18/10/2024
I put my hands in prayer position. Close to my forehead, And I just bowed. That’s all I knew to do. Bow and surrender, And let everything die.
The only other time I felt this much of a blow to my worldly ego was when flying mid air off my motorbike after being hit by another one. I landed on the grainy bitumen of a busy Bali intersection with my hands in prayer. As I knew exactly why I got hit. And I would have 6 months of limping around with a broken foot to integrate the lesson.
Here, after a bicycle pilgrimage along the Knight’s Templars trail that led me to Portugal. I got hit again. By choice. And I would bow my head again. But this time it was not a blinded Balinese man with his wife strapped to the back that would ram into me..
This time I was taken on a journey by the great grandmother of all plant medicines. The sacred medicine called Ayahuasca. As it was served by the original guardians of this powerful divination tool. The Huni Kuin of the Amazon Rainforest.
A people who for unknown lengths of time have related with the magical world of plant-animal spirit beings in a complex and meaningful way that is most likely incomprehensible to my Western industrialized mind.
But here I get to have a try, to surrender and journey the cosmos through their lens. As I was ready. Because I was willing to die. To who I thought I was. To any false attachment. Of who I was told I was. By family, by society. And any clinging on I was doing in order to avoid the truth of my infinite and unbound soul.
Tonight, sitting on bare soil, in a thick canvas tipi around a blazing fire, I’m flying freely through the stars like an eagle soaring the sky for the first time. The journey was exactly synchronized by the prayers of the Paje’s, the leaders of the ceremony. And when they end I naturally come back down. To open my eyes and look at the faces of these newfound guides in the reflection of the fire.
It’s as though I can see their strength without knowing their story. It’s like they are carrying something that most of the world is not ready or willing to hear. And can it be anything else than an otherworldly kind of forgiveness and love that these people are willing to travel to mainland Europe to sit here with me and call their brothers and sisters back home. Because, and I can see it so clearly now. We are lost, We strayed from the fire and got lost on a mad quest to suppress and dominate the very thing we are.
Nature.
Every aspect of our culture that honored the feminine, fertile aspects of our existence were destroyed by the forces of empire.
Next we were put on boats and lured to conquer cultures around the globe into the same colonial plantation models.
And what is it about the soul journey of this Huni Kuin woman right across from me that she is still here.
After all this.
Shivering cold on this Portuguese autumn night. Tired and probably hungry for the comfort of her forest home. Sitting with another tipi load of lost souls around the fire.
I could see, because the medicine allows one to see, her strength. As she picked up her guitar, dropped into her belly and opened her voice to allow another round of ‘icaros’, sacred songs from Nature, to fill the space.
And me, all I could do is bow. In the sweetest and most liberating surrender I have felt. Tears streamed down my face for hours on end, as my body shakes, sweats and purges the scars from lifetimes divorced from the sacred ways of Nature.
I don’t know what’s on the other side of these tears. But one thing is for sure. Things will never be the same.
