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I don’t know how to explain what happened to me.

I first heard about Tonkiri when I interviewed Sarah Anne Johnson back in June about her work on festivals and mind-altering substances. After our interview, we continued chatting more generally about the benefits of altering consciousness. She began to tell me about her experiences with ayahuasca at Tonkiri, a learning and wellness centre near Sandilands Provincial Park, using ayahuasca ceremony to heal, learn, and inspire. When we parted ways, she promised me the contact information of the ayahuasca shaman who runs Tonkiri, Jim Sanders, warning me that if I wanted to write an article about Tonkiri, Jim would likely ask me to participate in a ceremony. I knew nothing about ayahuasca, but I was intrigued.

A few months later, I’m headed east on Highway 1 towards Tonkiri, riding with two people Jim asked me to pick up in the city. I still don’t know much about ayahuasca, having decided not to do any online research before the trip. I wanted to just let myself have the experience. But my curiosity gets the better of me in the car. My passengers respond to my questions by telling me a bit about the structure of the ceremony, but when I ask what it’s like to be on ayahuasca — what they call drinking the medicine — they tell me it’s hard to describe. It’s not like anything else, and everyone has their own experience with the medicine. By the time we get to Tonkiri, I’m nervous about what to expect.

We unload the car and Jim greets us as we walk toward the ceremony lodge. I’m introduced to a small group of people whose names I forget almost immediately. I’m happy to see that Sarah’s here. She and Jim’s helpers get me set up in the lodge where I’ll be sleeping for the night after the ceremony. I spend a bit of time orienting myself, relearning names, and chatting with people before ceremony starts.

After ceremony, I spent time talking with Sarah and Jim about how someone could possibly write about the experience of ayahuasca. As Sarah aptly put it to me, “How do you communicate your reverence?” And the truth is, I don’t know how or if I should write about it. My experience was profoundly personal: something just for me. And yet, I went out to Tonkiri with the purpose of writing about it. That sense of guilt, of owing my readers and Jim something in exchange for the experience of being out there, was something I thought through a lot during the ceremony.

Here’s what I will say about it to satisfy your natural human curiosity. Yes, I got mind-meltingly, life-altering high, but it was more than that. I was able to think about my life and the world and the barriers I’d constructed for myself about writing this article in a way that felt productive. The experience changed me for the better.

The day after the ceremony, Jim and I make time to talk more. We’re sitting in one of his favourite spots in the woods around Tonkiri with the wind rustling through the trees. I’m not quite myself yet, still reeling from the ceremony, but I feel ready for our conversation. Ayahuasca helped me sort out the questions I want to ask, and how I want to ask them.

A handful of massive murals went up around downtown last week as part of the Wall-to-Wall Mural & Culture Festival thrown by Synonym Art Consultation. More specifically, along the north side of the New West Hotel and across a grassy vacant lot on the south side of the Medi-care Pharmacy on Main Street, four technicolour animals now stare each other in the eyes. 

The piece is the work of artists Jessica Canard, Siyee Man, Joseph Pilapil, Pat Lazo, and Gabrielle Funk, and draws its inspiration form the four weeks they spent teaching street art to the young people of Studio 393, a youth-led arts studio for emerging artists by Graffiti Art Programming Inc. 

The street-art workshops were balanced by activism workshops, where the teens “had discussions on the issues they were passionate about. We were just teaching them style; the content of the art they made was based on what they wanted to do. From that, we got the idea for the need to be unified together and to live positively,” says Siyee. 

Gabrielle adds, “We’ve all been building up the inspiration and prepping for this since mid-July. We started meeting to talk about the ideas in August. It’s been a really integrated, long, multi-faceted process.” 

Last Friday, I had the chance to sit down with Gabrielle, Siyee, and Pat to chat more about their work on the mural. They’ve been putting in long, hard days, with different artists coming in at different hours. I catch them on a quick break before they have to head off to grab the lunch provided to artists and volunteers.

On Saturday, September 30th, from 7pm-2am, Black Space Winnipeg will be putting on their second instalment of Nuit Noire in partnership with aceartinc., located on the second floor of 290 McDermot Avenue. Nuit Noire was founded out of “the need to diversify ... [and highlight] community voices,” and this year’s Nuit Noire, entitled Illuminate Our Voices, showcases Afrocentric visual and performance art.

This past week, I sat down with Nuit Noire artists Edmund Machona and dione c. haynes to discuss their perspectives and development as spoken-word performers.

I’ve just taken up a perch at the bar when rap artist and activist Vigdís Ósk Howser walks through the door. She’s on time, and I’m a bit relieved. Reykjavík’s Culture Night just wrapped, and she’s been partying most of the weekend. Earlier in the day, she overslept and missed our first meeting. I’m not particularly mad about it because Cafe Vinyl, the spot she originally suggested for our interview, is a cool place and the first good coffee I’ve drank in Reykjavík. Besides, I’ve been there. Sober-self overestimates hunger-over-self’s ability to get out of bed and through the door in the morning.

Now, we’re sitting in Prikið, billed as Iceland’s oldest bar, and home to breakfasting tourists in the mornings, locals dancing on the bar during punk shows at night, and even the occasional screening of an experimental film. Vigdís is a regular. She carries a card that gets her — and luckily me — a discount. In scenes from Vigdís’ latest music video, “Reyndo Bara,” you can spot Prikið’s hanging pot lights swinging around her head. One of the servers comes over for a quick chat in Icelandic during the course of our interview, stealing a few fries from our plate as she leaves.

Vigdís and I are fast friends. Our interview ends with a hug and a standing offer to swing by Vesturbæjarlaug the next day, the public swimming pool where she works part time. Instead, I spend most of the next afternoon somewhat guiltily lying around my hotel room, then spending my last krónas on a glass of red wine at a swanky French restaurant, but I figure Vigdís understands.