Dhammapada Diaries of Battling Warrior Princess Cuddlepants & her Prancing Pony

“Being unable to sleep is not a reason to drink medicine!”

Rachel’s voice is nothing short of condemnatory, cutting like cold steel. “What the hell do you mean?” I retort, looking down at her sitting up by the mosquitero. She just came back after brushing her teeth, preparing to go to bed. “You said a minute ago you were feeling tired and not up for it.” Tis true; I was feeling drained and fairly sleepy, my eyelids sliding down by themselves. “Yes, but then I realised I wasn’t going to fall asleep anyway, full moon and everything.” “I thought you didn’t want to drink so I brushed my teeth. Now I come back and you are setting up the space for ceremony.” I contemplate going to the tambo to drink by myself, which would instigate much negativity in my address I’ll have to deal with first thing in the morning, knowing Rachel’s insistence on being included in everything I do. Besides, I don’t feel like dragging the mattress into the tambo and setting up mosquitero. I slump down to the floor. “You gonna drink with me or not?” “Yes,” says Rachel in resentful tone. “Of course,” an expression of forced resignation painted on her face. “Damn it! What kind of ceremony are you gonna have with attitude like this?!” I burst out. “I’m better off going to the tambo!” “Please don’t!”

Rachel is meek, slumping down on her side of the ceremonial blanket, a usual spread of tobacco, medicine and scented perfume separating us. Turning my back and leaving is tempting but I know better by now there’s no escape from my despondent princess and in the end I’ll be paying for it resuscitating her back from the state of her misery.

“I can fix it by giving you a hug,” I offer. “Cause you aren’t able to do anything about it. It’s full moon, and I’ve been waiting for three weeks now to have a ceremony ever since we rocked up to Pucallpa. You know that.” Rachel accepts the embrace, dropping her resistance at once.

“Besides, I can’t wait to try new medicine Gerardo cooked for us.” The chaos medicine. We laugh. We’ve been through hell and back last week, without leaving our jungle paradise, Rachel indulging in pursuit of the devil and me retaliating in force, kicking and screaming in shameless protest while Gerardo waited politely up on the hill within an earshot talking on the phone to Mama Dina recuperating back in Pucallpa.

I have recruited Gerardo with much enthusiasm and expressed willingness oh his to lend a hand with explicit purpose of building us a tambo. A day prior to our leaving Pucallpa, Dina announced that a young fellow called Miguel is going to come along to help, and although initially I rejected the notion on financial considerations, as I would be short of cash to pay the guy, as well as being unwilling to crowd our one-room house with extra person, she twisted my arm. “Oh, you don’t need to pay him. He wants to learn jungle skills from his uncle,” she protested. “Alright,” I accepted. “I can at last pay his passage and feed him.”

Young Miguel turned out to be a real asset, carrying behemoth’s loads starting with hauling provisions from the drop-off point at the river, an hour-long walk over up-and-down jungle terrain to our home base of Cachiyacu. Both he and Gerardo packed so much into their carry sacks in their unwillingness to leave potatoes and beets behind that I had to ransack their loads to a large degree as they were impossible to lift. Miguel worked alongside Gerardo all day long, hauling fronds and logs out of the forest while I played around the tambo site levelling the ground and digging channels to divert torrential downpours as the last thing you want in your dieta is waking up in a growing lake of muddy water illuminated by lighting flashes. Rachel was having her ‘process’, basically keeping to herself and either reading or being immersed in a drawing pad and leaving it up to me to stoke the fire and cook most of the time, which I didn’t mind as I was getting a break from digging. Finally she did poke her nose in, having watched young Miguel hauling yarina fronds bundle after bundle, just in the right time to learn the basic palm-frond layering skills required for shedding of rainfall on a thatched roof of a tambo. Fronds are ‘broken’ left or right and layered groves up in alternating succession to create water proofing that will last anywhere between five and seven years, if done properly.

