Lilikoi, Passion fruit flower
by Skye Mandozay
Sitting with Lilikoi, inhaling her sweetness a moment–she offered me a great gift in recognition of my devotion to her wild beauty… She offered to share with me her path to becoming…
One that implicates the rhythm of my own breath…
The rivers of water in my ancestor’s tears and veins…
The bodies of ancient forests that once covered this world…
And the spectacular, violent and fiery deaths of the stars that seeded it…
Following that path back
I discover that nothing I touch is excluded from her flowering body…
That held within it, is a vast net of relationships…
From lichen to whales, from oaks to algae, from nebulae to that very 1st moment of the great flaring forth…
Yet somewhere along that path my people forgot how to call out the true names of their kin…
To trace the myriad intersections of mutuality that emanate from a single flower such as her…
to see the many ways we are tugged by those same threads…
The ways in which our bodies are woven into a larger pattern of becoming with all other bodies…
A pattern whose shape our individual eyes will never behold… in the same way a thread will never know the tapestry… or a single cell, the body…
Lilikoi is helping me to remember…
That nothing resides in a fixed and finite form…
neatly bound and packaged…
belonging only to itself and responsible only to itself.
That instead we are altered and transformed as we move through our world… just as each of us alters the world in turn… My shape taking on and taken in by each encounter… made and remade by every interaction…
Try as we might to forge our independence, permanence and then rule what we see from a distance…
In truth, we are inextricably connected and hopelessly vulnerable to a dazzling array of circumstances to take even One. More. Breath…
Our life is sustained by these gifts pouring forth with such constancy that we can no longer see… a gift our ancestors made sure to acknowledge and taught strong the laws of reciprocity…
Yet the wound in our minds has built a wall against this recognition and forged deeply the habits of separation…
And this fictional boundary that stops at the edge of the flesh i call ‘me’ has led me to forget the true impact of each act…
But slowly, Lilikoi reveals to me, what was always there but I could not see.
That I am of the Earth’s body, and the Earth’s body is me…
(*Lilikoi=passionfruit)
Skye Mandozay grew up on a farm in South Africa and spent her early years immersed in wildlife conservation and rehabilitation before going on to work as a wilderness guide. She then spent 5 years living in the Peruvian Amazon jungle where she was immersed in the study of traditional plant medicine of the indigenous Shipibo people and co-facilitated healing retreats alongside them for many years.
Skye moved to Melbourne, Australia in 2017, where she first encountered the Work that Reconnects through the workshops of John Seed and has been diving deeply into the study and facilitation of the work ever since. She also works as a nature connection mentor for young children using the model of Jon Young.