My Spiral of Emergence . The Thread of Time
As I prepare to travel to Oaxaca, to walk upon the soil where María Sabina lived, prayed, sang and practiced her medicine, I find myself looking backwards, because something in me is beginning to recognise the thread. I am going to Oaxaca with a mission, a mission that began long before I knew I was on my way there, and when I look at the path behind me now, I realise how many of the things I once experienced as separate were quietly preparing the ground for one another.
I am, in many ways, a late bloomer when it comes to psychedelics. I never approached them recreationally, and I was never particularly interested in altered states as a way of escaping the body or simply looking beyond it. My doorway into consciousness was always much closer to the ground. It began through the body, through Shaolin Fa men Chuan, through discipline, movement, breath and stillness, and later through yoga, meditation and breathwork, through discovering that consciousness could expand without leaving the body at all. The breath became a teacher and the body became a temple of perception, a place through which I could enter deeper dimensions of experience while remaining profoundly here.
Alongside this, almost organically, another path began unfolding | my relationship with the plant kingdom. For more than two decades I have followed plants through different languages of knowledge, through phytotherapy, herbalism, clinical aromatherapy, traditional systems, the intelligence of their chemistry, their relationship with the body and the mysteries that cannot be reduced to chemistry alone, their connection to the felt sense. The more I studied, the more I realised that knowledge could take me only so far. There comes a point when information needs to become relationship, when what we have learned needs to be digested by the body and become something we can actually live.
Looking back, I recognize something deeply Plutonian in the plants that began to call me. The plants that take us down, into the underworld of psyche, into the layers beneath the story, beneath the identities we have built and the things we thought we already understood. Into what has been buried, forgotten, defended or protected, into the places where something has to transform, sometimes even die, for another form of knowing to emerge. The deeper I went into the plant world, the more I found myself drawn toward those places where knowledge becomes initiation, where the intellect eventually has to surrender its position as the one who knows.
And then came my first journey with psilocybin.
I remember María Sabina. She appeared to me as I was chewing the mushroom, and she sat with me, repeatedly telling me to chew, more and more, as though the medicine was asking me to slow down enough to actually receive it. To taste. To savour. To find the taste in life.
That teaching has stayed with me for five years because there was something so simple and so profound about it. Savor, savour and the Latin sapere carry an ancient relationship between taste and knowing; sapere could speak both to having taste and to discernment, wisdom, knowing. I have returned to that word many times since, wondering if perhaps knowing is not only something we accumulate, but something we learn to taste, something we digest until it becomes part of our own substance.
That first journey was never the beginning of a desire to collect psychedelic experiences. It became another form of study, another doorway into a field I was already approaching from many different directions. I was immersed in intellectual and clinical approaches to altered states through my studies at Synthesis Institute in the Netherlands, learning about the psyche, neuroscience, preparation, integration, therapeutic frameworks and the emerging language around psychedelic experience. Yet there was something that information could never quite give me. It could describe an experience, map it, give it language and context, but it could not give me its taste. That required another kind of knowing, the kind that is lived, the kind that enters the body, the kind that asks us to chew slowly and savour what we are receiving until knowledge becomes wisdom.
Perhaps this is why I think of Pluto when I think of the mushroom. Not because the mushroom belongs to astrology, but because the metaphor describes so precisely the way this relationship has unfolded for me. Pluto takes us down into Scorpio's waters, into hidden layers, into death and regeneration, into the places where we have to surrender the version of ourselves that believed it already knew. It asks for depth, and then deeper still.
Five years have passed since that first encounter, and now I am going to Oaxaca, to honor the land from which this particular thread entered my consciousness and to walk more consciously toward a living tradition that held María Sabina and the Mazatec mushroom ceremonies known as veladas.
Taking this mission under the Libra constellation, where my Pluto resides, brings two aspects of my life into my field, The Mayans and the IIndigenous mushroom traditions. They belong to different cultural and ceremonial lineages, and I do not want to weave them together as though they were one. Yet they meet, for me, within the larger living landscape of Mesoamerica and within my own long relationship with plants, symbols, time and the intelligence of the land. The deeper I move into plant work, the more I understand that relationship begins with knowing where something comes from.
