I spoke to a friend several times today, and our friendship is blossoming. We work together, learn to understand our paths, and above all share a very strong connection when it comes to bringing a shared spiritual vision to life. She asked me to write down what is very obvious to me. So here I do.

I live everyday magic. I always have. I grew up this way as a small child, but sank into worry and darkness the moment I let go of it in order to be more acceptable to others. The so-called “hard reality” is an illusion. No matter how intense things may seem, life is good—and remains good—as long as we meet it with care, lightness, and love.

Everyday magic is different from what many people believe. It is the truth of existence. It is real, it works, and there is nothing mysterious about it. I am learning to lift the veils. And I teach you how to lift those veils too, so you can return to the magic that you yourself are.

How do I know this?

My grandmother’s mother—my great-grandmother, with Native American blood—was one of my greatest teachers, and physically also one of the smallest, when I look back. My sisters and I stayed with her several times a year during our holidays when we were very young. We slept in brightly colored hammocks in an exciting village, with a real river and a protruding rock to dive from. We walked in the mornings, and again in the afternoons when the heat rose from the stones and lay thick over the village.

We wandered over rolling hills with children who whispered secrets to us in a language I did not always fully understand. They told us where to walk carefully so as not to disturb wild animals, how softly we had to speak in certain places to stay safe. I was often pulled back by voices when I wandered off alone, chasing butterflies, iguanas, beetles, or birds—separate from the group—or sternly called back by my older sisters who explored with me.

I lived there in paradise: magical colors, incredibly beautiful animals and shapes, mystery, lights, elves, thousands of scents, and beings with whom I could lie in the grass. I would only be found again—falling back into my body after having gone for a walk on a sunbeam—when my grandmother, laughing but with concern in her voice, told me that I could not simply step out of my body. She warned me that the soul of a parrot might take my place, and that I would then continue life as a parrot. I didn’t like that story very much—but I never unlearned walking on sunbeams or floating between flowers.

My primary school reports always said, “Ilanga was daydreaming again.” I would return from walking on sunbeams and only then realize that I was supposed to be in class that day. Oh yes—I also walked on my toes until I had to unlearn that too, around the age of ten or eleven.

Flowers and plants are my Achilles heel. The promise of a special plant offered from a suspicious-looking van makes me lose all sense of discrimination. I would dive right in and come out again happily—though the trouble with obscure vans is absolutely not worth it. Reason completely abandons me when I fall under the spell of plants.

My absolute passion for fruit—one might call it an obsession—also comes from South America. The sweetest, most aromatic fruits, with their colors, textures, and flavor variations, always surprise me. No matter how much you imagine them in advance, real fruit always has more depth than expected. Fruit still makes me incredibly happy, energized, and alive in my senses—including fermented grape juice. Because of this, my family calls me “fruit bat.”

When I arrived in the village, my great-grandmother would bring enormous bunches of fruit and nuts harvested from towering palm trees. She placed me behind them and told me I could eat as much as I wanted, as long as I saved the kernels for her in a “nut boat”—the naturally boat-shaped shells of the palm fruit clusters. After a while, children from the village, along with my sisters, aunts, and uncles, joined in to help. No one was allowed to leave without handing their seeds over to me.

Then the process began.

In the cooking hut, roofed with beautifully woven palm leaves, there was a fire in the center with a rack above it where the seeds were slowly heated. My great-grandmother stirred them from time to time, pointing into the fire and asking me what I saw in the flames. That is how I learned to listen to the fire and understand its messages. We sat there together for hours—at least in my experience. I talked endlessly while she listened, sometimes telling stories, often laughing, and occasionally crying.

She cried when I told her about the woman I always saw—the one who took me on journeys, called me “little one,” and explained what would happen before major changes or illnesses and how long they would last. She cried when I described the woman’s face, her raven-black braids on either side, and the way she spoke. My great-grandmother told me that this woman was her mother.

They taught me how to place seeds in the earth, and about the silence and care required afterward because Mother Earth was pregnant. We learned how to tend to her until the seeds suddenly burst from the soil like magic. They told us stories of mermaids and how white people treated them. Of an ancestor who crossed the Amazon River by walking along the riverbed, able to hold her breath for hours. Of the river itself and its power.

There were rituals at Aunt Magda’s house: plant juices dripped into our eyes, very warm huts, strange-smelling medicines poured down our throats as we resisted. There was tension in the air as the family gathered, and eventually we children were sent to sleep. In the morning, the smell of sweet almonds and mangoes mixed with the joy of finding fruit that had fallen during the night. We jumped out of bed, eager for new adventures, or to go fishing with a specific plant in creeks before sunrise with Aunt Magda. Mixed with a river sand and a bit of red clay, the plant was crushed and gently released into the water. This specific plant temporarily took out the oxygen from the water, having the fish jump out for air, we were taught.

The fish would actually jump out of the water, fall to the sides and we were allowed to take only what we needed. The rest had to be returned. Fishing with that particular plant was not allowed after morning, nor repeatedly in the same creek.

There was Aunt Magda’s deep, endless cave behind her house. My niece and I threw stones into it, and it took an impossibly long time before we heard anything land. There was the smell of boiled herbs for tea, warming the cold mist of the mornings. Animals formed an orchestra with the rising sun. We breathed out clouds of vapor from the high altitude, warmed ourselves by wood fires, drank herbal teas, or waited for cacao to be traditionally boiled and spiced.

And then there was Aunt Magda with Laika—who always walked with us when given the task. We moved between forest giants, alert to every rustle in the bushes, where suddenly a rabbit, bird, or other innocent-looking creature would appear. Laika, with her caramel-colored coat, was the only dog I ever knew who fought snakes. She was strong and intelligent, and more than once returned to the yard dragging massive constrictors she had caught and killed. Terrifyingly large snakes. Laika was known throughout the area for chasing and killing snakes. She was the first professional assassin I ever knew.

We must also mention the chicken that, from just a few months old, sought out every bonfire and ran straight through it. My grandmother’s chicken—whom we believed had been an Indian fakir in a previous life and simply refused to let go of that talent.

Animals with character. Harmony with nature. Living and eating from what the earth provides. Respect—honoring strength, considering one another, encouraging growth. Understanding that adult animals deserve just as much respect, and cannot live with us as enslaved, castrated beings without purpose. Understanding the role of animals, including pets, and their meaningful place in our society.

There is still so much wisdom from the Amazon that could be shared. But this introduction—my life as a small child, briefly allowed to live in paradise among the line of healers from which I descend, whose umbilical cords are buried in South America at their Tree of Life, including my own—feels like a clear and true beginning of my journey together with you.