only “seen” but lived.

For 37 years, I marked 15 August with a kind of dread, a shadowed memory of collapse, panic, and loss. [...] When I mark it now as the return of my power to myself, I am not pretending the loss didn’t happen. I am saying: That was the day I was pulled out of the ordinary game and went on a journey to find the tools I was meant to carry.

The irony [the cosmic joke common in shamanic journeys] is that the spirit world often answers literally rather than politely. The teaching is direct, uncompromising, and impossible to ignore.

I don’t call myself a witch [it would be so much easier!] because that’s not the archetype I serve. That is not my land, my practice, my spirits. But I do call myself a shaman, because that’s what echoes through my bones, my dreams, my gestures.

I was looking for a hand. As an artist who draws and finds hands intriguing, I really wanted to see a hand and guess what? In my mind’s eye, I imagined a hand. Not a plastic bag holding a mismatch of bones of different shapes and sizes. Out of gesture, I had this form-image in me, but what I faced, instead, was matter. And then, I had this sort of bizarre and maybe irreverent idea: what if I artistically arranged the bones, not as they are supposed to be in reality, in a body

Then the sea came again. I sank into the water, the dead-body float. The surrender. The letting go. I turned and there she was: I wasn’t alone. The she-wolf. Always there, swimming beside me, moving with me no matter where I tried to go. Her presence was fierce, gentle, and intimate all at once. I moved from frenzy to surrender. That’s ritual form: I went back to the sea, this primal womb, and floated dead, corpse-like. Another shamanic death without spectacle, and she swam w

I read under trees whose names I don’t know. I write in cafés whose menus I don’t understand but whose coffee is exactly what I need. I keep moving, like the tide; like Artemis, always on the edge of the wild.

This is why I say that therapy is not “helping”. Therapy done in this way costs weight in my bones, loneliness in my psyche, and a lot of misunderstanding. This is why when I say that I know, it is because I know. In that state, I don’t observe, I become the conduit. There, the soul speaks.

... therapy is not always enough > Years of Person-Centred counselling gave me reflection. But it didn't hand me the tiller. It mirrored my story but didn’t help me write the next chapter. It validated my feelings and deposited me on a sandbank.

I am no longer waiting. I am leaning into the wind. This vessel, vast and trembling with power, is mine to command. She is alive, and she has called me to hold her steady; not by hiding from the storm, but by entering it, bending my body into its truth, anchoring the keel through my own spine. I ask for a crew: not of polished saints or clean-cut sailors, but of misfits, outlaws of the soul.

Stay tuned. Or don’t. I’ll be here. Watching the sugar dissolve.

The Land of Tranquillity is safe, silent, beige. But we are not here to stay safe. We are not here to settle. Happy After Easter!

The two worlds are not separate; they are part of one movement. We are not called to remain in rarefied light, but to bring it back with us — to carry the mountaintop into the village.

We must learn to sit in the moment before rebirth. Before we are sure. Before the story ends well.

Finding your spiritual tribe is an act of resistance — a quiet declaration that truth, love, and courage are possible when shared.

This is the Lotus Sutra’s radical insight: every single moment contains the full range of possibility. In uncertainty lies creativity.

Even in the flood, we are not powerless. Even in despair, we carry seeds of new life.

Death and rebirth are universal themes found across many traditions, from ancient mystery cults to Jungian individuation.

Sometimes, transformation requires disruption.

Waiting means sitting and facing our Shadow, our Devil King of the Sixth Heaven, and asking them where we need to change.

Words, when used with clarity and wisdom, can bridge gaps, connect people, and give meaning to experience.