the journey

I spent my childhood searching for sanctuary in the wildest places I could find, soothed time and again by the bugs and trees in my yard and the birds and clouds in the sky. But as a teenager living in a city, I sank fast into depression: every high school project on colonization or war or pesticides or factory farms or clearcutting or climate change was another blow to my faith in my species. My confusion grew when my peacebuilder father returned from warzones with reports of carnage beyond comprehension; I couldn’t reconcile my culture’s cruelty with my intuition about the intrinsic beauty of humanity. I felt lonely and out of place in the world of concrete and plastic and roads and tvs and shopping malls—but everyone else seemed fine, so I figured that what I was often told was true: I was too sensitive.

Then a friend took me to a Grateful Dead show, someone put LSD on my tongue, and the limits of the world dissolved. In the blissful alchemy of psychedelics, ecstatic dance, electrifying music, and kind and wild community, I got a glimpse of a possibility more radiant and thrilling than anything I had encountered before, and something was lit inside me that stayed lit, even back on the hard pavement of Ottawa, and in the fluorescence and linoleum and plastic of my school—now I knew who the freaks were, I knew I was one of them, and we could wink at each other, and sneak out to sun and grass between classes and pass each other a pipe, and summon enough magic to endure the artificiality and disconnectedness of our world.

I graduated from high school as soon as I could and hopped on a purple bus with a bevy of brilliant misfits for a soul-expanding summer of Dead shows and Rainbow gatherings. In August I flew west to British Columbia to begin a BA in Anthropology at Simon Fraser University, but I withdrew before classes began; I needed space and time to find out who I could be without walls or schedules. I hitchhiked to Nelson B.C. and got a job picking apples, and when the cold wind came, my boyfriend and I rode with truckers to California.

My adventure was less rebellion, more rite of passage: I was searching for something I couldn’t articulate, something I knew I wasn’t going to find in the concrete boxes of the university. I wanted magic and flow and mystery and connection; I wanted the company of people like the barefoot mystics I met at the Rainbow gathering, those feral kids who felt like kin. I wanted to get away from the culture I had grown up in, this culture that felt so false, so violent, so lost. I wanted elders and initiation and a life of meaning. All I knew was that I had to leave, and let the flow carry me where it would. So with grubby packs on our backs, old guitars over our shoulders, and a couple thousand dollars I had saved up working in restaurants through high school, we followed the birds south.

One day, at a festival in Big Sur, I learned some yoga, and it felt like coming home. I had been working at a restaurant in Santa Cruz but I kept getting messages directing me to Maui, so when a friend hooked me up to volunteer at a Sufi gathering on the island, I bought a one way ticket. After Sufi camp, I attended an intensive Ashtanga yoga course with Tim Miller. Plugged into a lovely community, and smitten with Maui’s sweetness, I stayed, and my infatuation with yoga matured into daily practice.

I got a job in an herbal apothecary and made enough to stay on Maui and spend my summers tramping about the west coast, to festivals and gatherings with my magical friends. But after two years I started feetling restless. I wanted to do more than wander with a backpack and guitar, doing sun salutations on beaches, nibbling mushrooms in redwoods, salvaging crumbs out of dumpsters. I had never stopped hearing the cry of the earth and feeling the pain of the world, and it was clear to me that my gallivanting about was a privilege that was only as good as my commitment to transform all I learned and received into service. A generous rockstar friend, moved by my devotion to yoga and nature, offered to pay for me to go to any university I chose.

I enrolled at Prescott College, and spent two years studying environmental science—I figured this track would give me the skills to defend nature from the attacks of my culture. But it reminded me of why I had hated science in high school, ever since my grade 11 biology teacher handed out scalpels and frogs’ eyes, and I fled in a hot blur of tears. My science classes at Prescott were more of the same—cold metal and plastic rooms, and heavy textbooks full as facts that, in their determination to nail the point, completely missed it. I was repelled by the premise of objectivity, the assumption of superiority, the attitude of entitlement, the certainty that the earth was ours to dissect and control for the purpose of advancing our agenda.

