Because my soul had chosen to walk “the narrow path” this lifetime, I packed a backpack and left my home country at twenty for a small five-square-mile island in the Caribbean. There, tucked away in the rainforest mountains on a small ecolodge, the first layers of distanced perspective on “society” became visible to me.

That pivotal time in nature activated a deepened curiosity and an inner knowing, one that set me on a path to pursue answers held somewhere beyond what modern society offers.

I found ways to connect with elders of Indigenous wisdom traditions, sitting and learning again from Grandmothers, Grandfathers, and Indigenous wisdom keepers. That led me to support, and eventually to host, Global Elder Gatherings from 2011 to 2014.

After years of exploring Indigenous ways of seeing the world, in my quest for deeper truth and connection, I found experience-based answers that rocked me to my core and left “reality” as I had known it far too small to fit back inside.

I am forever grateful for the opportunity to have been guided and requested to organise the International Forum on Water, the Waitaha Water Gathering, in Aotearoa, New Zealand, in 2014, an event that takes place once every fifty years. It was during the last days of staying in the Marae, listening to the mindsong of one of the Waitaha elders, that I finally found what I had known in my cells I could reach. Being in that field, listening to the mindsong and consciousness of Waitaha, I had a profound, life-changing experience of feeling reality through the heart, an awakening that changed everything, and the place where my own hero’s journey could finally begin.

Soon after that gathering, I began to comprehend that all those years leading toward that heart-seeing moment had been my own spirit walking me into this hero’s journey. The mind-heavy ways I had been conditioned to see and navigate the world stayed behind me from then on.

I became fully committed to re-enabling my own nature, and that is when the real, inner journey started, making it harder still to “fit in” or to function in society as I had known it. With my own cells as the only map and the only teacher, I followed them into years of de-programming, unlearning conditioned belief systems, and continually surrendering to what felt more natural.

Those cells walked me to the edge of my world. I am forever grateful to Papa Bear (Stephen Quinto) for extending the invitation to become project manager for East of Eden, and from 2018 to 2020 that is where I lived.

If I could paint you an image of the many journeys through thick jungle, across muddy dirt roads with potholes bigger than car tires, to arrive four sometimes five hours later at “East of Eden,” the intentional community project that became my home for almost two years, I would describe it as raw, primal, untouched, dense, and rough jungle. As far as the eye could see. Here I learned to die, to listen, to witness the patterns, the songlines of Syntropy, to unravel my manful mind. To turn all I was taught into practice. To truly live, embody, or at least try, through my willingness to turn knowledge into wisdom, by living what I was already shown, but I had thus far only known intellectually. There is a difference between knowing and liking information and having lived according to those comprehensions.

This was a rough and bold journey, travelling to the edge of my world to return to Nature in the raw. I still struggle to live with what I know.

And there I travelled, to the end of the world, to embrace, embody, integrate, and recalibrate all the wise teachings the Grandmothers and Sophia had already given me. What arrived there took me by surprise; through my immersion in raw jungle life, hours removed from any form of civilization, direct communion with Nature in the raw took place.

As I walked the walking trails and scouted the land for additional waterholes or springs, there was this presence that I felt, surrounding me, seeking my attention, and after a while, even calling me by my name. Being willfully ignorant, “a man on a mission,” I stayed deaf to the spirit whispers in the land; she grew angry and impatient with me. She could see that I could hear and see her, while I stayed preoccupied with building plans, keeping myself sane through busy-ness with my little thatched-roof wooden hut, out in the middle of nowhere. As she grew more frustrated, I became more aware that a female spirit presence really wanted my attention. One day, mapping out and designing a part of the welcoming village where the cross-house was to be built, she interjected my mindsong so strongly that I knew I was being summoned, and that something else would follow if I kept walking past her. I closed my eyes, and there I met her: “Anuw,” the Spirit of the Land in East of Eden, Vanuatu.

Anuw became my teacher, my guide, my companion, my lost love, and my protector. She served as my compass for navigating back home from the depths of jungle tracking and site mapping, always there to assist me to come back again to base camp. At night I would sit out on the meditation platform and ask her what her function with purpose was for me, and what my function with purpose was for her.

As real as any conversation, and so familiar in terms of my communion with Sophia and the Grandmothers, Anuw was from Earth, a Guardian Spirit rejoicing that she had finally found someone who would listen, and who would also address her grievances and assist her in her mission to become “whole” again.

She was my ultimate reflection.
Simply by being.
Exposing, revealing, unveiling me,
naked onto myself,
This mind,
I finally returned,
to Nature in the raw,
In the real, in the living,
In her reflection
Life, Love, self sovereignty in human ecology,
Became again,
Pure,
Syntropy.

Through that first year I was pioneering at East of Eden mostly on my own, while also setting in motion human gathering fantasies, reaching out to my dearest and closest Wananga of Love connections to explore a Seeding Gathering. Because the project was backed and fully resourced, slowly but surely people found their way to our Land Waka, where our meeting house became the Wharea, and the Wananga of Love became reality.

What made me lose inspiration for the “grand vision” of East of Eden, and for intentional communities in the wild in general, came about when I realised how impossible it would be to uplevel other people’s consciousness to ensure the safety of future children, especially girls.

What I saw, I could not unsee, and how do you live with what you know? Writing this, it is still tender, for I sacrificed so much during those two years, and I felt like I came away with “nothing,” but empty dreams. When I finally returned to Bali, two years after my departure, I realised what had all happened behind the veil; I completed a hero’s journey and had finally returned “Home.”

Now, years later, I write to you from Bali, where after even wilder, more nature-dense experiences and discoveries, I have truly found “home,” within and without.

Our Nature, and Nature conspiring in Syntropy with our cells, is always showing us, speaking to us, giving us opportunities to come into awareness of what is “really going on,” and there is so much beauty in being able to make use of the function with purpose, especially when I can contribute from that place of wisdom to others on the Journey Home, within.

In Love and Service,
Souvereign