Before the Plant

I. The searching

All my life, I had been searching for something. I didn't know what that something was. Only that it existed, only that I hadn't found it yet, only that the ache of its absence followed me through every room I entered, every faith I tried to inhabit, every name I tried to wear.

Looking back now, I understand that what I was really searching for was a sense of belonging. A place in this world where I could exist fully, without questioning who or what I was.

Because I had always been different.

Even as a child, I was exposed to a world that many people, grown adults included, had never experienced. When I slept, I didn't just dream. I travelled. I saw places I had never been, people I had never met, ancient people, unfamiliar faces who felt strangely known. I was shown things that had already happened, long before I was born. And sometimes, I was shown things that had not yet happened. And they would come to pass.

I saw people for who they were. Things for what they were.

I didn't understand it then. I only knew that I was not like everyone else. And because of that, I longed to belong.

I moved from church to church. From Amaroma (the Roman Church), to Zion, to Faith Mission, to Esheshi (the Anglican Church). Even to Islam, where I became Khadijah for a time, believing that perhaps this time, in this name, in this structure, I would find what I was looking for.

I didn't.

The unfortunate truth is that I kept searching outside of myself for something that was never out there to begin with.

Eventually, that search led me to Intwaso, my sangoma initiation. It felt like it would offer answers, a sense of direction, a way forward. And in many ways, it did. I learned things I could not have learned anywhere else. I was given language for experiences I had carried in silence my whole life.

But Intwaso also took something from me. Something precious. Something that had always been mine.

After my initiation, I could no longer remember my dreams.

II. The gift that was taken, and the plant that returned it

To understand what that loss meant, you have to understand what my dreams had always been. They were not ordinary dreams. They were the place where I received guidance. Where my ancestors spoke. Where the future arrived in the language of image and feeling, before it became reality. My dreaming was not a sleep function. It was a lifeline.

And then it went quiet.

I don't know if Intwaso took it, or if the intensity of the initiation simply overwhelmed the channel, or if my body needed time to recalibrate. What I know is that I woke up, day after day, to silence where there had always been colour and instruction and presence. That silence was its own kind of grief.

It pulled me in for three days before I finally listened. On the third day, I stopped. I looked it up. I read everything I could find. And what I found was fennel, Imboziso, an ancient herb associated with clarity of vision, with the opening of dreaming, with the courage to receive what the unconscious is trying to show us.

I brewed it that evening. And that night, I dreamed again.

What followed was not a project or a plan. It was a recognition. If this plant could restore something so intimate, so specific to me, then the earth had been holding medicine I hadn't known how to receive. I began to listen differently. To everything.

III. The death of my mother. The illness. The return.

The death of my mother became a subtle trigger. Not the cause of what came after, but the awakening of something that had already been living inside me, waiting. What followed was a series of events that nearly broke me. I came close to losing my mind. Eventually, I surrendered. First to what I thought would save me, and later, to something deeper.

My illness was never caused by my mother's passing.

It was caused by the emotions I had been carrying long before she left. Her death simply brought them to the surface. The grief cracked something open that had been sealed for years. What poured out was everything I had never allowed myself to feel.

Three years later, I made a decision that would change everything.

I walked away from a ten-year relationship that had brought me more unhappiness than joy. Eight years of disconnection, two years of happiness. Even those two were not enough to justify the slow erasure of who I was. Leaving was not easy. But it was necessary. That was the final shift.

From there, everything began to change. I changed my diet. I changed my perspective. I changed what I put into my body. Not to lose weight, not to become something new, but to cleanse and purify. To make room. To return to myself.

The weight loss was incidental. An accident of choosing myself. I had spent years trying to lose it: pills, juices, exercise programmes, effort layered on top of effort. Nothing worked. And then, when I wasn't trying at all, when I made a decision about my spiritual self and changed my diet for reasons that had nothing to do with a number on a scale, it simply fell away.

The body does not lie. It reflects exactly what is happening within. When I finally stopped carrying what didn't belong to me, emotionally, spiritually, relationally, my body released what didn't belong to it either.

IV. What I now believe

This journey changed not only my body and my practice. It changed the way I understand time itself.

This is not a philosophy I read somewhere. It is one I lived my way into. Through grief, through illness, through the slow work of choosing myself again and again when everything in me wanted to collapse backward into old patterns or forward into fantasies of being saved.

The present was the only place where healing was actually available. And it still is.

That journey is what gave birth to I AM NATURE. Not a brand. Not a content strategy. A living archive of what the earth offered me when I finally became still enough to receive it. And an invitation to anyone else who has been searching outside of themselves for something that was always here, waiting, rooted in the soil beneath their feet.