This experience is sold out.
Botanico Sacro| Becoming the Vessel
With Kara Wood + MaryBeth Bonfiglio
May 21-29, 2024
A 9 day ritual on Sicilia bringing us closer with the magic, the plants, the ancestors – and ourselves.
9 days, 8 nights
Locations: Gangi, Madonie Mountains + Siracusa area.
“Being in Sicily in pilgrimage with MaryBeth and Radici Siciliane is healing in the deepest and most total sense of the word. Worshipping at the mouths of caves, listening through the elements for the voices of our ancestors, introducing myself to our mother volcano, traveling ethically as a guest and not a tourist, learning with elders and medicine keepers, gathering pomegranates, being held by the waters, cracking freshly gathered chestnuts in the palms of my hands, wrapping my voice around the Sicilian language in song, drumming, writing, moving grief through my body, all in ecstatic circle. I am irrevocably changed for the better by MaryBeth’s curations through Radici and being reintroduced to my ancestors in the care of our circles! I feel the deepest, most profound, and ongoing transformations at a heart and DNA-level. SO grateful for you.”
We invite you to gather with us. To be together with what grows in Sicilia, and spend time in an extended ritual with the land.
We’ll sit with and learn among what blooms on the island— within, against and from the soil — volcanic and embedded with salt— made from the bones and dust and love from many of our ancestors.
And we will listen. We will offer. We will connect.
We will find rhythm in community.
We will practice becoming the vessel, both individually and collectively.
As humans with long lines of deep time, we know we come from those who offered with vessels. We will practice becoming kernos, an ancient Grecian offering vessel, worn on heads, and used as offering in the Eleusinian mysteries.
As vessels, we can hold medicine, magic, and beauty; for the lands, our lineages, our families and communities.
together we will:
Create ancestral essences on sacred sites.
Learn and pray within an elder cypress grove, our circle for learning, praying, and coming together.
Practice being the magic for this land, and for all land our bodies will touch, and be held by, forever.
Create space for deep contemplation of what it means to be visitors on ancient land.
Learn about Plants, flowers, trees and their lore— which were a part of our ancestors lives. They were guided by them in healing, dreaming, being, seasonal living. We will listen to how we can be…or how we already are.
Get to know and be in relationship with these plant-ways, on ancestral soil.
We hold this as an extreme gift, honor, privilege and responsibility
This year’s Botanico Sacro is created around ritual and offering - not just learning or taking information, but becoming the vessel to hold both ancient and modern ways of connection.
The folklorist, Michael Meade says “rituals make us”. In both current and ancient times, the lands of Magna Grecia, including Sicily, had many temples, where people went to ritualize, to offer. To sit and find the oracle they needed. They brought wheat, wine, honey, olive oil to offer in exchange. They offered to the goddesses, came to sit in the caves and necropolises when they were in times of distress. They wanted to know themselves, and the world around them, in a more well and whole well. They held ritual to become the ritual. They sat and sang with plants to become the medicine of the plants.
Ritualizing together was a prayer, an offering, and a practice - a way to become with the ritual and each other.
Botanico Sacro is a learning experience centering the plants of the island, and it is also a ritualizing practice.
How can we become what is fierce, beautiful and needed, that pulls from the past, but offers hope for the present and future? How do we dwell in the liminal and learn to move with the spiral?
With Botanico Sacro: becoming the vessel – we learn together in circle, make plant medicines and land based crafts together, create collective ritual, and spend time with hyper local makers and teachers of Sicily. We will spend time with the land, the people of the land, and each other, in intentional, joyous, real, honest, kind of ways.
There will be a weaving of plant programming, emergent ceremony, learning songs from the island. Everything will be a practicing offering and receiving, and becoming clear the medicine that we are, with the guidance from the land, the plants, and the ancestors. We will become vessels for animist ancestral folk magic and medicine.
Who are you as a vessel? What is the medicine prayer you bring? What will you carry?
What is your oracle? What plants have made you?
“I honestly still can hardly think about my time spent in Sicily without tears welling-up in my eyes. Being there helped me integrate parts of myself I didn’t even know, I didn’t fully understand. It was like coming home to myself. Spontaneous healing really and truly occurred for me there simply by spending time with and being fed by the land and its beautiful people.”
We will be with many, many plants — but the three that Kara, our guest guide and co-facilitator, will be holding space for a deeper learning with are three sacred plants that mean so much to Sicilia, and Southern Italy in general.
The Sacra Trinità: : olives, vine, and wheat.
The history of the Mediterranean would look very different if not for the Sacra Trinità.
