Light the candle
When opening a session, an email, a consultation, I begin with a greeting, an introduction. For you to already be here, perhaps we have met already in person, perhaps we have a strange and liquid parasocial bond through these screens that capture our attention. Perhaps you already know some things about me, as a person, as an artist, as a herbalist, as an organizer. Maybe you have followed my instagram account, watching the decor I carve into such beautiful bodies, some glimpses beyond the studio. Maybe we are old friends, have travelled great distances together, hitchhiked along highways or building gardens or washing dishes deep in the woods. Consider what you know, about who I am, about the work I am here to do, along with me.
Peripeteiah.
How do you say it?
What does it mean?
I’ll tell you how I got here.
There was a quiet yard. The apple trees there were beloved, if under pruned. If you walked out onto the porch, coffee steaming in your hand, and descended, it became a garden, we recognized. Piles of matter grew bushes and herbs, wood chip pathways woven between them. They seemed like islands of potential in the Saanich suburbia. It was clear that many disparate, connected and unrelated hands had worked on this growing space. The cats moved easily in the expanse, between raspberry canes and under lines of string lights, some working, some relics. Following them out towards the towering sequoias, a small smell of burnt wood from the shell of an old shed foundation let you know that last night, whoever came here had burnt some things, drank some things, laughed about some things in company or alone. The oil barrels at the back of the yard held hides, tanning, and to the left of the wood chip path there was an ancient chicken coop, more succulents growing on its roof than the best displays at botanical gardens. The path led out to a rotten fence, repaired many times by different minds and materials, into what we might call an “empty lot”. To me, it was home to the Hawthorn. Their thorny branches held onto the morning fog, grasses high and dry in my memory, frosty and full of ghosts. The Hawthorn its self crouched like scorpions in this field, enclosing secrets and poisons and dreams. There is a little hole, under the largest one, if you look close enough. Maybe you would see the candle burning.
No,
it was a different garden,
another candle,
another time,
I would come home to a shed, entombed in blackberry vines, in this place. Parented by the solitude and psychic clarity of hermitage, the fire was lit. Bed strewn with books, research, meaning making between ancient symbols and arts and medicine practices and the absolute devastation of where ever we find ourselves now. The tangle of people, trying to fabricate connection through all the ruin. The hole inside of me where my culture and family and future should be. I asked the plants to grow me some new limbs, to help me transform the brokenness I felt through tincture, poultice, salve. It was working, it was getting deeper and deeper, and then -
We were getting evicted.
She urged me. Figure it out. And I found it.
THE PATHWAY OF AVERSION
Understood as, the reversal of fortune.
The pathway of aversion, and the challenge to walk it. In aversion lies a key to power, and to consciously integrate it, shall we reverse our fortune. In confronting my aversion, I entered the sanctum of my personal abomination, into the true place of the things I did not want to do. The invitation to identify my weaknesses, my complaints, my excuses, and move towards them, not away. This pathway, of occult herbalism, asks us to walk the hedges of our minds, I walked and walked. The internet, consumer culture, cell phone, betrayal of time, what I do for money, hedges, hedges. And then I found it, the hole in the hedge.
Can you see the candle, now?
