"You always insist on knowing things from the beginning," Don Juan said. "But there's no beginning; the beginning is only in your thoughts."
~Separate Reality, Carlos Castaneda.
Where and when did it begin?
How and why did I come to the Cavitation BridgeHouse in Chania, Crete, where I’m spending the next 5 weeks of this chapter of my Life?
Airports. Train. Buses. Cars. Motorhomes.
These are spaces where I’ve spent a considerable time of my life over the last 3 years since I declared I would live a nomad life.
In my childhood I lived the first 7 years in a shared house with 11 other people. Parents, an uncle, aunts, cousins, my grandma… After that my parents moved at least 8 times from house to house, until I was 14. At this age I decided to leave my parent’s house to go study in a residential school in Rio de Janeiro.
From time to time I used to travel with my dad in his truck.
I remember stopping in an open field, during an evening, looking at the stars and asking him “Dad, who are you?” He said “I AM a truck driver”.
“I’m not asking what you do, I’m asking who you are?”
“I am Fabio, I AM a truck driver”.
“But right now as I talk to you, you are not driving a truck, are you still a truck driver?”
“Yes! I’m still a truck driver. I see the highway in your words, and I still see the stars as I look to you, and I see the open fields of sunflowers and corn behind you. I still see my dad.”
My grandfather died 1 year before I was born. My father was driving the truck. He was the age I am now as I’m writing. He overturned a gas truck he was driving off a cliff. My grandfather died before I met him in a human body.
Looking at the eyes of my father that evening, I could see beyond looking. I could see his grief and sorrow, something he might have dared not feel for fear the sorrow and grief would never end.
Fabio was my dad in my childhood. To him I gave my authority. I gave my authority to him when I was born as a girl. I decided he will decide for me and he has the right answers. I decided he has the power to ask things for me and from me, he has the power of declaring who I am and who I am not and he has the power of choosing for me. I was born a girl. And there I gave away the possibility of being the author of my life. The echoes of this decision still ripple in my life nowadays, as old habits bubble to the surface.
Even though as a little girl I had given away the authority of my own life, a flame in my heart for doing impossible things never got extinguished.
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Joseph Campbell describes that for those in whom a dominant mythology still works, there is an experience both in accordance with the social order, and in apparent harmony with the universe. If the symbols and signs of capitalism, for example, work for you, then you have a set of associated values, and there is a path you can take: working for a corporation, having one or two children, owning a house, taking vacations. For some, however, the authorized signs, such as church, money, and having a linear life, no longer work. What inevitably follows for these individuals is a sense both of dissociation from the local social nexus, and of quest, within and without, for life, for “meaning.” There begins the Hero’s Journey.
This is where my Journey began. 18th of February of 2022. A fresh summer evening in an island in the south of Brazil: Florianopolis. I’ve just left a wooden geodesic dome, with triangular glass windows on the side ways and on the roof. From the outside it looks like an alien spaceship.
It is around the 10th time that I have passed through this door over the last 3 days. I will still enter and leave this same door 6 more times, at least, over the next 2 days. Each time I go through this door, I’m a different person. Something had changed inside of me. I had discovered more things that I didn't know that I don't know about. More anger, more fear, more sadness, more joy. More presence, and more questions. More Life.
Expand the Box is the name of what was happening inside of this spaceship where myself and other 25 human beings were in. If you ask me who they were, the first answer would be that some of them I had never met or seen before, and some of them I ‘knew’ and they were friends. If I would be really honest with you I would say they are courageous Beings in a human box and body that came to the Earth to create, learn and grow. Even so, this is still me being a slave of my thoughts.
I’m sitting on the grass and cicadas are singing the song of the rain. I’ve spent the last 3 hours and 30 minutes inside. I’m staring at the steamed up glasses of the spaceship. It is as blurry as when you get out of a hot shower and you can only see your reflection in the mirror in a hazy way. Someone from the outside could assume this is from the difference of temperature, or from people doing intense physical exercises inside. No. The blurriness of the glass was from transformational steam: condensed breath in a room together of people going through an Initiation into Adulthood. An initiatory process that shifted my orientation and relationship with everything.
Orange brings the radiance of the sun at your hands and at your physical body. Initiations bring a shift of origin from which you move from.
Initiations into Adulthood are processes, trainings, and spaces through which a person becomes capable of taking higher levels of responsibility. Through initiations into adulthood a person shifts from being like a planet into becoming a star. A planet consumes more energy than it radiates. A star radiates more energy than it consumes. When a person authentically manifests her or his path into adulthood she or he shifts from absorbing and consuming into creating, proposing and sourcing.
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I’m sitting on a sofa, in a big Airbnb house overlooking the mediterranean sea near Xania on the north side of Crete. Some of my fellow team members are around me typing on their computer as well. We are 12 in total. I’ve been struggling to not be a slave of my thoughts. I’ve been wrestling with the thought “I’m not part of this group”. How is that possible?
I look outside the window. The sunlight has almost faded away, under the earth. Some people call this sunset. Right after the earth eats the sun, a specific show of lights are given to human beings: twilight, the period when the sky is not completely dark, but also not completely light.
Photographers value twilight because of the soft lighting and lack of shadows. Workers that hate their job value twilight because it is the announcement of the end of an arduous day, the ending out of their hell. Plants value twilight because they get to pause producing glucose, which allows them to exhale and grow. I value twilight because at this moment, as I see the earth eating the sun, I experience the NOW eating my stories. I’m sitting with the question: what does it take to be here? What would I give up in order to be present?
Another part of me values twilight because I’m closer to the time of sleeping, the final escape of being around people. What makes it so scary to be around people? What makes it so scary to be around another 11 present, alive and clear human beings?
Part of my experience here with these 11 people is that my past life, also with 11 family members, is projected into the present. It is like I am in a replay of a movie. If I don’t have my survival needs, what else will drive me?
There is a part of me that loves to constrain itself with habits and likes and dislikes, and preferences and beliefs, and options, and judgments. I call this part my Box, which would label and classify the experience of the wind in my skin as something horrible. It says things like “I hate cold”. And it says “I don’t know what I want”. And it says “I’m alone and no one gets me”. It is like a movie on repeat.
The process of deciding to join this group for 6 weeks came from an extraordinary space that a friend in New Zealand held for me. There I discovered “I can just be part of this team, if I’m other than I am”. There I made a new decision: I will take the steps to become the person who is the Cavitation Bridgehouse.
And now I’m on the way to shrinking my now to such a degree that no stories fit in my world for at least the next 3 seconds.
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