Thursday 3/21/19
Tuesday evening’s pot-luck dinner and cacao ceremony here at Imagine Acres was just delightful! We had nine people around the dinner table: Nicolo, Joanne, Richard, Monica, Claudia, Christel, Jim, Jeanné and me. Jeanné is Sicilian, and a great cook—her bread pudding casserole with bacon was scrumptious! I’ll be visiting her Sunday for a Medieval feast she’s putting on.
Cacao ceremony dinner. Monica, Joanne, Jeanne’, OZ, Claudia, Jim, Christel, Richard. Photo by Nicolo.
Christel Libiot and Jim Wert have an organization called One Heart Cacao. They have conducted numerous cacao ceremonies in the Mid-Atlantic, and have a global following. They use 100% pure ceremonial-grade cacao (chocolate in its purest form). This comes from wild Criollo trees grown and processed without any chemicals, and hand-prepared by indigenous Mayan people in the Lake Atitlan region of Guatemala, where Dona and I spent a month last summer. Criollo is the wild and most ancient of three main varieties of cacao. It makes up less than 1% of the world’s chocolate, as crop yields are low.
According to the flyer Christel and Jim handed out, “Cacao is a superfood with medicinal value and over 300 nutritional compounds. One of the main active ingredients is Theobromine (literally, ‘God-Food’), which facilitates the release of dopamine, the ‘pleasure hormone.’ Cacao supports memory, immunity, heart health, and relieves stress and depression. It contains the highest concentration of antioxidants of any food on the planet.”
For more info, and to order this special cacao: www.oneheartcacao.com
David Wolfe says: “Chocolate is helping usher in the ‘Cardiozoic Age’ – the Age of Heart. Cacao seems to help correct the imbalance between mind and heart, allowing the mind to support the heart. Increasing the heart energy brings forth compassion, wonder, healing and, most importantly, unconditional love.”
Since Morning Glory’s Ascension, She has been proclaimed a “Goddess of Unconditional Love.” And one of the things She loved was chocolate! So I felt Her presence presiding over this ceremony, which I opened with our traditional CAW food blessing to “Holy Mother Earth.”
This cacao ceremony was transformationally healing for me. As my closest friends know, I have had a lifetime aversion to the smell and taste of chocolate, due to PTSD from a childhood tonsillectomy, and the chocolate ice cream they gave me to eat after I emerged from the anesthesia – which felt like burning lava down my ravaged throat.
Yesterday we watched “Reefer Madness: the Movie Musical,” which no one but me had seen before. We all agreed it may be the best musical ever, even eclipsing “Rocky Horror.” If you haven’t seen it, you really should! You may want to have a little safety meeting beforehand…
After the movie, I drove 20 minutes to visit Tamara Shepard Truitt, her husband Tom, and her son Justin, in Waldorf, MD. Another fabulous cook, she served up a Moroccan dish of lamb couscous. Her mother, Ayesha, had spent a lot of time in Morocco before she moved with Tamara to Annwfn 40 years ago to live with Gwydion. We were all enthralled at the time by the incredible stories of her wild adventures with Tamara’s father, who was an international drug-lord. Tamara was just 9 years old back then, and she fell in well with all the rest of our feral “kid pack” at Greenfield Ranch – the 5,600-acre Hippie homesteading community in the Misty Mountains of NorCalifia, founded in 1972 and still going strong, of which CAW’s Annwfn is a 55-acre parcel. MG and I were sorta honorary Aunt & Uncle to all our kids as they grew up to become fine adults.
OZ and Tamara
Tamara got out the enormous photo album Ayesha had assembled, and we spent hours poring over the photos of her life from infancy to now, reminiscing about those glorious days of yesteryear. There were even pictures in the album of Gwydion, Morning Glory, me and our Unicorns! So much nostalgia, and such a sweet reunion!
This evening Nicolo has gotten us tickets for a play called “Confection,” by Zack Morris. As I understand, it’s an immersive experience, like dinner theatre. I’ll tell you all about it in my next Walkabout Journal installment…
#pagan #roadtrip #wizard #bucketlist #adventure #ozpatreon