A little more about me…
Untethered and free-range, as my soul, I landed in the US by sheer serendipity, …and love. Never thinking of living here, I ended up in Southern California for several years, sharing life and creativity, and the pursuit of beauty, …with a French citizen, bien sûr. What are the odds!
Beauty was the symbolic language imbuing daily life, informing my own healing and any of my offerings. Art, was prayer into matter; art, the condensed shape of my devotion…
Because as much as a precocious world traveler, I’ve also been an explorer of the uncharted territories of Spirit, occasionally flying with the surprised wings of an unwitting mystic. The veil is thin, and from time to time, a tear can reveal tiny glimpses of the Unfathomable. That, for which religions have claimed ownership, fighting each other, using swords of dogma, or worse... That, which is your Divine right.
Perhaps better attempts at apprehension might be by ways of contemplation, poetry, or art?… :)
So even if I’ve been an award winning artist, I am more of an anonymous Keeper of Beauty... I’ve been always an intuitive …and a semi-closeted healer. I’ve been an accidental mystic, and an impenitent Earth lover... And I truly relish when able to hold a hot paradox between my hands.
I was criticized or mocked for being a day dreamer, which was both perhaps a symptom of early trauma, and also was showing a tendency to fall in between the cracks of daily life, and having little tastes of Spirit… Spontaneous experiences have tended to happen in nature, my preferred, direct portal to Truth. I was always “elemental”, and a little “sun worshiper”, as well as a “tree person”, specially connected, marveled and held by the botanical realms, and secretly talking to everything (I still do!).
I lived many years at my maternal grandparents, who had remarkable green thumbs even in a regular city lot. My grandfather cared for beautiful flowers in the small yard, and my grandmother sold her own creations in a little plant shop, while passing on her proverbial nourishment wisdom on each meal, miraculously feeding, and keeping healthy, not only her own 11 (yes, that’s right, ELEVEN) children, but usually also a few strays, like me. So around 15 people every day, for years. While as a small child I wasn’t very welcomed in that very busy tiny kitchen, I carry the essence of the powerful Nourishment Medicine from that lineage. It took me years to realize how profound and important it is.
During school vacations, I’d take an old, rickety blue bus, that precariously negotiated a winding road, at the edge of a cliff, over a dark river. It was the only way to get to the Andean mountain hamlet where my paternal grandparents lived, in a centenary little adobe house. They tended to a handful of cows, and small orchards and vegetable gardens, watered at the time by a pure stream. I used to soak, shivering and blue lipped, in the gelid snowmelt waters of that creek. When the Water Company took it over, and brought the “progress” of chlorine, my grandmother couldn’t take it, and would walk up the hill to get pure water for drinking and for medicinal teas…
A favorite friend in that land, was an old and beautiful walnut tree. I would climb his welcoming , low branches, and hide up in this, my refuge. As I say in a poem, my first sanctuary was wooden. I’d bring a book and a handful of grapes or grandpa’s jerky in my dress pocket. Up there, spellbound, surrounded by majestic mountains, I’d listen to the sound of the breeze through leaves (my favorite music!), my long hair flapping in the Raco winds. I would then declare myself to be “¡la hija del viento!” (the daughter of the wind!)…
I would stay there for hours, until my grandmother would manage to find me… to help her make bread, or churn butter, or go with my grandfather to milk the cow.
Before sunset, I would help him light the evening “brasero”. This was a fire lit in a metal container; eventually, the resulting embers were brought inside to keep us warm, …and perhaps to cheer up the ghosts of melancholy, that were always wandering around, sitting at the beat up table, as permanent uninvited guests, in place of their only two sons, exiled across the ocean.
Often, in the middle of the night, I would wake up to my grandmother’s chronic cough, and to the short wave radio program she carefully fished out of thin air, on her little machine. It was coming from very far away, and was created specially for our country, so we could hear about news about the horrific happening right around us, all censored by the dictatorship.
In spite of those heavy doses of midnight tragedy, these were, nevertheless, the poetic times before TV, where important entertainments were fire and star gazing!… It took me many years to know the official names of some of the constellations, as I new them by my grandmother’s nicknames, the 3 sisters, the 3 little seeds, the 7 shiny ones... I still call them that, at times.