There are lineages, lands, people, elders and histories, and there is a responsibility that comes with receiving knowledge that did not originate with us. So I go as a student, with reverence, gratitude and the humility to understand that there are things I may encounter that are not mine to possess, explain or translate into my own language.
And perhaps this is why, as I prepare to go, I keep finding myself returning to another Mesoamerican thread that has accompanied me for many years | the Maya sacred calendar and the drawings I made from its twenty day signs more than fifteen years ago.
I was thirty then, living between São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, at the beginning of a completely new chapter with Cauhe, just before we decided to bring a child into our lives. I remember drawing each of the Maya sacred calendar symbols, following an attraction I could not fully explain. I would sit with the lines, the geometry, the forms, repeating them with my hands until something in me became quiet. At the time I thought I was simply drawing. Looking back, I wonder if I was already learning how to listen to a language I did not yet know how to hear, the psycodelic fractal language.
The drawings stayed. I changed.
And for me this is one of the mysterious powers of a symbol | it can survive its maker. It can hold a moment of consciousness and wait patiently until we are ready to meet it again. Years later we return to the same image carrying an entirely different life, and suddenly something opens. The symbol has not changed, but we have, and because we have changed, its meaning can deepen.
The calendar I was contemplating then was the Tzolk'in, or Chol Q'ij in K'iche', the 260-day sacred calendar formed through the interweaving of twenty day signs with the numbers one through thirteen. It is a way of relating to time through recurrence, rhythm and relationship, and its living use among Maya communities continues to connect human life with the cycles of the natural and cosmic world. I find myself especially drawn to this now because I have spent so much of my life contemplating time through Saturn, through Kronos, the long time, the time that accumulates inside the body, the years that become experience and the experiences that, if we are willing to digest them, become discernment.
Saturn has taught me about maturation, responsibility, structure, consequence, limitation and lineage. It reminds me that some things cannot be rushed into being, that wisdom has a rhythm of its own, that what is carried through generations becomes part of the architecture of who we are. And then there is Kairos, that other quality of time, the moment that opens, the particular quality of a moment in which something becomes possible. Between Kronos and Kairos, between the weight of lived time and the opening of the right moment, I have come to understand time less as something linear that we move through and more as something we participate in.
This is what moves me when I contemplate the Maya cycles. We return, but we do not return empty-handed. The cycle comes around again, yet we arrive carrying everything that has happened between the last encounter and this one.
I know the spiral is my own image, my own way of contemplating these cycles, but it gives language to something I have experienced repeatedly in my own life | we return to places, teachings, symbols and questions, and yet we never arrive as the same person. We return with memory. We return with experience. We return with more of ourselves.
And when I look again at those twenty symbols, I no longer feel the need to separate them into individual meanings. I feel their conversation. I feel water moving into wind, darkness making space for dawn, the serpent shedding what can no longer be carried, the seed waiting beneath the surface, the offering creating reciprocity, the deer finding direction, the thread continuing through time, the corn growing from what has been planted, the Earth holding what we entrust to her, the bird widening our vision, the will becoming conscious, wisdom gathering, the blade cutting what needs to be released, thunder interrupting what has become stagnant and the Sun illuminating what is ready to be seen. The symbols begin to feel less like a collection of definitions and more like a living choreography, each one creating the conditions for another to emerge. Just like fractals move.
And when I look at my own life through that same lens, I see the same movement. Shaolin led into yoga. Yoga opened into breath. Breath opened into deeper states of consciousness. Plants became teachers. Cosmobiology gave me another language for relationship between the human and the celestial. Death and dying taught me about surrender. Psychedelic science gave me frameworks, while experience taught me what frameworks could never fully contain. Ceremony brought me into questions of lineage and reciprocity. Art gave me a way to hold what could not always be spoken. None of these things were ever truly separate. They were threads of the same inquiry, appearing at different moments and teaching me different ways of listening.
