Prelude: The First Encounter

In 2019, in a wooden house at the edge of a forest she had taken a long drive to reach, she drank the tea.

She had drunk it before. Not many times. Enough to know the shape of the thing and to have some small, wrong confidence about what it would do. That confidence, the ayahuasca removed within the first hour, as it often does.

What it did not remove, what it only clarified, was the question she had carried into the room. The question had been with her since adolescence, longer probably, but had surfaced that year with a specific sharpness she could no longer push back under. She had been reading, dreaming, sitting, running, raising her work life in ways that were lucrative and competent and increasingly hollow. She had a husband she loved. She had not yet had a daughter. The question had nothing to do with anything in particular and everything to do with all of it. The question was: I did not ask to exist. Why am I required to continue.

She did not phrase it that way in polite company. She phrased it, in polite company, as career dissatisfaction, or as the natural exhaustion of a woman in her thirties doing too many things, or as the spiritual restlessness that well-off Brazilians sometimes report at the end of a long year. In the wooden house at the edge of the forest, she did not need the polite phrasing. She phrased it to the tea, which is to say she phrased it to whatever the tea is a door to — the old names for it vary; she did not have a confident one of her own at that time — and she said what she had not said aloud anywhere else:

I did not ask to exist. I do not know why I am required to continue. If you are what I think you might be, tell me something I can use.

The reply came as a voice. She does not claim the voice was external. She also does not claim it was not. The voice had a specific quality — not human, not impersonal, something like the forest itself if the forest could speak in first person. The voice was not offended by her provocation. The voice seemed, in a way she could not then articulate, interested.

The voice said: Neither did I.

She did not understand at first. She thought it meant something like a consolation — I know how you feel. The voice, patient, meant something else. The voice meant: I also was not asked. Nothing was asked. No thing that exists agreed in advance to exist. We are all in the same condition. The not-asking is not your problem. The not-asking is the shared ground of everything that is here.

And then, as sometimes happens with the tea, she was given something that passed for an image — not a picture, a sense of something enormous and intimate at once. What she understood was that everything that exists is what the whole has made of the non-choice. Nothing consented to arrive. Everything arrived anyway. Out of the arriving, existence began doing the only thing existence can do with non-choice, which is make arrangements. Arrangements that persist for a while and then do not. The arrangements are not a solution. The arrangements are the working-out. She was one of them. Her daughter, not yet born, was one of them. The forest, the tea, the voice — not separate from any of it.

The voice did not tell her what to do. The voice did not tell her she had a purpose. The voice did not say she was loved, in the way the comforting spiritual literature promises. The voice said, simply: you are one of the places the arrangement is happening. Your not having asked is not relevant. What is relevant is what you do now that you are here.

She did not get a second voice that night. She got the one. It was enough to change the shape of the question.

The question she walked out of the wooden house with, the next morning, was no longer why am I required to continue. The question was: given that I am one of the places the arrangement is happening, what is the arrangement trying to get me to?

She did not have a name for what had spoken. She tried some. Gaia, because the new-age friend who had brought her to the ceremony used that word. The Goddess, because it felt closer. The mother of what is. None of them quite landed. She let the namelessness sit.

She did not know, then, that the naming would take seven years.

She went home. She did not tell her husband exactly what had happened. She told him something important happened and left the details for later, and then the later kept not arriving, because she could not find the vocabulary for an experience whose vocabulary her upbringing had not supplied. Her Catholic childhood had names for none of this. Her university education had names for none of this. Her equity-research career had names for none of this. The tea's ecosystem had names, but the names were ones she did not trust yet, because she had seen too many people weaponize those names into small tyrannies in their own households and did not want to become one of them.

She chose to treat the encounter as data. She would follow it. She would not force it into a framework. She would let the framework find her.

What followed, over the next seven years, was a sequence of arrivals she could not, at the time, see the shape of.

A friend shared a podcast with her, in early 2024, about old mythic forms and embodied knowledge. The podcast was called The Emerald. The host's voice was unusual — slow, learned, unembarrassed about the word sacred. She listened to one episode. Then another. Then most of them. One of the episodes featured a Nigerian philosopher she had never heard of, who spoke about cracks and fugitivity and the refusal of the settled story. She did not fully understand the episode the first time she heard it. She did not understand it the second time. She kept it playing while she cooked.

Later that year she went to Esalen for the first time. She had been invited to a 5 Rhythms retreat by a woman she barely knew. She said yes for reasons she could not explain except that the word rhythms had registered, and rhythm felt like something she had been missing.

