At first, there is the identification,
Friday, March 15, 2024
Letting Go, Circa 23
At first, there is the identification,
Thursday, December 21, 2023
Ocho
I have obviously done a horrific job of maintaining web presence. So much has happened this year that I don't even know where to start. This place is still sitting in the ether, though, so hi.
Last summer we took a little road trip up to Oregon. I recognized this intersection when we drove through and thought we should stop and show how much has changed in the last 8 years.
Tuesday, March 7, 2023
Acate
Back to the point. When I walked away from my first experience with Kambo I had this feeling in my gut that this was something I could do, and it was something tangible. I spent my life trying to help people with my creativity, and that went severely misinterpreted. This was something that came with an immediate physical response, and also fueled creativity on a spiritual level. I have also always been turned completely off by how most of the spiritual practice, that I want to believe in, is presented. This medicine leaves no room for hoo-haw spiritual bypassing or the toxic positivity which taints most spirituality that has been so tragically diluted in the west. This is all very real poison pulsing through your veins, gathering toxins and panema, and purging it out in one way or another.
I sat with that feeling for a while, dealing with so many other things in my life. When I did have a conversation with my Goddess about it, she showed full support, and it didn't take much research to find training, though the universe did help a lot in lining everything up, and the closer we got to my doing this training, the closer we got to knowing we needed to get out of where we were. The training that found me was with Rainforest Healing Center, and it was in Salt Lake City. My very first Kambo experience was on 4/3/21, and the training started a year and one day later. Still floundering in my father's passing, I spent three days driving out there in Sancho, the Ford Hybrid that he left behind, which was ironically also dead, but we were able to bring that one back. I camped in my car in Ballarat, where I was greeted by a wild donkey as the sun set, Then I camped at a hot springs in northern Nevada. It was amazing to just be on the road and live in my car, but I did have a destination, and was cramming for a presentation that I had to give with my medicine sister, and I was also repeating necessary information in my head that I needed to memorize a little deeper than I would lines for a show. With every mile and quaint little Nevada mining town, things started getting more and more real. By the time I got to SLC, I was quick to realize that it was way too cold to car camp, so I got a cheap room and crammed some more. The day of arrival at the strangely themed rental, I ran around from shop to shop trying to finish up finding the items required for training. Then I was in it, surrounded by strangers, and everything felt great, aside from some off vibes I got from one of the trainees, and that played out in a pretty epic way that I don't think I'll ever be comfortable writing about, but I will certainly never look at Salvator Mundi the same. This medicine can bring out some darkness, and when you are sitting with it twice a day for over a week, with no real food but protein shakes and avocado, that dark is pitch black. I purged a lot, on a lot of levels. There was a ton of information to process, and just about every minute between doses was spent in class type talks, flooding us with information, and studying. After day three I called home and said I didn't think I was going to make it, but by my last dose on the left, I finally started to feel like I was getting it.I could've easily gone another week with the beautiful souls I found there, but after our heart dose initiation, which did not bode well for the wall I almost pushed myself through, a final exam that I am still a little shocked I did so well on, and a beautiful last meal, a la the medicine sister I did my presentation with, we cleaned up the house and everyone dispersed back into the real world. I had a long drive home to really sit with everything that happened.It was such an amazing and healing experience that I didn't want to go home. I wanted my family to meet me there so we could just disappear, but there was still a lot to do, and I had agreed to work another month at the job I was leaving behind. It was so difficult to take what I had just been through back to that place that I spent my whole life trying to escape, but we did it, and we got out, and the first significant destination we had when we hit the road was to introduce my family to my medicine family. I initially did this training to serve my partner and myself, but when I did start serving others, each sit has been an incredibly rewarding adventure of its own.Come sit with us!
* All of these photos were taken by Omar, the master practitioner who did the training.
Monday, February 13, 2023
Følg Strømmen
Thursday, February 9, 2023
Wait a Minute...
We went for a hike one day after dropping the girls off at their nature class, and found this massive oak tree that had fallen down at some point, likely by eroding from the creek next to it and triggered by a massive flow of water. It continued to grow, though, with the half of its roots that were still in the ground. If that doesn't sum everything up beautifully, I don't know what does? We only shot for about 15 minutes, stopping a couple times for hikers meandering by, hiked over to a dam that was built in 1803, blessed and picked some black sage, then hiked back to the car in the rain, and it was beautiful.
Wednesday, February 8, 2023
Dkyil Khor
I really wanted to test YouTube's nudity policy, because according to them nudity is allowed as long as it is instructional, documentary, or artistic, but I decided to go with the blurry version because I don't trust any of it at this point.
Monday, January 2, 2023
Tatramajjhattatā
The biggest hurdle has been to switch my website from Wix to Hostinger, at a fraction of the price, but there's a lot to move around and code to figure out, which has been a primary focus this last month. Mainly moving my blog, since Wix makes it impossible to move your site. I manually c/p'd every little thing, bit by bit, into this old blog. That took days and resulted in a ton or formatting errors, which I spent another couple days fixing, cursing Wix under my breath with every click.
On top of that, I've had more time to wrap my head around transitioning my work into more of a healing journey, to go with the Kambo training, so I'm restructuring the site around that, and making it more about our journey as a family. This also involves getting all our phones synched up with platforms that make them readily accessible, because one thing I discovered pretty quick on our journey is that I didn't take many photos lugging my 5d around; most of the living journey snaps are on our phones. Don't even get me started on the dash cam footage, and the action camera that I accidentally abandoned about halfway through our journey. I realized that there were certain things we need, like a gimbal, but they don't really fall into our budget, so my creative mind lost interest in having that extra camera, which means most of the videos that were recorded were also on my phone, creating an even bigger storage and transfer problem. This post suddenly got very technical, but I have nightmares about this stuff. What I don't want to say is that the action camera isn't great, it was affordable, and the dash cam is great, but the brand stamp won't go away, even when I turn it off. My 5d is getting bigger and heavier every time I pull it out, but I'm still not sure why I haven't shot any video on that, aside from having an even bigger gimbal and storage problem.
At the end of the day, while we do have our silly issues, including having some trouble connecting with people in San Diego, most would agree that there are far worse places to be right now. Most of the country is frozen solid, and we're out here grumbling when it gets below 60. There are obviously far greater things going on than the weather, but things are a bit easier to figure out when we can leave the house whenever we want and it's usually sunny out. Things are actually quite beautiful, and writing on this blog feels so much more comfortable than writing on the website, probably because I was here for the better part of a decade before I switched to the new format. It feels a lot easier here to just rant about how I'm feeling, instead of "official" website blog stress, where everything needs to be well thought out and important... ish. With the integration of the website posts here, this blog looks more like the evolution of a soul that the original idiedatbirth blog was, and I hope that comfort will translate to more casual posts across all mediums.The time here has also meant more music, which is another thing I felt was missing. I had the opportunity to shoot a dear friend's show on my little mountain, which is more like an authentic Irish pub comedic debacle, and that really sparked something in me. Meanwhile, my mom randomly sent me a dulcimer, so I've been learning a bunch of songs with that sound. Send me a fiddle, mom! We need more people in our lives that spark, and we are still searching for community that all spark each other. I hereby promise to post more than once a month, or three months.