Letting Go, Circa 23

At first, there is the identification, 

"I am the body." 

As the mechanism of surrender continues, it becomes quite obvious that, 

"I am the mind that experiences the body, not the body." 

As more feelings and belief systems are surrendered, there eventually comes the awareness, 

"I am not the mind either, but that which witnesses and experiences the mind, emotions, and body."

p. 254

Eleven

Sitting on a wooden deck next to a tambo, serenaded by the deep amazon rain, I turned the pages of a book that I could only truly understand at that point in my journey. Every day that goes by, I realize more how perfectly it all fit together. Letting Go was the accidental theme, but it has been lingering since I first sat with Kambô, which just defined a feeling I had been struggling with for years that culminated in finding my father's body. Bufo crammed me into an existential nightmare that led to me abandoning my work altogether. Tepe pulled me out of the nightmare, but left me in a new question mark, especially with my work. Sitting with Aya in the Peruvian Amazon left me with more questions than answers, and I still don't even know how to articulate those questions, or what in this universe would understand what I'm asking... but I walked away from that inspired to really do the work that I love and know I'm meant to do, which was primarily inspired by spending so much time with Gabe..... all divine integration.

At this point in my journey I am left with a kind of futile emptiness, which is really just what life is, and our journey is finding beauty in that. I got all those experiences that I longed for my entire life, but I have once again circled back to this, feeling like the life that I long for is drowning in an ocean of egos. That's it. That's my light bulb. These amazing plant medicines aren't cheap, nor are they as readily available as they should be for the betterment of humanity and this world that we are destroying, which is all starting to feel like the Catholic Church charging the masses for salvation. I hear so many stories about beautiful healing journeys with these plants, and I feel like I exist to document and appreciate those stories, while coming to terms with the fact that I'm not actually supposed to have one of my own, because mine doesn't look or feel like any of that which is described. My biggest conundrum in all of this is realizing that there is nothing to heal. All the traumas and pains that everyone is wallowing in and trying to heal don't exist anymore, but in our memories of them. Everything happened exactly how it was supposed to in order for us to become what we're supposed to be. By holding on to and thinking we need to heal something that only exists in our memory, we are really negating our own existence. If you could go back in time and delete or change an experience, you would return to a completely different reality, and the only guarantee is that your new life won't be any better or worse, it will only be different. You can keep doing that for all eternity, searching for the perfect existence, until one day you'll realize that you truly appreciate and miss the original story, and you'll understand how much precious time and energy you wasted searching for something different, thinking it would be better.

It is not our experiences, or at worst, traumas, that we need to heal from, but our own thinking that those experiences and traumas are important enough to keep us from thriving in our best possible existence. It could also be argued that our greatest trauma is thinking itself. It is our egos, in their inflated selfishness, having all of those silly experiences. We are the everything and nothing that is watching the ego flounder with all of the ego-made problems and issues. The plants are trying to show you something past the ego, often times by smashing you in the face with it. I'm not saying that anyone should stop doing the work, or stop trying to heal what they think is holding them back. I'm just saying that I hope one day you also realize that it is not healing what you've been through that is holding you back; it is the you who needs to be healed that is keeping you from living your best possible life.

I recently read that it is incorrect to say that we create abundance. Abundance is already there. We create limitations.

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.

Acate

I haven't actually recounted my journey with Kambo on here in any way, aside from how I found the frog, and a brief overview of my first inoculation experience, and how Bufo messed up my head, which were both almost two years ago in Dormiveglia and Entangled, with retreated photos from over a decade ago that seem completely obsolete now. Along with my mind being blasted open by that whole experience, I had the overwhelming drive to go through all of my photos and retreat them, only to realize that there were far too many to go through while still managing to maintain a full-time job, family of four, and also searching for a way to move forward with my work. 20 months and a whopping 7 posts later, I have abandoned my still present drive to retreat everything, and am still searching.

Fast forward 9 months from those posts, or rewind 11 months from now, I drove away from my Kambo practitioner training with a plan to talk about how life changing of an experience it was in a post, but by the time I got home, all of that was put on the shelf for various reasons, and in these times my creative shelves are absolutely stuffed with projects that I may or may not ever get to. To be honest, just about everything that has happened in the last year or more has been written about very little, if at all.  I am a certified Kambo practitioner, but few know it because I just kind of hinted around to what was happening in my life now, and generally just posted what I imagine were confusing photos of folks hugging buckets on social media, amongst my fine art work and random quotes or rants. That was something seriously significant in my life that I simply left for people to figure out, amongst other things in my creative flail and learning to just live in the moment, like the fact that I quit my job and we quit our town and were living in a pop-up camper on the road, which my partner hinted around at on social media, but I just kind of didn't talk about for a couple months.

