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Portrait with Nick Collura
Description: A young woman wearing a Mexican white embroidered shirt sits surrounded by lush greenery. Her hair is adorned with plants. She holds a Mayan statuette in her hands.
Portrait with Nick Collura
“When I look at my portrait, the first word that comes to mind is decolonize.
To me, plants represent coming back to your roots, coming back to not only your ancestral ties, but to also your own spiritual self.
Our society focuses a lot on the material, which is powerful too, but we need a balance.
I've always just felt passionate about creating medicine. It’s a sacred thing. It's channeling my ancestors, ancient knowledge that I'm receiving through dreams and synchronicities, conversations with people - anything that I experienced up to now. To me, it's God. It's everything.
When I started practicing plant medicine, I started realizing a lot of things in my life were important as well; like your diet, what content you are filling your mind with, energy-exchanges. When we come back to nature, we start healing ourselves. It's not only going for a hike. It’s tapping into your subconscious, exploring your roots, researching where your parents come from or learning more about your culture.
Nature is God and God is within every single one of us and so that to me is coming back to ourselves.
I want others to see me as a mirror - a reflection of themselves and what they already have inside and what they could work on.
I want to be seen as a nurturer and healer.
When I was younger, it was more of a subconscious thing; it was an intuition. When you're a kid, you just do what feels right for you unless your parents are forcing you to do something, right? I remember going into my garden and taking all of these plants and speaking intentions into them. I didn't think about it, I didn't question it, I would just do it.
When I got to high school, I was far from that. I lost sight of who I was and didn’t know what I was doing here. Then, through near death experiences and through what I feel was a dark night of the soul, I became conscious of the fact that there's a reason for me to be here. It was very sudden. One minute you’re ok, you're comfortable like a caterpillar. Then all of a sudden, you go through this metamorphosis. It hurts when you're going through it, and you don't understand why. Then all of a sudden, you make it through. You're reborn, you open your eyes, and you realize that's why it was happening.
I appreciate life every day now, because I had that experience. I think it was necessary for me to lose myself so that I could realize how important it is to find and know myself. Now I'm this beautiful butterfly and I can inspire people with the beauty of becoming one.”
Milwaukee, 2020