ince I was a small girl, stories and myths of all cultures fascinated me. My art reflects this. I am Italian on my mother's side, and English, Italian and South American Native on my father's side. The natives of my area are the Calimas whose roots are in Asia. The name may be connected to the Indian goddess Kali. 
      I was born in Cali, Colombia, and raised in a small town in the Andes that is 450 years old. My family (a clan of eighty people) still lives in the house I grew up in--the fort where the battle of independence was won against the Spanish conquistadors. A plate in one of the rooms says, "Ignacio Asinn was hung and decapitated here by the natives." I feel spirits of the old time in the house. It has forty-five rooms, and there is an outdoor chapel at the end. When I was a little girl I would go there and play with the statues. My ancestors are buried there at the chapel. 
     My family is political--my great grandfather was the president of Colombia; my grandfather was a senator, and head of the liberal party; my dad, a doctor, was a state governor and held other posts over the years including Dean of the Conservatory of Arts and Music; and my cousin has just completed a term as vice president of Colombia. Although they are rich and have servants, chauffeurs and bodyguards, I prefer to mix with the poor people when I visit there. I sit and talk to them as equals, and they adore me. When I go into their huts, I see they are simple and don't have many problems. They all want TVs, but in reality they are happy. When you go into the rich people's living rooms you see they have massive problems. They are afraid of being kidnapped or killed. What kind of life is that? So I left this crazy place in South America, and now I live on a quiet remote land in the mountains overlooking Lake Pillsbury. I prefer the aloneness. 
      I was very sick from the beginning of my life. At times I was in contact with the spirit world and with psychic disturbances in the house from the ghosts of people who had died there. I found solace in nature and with the devas of nature. This is in my art. At age six I had a peritonitis attack and I died and came back. So, from my earliest time I was interested in the spiritual things. Also, from the age of five until I was thirty, I studied dance, particularly ballet. That was the love of my life. I still have a place on the land where I go to dance. I also studied art and weaving. A lot of my art and inspiration comes from my grandmothers. My father's mother was a weaver, and my mother's mother was an esoteric person. She was into the theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and Annie Besant, and later was initiated by Kirpal Singh, an Indian saint. I'm a mix of influences from those two grandmothers. 
      When I was eight years old, I went to New Orleans with my family. My father was working on his Ph.D. in psychiatry at Tulane University. My mother took art classes. At fifteen, I was sent to Spain to study art at the Fae School of Spanish art. I was fascinated with all the fabulous tapestry work of Europe, especially what I saw in the medieval museums in Paris and Spain. It was then that I decided to become a tapestry maker rather than a painter. I had been studying painting, but when I went to those museums, I saw that everything was already painted. 
      I went back to Colombia and married at eighteen. When I was pregnant with my daughter Paula, who is now an adult, I wove rugs for the floor--using the technique my grandmother had taught me. When people came to visit the baby, they wanted me to sell them the rugs. So I started a business. By the time I was twenty-one I had a pretty good business going, with four people weaving for me. I drew the designs, and they wove them. We made tapestries for children--fairies, gnomes, elves and all the spirits of nature. It was called El Mundo Infantil ("The World's Children"). Then suddenly I thought, I don't want to do this anymore. In a flash, I folded up my business and went to the United States. I started all over again. I just knew that I had to come, and that my life was here.  
     I landed in Miami and took a bus that was going all the way to San Francisco. I stopped in New Orleans and went to a hotel where my parents and I had stayed when I was a little kid. In that lobby I met the hotel manager, a lady from Ecuador named Helen. She ended up renting me a room and becoming my teacher. I stayed there three and a half years. Helen had traveled all over the world before she came to New Orleans. She trained me for three years in esoteric cultures--shamanism, Celtic Wicca, Santeria, Gnosticism, ceremonial magic, Earth religions, and Hinduism. I never really practiced what she taught me until she sent me back to Colombia. Helen was also an initiate of Maestro Samael, a Gnostic master of the South American Sierra Nevada from the town of Santa Marta, Colombia. He was a mama (shaman) from the Kogi Indian tribe. They have an advanced civilization and have kept the ancient knowledge alive. This Sierra Nevada mountain range has all climates and types of vegetation, and is a very powerful place. Many esoteric people have temples there. 
      After my training was over, Helen told me I would meet a master who was higher than she was. Then she let me go. I went home and met Master Kirpal in Cali. He initiated my grandmother in the early '50s, and when he came to Colombia in December of 1973, he initiated me also. He died the next year, in August. So although I had been trained by a Wiccan, now I was doing this meditation practice. 
