The Waves Beyond the Waves
Some Introductions Are In Order
Good Evening Readers,
I’m offering up an extra post this week since I’m behind on posts due to my slow integration of the 8th principle of the oscillation of magic in order to move closer to completing The Art of Spellcasting. But I do feel it’s coming soon! For readers who want to catch up on the series while I’m integrating, Parts 1-7 are all here in the archives. I will also be sending all paid subscribers a PDF book of the whole series, with revisions and comments when it’s complete, so if you’ve been thinking about upgrading to paid, now’s a good time to jump in.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share the introduction to Piko, which if you haven’t read the book yet, gives you an idea of the book’s themes. It also serves as an intro to many of the concepts I talk about in The Corpus Callosum Chronicles like Heka, pua’aehuehu, and Mū culture. In the first year or so of this Substack, I laid out definitions on these subjects, but as I’ve continued to write, I’ve chosen not to bog down the narrative with defining them every time. I realize newer readers may have no idea what I’m talking about! The intro to Piko will help with that. Feel free to also drop a question in the comments or email me directly by responding to this letter if you want clarification. Happy to spread the gospel of Mū and Heka!
Links to purchase Piko or leave a review on Goodreads or Amazon are at the bottom of this letter. They really help bump the algorithm, so if you’ve got a minute to help me out, I would be so appreciative. Without further ado, here’s the promised intro:
Introduction to Piko: A Return to the Dreaming
Once upon a time people believed a culture was maintained and a life could be saved by stories and ceremony. Some still do. I am one of those people, a living testament to how story can heal a sick body and a damaged soul.
Once I would have begun this ceremony by reciting my lineage in order to place myself in time and space and invoke the guidance of my ancestors going back to the stars, but I am the descendant of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic, migrants who left their villages for reasons not passed down, a daughter of lost forests.
I don’t know what motivated my ancestors to leave Europe for an unknown land. Maybe some were just adventurous spirits, but more likely most left because they had to. Perhaps there was a famine, or they were persecuted for their political and religious beliefs. Maybe, like so many migrants, they wanted more opportunities for their children. Whatever the case, they claimed what didn’t belong to them, nearly erasing the stories and cultures of the land they occupied. Turtle Island, where the Woman Who Fell from the Sky found refuge, became North America, named for the Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci.
I feel the loss of what my ancestors took without permission, and I feel the loss of what they left behind—the fern-spun song of the spring where they gathered water, the stream just outside the village lined with curly dock and cow parsnips where spiderwebs sparkled at dawn, the rivers they followed to the ports where they boarded ships with all their worldly goods to be carried over the edge of a map to the place marked “Here be dragons.”
I invoke my ancestors now through a bloodstream, rich and pulsing. I honor the severed umbilical cord of my lineage by providing it now with fertile ground so my ancestors’ lineage can complete its potential through me. I am the ground. I am their legacy, and if I am the result of a forgotten lineage, it’s up to me to remember where we came from. As I remember, I banish this amnesia, with your permission—for us all.
On April 1st, 2021, I sat at the edge of two small anchialine ponds in the Pu’uhonua o Hōnaunau, the Place of Refuge, on Moku o Keawe, known in modern times as the Big Island, and told stories to the water from many cultures: Hawaiian, Haitian, Irish, Inuit, Greek, Sumerian, and Shinto. Day after day, I wove myself into the place with words. I opened my senses. I watched. I listened. I smelled, touched, and tasted. I felt... and I wrote.
As the ceremony evolved I found myself weaving my own lived experience of trauma into the narrative along with observations on the climate crisis, ecocide, and the legacy of colonialism in Hawai’i. This book is the resolution of my own trauma through reconnection with nature and the words here are the result of the sacred exchange that occurred between me and the elements.
My wish is for this book to activate your own internal compass. Everyone’s path will be different as we collectively navigate the massive transformations occurringnow on Earth. We all have important parts to play, but the directives must come from within. We can no longer rely on outside forces to tell us what to do.
