it all started when…

I grew up playing with bugs in the backyard. In spring I loved plucking slugs and roly-polys off the underside of rocks, inspecting them with a close and curious eye, giggling and squealing as they crawled and slimed across my small palms.

Running in the sprinkler on summer days, feeling the tickles of grass on my skin as I rolled down hills, laughing the whole way. The callused bark of trees roughing up my soft flesh as I climbed to nestle into their limbs.

In the autumn, piles of leaves by the sidewalk made perfect landing pads for my boisterous leaps. Ladybugs, freckled like me, used my body too as a landing pad, all before opening their armored bodies and unfolding hidden papery wings to flight in the cool air.

My small and well insulated body, floating above the earth on a fresh bed of snowfall. Waving my arms and legs as far as they could go, carving angels into the silent blanket. Mouth open wide, eyelashes swatting, fluttering at incoming snowflakes. Cheeks rosy, lips chapping, teeth chattering, on the face of a smiling happy child.

I grew up in the final breaths of the turn of the century, in a small town graced by the powers of the four seasons. The love I shared with nature at a young age, as most if not all children do, has matured as I have, even in light of the complexities of growing up.

In my early twenties, I was beginning to feel the weight of the world piling onto my generation through immense expectation and doomsday rhetoric, so I lead off in search of something greater, something transcendent, something that could perhaps even save the earth from total destruction. As I watched her oceans poisoned and her forests plowed, the pain became unbearable. Watching, complicity participating in even, the ruination, the disconnection, the raping of this planet — Earth as my friend, my mother, my love, myself. I sought something that could replace earth’s cradle in my heart, so I wouldn’t have to face, or worse - feel - the devastating grief and rage bubbling up within.

I sought escape from this pain by looking for G-d, for enlightenment, for the source of all this magic and madness, for some greater power with the answers, the holy refuge.

My search lead me far and wide, as it often does for the devoted seeker. To spiritual meccas in India and Nepal, to the Holy Land, to hundreds of hours of solitude in Buddhist meditation and to the backcountry for weeks on end. It lead me to medicine and ritual, to ceremonies with witches, with priestesses, with shamans, with Indigenous guides and elders and ultimately with myself. My search led me to dance floors, to car accidents, to studies of herbalism, mythology, the ways of the Wise Women and the occult.

It also lead me down several rabbit holes, through what is known to some as the underworld. Through dissociated journeys in the cosmic wilderness and even into the arms of a man who boldly claimed he himself to be this greater power with the answers I devotionally sought — ha!

Alas, the grace and beauty in the heart of this chaos, and perhaps irony too, was realizing that the road back home to my true self from all this madness was in fact the very path glistening in the gems of wisdom that I had set out in the first place to find! Ah, I must have known all along the cosmic joke was upon me!

On the way home to myself, walking the path of somatic and spiritual integration I finally understood the indispensable value of connection, closeness and intimacy. The sage intelligence and intuition of the body, and the body of earth by extension. The feeling and knowing of what true love is, and the discernment between love and trauma.

This homecoming journey has lead me to what I believe is a universal remedy for the malaise of our times: restorative intimacy with earth, with oneself, and with each other. And a radical romance with life.

Love and peace to all,
Sophie