As a teen, I always wanted to travel to other cultures and‘ go where nothing was familiar- because I felt It would shake off the numbing effects of suburban living. Like many youth of the 1960s, we had a sense htat the burbs and cities were a fake reality even though we hadn’t yet been out in the world. What helped me to feel happy and in balance was the amazing efforts my parents made to immerse me, during weekends in their world of sailing, thus instilling awareness of the power of nature and the elements around me.
The other reality I discovered at 5 was that drawing was fun! I could not stop drawing.
Later I spent hours studying anatomy and the human form. It became my passion. It Helped me cope with the city and the cold school system.
My drawing skills led me eventually into the commercial art world after highschool graduation and in the 70’s I was busy and happy in the fields of fashion illustration and animation as a layout artist and cartoon designer.. Life was good.
A few years latter I found myself finally traveling to remote places where nothing was familiar, as I had always dreamed of and found myself sitting with circles of women on the Sepik river deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. I daily drew them and their ways and their carvings and weavings during the 6 months I was there..
I also found myself in the high arctic for a year, also in womens circles, being offered raw seal kidney and being taught waterproof stitching. Again I drew them and their tools and their ancient ways. I even gave birth to my daughter there in 2 hours and with no interference. It was the children that told me giants had built the inukshuks.
The year I lived on the tundra with the Netsilingmiut gave me a precious opportunity to draw their portraits and join in their daily life which was a window into their ancient ensouled and egalitarian ways and a sense of how expanded and unlimited their knowing was on many levels.
However later on back in Toronto my drawing skills were soon to be downplayed as the new fine arts movement of abstraction and pop art etc.moved in and pushed aside ‘realism’ labeling it as nieve. Also the new digital world eliminated the need for hand drawing.
It was then in my mid 30s, when my difficult times began as I faced this new reality together with making poor choices in relationships. In hindsight I see my saving grace was the little piece of land I invested in at my fathers advice when I was 27, which is where I live today.
So in my mid 40s I made the big changes I needed to make, as many of us do, to reclaim and dedicate myself totally to my true purpose.
I reconnected with drawing through building a life as a mural artist. One of the last venues left for an artist to work simply and directly with brush, house paint and ladder!
A new cosmic direction.
Now I was drawing, drafting and designing large scale full colour murals in schools and colleges. I was in heaven again( even though I had to weave around the restrictions of the govrnt system).
After I had created a mural for myself in my own home, which I had built on my piece of land, I had a powerful dream- the morphic creature I had just painted, was actually descending the stairs. I could hear her huge lion paws landing!
I called a psychic to ask for meaning and she said “you are going to start a new kind of work, a new direction. You have landed!”
I was not impressed! I had only just developed my new little business at 46 and was just getting known. I didnt have the time or resources to start a new unknown direction.
Nevertheless it was my next mural assignment that brought this new direction to me. I was hired by my neighbours, the Mohawks of Tyendinaga, to paint their traditions on the walls of their school. Me! An Irish woman. It was 2006.
The Blood Masteries
A specific theme emerged for me from the forgotten and hidden wisdom of the Haudenosaunee Peacemaker mythology. It pushed through to my awareness as I began to interpret these complex teachings visually, on the school walls on the Mohawk Nation Territory.
It was The Womb Blood Masteries that began to slowly make their wisdom known to me, as I painted the life of the indigenous Virgin Birth Mothers of the Peacemaker Group, who lived here in Ontario 900 years ago.
So began my search to uncover this natural technology that I later learned was a global practice. There was no written material I could find so I decided to engage the help of the ayahuasca plant and did biannual ceremonies for 6 years at my small studio home.
This led to more levels of meaning of the inner body technologies and it began to expose other hidden truths buried in other cultures. It led me to find the “womb to heart natural technologies” of the Qero of the Andes; a precontact system.
I was also at the time hosting small womb wisdom retreats in my country hideaway and I asked my friend and collegue, Karen Holmes, to lead related retreats in my new mongolian yurt I erected on my land.
Her work exposed me to the world of R. Steiner and the Hybernian Mysteries. This wisdom helped me to understand the relation our ancestors had with the land in the time the indigenous Peacemakers of Turtle Island walked the land.
I began to also lead small ceremonies in my newly established Dark Lodge yurt. I called my intimate little center in the trees Wyldwood Sojourn- a name my mother chose. It was 2010.I hosted many 2 day retreats with colleagues until 2020.
A Record of the findings
I was determined to gather all the different streams of this global system, sourced from the Qero womb to heart technology together with the Peacemaker mission and record them in the book that I wrote between 2020 and 2022, called the “Good Darkness”.