Van tales 1: A call from the Underworld

It was the week before lockdown was announced. Talk of Covid had been circulating but dismissed as hype. I was in London, which had been my home for nearly twenty years. My work as a yoga and meditation teacher had been flowing along well up till this point. This was the week it all changed. My income came from three main sources: the fancy yoga studio I was teaching for in Mayfair, a California startup mindfulness company that arranged for me to give live meditations accompanied by cellos and harps for hotels and corporates, and a modest income from the activist organisation Extinction Rebellion. Well, that week, the yoga studio went under, still owing me thousands of pounds. The California startup had a change of strategy and tried to turn me into someone who’d read a script to prime salespeople – so I quit. And the XR funding got pulled. I was left with my own project which I’d been about to start – As We Live & Breathe. I’d intended as a pop-up eco-wellbeing event business across the city.
I remember standing in a doorway in the pouring rain on the phone to my new business partner when the reality of the lockdown news and my situation kicked in. I had no work, and these were not going to be easy times to find anything new. London’s an expensive place to live on no income.

I managed the first few months of that disorientating time by creating the As We Live & Breathe website and arranging online offerings. We hooked up with a non-alcoholic drinks company who had an audience of recovering alcoholics, and quickly built a community of people coming to our online morning meditations, yoga classes and eco workshops. On the surface I was holding it together.

In the night, however, I was having a lot of apocalyptic nightmares. I was deeply disorientated and covid was only part of it. I would go for long walks, listening to audio versions of Jung, Hillman, James Hollis, and Bill Plotkin – steeped in the atmosphere of depth psychology. Life took on a strange ‘under water’ quality that wouldn’t seem to budge, and a feeling of ‘pressure’ from the outside seemed to be pulling me down.

I began working with Bell Selkie, a mentor and ‘Soul Guide’, and signed up for her upcoming Vision Quest. Inspired by the rites of passage from various indigenous traditions and alchemy, I would be fasting for 5 days in nature with no tent and seeing what my psyche wanted to do with that. It was a ‘spiritual descent into the Underworld’.

I had started dating an activist during this time. He was a good-looking gardener and qi gong teacher who lived in a van, and we were regularly breaking the lockdown rules. His lifestyle inspired me. His van was beautifully set up for what he needed. Plenty of spices and fresh coffee in his kitchen. A well-stocked bookshelf. Could park wherever he pleased. It made van living seem like a much better alternative than being stuck in my flat running down my savings by the day.

I did the Vision Quest, which of course was a very deep process I won’t share directly. But afterwards I had two realisations: one was a strange feeling that I was a ‘witch’, although I had no idea of what that really meant. The other was that I had not resurfaced. I wasn’t going to get off that lightly. This was only the beginning of my Underworld descent, and the van was the key.

I took a month or two where my psyche tried to rebel and find anything that could keep me in a viable normal life. I applied to King’s College to do a Masters in Environmental Policy even. When the acceptance letter came through my heart sank. It felt like a death sentence. I sold my car and bought my van (really a truck). I called her ‘Misty’ – my key to the Mystery. She would be my chariot through the Underworld.

I was completely out of my depth. For starters, I’m not the best driver. I pulled into the petrol station and nearly took out the entire dispenser. Parking was embarassing and, with bright bold graffitti on either side of my truck I was not exactly inconspicuous. I’m not good with mechanics, or technicalities like that either. I struggled those weeks with with the electrics, the water tank and fitting solar panels, as well as trying to cram as much of my old life in there as I possibly could – including gongs, singing bowls, a guitar, all my spiritual books, an entire range of herbal potions and cosmetics and a wardrobe of completely impractical clothes. My contract on my flat was up and I was now living in my parking spot in Battersea, waking up to wealthy parents walking past with their kids. I felt like I’d crossed over the threshold into being something ‘other’.

I couldn’t stay in London any longer, but where would I go? I’d found one link on Facebook to what was known as ‘Piers’s place’ by some of my activist friends. Or what Piers called the Deep Adaptation Research Center. He had a few acres of land in the middle of a fancy rural part of Kent, a couple of hours outside London, where he’d built some sheds and structures to house activists and was exploring permaculture and sustainable living options. It felt like the place. My wandering days officially began.

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