*(Important) Transdimensional treasure hunt
Kit is speaking. Distinctly if not directly distinguishably. I see xem clearly, transported back to when I was living at Jill’s house last summer, walking up to the zoo to draw animals with the fresh scent of the jungle in my nostrils, hapé caked at the corners, talking to xem on time-delay over voice note, feeling unworthy of xir precious last Earthly energy. I was called to upload xir voice notes to Otter and I have a new perspective now, and am now not in shame but humbled and so grateful, xe clearly did sign up for this multidimensional mentoring thing, part of me keeps trying not to believe, but I can’t not.
The seeds were planted then for the Maya theatre project, I didn’t quite understand it then but now it makes all the sense in the world.
It’s not about me and my art. That was a little-kid part that wanted to be seen, all the exiles who didn’t get to live their dreams, and the ones who want to give dad the finger; I was letting them steer, and they needed to get it out of their system, but I’m becoming so grounded in that not really being my purpose.
My dharma is about helping people reconnect to themselves, each other, and the Earth; rediscover their own indigeneity; and find their expression.
This is why Kit, this is why I met Sophie and she offered me this opportunity at the devising workshop. This is part of the call of Meso- and South America: because the land that is cracking open my heart and transforming my soul must be held in sacred reciprocity, and I want to give back, and maybe this is how I do that—by helping people transmute their pain the way I did as a kid, turning it into theatre; putting their pain up on the stage to speak its name and be trans-formed, keeping their history alive like a secret through oral tradition when the oppressors took the records from them and got it twisted.
The Rabinal Ache is performed at the end of February, and there are groups trying to revive and preserve it; I think this is what Kit’s ex-wife was doing, but xe never gave me her name that I can recall, or her organization. I think it might be mentioned in one of xir writings; Laura just remembers that her name is Tamera. I am on a mission.
This is fun. Like a transdimensional treasure hunt, following the trail through scraps of transdimensional memories, dreams, and reflections.
Like another labyrinthine late-nineties adventure-PC game, Treasure Quest, that sucked me into its atemporal Neptunian landscapes as a kid.
I was feeling called to a similar cultural production in Colombia, I think, that someone was asking for help with through the Wisdom Keepers Patreon. I felt called to reach out to them; having just found out that I was accepted to the ArteSumapaz residency in Colombia (!!!!), this all seems to be lining up…
One of the stated goals of my exhibition for the summer residency, and a driving principle: “To engage with surveillance and archiving through the lens of consent, inclusivity, and radical subjectivity.”
THE MORE RADICALLY SUBJECTIVE, THE MORE UNIVERSAL IT GETS
From my notes last summer, reading Kit’s thesis:
(I’m not positive what’s me and what’s xem, the styles and subjects are so similar, but I think I’m the italics only)
if I am writing for you, so that you know I am now writing from this or that method, then I’m not really writing from a radical subjectivity, I am already writing on a mirror, writing to an Other I can’t see. The question might be, rather, how do you write the interior so deep inside that interior that interior becomes Other? And what does that look like?
Can a text for a journal, for an art research journal, be constructed so that it might resemble madness, to represent madness that comes on the evening of a breakthrough? I had a breakthrough. Because I had a breakthrough. Because I really really had a break through.
THIS IS THE JOURNAL - THE JOURNALS - THE PERSONAL MADE PUBLIC VS THE ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE - SOMETHING V IMPORTANT ABOUT THE PROCESS AS PRACTICE AS WORK RE: JOURNALS/JOURNALING
An option: Make up a fake theorist we can write about, because we need some kind of documentation that exists outside this text, and we need a documentation that is too hard to find, but too sensical to refute.
But now we have a body, we have always had bodies of knowledge, they just live in the jungle and don’t have university funding
The reason we might invent an imaginary source is, for one, it is much easier than having to bother to look for sources when we know they are already there somewhere … we are making our own claims self-consciously suspicious, putting ourselves in the role of an unreliable narrator, and all authority needs to be undermined.
