Sacred Medicines and Healing: Recognizing the Divine Within

I am so grateful that I was able to — quite literally — flee NYC during the first peak of the coronavirus pandemic in June 2020. I had moved there in August 2003 in my early 20’s, and I had clocked over 15 years living there, entangled in the madness that is both living in NYC and early adulthood — and early womanhood in the early 2000’s, more specifically. The city, an addictive, fickle, tempestuous, and demanding lover, imprinted itself upon me, and gradually but also suddenly, I began finding myself being pulled like a pool floatie in erratic currents between shifting, overlapping, and contradictory facets of it as I continued to come up for air and then re-immerse myself in the city and all of its hyped-up madness. Fast forward to the present, and I am now more than twice as wealthy as when I began that addictive, volatile affair with NYC but with less social cache and freedom, and of course less of that youthful, innocent optimism than I had in that hazy because now-so-distant but yet crystal-clear, rose-colored and alcohol-fueled youth of my 20’s. Yet I also feel wiser, more empowered, more comfortable with myself — even if terrified of the future and what it may hold for myself, for my daughter, and for humanity and the larger natural world.

I can and do lament the mistakes and foolhardy passions and illusions of my youth, yet I also feel grateful that I’ve come out alive, quite literally so as I mourn friends who have passed away from struggles with mental illness and alcohol & substance use. I…