Puente PachaMama Origin Story
 

My entire life, I have been fascinated by what makes culture whole, tracking the threads of my bi-cultural upbringing, for that which remains intact within my lineages, and reckoning with the dissonance that comes from straddling the divide. I have been bridging  cultures, languages, continents, generations, and worlds for my entire life. 

 

As a young girl, I lost my mother to cancer, and experienced the universal destitution and isolation of our modern culture’s inability to meet me as I slipped through the cracks, unable to find refuge in either of my homelands.

 

My longing led me on a wild journey through the underground street cultures of North, Central, and South America. This 13-year pilgrimage guided me home to my unshakable belonging to the Great Mother archetype, Holy Mother, Pachamama. 

 

Those years were wild, gritty, humble, close to the earth, and a deep practice in surrender. I hitchhiked and camped, bartered, made art, and grew my trades and skills. I was deeply embraced by the people on my journey, and will forever be indebted to the hospitality, the open minds, and the generosity of the abuelas, madres, and comadres who took me in. I ended up falling irrevocably in love with, and intimately familiar with, the beating heart and open veins of Latin America.

 

It also led me to finding my vocation and voice as an activist, artist, community weaver, holder of sacred space, and author. ​When the outrage of injustice that I witnessed became more than I could bear, I turned fervently to my writing. Hiding out in a one room cabin in Guatemala, to the beat of incessant rain on the tin roof, I wove the stories of my travels into my first published book: Caminante, Bridger of Worlds in 2008.

 

The experience of writing Caminante was not only healing and integrating for me, as I tried to make sense of the senseless suffering around me, but I discovered that it was healing for others, as well! I found that my stories, told through eyes of love and wonder, inspired love and solidarity in my readers. It was a call to action for those it touched. Serendipitously, my understanding of Sacred Activism, and this body of work, was born!

 

In the following season of my life, I became a professional cross-cultural guide, dedicating 10+ years to international rites-of -passage work. During this era, I designed and led multiple semesters through South America and Asia. I worked as a professional Internship Placement Specialist for a gap-year university program.

 

When Nico, my childhood best friend and life partner, was taken by the Ganga river in a tragic rafting accident in 2013, I returned to my writing, on my knees.  It was through the writing of  Sweet Water Tsunami, in 2018,  that  I – alone in an adobe hut in the high Andean desert – learned about writing to save one's life. Writing as therapy, as prayer, as lifeline.

 

I understood, through this experience, that engaging with the creative spirit has the power to summon us from the underworld. It was the ultimate singing-over-the-bones ritual, and it resulted in an even deeper devotion to creativity as a spiritual practice.

 

The process of reforming, after having dissolved in the years that followed my loss, was a profound opportunity to heal and to be mentored and trained by some of the great leaders and teachers of our time. Through those mentorships, my internal work, and my work in the community, my professional development rooted and ripened.

 

Those years also gifted me with unimaginable miracles…Like falling  in love with my cowboy, Juan Guerrero. (A warrior of the heart,  like me :)  Soon after came  the ultimate conjuring of courage – to literally let life in, when I became the Mama of my beautiful children Selva and Luna. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that love and life after loss could be so blessed. That my heart could be so drenched in honey. 

 

Nor could I have known that the raucous, raw, and revolutionary maiden, who once rode bareback through wild lands, with a drum in her hands and coplas on her lips, would grow strong in me once more. Calling me to create brave spaces of refuge and rebellion to mend our creative spirits and our cultures. To alchemize the parts of us that are outraged and orphaned into belonging, joyful purpose, action, solidarity, and service.

 

These rich journeys through the vast terrain of my personal mythos; a lifetime of bridging cultures and worlds; decades of professional experience as a facilitator, mentor, and guide; and my soul apprenticeships with the lineages and teachers who have blessed me on this path have all led to the founding of PUENTE PACHAMAMA.

 

It is my JOY and honor to share these hard-earned offerings with you. I bow in humility and gratitude to the countless ways that my community, seen and unseen, has held me through it all.  Thank you for leaning in, and for learning more about what I am up to.  Please share  these offerings with your circles, as you feel called! 

 

May our collaborative medicine find its way to our relatives, friends, and so called foes who are most needing it. May unimaginable healing and positive change ripple out to touch our hurting and beautiful world.  

 

May LOVE guide our every step.

 

¡Viva la Vida!

Sarita