My advisor is dead.

And it’s perfect.

In fact, I think it’s kind of how we both realized it was supposed to happen.

When I was asked to choose my advisory team, there was only one person I really wanted to work with. Xe called out to me like a beacon, practically jumping out of the lineup of headshots.

After submitting my selection, the coordinator told me xe had a terminal illness—but hadn’t formally withdrawn their advisory status. She reached out, but didn’t hear back for a while, and assumed it wouldn’t work. So I met with a few others and brought on board one of them, but something told me to keep holding onto my intuitive first selection. Through the silence, the coordinator kept asking me if I wouldn’t rather choose someone different, or at least additional. I considered, but didn’t want to. Finally, xe surfaced; it turned out the coordinator had the wrong email address.

In our email communications, xe enthusiastically agreed to mentor me to whatever capacity xe had left. After our one and only Zoom call, I was wracked with regret that I spent so much of the time trying to fill xem in on my own story and didn’t hear enough of xirs. Over a series of voice notes, xe assured me it would be okay; we had all the time in the world, we just didn’t know yet exactly what that would look like.

I still regret that I didn’t ask more questions, but I’m grateful xe left a body of work behind.

I will study it carefully, but I’m mostly trying to connect with xem directly.

Kit Danowski crossed over on August TK, 2024. I felt it in the hours after it happened; maybe even in the moment. Something rippled like a shock wave through me while I was walking through the cemetery park near the friend’s flat that serves as my in-between-spaces base, through which you have to cross to get anywhere.

Because every journey needs a good graveyard crossroads.

Kit told me to draw a tarot card when xe passed, and that way, would send me a message. So I closed my eyes, called on Kit, and pulled one from my Wildwood Tarot deck. When I saw it, I laughed and sobbed simultaneously, an experience that only intensified when reading the description.

You can’t make this stuff up, and why would you want to? Truth is stranger than fiction.

The card Kit sent.

Ever since I was a kid and my Sunday School teacher told us we were not, in fact, all saved just because we loved Jesus, but that we were actually sinners who needed to repent or be punished, and I lost my best friend and spiritual mentor the first time, I’ve been desperate for a teacher; someone to show me the way and lead my sorry soul to salvation. I searched for those figures in every sphere and manifestation: the lovers who would redeem me; professional mentors who would show me the ropes; bosses who would make me somebody; friends who would fill the needs unmet by my family. I met some amazing people along the way, and even those that eded less than perfect taught me something important.

I thought I had finally found the person I was looking for when my life fell apart as I extracted myself from an abusive marriage and started deconstructing everything. For a few blissful years, I found a spiritual guide who seemed to have all the answers. She led me to practices and teachings I had never heard of, and still follow every day. Most importantly, she led me back to myself in some profound ways. But in the end, the relationship became codependent, a dynamic that I feel she fostered until abruptly cutting it off, leaving me feeling limbless, listless, terrified and rudderless. I bounced around the world like a ping-pong ball for nearly a year after that, but landed exactly where and when I was meant to, at the first ayahuasca retreat for LGBTQIA+ people. And in this process, guided by the plants and held in the safest container I’ve ever known, surrounded by the new family of friends I knew I had always known in some sense, I finally began the long process of coming home.

The ceremony started that first night I sat on the mat numbered 13 in the jungle, my birth date and nahual: the energy signature of the day I incarnated according to the Maya calendar; 13 Kan, the serpent, which is also the animal manifestation of the ayahuasca spirit. It peaked when I broke my pelvis in five places while living in a ceremony space adorned with a giant tapestry of Frida Kahlo. And a new chapter began when I drew the 13 card Kit sent me: Death, the Journey, the end that is only a beginning, everything circling and spiraling beautifully and terribly.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared. But anything worth doing should make you feel that way. Along the way, I will document my journals, downloads, altars, ceremonies, and communications with the dead, along with whatever (art)works may come out of this.

The ceremonial altar, with Kit’s card and cacao offering on the right.