called to the fire

For 37 years, I marked 15 August with a kind of dread, a shadowed memory of collapse, panic, and loss. Ferragosto, this holiday we have in Italy, was always lived with a sense of dread and fear: an extremely hot day, eerie silence, a sense of gloomy depression and still air blanketing everything.  It always felt like it marked the beginning of the end of summer and the closing in on the return to the drama-induced autumn back home, the loss of freedom. Back in the cage.

On 15 August 1988, I lost everything I knew. I know I wrote about it multiple times and at length, but only this morning I saw this day as, instead, the gaining of something different. It took me 37 years to get to this point, today, where I am experiencing it as a different day.

Today, I feel the weight lifted. This day [once a tomb of everything I thought I knew] is my threshold, the day the world as I understood it dissolved so that I might step into a life I could never have foreseen. It was never an end, but a return of power to myself, a rebirth hidden within chaos.

In 1988, everything I thought I would do and follow [the lines, the destinations, the whole projected life] dissolved in seconds. And because of that collapse, I didn’t just take a “detour,” I stepped onto a different cosmology. A world with different rules, different companions, different weather. In initiatory terms, that’s not a side road: that’s the moment the spirits said: We’ve seen your path. It’s not the one you think. We’re taking you there. And we are taking you now.

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. If I start treating each anniversary as the renewal of my pact with that day, the emotional charge changes:  it’s no longer the ghost of collapse, but the heartbeat of my real life’s timeline. I think the dream arriving exactly on this date, this morning, is the first time my unconscious [and maybe my guides] have handed me a vision of the post-initiation landscape. It’s as if my guides were saying: You’ve already died. Now here’s what living looks like on the other side. Here is the Entering the House of Bones [my willingness now to walk into deep work without fear], and my Rejecting the False Feast [my discernment about where to invest my life force] and finally me Standing in the Laurel Grove [my sensual, embodied and creative sovereignty and prophetic sight].

The Initiatory Arc of My Life

Each moment of panic, each rupture of memory, every collapse I endured were symbolic deaths, small funerals for the self I thought I was. These were initiations: thresholds demanding passage, teaching me the rhythm of dissolution and regeneration.

Every 9.50 years [ish] I faced these invitations to witness myself falling and rising, again and again, until the shape of my being became my own, no longer borrowed, no longer guided by fear.

1988 > The First Gate, or Initiation through Loss: the panic attacks, the loss of memory and total sense of identity, gone in seconds;

2008 > The Second Gate, or Severing from the False Life: breaking up, dissolution of marriage, losing my artistic path and my job, and then a change of country, all gone in about a month;

2017 > The Third Gate, or Stripping to the Core Self: everything I thought I knew I built for myself [the counselling, therapy, new country, new relationship, means of support, and even my car] gone. In roughly 30 minutes.

In between, it felt like rushing toward something, anything! A running away, numbing out, diving into books, falling into lovers, grasping for rituals, abiding by new and fancy theories… all was a spiral around that initial rupture. From a shamanic lens, that’s what happens when the “big crack” happens but isn’t yet consciously integrated: the spirit keeps nudging, then shoving, then outright dragging you back toward the reason for the crack. All the while feeling very stupid because you still just don’t get it! [that IT so elusive, so unnameable, so uncanny, but you know it is THERE]. That’s the “Universe whacking me back”; not as punishment, but as course correction. That’s my daemon sounding like Rio asking me How you feeling, Mama? then suggesting we go for a drive, to get some air and then sternly telling me get in the car, Matilde. And while it felt terrifying, dangerous and painful, little did I know it was saving me every time.

