Driving to the airport, I cursed loudly in the car. At first the emotions broke outward in murmuring, then in my mother tongue. This is unlike me — more precisely, I do it when the inner volcano can no longer only smoke but lava begins rolling from the depths. The next time I’ll do it will be on the highway in Spain, where I’ll be screaming hysterically, speeding at great speed along a luxuriously fine sea coast, past castles, villas, countless supermarkets and the dry, arid Andalusian cliffs.

Why do you put such heaviness in my heart? I cried. As if my heart weren’t her own. Why do you stir up fears, suspicions, premonitions? Do you not see that right now I am doing one of the bravest things of my life? Do you not see what this courage costs me? Can you not ever simply let me be human, be happy? Do I never deserve a happy ending, without trials? Can it please stop hurting at last?

Mušītu, my Black Night companion, eternal knowing and presence, of course did not answer. There is no point in arguing with her, you can only talk with yourself, and she knows this, and you know she knows it. Yet I had turned to her.

You show me narcissi. A woman who sinks. A story that stops just before the end.

The traffic light flickered yellow, then red. Pause. I understood the message and it infuriated me even more.

You know, I’ll go anyway. Perhaps it will be only ten days there, where I have always known I would walk — in the ancient valleys and ocean shores, in the sequoia forests and dried salt lakes.

Lies — even then I knew that I would want to stay with all my might. Yesterday in the sacred Plant ceremony I had said farewell to my sisters — medicine women — as if before an infinitely long journey. Now you, I told them. I am going on a journey I have awaited all my life. Even after Peru and Brazil’s jungle’s wildest paths, after India’s temples and countless sacred sites I must not name — this is the Great Path, here it begins. How true that was. And how much I looked then like the Fool in the Tarot — a step over the abyss, a little bag over the shoulder, hope. And the great initiation journey — through all the sacred stages of transformation, from trusting the Soul, through the Death, Devil, Star and Rebirth cards.

Yes, I went anyway.

Between wisdom and foolishness there is one nearly palpable, fine-fine line, they both balance on one arrow’s edge. They are both distinguishable and often two sides of one coin. I knew there were things one can but cannot but do. They say that after the Tarot’s Major Arcana, after the known 22 cards, there follow several more cards — knowable only after one has already stepped over the threshold. Comprehensible only after one has walked the Fool’s path. And there too everything begins again in more enlightened, yet still beginner’s foolishness. My colt had to be released into freedom, however dark a night Mušītu promised me. And I had to trust the Great Spirit that, whatever dew and mist lay on the path — I would find it again, I would see my strength again, fresh and new.

Mušītu was silent. Not heavier, not lighter, a little differently. We had said everything we needed to say to each other. Both of us knew this moment’s significance. She like someone who already knows the story’s end, I like someone who does not want to turn the book’s pages to find out whether the last words will be “happily ever after”.

There was someone else within me who was also silent.

A ten-year-old girl. A fair-haired child who very early understood that her home does not stand by itself — someone has to hold it. A child who learned to listen and hear the subtlest changes and nuances — by the way the kitchen light was on, by how the footsteps sounded of the one coming home, even by the way the cigarette her father lit was smoking. From the smoke to read his mood and predict whether she needed to be ready to leap — to save, to hold, to endure.

This girl was very tired. And very, truly now, truly wanted someone to come at last and say: I see you. You don’t have to hold it alone anymore. Whether imagined or real, it doesn’t matter — you are no more alone. To both of them — the little girl and Mušītu — I said not another word. After the cursing and harsh words in the car, silence had settled. In my pocket, carefully tucked away, a tiny Saint Francis figurine was resting. The saint who gave away everything he possessed in order to be free.

And so we drove. Mušītu. The girl. And I.

On the plane I fell asleep. The dream came quickly, without a long preamble or wandering in the fog.

A chimney. Old, black, with an ancient smoke smell soaked into every brick, from top to bottom. The furnace mouth, wide open, black, warm. Something moves downward. I see a snake — long, red-brown, with scales reflecting fire that isn’t there — will-o’-the-wisp fire. The snake transforms into a beautiful man. Dark, brilliant eyes — the eye colour changes, now greenish, now brown, now yellow with pink spots, now pitch black.

