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Hi, friends!
Wishing you all a belated happy new year. I’ve been offline for the past few weeks. Taking it slow. I hope you’ve all had/are having a restorative period. I don’t personally really buy into the Gregorian New Year. I feel mine begin on the Solstice and my animal body doesn’t much care for the yearly sparkly “new year, new you” promises. It’s too much pressure. And not the good kind of pressure.
I choose slowness. It is another kind of revolution. A quiet one that trembles, invisible, under the roots of trees, until, seemingly suddenly, blossoms appear on its branches.
I have been in this quiet place of becoming for months now, hearing the songs of the muses ebb and flow, sometimes as indistinguishable echoes and others as directives clear and absolute as lightning.
To have given myself to the writing of a book in 2024 for the first time has tugged at parts of me I hadn’t encountered before. A pound in flesh was given, and now I’m regrowing the skin and have much to reflect on.
I’m currently in the process of preparing proposals to find a publishing home for my baby. Luck, if you have some to spare, would be heartily received!
This year is already promising a lot of change. My partner and I are in the midst of a move. After months of deliberation, we’re leaving our hermitage in the bush and heading South. I won’t speak on that just yet as I’m in the crux of it and need yet to find my words.
In the midst of this - the boxes and Facebook marketplace and random outbursts of terror and excitement all at once - I got one of those calls, the kind you hope never to get. My grandmother had a fall. She is in recovery now, but for a couple of days we didn’t know if she would survive her operation. I spoke to her for the first time last night and when I asked her how she is, she responded, “Like a stone fallen down a well; I see no way out.” She may never walk again. Her life will never be the same. Moments like this bring everything into sharp focus.
There’s been lots of staring into space - or the vivid greenery of the bush, to be exact - watching the foliage of gum trees undulating like underwater reefs. Lots of baking bread and time in the garden and pickling cucumbers and dehydrating mangos and bananas from our trees.
I am now in that weird terrain that is a house move. Not really here anymore and not yet at the next place, but in the crucible where, counterintuitively (though everything screams to rip the page into the new chapter fast!) is the creative place. The place of becoming. It’s where the next life gets shaped and its seeds sown. The place of deep dreaming and personal myth making.
To be reborn again and again, and have our creativity follow suit, changing shape and moulding itself into new forms and our job is perhaps simply to not let it get out of sight. As P. L. Travers said, ‘I cannot summon up inspiration; I myself am summoned.’
So only a few words from me today.
Next week, I will send you my teaching calendar for 2025. I’m slowly putting it together. It may not all be ready by Sunday. But that’s the rhythm I want to be loyal to moving forward. I have been burned out by capitalist models of production on multiple occasions - as I would imagine many of you reading this have been too - and after taking my hiatus to write my manuscript, I am committed to not falling into that trap again.
I was really excited to find how many of you wanted to participate in the Solstice ceremony last month. So I will be sharing more prompts for rituals throughout the year, along with announcing the start of an online gathering place for paid subscribers. Thank you to all of you who are new or continuing to financially support my publication! There would be no possibility to write here if it wasn’t for you.
Though there is too much sparkle and paraphernalia for my liking, the New Year hype does maintain alive the age-old principle of regeneration. That yearly veneration of the vegetation god in order to ensure renewal of the land and new life. In other words, the intrinsic human need to regenerate itself as does the Earth.
P. L. Travers (I mention her again as she has been keeping close company during the writing of my manuscript) puts it this way:
…at New Year, when the twelve strokes sound and we make our resolutions - ‘I will be good; turn over a leaf; be unmade and made anew’ - we are embodying, even if we do not know it, or perhaps being embodied by, the myth of eternal return, the periodic destruction and recreation of the cosmos, common to all religions, when world, time, and man himself are, after a ritual pause, ritually renewed.
So as we all undergo our renewal in our own strange and secret ways (be it in accordance with January 1st or the Solstice or our own cultural or personal preference) there is certainly a slowness required to ensure all the bits get put back where they belong! A remembering after the dismemberment of a yearly cycle.
I wish you proficiency, much kindness and a lightness of touch in whatever changes you might be navigating. In the last oracle ceremony, I was shocked to see how many people were wrestling with similar questions I was around home, belonging, a should I stay or should I go situation… I wonder what everyone decided. I’m sure astrologers would have something to say about the similarity in the battles many of us are currently facing. Or perhaps it’s just government policy on cost of living…
Anyway, here’s a poem, a podcast interview and a couple of announcements for today as I slowly get back to teaching.
