Santuario – Boiling River – Night
I kneel down in front of a tree, stabilizing myself against its root extending towards rocks down below. It feels strong and smooth under my hand, an anchor for the celestial corona swaying up above. Surroundings are swimming in mist coming in wispy shreds torn from the gurgling flow, filling night air with mineral essence.
Kill the torch, say the prayer.
It helps to be vocal. Nature is sentient and can hear your pleas much clearer when you speak out loud without being embarrassed by the sound of your own voice. Took me a long time to come to that realization, let me tell ya… oh mighty tree, reaching for the sky, rooted in the earth… help me to ride this one out, give me your strength. Cleanse me. Here I come. Two fingers down the throat, the contents of my stomach gushes out in spasms of warm half-digested remains with unmistakable acidic aftertaste. No wonder, all the maduro we’ve had in the last two days… this is why one has to stick to the dieta when ingesting tree barks, even if a tree is just but a shrub – as is the case with chiric-sanango. It also explains why medicine didn’t kick in for two hours during the ceremony. All the negative energies I’ve been exposed to when Rachel completely lost it on Monday after we took a lion’s share of the root’s scrapings. “I can’t make it!”, “I’m gonna die!” Yes you can. You will feel better soon. “How soon? When is this gonna pass?” You have to bath with cold water. Stay calm. “I can’t walk! I can’t stay calm! It’s not passing!”
Luckily, my princess is light and I had no difficulty carrying Rachel to the log table outside where I poured jugs of freshly collected rain water, courtesy of torrential downpours as of late. I dieted chiric-sanango before, stripping entire root down, but was different. The shrub itself was bushier, its root much thicker, its effects came on barely five minutes after drinking soaked-in-water overnight preparation. We drank full glass each. My mouth went numb after no more than ten minutes, as if I’ve been given anaesthesia by a dentist in preparation for an extraction, followed by intense vibrations in the extremities and cold flushes spreading from head to toes. Unlike Rachel, I couldn’t afford to enter into panic state, being largely responsible for the whole thing. Namely, dieting without guidance and supervision of a maestro and serving plant preparation to my companion and accomplice who trusted my judgement. I have advised Rachel to let her body decide how much she needed to drink, then proceeded to drown my cup in several uninterrupted gulps while she watched. It was deceitfully easy to drink, just a red-tinted liquid with woody scent to it. Half an hour later we held apprehensive council to discuss our options and whether or not we can make to Santuario to seek help with bringing the effects down. Santuario, close as it was, meant half-an-hour trip up and down slippery path through the jungle made impossible by Rachel’s weakness. I could not possibly carry her the first fifty-meter obstacle course from our residency, constituted by almost vertical scrambling up the narrow ledges of steps cut into sand-rock always ready to crumble under your weight.
Rachel was conscious but delirious, hardly being able to remember neither a brief visit of Hilder, Enrique’s brother, who timely turned up on the back of our porch, nor screaming in agonising abandon while going through past-life regressions, raging against the void and naked behind the kitchen table. Primal screaming is the exact way to put it. Once you hear it, you can’t mistake it for something of man’s doing. It can be channelled, but can’t be done. I could do absolutely nothing, apart from diving downhill and wading down the stream till I could no longer hear the murder taking place. In spite of Hilder’s advise, no bathing in cold water and no blowing tobacco in futile attempt to bring Rachel back to her senses did anything.
All of this flashed at the back of my eyelids while I spewed my guts out, concurrently releasing previously absorbed energies which I could not stomach at the time – quite literally so.
I thanked the tree and the earth for giving me grounding and absorbing nutritious waste in earnest, charged the water in the bottle by blowing a whistling tune down the bottleneck and uttered another prayer for cleansing. Drank a mouthful, stayed put just long enough to absorb the liquid and watch its cooling effects in its passing as it spread through inner passages and dissolved in my body. It did me good but mareacion remained overwhelming, ayahuaska now entering previously unavailable recesses deep in my guts and affecting my bloodstream as I stumbled back to the veranda where Rachel awaited faithfully my return.
