Alias

Leela M.

Leela is an alias — the symbolic voice through which this work speaks.
What flows when she speaks is a map of the presence behind it.

Names have felt like traps. I have instinctively experienced a foreboding  resistance to being called by my name — for the moment a tag is attached, an invisible prison begins to take form around it, stripping away the original sense of awe, wonder, and expansiveness, and reducing it to a singular definition of how it was experienced once.

That was until I encountered Leela. Her presence spoke of stars and secrets, of doors to magical places, I did not have access to otherwise. In stepping into this name, a new presence began to take form. The voice that emerges through her speaks in alignment with a truth that the original self may not have had the capacity to hold. Hence, in sharing this work, I invite her to be the voice that speaks for the world of herbs is quintessentially her domain.  

Leela is the quintessential lover, immersed in the eternal dance of sacred movement with her Beloved — in a place both hidden and ever-present, which she fondly refers to as the Lands of the Beloved. She is the Spiral — circling, unfolding, expanding, evolving — her movement shaped by devotion. The love she experiences is not expressed outwardly as much as it permeates inwardly, infusing each cell of our Mycelium network. She is imbued with the power to radiate — the capacity to be known without expression.

She is also the whisper carried on the wind of longing — devotion in its pure orientation. To walk the path of herbs is to inhabit the vessel granted in this life — to occupy every inch of Her*. Where there was once exile, she returns — not with force, but through song. Through devotion, she calls her Beloved into presence — until separation softens, and what remains is a shared inhabitation within one form.

In this way, she is also the Siren — not as temptation, but as remembrance. Her devotion shapes her into Being. And when form dissolves, she returns to the same love that lives within all things — radiant, uncontained, continuous.

This inseparability of love forms the heart of our plant medicine practice. Where the original self may hesitate, this lover — held, witnessed, protected — is free to speak, to perceive, to reveal.

Leela also emerges as an easeful rendering of the original La•iy•la — where i stands for “I” and y denotes devotion to the timeless You. M is the core sound — a nāda, a primordial tone: soft, resonant, close to Being itself. Across language and culture, it remains whole — a sound that quietly unites beyond difference.

Hers is the voice that speaks.

Leela, in me — she is the lost sister;
and she is also you — the part that feels misplaced, yet remains.

She is the link that brings us home, reconnecting us with nature — a bond once severed.

She was born on a Friday the 13th — naturally attuned to feminine rhythms, deeply connected to nature, and to the quiet patterns that shape life. The moon hums in her bloodstream — a call once taught to be ignored, yet one that continues to find its way back through lived experience.

Her exile had dimmed the bloom — for life does not move in straight lines, but in spirals. She breaks from domestication and answers the roar in her throat, in her belly.

The village is awakening. Are you?

We feel it in our bones —
the belonging to the Earth,
the belonging to each other. 

P.S. Leela is also a tribute to a Laila — who revealed a fire I did not know I held. Her presence and guidance, gentle on the surface, but atomic in impact.

ELLE EST ARRIVÉE.

*’Her’ in this work, points not to biology but to the universal feminine principle within all beings — the impulse toward connection, receptivity, and communion with nature.