The point is to show people how easy it is to manipulate them
if I perform the role of narrator/researcher, and take on multiple roles, to perform the multiple methods, offers a grounding to the performance and the interviews
Also video of the trance performance and interviews with people talking about their trance experience > how these elements might add up to a vocabulary for exposition in my practice, and whether these multiple levels of inquiry might not themselves take form as performed research. The exhibition of the work is something other than the work itself, creating meta-narratives … This text is a construction of multiple narrative voices speaking to and against each other
Problematic terms when talking about other cosmologies/cultures: i.e., Lukumí/Yoruba colonialist roots
oral tradition in this case is not only based on the spoken word, but on signs and symbols within the oral teachings. In some cases, the oral transmission of knowledge falls outside the academic definitions of oral tradition, because rather than transmission of knowledge from the mouth of an elder to an apprentice, this is transmitted in dreams and trance, through visitations from elders who are dead.
Did xe know xir prescience when xe said this? Was it always intended? “I have yet to come across a study that allows for the dead to participate as subjects, and practitioners know that the dead are more active subjects than the living, because they speak through the living.”
I wonder about how to cite claims that are based on secrets. And I wonder about the necessity for documentation of the history of a religion that is already well-established in ethnographic literature
Different takes/framing when writing from ethnographic, psychoanalytic, and radically subjective perspective (“on the edge of madness”) >> this is what I have been doing, the not quite chanting/rapping/poetry/stream of consciousness stuff.
I want to consider writing, research writing about art as research, as montage, in the way that Eisenstein considered montage: ‘an idea that DERIVES from the collision between two shots that are independent of one another’
Anthi, writing as drawing
How is/can writing be embodied?
…
Criteria for ethical practice:
first, drawing frameworks from the cultural system itself (i.e., from Lukumí and/or Palo, rather than a European ritual framework);
second, maintaining the respectful distance necessary for ethical intercultural practice, with attention to the tradition’s transcultural nature;
third, taking a position of radical subjectivity from within the ritual system (vs. the position of a performance practitioner borrowing from world ritual culture as though it were a palette).
Safety: discussion of techniques in cultural ritual context and how they are different in this modified form; 2 participants stay lucid in case someone needs help; consensual approach where performers can stop when uncomfortable
performers were given mirrors charged w spiritual energy so they could stop/control the flow
DUDE WTF!! THIS WAS LITERALLY THE IDEA I HAD AND THEN I THOUGHT PEOPLE WOULD THINK IT WAS STUPID - to do a ceremony/ritual on stage as part of a one person show (then six months later, I did do it…)
Both Mendieta and Kantor are part of the mis-en-scène they create. Mendieta’s body is indelibly burned or otherwise imprinted in many of her more famous works, like a ghost. Kantor is present, sitting to the side of the playing area, serving to remind the spectator that the performance one is seeing is through Kantor’s point of view. This radical subjectivity interwoven into their work makes the ritual nature of their work likewise entirely subjective.
The viewer, or the spectator, is not an active participant, or witness to an authentic rite, but is instead watching someone else go through an elaborate rite.There is a spiritual dimension here, but it is just out of reach. This creates a tension where the viewer or the spectator or the audience is left to resolve their own subjective experience.
“New mestiza” = identity formed by crossing borders
“Many ways to cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the normal” - overlapping and intersecting the experience of Chicanas on US/Mexico border
Mestiza consciousness is a new form “characterized by a unique awareness of the functions of power that construct this form of subjectivity … [where] those who are constituted as abnormal transgressors have gained a tolerance not only for duality but for multiplicity and ambiguity.”
“Her thinking resists binaries that structure dominant ways of knowing, including subject-object, normal-abnormal, and English-Spanish”
Trans* resists being bound by any conception of gender and sexuality even as it claims them–it is quantum, inherently paradoxical, a particle and a wave at the same time, all genders and none at once. It becomes one intersection when you observe it and then rejoins the rainbow wave like the monks that dissolve into rainbow bodies
I share Anzaldua’s “preoccupation with the inner life of the self, and with the struggle of that Self amidst adversity and violation; with the confluence of primordial images; with the unique positions consciousness takes at these confluent streams; and with my almost instinctive urge to communicate, to speak, to write about life on the borders, life in the shadows.”