I know that looking into these eyes for too long is not permitted, but to look away is infinitely difficult, the eyes hypnotise, excite, draw in. I look around. In the room stands a woman. Suddenly I see that she is growing pale. Then literally begins to dissolve before my eyes, becoming ever thinner and thinner like gauze. The woman gazes into the man’s eyes. It seems something is eating her from inside, draining all her life-force. Yet she cannot stop looking. At that moment in the dream some voice sounds. It belongs neither to me, nor to the woman, nor to the snake-man. The voice sounds hollow and from a distance, seeming to resound both in and outside the dream.

The voice says one single word.

I woke with this word in my mouth — literally in my mouth, feeling it rolling at the upper palate, at the tip of the tongue, in the mouth’s corners. While I was dozing, someone had sat down beside me. Stefan, so he introduced himself. Stefan was good — I knew this. In him rested simplicity, firmness, presence and also non-intrusiveness.

And I told — of what we had planned to create together with someone awaiting me in the city of Saint Francis, that this was the beginning of a new life. Also about being a medicine woman, working with the God-Plants, having studied in the Amazon jungle. I burbled like a spring brook and marvelled at myself, because by nature I was closed and to strangers I didn’t usually unbutton my heart’s corners and turn them outward.

The stranger was a presence that listened. Only for one small moment during my telling something moved in the Stranger’s face. Not doubt, not support, something more precise than that. Attention that hears behind the words. He said little. But I descended carrying something new within me, one more seed which beside Mušītu and the red snake skin I stored in my inner, only-I-knew hiding place. A little knowing-seed from the stranger thirty thousand feet high. Someone who either was or wasn’t, because after disembarking from the plane, in the airport corridors, I searched for the Stranger with one eye to say goodbye, but our paths crossed no more. Not at the baggage claim belts, not at the document-check points. As if he hadn’t had a suitcase with him, nor needed to show a border-crossing permit.

Before the mountain there was a waterfall.

Castle Crags — granite towers in Northern California’s forests that shoot from the earth so sharply that they seem carved from celestial — cloud, wind, star — mass. This was the native land of the Okwanuchu Shasta. The Wintu people called these granite towers the dwelling of the Spirits. All streams, the Sacramento River, natural springs in this area were sacred. In 1855 the Okwanuchu Shasta and Wintu people were killed beside these stones. Children. Women. The old. The sacred rivers flowed, carrying knowledge of death in themselves. At that time I didn’t yet know this, because I always want a place to tell me its own story — as much as I am allowed to know.

We set off along a path that flowed away from the rest. On my feet were cream-coloured boots bought at Walmart — the one I had come to meet had looked at my leather sandals and announced that “we don’t do that here”, and with great pride had bought trainers for nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. I had been waiting a long time for the moment when I could ask the ancestors of these lands permission to place footsteps on their earth. I asked Chaski that I needed a moment for prayer. He quickly stirred himself and with a very serious facial expression announced that exactly in this spot he always meditated and that he also had an irresistible desire to enter his process. And so we sat each on our own edge of the cliff and prayed.

When I returned from the inner journey, it turned out a long time had passed. I saw how Chaski was restlessly walking across the cliff face with a wooden stick in his hand and poking the moss. To the side were stacked little stone piles — as if in a circle, as if in a mandala. Oh God, how beautiful and pure, I thought. But something reminded me of the moment when with my children I sat at the Northern lake shore, on a hot summer’s day. While I’d been reading a book, they’d built sandcastles with stone and shell ramparts in the white beach sand. The feeling was very similar — like patience, like peace, like the protective instinct and observer that belongs to a mother who ceaselessly holds the field so that the children can grow up.

We continued walking. The path wound upward through a conifer forest until Root Creek waterfall appeared — white water veils five hundred feet wide that flowed over granite boulders from Castle Dome’s summit in a narrow, dark gorge. Beyond it — the sharp cliff ridges. Above them — sky.

