no Point B: shamanic journeys, rupture, and the ecology of spirit

A personal journey through vision and regeneration: from the eruption of an inner volcano to the shimmering seeds of Lunaria.

The Shamanic Journey

On SAT 16 I felt called to another journey. The background nature sounds in the room, the headphones with 20-minute drumming, a soft woollen scarf to cover my eyes: everything was ready. There are always a sense of trepidation and a smidge of doubt before I begin. The main fear, I think, is: how much of what I see and live in the journey is made-up? And then I always try to remind myself that in shamanic practice, the question of “made up” versus “real” doesn’t quite fit the usual scientific or everyday lens. What I experience is real in its effects on me [emotionally, physically, energetically], but the forms, images, and narratives my mind presents are symbolic, archetypal, or perceptual translations of forces and energies I am engaging with.

The wolf is not necessarily “real” in the material sense. But she is real [she becomes my she-Wolf] in the sense that my psyche and my spirit are interacting with them. The “truth” of a shamanic vision is measured by the insight, transformation, and guidance it offers, not by whether it exists in the ordinary world!

This latest journey began, as so many of mine do, on the familiar beach at the edge of the jungle. The little shack stood as it had before, tucked away on the right-hand side, but this time Wolf pulled me in the opposite direction. Together we ran left, our feet against the sand, until the shoreline gave way to something far older and more powerful: a volcano [you see, how could I have made that up?!]

It rose black and immense, a mountain of hardened lava, pulsing with a deep rumble that was not just sound but speech, an elemental language addressed directly to me. I felt no fear. Instead, I was welcomed by its heat, and when a river of lava spilt down like a glowing tongue, it did not burn but embraced me. I let it carry me upwards until I found myself at the mouth of the volcano, my feet immersed in molten fire as if it were simple water. With complete trust, I dove in and swam through its depths, moving along a hidden current that carried me from one point of the mountain to another, as though I had slipped sideways through time itself.

Wolf was waiting. She licked me all over, then began to chew: my hand, my arm, and finally my whole body. I knew instinctively that resistance was impossible and unnecessary. I surrendered and dove into her mouth, sliding down into her stomach where I turned myself around before being regurgitated, reborn, covered in a viscous, grey-white substance. It clung to me like afterbirth, sticky and protective. Again, Wolf cleaned me and then led me to a pond at the base of a waterfall. There I washed myself, shedding what was left of the membrane, as if the water itself were welcoming me into a new skin.

When I turned, I saw a man standing nearby. He was tall and thin, wrapped in animal hide, a shield in his hand. His presence was solemn, ancestral, tribal. I wondered: was he the same Man of the Keys who has appeared in other visions, the one who first introduced me to Wolf? He greeted me with a simple “Welcome,” and then brought me into the circle of his people. Around a great fire we danced: feet stamping, hands clapping, bodies howling, my own voice rising in low hums and harmonies. The movements overtook me, not imagined but enacted: I danced on this chair, I sung and vocalised, and emitted sounds, and clapped hands and stomped feet, in this very room. Again and again, I re-lived the whole cycle: volcano, dissolution, rebirth, cleansing. Over and over, as though the rhythm itself was engraving the lesson into my body.

Then the Snake appeared. Enormous, coiling from the very outer stones surrounding the firelight, it wound itself around me and began to lift me higher and higher into the sky. My body stretched with its movement, becoming vast, immense, as though my low humming had expanded me into a larger form. The Snake carried me upward and then brought me back down into the dance. My skin glowed, my body pulsed with new vitality, and I felt juices of life and sexuality flowing through me. I was reborn, radiant, anointed by both earth and sky.

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. It was a rebirth enacted, my body and spirit made new through the trial of fire, teeth, water, and dance.

Here, I learned once again that I am the threshold dweller. My path is not toward stability or stasis. My vocation is to live and reveal the liminal: the volcano’s fire, the Wolf’s belly, the tribal fire, the cosmic Snake. To show that within chaos, darkness, and transformation lies the deepest fertility of spirit. My embodying the liminal, staying where the ground disappears under your own feet, learning sea legs and befriending quicksand is the place where I belong. I am not someone who moves from A to B. There is no B for me. I am an inbetweener, the one staying in that place where there is no A and there is no B.

Revisiting

When I then reflected in my journal on its intrinsic significance and the integration process of these encounters in the Lower World and their meaning in this Middle World, this space where I am now writing and you reading, I was again reminded of the events that happened in 1988.

