A raw post-ceremony dialogue between philosopher Hannes Schumacher and Colombian ayahuasca guide Juliet Goméz. This exchange navigates terror, tenderness, and transformation, revealing how sacred medicine strips illusions, confronts suffering, and reorients us toward balance, humility, and love. A meditation on control, surrender, and the grace of healing.

As her son wakes with questions about black holes and infinity, the author follows him into a conversation that bridges astrophysics with ancestry, parenting with cosmic continuity. Interwoven with observations on grief, embodiment, and the passing of days, the piece reminds us that time is not only measured in minutes, but in meaning, and that children often hold the key to remembering how to live in the now.

Today, it is often only the presence of sustenance that gets acknowledged. The absence of such things is almost exclusively spoken of as poverty. But what if this contemporary poverty arises not from sustenance’s presence, but from having forgotten what is absent in that recognition? 

The concept of “composting grief’’ resonates as a way of transforming energy into a renewed sense of purpose and growth. I think of this as transmutation or snake medicine: sound, meditation, selfless service, praying, nature, movement. I propose that we explore the concept of a symbiotic relationship between human grief and its impact on the underground microbial life—the microbiome

We can practice 'unlearning' grasping and clinging by using the beauty of 'Colors In Motion' to entrain our minds and our nervous systems to accept flow. Flow is a healthy approach to the rapid changes humans are experiencing, and can expand our capacity to be present in every precious moment.