Creatricksters of Feral Lunacy
Amanda Fiorino
Sara McFarland
Amanda is a polyphyletic creature, an embodied convergence of ancestral lines that stretch from the Dawnlands of Turtle Island (Passamaquoddy - eastern US) to the mountains of Macedonia; from the ocean-hugging lands of Greece & Sicily to the seafaring lands of the Celts. Mother to a shapeshifter, *she/they dwells in the mountains of Southern Ute territories with her partner, child, and furred/feathered kin.
As a lover of crossroads, she tends to the intersections of ancestry, mythos, gender, trauma, chthonic & cosmic spiritualities, inter-species relating, and place-based re-membering as pathways for the reimagining of emergent and unknown futures. Futures that humanity might come to inhabit from places of radical trans-formation. With a particular focus in eco-mystical experiences and their capacity to in-form deep mycelial change, Amanda believes such experiences connect us to wider narratives of possibility and break down petro-patterns that feed the soil of life’s entangled becoming.
She feels that in these times of eco- and paradigmatic- collapse, our somatic intelligence is ancestrally equipped to channel a feral kind of consciousness. An awareness that we are so much more than what we’ve been coerced, forced, or seduced into believing. Amanda allies herself to the dawning of hybridity - a way of moving with the world that invokes our trans-specied and mythopoetic brilliance. A hybridity that is capable of inhabiting/learning to inhabit landscapes of uncertainty.
Her work is a confluence of diverse heritages. From pan-cultural traditions and inter-cultural cosmologies to contemplative practices and body-based approaches, Amanda brings particular attention to folx eco- and multi-plicitious natures. With a heightened sensitivity for the dynamic body of experience each person engages the world from, her guiding is a process of listening and tracking with all of her sensual faculties. Through shared curiosity, willingness, and wonder, she and those she works with sense together for the relational pathways one might follow in their entangled evolution and growth.
Supported by a lifetime of personal experience and over 18 years of formal training & apprenticing within various traditions and fields of study, Amanda’s work continues to evolve. Her work is deeply informed by her ancestors, the lands she has lived with and currently lives with, the liminal, and the dreamtime. She has trained with practitioners such as Robin Saltonstall, Bayo Akomolafe, Bill Plotkin, and many more.
You'll find her out beyond ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing with her nose to the ground and her ears pricked peripherally, smelling and listening to the voices that bounce off holographic stretches of time. Voices incanting multiplicitous possibilities clambering and crawling from the edges of life's entangled emergence.
You can find her/their personal work at www.feralmysticism.com
Sara is a healer of the Golden Web of Life, an Edgewalker singing the Frequencies of Soul, a ritualist in reciprocal relationship with the Holy in the Wild. As an improvisational singer, Soul Storyteller, and guide, she/they creates Fire Silk and dreams Earth’s Web in order to weave paths of golden threads into the underworld and between the worlds for others to travel. Mystery, the Cailleach and the Dream guide them in living a Muse inspired, Soul-led life.
She is a Queer, both/and creature, welcoming of the exquisite multiplicity of Life beyond the binary. Their capacity as a Gatekeeper allows them to presence the many manifestations of life (seen and unseen) blossoming beyond a human-centric perspective. They are a traveler-with, a friend along the path - the guiding is compassionately and somatically trauma-informed, in service to healing trauma personal, Earth community and civilization.
Tracking the Life - Death - Life energy of transformation, Sara serves as a Death Doula to that which is dying- both personal as well as collective. She is unafraid to be fierce, lovingly cutting to the heart of the matter, in service to ending the current paradigm of Life-destroying-ways, as well as the dying that presages the renewal of Soul Initiation. Called to serve the death of the current paradigm and the composting of the too-small-life, invariably she touches upon the deepest wound carved canyons of beauty, calling forth the echoes, songs, colors and earth-bodied magic of living within Earth Community.
Sara’s work is a confluence of experiences that have prepared her gifts and abilities for these times - training in Wild Mind and Soul Initiation guiding through Animas Valley Institute, her work as an herbalist and Ortho-Bionomy practitioner, Zen Novice and temple manager at Upaya Zen Center, singer, actor and storyteller with a Masters in Interdisciplinary Art, apprenticeship to Forest, Wolf, Fox, Boar, and the sacred Mountains. Belonging to Earth Community and listening deeply to Soul, stepping into the great work of Now, gifted by the ancestors both Human and More than Human Sara meets you in the moment of dying, composting, gestating and being born. Tracking your own personal Mythos, your gifts and shadows, talents and wounds, bigness and humanness, we travel together along the strands of the Golden Web of Life: weaving, healing, growing, transforming, un/earthing, embodying, singing, seeking, arriving, shedding, belonging. Mystery guides us into the star filled darkness, the claw and fur and belly of you, the light alive hugeness of you, the particular entanglement of you, the Earth body of you, the creative impulse of you to the Soul Place of you.
Sara is of Celtic, Slavic and Baltic descent, honoring her peoples ways of living with their oceans, forests, mountains and rivers, as well as finding herself in relationship with the wild boar, wolf, deer and other creatures, ancient volcanoes and spring waters where she/they currently resides in the heart of Germany.
You can find her/their personal work at www.saramcfarland.com