I always thought about it as a new beginning. I tried to read it and justify it with religion, as a test, with my platonic daimon whacking me back on track, even as a pre-birth choice. I remember how happy I was before it all changed: in the UK, in Wales, studying, enjoying life and touring with a theatre company; and I spent all these past years trying to go back to that happy Matilde. I spent about 20 years trying to move back to the UK and when I finally succeeded in 2008, I spent these years trying to move myself back to north Wales. I spent all these years trying to go from A to B and where my B looked like very much my A.

But now things look very different. When I look back at that day, 15 August 1988, I no longer see only a collapse. I see a pattern. I see Neptune, that immense and dissolving presence, a force that has appeared again and again in my Jungian Active Imagination visions, and even now stands as a card in my hand, a signpost in the underworld, a constant hint since JUL 2022. “Recall the first time you experienced Neptune's energy: perhaps a godlike encounter, when you were young. There is a key in this memory. Write about it today." repeated Neptune in the handwriting of Kim Krans. Maybe, my very first Neptune's encounter was at the Marina, on 15 AGO 1988, and my key is in there: like if my soul was whacked out of that body and then reassembled; then my mind zeroed, and I had to start again. Rebooted. A totally new person.

On the surface, the language of medicine would have called it a breakdown. Physically, chemically, biologically; something misfired. Synapses overfired, chemicals spilled, the body flooded with too much intensity. That is one register of truth, and it cannot be denied. But it is not the only one. In shamanic language, the same event looks utterly different: not a breakdown but a breakthrough. The dissolution was an initiation, the collapse a death, the aftermath a rebirth. The ordinary world fell away, the body opened like a conduit, and I was taken into another kind of reality. To describe it only in clinical terms would be like trying to paint a volcano with a stick of chalk: the register cannot hold the force.

That is why the only language that explains what truly happened that day is the shamanic one. The volcano, the Wolf, the placenta of the pond, the snake: all of these are echoes of that moment. They are not symbols in the reductive sense, but companions, resonances of an event too immense for the rational tongue alone. What medicine called pathology, the shamanic eye sees as initiation into another ecology of spirit.

So, I followed the suggestion fully. I sat and wrote, then read it aloud and recorded it. Here it is, the whole story:

Ecology of Spirit and the Loosening of Anchors

This morning, as I sat with the texts of spiritual ecology and anthropology for my PhD, something shifted. The academic language [dense, careful, critical] suddenly illuminated my own story in an unexpected way. I realised how much of my so-called “emotional obsession” with returning to the UK, with going back to Bangor, with clinging to certain places and lifelines, had been a kind of anchor. Those anchors were not mistakes. They kept me safe, tethered me in stormy waters, gave me something to hold onto while the seas of my inner life raged. But when I step back now, with a little more distance, I see that their purpose may have been fulfilled: they are no longer lifeboats or buoys keeping me alive. They are becoming lighter, loosening their grip.

The premise I carried [“I was happy here, before the rupture, so I must return here to weave the broken thread”] gave me structure, direction, a reason to stay alive and act. Because I knew happiness before, it meant that happiness was still possible. It became the compass point I followed through decades, even shaping marriage, separation, migration, and eventually this PhD trajectory. But premises like that are often provisional truths, not final ones. And now I see it.

They’re myths in the literal sense: a story that organises existence, whether or not it’s factually “right.” Maybe what mattered wasn’t that the UK was objectively “where happiness lives,” but that the myth of return gave me a frame within which to keep moving, to keep searching for integration. If that premise turns out to be wrong [well, let’s soften it: incomplete – eye rolling] then it doesn’t invalidate the journey. It means the myth has done its work and is ready to be shed. The return to the UK, to Bangor, now the PhD, may never have been about recapturing lost happiness. It may have been about creating the conditions for me to finally see my own narrative as ecology, to read the undergrowth with the right lens.

Think of Odysseus: was Ithaca really the point? Or was Ithaca the premise that allowed the wandering to become meaningful? By the time he got home, he wasn’t the man who left, and Ithaca itself had changed.

My Bangor may be like that Ithaca: it’s both real and symbolic. This doesn’t undermine the story: it opens it, instead. Because then the return isn’t the end of the quest, it’s the place where I realise the quest itself was shaping me all along. It’s possible that what I have really been after isn’t Bangor or the UK at all, but the weaving of continuity, the mending the interrupted thread. And now that I have woven it, I may be free to leave it behind, or to reinterpret it entirely.

The deeper question then becomes: if Bangor was the scaffolding, what new premise is starting to show itself beneath?