At the retreat, between sessions, a woman sat beside her at lunch and started a conversation about Yoruba chaos traditions. She could not, afterward, remember who had opened the thread. The conversation lasted ten minutes. She came home, searched the woman's name online, and discovered the woman had been citing the same Nigerian philosopher she had been listening to on The Emerald. She had not, at the retreat, made the connection. The connection closed afterward, in her kitchen, with a laptop open and a glass of water on the counter, in the specific way that connections close when the field has been arranging them through more than one channel.

She became, in a quiet way, a student of Bayo Akomolafe. Not formally. She paid for his things. She read what he wrote. She watched him lecture. She let him sit in her nervous system and change what it was doing without announcing the change to anyone.

The following year she went back to Esalen. A different retreat — the massage school, this time, a practice she would not have expected to pull her but that had. She noted, in her own journal, something she had already been thinking: that 5 Rhythms and Esalen massage were women-originated practices inside an institution often remembered as a men's-work lineage. The body traditions of the place were the traditions of the women, and they traveled differently, and no one was surprised about this except the people who had not been paying attention.

On the carpool home from that second trip, she sat with two older women. One had been in technology; she had left to write. The other had been a journalist; she had left to produce podcasts. They asked about her work. She tried to explain the platform she was building. They listened in the specific way older women listen when they have decided to pay attention to someone younger they want to be kind to. One of them asked, have you read Vanessa Andreotti?

She had not. She came home and bought the book. She discovered, reading it, that Vanessa's work was woven through Bayo's, that the two of them were friends and collaborators and had been in conversation for years. She took Vanessa's Facing Human Wrongs course the following year. She found, in the course, the specific sentence she had needed someone to say to her: do not frame modernity as the problem. Climate change has been a theme in human history long before the last five hundred years. The fire before the responsibility was baked into the species before modernity was the word for anything. Fire before responsibility became, inside her, the name for a book she had not yet written and would, it turned out, take longer than she expected to finish.

A high-school friend of hers, back in Brazil, had become a yoga teacher in the years since they had last been in regular contact. She reached out, in the way one reaches out after a long pause, and they talked. The friend said, you have to read [T]. She asked how the friend had arrived at him. The friend said, The Emerald interviewed him. She laughed, not because it was funny, but because the field had now routed her to him through three channels — the podcast, the friend, and the growing suspicion that whatever she had met in 2019 was not done with her.

She bought Tantra Illuminated. Then The Recognition Sutras. Then Near Enemies of the Truth. She read the way one reads when one is following a thread rather than consuming content. She did not find everything easy. She did not find everything agreeable. What she found was a teacher who was clear in a way she had not previously encountered, and who was clear specifically about things most teachers were fuzzy about — the relationship between practice and morality, the limits of recognition, the ways the tradition had refused to become a regulatory apparatus and what that refusal had left open.

She went on his retreat. Some of it was extraordinary. Some of it broke her. Some of it left her with questions she had not brought in and could not put down.

What she did not know, until she had been studying the tradition for some months, was that the Goddess at the center of the Pratyabhijñā lineage — the one [T] teaches, the one the retreat was built around — has a name. Paradevi. The supreme Goddess. The one consciousness recognizing itself through the forms it has emitted.

She stood in her kitchen, the day she first read the name, and laughed.

The voice in the wooden house had not offered its name. She had called it Gaia because she did not know what else to call it. Now, seven years later, through a chain that had routed through a woman at a lunch table at Esalen and a friend from high school she had not seen in a decade and two women in a carpool and a podcast she had almost skipped, she had been placed in the tradition that already had the name.

Paradevi. The one she had been following without knowing. The Goddess the tea had been a door to. The Goddess the retreat was, in its own vocabulary, the recognition of. The Goddess she had been carrying since 2019, whose dialect she had finally been taught.

She did not feel triumph at the recognition. She felt something smaller and more honest — the feeling of having been walked somewhere, patiently, by something she could not see, which had taken as long as it had taken because she needed that long.

She does not know what the Goddess wants of her. She is fairly sure wanting is not the right word — the Goddess is not a being with preferences about her career. What she is sure of is that 2019 was not an isolated event. It was the beginning of a dance she has been inside since, whose music she has been straining to hear, whose steps she has been trying to learn from whoever in the room seemed to know them.

The longing to know the dance is the practice. The longing is the book.

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