KIT CROSSED THE BORDER TO THE OTHER REALM, RICHARD CROSSED THE BORDER TO THE OTHER REALM, AND THEY BOTH WROTE ABOUT BORDER-CROSSING AND NEO-MESTIZ(X) IDENTITY BEFORE THEY SLIPPED THROUGH THE PORTAL
WHAT DOES THE TRANSDIMENSIONAL MESTIZ(X) IDENTITY LOOK LIKE? THIS IS TRANS* AS EMERGENT ARCHETYPE, THE BEING THAT CAN INHABIT BOTH LIVING AND DEAD, SPIRIT AND MATTER AT ONCE
Richard, from “The Crossing”:
“Their children were, or would be, mestizos, part of a new and burgeoning race re-populating Mexico after its 16th-century apocalypse; by this time, the Spanish invasion and its wave of alien plagues, such as smallpox — along with war and its cousin, famine — had killed all but 2 million of Mexico’s 15 to 30 million native people.” (p35)
“just as the Manso and Jumano increasingly melted into the Apache, so did the Spanish and European into the newest race in the world: the mestizo, that uniquely Mexican fusion of native and European (namely Iberian) bloodlines. But genetics aside, the culture that developed here on the high Chihuahuan desert would be decidedly different than its predecessors, growing into its sparse and harsh environs — just like the mustang.”
“But most importantly, it was during this period that distinctions between races began to fall away. The Belgians, Germans, and other Europeans, for example, melted into the thousands of other Spanish subjects. They learned the languages and customs of their ruler and fellow settlers alike. The native people often spoke Spanish now. White, European men frequently married and settled down with native women, Pueblo and Manso, and many of the newest generation of adults and leaders were known as coyotes, mestizos, and ladinos. Coyote was just another word for half-breed; mestizo was the mix of European and native blood; and the word ladino was adopted from faraway Spain where it was employed to label Spanish Jews. Some were Black men, slaves freed to become soldiers, who married into the Pueblo culture or took Tlaxcalan wives: women descended from the original Mexican indigenous troops who helped conquer New Mexico.
This budding tradition of intermarriage was, of course, inherited from the Native American people — who would marry into other bands and tribes altogether — as well as the Spanish, who had intermarried with Jews and even their greatest enemy, the Moors, at least between wars. El Paso represented a turning point in American history, in sharp contrast to the English colonies of the East Coast: here and in the Southwest, color and creed were not obstacles to toiling together, fighting together for survival, nor even to that most sacred human sacrament: marriage. In the English colonies that would come to dominate the American story, however, nothing could be further from reality. From Massachusetts southward, the English tradition of dividing whites from everyone else — especially Black people — was the norm that would rule the day. That part of America was enmeshed in the original sin of slavery from 1619 onward, along with segregation and seething hatred. Intermarriage, even with Native Americans, was rare and roundly scorned. As historian Jennifer Agee Jones wrote of the English colonies:
While settlers may have had the opportunity, very few such unions took place in the colonial era. Powerful psychological barriers prevented most Europeans from marrying Indians. That the Indians were "wild" people without knowledge of Christianity convinced many that marrying them was dangerous to one's soul. Other newcomers felt less constrained by cultural boundaries and easily shed the trappings of their culture to marry the native way. To colonial officials, such actions provided evidence that the wild land and its inhabitants were a temptation to those struggling to maintain godly communities on the frontier. Such renegades served as a symbol of religious and cultural degeneration that could ultimately undermine colonial endeavors.
