The first inhalation of our journey begins with a divine breath and the primordial sound of a cosmic overture. Gas giant Jupiter commands the inky skies and calls to Aeolus, the keeper of the winds. Zephyrus decodes the cloud atlas from Endymion, in a state of entropy that moves matter through resonance as the Imhotep listens to the cellular dissonance and the alchemy of sound within his patient, dreaming of the hypogeum. Enchanted, we chant the song of the soul and tune in to the solfeggio frequencies dialling back to 432Hz. Nightingales hear our winter’s grief and herald the spring; night surgeons operating on our soul through their song as we digitise into the aviary; and swifts carry the message of our future in flight, dissecting the anatomy of a birdman to interpret the language of the birds. Fecund honeybees emancipate themselves from sexual slavery along the pollen path. We alchemise words written in the data garden and employ the art of ikebana in the spaces in between blossoms and stems. Marigolds scent the cemeteries on Dia de los Muertos as fishermen catch souls in butterfly nets and liminal out-of-body travellers join the souls hitchhiking in the smoke and chemistry of desire. A commonwealth of trees and lungs live in an ocean of air that morphs into the voice of a fly-ash particle, reclaiming contagion through community as psyche absorbs soul from mind, and memory rewrites its history in an air age of technobiophilia, where we can all be eternal. Air as medium mitigates our sense of separation and unites us in our collective opus. Air is time, and we blow out the dandelion clock, recalibrating our inner barometers for a new epoch. And breathe.

Our journey is awakened from this primordial deep as we are poured out from distant galaxies, flooding life forms into our earthly sphere to form pools of fluid consciousness that crack the surface and deluge ensues. The civilisations of Lemuria and Atlantis are lost beneath Neptune’s waves as Orpheus plays his lyre. The Moon’s silvery lakes dance in the reflection of other, more distant moons as we search for life in our solar system, seeking the precursor to existence as microbial beings hitchhike on asteroids to recalibrate our land — the destroyer and the creator of worlds. In communion with the skies and gods, we pray for rain to fall and quench parched soil, and in hypnagogic states, we slip downstream into the collective unconscious whilst precognition washes through our nightmares.

In an ever-watery world, whales are the gatekeepers to dream portals and pink river dolphins hypnotise us like sirens into their wake. Odin’s eye blinks from the distorted reflection of a sacred well as Melusine’s tail echoes lost loves, while Selkie sheds the pelts of ancestors who hear the cries outside of time. Diving into the big blue, the tentacles of alien creatures tell spiralised tales of interplanetary origins as coral reefs play a symphony of a future out of tune. We bend the river back to whence it came, its bed lined with silver coins, offered up as a new river sings songs to a cloaked lunar goddess.

A drinking tree wets the pages of its bark as we read its course, revealing its sentience in a new phase, a fourth paradigm. Charged with one hundred words for water, we rest by sacred banks and taste our inner waters, bittersweet with memories as we traverse the tributaries of what once was, the past now displaced and eroded. We rise up and break the surface, restored, renewed and released as our sweat and tears crystallise to form the banks of a river that guides us in a new direction, and we flow.

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We ignite our path with an explosive revision of the big bang, burning through the heliosphere. Hearts racing, as we trace the path of Osiris and bear witness to Prometheus stealing the fire from the gods at Olympus. The sun kisses the moon as we chase our tails riding dragons across night skies and as Martians we take up our iron swords, the scent of pepper and smoke filling our lungs as the god of war drives us forward into a battle that need not be fought as we experience our trans-species origins in the huito fruit. Our inky past tracing its tributaries across our flesh and the taste of a golden apple sets our wings alight as we dance as the Firebird with the sorcerer Koschei until we are liberated from form.

In the crucible of our desires, the serpent rises, pouring forth the immortal elixir, distilling our illusions until we experience the light of the truth through tantric practice. We fan the flames of the female orgasm, incant love spells and become apprentices to the oracles of fire, stepping into the fire of purification and dancing with our inner pyromancy into the magma of our personal power, creating new lands.

From the ashes, we transform through the womb of creation as survivors and reclaim our sovereignty and power from those that have raged against us. The heat from our hands gives us power to cast life from clay into the kiln, drinking fire medicine from its urn, lighting the digestive fire within and tasting the acrid, pungent nature of its flames on our tongues. Once again, we trace the path of the sun, honour the flame and embody our regenerative potential. Like wildfire, our will and desires for justice and virtue propel us towards an eruption and we are immersed in the soundscape of protest, the chants of our comrades exploding in our ears, a moment of chaos until our vision clears and we see the true nature of things.

We place our hands on the warmth of the earth and look towards our future as warriors and lovers and co-creators, to effectively employ our actions and desires to protect and serve our planet. We rise, like the tulip, to face the sun for a new day.

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Our descent into Earth begins with our creation from primeval chaos into form, as a lone electron spiralling through the zodiac along magnetic highways, hitchhiking on an intergalactic mycelium spaceship and as homesick astronauts dreaming of our blue planet, olfactory memories of cedar, moss and amber resin that take us deep into the soil, travelling along the mycorrhizal network into the cool, dark womb of Earth where we surrender to the alchemical process of death, resurrection and rebirth. We emerge from our metamorphosis as eartheaters and earthworms, tunnelling through the rotting pedosphere to the surface we inhale the sweet smell of rain on dry soil, as seedlings we uncoil into the biosphere, a time capsule dug from the earth. We hear the wisdom of the trees and dance through the seasons to meet the rose and the plants that have seeded historic change. We converse in the fractal language of nature, explore plant agency and personplant relationships, animal behaviour and interspecies communication, moving from the anthro(man)pocene to the chthul(earth)ucene

Feeling our way into the geometry of Earth, we build our bodies into our designs. As humans, we taste and digest the earth element as nutrition, materialising our own forms into structure, turning our sweat into crystals. We look at the act of making earth and the nature of physical form. We realign our gaze with the plurality of our senses, towards community and inclusion, with the Bantu concept of ‘I am therefore we are and we are therefore I am’. At last, we see art as an alchemical process and ask how to effectively apply agency to our experience and reorient ourselves in an eco-centric landscape. As night falls on our voyage and with the stars as our witness, we return to our crucible and offer its liquid gold back to Earth, ready for a new dawn as apprentices to the wild.

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