The Descent Into Spirituality

How losing everything led me back to the sacred.

There was no white-light awakening.

No sage-filled ceremony that fixed me.

My descent into spirituality wasn’t gentle — it was survival. When I left the zoo, I didn’t rise. I fell.

At first, it looked like collapse.

I couldn’t sleep. My body shook at random. The world felt unsafe, even in silence. But somewhere inside the wreckage, something ancient began whispering: if they won’t believe you, start listening to what does.

That’s how it began — with the land.

The smell of pine pitch on my hands. The hum of bees in fireweed. The feeling that the forest wasn’t indifferent to me.I started foraging not because it was trendy, but because I needed proof that life could still be generous.

Each plant had a lesson my nervous system understood before my mind did.

• Yarrow for the wounds that wouldn’t close.

• Rose for remembering softness.

• Fireweed for rising through ruin.

Spirituality found me in the dirt, not in doctrine.

It showed me that

• My body was an altar — scarred, trembling, and sacred.

• That the tiger wasn’t just a symbol of danger, but of sovereignty.

• That every panic attack was a prayer my body didn’t know how to translate yet.

I stopped searching for answers in human systems that broke me. I started building rituals out of breath, moonlight, and matches. Fire became language again — not destruction, but purification.

I learned to speak

• To the ancestors through smoke.

• To the tigers through dreams.

• To myself through stillness.

My descent wasn’t the end. It was initiation.

It taught me that spirituality isn’t escape — it’s embodiment. It’s what happens when the soul refuses to stay silent any longer.

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The First Ally

The first book I ever bought was The Boreal Herbal. It gave me the basics — how to identify, harvest, and heal — but not how to listen. It didn’t speak about the spirit of each ally, only their uses and signatures. Still, it was a beginning.

Because you and I both know: when you first look into a meadow, it’s just green.

But when you walk through it slowly, you start to see the shapes — the spikes on the rosebush leaves, the long slender blade of pearly everlasting, the feathery crown of yarrow.

Over the weeks you watch the stems climb, the buds swell, the flowers open — and suddenly the field isn’t green at all. It’s a vast, breathing mosaic.

The obsession became real. The need to be part of it became real.

At first, I didn’t connect the metaphysical with the foraging — I simply followed what called to me. But the more I paid attention, the more I saw a pattern. The plants that drew me in were the ones that mirrored what I needed most.

My heart ached for what I had lost — my life, my safety, my career, my everything.

And that’s when she appeared.

Wild Rose.

Delicate petals with a pungent, grounding scent. She called to me in spring, her blossoms opening like small promises. I made jelly and syrup, anointing oils and creams — I couldn’t get enough of her.

But why?

Because Wild Rose is self-love embodied.

She grows in the most hostile places, protected by spines and barbs, and yet she offers the gentlest flower — home to crab spiders, nourishment for bees. And when the petals fall, she transforms again — her hips turning red with nourishment to carry life through the dark months ahead.

Wild Rose is my root system: Alberta. Self-love. Protection. Beauty.

This connection was undeniable. And once I listened, everything else began to answer back. The land became my mentor. The plants, my allies. The tiger within me, my guide.

That’s when I stopped surviving and started remembering.