Final Stitches and Finishes

Tales of the Serpent and the Moon - Final Chapter

Dec 05, 2023

The final chapter is here!

I've been sending a chapter a month for over a year, and here we are at the final one! At the bottom of the article, you can find a list with links for all the previous chapters. All the previous chapters and stories will be open and available for free subscribers from December 31st onwards.

When, a few years ago, I dreamt of being wild and woke up feeling lost and in mourning, I couldn't have imagined the rescue pilgrimage that would follow. I dreamt of being wild, totally free and in living relationship. When I woke up, I suffered the loss of acute, ancient and profound senses and the radical awareness of living ritually as an integral part of the cosmos. Before humans learned to fear themselves, they lived in an intrinsic connection with everything else —embraced in the essential kiss of the black earth beneath their feet and the potent caress of the heavens above, cradled in the bones of their ancestors.

We need the deep silence of infinite radical presence to connect with the ancient wild being that we have carried since the beginning of time. But we are immersed in the omnipresent noises of modernity, the static tumult distracts us from what is in front of us and around us. Constantly. This book also rescued the instinct to feel beyond the turbulence of modernity.

Human skin senses what we can't see or quantify, feeling life all around us. The long process of our domestication is our dereliction; we keep forgetting. The amnesia of interbeing always co-creating tangled memories of true strength, in a mysterious and abundant world. Forgotten languages, soundscapes, textures and bridges of connection with other beings, different chthonic, telluric and cosmic knowledge.

We have forgotten the true value of sacred life itself. We've become smaller. Alone and afraid. Islands of oblivion and isolation, believing that fear is the only lens and conquering it the only solution. Yes, nature is wild and violent. And so are we. Yes, nature is spontaneous and tough. So are we. But it's also creative, inventive, magical, mysterious, always changing and evolving. If we could hear its stories and its old wisdom again, we would cherish it once more.

The wilds are complex multidimensional landscapes —without linear maps to cross them, without point A to point B. To cross these territories, we need our feet rooted to the ground, humming, because we are the wild place. We are in it, rooted. We are the rocks and the mountains, the wind and the waters —sacred flesh on sacred soil. I long to be wild, and it whispers back to me, calling me— echoing the deep past. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, shivers running up my spine. I remember watching and being watched in long silent conversations with other beings. Living the earth as a co-created home and not as a stranger to be owned, used or conquered. Nurturing and caring for all creation. Present in a playful and empathetic way. Remembering old stories of care and not just destruction. Walking powerful and free, longing for what is, in a deep and mysterious relationship with the earth and caring for all its inhabitants: living in a sacred, intentional, active way and participating in the ever-dynamic creation. These are also tales to simply remember.

We've come here from a pilgrimage to the ends of human history, starting in the middle and ending up at the core, at the heart of the cosmic-telluric body.

Let's remember that tales bring us many ways of communicating, different ways of dialoguing and listening. The discourse of each tale is always contextualised and a fractal product of countless sources, opening up so many other possibilities. We put together the pieces and threads of the networks of ancestral and reciprocal dialogue, a task only possible in a web that interweaves various multidimensional and even paradoxical concepts that allow access to the imaginal, emotional and associative mind.

These various threads make it possible to weave a perception of reality not just based on crippling Cartesian and linear thinking, but by opening up new and old spaces for questions and, consequently, different writings that express emotions and dendritically diverse worlds. Each of these threads, fibres or shards can be glued or woven together in multiple and diverse ways, because the richness of subjectivity is not limited to a single answer or narrative.

The fragments rescued throughout this book, and all their scraps, remnants, bones, shards, splinters or remains, are part of a shawl, basket or fractal pitcher, which insist on being reconstructed, always differently, remolded repeatedly.

This is the place of impermanence and not absolute truth, of the richness of depth and variety of perspectives, not hierarchically ordered, but in a network of possibilities in co-generation and dialogue. This is the place of diversity and of the many voices that tell different versions of the same story, making up a truth that is always kaleidoscopic and hybrid. This is the place for the living word in organic and primal connection.

The chimera of absolute world truth as hierarchically superior to all others can now be relinquished, freed and left to decompose, composting and nourishing the varied local subjective and emotional perspectives, which are profound and always richly interconnected with the complexity of the space and time contexts that generate them.

When we allow the tales, woven from this decolonised perspective, to work on us, we recover our integrity and the way we present ourselves to the world and the way the world presents itself to us. We awaken creativity and make our way through complexity, relearning to be and to be beyond the sphere centred on the exclusively Western, masculine, human or even individual hierarchy. We have always been part of the ecosystem, be it biological, social or mythical.

The threads, fibres and pieces found throughout this book, including the stories themselves, all their invisible and imaginary fragments, now form a fractal shawl, a dendritic basket and a kaleidoscopic pitcher, with a multi-vocal and hybrid connection.

Always alive and mutable. Shall we enter?

Enchanted Words

Words that appear several times in this publication and that are essential to rediscover:

• Daemon - Divinity or guiding spirit. The word derives from the Proto-Indo-European “provider, divider (of fortunes or destinies)”. The Daemons were possibly seen as the guardians of each individual or tutelary deities of places.

• Entheogen - Plants, prepared in potions, teas, tinctures, balms or ointments capable of altering consciousness and inducing a state of shamanism or ecstasy, passing through membranes of perception of reality, accessing other dimensions.

• Immanence - Immanence is ancient but largely forgotten. In a colonised sense, it has an inferior quality, as if it were lesser. It has to do with entanglement and interdependence, with a secret and vital movement of continuous becoming. Immanence is textures, emotions from experiences and practice, and everything that flows through the body to the sacred Earth. It relates to a deeply rooted and elemental divine reality. The rescue of potent immanence is based on the fundamental assumptions of decolonisation, ecopsychology, transpersonal and liberation psychology, valuable and complex indigenous systemic thinking, ancestry, as well as future literacy and animism.

• Inspiratus - From the Latin meaning “to breathe in, or inspire”. An ancient mythical wind that blows, illuminates, motivates, guides and sweeps us off our feet, captivates, excites, enthuses and fascinates us.

• Catabasis - Katabasis or Catabasis is a descent of some kind, such as the descent of a hill, the setting of the wind or the sun, a retreat, a journey to the underworld, or a journey from the interior of a country to its coast. The term has multiple related meanings in poetry, rhetoric and psychology. Here it refers to the mythical and dreamlike journey to the sacred subterranean worlds.

• Co-emergence - Interwoven and living systems that emerge and transform through mutual influence.

• Systemic complexity - Systemic thinking seeks to understand a given system as a whole, considering all the connections between its elements; complex thinking also seeks to understand the system, but considering the context of the other systems that surround it, whether macro or micro.

• Chthonic - Literally “earth-related” “earthly”, designating gods or spirits of the subterranean world, as opposed to cosmic deities.

• Telluric - From the Latin tellus, meaning earth and what emanates from it.

• Ophiussa - Name given by the ancient Greeks to the Portuguese territory. It means Land of the Serpents, but it is also the great chthonic tutelary entity of this territory, the great Serpent Goddess.

• Re-membering - Bringing back together, intertwining with what is separated, neglected, mutilated, forgotten or lost.

• Wyrd - A concept in Anglo-Saxon culture that corresponds broadly to fate or personal destiny.

Why are these tales important now?

INTRO, tale list and chapter references.