Honouring Mirca

"She was my study buddy. Often she brought the freshness of the outside to our calls and I always appreciated her northern German clarity and straightforwardness.

I met Mirca three years ago in encounter with Ya’Acov. At that time we both had been pretty new to movement medicine and Ya’Acov‘s work as a shaman. We matched very well. After finding us again in the second encounter we decided that we would like to share on a permanent basis and started video calling regularly.

Sometimes we just talked, sometimes we shared and danced. Dancing together brought an unexpected joy and closeness.

We were also connected by similarities in our family history. Caring for our mother still played a big role in both our lives. Mirca also had left her home as a juvenile and lived a life of her own without her original family. But none the less before the death of her parents she helped caring for them, accompanied her mother in her last months. Even though this has been asking a lot of her she never gave up.

Mirca used to live close to Bremen in the north of Germany. Together with two friends she had been running a social project: the „Luettnpeerhoff“ – the name means as much as the farm with the little horses. They have ponies and are offering extraordinary courses where both horses and children are invited to be exactly who they really are. The heartfelt concern of this project is about the encounter of the “eigen-sinnigen”, wild and unique paths of horses and people which allow deep healing experiences. This project of her heart brought a lot of joy to Mirca, but it also brought pain, when one of the ponies got ill or even died. Life had been sometimes challenging due to extraordinary rains in their region or other obstacles. She encountered these with her courage and strength and her joy and love which she felt for her friends and the horses, sometimes renewing herself in the all-oneness of the ocean.

Mirca has been a skilled “Heilpraktiker“ (a German profession – a doctor without a university degree who is specialized on alternative healing) and as such, she has been a thoroughly skilled listener. I always found her listening attentively and wholeheartedly. My deep feeling of being heard was something I will never forget.

Mirca died unexpectedly last week after a bleeding in her brain.

When I got to know it, I was in pain and decided to dance the live session of the “waters of the heart“ as a “first aid" for the grief I felt. This dance I dedicated to her. With all my tears I felt the calm, steady and loving support of the web, helping my heart to let the waters of life cleaning and smoothing and helping the flow of tears move more quiet, diminishing the fight a bit. When I danced for her in this session I saw her riding toward the mountains on a horse. She has been waving to me, smiling and telling me not to take everything so seriously. At that point I felt and still feel deeply comforted. It is a beautiful picture to see her smiling and waving. I will keep in my heart this way.

She has been such a great study buddy and friend. I miss her deeply and bow to her courage, strength and big loving heart. Remembering her I feel warmth, my heart opening and love streaming towards her."

Uta Wilke

"As I am writing this, Mirca's funeral service is about to start, somewhere way up in the north of Germany. Her body will be given over to the fire in about an hour or so, by that time I will be sitting by the river, praying between the presence of water and fire.
Thank you for the opportunity to share something about what my dear companion means to me in this auspicious moment.

Mirca's abrupt death hurts badly. She was my study buddy during the Pheonix Rising Online Course of 2023. We have continued the weekly embodied listening and dance practice through zoom since then. She has been an invaluable companion to me in the one and a half years of knowing each other. She was a real kindred spirit, with our shared love for horses and the heyoka spirit.
One of her partners on the horse farm they ran together put it this way "what really mattered to Mirca's heart were the  wild, unique and headstrong ways of horses and people in free encounters.  And the healing experiences that arise from them."
Our intimate sharing sessions felt like the meeting of two deeply hurting yet fiercely tender loving kindred souls, in the safe container of an embodied listening practice, joined by the medicine of the dance. These sessions have provided precious relief to many of my life circumstances.
From it arose a mutual wish to collaborate with each other on artistic projects in the future: I shared with her about "Dinner for Horses and Humans" an installation performance where the audience is invited to sit down and dine together with horses - sensorial experience as the common ground for interspecies relationships.

Mirca invited me to come visit, to get to know her horses, to find out what we want to create together.
Mirca, I thank you for that open door, may the opening of that space be a seed that will blossom in unforeseen ways…

The following is a letter I wrote to Mirca in gratitude of her being my study buddy for the 2023 Pheonix Rising online course:

Mirca
I am deeply impressed and touched by your way of exploring and experiencing life with all your senses.
I perceive your way of living as an unprejudiced laughing tenderness and wildness. A passionate, heterarchic, animistic and deeply humane being with life.
This way of being, which to me seems to be your birth present, inspires me and makes me feel deeply, joyfully alive.
I would also like to honor with how much dignity and willingness you have been meeting and dancing with the difficult experiences of your past in these last weeks.
Thank you for your open listening, your resonance with my being and your being a true companion. Luckily exactly you where my study buddy.

I would like to end this writing by letting you, dear MM companions and you, dearest Mirca know a little secret: last time we did our online session together I had a vision during the dance. I became a thunderbird the had just risen from the ashes, barely hovering over the fire pit.
When I told Mirca about it, it became clear to me that it was a vision of myself, and that the dream it contains is to be that self while in the presence of others, not hiding, not forcing.
I am currently teaching a group of beautiful performance artists a butoh choreography which will be part of our Sensorial theatre performance in December.  The thunder bird hovering over the fire pit found its way into the choreography. It is facing down towards the ashes, then it stretches its wings, flips on its back (a very hard thing to do for a thunderbird), presents its tender belly fluff to the sun. And becomes a star.

This is poetry of course, and dance. But that is much of what Mirca was made of."

Zoë Binetti