Learning to Speak Light Language
Body Re-Enchantment with Pua'aehuehu and a Poem
Directions for Living On a Mountain
A rain veil rises up the mountain.
Far below the sea softens.
Behind a cloud screen,
petals pivot,
open wider in the sun’s direction.
From the daybed,
I listen to rain tap-dance on the roof.
The dance step merge into
women singing in the river,
and then the river’s own song
moving through tunnels
on currents of dark blood.
On Earth it’s easy to believe
we are the ones in orbit, not the sun.
We are gravity’s story,
falling towards our inevitable ending.
The flowers remember,
following the sun without shame
or blame when the light goes its own way.
It’s just the way it is on Earth. Collapsing
orbits, fire at the end and the origin.
I remember how my body burned against yours.
Let me give up the search
for the meaning of loss, memory
I release you as I remember
how even my story began in the stars.
Half-asleep, I toss on the daybed
while rain reverses the story.
Coming down the mountain
to meet the rising rain
I remember
how we swam in the creek
so cold my lips turned blue.
Frozen kisses. My lips turned blue.
How could I ever regret
knowing I followed
the sound of wild water
to the source of tears?
We don’t need to know
where we’re going
say the clouds.
Hello Readers,
I have so many ideas and notes for essays jotted down I wasn’t sure, this week, where to start. I’m feeling the pressure of time-that there’s not enough of it in this modern world where so much of it is directed toward making a living, that I don’t have enough space to bring all my creations into being, but I don’t feel frustrated or down at the moment. More in a state of observation of time itself-how it expands when I’m doing what I love. Maybe if I write even more, time will expand to the point where I create more of it. That seems like a worthwhile venture.
This week I’m also sharing a description of my latest offering, Body Re-Enchantment. The following is an expanded version of what began as web copy to let potential participants know what I’m cooking up. I expect to be offering these sessions in person in Kona on Moku o Keawe by mid-February. If you are in the neighborhood, look me up. The whales are around these days, too, supporting us with sonar frequencies, and hopefully cheering me on as I continue with the editing of Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, which will hopefully be published by Whale Road Press in September 2023.
Body Re-Enchantment: Esoteric Bodywork
Access your body’s primal memories of wholeness, interconnectedness and wonder in this innovative session combining bodywork, ritual, sound healing and nervous system recalibration to nature’s original organic codes with the help of pua’aehuehu, esoteric Hawaiian fern medicine.
Each customized session begins with self-attunement through the Hawaiian practice of ku like, a simple process for connecting with one’s nau and pu’uwai, the energetic feminine and masculine centers correlating in the physical body to the sacral area and the heart.
Through connection with your feminine and masculine, we’ll determine in conversation what ferns want to assist in our ceremony and you’ll be offered the option to take an oral dose of the medicine or medicines, or to have them applied topically in the bodywork portion of the session. Medicinal hydrosols, tinctures and anointing oils are from Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals on Maui.
Integration of the fern medicine will be facilitated through gentle lomi lomi massage with hot stones, myofascial release, craniosacral therapy, anointing of the ‘iwi ‘iwi kuamoa (spinal chord) with fern medicinals, sound healing with crystal bowls and toning and the transformational currents I run through my hands.
These customized sessions have the potential to invoke deep cellular change on a quantum level. Not only your life will be changed. As you realign with the organic, your healing is a contribution to humanity, Earth and the Cosmos.
As someone who has worked directly with the ferns for the past three years, I know the potency of this medicine firsthand and am continually astonished at its precision, power and subtlety. You’ll have the opportunity to release and integrate traumas and emotional and mental blocks on all levels and lifetimes while receiving compassionate touch supported by the ferns.
Through my work with Ke’oni Hanalei of Pōhala Hawaiian Botanicals, I have recovered my memory of my Draco lineage, which enables me to scan the energetic emotional body of clients to see where blockages have settled and assist in releasing them through ritual and the grace of my hands. I also carry the gifts of the Sirius lineages to heal through sound frequency and the power of water, the carrier of memories and the universal solvent. I already knew I had these abilities, but in my sharing of remembering where they came from, I offer you the opportunity to expand your story of humanity’s origins and purpose that will inspire your own memories to arise as your own evolutionary guides.
Why Enchantment?
To enchant is to cast a spell, to beguile. In western culture, it often has a negative connotation of manipulation or is dismissed as a fantasy, but the root meaning of the word tells us why Body Re-Enchantment can make a significant contribution in your own life and our collective. The Proto-Indo-European root of the word enchantment is “to sing in.” Body Re-Enchantment reanimates the body with song, the frequency of Creation acknowledged by both mystics and scientists.