This book is grounded in Heka, Mū Hawaiian magic. Those of us conditioned by Western culture to view magic as something fanciful, may not realize it’s actually a system with principles and rules that, much like a scientific formula, enable usto produce concrete, measurable results.
According to Heka, a spell consists of three parts: invocation, banishment and administration. This formula is a law of nature, a cosmological constant, that governs creation on Earth. Heka is both science and ceremony, a means of creation through holistic consciousness using both brain hemispheres.
What could our planet become if we bridged the gap between logic and imagi-nation and channeled the unified power of our brains? Born in a left-brain, masculine dominant culture that worships logic and relegates imagination to fantasy, I’m not advocating for a return to the feminine right-brain. I’m proposing an advance to the holistic, that we cultivate an androgynous vision and expand our concept of creation beyond our current limited materialistic view to include ceremonies and spells. As each one of us aligns our consciousness with the highest good of all life on Earth and beyond, we shall invoke the qualities necessary to move into homeostasis, banishing whatever we discover that keeps them from manifesting on Earth. Sometimes those qualities may sweep broadly across our whole culture, but more often they will be aspects of ourselves that need to shift and evolve. Every human on Earth is essential to the whole. Individual actions matter.
I may not know the stories or the ways of my ancestors when they were still immersed in an indigenous consciousness—knowing themselves and their place in the cosmos through relationships to plants, rivers, streams, deer, bear, and boar, but I am here now. I am proof of my lineage, and while I may long for what was lost, I will no longer define my life by it. I will use the body my ancestors gave me to learn the stories directly from nature. I claim connection with the stars and proclaim my lineage through the living entity of a language sourced from within my bones and blood, held within the greater matrices of forest, ocean, lava field, and waterfall.
Words are spells. My hope is that this book will help humans reconnect to our primal origins and realign with our divine potential through surrendering to the greater powers of nature. All around us, even in cities, pigweed pokes up through sidewalk cracks, pigeons offer weather reports from peregrine falcons soaring high above skyscrapers, stones carrying the deep dreaming of Earth’s molten core envelop passengers on the subway, and underground rivers are still in touch with theclouds, and wherever water came from in the first place. Everything we need to save the world is right here. We just need to believe in ourselves.
Where do stories come from? Many aboriginal and indigenous people today say they are the voice of Earth herself, and believe that telling stories is an essential role in keeping the balance between human culture, our home planet, and the cosmos. Awell-known example of this today would be the Shipibo people of the Amazon, who say their icaros are direct transmissions from the plant medicine ayahuasca. Although many modern cultures have lost their stories, if it’s true they come from beyond human sources, they could still exist and are waiting to be resurrected and broadcast through a human voice box. In the meantime, thousands are still with us, passed on through the oral tradition and preserved in books. We need these stories.
I have witnessed in hundreds of people, the craving for deeper connection, and held space for the individual griefs of this collective loss through years of teaching, traveling, and working with clients as a bodyworker on the table and in the water. One thing I’ve learned from all my experiences, is the mind will only get us so far. Piko: A Return to the Dreaming, moves beyond the intellect and its explanations and rational-izations. Reading it requires some work. This is not a linear narrative moving like a line down the highway at top speed, it’s a meandering dirt road. At times, it may not even be a road. I write this way in order to invoke embodied participation on your part. Because it is a spell, be forewarned that it will require vigilance. If you choose to allow the words to penetrate you, you may be moved to your own invocations. Remember, any invocation must be balanced equally by a sacrifice. I can tell you I had to sacrifice my own sense of inadequacy over and over again during the ceremony and in the process of writing this book. Every time doubts come up again, I administer to themby asking why they are here and if there are any actions they want me to take in the world. In this way, I show my commitment to my kiakahi, my purpose.
