It was a day like any other day, I was driving down River Road which runs through the redwood forest and along the Russian River in Sonoma County. I must have been somewhere around Duncan Mills and I heard "go deeper." I did not know exactly what that meant at the time but it became a voice I could not quiet. Deeper inside myself, deeper inside the woods - deeper where? I already lived in Forestville, how deep was I called to go?

I turned to a friend and mentor in the Melidoma Somé tradition and through a divination she started to speak about my work with psychedelics and taking my private work with plants and psychedelics out into the mainstream. At the same time I was starting to feel restless and felt a move on the horizon. My intuition was right because as the world was opening up after covid, we lost our home and sure enough the only home that would take a family of 6 with a menagerie of pets was a relic of 1970's gem deep in the redwood forest on 7 acres completely secluded from neighbors, up a one lane fire road. When I got there I finally felt a sense of belonging and home.

As I unpacked I found my husband's and my dream house manifest list that we had scribbled onto the back of an ordering check from a restaurant we must have been at 14 years prior and everything on the list was answered for, except that we would not be sharing the dream together. As we transitioned into what I thought was our dream home, finally actualized 14 years later, the cannabis market in California was on a quick decline and we were soon to be out of a job. To support us my husband moved to Florida to take a blessing of a gig - a huge opportunity to be the director of cultivation for a major player in the Florida vertical integrated market. But at last I was deeper in the woods.

I was at home in the redwoods, the crystal waters of Salmon Creek, the land. Two ravens befriended me, I witnessed a bay hawk make its first flight, tracked a mountain lion who liked to visit the pond there around my birthday of August 6th. A fox named Talita who liked to sit as I drank my morning tea and deer who would almost eat apples out of my daughter's hand. It was on the land that my work with psilocybin deepened and through the own relationship I was building with the life ecosystem I was living in I felt called to go deeper still.

This time I turned to my dear friend/wisdom holder of medicine from the Shurar lineage. After consultation we opened a 3 month psilocybin dieta which meant that I spent every day in meditation after sipping a bit of water I had soaked the mushroom in. It was during this time that I heard the term Sacred Spore. As I say it now I chuckle a bit because I remember hearing the 2 words together and giggling because I saw how everywhere I looked was a sacred spore - I was one too. During this time and since, if you see a smirk on my face and giggle in my smile it's because of this.

Many insights came from this period but the biggest insight I received was the awareness of the regenerative cycle I was on. I started to see how all the ways I held myself, spoke, relationships and actions that were out of alignment had to fall away like a leaf falling from a fall tree. That death was part of life and even though I had gone deeper, found my dream home, a place I had been searching for and truly felt at home since I left home in 1994, it was not sustainable. The home when you looked at it without the veil of dreams and illusions, was old, the roof leaked, the water was scarce, there were termites - it was old, it was like an old dream had finally caught up to me. How blessed I was to have completed that loop but at the same time it felt like it was outdated. And it started to feel like everything around me was dying and on some level parts of me were too. The parts of me also that had been hiding, partly because of being in the profession as an underground healer and cannabis grower but also the part of me that had laid dormant through raising kids, caring for the sick, hustling to stay afloat at times and lived through a life gripping addiction.

It was time for me to emerge from the darkness of the woods and into the light so I moved to Florida so our family could be together. The land of humidity and water. A place for this seed to be watered and sprout out of the earth's crust.

As I settled into Florida, I began deepening my ceremonial knowledge and ethical grounding through a six-month certification with The Chacruna Institute on Ceremony, Reciprocity, and Ethics. Through this training, the path became clear: in Florida, the only way to legally practice medicine work is through the protection of a church. After years of existing in the underground, I no longer wanted to hide or work in gray areas. Starting a church felt like the authentic, legal, and natural step forward.

What I could never have imagined is that this journey would lead me to Ravens Gate - a name and vision that emerged not from planning, but from following the path of integrity that the forest teachings had shown me. This body of work is me bursting through. This transition has been incredibly confronting, exciting, longing, and deepening, stretching me in ways I never expected but always needed.