It has begun #1

1 February 2023

4 min read

Welcome to Share the Adventure - the Amazon Blog in which we track alongside Ya’Acov Darling Khan’s Pachamama Alliance journey deep into the Amazon rainforest (February 2023). Be prepared for a deep, personal and revelatory story of connection between worlds. Enjoy the ride!

"On Sunday I said goodbye to Ya’Acov as he got onto the bus and made his way to Bristol airport.

He’s on his way to the Ecuadorian Amazon, for a journey he is leading with the Pachamama Alliance deep into the forest. I was going to go with him, until other needs intervened.

However, I am in the privileged position of having been on similar deep immersion journeys many times together with Ya'Acov in previous years. I love and know the places and many of the people that Ya'Acov and his group are visiting. So,I realised that I am in a unique position to share something of this meaningful adventure with you and I hope that you will find some gold in here to support your own life journey.

I am also happy, through sharing these deeply personal stories, to introduce you to the Pachamama Alliance and how and why their work sings so deeply in our hearts.

In that quiet pause after Christmas and before New Year, we went slowly enough to recognise what, perhaps, deep down, we already knew. We realised that it just did not feel right for me to leave my father right now in his state of fragility and advanced age. My longing to be in the Amazon rainforest once again was pulling me strongly and the care that we had in place for my father was good. However it just was not right to go somewhere so far away at this time.

As we approached that bus moment we recognised that through the pandemic we’ve landed in a deeper and more continuous way of being together than we’ve ever known. So saying goodbye to Ya’Acov was emotional. I came home and put on that music (see below) from the Tribal Heart ceremony and roared and sobbed. I don’t think I have ever felt such a powerful mix of emotions. I am glad that I can feel how much I miss my husband and how sad I am not to be sharing this particular deep adventure of the soul with him.

At the same time, I know that this decision is good and real. I know that if I had gone, it would not have felt right. This IS the next step of the deep adventure of the soul Ya’Acov and I are on together.

And, I am also glad to have time here at home on the land and in my own flow, in my own work; getting on at last with writing the book that has been incubating in me for several years on "Embodied Listening."

When it became clear to us that we had made the decision that I would not go, I asked myself what possible contribution I could make to support the deep intentions of this journey from “outside” the forest. And I realised that what I really wanted was to share this adventure with you.

These times in the Amazon have been life changing for me and for us. I hope I can convey something of that in this blog. That’s why we’ve called it “Sharing the Adventure”. I’ll be bringing words from Ya’Acov and from others who I’ll introduce along the way. Step by step, through this sharing, I hope we can offer you something of the meaning and the experience of being there, in the Amazon, with and through the Pachamama Alliance and with the indigenous people who live there.

Yesterday felt like the first day of spring here. I walked up onto Dartmoor with Ivanhoe the Exmoor pony and Moxi our dog and I felt blessed. Whilst I was walking, lapping up the sun, Ya’Acov was flying high over the atlantic. It’s a really, really long way. I look over the skyline to the southwest and I sense the vast distance he is going around the circumference of the planet; “over the hills and far away”.

I look forward to sharing this journey with you, thank you for reading and sharing the adventure.