How it began
Para PachaMama ~ Spirit of Earth began on the Caribbean island of Saba in 2010 as a Global Community Network of Trustees for Planet Earth, out to unify the tribes and awaken the hundredth monkey, and it grew out of the Self Sustainable Saba Initiative, which had gathered islanders around energy, water, waste and island farming from 2007 to 2009.
From the slopes of Mount Scenery the network held its first Full Moon Tuning to the New Consciousness Grid in August 2010, and within three full moons more than a thousand hearts around the world were tuning in together.
At the end of 2010 the work moved to Kuranda in Far North Queensland, where Pachamama House became a birth sanctuary, earth school and spiritual centre on five acres of rainforest, and where the grid work on the Australian continent began.
In November 2012, under the total solar eclipse, Para PachaMama and the Rare Earth Foundation helped the Gungganji Council of Elders hold the Global Elders Gathering at Yarrabah, a gathering foretold in the ancient story of that land.
The same years brought Solar, the Australian Crystal Skull, into the story, from a conversation in Kuranda to the transmission of his spirit at Enuma Elish near Ravenshoe and his altar on the star mosaic of Pachamama House.
In October 2014 the Waitaha Nation opened its fifty-year Waitaha Water Gathering at Waitangi to the world for the first time, with Para PachaMama holding the calling and the organising around it.
In 2018 the first whispers of the Wānanga of Love went out through the same Global Community Network, and in November of that year it was born in a Lotus Birth Ceremony in one of the oldest temples of Bali.
From Bali the Wānanga travelled to Espiritu Santo, where East of Eden, Vanuatu gave it its first meeting house and gave Syntropy a home in the island soil. The whole story, year by year, lives on the Timeline.
Its founder, Sjoerd Aardema
Sjoerd Aardema, who writes today as Souvereign and goes by Ketut in Bali, left the Netherlands at twenty for the small Caribbean island of Saba, and it was on Saba that the two strands of his life first took root together. Between 2007 and 2009 he led the Self Sustainable Saba Initiative, project managing a five-acre organoponics farm and gathering islanders around energy, water, waste and island farming, and in 2010 he began Para PachaMama ~ Spirit of Earth.
Moving to Far North Queensland at the end of 2010, he spent the next decade weaving land and spirit side by side. He built and guided RealFood Network, a community supported agriculture enterprise in Cairns, and spoke for Recharge Kuranda, the region’s community transition centre, while Para PachaMama held the Global Elders Gathering and the Waitaha Water Gathering. From the age of 32 he apprenticed with the Waitaha grandmothers, and for many years he has walked beside families as a birth doula and lotus birth advocate.
Syntropic Agroforestry entered his life in 2016, when he trained in the method and met Thiago Barbosa, whom he brought to Petals in the Park at Tolga to seed a Syntropic hub. From 2018 to 2020 he served as program director at East of Eden on Espiritu Santo, bringing Syntropy and human ecology into an intentional community.
Since 2018 Bali has been home, where he founded the Syntropic Agroforestry Research Institute, co-founded the Brave New Life community, served as a trustee of NewEarth and of Haven Earth, and spoke on Eco.Logic at the World Sustainability Conference in Ubud in 2022. Today he teaches Syntropic Human Ecology and Syntropic Embodiment from Puri Legon in Keliki, where both strands have become one teaching: Syntropy in the soil and Syntropy in the person. His work today lives at souvereignsharing.net.
