Rebeccah Santa Ana Stromberg
Rebeccah is a …….
what follows is a……
The body, re-membered, remembers
One day I picked up a book on contemporary shamanic practice, and decided to try it for myself. I sat down and listened to a shamanic drum track on an old CD player in my studio, and tried to visualize a journey.
I scarcely believed what I experienced. But something about it felt right, so I continued to practice. I began to craft altars whenever I would journey, to guide and anchor. And after a profound experience a few months later, I cycled naturally for the first time since I was a teenager.
Engaging images of female divinity and practicing emergent animist ritual led me to study traditional and Indigenous embodiment and healing practices cross-culturally at Harvard Divinity School. That same year I participated in the Succurro Fellowship. I continued to practice and explore animist ritual. My culminating Fellowship project was to birth a shamanic drum from cedar wood and elk skin, so that I may one day drum my own journeys.
Nine years ago, I decided to try everything I could to cycle naturally, every month. During this time, I also rented an art studio, giving myself space and time to explore the presence of female divinity through research and art marking.
That year I drew image after image of snakes, birds, and flying snakes; of bulls heads and horns; of eight pointed stars, diamond chevrons, and zig zags; of antlered goddesses coming out of a diamond network pattern; of women holding a snake in each hand; of stylized women giving birth out of chevron shaped vaginal portals. I created an installation called Womb as Tomb, Tomb as Womb – a red painted earthen-like cave passage, that people could walk through and pause within.
During this first year, I had a powerful dream: of beetles flying out of my vagina. And still, no cycle. But I could feel my body trying -- a twinge of cramps once a month. Something was waking up.
I share about these years of study, discovery, practice, and exploration in my thesis Drumbeats Beat Themselves Through Me.
Listening to Land / Entry into Lineage:
Offerings & Practice
At the end of the first summer I spent at Succurro, when the light began to change, I felt an insistent tugging on my head. I was confused and bothered, unclear what was going on. After an afternoon of discomfort, at some point it occurred to me that the land was asking for something – a harvest offering.
My head tingling with sensation and presence, I gathered the fruits of harvest: crab apples from the land’s trees, stewed into an apple sauce; honey from the bees, goat’s milk from the goats; water from the stream, water from the spring; elderberries from the elderberry tree, cooked with sugar into a jam; tomatoes, a few greens; flowers. A little bit of everything.
I set these offerings down in a place that felt like a portal. I offered tobacco. I smoked my sacred pipe and blew tobacco smoke over the offerings and onto the land. The land instructed me how, saying: this is an offering. This does not involve you. You are the vessel through which the offering passes. Give what we have given to you, back to us.
The second summer at Succurro, one of the Fellowship projects was to build a walking trail through the forest. The first few times we went into the forest, I brought my pipe with me. I quickly learned that it is very practical to make tobacco offerings in the forest: to form relationships with the beings there, to ask for permission, to apologize for overstepping boundaries, to state intentions, to introduce oneself, to communicate, to support in smoothing relations when mistakes are made. To sing one’s intentions to the land.
I began to see that spiritual practice was not just for myself, for an endless self-centered progress oriented narrative. Rather, there is a web of relations that I am a part of, that exists before me, exists after me, and that requests presence, attention, and engaged participation.
That second summer I would sometimes feel a great anxiety and dread descend upon me. It took a while before
I understood the forest was calling, asking for an offering. I just wasn’t very familiar with reading the signs, and misunderstood the sensations I was experiencing. I was learning on the go, without anyone to really help explain what I was experiencing.
When I responded to these calls, the tugging sensation on my head would go away, and the insistent pull would dissipate, the request addressed. It was most often a request for tobacco, sacred smoke, water, or a song. I didn’t always know what was going on, or how to respond. But whenever I would feel this pull, I would try things. I would listen for instructions from the land; I would listen for the felt sense of presence and acceptance, for the felt sense of yes, do this, no, don’t do that. And I learned, slowly, how to make offerings, with an ear close to the ground.
How to give an offering: Listen. Learn to cultivate a felt inner sense of yes and no. Call in guardian energies. Get out of the way. Stay out of it. Try. If something doesn’t work, listen, and try again; or try again later.