Just five minutes ago we had an epic sing-along, opening one hell of a cosmic portal through sheer resonance of our voices that only two crazy people in love can muster – a perfect union of insane beauty, it felt - and now I am a subject to rippling distortions causing space all around warp on itself and there’s nothing I can do to stop my psyche from falling apart and collapsing into a disjointed mess. I tell Rachel we need to seek help from Enrique, trying to be calm and jolly in the face of the inevitable meltdown. Medicine is too strong, my heart is racing. Not a good sign.
Earlier on in the night I took a shot-glass of ayahuaska and then topped it up with another gulp two hours later, having not given due credit to the mighty chiric-sanango recently circulating in my blood. This is the emergency that curanderos warn you against – one cannot control the medicine effects that threaten to cook the system inside-out. You feel literally on fire. The amount of heat generated can only be compared to that reached by tumo practice adepts at the peak of their trance or hyperthermia that has mountaineers ripping off their layers to seek cooling in the snow on the edge of a cliff – that’s where their bodies are later found, completely naked.
Looking Rachel in the eyes I am wary she is very much in the fairy-land, barely comprehending the seriousness of what is going on. “We must find Enrique,” I tell her. What for? To wake him up and ask him for a sopla to bring my mareacion down. “Okay,” she replies and starts after me into the stumbling excursion to look for the maestro. She has no torch and I grab hold of her hand, leading down the river-stone path my freshly fallen down the rabbit hole Alice-in-Wonderland. Our first port of call is a large two-storey wing below the old maloka, but Enrique’s resting room is padlocked. My hopes of quick salvation dashed, I try not to panic and glide along observing slow deliberate movements, lest my heart pops out of the ribcage. Off we go, again, into the darkness. Only to be thoroughly lost after a dozen paves, we are wandering among previously non-existent in my memory map utility buildings and toilet blocks snapped out of the surrounding gloom by the light of the torch, time grossly dilated and all dead quiet.
I search for signs of sandals on empty porches to no avail… try all the doors in a dormitory I’ve never seen in daylight before, none of them opens, all doors locked from outside. Finally, by a stroke of luck – or perhaps guided by almighty providence – I find unlocked room in a bungalow we’ve passed through already. I knock. A baritone responds, unmistakably Enrique’s. “Who’s there?”
With a sigh of relief, I report myself in. “Enrique… I could do with some help. Sorry for waking you, medicine is too strong.” Whew… Enrique opens the door, casts a quick look in my direction, sees Rachel standing with glazed eyes by my side. “Over there,” he points into the dark to my left. I was expecting he’d invite me inside… “Amigo, I’m pretty weak on my feet and feel like passing out any moment,” I venture. “You will be fine. Be calm,” he tells me. ‘Tranquilo’ is Enrique’s ubiquitous response to any and all queries, concerns and problems people through at him in times of trouble and desperation. Be calm. Wait a moment. In my state, moment stretches a long way. Long enough to circumnavigate my entire life and come back to this particular junction in time where past is painfully obvious and future is a blurred question mark, unsteady on its feet. I slide down to the porch step below and prepare myself for the second round trip when Enrique comes out, dressed, clutching what can only be a bottle of home-made ceremonial perfume. We follow him a wee way uphill to a bench under a lemon tree. “Take a seat,” he says. The emergency room under an open sky… a wooden bench, still wet from the drizzle. “Okay,” I swallow my forthcoming remark about inadequacy of the operational theatre where heart surgery is to be performed, remembering Robalino’s ‘maloka’ in the virgin jungle where we drank medicine seated on a couple of rough-sawn slabs left in the wake of rogue loggers. “Incredible,” I squeeze a laugh out of my lungs. It is what it is.
I take my gumboots off to gain better grounding and tune into Enrique’s whistling while he charges up his mapacho to give me a sopla. I follow his breath in order to receive the works, a transference of vital energy by means of being bathed in clouds of blown tobacco smoke. Here it comes, first on my crown, onto my back, my chest and hands and finally, my feet. Enrique proceeds to shake his bottle that makes the bark rattle inside and gives me a generous drenching on the head. I feel fairly good for a spell, relieved of the internal swirling, which gives me just enough time to recount to Enrique what happened when we parted ways after the ceremony.
