When Humans Tense, Faeries Gather
New prints and the story they grew from.
Dear reader,
I started creating these Psychic Botanicals last year, in the thick of my separation from Aki’s dad, while I was learning how to be alone in a new way, befriending grief and loosening what felt like generations of inherited patterns. There were moments when water, in pigment, in tears, in the lakes, in the bath, spoke with such clarity that I couldn’t argue with it anymore. It told me I had outgrown certain places and people. It asked me to look directly at myself, without flinching. So I returned to the plants. To candle magic. To my daily walks. To the Cyclamens, to the Catalpa tree in our neighbourhood, to Mugwort, Nettle, Marigold, Tulsi.
There were days when the grief was overwhelming. Not just my own, but the world’s. The genocides, the polycrisis, the whales in captivity, the forests burning, the animals and people and children and old growth forests being slaughtered. I would walk Aki to school, then cry the whole way home, holding all of it while becoming a single mother, while my life was breaking apart and re-forming at the roots.
And don’t let the past tense fool you. The overwhelm, the horrors of the world, are still here. But my grief grew limbs, and I taught it how to dance.
One day I was sitting with the Catalpa, crying, feeling it all, when I felt my spirit-self grow an extra set of arms, as if something older and wiser reached down and lifted me from the darkness of my own womb.
Then a memory returned.
One of my early plant sits in Brazil, about twenty years ago. I was so deep in feeling I could barely orient myself. I remember lying close to the ground, exhausted. My life was shedding faster than I could keep up. Something shifted in my perception. The world softened. The air felt populated. Small presences at the edge of vision. Faeries, or what I’ve come to call Faeries. It felt like a change in scale. An instant remembering that I wasn’t alone.
A question rose in me then, and it has stayed whenever I need guidance. I want to offer it to you now:
What would faeries do?
When the ground is shaking, when everything familiar is dissolving, faeries don’t brace harder.
They shift shape.
They listen to the land.
They trust the invisible currents more than the visible ones.
They follow warmth, instinct, small glimmers.
They trust even when trusting feels unreasonable.
They walk slower.
They loosen their grip.
They choose play instead of panic.
They dance because movement clears fear.
They laugh because laughter breaks spells.
They trades stories so no one forgets what’s real.
They sit around a fire because fire reminds the body that transformation is natural, cyclical, and necessary.
They tend the spark.
They care for one another.
They grieve out loud.
They act for the benefit of the whole.
They move toward delight, even in dark forests.
They rest when the forest rests. Without guilt.
They know that when an old structure collapses, something truer is trying to come through.
When humans tense, faeries gather.
To me, this has always felt like instruction from the earth.
This is what I mean by feminine ecologies. A way of living that’s relational. A way of responding to collapse with closeness instead of control.
When we listen closely to the earth, something listens back. Intuition. Ancestors. Imagination. Faeries. The earth is alive and speaking through us.
All my art comes from this relationship. From sitting with plants. From slowing down enough to feel the unseen currents moving through a place. From trusting what arrives, in vision, feeling, dream, or sensation.
Sometimes the instruction is simple:
Be a little more fae
More fluid
More connected
Less armored
Stay warm
Stay together
Laugh
Play
Follow what feels alive.
And so one night, after putting Aki to bed, I danced, made soup, lit candles, and let these come through.
With love,
Vanja
Appreciate you so dear Rachel ❣️🌱
This touched me deeply! Thank you so very much for this! 🩵🍃