In the last three years I have met a lot people who have created a dependency on the plant medicines (drugs) in order to gain insight into dilemmas they perceive that they have in life. Not one of these people I know who has partaken in their ceremonial experience has to my understanding gained any …
The summer of 1996/1997 was one of the most formative of my life experience thus far. It culminated in my venturing to the Festival of Possibilities in March 1997, and it was here that I would meet perhaps the most important woman of my life (once again, thus far). Annette was sitting with her partner at the …
Addiction has been a huge part of my life experience. In earnest, addiction was for me a form of coping with trauma, boredom and often subjugating unexpressed emotion. When I was at Otago University, in Dunedin, alcoholism (which has history on my father’s side of the family) became my coping mechanism as I began to …
It’s a cliche that you hear in movies, poems, and songs If I had known then, what I know now, would I have taken the job with Suzanne Castonguay when she said, “You’re going to work for me”, I am at a loss to say yes or no. Without being dramatic, there is so much about …
I worked as a Personal Assistant for Suzanne Castonguay from August 1999 – May 2001. To her, I was an open book. She knew my life story the moment I walked through her door to build her the closet with Charlie. Her psychic abilities were extraordinary, and her insights into my downfall were relayed to …
The feeling of helplessness that filled the later part of 1999 was suspended by the kindness of the fellow travellers that I met in Kitsilano and the burgeoning friendships I made with a group of people from Point Grey and Kitsilano. The then occupants of West 10th and Macdonald (in 1999 the house was two …
In August 1999 I boarded a plane bound for Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada from Bangkok. I had been travelling around what was once called Indochina, that being the countries, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos for around eight weeks on a very tight budget, but had enough money left over to either take me west, to India, …