It’s important to me to give proper credit and outright gratitude to
, whose book, Wolferland, was the inspiration for my ceremony and book. Reading the story of Martin’s 101-day vigil on Dartmoor in Devon, England, is my idea of athriller. Martin is a pioneer who uses images to invoke his readers to explore new territory. Without Wolferland and Martin’s body of work, written and oral, mine might not exist. I hope this book honors what he has so generously passed down.Anyone who has been blessed to listen to Martin tell a story, will know the experience is both bespoke and collective. For over ten years I experienced this by the shore of Lake Damariscotta at the Great Mother Conference in Maine. Not only did his words shine light on my wounds and triumphs, they did the same for everyone else in the hall. Every year, as the week unfurled, the events of the stories he told permeated oureveryday interactions. The “conference” was really an alchemical crucible of the highest order and I am forever changed by it.
Ironically, it’s hard not to reduce the impact of our shared experiences at the Great Mother Conference with words, especially a linear account of what happens during the week. The best way to describe it is mycelial. As the story evolves you individually, it’s also evolving the other hundred or so folks sitting in the hall. When the fungal threads reconvene, as they inevitably do, the convergence evolves the stories, too, keeping them alive in the fertile ground of human bodies who have perhaps learned a little about how to navigate like a blind mole under layers of living soil. In this way, it’s the linear narrative that is proven to be the fantasy.
In Piko, I hope to incite this same process in the reader by bypassing the flat highway and driving us on a curving mountain road of narrative streams and literary techniques. Here you will find a tapestry of memory, poetry, folk tales, reflections, and song lyrics that I hope will keep the reader from the comfortable dissociation of a good read. Although I love a good page-turner, I don’t think we need any more books to lull us to sleep. I suspect waking up will, in the long run, be much moresatisfying, even if we don’t get the happy Hollywood ending we crave or think we deserve.
At the Great Mother Conference we speak of the “handmade life,” a life lived on purpose according to one’s destiny. I’m hoping that by disrupting the linear narrative readers will awaken to the power of stories to cast spells by becoming aware of the field of transformation that activates when we engage with language in a sacred way. My hope is, as a species, we’ll remember our purpose on Earth and commit to fulfilling that, instead of destroying ourselves and losing this opportunity toparticipate in the evolution of the cosmos through our greatest gift, love.
Finally, despite the illusion of density and permanence we’ve created by following a path away from nature, even today, with the night sky smeared by artificial illumination and smog, there are some cultures where people can recitetheir lineage back to the stars. The names of their ancestors are incantations containing cellular memories that bind the speaker to the truth of where we came from and where we aregoing as the human experiment unfolds. I am fortunate to have encountered one of those people and to be in close relationship with him as my mentor.
Ke’oni Hanalei is a descendant of the Mū Hawaiians, a mysterious people often associated with legends of Lemuria, who lived in the Hawaiian Islands before the Tahitians sailed across the Pacific around 500CE to settle the islands and establish what we know as Hawaiian culture. Most of what I’ve learned from Ke’oni has been transmitted orally, so at times in this book, you’ll hear me say, “Ke’oni says…” without citing a further reference. You’ll find directions to his work in the notes at theback of the book. I would, however, like to clarify that the Mū doctrines and the wisdom of the ferns contained in pua’aehuehu, fern medicine, operate differently than what those of us educated in conventional Western school systems are used to. They are not something to be memorized and applied, they are an activation. Much of what I learned from the ferns can thus be seen as remembering, and this book is my direct testimony about what they continue to teach me.
Lemuria was an ancient civilization. The Mū however, are still here. According to oral records, Mū, which predates Sumeria and Egypt, is one of the seed civilizations on Earth. Traces of it are still found in symbols around the globe. Basically, if you’re alive now you are Mū.
Through the medium of pua’aehuehu, Ke’oni shares Mū teachings on emotional intelligence that have been preserved in the DNA of ferns. Millenia ago, when it became clear human culture was about to be destroyed by catastrophic earth changes resulting from the abuse of technology, 103 known ferns volunteered to encode the Mū teachings in their spores. The ferns were the perfect vessel because they had reached evolutionary stasis, meaning they couldn’t be genetically altered, ensuring the wisdom of Mū would live on uncorrupted. Ke’oni has named these teachings “the principles of aloha.” Each one is an initiation all humans must navigate and integrate in order to fulfill their role in the human experiment, which is to embody aloha mā, self-reflective love. This does not mean to love yourself in the way we’re exhorted to do by New Age culture, although I’m not knocking that. Most Westernized humans are so immersed in shame we could benefit from more self-compassion, especially if it leads to atonement and corrective actions to heal the distortions of colonialism and war our culture has enacted on our planet. Rather, aloha mā is a direct experience of totality, a shamanic knowing that you are an aspect of God, or however you want to define the holy force of creation. It is the ouroboros, the snake consuming its own tail.Once you experience it, you are consumed.
