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About

Hello.

As a child I could be regularly found at the bottom of a garden barefoot, talking to the birds and the trees, not much has changed!

I have led quite a nomadic life as a writer/performer poet and Yogi. I write about my travel experiences and learning from the open road in true Sagittarius style at my Substack.

I’m a descendent of people from the mountain village of Amboori, located on the outskirts of Thiruvananthapuram in Kerala, South India.

I also have bloodlines in Goem the native Konkani name for Goa, Singapore, London, the South West of England in Wiltshire and the Scottish borders near the River Tweed.

I am the daughter of Heather and the granddaughter of Margaret and Josephine.

Before British colonization Singapore was known as Temasek, and was part of the Malay world, with an indigenous population primarily consisting of Malay and Orang Laut (sea nomads).

Wiltshire’s indigenous history is rich with pre-Roman settlements, including Mesolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Age people who built on the hills and downland, evidenced by sacred sites like Stonehenge, Silbury hill and Avebury.

The River Tweed or Tweed Water near my grandfather’s birthplace of Peebles, steers an extraordinary 97 mile long course that flows east across the Border region in Scotland and northern England on its way to the North Sea and is one of the great salmon rivers of Britain.

I am deeply grateful to all the ancestors, pathways and streams that brought me here.

 

CREATRIX, PROTECTRESS, AND DESTRUCTRESS.

I first started working with the goddess Kali when I travelled to Amboori in Kerala and was “caught” dancing near a sacred site on a burial ground by a local Catholic priest. He would invite me to communion and attempt to convert me.

It was an echoing not only of the story of Christian domination and control that pervaded this land, but of the one I experienced in England growing up in my mother’s evangelical Jehovah’s Witness faith.

It did not seem to matter what piece of land I was standing on, what education I sought out, or what culture I attempted to explore, domination and control was the overarching theme.

To me Kali was a symbol of the complex forces of Mother Nature and the feminine that would not be tamed, suppressed or denied.

Reclaiming Varghese was a way to embrace the complexity and beauty of our European ancestry; there would never be a way to escape the history that we were both the oppressed and the oppressor, perhaps our deeper healing comes in acceptance of this.

Kali arrived at my feet with a powerful message.

Mother Nature would not allow this decimation and destruction of our Earth and our original healing practices without first calling us back home to protect her.

That we could find the power and resolve within to resist systems and structures of domination and control and collectively heal.

That like agricultural burning for replenishment we too could burn down outdated systems and structures and start again.

Choosing together to grow something different.

It was not too late to come home to our true nature, to return to reciprocity and care over domination, greed and extraction.

It was not too late to plant new seeds.

I take a decolonial approach to education & lifelong learning. I believe in the power of oral traditions and other ways of holding and transferring knowledge that have been traditionally less valued.

I am deeply committed to decolonisation and land back initiatives, that revitalise and honour indigenous ways of being and knowing to support our collective liberation.

It is my belief that life is sacred and we all have a right to sovereignty, dignity and freedom whilst walking this beautiful Earth as its guardians.

Kali – my name sake

She takes the darkness & eats it.

With a necklace of skulls and a gaze that burns through illusion, she is both creator and destroyer. Her laughter cracks the heavens, her dance shakes the earth…

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