For a moment I sank into this view. The Andean sages call mountains Apu. And know they are Mother Earth’s communication “antennae” with the Stars. At that moment I didn’t yet have words for it, but the moment of gazing caught in me. Beautiful, noble, living sacredness, I thought. And then I told him about my medicine woman’s book. About a chapter in my recently written book where a woman loses a child. About how writing sometimes seems to me like prophecy — that I write things that haven’t yet happened, fearing they will be fulfilled. But I cannot not write, because the one who writes through me is more powerful than fears.

At that moment my foot slipped on the mossy stone. The cream boots flashed through the air and splash! I was knee-deep in water, murky, dark slush. The water was very cold. I scrambled out, feeling very awkward. I had been looking at the sky, thinking about nobility and beauty. And here I stood with nine-dollar boots covered in mud and algae layers.

Are you okay? he asked in that American expression that conveys exaggerated sympathy but only the phrase is perceptible.

Yes, yes, sorry, I said. From the slush I scrambled out myself.

He stood on the bank with that expression I now recognise — very rapid calculation of how it would be correct to act in the situation. Then he threw himself to give me his hand, rashly and too fast — and slipped himself into the water’s slush. I poured water from the sports shoes, wrung out the moisture from the trouser legs. I smiled to ease his confusion a little. Now all attention was devoted to his wet feet.

We slowly began making our way back to the car parked below. I carried my boots in my hands, treading across the cliffs with bare feet. He continued walking in the soaked shoes that squelched unpleasantly with each step. His feet were white and soft, I would observe that later. Mine were rough and grazed, because I loved walking barefoot. I had arrived on this continent with pinkly lacquered nails. And now the pink nails shone between the mud-smeared feet.

I watched how in the setting sun’s light Chaski, shoes squelching, made his way, walking ahead of me. How delicately slender was his build, how peculiar his gait, one foot turned slightly outward, as if limping slightly. His joints possessed such delicacy as of a long and carefully carved stone sculpture. Against the light the figure cast a shadow and I thought he looked like an embodied fine line that exists between reason and unreason, wisdom and foolishness, child and eternal saint sitting somewhere in a cave, far in the Himalayan mountains.

Behind him walked we three — the little girl who wanted to believe in miracle, the primordially ancient Mušītu and the woman whose body burned and fingers wanted to touch each curve of his body, each line carved in the body’s marble.

Lake Tahoe is eight hundred metres deep. Looking at it from the shore, you cannot tell — the lake spreads peacefully as a mountain lake does, only it colours itself bluer. Yet beneath the bright blue there is a huge depth, dark and cold below. That can only be felt, or of course experienced, when you jump in the lake to swim. It was too early in spring for that.

I was hungry. Simply, humanly hungry — after the long walking, falling in water and tiring drive. The body needed to eat.

Chaski at first resisted and offered me little jars of boiled tasteless vegetables. But I wanted to feel what pizza tasted like by Lake Tahoe, to sense how things smell here, how sweet, bitter, filling they were. Reluctantly he agreed that I could order myself food. Arriving at the rented traveller’s inn room, I spread the pizza box on the bed and opened the lid.

The room filled with a warm and rich smell. And after a little while I was already watching how the boiled vegetables jars stood untouched on the dresser’s edge and Chaski was eating the scorned pizza. Eating because he was hungry, eating without noticing anything around him. Finally eating. On the bed’s edge sat not a monk for whom food is only a blessing that maintains the body alive. There raged a man who has kept himself in the reins of ideas and principles.

And suddenly I felt very guilty, fear crept into me. Chaski began to tell how essential it was to eat pure food. “I’ve cultivated my mind for years to eat only living, pure and simple food,” he said. “Now it’s all gone. What a disgusting feeling in the stomach, do you feel how much dead material is in this food, how wretchedly fatty it is?”

I sat on the bed’s edge, in my hand was the pizza crust. He looked at it as if I held in my hands a loaf baked by Satan. I smiled, trying to soften the situation. I was afraid that I had done something irreparable, that I had shown my true, unspiritual nature. I looked at the pizza box. I had eaten one slice of juicy cheese and pineapple pizza. The box was empty. The remaining three as a curse had settled into Chaski’s stomach.

The emotional temperature in the little room had changed and, having sat for a bit, I suggested going for a walk along the only village street. Finally we dressed and went out into the town’s dusk.

