Dear Readers,
I fasted for five days before writing this newsletter.
It began as a tribute to my dear friend following her passing, as a small group of us made a pilgrimage to the Sierra Nevada of Colombia. We were bringing her ashes to the Palomino River.
As I was fasting, I received disturbing news about the shaman I used to study plant medicine healing with—who, by happenstance, is also from Colombia. I added this news to my “prayer pile”.
The convergence of death medicine with this utterly disillusioning revelation, both connected to the native traditions of Colombia, was intense to process. The fasting, I hoped, would help me clarify and deepen whatever teaching was embedded in this moment.
I fasted until I returned to Miami, and I was still without clarity.
Back home in Miami, I went on a date night with my husband (to Mad Radio, our favorite dive bar) and broke my fast with a burger, still wondering—what was I supposed to learn? What was being revealed? That night, as we listened to the DJ spinning vinyl records, the answer came to me.
The answer was Taylor Swift.
The Death That Clarified Everything
My friend was young, a beautiful soul who embodied the very core frequency of divine feminine power. She was a passionate steward of the earth, and as she gracefully moved through the cancer that ultimately took her, I often wondered why she had to suffer.
It seemed to me that her very body, her blood itself, was a mirror showing us the impact of how we contaminate the earth. She was such a pure soul—it felt like we had failed her. Her body was the canary in the coal mine, showing us that our way of living on this planet, trashing it with plastic and forever chemicals and endless consumption, was something an angel like her simply couldn’t survive.
Much like a river cannot expel the chemicals we dump into her—our toxins work their way into her sand, her fish, her weeds. We poison entire systems with our greed and ignorance.
My friend’s body was the river.
It was a perfect ritual to release her ashes into the rivers of her homeland, guided by tribes who are keepers of deeply sacred ways of honoring the divine feminine and the earth.
The Death of Sacred Lineage
During that pilgrimage, another death was unfolding around me.
Over ten years ago, I began studying with a tribe from Colombia under the tutelage of a young but brilliant healer. I felt a call to apprentice with him and took this apprenticeship seriously. Early in my studies, one of his male acolytes approached me inappropriately. I reported the incident—I felt it was important to have clear boundaries between students and healers.
It is deeply confusing—and possibly harmful—to work with these powerful and sacred technologies of consciousness born in the Amazon while trying to navigate blurred sexual boundaries.
My warning was unheeded. Yet, I carried on in my studies, hoping it was an isolated incident.
Years later, it emerged that it was not an isolated incident. In fact, the same man had gone on to harass many other women in this lineage. That, coupled with a serious boundary violation from a grandfather (an elder healer with significant spiritual authority) involving several female students—and an unclear response to prevent recurrence—is why I ultimately left and found apprenticeship elsewhere.
The tragedy deepened recently. The main teacher—by all accounts an extraordinary healer—admitted to an affair with a student twenty years his junior, after she exposed him publicly. As I processed my friend’s transition during our pilgrimage, I witnessed the figurative death of an entire family of healers, now left reeling, trying to understand how to carry on.
As I fasted and prayed in the Sierra Nevada, this question worked its way through my heart: What is the divine feminine to do?
The Shaman in Sequins
I have never been a Taylor Swift fan, until recently. I’m not exactly her target demographic.
During her Miami leg of the Eras Tour, my friends surprised me with tickets. That night, as we approached the stadium, I was astonished by the ocean of sparkles flowing from every direction into the arena. It was positively cult-like and beautiful to see so many girls and women declaring with their dresses: I shine. We shine.
Meanwhile, a heckler circled above in a small plane with a banner mocking her for being a cat lady. Yes, actually.
The minute she came onto the stage, I understood why she threatened someone enough to spend money on aerial harassment. She isn’t just a musician—she is a revolution.
There are elements of shamanic ceremony that she had mastered to an incredible degree:
The way every single person in the stadium knew every word of every song, unifying the voice of 65,000.
The sameness of the sparkles, creating visual cohesion.
The friendship bracelets being traded from fan to fan.
Her positivity was relentless, released like a floodgate of the divine. It was sent pulsing through every crevice of the arena and created an epic force field of heart and mind cohesion.
And Taylor herself—she commands a stage with power beyond any healer, sage, shaman, or teacher I have ever encountered. Her energy is precise, razor-sharp, and totally entrancing. We entered a prolonged trance state that night, guided by her music.
There were moments when it was just her alone on stage with a guitar, and moments when she was surrounded by a deluge of dancers. When Florence Welch emerged from the floor for a single song (Florida), if anyone had doubted they were in the presence of witches, there was no way to doubt it after seeing those two conjure their power together.
It wasn’t just a swirl of silk and sound—it was a transmission.
As I stood there in awe, it became abundantly clear: Taylor is a shaman, and she is entraining an entire generation of young women with new codes of how to be a woman. Codes of power, codes of divine feminine consciousness, codes of how to flirt, how to fight, how to live, how to mourn, how to be.
It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. It gave me hope for the future.
Her songs might sound like pop music until you unlock the transmission within them—then they reveal themselves to be medicine.
The Teaching
Here was a man flying a plane above, burning fossil fuels to taunt the goddess herself, and she was unfazed, unfettered—too busy laying down teachings to transform the next generation of girls into giants to be bothered by the haters.
This is why Taylor came to me in this moment of mourning, of loss, of sobriety. I was watching this medicine family struggle with their teacher’s transgression—trying to fit it into boxes—’bad,’ ‘not so bad,’ or ‘maybe okay.’
Trying to reconcile their image of an evolved shaman with the revelation of an imperfect man.
Trying to reconcile their love of sacred medicines with their doubt in the lineage that holds them.
Trying to reconcile indigenous ways with Western therapeutic boundaries.
Trying to reconcile a lineage that is acutely patriarchal with the obvious need for feminine influence.
Meanwhile, the feminine is rising—but not in the traditional healing maloka.
It’s rising in a stadium.
My friend’s death was a gift to me and all those who brought her ashes home. Death medicine is clarifying. We don’t have forever to figure out how to care properly for this planet, and we don’t have infinite days to awaken to our own true nature. We are on an hourglass timer and nobody knows how much sand is left.
Her death made that abundantly clear.
We don’t have time to waste on old ways of awakening that are embroiled in recalcitrant traditions.
No. It’s time to find the new wave of teachers—the ones who teach in ordinary ways, like pop music.
Taylor—from one older witch to a younger—I salute you. May all the covens of elders weave protection around you as you change the universe one song at a time.
Alchemy On.
In Everything We Trust,
Sylvia