Because intermarriage would have proven a means of assimilation between the two groups, its absence underscores the most irreconcilable divisions between Europeans and Indians. The attitudes that prevented Europeans from marrying the natives were the same attitudes that governed most interactions between the two peoples in the seventeenth century. The failure of the two groups to marry one another was one component of a larger failure to cohabit peacefully in seventeenth-century North America.” (p 140-142)
“For much of its three centuries, the El Paso region had been part of a multicultural society of Europeans, mestizos, and Native Americans as part of either Mexico or New Mexico, both politically and culturally. Indeed, there were frequent movements to break away from Texas and become part of New Mexico, or even to form a new state altogether. But now the long arm of segregation reached from Reconstruction-era Texas to the Rio Grande. The laws of Jim Crow twisted a society centuries in the making, dividing it by hue of skin, color, and language.” (p301)
LA POCHA NOSTRA ALSO TALKS ABOUT THIS—I just reached out to Balitroníca yesterday
To honor Kit means to learn:
"Xe": is used as the subject pronoun (e.g., "Xe is going to the store") - "zee"
"Xir": is used as the possessive pronoun (e.g., "That's xir book") - "zeer"
"Xem": is used as the objective pronoun (e.g., "I saw xem at the park") - “zeem”
"Xirs": is used as the possessive pronoun (e.g., "That book is xirs") - “zeers”
Examples:
"Xe is a talented artist, and xir paintings are beautiful."
"I met xem at the library, and xir was very friendly."
"That is xirs car, and xe drives it to work."
"I saw xir yesterday, and xe said the book was xirs."
Voice memo from Kit, 6.20. 24 / LISTEN
Uh, hey, there, hey there. Ferdinand, hey, there. Um, hey, this is kit calling. Um. I'll try to keep this like short ish, um, but yeah, I just wanted to touch base and stuff and say hey. And, yeah, it was great talking earlier today. And, oh, God, you didn't talk too much at all. That was really interesting, um. And it's a really good, really good for me to hear, like all of the different, you know, like the different contextual information and stuff like we said about, about what the kind of work that you do and the kind of work that you're looking looking to do. Um, and so I was thinking, I was thinking further about it too. And there, there are a couple couple of books of auto theory that you probably know about, that might be really relevant to me. That may be or may not be relevant, I'm not sure, but one I was thinking, of course, you probably know the writing of Paul Preciado. It's P, R, E, C, I, A, D, O, and I, he's a trans mask. And actually, his testo junkie is amazing. I mean, I read it, I didn't understand it, you know, it was one of but I got a lot of it. It's super, super, way over my head. And so, so, so smart and so brilliant, but in a way like he makes himself his own practices research project, as he talks about about transitioning and things and all of the different pseudo pharmacological empire and all of this deep state kind of fast. It's just fascinating as hell. And if you haven't come across that, it might be nice to take a look at too. I always like, I always go back to to his order, or la frontera Borderlands, because I think I'll think a lot of times when people talk about auto theory, they start with, with, what's her face with Nelson? About Jenny Nelson, is that her name? But the Argonauts, which is book I really, I really love, because she called it auto theory, even the first, although Paul Preciado actually called it that first in French. Either way, it doesn't matter. I think Gloria anzaldua and a lot of the, a lot of the Chicana activist writers of the 70s, and also black writers like, Oh God, what Audrey Lord writing about her own breast cancer, like all of all of those writers are already like in that, in that zone, like sub alternate identities, and talking from different, different identity formation places, and finding the ways of articulating that, and in The process, inventing new, new ways of, you know, talking about the impossible thing that we're all trying to talk about, that kind of thing. So I anyway, there were, there were those. There was another one to God. There's just so many things that pop popping into my head. I just feel like there's so many different resonances with what you're doing and the kind of stuff that I'm really interested in. So it just makes me want to want to want to want to be involved, how, however, I can, even if it's for a very short time. But I was also thinking yes about Anne Boyer, who has a book called the undying that you may know of, and that's about her own experience with breast cancer. So I'm just because, I'm just thinking, because you were talking about writing about illness and the hell healthy body and the sick body, and those things are, are pretty fascinating places to go once you open up everything. And I feel like in a project