And I began to tell. About how I came to the jungle, how I began to work with the God-Plants, how the feeling after my very first Ayahuasca ceremony was — I am finally home, I am finally in reality, in what I have always known. Reality continued when the shaman first called me to the jungle to learn to work with the Plants. And continued in many experiences and difficult lessons in the Amazon’s high and very deep jungle. About how with the medicine I rediscovered the Creator again and again, the Earth’s Soul, the unity of everything. And how I descended into the deepest underground corners, vomiting out the blackest darkness. The story imperceptibly led also to the discovery of the medicine people and shamans’ world, where since ancient times battles and wars have taken place, how there are those who work with the Darkness, brujos, and those who relentlessly illuminate all that festers and rots.

The sun had nearly set. We walked along the straight street.

“Why are you telling me this?” Chaski asked condemningly when I paused to draw breath. He seemed frightened, as if all the black wizards, witches and underground spirits had taken their places beside us and were strolling along the only town street. “I don’t work with darkness, it’s an old illusion. When light is absolute, shadow disappears,” he said, not letting me continue telling who I am.

“Sorry,” this was the first time I heard myself loudly apologising for my life, my field, for the medicine work. “I won’t talk about this anymore, sorry,” I added too hastily. And something in me was astonished, because never, never before had I apologised to anyone for my life — quite the opposite, I had been a reliable guardian and defender of medicine.

We set off back to our room. There was still heaviness in the air. We lay down beside each other, yet I could not nestle close — between us was some invisible wall. Chaski pretended all was well, became overly practical and said he was very tired. Tomorrow the drive to Mount Shasta. All three of us internally battled, each for her own piece of truth — the girl hoped, the woman was angry about the rejection, the old wise woman said that now was the moment when I could still stop.

The room’s lights went out and in the semi-darkness I watched him falling asleep. With my eyes I loved the cheekbone contours, the slender fingers. Already half-asleep, nearly drifted off, he whispered: “I’m tired of farting. Now I’ll fart again.”

Some part of me could not believe those were the last words before sleep, before going to Mount Shasta, before our marriage ceremony. But some part rejoiced, thinking that finally the body and flesh’s simplicity was coming in. And then we fell asleep — with a palm’s-breadth between us. Because tomorrow was a big day, tomorrow I would see the Mountain.

The next day came. And before my eyes the Mountain rose.

The Wintu people, who have lived at the foot of their sacred mountain for thousands of years, tell of Mis Misa — the small but extraordinarily powerful Mountain Spirit that dwells in the very middle and maintains balance between Earth and Universe. Holds the Earth at the correct distance from the Sun. Turns the Earth’s globe so that in every part there is the right season. Once there was a firm prohibition — to the summit of Mount Shasta, above the place where trees stopped leafing and needling, only medicine women and men were permitted to climb. And even then only having received the Mountain Spirit’s permission.

But those were other times. Thousands of people now scrambled the mountain with crystals in their pockets and spoke in a language that tasted of sweetened lemonade. At the mountain’s foot lies the Wintu people’s birthplace, a sacred field, now trampled by tourist crowds, intergalactic Light-language practitioners and UFO specialists. Among them were originals and charlatans, those who truly sought power and healing, and those who, hung with expensive accessories and ritual tools, climbed past the tree-marked boundary to remember their ancient Lemurian origins.

Not far from the mountain, wide and deep, lies Medicine Lake. And next to it — vast obsidian fields. A place where lava flowing from a volcano met ice and cold, creating the sharpest crystalline substance found in nature. The local people with great care used this black, metallic shining glass in their ceremonies, forming mirrors, blades and arrowheads. We wanted to stop at Medicine Lake and I longed to receive permission to reach Sáttítla — that’s what the Ajumawi tribe called the mighty obsidian fields that spread 30 miles to the northeast of Mount Shasta.

