Entering a World of Awe and Spontaneity: Notes from a Journeyman Diviner
Stuart Goodnick - Dagara Stick and Voice Diviner and co-founder of Many Rivers Books & Tea
Thursday, October 1, 2026 @ 7:00 pm

The modern world in which we live is one of transactions. We do to get. We play out scripts that have been served up to us from the society in which we are enmeshed. Our lives have become mediated by screens which display a world of objects that we struggle to negotiate. The result leaves us feeling an undercurrent of emptiness and a vague sense that meaning is missing from our lives. Indigenous ways of living teach us that the world is alive and filled with spirit. Such traditions demonstrate a relational way of being in which all beings, be they human, animal, plant, or mineral are alive and in ongoing conversation with us. All we need to do is to learn to listen.

My apprenticeship in Dagara Stick and Voice Divination with my mentor, Theresa Dintino, began in March of 2021. Though my husband and I had participated in a number of personal divinations in years prior and had a number of significant outcomes from those sessions, it was just after my 60th birthday when I was “claimed” by the Wedemé to begin the journey of becoming a Diviner.

In the ensuing five years, I built shrines, performed rituals, studied the Dagara cosmology with my mentor, received guidance through multiple divinations, worked closely in group activities with many of the Diviners of the Strega Tree Collective, and opened myself to be a willing partner in the work of the Wedemé and Kontomblé in healing the Earth and the beings who dwell upon her. In April of 2026, I was formally initiated as a Diviner in this tradition.

Every Diviner represents a unique warp and weft of capacities, personal histories, interests, and talents through which the Wedemé and Kontomblé weave the tapestry of a divination on behalf of the client. In my own case, I have been a student of Tayu Meditation for over 40 years and a Tayu Meditation teacher for over 33 years. The Tayu tradition, founded by Robert Daniel Ennis in 1976 and grounded in the Fourth Way tradition of G.I. Gurdjieff emphasizes conversation, be it within ourselves, with others, and between spiritual traditions. Its foundational practices are Self-Observation and Self-Remembering.

A Dagara-style divination is itself a transformative conversation, and whatever skills I may have accrued in my work with Tayu are put to good use by the Wedemé and Kontomblé in the course of a Stick or a Voice Divination.

The power and the beauty of the Dagara forms of divination lie in their invitation to pull our attention away from our thoughts stirred up by the constant barrage of modern media and to redirect it to the Earth. We find true healing when we learn to engage with that which created us and to reconnect with the abundant spirits of the Wild with whom we have lost touch through our modern ways of being. The rituals and offerings that arise out of divination enlist the forces of the Natural World to assist each of us in reconnecting to our true vital selves.

Join us for a discussion about how indigenous practices such as Dagara Stick Divination and the cosmologies from which they emerge, provide a gateway through which we can enter and productively engage with a world of beauty, awe and spontaneity and, in so doing, leave a life of transaction and emptiness behind.

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