The story
GIFE began
with my grandmother.
The word
What I practice is called earth technology. the oldest intelligence on the planet, and the one most of us have forgotten. It does not need to be explained. It needs to be remembered.
She was an automatic writer. The symbol she used for God. For spirit. For love. She called it GIFE. An ever-winding spiral. A line that never closes.
She died. Years passed. One day I stared at that symbol and heard: Go Inside For Enlightenment.
I laughed. That's the divine comedy of life.
In recognizing what GIFE meant, I understood I had to make the journey myself first. The descent into my own heart. I am still on it. Slowly opening each door. Key after key.
The lineage
My great-grandfather built. My grandfather built. My father builds still. Hotels, developments, homes. Generations of men who took raw ground and made it into a place where people could gather, rest, and be held. They did not call it ceremony. But that is what it was.
Behind them, and behind the other three lines that run through me, are people I will never meet by name. People who tended land, crossed oceans, survived what should not have been survivable, and kept moving forward. Each one passing something on. Even when they did not know what they were passing.
I am the place where four lines converge. GIFE is what I do with that.
Not to honor myself. To honor them. To be a good link in the chain. Receiving what was passed. Passing it forward with intention, with ceremony, with care.
For the ones who came before. For the ones who will come after.
The land
The Horse Shoe Farm has been one of my greatest teachers.
For nine years I tended 85 acres in the mountains of Western North Carolina. The land taught me how to listen. How to follow what a place asks of you. How to build something that holds people through transformation.
The Farm remains GIFE's first sacred partner. The place where this work was forged and tested and made real. But GIFE travels. Because the work is not about any particular piece of ground. It is about learning to be in relationship with all of it.
The training
My path into ceremony came through Kedar Brown of Rites of Passage Council, whose lineage runs through Elder Malidoma Somé of the Dagara people of West Africa and Will Rockingbear, Cherokee elder and medicine person.
This work found me before I had words for it. I came through loss, through sitting in the woods, through a grandmother who wrote in spirals.
Full disclosure
Full disclosure. I am aware that none of this sounds normal.
A word from my grandmother's automatic writing. Cowry shells on a table in Western North Carolina. Standing in fields at dawn. Circles. So many circles. My life has always felt like a cosmic joke. It felt that way especially during the first years on the farm. when I was building a labyrinth out of abandoned bricks and wondering what on earth I was doing.
And yet. Here we are. We begin in the East. in vision, in first breath, in the completely unreasonable belief that going inside every day changes everything. What GIFE is becoming is larger than what it is today. A place. A practice. A body of work that takes the earth seriously even when it doesn't take itself too seriously.
Welcome. You are already on your way.
The answers you are looking for are already inside you.
— Jordan Turchin
Founder, GIFE