like this, it's kind of nice to open up all of the, all of the, not, not cans of worms, because no one really wants to open up a can. I don't want to open up the can of worms for any particular good reason, but just to give yourself permission to talk about the things that you want to talk about, if that makes sense. Um, and talking about the body, I think is necessary to, like, engage with the ideas of sickness and stuff, blah, blah, blah, you know, like all that kind of stuff. And then, you know that. But her book, the undying was one I started reading at the beginning, one I understood before the doctors did. I think that what I had was cancer, and that it wasn't a good one, and it wasn't going to be one that was that was curable. Hers was curable, it turns out, fortunately. But the way she writes about that experience of being, you know, a feminist body, in feminist spaces, and kind of continue. Doing the work that Susan Sontag did with her own writing on breast cancer, course, and then, and then AIDS and HIV and all that stuff. They're all kind of like it's tied together. And these are things that I've been drawing from a lot, a lot lately. Yeah, and I know a little bit more, I guess I don't know. I, yeah, I wanted to mention, like, so just with my own experience with gender, I mean, I always knew that was something else. So identify as non binary, and that didn't really come into play, like, publicly, in a public way, until, actually during the pandemic, and kind of part of what inspired it is that, like a few years before the pandemic started, when I moved here to the UK, I had a had a conversation with Eliana, my kid, who's 24 now, and they were like, it would have been like 17 then, and we went out for we celebrate Festivus from Seinfeld. And so what we do is we go for a cigar on Christmas Eve, or Christmas Eve Eve. And we used to call it father daughter cigar day. And then this one year, Ellie said, Can we rethink the terms of this arrangement and the terms of this relationship, and rethink the idea of, like, father daughter, um, and I knew what they were getting, and I was like, Yeah, of course. Oh my god. Oh my so, because I hadn't, hadn't realized that, um, that they had started identifying that way and had experiences with, you know, like, lots of like, like best friends, one best friend that I grew up with, and then my best friend in the world right now, watching, watching her go through a transition in kind of a massively public way, too. So when Eliana was like, hinting that, that that was going on, was kind of like, Oh, my God, of course, yes, um. But then the more I got to thinking about it, like I would tell, tell people about my kid and say, yeah, yeah, my kid is non binary. They take away, they and she and I, you know, I got, God, I wish I feel like we missed the boat, like our generation, because I'm 57 now. And that, you know. And I would say, I would tell my friends like, God, I mean, if there was an extra box that I could have checked when I was, like, 16, I would have checked it or 14 or 12, like I knew. I always knew that there was something different. I just didn't know that there was a box, like another box that I could check. So it was sort of like, like my my kid, that generation, is the one that gave me permission to be the person that I always knew I was. I just didn't have a language, language for it, and didn't so that opened up a whole, a whole thing, and so I don't my big thing, I guess, just an art in life in general, is really it's always been about permission. And in retrospect, the places that I've learned the most is when I get out into that deep water that David Bowie talks about, where you can't feel the bottom anymore, is when you when you get to that, that space, and realize that what, what you need is permission to be there and and that that's the space where, where you get to become the next thing that you get to become. And then the work starts, starts to, you
know, really take take on it some. It's visceral, visceralness, I guess I'd say, Yeah, so my background is mostly theater, and not so much visual, although I use a lot of visual stuff, and I'm
very influenced by it, but, like, mostly theatrical, but then a lot of ritual, because I'm initiated in these different, different, different, I guess spiritual traditions you call them from that come from Central Africa and West Africa into the new world. I know you've heard of like like Santeria. We call it Lukumi in the circles of your call it re, taking back, taking back the name, because synthetic is kind of a colonial name, because it adds the saints into these, these African ideas of deities. And then they're, they're not very Catholic. They just kind of look at some people practice it differently. But I tried to anyway, that's a very complicated conversation as well.
I got interested in ritual through Well, I've always been interested in ritual. This is a little bit long, okay, I won't say too much more, because there's I could go. Forever.