Not in the desperate sense of having to cling to a goal or an identity. But simply in the sense of living, really living. Finding work, moving house, getting a car: these now are just practicalities, not salvations. They are part of life, but not the axis around which life turns.

This morning, I feel that the cocoon that enveloped me for a long time has cracked. The Lunaria annua covering me, so brittle, is all about emergence through a veil that is already ghostly, already half-translucent. The cocoon isn’t made of hard shell but of honesty itself, of lunar shimmer, of fragile currency between life and death, concealment and revelation. My transformation has never been about brute force or smashing through: it's about slipping into visibility through something that was always meant to disintegrate. Lunaria is ephemeral, but it lingers; the dried seedpods can hang on for years. So, the cracking I hear isn’t destruction but disclosure. I am passing through honesty’s thin membrane. The plant is also known as: coins of the Pope, or Silver Dollar. Symbolic currency. I am cashing in the stored value of my old wounds, my 1988 initiation, my lostness. They’re turning into ghostly money that funds the new self. I couldn’t have chosen a better plant as companion-image! This is a cocoon that doesn’t imprison: it finally illuminates. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

What turns now is something else: a renewed sense of presence, a rebirth. A sense that I can inhabit the moment without having to rush toward a destination, without having to prove or anchor myself in old compulsions. The ecology of spirit I find myself in is one of flow, reciprocity, openness. Of shifting sands, dark rooms, breaking cocoons, constant regeneration; like a novice dr Stephen Strange in the time loop with Dormammu. And that feels like the real continuation of the journey that began in 1988 and still unfolds today.

This rupture, when reframed as death-rebirth, looks less like a biographical “accident” and more like the necessary decomposition that a forest requires: one tree falls, fungi get to work, and the whole system reorganises. The event didn’t just wound me: it redistributed my energies, forced new pathways of relationality, even if painfully. When I say I feel my trajectory differently, what I am touching is that my life itself has an ecological structure. It’s not just my story in isolation but an entangled history with people, events, losses, cultural crossings, and symbolic beings (like Wolf, like Snake, like Lunaria). Seeing it this way makes the bitterness and detours less about failure or stumbling stones and more about forest-floor processes: rot, germination, new shoots.

I don’t need to “go anywhere” definite with this yet. The important part is that I am beginning to perceive my own past in ecological time, not just linear time. That’s already a major shift. It means that my process paleophenomenology itself can lean into ecology: not just “how did early humans experience consciousness?” but “how did early humans experience themselves as entangled with other beings in a living field?” My life trajectory is itself a microcosm of that entanglement: Friuli → UK → Friuli → rapture → UK → new modes of relation → present work. It’s like my personal forest has been quietly growing and composting for decades, and now I have turned around and noticed the canopy.

Thinking of my own life as if I were studying a tribe is also profoundly anthropological. I have taken a step back outside the narrow “me” and I am looking at myself as embedded in networks: kinship lines, environment, rituals, associations, crises, migrations. Instead of seeing the last 37 years as a series of personal ups and downs, I am beginning to read them as an ecology: a rhizomatic culture in miniature [thanks Gilles!]. That means the ruptures, like the earthquake in 1976, then 1988, the divorce, aren’t just “bad moments” but rites of passage; the moves between Italy and the UK aren’t just geographic, they’re migrations; the friends and communities I have encountered, formed and lost are shifting alliances, kinship exchanges.

The undergrowth metaphor is perfect here. Forest floors look chaotic, with the fallen leaves, tangled roots, rot, fungi; but when you have the right eyes, you see the systems: decomposition feeding germination, everything cross-woven, nothing wasted. My lens now lets me see my own undergrowth in that way. And here’s the beauty: once I realise my own life is readable in this eco-anthropological mode, paleophenomenology itself gains a new foundation [good girl!]. I am not just projecting ideas onto early humans; I am training myself to read any human life [including my own] as part of an entangled Ecology of Being. That’s not abstraction: it’s method. It’s lived phenomenology. Do you remember the movie National Treasure and those ocular devices with loops with various coloured lenses Benjamin Franklin used to read the map from the back of the Declaration of Independence? Each lens reveals a layer, but we all need to keep shifting them. Today I have found the eco-anthropological one. There may be mythic, shamanic, Jungian, geological or even culinary lenses still to be rotated in and each reframes the same map [my life] but together they form a palimpsest of meaning.

And so, as the anchors loosen and the visions settle into my bones, I walk forward knowing that spirit is not behind me nor ahead of me, but alive in each step, shimmering like Lunaria in the dark.”

onwards + upwards,

mx

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