I am not really feeling it myself, and my friend Natalie doesn’t feel ready for what would be her first ceremony either, and we decide to let the idea go. So, we are sitting in Petite Leon café, meeting with a serendipitous group of enthusiastic plant experts from Mexico city, looking to collaborate in regenerative agriculture and medicinal plant cultivation here in El Pescadero. This is the beginning of something good. And in, out of the blue, pops English Iona. Infinitesimal probability of that happening by chance – time and space thing. She’s picking up Leah (name changed by request. One of the lauded Thirteen Grandmothers) on their way back from Los Cabos airport to La Paz. I see only the back of a little white haired lady, struggling a bit, to get into the back of Iona’s convertible white Mustang.
And here we are, surrounded by the forces of the divine feminine, and I, the only man besides Das, in a group of women, all dressed in white for this full moon night. A curiously diverse, eclectic and slightly odd little group it seems to me. Mercy, Das, Japa and Leah at the head of the rectangular ‘circle’, singing delightfully from the heart, Jamie and Michelle as “helpers”, angelic, priestess archetypes of youthful grace, sitting upright, guarding the spirit temple to my left under the palapa which we all sit.
The ceremony is the most beautiful I have attended. The music, the vocal harmonies – tender, loving, divine. Truly. And unexpectedly, the neighbours happen to be having a party tonight too. To me, it is a curious fascination, to be an outsider listening in, invisibly in the moonlit night, to the culture of Mexico, into which we have invited ourselves, celebrating itself through progressions of musical genres, intoxicating and intoxicated laughter. Albeit an intrusion into our own process. And the lights. And later, the booming bad bass. And the medicine remains sweet and gentle – if quite underwhelming in any psychotropic effect. And at the end, everyone is chatty and shuffling around while I feel stiff and frustrated and headachey and kinda pissed off and growly by this time, just wanting silence and stillness. Then we all sleep it off, both sides of the fence, as the burgeoning moon rises higher in the night.
We gather for a morning circle of sharing. I express some disappointment. Leah, in her turn, responds with perfect wisdom and grace. “She” gives us (not what we want, but) exactly what we need. I do not particularly concur. All respect, but I like my medicine strong else what’s the point. I’m here to do the journey work.
Iona comes over and quietly says, hey, I have some Bufo (Colorado river toad) I think you might like to try. I do. I have been waiting with years of patience for 5-MeO-DMT to present itself to me, and this, apparently is the right moment. And this is the potent medicine that breaks through and takes me where I need to go – and I do see the divine beauty of the whole process that leads to this moment now, and the weight lifted only by growling through the ceremony and process – crawling through the canal, to be ready, for birthing once more, by the grace of the midwife Iona, the dreadlock shamamma herself.
I appreciate now, the short cut to Bufo facilitated expansion of consciousness is harder to integrate in its short intensity, than the slower journey through the mother plants of Ayahuasca, though both facilitate the same, or similar chemical opening of the doors of perception. I glimpse the primal wound that is the very answer to my question. I feel the resonance in the DNA – generational. The recognition, acceptance and potential for transmutation and transcendence of this otherwise ever present fear – the primal fear at the core of the self. I feel a tortured man on this earth, not without reason, and yet my only simple desire, is to walk in beauty.
Phrases from Rilke’s Wendung – Turning Point, become present in my mind. “the imprisoned lions stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom…” Later I go back and re-read them – and my own ekphrastic response poem, The Return. Wow, yup – a recurring theme. And yet, in Iona’s own reflection of the process she is holding space for, in a little tent containing the cosmos, under the shade of a Neem tree in her garden – the overpowering male story of subjugation, hierarchy and separation – is not the true story. The true story, so long as we are able to see and chose this path, is one of beauty and paradise on earth – the path of the heart.
During a blessing over breakfast, Leah pulls a card for the group process.
True dat. I continue to feel that the work I am doing here and now and overall, building sanctuary from the ground up, largely single handedly to date, this troubled fool, alone in the desert, is all as it must be. And sometimes I lose my way and forget – but I am on a mission, and I am, though I forget sometimes, and am terrified at times, fully supported in this process, by divine providence. “Exactly what we need.” All in its own time. And patience is the greatest virtue of this land.
The epigraph to Rilke’s poem states,
The road from intensity to greatness passes through sacrifice.
Is that what all this is then, I ask myself. I believe there is a kind of greatness that wants to move through me, to facilitate healing in this world – I simply need to continue the process of getting out of my own way. Let go. Listen deeply. Learn to trust ever more, the ground under my feet, to cultivate grace in the face of a troubled self and world at large. To let go of control – as if.
Then, the moon, once more, magnifier of process, introspective dam buster – I watch her slip quietly under our shadow, transforming, ever so slowly, into a deepening three dimensional amber icon of self reflection. Blood moon. Our own shadow revealed in the night.
I recognise that this overall ceremony’s period, process and effect, over 3 days during this eclipse moon, is the most gentle and profound of all. I feel a weight lifted, after over a year of grappling with self and place and story, there is light on the horizon. All is well.