I've always been interested in ritual. When I was 25 or 26 the woman I was married to was working on her doctorate, doctorate, Tamara. Anyway, her name's her name's Tamara, and she was working on Mayan theater, and got interested in Mayan theater in 1993 9419 93 and decided that that would be something that she would want to write about. And she wasn't sure why or how, and she knew she wanted to work in Chiapas, because there were a lot of a lot of her mentors had done work there in in southern Mexico, the poorest state in the highlands, where it's where it's really cold. And anyway, as she got interested in doing this, you probably know, like in 1994 the Zapatista revolution started. And so that really kind of kind of gave her work a focus. So we went there in like 1995 96 and spent like a good five months there, and then returned several times. But doing that like I got to see communities in action. And actually this, that's the subtitle of her book, or enacted communities, communities action, and saw how these theater companies that were writing old Mayan myths that had been basically colonized out of people through through centuries of violence that they were re reinterpreting or reinscribing, inscribing them theatrically and just watching how that, you know, that idea that like watching a bunch of like little kids rushing up to a stage because the people on the stage look like them, and they have, you know, complex gender identities that they that they also have and the same skin color and are speaking the language that they speak at home. When I saw that that kind of thing happening, it shifted how I thought about theater, and gave it like an extra idea about about pulse. So the pulse for me was chasing after these different kinds of experiences I had, which were not so much in a Mayan context, because I'm not Mayan, but through these, like, African based systems, which they're like, you know, like probably hundreds of 1000s of practitioners, like in New York and LA and many in Phoenix. So, so been around it, and once I started looking into it, I kind of fell through, I guess, sort of like a rabbit hole, like Alice in the rabbit hole, and things started to make sense. And so in a lot of these, like different there's different ways of dealing specifically with the dead and ancestors and connecting to ancestral lineages. And that's a way to that's like the way of approaching divine. And like that the Divine is in your body. Now you know that, that kind of thing and that we all, we're all made of nature. We have all of the elements that are floating, it's, you know, and on all about that kind of stuff. So that was another thing that made me groove like, so like, the ritual on the site I did, I knew about theater, and then I got super interested in technology too, and just thinking about technological spaces of like represent like screens, and how the screen like the what do you call it? Just the screen. What's the word for the screen? I can't think of another word for it. Where you project a video is the space of ghosts, or the spaces of the dead, or the space of these kinds of things, and making work that's, like, super intimate and that kind of stuff. So anyway, that's a little bit more about me. And just to give you a sense of, like, kind of, kind of where I'm coming from with, with all those things. And so, yeah, I guess I just Yeah, I just hope, I hope that I say things that that might be helpful, and I'm really happy, happy to listen to, of course. Yeah, anyway, I probably can't do like, a jillion messages like this, but I'll send, I'll send as many as I can if we're ever talking and that just sounds great to me. So it was really, as really a pleasure. I think the work that you're doing sounds super interesting, and I think you're looking in some very, very interesting directions. So I can't wait to see what happens next anyway, yeah, have yourself a great Solstice, and good luck with this. With this next full moon. I hope it's soft and easy and and just you know, full of joy and healing and all those good things. All right, thank you. Lovely meeting you.
Kit voice memo 6.29.24 / LISTEN
God, hey, hello, hey. God, yeah, your messages are great, so excuse me, there's no way that I can possibly answer everything I want to say. I would want to say, like, 1000 things from 1000 different directions at once.