Gerardo was going to sleep in the tambo on the day it was ready, but it panned out differently. It was me who took my mosquitero down to escape Rachel’s process that renewed itself in earnest after a wee stint of communal work she took part in. To be fair, she did do marvellous lentil stews by that point which we all enjoyed a great deal save for hard-to-please Gerardo whose gustatory preferences for a fish entry on the menu pained him to the extent of developing upset stomach. His distraught tummy, however, didn’t stop Gerardo from stoically completing the job day and a half earlier. Gerardo wasn’t in best shape to begin with, having been debilitated by donating a litre of his blood to Eulalia, Jack’s spouse, only a week prior. He also managed to roll his motorcar over taking a tight corner same morning we left for Cachiyacu and had a gaping gash on his head he hasn’t told us about until lugging all provisions to the house while feeling like passing out, being used to ploughing ahead without paying attention to illness and injuries he ignored on the account of his blood being loaded with alkaloids of medicinal barks which he self-administered in the form of homemade tinctures he himself prepares using cane alcohol as a base. Upon closer inspection of his skull under the hair, the gash was still bleeding and I used plantain resin and tobacco ash on top to fix him up, creating instant antiseptic seal and it healed within three days afterwards.

In order to celebrate completion of the tambo, we were going to have a ceremony, all hands feeling pretty stoked, apart from Rachel who suddenly learnt that the tambo was a one-man spaceship designed for solo voyage into the realm of plant spirits, which meant separation for the duration of the dieta from her beloved companion – me. My memory fails to reconstruct entire argument that led to the dark episode that followed, but I do have indelible recollection of kicking Rachel, quite literally, out of the tambo where I went seeking sanctuary and rest from futile debate before our proposed ceremony. I was very aware of rising heat inside my chest in response to being denied privacy against my repeated requests that deteriorated from polite to most abrasive and abrupt, my tiredness all but gone, blood pumping hot all of a sudden, just like engine oil in a running car, an impartial witness on the back seat hearing myself yelling out at the top of my lungs get out! Leave me alone! for all the jungle to hear, drowning incessant screeching of crickets for a moment (who didn’t miss a bit, nonplussed by all the dramatic commotion) and finally chasing out my stubborn and incomprehensive Princess Cuddle Pants on her crusade for a rendezvous in a rather violent fashion, pushing her down the slope to join the rest of the debris left in the wake of tambo site clearing with unrestricted force of an ape-man woken up from his slumber. I am typing this up so you may judge the full amplitude of the pendulum swing and plumb the depth of despair one faces on the medicine path in order to arrive at one’s heart in complete and utter surrender, letting go of pride, righteousness, and the rest of the bloated ego that holds down the spirit in its oppressively ugly grip, masquerading for Self and employing leverage of morality whenever possible.

Ego is a vulture feasting on dead flesh and everything it touches becomes infected with corruption and rot; the morbidness of the scene needs not to be conjured up for it is explicitly vivid in its raw impact as we plough through life in unconscious brutality. One look at the state of the world proves the point. All the talk of saving humanity is sheer nonsense, an excuse from the real challenge of looking inside oneself. Ironically, looking inside is greatly facilitated and sometimes only possible with the help of a beloved, someone who’s by your side in most banal, most intimate and most private moments and whom you can’t escape for better or worse from presenting a mirror to you. And unless you look hard at the reflection and don’t flinch, you’ll never get to the bottom of it. Only upon seeing ugliness in oneself undermining your best intentions, only upon being completely and utterly disgusted does one turn around and starts walking in the opposite direction.