Bridging Sacred & Mundane
In Summer 2023, I started Baking for Ishtar, a creative project that bridges the sacred and mundane through the act of baking bread in an earth oven. There are very old threads, archetypes, images, and spirits involved in the simple practice of baking bread. It evokes and reminds us of creation itself — a process that we live out in our bodies everyday, in every moment.
Ishtar — Inanna-Ishtar — is a goddess of love and fertility. She comes from Mesopotamia. She is in charge of all life, all creation, she is the power in plants and animals and all beings that grow, change, transform. She is everywhere. She is the moon, and the morning and evening star (Venus). We see her in the sky, today, whenever she crosses the horizon. When she and her husband Dumuzi (the god of agriculture, shepherding, vegetation) join together, plants, grain, water, bread pour out of her.
There is another side to her — Ereshkigal, Queen of the Land of the Dead. Her sister, but also not her sister exactly — an aspect of herself that lives deep below, in the ground.
That summer, we marked the beginning and end of the season at the Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox with a Georgian Feast – a style of feasting and toasting that I had grown up with at home.
A Feast – an ancient, timeless, nearly hidden-in-plain-sight ritual, where we acknowledge where nourishment and sustenance come from, and share it with our human and more-than-human relations.
One aspect of the project was to make 50 earthen wine cups, in keeping with traditional Georgian wine drinking culture. My intention was to drink wine made from grapes of the vine, that emerged from the earth, from a cup made of earth.
The day after the Solstice Feast, I prepared a few small plates of food from the meal we ate together, to make an offering to the land and the beings present. I walked into trees and placed the offering and poured libations of water and drink. I lit a candle. I sang to the plants, the sky, the land, the waters, the animals, the insects, the web of all beings. I made an offering with smoke, over myself, in the directions, into the sky, into the land, the smoke carrying my thanks, my recognition that yes, we are together in this creation, in this place, at this time.
Throughout the summer, each week, I baked bread as an offering to Ishtar, to the ancient spirits of fire, creativity, and fertility. With every bread bake, I shared a newsletter with a small community of bread subscribers, exploring these potent threads through the myths of Inanna-Ishtar and other fertility deities.
In Summer 2024 I shifted the focus of the project to Feeding Trickster – a practice of coming into relationship with the force of change and transformation that is the creative impulse of life itself. It was a summer full of tricks and tests — experiencing the archetype of Trickster as creative destructor, the force of storms clearing the air, clearing the ecosystem — so that a healthier pattern might emerge, take root, and support the whole. As the summer rounded out, I began to feel the blessings of weathering the storms of change and transformation, of making the changes where they needed to be made, and evolving with the flow of the project — connecting with a greater sense of flow that was beyond me.
In Summer 2025 the underlying theme was quieter, barely said out loud to myself or others. It presented itself in the wake of Trickster. Over the season I would say silently to myself: this is the year of the heart. After the clearing storms of Trickster, with his profound guardianship and protection in place, can the heart be touched, the heart gradually opened, light let in. The last two years, the hawthorn trees on the land have been especially abundant. Hawthorn is profound heart medicine: medicine for grieving hearts, cracked open.
Neither Ishtar nor Trickster have left. They pave the way so that the heart may open; so that the feeling may be felt; so that the bound up energy may be liberated.
Spending time by the wood-fired oven these last few years, staring into the fire, my practice has deepened and changed. The seeming separation between the sacred and mundane collapses, and this collapse reverberates as waves through layers and layers of my nervous system. Rooted and deeply connected in a network of being that includes me, and extends far beyond me.
Cycles & Return — Venus Retrograde
The very first year of the bread baking project, dedicated to Ishtar, I was shocked to discover that Venus (the planet that represents Inanna-Ishtar) would undergo a retrograde period.
The Venus retrograde period corresponds to one of Inanna-Ishtar’s most famous stories: The Descent of Inanna, where the goddess journeys to the Underworld, dies, and comes back to life after three days, mirroring the journey each of us walks from life, death, to life again.
I remember Venus’ physical presence that summer. I remember seeing her early in the summer in the evening sky, as the evening star. I noticed when she disappeared during her retrograde, disappearing into the earth, descending into the Underworld. 7 weeks later, I witnessed her rise as the morning star one early morning when I went to fire up the oven. She rose, shining, just beyond the earth oven.
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