Yet in the highlands cold still ruled — ice and snow on the roads leading to the black glass fields were still impassable. And we were stopped halfway. There was not yet my time to reach the place covered by the truth’s black, sharp material. Somewhere in me after yesterday’s doubts grew, and the snow that did not let us reach Medicine Lake suddenly seemed to me like a sign that I had no permission to get there. Something was not right with me. That was a strange thought, because suddenly a sort of rivalry had crept in — which of us is stronger. But it was not mine; I felt challenged to some battle uncharacteristic of me, which saddened me very deeply, because I was here for only one reason. I loved.

When we finally arrived in the Mount Shasta town, we went to meet Chaski’s acquaintances. We met in a smoothie and fresh juice bar. Opposite was a row of shops whose windows were decorated with crystals, shaman’s drums, shells and loud signs about how Shasta is the storage site of the ancient continent Lemuria’s consciousness.

There weren’t many tourists, the town languished in the off-season. We sat at an inelegant metal table, I, Chaski, his acquaintance and a woman with grey hair and peculiar eyes. Suddenly both women right there in the juice bar began speaking among themselves in the so-called Light language. And spoke for a long time. I sat and marvelled at what I saw and heard. The language had no sound, it did not come from the Source. I know Light language exists, but this was such murmuring as small children invent when they pretend to speak in a foreign tongue. Two grey women with smoothies in their hands told each other something endlessly — as if neither of us two was there at all. I, as ever, accepted that my sense of artificiality was not correct and that there must be something I did not yet have access to.

And then we went to Mount Shasta, where in a forest bend between trees stones had been laid out in a star pattern. And here again I noticed that one of the ladies had extraordinarily peculiar eyes — the pupils expanded and contracted like a cat’s. At some point something reptilian looked out of them and I was confused by the hunger that radiated from it to the left and right. The woman looked at both of us with Chaski and announced that we were a Divine Pair. The chosen ones. Everything in me contracted. I felt uncomfortable that all this was happening in Mount Shasta’s spirit’s presence — this theatre, this vulgar play. But I was in a foreign land, among foreign people, I wanted to be kind and open.

Then both women stood facing each other before the stones laid out on the ground. Both continued conversing in Light language which turned into an argument. Just as quickly as it had begun, the argument stopped. The more benevolent of the women lifted out from the car a large suitcase, opened it, carefully unwrapped the fine cloths in which rested — a huge crystal skull. “This is Mary,” the woman said quietly. “I have been entrusted to care for her, she guides me, I must wash and tend her. This time you two will wash her!”

I stood confused and searched for Chaski’s gaze. In this theatre something was happening that was very childishly, primitively fragile. There was revealed some new-age facet I didn’t know. Something in all of it was primordial and real, but the reality was translated into some strange language, something very childlike in it. But the very root, the very depth of love I saw in the woman. And I agreed on Mount Shasta’s edge to wash together with my beloved a shimmering amethyst crystal skull. Love’s work is and remains love’s work. Together with Chaski we washed death.

After the whole process the benevolent woman pressed into my hands a small leather pouch. Inside was — a crystal key.

I took the key. Thank you, I said.

And understood nothing — everything was so theatrical, so invented and at the same time so real and with such deep rootedness. It seemed that exactly this kind of game was needed to pass on the truth to me. A moment will come when we’ll stand in the Andean mountains, on the sacred Puma Orco hill, and I’ll place there the little white crystal key — hand it over to the Q’eros people’s hands. Everyone will pretend to understand everything, everyone will pretend to understand nothing. The part of the game unknown to us will have been fulfilled.

Then we scrambled down. I quietly rejoiced that we had not climbed the Mountain higher than the tree-marked line. It seemed the previous day’s reorganisation in the crooked mirror hall was forgotten. Chaski was again that beautiful, slender figure I seemed to know and loved so infinitely.

Tomorrow was our sacred marriage ceremony. We would dress in white. I would wear his shirt, because I had no other garment for my wedding day. We would sit by the mountain river and into the ceremony would enter the Sacred San Pedro cactus — Wachuma, the Great Light from the Andean mountains.

We slowly headed toward this day, two children in the middle of a forest, at Mount Shasta’s foot. Walking, I recalled the fairy tale about Hansel and Gretel. About two children in a dark forest, searching for the way home, but the path leads only ever closer and closer to the forest’s core — to the depth with the witch’s little house at the very middle.

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