Aside from the people who existed in our little circle, no one really understood what was happening, and I was dependent on the fact that no one was paying attention. I could also argue that even people inside our circle didn't really even know what was going on, and it wasn't until a month and a half into our journey, almost exactly a year after Entangled, that Familie Zuerst rolled in, kind of explaining what was going on. By that time, the souls who were paying attention to what I wrote had wandered off because it had been so long since any words hit the ether. After I finally did get something written, I did a decent job of updating, in my vague and poetically obscured way, about every week, until there was another gap between August and January, a gap we lovingly call San Diego and caretaking for Gram Cracker. The adventure on pause, but feeling over, as we spent months around Christmas flailing and searching for connection and purpose outside of caretaking, in a city that was not on our list of places to hang out for 6+ months.

Maybe I need to learn to tell better stories? Maybe I tell stories perfectly fine and I need to manifest more readers who appreciate my take on everything? Maybe everything happens the way it's supposed to and I should just write when things come up organically, and not force them because something happened? I think my biggest problem with writing about what's going on, especially the significant stuff, is that I always just put it all out there, and I have been gradually learning to experience life as it happens, instead of how it applies to a potential story to tell. I journal more instead of posting everything to social media or blogs. There have been bouts with the negative self talk of my voice not really mattering, but Ive shifted into how important my voice actually is, so I am learning to direct it better. On this platform my voice is obviously just words, but I have been kicking around getting my actual voice out there, right about the time I lost my ability to form words properly because of some traumatic dental work, which I am also yet to write about.

What I do know is that when you don't regularly remind the world that you exist, you cease to exist on some level. I also know that when you don't let your readers know exactly what's going on, they are left to assume and fill in the gaps of the story how their conditioning allows. I am strangely ok with both of those. I think that's why I had a block on doing our travel blog and youtube channel while we were on the road: I don't think I was ready for the pressure of the constant update because I'm so far removed from that, and creativity in general. 

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.

Følg Strømmen

“The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another.”  ~ Henry Miller

The road went by too quick. It was a mad dash from destination to destination like we were finally free and wanted to make the absolute most of it, but we so easily lost our heads in quantity, and lost the quality of our deep breaths. We didn't get many chances to simply stop and look at what we had, then before we knew it we were wishing we had it again, but here we are, doing something beautiful. At our core we want to be of service, whether that be spiritual or creative, or just practical help, and getting the opportunity to care for our family was something we always talked about being a possibility. 

I feel like the universe gave us a beautiful opportunity to just be here and appreciate this, and there is a part of us that has been fighting it because it doesn't look how we wanted everything to look, and we aren't connecting with community the way we so desperately wished for.  There is still time to manifest our beautiful world, but our time with Grandma Spitfire is limited, and we need to remember that. I also need to remember that this is a perfect opportunity to look over everything we accomplished without stacking so much on top of it that I forgot what we did last week.

 

Wait a Minute...

After the last post I was a bit down on myself for being so "negative," but it wasn't negative; it was real and vulnerable human emotion.  That is exactly what I want this place to be. I want anyone in creative or spiritual communities to feel welcome to write here about all their raw human emotions, without judgement or guilt, but with support and open hearts.  So there it is.

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. 

Dkyil Khor

Every moment of our existence is accidentally building the mandalic patterns of our lives. The intricacies of which would be barely recognizable if we were to step out of our bodies and gaze upon the complexities of it all... the unconscious patterns of our every breath. The beauty of a tangible mandala is the meditation that goes into building it, and the ritual destroying of it, only to begin on another. That is kind of the point… circles on circles on circles in life. While the evidence of each of those structures may be destroyed and started over, each one lives on forever within us.

So many times in my life I have attempted to start over because the holes I dug were too deep, searching for a new center of a new pattern, but I usually found that though everything may have looked or felt different, I was still lost in the delicate details of the old pattern, refusing to let it go until I realized some conclusion... some complete pattern and work. What I was actually doing by trying to start over was making the older work that much more complex, and I feel that instead of letting everything go, I am actually dooming myself to the madness of layering all of these individual circles in patterns on top of each other.