God, yeah, exactly. It's very similar, like, in terms of synchronicities and all that, all that stuff, same, really similar wavelength. I'm just super I'm super grateful that that it all worked out like this, then that that Chell and Michael were able to to figure out that this, this would be a really, a really good match. Um, yeah, I think that for me, if, if sounds, sounds right with you, just keep communicating like this is great, and occasionally do a zoom, but I'm talking like this in the mean and it for the time being, really works well, mostly the immediate moment, because I've got all these people coming like so my mom's here, then she leaves, and then my ex, who we've done all the different travels, and Mayan Theater, which so many things to talk About with that. Oh my God, when we lived in the office, and she'll be here staying with me and my kid, and they'll be here for a few weeks. So we're going to be kind of like last time we were all together in the house, we were getting divorced. So this will be a very, very different kind of thing, a very different kind of experience now. So that's going to be really good. And then after that, there's like, another friend coming who's going to stay for a week, then another friend coming first thing for a week, and then another ex who's going to be coming and staying for a couple of weeks, all that kind of stuff. And so there, like, little breaks in between things, but mostly there's going to be people around. Like, what really did keep you company, kind of, it's also sort of like, kind of going with, like, not really sure how much, how much time there is. It could be months. I hope it's months. I hope it's many, many, many months. But it's it's also to keep an eye on on me, because I've had, like, yeah, the seizure. And they thought the other thing was a mini stroke, but I talked to my doctor a couple days ago, and she thought that it probably was not a mini stroke, which is more of the of the seizure just kind of playing itself out because of what happened. This is ridiculous to say when you get a brain tumor and when it starts doing doing a brain bleed, which, yeah, anyway, so that's my life. God, at least I can laugh about it. It's, it's so it's so absurd, and it's so funny and so so strange and so interesting to just because, like all the, I don't know, the neuro, neurological things I think connect to spiritual things and a brain on fire, like, literally, and all that kind of stuff is pretty, pretty pretty interesting. Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure curious about all the different things that you've had, especially the stuff with with the with the pelvis, and the Mayan magic and and those different kinds of cosmologies. And I'm curious about all that stuff too. So, real quick. So you asked something about initiation, and if you thought it was necessary to be initiated into certain things. And I don't know, of course, I don't know, but I would say, like, like, for me, it was really important, because I was in my 20s, and I was wandering aimless like a cloud or whatever. And I had had a mentor who turned out to be a little bit crazy, but also very, very wise at the moment, and thought that that what I needed to do was to find the path and to go deep into it. So I did. And Santeria is not necessarily like a like a light path. I'm usually like vegan or at least vegetarian, and it's not necessarily one that's like, you know, cut out for vegans or vegetarians. If you know how these, like Earth religions work the mind stuff works similarly to in terms of of life and all that kind of stuff, which, of course, I've got, I've got problems and issues with, but, but I've done all the different, all the different kinds of ceremonies and stuff that are involved with that so but, but it for me. Me going deeper into something was really good. It was a very good grounding thing, and that's where I live, like my soul is in that, as in that the Orisha grabbed me, the spirit grabs you when you fall down, that kind of thing. That's That's what happened to me with that, and it led to unimaginable worlds, which I'm sure, I'm sure you're familiar with. And I think all the paths do that, and I don't know, yeah, if initiation is in the is in the cards, then it's just in the in the cards. And you'd be probably know it already or not. And it's not necessarily always, always necessary. I think it's often not necessary. And in fact, in terms I've seen lots of people that have been recommended to get initiated that I don't really agree with some of the decisions that some of the godparents I've seen make in terms of that particular path. Anyway, that's a whole nother issue. But yeah, any specific questions? Cool. And as you allegwa, the Trickster spirits, stuff like that, God, it's not forever about everything. So, yeah, I don't know. Let's just keep talking. Let's just keep talking like this. It's wonderful. And, yeah, anyway, I should cut this short, because I've got to go have dinner with my mom, because we haven't actually gone out to dinner since, since she's been here, because life is so strange now that's doing something as casual as going out for dinner is unusual, if that makes sense. So anyway, that's what we're gonna do, because we're coming to the end of the trip and thought it would be a proper thing or whatever. So anyway, I'm gonna eat vegan food by for whatever that's worth. Anyway, I just send it. Send you all the best hope. Hope you're having a wonderful day. Let's, let's, yeah, let's keep talking like this. That's cool, and yeah, and we'll keep sending messages back and forth. And it's extraordinarily fun, and it's really, this is really enlivening me and giving me a place to focus, and just kind of thinking about in terms of, like, mentorship. Maybe I've said this before that I kind of, I always see it not as like, you know, there's not like a grand master or whatever, we're following gurus and all that kind of bullshit. It's just that sometimes someone is like, maybe gone, like, around a different kind of corner, and knows a little bit a little bit more about that kind of corner, and can tell you something about that. So I hope I'm helpful and that way, but you're sure to teaching me an awful lot too, and I think it's just kind of fascinating a life path. Somehow, how interesting. We just have interesting, interesting people find themselves traveling in parallel dimensions without even realizing it. So anyway, all right, so happy whatever day it is, the Friday or Saturday or Sunday or whatever, and look forward to talking soon you.