I think about Micael here too, my Capricorn, my Saturnian teacher, because lineage became something completely different for me when I became a mother. A child is not simply the continuation of what came before. A child changes the direction of the thread. We receive, we embody, we transform, we transmit, and in doing so we become responsible for what we carry forward. Perhaps our responsibility is not to preserve everything exactly as it was given to us, nor to reject everything that came before, but to understand what we have received deeply enough that we can carry its essence forward with integrity.
This is also why the symbol matters so much to me, because it can become a vessel for relationship. It carries attention. It holds memory. It allows something that happened in one moment to speak to another moment across time and space. The woman who drew those symbols in Rio could never have known the woman who would one day look at them while preparing to walk the mountains of Oaxaca, but somehow she left something behind for me. A breadcrumb. A thread. A reminder that the path was already unfolding.
This is what I mean when I speak about remembrance. I am not speaking about remembering facts. I am speaking about remembering relationship. Remembering where something came from. Remembering who we were when a particular teaching first touched us. Remembering the people, plants, places and experiences that carried us toward the next point. Remembering that our lives are not a collection of isolated events but something woven, something continuously BEcoming.
So as I prepare to walk onto that land, I feel the thread behind me and the unknown ahead of me | María Sabina, the mushroom, the first journey, the instruction to chew, to taste, to savour, to know; the years of study that followed; the plants that taught me to listen; the body that taught me to feel; the breath that taught me to enter; the psyche that taught me to descend; the symbols that taught me to remember.
And now Oaxaca.
I do not know what this next chapter will ask of me. I only know that I am arriving differently than I would have arrived five years ago, with more humility, more context, more responsibility, more gratitude and, I hope, more capacity to savour. Because perhaps that was the first teaching after all | to stop trying to understand life from a distance, to put it in the mouth, to taste it, to chew it slowly, to let it become part of us. To discover that knowing and savouring may have been whispering to each other all along.
And this brings me back to the drawings.
After every experience that truly moves me, I feel an almost instinctive need to give it a tangible form. I need to make something with my hands | a symbol, a drawing, a talisman, a collection of images that can hold something words cannot quite contain. It is my way of crystallising an experience, of allowing something invisible to take on a physical body that can remain with me long after the moment itself has passed. I see this as part of integration too: the movement from experience into embodiment, from something that happened to something that becomes part of the architecture of who we are.
It is my way of saying | I see you. I embody you. I honour you. I release you.
You are not mine. You moved through me.
The twenty drawings have become that for me. They are a tangible expression of a thread that has been moving through my life for years, a way of bringing the symbols together so they can be held, contemplated, returned to and encountered again from wherever we happen to be in our own cycle. I have gathered them into a set of twenty cards, as an invitation into contemplation, into relationship with image and symbol, and into that mysterious place where an old image can suddenly speak to a new version of ourselves.
Something to hold. Something to return to. Something to turn over in the hands and in the imagination. Something that reminds us that what moves through us does not need to be possessed in order to become part of us.
After so many years walking with the plant kingdom, the plants have somehow opened another door, into fungi, another kingdom entirely. I love this meeting of intelligences | plants, fungi, the human body, the land, the cosmos, each belonging to its own kingdom and yet participating in the larger mystery of life. One does not need to become the other for them to belong to the same living conversation.
Maybe this is the thread I am following to Oaxaca.
Not a straight line. Not a destination. A conversation that keeps deepening. A spiral. A remembrance. A path that continues to reveal itself as I walk it.
The cards are simply one way of giving this particular chapter a body, of allowing something that has moved through me to become tangible and available for another person to meet in their own way.
If you feel drawn to bring this thread into your own hands, the complete set of twenty cards are available below.
The thread was already being woven. And now I am simply learning how to see it.
MAYA SACRED CALENDAR . 20 ILLUSTRATED CARDS | 35€
A contemplative card set inspired by the Maya sacred calendar and its twenty day signs.
20 illustrated cards | 10 × 10 cm Designed and illustrated by Margaret
Full illustration on the front & Blank on the back, created as an open space for your own words, reflections, messages or drawings
A physical companion for contemplation, journaling and symbolic exploration A small object to hold a thread of memory in your hands.
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