I set the expectations on myself too high, too soon in life, and I have wasted my life trying to live up to that madness. I always understood that what we are working toward will never matter as much as what we accomplish while we are getting there, but everything I accomplished just seemed so petty in relation to my expectation, and everything about that is wrong.  I've been at a crossroads for years, but I just can't move. I have always prided myself on being able to be fine regardless of where I am, but I was also working toward something that seems so silly now. There is an energy in me that can't let go of what I'm trying to accomplish, regardless of how much sense I'm given, over and over. There is a part of me that feels all that doubt and... what? Do I give up like my dad did and just live the numb existence that everyone tells me is normal? How does one do that when they are standing in such a complex mandala, and the more they try do destroy it and start over, the more complex it gets?

I've tried writing this post a handful of times, and I just can't get it past this. That's where I'm at... deciding to keep trying or give up, and I hate feeling like this. We were on the road for 3 months and I was just enjoying time with my family. We never found what we were looking for, and instead of saying it doesn't exist, I simply believe that we just haven't found it yet, but it is out there, somewhere. Now we've been in San Diego for six months, and the road, which is severely missed, feels daunting, like an unrealistic ideal all its own.

Every morning I walk Grandma's yard and pull flowers from the lawn, because here they are considered weeds, but to the bees I have to gently shoo away to get to these "weeds", I am a threat to their very existence. 

My goddess is off visiting a friend in the desert, and I've got to get up early to treck to Mexico to get some pretty painful dental work done.

The upside that I am choosing to focus on in all of this is that I finally sat down and cut a little video together, dating way back to the night before we left our little mountain. This probably should've been done a little sooner than 7 months later, but I can at least say that I added another complex circle to my pattern. On top of that, I actually started a YouTube channel with that one video. On top of that, I actually sent an email to Alexa Sunshine Rose to get permission to use her music, and her quick and sweet response gave me some hope in finding the spiritual and creative community that we long for.

“You don’t drown by falling in water. You only drown if you stay there.” ~ Zig Zigler

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. 

Tatramajjhattatā

The new year has arrived, and we are anchored down in Chula Vista, California... which sounds so strange to write down. This was certainly not something we had planned heading out six months ago.  I have done a horrible job writing on the road, and an even worse job writing once we fell off the road, but it was a definite plan to hunker down somewhere for the winter, California just wasn't on our list of options, because part of the point of this journey was to escape here, if only because of the gas prices.

Life takes us places. Rarely do we have much control over that. I don’t feel like we should have any stress or judgement or anything else around it. No matter what you want or plan for or work towards, the universe generally stops you and gives you what you need.We came down here for some functional dental work in the very well documented financial break of Tijuana, Mexico, thinking we would stay with grandma for a week or two, but we quickly realized that grandma wasn’t getting the attention or care that she needed at 94, so we found ourselves called to spend more time here. It wasn’t an easy decision with the family, but it was an easy decision to spend more time with grandma. Now instead of feeling like this or that Christmas might be the last time we see her, we see her everyday, watching her mental and physical ebbs and flows.

We set out on the road June 1st with a vague plan, but pretty much the entire time out there it didn’t feel right to me, and I’m not sure why. Not that it felt wrong, or that it wasn’t what we expected. Something just felt ….. off, just about everywhere we went. I, of course, am not the best at articulating feelings like that, so I just felt it the best I could. We went to some beautiful places, that I personally feel like we didn’t truly appreciate, and we will go to a lot more beautiful places with different heads. I have a tendency to just keep my head down and keep going, but our time on the road felt very rushed, like there was always a deadline or agenda, and that never allowed any of us to just be where we are. That made me feel quite lost most of the time. 

Even the posts I did do on the road were written over days in different locations, during brief moments of calm in the chaos and going. I was never able to strike a balance between being present with my family and taking time to process all that into words and photos, forget going through video footage and editing. Even now, I have an overwhelming desire to go off into the woods by myself for a couple days. It wasn’t difficult to put my creative drive on the shelf to be wherever we happen to be, but the actual work is personal, if that makes any sense.

One thing that I know was silently looming over my head on the journey was how much work I still had to do organizing and sorting through all my photos and files. The plan was to get a platform solidified at the start of the journey, but all of my creative preparation was put way back on the list behind all of the practical preparation. So, right now has been a great opportunity to finish all of that up, which there is still a lot to do, but I've finally got the time to breathe and figure it all out.

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. 

Happy New Year, all you beautiful souls!