Mountains, because that's where Earth meets Sky. Remote enough to disappear into, with as little civilisation around as possible.

And with a cemetery nearby, not despite the fear it inspires, but because of it. Most people prefer to stay away from the dead and that kind of fear protects better than any fence.

From a shamanic perspective, there is a difference between seeking something and allowing it to reveal itself. The laws of manifestation say that your dream has to come to you on its own, chasing it only pushes it further away.

One day out of nowhere a friend told me about a piece of land that was for sale. Apparently, it belonged to a friend of a friend of a friend, which already sounded like exactly the kind of chain of events through which something interesting could happen.

"There is just one problem with this land..." - he said.
"It is right next to a cemetery."

I smiled deep in my soul, because I knew something had just answered back to my request.

I don't really know how to explain it, but it was love at first breath. There was something about her that immediately caught me, I was almost intimidated by her beauty.
She felt enormous, wild and deeply present.

While I was exploring her deeper, my hand somehow got caught, I cut my finger and blood started running from it.

I remember my immediate reaction: "Okay, I see you want to go serious. I'm ready for that too!"

So I left my blood as an offering, and I knew we had a deal. It was my way of showing her my devotion.
In return, she gave me a credit of trust and a chance to show what I am capable of.

I slowed down and devoted myself to her. I walked barefoot to establish deep connect with her. I greeted her each and every morning. I drank only water from her sources, ate what the land provided, meditated with her, shared with her my dreams and learned to move at her pace rather than my own.

The question which I came with was no longer:
“What can I build here?”

It became:

“What can we become together?”

And somewhere along the way, I got accepted.

The moment I touched him for the first time, he pressed himself against me and simply wouldn't leave. I gave him a place to sleep, cleaned him up and planned to return him to wherever he had come from.

No matter how far I went, he followed me. I even tried to lose his trail. I remember seeing him running behind the car in the side mirror, barking and refusing to let me go. Something in me broke in that moment.

I realised I was rejecting something I had forgotten how to let in: unconditional love. His attachement reminded me that the only thing keeping me from it was myself.

Three days after I rejected him, he came back. He was waiting outside the gate, wounded and exhausted. That was when I understood that he was staying with me for good.

I took him through an initiation ritual, symbolically leaving his old life behind. And with the beginning of this new chapter, he received a new name: Balthazar, which is traditionally associated with protection.

He watches over the land, follows me through the forest and stays close to me, almost as if he knows that this is where he is always supposed to be.

I knew if it stayed there, it would eventually decompose into the water, the same source that feeds the village and the land around it.

I asked three men from the village to help me move her. All of them refused. And after the third refusal, I came to the conclusion that men are apparently useless when things get serious and perhaps this was not something I was supposed to hand over to someone else.

So I embraced the challenge, moved the body away from the river and prepared a place to burry it in the earth.

I cut the Bear's head from her body with a machete and buried it separately to protect the skull from atracting hungry animals. The rest of the body was buried nearby and covered with stones.

I will never forget the smell of it as she began to decompose. It stayed with me for a long time and somehow became a strange reminder of how precious a fresh breath actually is while you're still alive to take one.

When everything was done, I sat on a stone and looked at the Mountain. And honestly, I felt like I had just grown a pair of balls. Unfortunately, they grew so huge that I had no choice but to cut them off with a machete too, so they wouldn't make the village men jealous ♡

When the skull was eventually cleaned by the worms, I preserved it. Hakker Land doesn't have a fence yet but I already know that when it does, this skull will hang there proudly, guarding the entrance. For now, I keep it mounted high on a stick, following the idea Baba Yaga whisper into my ear.

The Bear's Spirit is now woven into Hakker Land, as a constant reminder of how much strength lives inside each of us. Most of the time, the only thing standing between us and what we are capable of is the limit of our own mind.

Baba Yaga is a figure of the wild: unpredictable, powerful, independent and impossible to fully control.

She does not simply protect the forest. She decides who may enter, who is ready to pass through and who needs to find another path.

Hakker Land sits at the very edge of the village, right where it meets the mountains and the forest. That position needs the same kind of protection Baba Yaga offers.

She's the one who decides whether you're let into the forest, or eaten by it.

Her house stands on chicken legs never fully fixed to one place, always capable of movement.

Hakker Land will carry this same principle: structures designed to move, adapt and respond to the living landscape rather than forcing it into stillness.

At its core, shamanism is a practice of healing and relating to the world, expressed differently across cultures, never identical and never owned by any religion. Every territory shapes its own version of it, rooted in its own land, history and people.

Its influence reaches further than most people realise. Many traditions that shaped entire civilizations, including Daoism, Confucianism and Buddhism, carry traces of much older shamanic practices: rituals through which people learned to understand the world, relate to one another and eventually shape the values they lived by.

Shamanism has always been a form of healing, not just for the body, but for what is broken in how people relate to each other and the world around them. My healing practice is aimed at one disease in particular, which is disconnection, whcih I approach it the same way shamans always have: through rituals.

Mine are crafted for a world run by algorithms, screens and AI. Rituals through which people can learn to understand how technology is shaping their lives, reconnect with one another and reclaim the agency to shape the values that will define the technology of tomorrow, instead of letting it shape them.

Hakker Land is where all of this actually takes place. Here, held by the Mountain, humans and non-human beings come together to create knowledge and tools, laying the foundations for a radically different approach to technology, one rooted in connection, listening and respect for what is alive.

Then ask yourself: whose actions and way of creating today resonate with you enough to make you believe in the future they are building, but most importantly, make you want to follow it?

A woman who respects heritage and lineage, works from a place of deep embodiment, and keeps an ancient practice alive instead of letting it be colonised and monetised like everything else and who once cut the head off a dead bear with a machete to protect her land and the water source it depends on?

Or another privileged white man in a suit, whose actions follow the same old playbook of cultural colonisation: taking a Slavic energy genius's name without permission, turning it into a global car brand, then moving on to monopolising the technology that will define everyone's future while telling you his AI is coming for your job?