More On Pua’aehuehu
Preserved in the DNA of ferns, pua’aehuehu, is a body of knowledge on emotional intelligence as a path to ascension and completion of the human experiment on Earth. This path was delineated by people known as the Mū, the original planetary civilization, remnants of which have survived to the current day in the Mū Hawaiian culture.
Because ferns had reached evolutionary stasis, they were the perfect avatars for preserving this wisdom when it became clear human civilization was going to be destroyed by catastrophic earth changes. The ferns volunteered for this task and have been carrying this intelligence with much grace and alluring beauty. Who hasn’t been moved by the sight of forest floor covered in ferns, or been moved to sit in their shade on a hot summer day? Who hasn’t been fascinated by their feathered fractals?
Up until very recently, fern medicine, due to the destruction of so much in Hawai’i through colonialism, has not been widely known outside the Mū Hawaiian culture. The ike was declared kapu and kept secret. This has changed in the past few years as Ke’oni Hanalei, whose memory of his Mū lineage has remained intact, has begun to share these teachings as a contemporary mystic in ways that are applicable to modern humans. I have worked directly with Ke’oni in mentorship since 2021 and recently collaborated with him in a workshop on Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic, as a spell-caster and poet.
Where Are We Going?
I don’t have a definitive answer to that. I think our destinations are all bespoke, but I can say some of us are already standing in the crossroads, some of us are approaching with varying degrees of fear, awe, resistance, urgency and wonder. But we will all soon be placed in the center where the roads converge as technology and the organic merge.
Instead of struggling or choosing one side over the other, we have the choice to collaborate with both by understanding our individual contracts and designing our relationships with the mecha (AI) and the organic in order to fulfill the terms established by our souls in order to further our evolution. Once we excavate those contracts from amnesia, we can choose to accept their terms and abide by them, or we can re-negotiate. This doesn’t mean we’ll get what we want, but we do have the option to make our getting of what we need, to paraphrase the Stones, more friendly. In other words, don't be dismayed by the height of the mountain or the slippery slopes. Step carefully, buy some good boots, and begin your journey in whatever way calls to you. You can even go backwards or downhill if that’s the direction you fell pulled. As individuals, we have the power of agency, and as more of us exercise it, our waning culture will evolve into its next expression.
Currently, technology is the louder voice, but the sound of running water is always singing beneath its garish hum. Participation with fern medicine, whether it be through ingesting or anointing with the medicines made from the ferns’ avatars or through direct communion with the ferns in nature or meditation is the most potent plant medicine I know. It’s the most potent medicine, period.
You can study the teachings Ke’oni transmits on Instagram at @pohala_hawaiian_botanicals or on his website-I certainly have- but genuine transformation won’t come through memorizing what Ke’oni says, though I’ve certainly enjoyed all I’ve heard or read.
Instead, the ferns will begin to speak directly to you through the way your life unfolds. You’ll be presented with the opportunities to move through the lessons you need to complete the particular emotion or quality held by the fern on your path to aloha mā, self-reflective love. I guess if you were a Buddhist you’d call this enlightenment, or a yogi would say they’d reached nirvana. A Knight of the Round Table would say they’d found the grail. A Christian mystic like Hildegard of Bingen or Teresa of Avila might say they became one with God. However the story unfolds, the final outcome is the same. Aloha mā.
For me, communication with the ferns has been a path of remembering. Ke’oni will say something and I just know it’s true for me in my bones. The process is a lot like writing a poem. The words labor through me to take their intended form. The more I relax, the more they come into the world with less amnesia, carrying more memory of their potential expression as vehicles of my soul and the animus mundi constructed of words.
In creating this offering, I feel a convergence of my own gifts, earned skills and passions like never before. I come to you with open hands as poet, scholar, bodyworker, visionary, mystic, activist, ocean swimmer, story-carrier and singer.
The title of this essay is one that came to me several years ago as the title for the next book of poems I was going to write. The book has not yet come into being, and I’m not sure it will. Instead, it has shape-shifted into this new body of work I’m sharing in The Corpus Callosum Chronicles and in my in-person sessions, a convergence and a culmination of all I’ve learned so far. In this, it has been a prophecy I saw for myself before I had any idea of who I would be writing to you right now. I have learned to speak light language.
I offer all this as a vessel to carry you across your own inner oceans. Where are we going on this aqua odyssey?
Home. Meet me there. In the body.
For those who are unable to have a session in person, I am currently developing what will become either an online course or mentorship, possibly both, on spell casting called “Circumnavigation of the Po’ai: The Art of Spellcasting.” This work will appeal to both serious writers and anyone who wants to explore their own domain ( po’ai means coven or domain in Hawaiian) through language. Stay tuned for all the details. I hope to launch this on May 1st, Beltaine, and ride the waves of springtime blessing for a beautiful harvest that makes a contribution to our remembrance of our collective goodness and ability to create a more beautiful and just world.
Kō aloha la ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light