“Sananga Dieta” began as an unprimed, folded canvas a friend bought to catch paint as it hit the floor. I picked it up during a visit to Brooklyn, New York, and off it went with me, full of ambition, to Lefkada, Greece.

Another friend insisted on helping me get it stretched and primed so I could work. A sailor and handyman, he built the frame from recycled wood, and we stretched and stapled the canvas together by hand.

Excited, I painted freely with no objective, simply enjoying the scale. Soon after, I decided to travel east around the world with some spare miles. I took the canvas off the frame and folded it three times to fit in my suitcase.

It traveled with me across Europe, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and the Pacific

At the time, my nervous system was still living inside something unresolved, something it did not yet feel safe enough to release. Along the way, I found ways to lift the lid slightly through practices like TRE exercises and craniosacral therapy. I felt frozen on the inside, yet deeply observant in each place I visited, moving through countries without ever fully arriving in any of them.

When the travels ended, the canvas rested for several months. At just the right time, another friend helped me unfold it from its year-and-a-half slumber and stretch it again, a physical test of strength and patience as we built a new frame together. Once it was back on the wall, I disliked the direction it was taking and began frantically painting over the right side.

Soon after, another friend invited me to a ceremonial setting with a shaman. Rapé, tobacco, and a clear intention redirected me toward a Sananga dieta.

Sananga is a plant medicine native to the Amazon, used by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years. Traditionally administered as eye drops before hunting, it enhances visual acuity, color, and depth perception. It is also used to clear energetic residue, supporting the release of mental, emotional, physical, or spiritual imprints. The experience was an intense, unavoidable physical sensation administered directly to the eyes

A dieta is a period of intentional relationship with a sacred plant, allowing consciousness to intertwine with its intelligence. Mine lasted three weeks. One drop in each eye every morning, and full surrender. I am deeply grateful to have been brought face to face with something inescapable: pain and discomfort.

In a society driven by numbing, distraction, and escape, confronting our darkness is an act of courage, and a profoundly uncomfortable one.

During this time, a hummingbird began appearing repeatedly in my mind’s eye, vivid and insistent, its beak impossibly sharp. Once I painted it, everything else followed.

This painting reflects my experience of the dieta, always in the morning. Its dominant themes include the intertwining of light and dark, birds as symbols of freedom, and the presence of the natural world.

In Kabbalah, darkness breaks the vessel so it can truly hold light. According to the teaching of the Shattering of the Vessels, divine light was too vast for finite containers, and they shattered, creating fragmentation and darkness. This breaking was not a failure but a necessity. An unbroken vessel can only receive light passively, while a broken and repaired one gains depth, awareness, and the ability to integrate light consciously. Darkness creates capacity; repair allows the light to dwell more fully and endure.

The rest is left to your interpretation.