🧜♀️ Meet the Siren Behind the Mermaid Lounge
Renée Boje - Curator of the Mermaid Lounge Evenings & Producer of the Blissful Cabarets
There once was a mermaid named Renée Boje who had a rather irresistible habit of following the call of the wild feminine
She was born with an adventurous soul, an insatiable curiosity for the mysteries of this beautiful planet, and a deep suspicion that life was meant to be lived as an adventure.
The plants enchanted her.
Music bewitched her.
Mother Nature called her home.
And freedom...
Freedom was the one lover she could never resist.
From her earliest days, Renée felt most at home among the flowers, forests, wild herbs and open star filled skies. She sensed something alive within the natural world, an ancient language spoken between the plants, Mother Earth and all those who still knew how to listen.
She also discovered rather quickly that she was not particularly well suited to cages.
This would prove to be an important detail.
For in 1997, beneath the California sun, our young mermaid found herself caught in some very troubled waters over a certain forbidden green Goddess...
Cannabis.
Faced with the possibility of ten years to life in federal prison and unwilling to betray those she loved, Renée chose the unknown over the cage.
She left everything she owned and a life she once held so dear and fled California as a reefer refugee, setting her sights upon the wild northern waters of Canada.
And so began a rather extraordinary chapter in the life of this particular cannabis Siren.
Eventually, Renée washed ashore on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, where ancient forests meet the Salish Sea and the wild beauty of the land felt strangely familiar.
Here, she began putting down roots.
She gathered women.
She spoke with the plants.
She created ceremonies honouring the turning of the seasons and the Divine Feminine.
She made potions.
And she continued listening for whatever mysterious current might call her next.
It wasn't long before the tides carried her into Vancouver, where her love affair with the botanical world took on a decidedly more decadent flavour.
After opening the first Entheogen shop in Vancouver called the Urban Shaman, Renée went on to create Shakti Blissful Botanicals on Commercial Drive.
And Shakti was no ordinary botanical shop.
By night, she became something else entirely....
Five nights a week, the doors opened and all manner of colourful creatures wandered in.
Burlesque beauties shimmied beneath the lights. Belly dancers undulated through the room. Poets whispered their words into microphones. DJs spun music into the night. Musicians played while hookahs bubbled with fragrant blissful herbs.
There were botanical mocktails, blissful aphrodisiac desserts, herbal treats and plenty of delicious lounging about.
People came to dance.
To flirt.
To listen.
To taste.
To laugh.
To connect.
And perhaps, for a few enchanted hours, to forget about the sensible world waiting outside.
Shakti was sensual, botanical, bohemian, a little rebellious and deliciously alive.
Renée was completely in her element.
For somewhere amidst all those herbs, bodies, rhythms and late-night revelries, she discovered something that would become one of the great love affairs of her life:
Plant Spirit Medicines. Music. Magic.
Three currents that seemed capable of carrying human beings beyond the shores of the ordinary.
And three currents Renée would follow again and again.
One evening, many moons later, another song found her.
This one had travelled much farther.
It was a sacred medicine song of the Yawanawa people of the Brazilian Amazon, and something within its melody called to a place deep inside Renée.
Of course it was a song.
How else does one summon a Siren?
So she followed it.
All the way to the Amazon.
There, beneath another canopy of stars, Renée met Putanny Yawanawa, one of the first women of her people to walk the path of shamanism and become a Pajé - a role traditionally held by men.
That meeting would change the course of Renée's life.
In Putanny, Renée encountered a woman of extraordinary strength and wisdom - a woman walking a path that embodied so much of what Renée herself had been seeking through the plants, the Divine Feminine and her own wild journey upon this Earth.
Renée became her student, receiving profound healing and forming a spiritual bond with Putanny that would continue long after she left the Amazon.
And when the tides finally carried Renée home to Canada, she did not return as the same mermaid who had left.
She returned carrying a vision.
Inspired deeply by Putanny, Renée knew she wanted to create a sacred space where women could gather together and journey with Plant Spirit Medicines - a space held specifically for women, where healing, feminine wisdom, sisterhood and the ancient intelligence of the plants could meet.
And so, back on the wild shores of the Sunshine Coast, Renée began the work of bringing that vision into form.
What began as a calling eventually became a living community of ceremonies for women - and in time, blossomed into the Plant Spirit Medicine Society.
The song that had once carried a curious Siren all the way to the Amazon had, in its own mysterious way, carried her home again...
with a new purpose swimming inside her.
