This story begins at Rustlers Valley in December 1994, when I was thirty-one. The thirty years before that had very little to do with ceremony. Everything since has grown from what began there.
Until 1993 I was a professional photographer in Cape Town. I had built my own studio with darkrooms in Oranjezicht, on the slopes of Table Mountain, where I printed high-quality black and white work. I shot regular editorials for local fashion magazines and model agencies. I loved the work and I was good at it. In 1993 I received six Ilford Profoto awards, two silver and four bronze.
It was a hard business to keep going. I owned it myself, with no capital behind me and no insurance on my equipment, and most months I was barely paying the bills. Then in August 1993 a fire destroyed the studio and the darkrooms. All my files, my photographs and the negatives from years of work were gone.
That fire turned my life in a new direction. I stopped believing in the system and stepped away from it. I decided I wasn’t going to try and amass lots of cash. I would use what I could collect day by day or month by month, and move one step at a time without creating any debt. For the next six years I lived in a tipi and owned nothing but a fire, a drum and some blankets. I tell more of that in Built to Burn.
Rustlers Valley, in the foothills of the Maluti Mountains
Later that year, a friend told me he was holding a sweat lodge and that I should come. I was moping over everything I had lost. I had no idea what a sweat lodge was, so I packed my swimming trunks, a towel and a dozen beers. I knew no better.
Only five of us were at the fire. The lodge was a rough frame of bamboo covered with old blankets, just big enough for five or six people to sit around the hot stones. It was very different from the lodges I would build later, but it opened my mind to a new reality and it changed my life that day.
The lodge keeper, Warrick, gave me the name Niyan, the spirit of man. I kept it to myself for a while, and only took it as my name after I had lived at Rustlers Valley for some time. I carried it for many years, until my friend Yawa Bane, a Huni Kuin man from the Brazilian forest, renamed me Nixiwaka on our first night of ceremony together. To him it meant the man of the fire. I was glad to take it. Niyan always felt like it carried a great responsibility, and the firekeeper is more humble, and closer to what I am. The full story of that first lodge is in The Name in the Heat.
“It was a blanket lodge, and it opened my mind to a new reality. It changed my life that day.”
Some months after that first sweat lodge, I heard about a community living in the foothills of the Maluti Mountains near Lesotho. They were starting to hold festivals and experimenting with something called permaculture, with living off the grid and other alternative ways of life.
I had met a guy named Davide at a drum circle in Cape Town. He lived in that community and told me I should visit sometime. I didn’t know much about the place, but I was drawn there, and I decided to go to the Rustlers Valley Christmas Free Festival in December 1994. Davide never thought I would actually come, and he was surprised when I arrived unannounced. Over the next few years we became close friends, a kind of spiritual brotherhood, and we still hold ceremony together when our paths cross.
San Pedro in flower, one of the medicines I came to know at Rustlers Valley
I came to the festival as a paying guest. When it ended, I didn’t want to leave. The owner of the farm gave me a title, master of ceremonies, and with it the job of keeping the fires going.
That job grew. Tending the fires turned into holding ceremonies of many kinds: sound journeys, ayahuasca, fire ceremonies, meditations and group hikes into the mountains. I see myself as a director of ceremony, someone who holds the space for it. A jack of all trades, master of ceremony.
Over the years that followed, I learned from Sangomas, medicine women, curanderos, pajés and shamans of many cultures, and from friends who simply knew the medicines well and loved them. I put myself through many initiations and explored every way I could find into the spiritual world.
When I look back, it all comes down to two things, the fire and the drum. Those two have carried me to everything else, the didgeridoo, the maracas, the marimbas, the sweat lodges, the drum circles and the medicines.
Looking back now, the dark room in this story has more than one meaning. There is the room where I printed my photographs, and there are the dark rooms we all find ourselves in at times: the dark room in our own heads, the dark room of being trapped in society’s constructs, the dark room of a relationship we don’t want to be in.
Moving to the fire meant letting go of the past, letting go of desire, letting go of the need for something. The fire brings us back to the light. The Buddhists call this letting go of attachment, and I was living it long before I understood anything about Buddhism.
“Everything I thought I knew was turned upside down, and so many people showed me a different way of living.”
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