     In 1976 I went back to the United States, and lived in San Francisco for a year. The following year I went to Potter Valley to meet Kirpal's successor, Sant Ji, at the Shamaz Retreat Center. (This was his first retreat in California.) Sant Ji gave me the rest of my initiation. I stayed in Potter Valley, got married and raised my kids at a small ranch overlooking Lake Pillsbury. I began growing herbs, and started a small business making incense, smudge sticks, herb baths, and candles--all for ceremonial use. My business is called "Heart of the Moon"--after the name Helen gave me (Corazon de Luna). 
     Three years ago I went to see a North American shaman in Arizona. He is a dream shaman. When I told him my dream, he didn't seem to care about it; he just asked me where I lived. I told him that I lived in Northern California, in the mountains. He was very interested in this and told me that it is a very special place. He fanned his face, and told me that my work was to make a giant medicine wheel on the land. He taught me the art of placing it and how to make a medicine wheel. He taught me about totems, spirit-animal guides and how to work with an American Indian form, because I live on American Indian ground. I now have made eight shrines on the land. He sent me to look for certain things, and I found them. It has taken me three years, but the medicine wheel is almost complete now. Its purpose is to protect the animals. Before I do my meditation, I do a kind of shield to protect the bears. Thirty bears have been killed around here in the past seven years. During bear season, people come here and kill them, but not face-to-face; they send dogs to chase the bear up a tree, and then they kill it. Then they open the bear, take the liver out and sell it in the marketplace in San Francisco. They are paid a thousand dollars for the liver, which is used in Chinese medicine. They leave the rest of the bear behind. 
    Some people also come nearby to kill the squirrels in the national forest. There are no rules about hunting squirrels because nobody has ever hunted them before. These people hunt them for food, so now the gray squirrels are almost all gone. I believe that the medicine man saw this, and wanted me to shield this area to keep the hunters away. It has been working. So far no bear has been killed inside this compound. 
      I am also connected to the lions and cats. I dream with them, and know exactly what my cats want. In South America they don't treat the animals well, and I can't handle that, so here I feel that I have to learn to balance all things from the combination of cultures. Even when I was very little I prayed to work for the animal kingdom. 
     When I go out into the woods, I always take my dogs to protect me. Before I met the shaman, there was a mountain lion here that ate baby colts and our neighbor's dogs and the cats. I saw him several times during the day. The forest service eventually came in and killed him. He was a huge old mountain lion. I wanted them to catch him and move him over to Snow Mountain where there are no roads or cars, but they told me that mountain lions have a huge territory, and there was no way to let him live. So I said "Well, this is in the hands of the Lord, and the mountain lion will get another incarnation." This is how he had to go. 
     So, the shaman wanted me to create a shield around this place, and I have created beautiful sites here--little temples and shrines. In South America they have temples everywhere. I can create the world I want here without the danger. I do my practices alone. The most important thing is that I meditate. Wherever we meditate is sacred. 
 
     I recently visited my family in Colombia, and am preparing to go back to do a show of goddesses tapestries. They have the Virgin Mary, a very powerful figure in the Catholic Church, but I noticed that a lot of people want to learn about goddesses from other cultures. I want them to see that Mother Earth is a living entity and that they are destroying her. In Columbia, they are not aware of the results of cutting the trees and polluting the waters, and they don't know about recycling. The women are not allowed to control births, and there are many poor people with five to ten kids. If you married in the Catholic Church, you still cannot divorce. Divorce has only been allowed in the country for four years. I have been talking to my girlfriends, and we think that Colombia needs to have a woman as vice-president very soon or there could be a huge revolt. They are behind the United States about a hundred years. It is like going back in time. So I am making goddess tapestries for this show I am preparing for my people. 
     I first paint the images on a canvas, and then it takes about a week to make a weaving. I don't have the space to weave with looms, so that's why I do hooked tapestry weaving. I have a strong connection to color, and I see a lot of colors that are not in this physical realm. When you work with a shaman of South America, you go through color realms, and I feel that color is a way to heal people. I make yarns of so many different colors, but they are never quite the colors of these other realms. Also I try to indicate the realms by using big figures that represent the devas of the plants, trees, mountains and sky nest to the small towns and monuments. 
    The designs on my tapestries can be seen from both sides. Sometimes I bead stars and crowns and crystals into the weaving. I also dye the chenille. Over thirty years, I've done thousands of weavings. I just weave them, and then they leave. I'm very detached because I am always thinking about the next one.       To be an artist is one of the hardest things for me. It feels like a gift from God, and at the same time like a punishment and a curse. I'm very shy about my work, but with weaving if there's a problem with how it turns out, you can always make a rug into a blanket and warm up with it.