With much love to you dashing creatures,
x Gabriela
Poetry Offering
As usual, I chose a poetry book (based on instinct but also, this time, practicality as the majority of my books are now packed up!). And used bibliomancy to choose a poem for all who might find themselves reading these words. If you’re not familiar with bibliomancy, the practice involves setting an intention and then flicking through the pages until one opens. This page turns out not to be a poem, but a piece of prose on Genius by the Irish poet David Whyte from his book ‘Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.’
I’m delighted by how intimately it speaks to this theme of renewal. Here it is:
To live out our genius is to live out the conversation between our particular inherited body and the body of the world from which we seem to have been made. Genius is not a fixed platform where we can arrive solely through accomplishment, it is the meeting place of our particular physical body meeting all other bodies, corporeal and elemental: a body breathed over by wind, shaken by interior tremors and washed away and rearranged by periodic floods; it has its own hard won language and its attempts to order the un-orderable but it also must follow the seasons, its own forms of happiness and its particular and necessary griefs; it intuits a particular future for itself but is made in conversation with all other futures.
Genius is both a specific gift and a possibility that has not yet occurred; it is not a fixed internal commodity to be exploited and brought to the surface but a conversation to be followed, deepened, understood and celebrated. Genius is the meeting between inheritance and horizon, between what has been told, what can be told, and what has yet to be told, between our practical abilities and our relationship to the gravitational mystery that pulls us on. Our genius is to understand and stand beneath the set of stars present at our birth, and from that place, to seek the hidden, single star, over the night horizon, we did not know we were following.
Announcements 2025
Mentorship
I am opening up six places for 1-1 mentorship this year. This is for anyone who would like support and/or supervision within creative endeavours and spiritual work, or support with personal matters through the use of shamanic, animistic, mythic techniques for inner transformation.
These personalised sessions are structured to meet once a month, beginning with 3 months.
Upcoming online course
The applications for my online program The Bee Priestesses is now open. This is a place where I share my findings on the historical record, mythologies and religious experience of a time when women upheld the primary religious roles in ancient Greece and Crete.
BEGINS FEBRUARY 23RD. See below for module details, course dates and fees.
Guest teaching
I’ll be amidst a bright constellation of teachers on this phenomenal year-long online program. Find out more here. You can use the discount code GABRIELA10 for 10% off.
BEGINS FEBRUARY 1ST
Podcast interview
I was delighted to chat to the lovely Jeanette - an old client of mine - on her podcast last month (my first one in seemingly eons as I peel off my hibernating bear skin). Here is the description:
In this heartfelt and soul-stirring episode of the Nourish Collective Podcast, host Jeanette Sealy sits down with the inspiring Gabriela Gutiérrez, a healer, polyglot, and wisdom-keeper whose journey spans continents, traditions, and profound spiritual exploration. Together, they delve into the themes of ancient wisdom, the natural world, and the deep listening required to reconnect with both. Tune in for a deeply nourishing conversation filled with wisdom, connection, and the invitation to listen more deeply to yourself and the world around you.
Episode Highlights:
Listening to the Natural World
Gabriela explores the profound practice of listening deeply to the "more-than-human" world. From sitting with beehives to immersing in silence, she reveals how this practice nourishes the soul and helps us navigate a chaotic modern world.Ritual Practices for the Solstice
Discover a transformative three-day solstice ritual that invites us to seed our intentions into the womb of the dark and dream a more nourishing life into being. Gabriela offers actionable steps to connect with the sacred rhythms of the earth during this potent time.On Bees and Ancient Wisdom
Gabriela shares her research into the sacred symbolism of bees in ancient traditions and their connection to women's spiritual experiences. Learn how observing the natural world can unlock ancestral wisdom embedded in our bones and bloodlines.Reconnecting Through Poetry and Walks
The conversation turns to the power of poetry and simple practices, like daily walks at dawn or dusk, to deepen our connection to ourselves and the world around us. Gabriela and Jeanette reflect on how these small yet profound actions can create space for transformation and renewal.
Tune in for a deeply nourishing conversation filled with wisdom, connection, and the invitation to listen more deeply to yourself and the world around you.
Watch the full unedited video of our conversation here
What a beautiful and powerful quote to begin with. Thank you. I will definitely be reaching out about mentorship. It has been on my mind for some time and I feel now more than I ever it’s time 🖤