Buddhists would say it’s stepping off the Wheel of Karma and tell stories of Bodhisattvas who, having done this, choose to come back to Earth to assist humans. According to the Mū, once a person has integrated all the principles of aloha mā,they hala, or ascend, meaning they don’t come back in physicalform. Instead, the integration of all the principles results in the collapse of amnesia and the remembrance of one’s divinity, making a contribution to the human experiment by upping the odds we’ll be successful at seeding the next world with love.
Many indigenous cultures today speak of different epochs of life on Earth as “worlds.” The Hopi say we are currently in the fourth world. In the first three, most of humanity was destroyed because of war and other destructive practices. Hindus say each universe passes through four yugas before being destroyed and reborn. The Kali Yuga, happening now, is the fourth. According to the Mū, the experiment of the last agewas electricity, and this experiment was successfully seeded in our age by the he’e, the octopus. Will we channel the electrical forces gifted to us by the last world and become a conduit to pass aloha mā on to the next?
Without my own ceremonial lineage to reference, I relied on intuition and things I’d been told or read about to create this ceremony. I am not Hawaiian and was aware the whole time I was in a very sacred place that had been colonized by white settlers, my human lineage. I earnestly do not want to be part of the wave of colonization my ancestors rode, turning Turtle Island into North America and Hawai’i into a tourist destination to be consumed for entertainment, but I’m also aware of the waves beyond the waves that carried my ancestors over the Atlantic. Where did they begin?
Humans have been displacing other humans as far back in history as we know. Is our species inherently greedy? I don’t believe so. Instead, I will explore in the book how our impulse to conquer and colonize is a result of primal wounds to both ourfeminine (‘unihipili) and masculine (‘uhane) energy centers that have resulted in distortions that keep us disconnected from our aumakua, the androgynous center that contains bothprinciples and gives us access to the non-binary consciousness we need to see beyond the polarizing beliefs that keep us in conflict on an inner level, with our fellow humans, and Earth herself.
As Ke’oni teaches, the ‘unihipili establishes safety. Those who don’t feel safe approach the world from a stance of defense, and since the task of the ‘uhane is to be the hero ofour lives, to take action, the distorted masculine goes on the attack in a misguided attempt to fulfill its kiakahi (purpose). This theme will become more clear as I share how this unfolded in my personal story in relationship with a local Hawaiian whenI first came to Moku o Keawe 27 years ago, although back then I called it the Big Island like every other colonizer.
I’m sure I made mistakes. I may have offended the spirits and the local Hawaiians. If so, I am sorry. If someone who reads this feels I need to make a correction, please let me know.
One of my great poetry teachers, Fran Quinn, insists that mistakes are how we learn the most, and I’ve heard that even today in indigenous cultures, children are not as carefully guarded as they are in modern industrial society. If they put their hand in the fire they get burned. Hopefully next time they won’t do it so they can grow up to have two hands to make all the things only humans can—embroidered shirts, feather cloaks, engraved silver nose rings, finger paintings, and murals of feasting gods on the ceilings of domed temples. And of course, there’s Rumi and Leonard Cohen reminding us that cracks and wounds are where the light comes through.
It’s embarrassing to be a clumsy, ignorant human without a lineage who has to make up her own ceremonies, but I did it anyway because I want to become a worthy ancestor, reweaving my broken lineage for us all through a relationship withthe particular ground I stand upon. The stories we need are beneath our feet. They always have been.
Kō aloha lā ea
Concentrate on love by way of the light