These three beings / plants have helped birth, nourish, and sustain Mediterranean civilization and culture for millennia.
Olive oil, wine, and bread are alive and woven through the living and ancestral realms.
On Sicily, these three plant ancestors have been in the forefront of life and ritual, connecting at some point with every single ancestor on the island; elemental and human. They have fed and protected, been a deep medicine of body and spirit.
Spending time with, and deepening into the connection with these three beings is foundational to being in relationship with the energies and ancestors of the island. This connection transcends our linear time.
Through these three spirits, a thread runs around and through all who are of the island; the birth from the salt, and sea, and volcano.
Botanico Sacro is a space to remember these three sacred plants, to remember the thread that pulls them and us together. And to listen to these plants as prayers and spells from our ancestors.
Come experience togetherness, to be guided by what grows, and be held by the daily oracles of nature.
Lean into your own medicine.
Listen for your own oracle.
Be the vessel for the remedies and magic this world yearns for.
Have questions? Take a look at our FAQ.
we will:
Take part in a silent pilgrimage/professione up Mungibeddu, volcano Mother. On the descent, a naturalist guide will share native and endemic plants of the volcano.
Learn plant mythology, specifically centered around the Sacra Trinita: wheat, vines, and olives
Use our hands to make anointing oils, fumigation blends, and plant bundles for rituals, just to name a few (there will be more!).
Visit a local caretaker of ancient plants and a “museum” he has tended for “those who return” (that’s us).
Learn with plants at an ancient temple of the Grain Goddess Demeter, and visit a sacred place where Persephone climbed /plunged to the underworld.
Weave ritual, somatic integration, storytelling, and contemplation throughout.
Tend to the ritualistic body, as our connection to each other and land.
Learn songs in circle
Be held by the salt of the sea
Learn at an ancient necropolis
Work with a local elder, plant medicine keeper, and folk magic keeper.
Pilgrimage to Madonna dell’Alto, an area of preservation with endemic plants.
Eat seasonal foods, enjoy wine and amaro, laugh, grieve, make and storytell together.
Cost of Experience
$4850
Per person based on double occupancy; excludes airfare. Limited single occupancy rooms available upon request for an additional $600.
Note: Airfare and airport transportation are not included.
Want to know more about our redistribution of money in Sicily? Click here.
What’s included?
Overnight accommodations for 9 nights
20 meals over 9 days with Radici Siciliane. We promise you will not go hungry! Wine is always included.
Licensed, insured, and certified guides and drivers that are invaluable, welcoming, deeply knowledgeable. They are my good friends… and will become your friends as well.
All experiences, which includes local guides and translators
Moral and emotional support — it can be intense to be immersed in another culture, especially if it is your ancestral land.
Deep knowledge of the land, ancient and modern myths and stories will be shared.
A community for both longing + belonging to be explored.
A life changing experience in Sicilia, one that you will hold, carry, and share forever.
Ancestral healing practices and ritual anchored in body and land.
Integration with true Sicilian culture led by multigenerational Sicilians.
Creative and ancestral re-weaving guidance (the entire trip is one big ancestral journey).
Is this immersion a good fit for you? Check out our FAQ + Community Guidelines
About Our Facilitators
Kara Wood
Kara (Cimaruta Remedies) is an animist folk herbalist and ancestral weaver.
Her ancestors were Calabrian on her mothers side, English, German, Scottish
and Irish on her fathers.
Kara believes that we hold the ancestor realm inside of our bodies.
She believes the elements, the plants, the trees and mushrooms are our ancestors.
She believes it is all energy exchange.
Epigenetics, Mythology, and Living Folk culture direct and inform her work.
Kara lives with her family on the Central Coast of California and holds classes and workshops in person and online, works one on one with those seeking to deepen connection with their ancestors, and makes herbal products.
MaryBeth Bonfiglio
MaryBeth Bonfiglio is a writer, independent researcher, and ancestralist. She is the founder/co- curator of Radici Siciliane, as well as Blood + Belonging: an ancestral wisdom school. Her favorite work is gathering people together to be wildly creative and connected to each other. She creates containers for wisdom and relationship remembering, for tending to the village, and weaves folks together in non-hierarchical/non linear ways. She has been trained in midwifery, yoga, animist space holding, and holds an an MFA in creative writing. MaryBeth co-organizes and visions the gathering of people together in Sicily, while holding a tight ancestral container— her role is to listen, sit with you, and support ritual integration. She is full Sicilian on her late father’s side, and half Piemontese and Slavic on her mother’s side.
She devotes herself to caring for those who are around her— both the living and the dead. She is honored and privileged to cultivate this work/play/prayer with you.