A primal, elemental connection to Pachamama, Mother Earth, was a key source of protection, nurturance and inspiration, essential in challenging times as a child, and crucial for my healing, later on. A contemplative disposition has come with a need for solitude and silence, and even periods of full hermithood in nature, where I’ve practiced the adamant labors of a Keeper of Beauty, and of an Earth Healer...
That earthy approach to life and health was strongly present in my lineage. It was rooted in perennial awe and gratitude towards Nature’s beauty, and its bounty. Simple, wholesome, fresh foods, (a piece of fruit was a wonderful dessert!), a fundamental, empirical understanding of Nourishment, and the use of natural approaches to healing, such as herbs.
There was a certain low key, implicit devotion to the Earth, just as there was a tacit acceptance of the holiness of the body, that I see as a quiet understanding of the immanence of the Sacred. I am so grateful for having been exposed to values of simple, innocent devotion towards Earth.
Forgetfulness of these values has brought dire consequences for humanity as a whole… Ecocide and other wide spread tragedies, the result of this disconnection; from Earth, from body, from each other… What in the current “Trauma Talk” I would maybe describe as “Collective Dissociation”.
Indeed, I feel trauma, along with seemingly dissonant philosophical, political and religious paradigms, have kept pushing us out of the first-hand temple of our bodies, away from the (immanent) Sacred. Away from a felt, personal (and sovereign) sense of Life and Spirit.
Extreme materialism, the way of high consumerism and greed, has led us to a place where planet, people, beings, are treated as commodities. It has lead to a blatant disregard and destruction of the environment, and to a normalized state of affairs of ingrained violence, with enormous casualties in terms of human and other lives. And I feel this way of existing, a form of extremely short sighted narcissism, can even be enabled and supported by some views of “transcendental” spiritual paradigms, inclined to fully detach from this immanence of the Sacred in Matter, in Earth, in all that is, in each of us… This appears to some as a seemingly paradoxical combo, but can be quite devastating.
Why do I speak of this, …in spite of my shyness? For many reasons. And as an offering to You.
All of this is at the root of my pervasive sense of integrity; so it informs my Art, as well as my Healing, wherever you set the elusive line between them.
For me, an intuitive sense of (the immanence of) the sacred, a deep connection to nature, allowed a willingness to remain present in this planet, and in my body, against all odds. In spite of aspects of my cultural background, and the gaping wounds of trauma. In spite of excruciatingly sharp senses, and a wide palette of feeling, that made the experiences of pain all the more intense. There was an early determination, a stubbornness perhaps, to experience life in sober awareness, and in the first person.
These elements brought about a beautiful, albeit precarious, and sometimes lonely tightrope walk; dancing to my own drum and to the mindfulness (or bodyfulness!) bells of flesh and clay. This dance, this bell, keeps calling me away from inflicting my trauma on others, and from the various forms of numbness and dissociation trauma can lead to, from plain oblivion, to addictions, to intellectual or spiritual bypassing, etc... It points me, over and over, to a tender, embodied devotion; to a child-like awareness of the beauty of life and this planet, (a certain innocence if you will), and a felt sense of the Divine, that for me, speaks loudest in Nature…
To me, Beauty ignites Devotion. And the Beauty of Earth, calls me back to the humility of Clay. To the generous, courageous willingness of being incarnate beings, at this time, on this planet. Soul & Soil.
Beauty is a slippery slope to the sometimes bloody portal of the Heart, where Love dwells, along with truth, and freedom. Beyond dry spells, dark nights, sharp bumps on the path. The place where profound alchemy happens, bringing transformation, both personally and collectively.
Crossing a threshold of Beauty, any othering, destructive, or murderous compulsions will vanish, with an accidental taste of how YOU, intersect with ANOTHER, and with ALL...
Something people have been able to see throughout the ages, with the help of entheogen sacred medicines, or by sheer Grace, in mystical experiences. Outside of dogma or storytelling; as empirical knowledge, as a felt sense.
May my offerings ignite
reverence and devotion
towards our Earth Mother.
May we walk to her heartbeat,
delighting in her gentle rhythms.
May we know ourselves
as indivisible part
of her immense beauty.
Thank you for being here, I see You.
Luna
© LUNA
