When Nature Answered

I. The silence after initiation

After Intwaso, my sangoma initiation, something changed that I hadn't anticipated. I had gone in searching for answers, for direction, for a deeper understanding of who I was and what I had been given. And I received those things. The initiation was profound. It was difficult. It was necessary.

But it took something from me in return.

My whole life, I had been a dreamer. Not in the ordinary sense. I travelled in sleep. I received guidance. I saw things before they happened. My ancestors spoke to me in the language of images and feeling, and I had learned, over years, to trust what I was shown. That dreaming was not a gift I had earned. It had simply always been there, the way your own heartbeat is always there, so familiar you stop noticing it, until the day it goes quiet.

After my initiation, I woke up each morning to nothing. No colour. No instruction. No familiar presence waiting at the threshold of waking. Just silence.

I did not know how to ask for it back. I did not know if it could be returned. I continued my work, my days, my walking. But there was a quality of flatness to everything, as though a frequency had been removed from the signal.

II. Three days on a footpath

I don't remember which morning it was that I first noticed the plant. It was on my path to work, one of those plants that grow in the spaces between intention and neglect: a crack in the pavement, a strip of ground beside a wall, somewhere no one thought to tend.

It didn't announce itself. But it insisted.

For three days I passed it. For three days something in me slowed each time I came near it, a pull I couldn't name, a recognition without context. I had learned enough, by then, to know the difference between idle curiosity and the particular quality of attention that means: this is for you. Pay attention.

On the third day, I stopped. I looked at it properly for the first time. And then I looked it up.

Foeniculum vulgare. Fennel. In isiZulu: Imboziso, meaning, in the botanical literature, that which clears the path of sight. An herb used across centuries and continents for digestion, for clarity, for the opening of vision. And in the older traditions: associated with dreaming. With the courage to receive what the unconscious is trying to show us.

I brewed it that evening. Lightly crushed seeds. Boiling water. Ten minutes steep. Nothing elaborate. Just the plant and the intention and the act of paying attention to what I had been given.

That night, I dreamed.

III. What it returned

Not just any dream. The kind I used to have. Rich, specific, inhabited. The ancestors present. The guidance clear. I woke up with the particular feeling of having been somewhere important, of having received something I needed, even if I could not yet translate it into ordinary language.

I lay still for a long time before getting up. Holding the experience. Trying to understand what had just happened.

Imboziso: the path of sight

A plant I had not searched for. A plant I had not known by name. A plant growing between the cracks of a city footpath, in the least romantic possible setting, had found me at the precise moment I needed it and restored something I thought was gone.

That was not coincidence. I do not believe in coincidence the way I once did. What I believe in is attunement, the quality of openness that allows you to receive what is being offered, rather than walking past it for the fourth day running.

I had been quiet enough, finally, to hear.

From that morning, everything shifted. I began to pay attention to plants differently. Not as ingredients or remedies or interesting facts, but as presences. As teachers. As beings with their own intelligence and their own timing, willing to share what they know with anyone who approaches with genuine respect and genuine need.

I AM NATURE did not begin as a website. It began as a daily practice of listening. The library you are reading now is the record of what I heard.