And still the mermaid kept swimming.
Through plants and potions.
Through ceremony and community.
Through the Goddess and the Wild Feminine.
Through beautiful beginnings, necessary endings and more than a few unexpected storms.
Her devotion to Plant Spirit Medicine eventually blossomed into the Plant Spirit Medicine Society, while her lifelong love affair with the botanical world found another incarnation in Freja's Magic Potions, her ceremonial herbal apothecary on the Sunshine Coast.
Yet somewhere beneath all those waters, another longing was stirring.
Renée missed Shakti.
She missed the music.
The performers.
The sensuality.
The beautiful tribal family she had found herself amongst and the magical creatures of the Moonlight.
She missed creating a place where someone could walk through a doorway and feel the ordinary world fall away behind them.
A place to gather.
A place to connect.
A place to dress beautifully, sip something delicious, hear extraordinary music, witness something unexpected and surrender for a while to mystery and pleasure.
The Siren was singing again.
And this time, her song carried Renée toward another Siren.
Many moons before, Renée had crossed currents with a wonderfully wild creature named Dixie Honey White.
Designer. Hoola hoop instructor. Sultry performer. Creatrix of daring fashions and wild feminine spectacles.
Dixie was untamed, sensual, wildly creative and entirely uninterested in making the Feminine small.
Naturally, the two Sirens recognized something in one another.
Many moons ago, Dixie designed the magnificent turquoise-and-white mermaid tail Renée wears in the photograph you see here.
And where better to photograph a mermaid in her newly acquired tail than Shambhala Music Festival, where music fills the forest, reality becomes delightfully fluid, and many a mermaid has been known to frolic?
Dixie took the photograph herself.
Neither Siren could have known then that somewhere beneath the surface, another chapter of their story had already begun.
Years passed.
Currents shifted.
And eventually, the tides brought the two Sirens together again on the Sunshine Coast.
By then, Dixie had created Ambassadress Studios, a world devoted to movement, creativity, performance and unapologetic feminine expression.
And Renée?
Well...
her Mermaid Ship had been searching for somewhere to land.
Renee found her harbour at Ambassadress Studios.
And so, after many years and many wild waters, Renée began recreating something she had loved so dearly at Shakti — only this time through everything she had gathered along the way.
The Mermaid Lounge was born.
Today, Renée lovingly curates the Mermaid Lounge evenings at Ambassadress Studios and produces the Mermaid Lounge Blissful Cabarets, weaving together the threads that have followed her throughout her life:
Plant Spirit Medicines.
Music.
Magic.
Sensuality.
Performance.
Beauty.
Freedom.
The Divine Feminine.
The Mermaid Lounge is a new incarnation of an old dream.
A place where the lights can dim, the music can rise, beautiful creatures can gather and the boundaries of ordinary life can soften for an evening.
A place for pleasure and play.
For artistry and expression.
For connection, curiosity and enchantment.
A place where the Wild Feminine is not asked to behave herself.
Perhaps that is why the Mermaid has always felt so deeply familiar to Renée.
She is the creature who belongs to herself.
The Wild Feminine who refuses the cage.
The sensual being who makes no apology for her pleasure.
The wanderer who follows strange songs into distant lands.
The plant woman who knows that Mother Earth keeps delicious mysteries for those willing to listen.
The Siren who understands that music can carry us into other realms.
And the adventuress who would rather swim the wild waters of the unknown than spend her life safely tied to shore.
And perhaps that is the way of a mermaid's life.
She follows strange currents. Falls under unexpected spells. Encounters extraordinary creatures along the way. Some disappear beyond the horizon, only to surface again many moons later.
And every so often, a mermaid discovers that what once seemed like a chance encounter was destiny quietly winking at her from beneath the waves.
Looking back now, Renée can see the current that was there all along.
California.
Cannabis.
The wild shores of Canada.
The women.
The plants.
Shakti.
The music.
The Amazon.
The potions.
The Sirens she met along the way.
Each adventure carrying her toward another.
Each song leading to the next.
And now, after nearly three decades of swimming these wild and wondrous waters, Renée finds herself exactly where a mermaid ought to be...
Beside the sea.
Stirring her potions.
Gathering her performers.
Dreaming up her next Blissful Cabaret.
And listening for the music.
For somewhere beyond the shores of the ordinary world,
the Sirens are always singing.....
And wel... Renée has still to this day never heard of a good enough reason to resist their call...
🧜♀️ 🐚 ✨