This is our moment, our time. We will be held accountable for what we did with our lives. For how we responded to Aboriginal deaths in custody. To how we voted once we learned that Australia is the only Commonwealth nation who doesn’t recognise its First Peoples in its constitution, or in any kind of treaty. We will be held accountable for what we let slide by us because we felt overwhelmed, too tired, or worried we would get it wrong.

Wake up. We have no more time for dilly dallying. The world needs you to show up, break the mould you were poured into by virtue of your family of origin, your religious conditioning or your gender role. It needs you to wake up and sing your song, write your book, tell your story, make your art, plant your garden.

I lie in the flickering dawn light taking all this in, letting it settle deep into my heart space as I allow room for wonder and exploration. I hold the dream like a stone in my hand. Putting it in my pocket as I pry my tired body up out of the bed and shuffle sleepily to the kitchen to tend to the kids, brew coffee, kiss my baby nephew who is gurgling away happily in his highchair in the middle of the bright yellow kitchen of the holiday home I’ve rented with my sister.

I have learned to discern where the fibres of bone and marrow meet at the intersection of spiritual abuse and underlying mental illness. I have deeply studied the connection between evil and stupidity, and noticed how the capacity for addiction often indicates a commensurate capacity for spiritual power and awareness. I have made detailed notes about where intent ends and consequences begin, where family of origin patterns lay the groundwork for enabling harm, and where that groundwork overlaps with the safety and survival of individual members. I have mapped the subtle but discernible differences between a psychotic break and a spiritual awakening. I have circumnavigated the delicate meeting place between shamanic power, spiritual anointing and energetic intelligence.

I am absolutely convinced by the universal law of free will, that no one can ever make us do anything that insults our soul. That we are all completely sovereign beings. When I connect with someone’s higher self, I am deeply connected to the root of their own sovereignty. There, the muddy waters which can sometimes swirl between a client and a practitioner, things like power dynamics, transference, countertransference and projection have very little impact. No one for a hot second is allowed to put me on a pedestal, or to substitute my own framework for their own, or divest their authority to me. Not even a tiny bit. Their higher self won’t have it. Neither will mine. So when I relate to them like this, it is inherently empowering for them, and it constantly reminds them of their own grace, dignity, belonging and agency.

An amazing thing happens in this part of the journey. I find that my own cosmic cocoon is transparent to a certain number of close friends and companions. They can see it because they know it; they have also been initiated by the cocoon and so it holds no terror for them, to see me undergoing it. They are the Mystery-Holders for this part of my initiation and the astonishing and scandalous grace of it all is that I get to have them by my side through the whole thing.

In the fluid horror of the dark deep, I am invited to meet my own adaptability, supple strength, fluidity and resourcefulness in the motif of the octopus. As I watch myself in octopus form, tentacles curling gracefully in and out, shifting with the current, methodical, slow, magical, measured my frightened, ragged breathing slowly give way to the kinaesthetic mysticism of measured inhale and exhale with the octopus, and the Big Task facing me starts to lose its power to halt my forward motion, to freeze me in place.

I only just have time to catch my breath on this new horizon before the fire comes to burn away anything I don’t need anymore. Which is most things, as it turns out. This stage teaches me that we really need only one thing; unconditional love. And that is always available to us as close as our next breath in this abundant universe stitched together by Love. Anything that cannot resonate at the frequency of unconditional love now has to go. And so the fire is here for it. And with the fire comes grief for what is burning.

There are things I learn from that experience that I will never be able to translate into language. They are Knowings that go deeper than language, and as such, are the fingerprint of Divine. They are planted in me, like a series of internal way-showers, map-markers, energetic signposts. They cannot be explained or described, they are simply Known, where once they were not-known.

This place might sound sad or lonely to you, if you yourself have not been invited to live here. It might even sound terrifying.

It is not sad. It is many things, but sad isn’t one of them.

It is wild and generous, untamed and scandalously beautiful. It echoes with many millennia of sacred songs, thrums with the beating of a million hearts and two million feet dancing the ancient mandala of life and love and bearing witness to the unfoldment of all of creation. It is holy and unspeakable and I never want to leave.