Finding Nature’s Sensefelt Language

Vanuatu: Wilderness, Intentional Community, Lost, Found, Death and starting Anew.

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 4 sometimes 5 hours later at “East of Eden” the intentional community project that became my home for almost 2 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, 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 where I travelled to the edge of my world,
to return to Nature in the raw. I am forever grateful to Papa Bear (Stephen Quinto) for extending the invitation to become project manager for East of Eden.
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. I was not expecting this would happen; through my immersion in raw jungle life nature, hours removed from any form of civilization, direct communion with Nature in the raw took place. As I walked the walking trails, 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 started calling me by my name. Because I was willfully ignorant, being “a man on a mission”, I did not listen to the spirit whispers in the land; she grew angry and impatient with me. She could see that I could hear and see her, but I was 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, when I was mapping out and designing a part of the welcoming village where the cross-house was to be built, she finally interjected my mindsong so strongly that I knew I was being summoned, and if I did not listen, something else would happen. 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 that was rejoicing for she finally found someone who would not only listen, but also address her grievances and assist her in her mission to become “whole” again. Because of my solitude in that jungle, I learned of the Spirit calling language that late at night would keep all the nearby villagers in their houses. Terrified, all local Nivan people were of the forest Spirit people, for they had lost faith and connection in the magic of nature, and I understood why. Cannibalism and tribal wars across the island had left deep scars in people’s memories. If it wasn’t for Anuw, who was always there to buffer and translate for me, I am sure I would have been scared late at night with the crackling and howling all by myself, in my little straw hut, away from base camp.

This little white manboy, what on earth was he thinking? What really was he looking for in such a wild, remote, and rugged jungle, somewhere on an island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean? Was he navigating the building of an Intentional Community called East of Eden? In reflection, it sounds to me like he got himself into the ultimate Hero’s Journey of going even more remote than ever before, and now there was no one around. No road signs, no sign of civilization, no electricity, and no running water or flushing toilets. This was my return to “square one”, gathering in the spirit of “community” intentionally, anew, and with Syntropy as the lens for my navigation, I learned, retrieved, discovered, unveiled, and remembered more than I think would be humanly possible if it wasn’t for Anuw.

Anew

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.

In all her ways, always
I am welcomed to partake,
to enjoin my mindsong to hers.
And She giggles as I try to sing all her patterns
one after another.

She admires how a manfulmind
is willed
to unwind.

And as I give her my hand,
and head in surrender,
She girths my being,
with zealous love.

“Look deep into my being!
Witness my Living Life-Ways!
Question their function,
Will aflame, your intrinsic knowing,
And all you left behind,
To find me.
And I will,
crown you,
a pattern of perfection,
expressed through time,
if you are willing,
Anew.”

Although for the first year, I was pioneering being at East of Eden mostly on my own, I was also setting in motion human gathering fantasies, and I started 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 were finding their way to our Land Waka, where our meeting house became the Wharea, and the Wananga of Love became reality.

As I oversaw the building team of 40-plus nivan men, I integrated myself into their customs and ways of holding ceremony. I thought I was familiar with ceremony because I left Bali, where I received all my instructions and downloads for the Wananga of Love, to settle “indefinitely” in Vanuatu. For months, there was mud, rain, cold winds, and simple meals cooked on the fire. I felt I reconnected with my primordial Nature. Climbing coconut trees, foraging in the wild while setting up the biggest Intentional Community project I had ever seen, and somehow I was the one who was giving lead direction to bring over our star Whanau (family) to help free all the trapped spirits and help Anuw, to heal the land from all that had come before us.

I am no longer there, but something invaluable, almost incomprehensible, happened for me in that raw, dense, remote jungle. We activated Humanities’ original Dreamseeds, in freedom, anew. This experience became about restoring our mutual covenant or “suntheke” with creation, a ritual for which we each had travelled there, not knowing what or how this “Seeding Gathering” would unfold.

I wish I had more photos of the ceremonies, the circles for exploring what was emerging and what wanted to be revealed. We, of course, had many hurt spirits that tried haunting us at night and in broad daylight. They knew that they were going to be released from the place they were occupying, and although I don’t share around these private supernatural missions that I have been on often, I know that without me doing a years of “groundwork” leading up to the gathering, I would not have found Anuw and or the purpose for the Wananga of Love Ground crew to come to this land that was about activating original dreamseeds for humanity, anew and renewing our human suntheke with Io, the Parentless creator.

The months after the Gathering felt as if a spiritual function with purpose had been completed, and a sense of redirection of my energy started to arise in me that led me to another island, back in “society” serving in a different role and function, still for the greater vision of East of Eden to still become reality, but in hindsight it was my way out of getting out from “there” and away from the response ability of what I was truly playing with. It all happened rather abruptly, and it was a major turning point that I cannot withhold from sharing.

What made me lose inspiration for the “grand vision” of East of Eden, or 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.

It was one of my last conversations and visioning sessions with Anuw, who had helped me to refine my ability to feel through time. She helped me to feel the agroforest with each breath. How it moves, grows, and transitions into a new stage, succession, or expression. At first, we started with small trees and small clusters of forest. Eventually, I was able to feel-breathe entire fields of Syntropy and feel the future of the forest. Anuw asked me to feel the future of the community, which became a hard and confronting reality check from which I only very slowly recovered because I saw and realised the cause and effects of what our so well-intended intentional community fantasies would bring about. This wasn’t fear-driven; it was the causal nature of unconscious awareness in action. Humans and their fantasies, not taking into consideration, through time, the sociological, human ecological tenets that are alive in the field. This was by far the biggest teaching and takeaway from my time with Nature. I would have never found out that I can feel through time in Succenional Human Ecology, breathing in all elements into the field who are there to play their function with purpose.

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, 2 years after my departure, I realised what had all happened behind the veil; I completed a hero’s journey and had finally returned “Home”.

I got renewed, finally with new eyes to see the true beauty, depth of care, and beyond belief artistry that I had previously taken for granted on this beautiful Island of the Gods. The years to follow have been intense, purposeful, and equally full of beauty and healing (thank you Mama Bali), but I’ll save that for another time.

What I can now carry forward in my learnings from the living language of Nature that Anuw was showing me is still hard to put into words. I have “remembered” how to feel/see that “archetypal language” which I sense is the language of our cells that can speak to us through the feeling function of our innate knowing. I can feel and sense, and see through time, and sometimes, when I am not daydreaming enough, I receive the future dreaming when I am sleeping.

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.

I look forward to supporting you in becoming your own master navigator by sharing with you all teachings, downloads, and response-abilities I have found. All of it is contained in living lifeways translated into language by knowing so deeply of Syntropy and the Syntropic Nature of Life.

Yay to cultivating a centering focus for exploring Syntropic Human Ecology, now in Bali! Where I have begun Anew.

In Love and Service,

A short film of our dreamseeds planted in our dreaming for Anew Beginnings.

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