All those books, the lovers, the chanting, the kneeling, the praying, the begging, the changing, the hoping, the believing I finally found THAT ONE SINGLE THING that would take all this pain away… all of it was simply apprenticeship, even if it felt messy and looked desperate from the undiscerning eyes. I was instead learning a hundred micro-skills of perception, endurance, intuition, and resilience. I tried deep Catholicism, easter esoteric practices, I chanted in Sanskrit, lit incense, learned everything about mala, I defined myself as Christian, Buddhist, Zen, Tantra, Hindu... Like a child in a religious sweet shop: I taught in a Jewish school, fasted like my Muslim friend and prayed like my Anglican priest friend; I bent in yoga, I tasted disparate diets, I loved in different languages, I learned to trace my mind with a scientific methodology that Volta would have been proud of, and drew my inner configuration while in the background Jung was making me cup of teas.

Stepping Stones of Knowledge

Guides appeared in unexpected forms: books, teachers, words pressed into my hands like offerings. James Readfield first whispered that the unseen world could be navigated; Dan Millman told me I should apply myself; Carlos Castaneda’s journeys taught me the wild in liminality; Sharon Blackie and Phyllis Currott sang of wildness and earth; Elizabeth Gilbert whispered of surrender and courage, Plato showed Truth, and Martin Heidegger whispered Aletheia; I fell asleep with Wayne Dyer in my ears and Deepak Chopra saved my life. Each book, each page, a stepping stone across the rivers of uncertainty, a light along the labyrinthine corridors of my own psyche.

Then I feasted with Gilles Deleuze, and I still missed "Home"...

Integration Across Paths

In all of this, I felt I had to choose: on this continuum between philosophical Jungian active self-reflecting, self-referencing and scientific pragmatic methodology on one end, and the embodied, wild, earthly, sensual shamanic transcendent vertical frenzied praxis on the other, I had to choose. Not more than two years ago, I was sitting on this large soft brown leather sofa in front of my therapist and could still not understand which one was better, which one was the One, which one was the one that would make me feel whole, and would make me feel Me.

This need to choose ended this morning, when my sweet she-Wolf I meet in my shamanic journeys, who runs and dances wild in the undergrowth of this luscious forest and invites me to healings and connections with the wider divine, mutated into Artemis in one of my active imagination experiences, in this archetypal configuration of the inner being.

So within, so without. So above, so below.

Religions, science, therapy, art, philosophy, alchemy, shamanism: these were not separate threads but woven strands of one living tapestry.

Nothing works. Everything works.

The horizontal: reflection, craft, careful tracing of meaning in the material world; the vertical: liminal, ecstatic, shamanic, the dialogue with forces larger than myself. In dreams and visions, in my body and through my art, the two axes converge: Wolf and Artemis guiding me, showing me the axis where instinct, reflection, and transcendence meet.

Reframing the Day

15 August is no longer a day of fear, but a day of initiation, a turning point where the veil lifted and I glimpsed the life I was meant to inhabit. It is the day I learned that collapse is not defeat, that the fissures in my world were openings, that rebirth is coded into loss. And in that recognition, I step fully into the world I have built, where art, embodiment, reflection, and shamanic presence are inseparable, and I am home within myself.

... I am only wondering...

On that 15 August, panic ripped the floor from beneath me. I forgot to eat, to drink. I was petrified of falling asleep. I was heavily medicated, sent to sit in a corner and to just stay. It took me about 8 years to leave the house unaccompanied, 16 years to get a driving license and 20 years to be able to sleep alone. 37 years to write this.

What if collapse has hollowed out also your chest, labels have been glued on your skin and soul, others have decided to define you, and pills have tried to contain you…

What if you forgot who you were and are?

What if you believed anyone who told you that they knew best what was right for you?

Your mother, your GP, your husband, your God...

Know this: you were called to the fire. You were being pulled through the threshold, stripped to your essence, summoned to the life that only your own courage could conjure.

This was not a disease. It was your soul shouting. It was a calling.

A crack in the ordinary through which the extraordinary presses.

You were being initiated: taught to rise, to claim your power, to dance with the unknown without shame or fear.

Step into it. Step through the tremor. Let the shards of the old world fall behind you.

This is your rebirth, and the life that waits is fierce, wild, and wholly yours.

onwards + upwards,

mx