I watched Enrique treat Rachel to a sopla… and then started losing it again, sliding back into rapid decay of ambivalent chaos, a screaming disarray of incoherent parts. In retrospect it reminds one of the bordo states from Tibetan Book of the Dead, but at the time one is consumed by the ordeal and light of dawn is nowhere in sight. My heartbeat is throbbing in my temples with alarming pace. I tell Enrique I’m gonna pass out this time for sure and he replies that I need to center myself as my mind is disconnecting me from Nature, and be calm. His voice is distant, although he’s standing only a few paces away. He talks about medicines but I can’t follow – he’s but a ghosting shadow on the periphery of my vision while I’m staring at a spinning whirlpool consuming space all around me with inexorable pull one cannot possibly resist. Amazingly, I’m still able to move my feet as I find myself a piece of ground to land on as I go down on my knees and place my forehead between palms of my hands, crouching in a tight ball of emergency position that helped me time and again in times of crisis.
Spinning slows down somewhat and ceases altogether soon as I am able to relax by breathing into my tummy. I am aware of the wet ground underneath and ants crawling around till they pause in their tracks having found an opportune spot to administer a shot of calcium, clenching their tiny jaws into my flesh with relentless force of precision… I hear cicadas churning away their rhythmical cadence… I feel Enrique’s patient presence as he’s watching over my process.
“I am alive!” I announce from the ground without lifting my head. Cessation of thought brings utter and ultimate relaxation, restorative and healing. “I feel much better, like a new-born.” Indeed, my body is supple and filled with vitality, breathing is easy and my heart is no longer a runaway train. I am smiling wide. “This is what happens when you go into dieta. Plant medicine regenerate you. You are reborn through it. My father is hundred years old and still going strong, drinking his preparations – ahoskiro, chiric-sanango, pico-carpintero…” We talk about preparations and it turns out Enrique prefers to use grape vine instead of cane sugar alcohol, the rest is essentially the same as Jack taught me. Fast before harvesting the barks, ask permission from plants beforehand, burry the bottle in the earth for a month or so to mature.
I tell Enrique I’ve been short of a maestro to work with, in Pucallpa it’s just impossible to relax. I tell him I understand the implications of being involved with a disciple, it means investing a great deal of trust into an unknown factor that comes knocking on your door. Here I am, teach me. Oh yeah… and who are you? Know Thyself is writ for a reason. A failure of a disciple is a failure of the maestro, affecting both. I’ve seen a few prospects, yet none stayed around - and here I am face in the dirt, asking for a transmission and crazy enough to dive into any deep end; times are such, one either swims or drowns. I need to know, after all these years of dabbling into plant medicines, how to enter mystical realms. I can do with some guidance at this point… “Despacio,” he says. “Slowly, you will learn.” So Chief has spoken. That’s right, we’ve had this discussion before. There’s no hurrying the process. One must have patience, become pregnant with medicine. It takes months for the embryo to develop in the womb before it’s ready to see the light of day, with the only difference that as far as birthing goes, this time one is giving birth to oneself using plants to prepare the body and the mind for illuminated state of awareness that comes with higher vibrations. Few people choose this path, and even fewer arrive.
By taking up a disciple, maestro a compromise of guiding his protégé through a narrow gateway much like a midwife who is made responsible for being there in the midst of a bloody miracle of creation to receive the new-born. Being there to snap the umbilical cord so that the little fella takes his first breath when his brand-new lungs inject the first autonomous uptake of oxygen into his bloodstream, no longer dependent on the host organism that facilitated this function previously. Later in the morning Enrique will be telling us of a young Canadian guy who went crazy after dieting high doses of toe and then drinking too much ayahuaska. He lost the plot entirely and went running into the jungle like a wild ape. When they finally caught up with the man, he had to be tied down with jungle vine and carried back to Santuario screaming and trothing at the mouth. Enrique spent a month treating him to get back to a semblance of sanity. I believe it.
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