Fuck that, I thought; if this is science, I’m out. I’ll be a yogi instead. A yogi who swears. I’ll help people wake up to the fact that nature is a living, sentient, glorious, indomitable divinity that can not be reduced to the sum of her parts, no matter how advanced our degrees or sharp our weapons—and so are we. I’ll be a guide who walks with people into the wild and helps them remember what nature always tells us when we listen—that control and progress are goals that are will destroy us, but connection is the path to a life of meaning.

I transferred to Naropa’s environmental studies program but even that felt too confining, so I went rogue and explored connections between body and soul, culture and nature, and mysticism and creativity from interdiscplinary perspectives. Inspired by Joanna Macy, Malidoma Somé, David Abrams and Chellis Glendinning, I created an Ecopsychology curriculum—long before the program existed—that included deep ecology, transpersonal psychology, indigenous wisdom traditions, nature-based rituals, Jewish mysticism, Buddhist meditation and social justice.

In 1999 I was introduced to the Santo Daime, a syncretic tradition that hails from the Brazilian Amazon, in which elements of mystical Christianity and Yoruba mediumship meet indigenous Amazonian ayahuasca traditions, in ceremonies called works. That fall I joined an expedition into the Amazon led by Padrinho Alfredo, the spiritual leader of the Daime, beginning an immersive apprenticeship in plant medicine, music and ceremony that deepened over many years and journeys.

In 2001, after completing a massage training at the Esalen Institute, I prepared to fly to Rio to be with Baixinha, a leader in the Umbandaime tradition. This gnome-like elder only reached my shoulders, and I’m small—yet Baixinha was one of the most spiritually immense souls I had ever met. The night before my flight I found out that my dad was in intensive care. Plans shattered, I flew north the next morning instead of south. My father died, and my world ended.

I fled to Boulder and tried to go to Daime works, but the guardians got impatient with the depth and timelessness of my sadness, and kept pushing me to stand up and sing when all I could do was fall and keep falling through the darkest galaxies. At a party at a friend’s house, I met my queer psychedelic angels. They fed me MDMA and held me without judgement as I was annihilated by grief. The next morning we went to the river, and the water washed us and made us new. That September the planes hit the towers, the country erupted in resistance, and I joined thousands marching for peace. Between protests I went to poetry slams, and joined a diverse crowd who ranted and prayed and channeled spirits in three minute poems. Discovering poetry as activism, therapy and ceremony, I wrote like never before. I had always scribbled in journals but this was a different kind of writing than anything I had ever done; the more I held my pen, the more I understood that it was one of my keys to healing and freedom.

This became my world: performing slam poetry, dodging tear gas at protests, eating ecstacy and dancing and flying and being opened and pulverized by the gods of grief, and then biking to the river at sunrise, and washing it all away in her waters. Slam poetry wasn’t paying much though; I needed a job. A friend connected me with an internship at Free Speech TV,  where I joined a team of activists advocating for human rights and environmental justice. But they couldn’t hire me since I was a Canadian and I was weary of being a hand to mouth artist. I moved to Vancouver to study digital media. After a couple of years, dreams led me to Portland to reconnect with the Santo Daime community. I met a documentary producer at a work and he hired me. The company was too small to provide a visa but the risk seemed worth it: I had a job and a spiritual community I was devoted to. The documentary company barely payed so I printed t-shirts with my art and sold them out of the back of my car.

After visiting family in Norway the next summer, I was pulled aside at the Portland airport. Armed border guards ushered me into a room, interrogated me, scolded me for living and working “illegally”, and shipped me north. This was bad timing. One of the thirteen grandmothers was on her way to Portland, and I was supposed to play guitar in her ceremonies. Plus I had met a boy. After a few days in Canada I weaseled across the border. The boy and I flew to Brazil to spend several months with Daime communities in the Amazon, then returned to Cascadia and got pregnant. 

When Teja was two, I completed a yoga teacher training program at 8 Limbs Yoga Centers in Seattle. A year later we began our odyssey in search of a community to call home. After visiting the Sacred Valley in Peru, we found an ecovillage in Costa Rica, on the banks of a river that won our hearts. We bought a lot in the jungle and I designed our house, which we spent the last two years building with local, natural, and salvaged materials. I have been engaged in a deep study of permaculture and village-building, and facilitating weekly sacred music song circles. In my occasional free moments, between homeschooling the nine year old and wrangling the toddler, I write.

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