Inner transformation is by far the hardest challenge a man can face and far from everyone ever tries, let alone lasts, the distance to the sunlit peaks of full conscious awareness. It is far easier to climb Everest, if you take into consideration total number of enlightened people kicking around. Mountain climbing, after all, is a matter of achieving the goal, arduous as it is, by means of acquiring techniques and exerting the effort. The more effort one makes to reach the state of ultimate illumination, however, the further one gets away from it. No technique can be given, no instructions can be imparted to reach it, either. Welcome to Alice in Wonderland terrain of mystics; leaving the mind behind is the price of admission (a nod to Magic Theatre of Hermann Gesse and his

crisis times reflected in Steppenwolf). The very concept of a spiritual journey, of walking a spiritual path, once you get a good glimpse, is nonsensical for the simple reason that one is born enlightened. It is already the case. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to achieve. Mind recoils in horror and falls flat faced with conundrum of ultimate liberation exactly same way it fails when trying to contemplate death experience it cannot penetrate. The mind is the very obstacle in the way of seeing the truth of oneness. It is no wonder that even most intelligent people find themselves floating adrift in the streams of religious following, be it Christianity, Buddhism or Islam or one of any three hundred religions all claiming one God, by the way, on the account of well-established institute of worship fortified with glorified temples, mosques and candle-filled cathedrals richly satiated with copal aroma and chanting of verse memorised from a corresponding book of prayers. Every religious movement comes with a thick volume of instructions and even thicker and bulkier commentaries that go along with it, be it Gita, Koran or Bible. Safety in numbers; yet by following a path one can arrive anywhere else except one’s own being since one’s being is a starting point, not a destination.

Being a complete fabrication in the first place with no existential possibility, ego loves to push things as far as possible in order to gain weight and size and dimensions as to appear substantial. With enough dedication and ascetic practices mind is fully capable of conjuring up visions of saints and prophets coming down diamond-studded staircases to bestow their grace to the entranced and faith-filled follower. A path, after all, has been trodden by innumerable multitude and by following in the footsteps of others one gets away further and further from oneself. Since Truth is existential, there’s no way receiving it second-hand. It must be claimed in person. And once it is claimed, expect your relations to be thoroughly shaken up, careening dangerously on the edge of a crumbling precipice; your friends and family easily flipping to become your instant adversaries; society, never a safest environment to inhabit, turning unapologetically hostile towards your presence. One gets crucified living in the truth and those closest to you will hammer nails of condemnation into your wrists first in their attempt to stop your vibrations bridging the gap and wreaking havoc on every aspect of their convenient and ‘sensible’ lives.

Because we live in our heads most of the time, being near a man who is a light onto himself can be really painful. All your artificiality and farcical behaviour becomes exposed all of a sudden and you find yourself in a scattered agony of a dissection table being pulled apart by a higher intelligence that dwells in the heart, rather than the mind. The immeasurable distance between one’s potential and one’s actual state is made acutely felt by the presence of a master. It awakens one to utter inadequacy dominating the inner landscape and a great urge arises to change one’s vibrational orbit.

Gurdjieff once said that it would only take two hundred enlightened people to spark up global fire of awareness that would engulf entire planet in a flash and give birth to New Man. Don’t ask me why he has chosen this particular number, but in any case it is both encouraging as a possibility as well as making one apprehensive to how rare the phenomenon actually takes place.

Ayahuaska facilitates opening of the heart by clearing energy blockages present in the body and purging negativity on a gross physical level alongside expulsion of toxins. Nutritional aspect pertaining to protocols of dietas of specific plants have a lot to do with liberating circulation of blood to internal organs and aligning vital flow of chi that instigates healing taking place, a delicate internal process requiring safe and quiet sanctuary of a tambo.

One thing is to hear about practices of aspired curanderos and another thing is to embark on a healing odyssey oneself, experiencing mystical adventure first-hand as we were about to do, anxiously aware of internal upheavals on the way to upcoming transformation and calling it in. Healing is not something one can desire or aspire to accomplish sometime in the future; it requires your immediate presence and trust in Universe. If you are brought up in a western culture, which must be the case since you are reading this articulate write-up (by this I refer to awesome prowess of your vocabulary to string these words into meaningful sentences), your immediate reaction to the shamanic notion of recruiting help of spirits for healing the patient must be that of scoffing disbelief and scepticism of a well-educated ‘progressive’ man. Before addressing benevolent spirits of nature, as logic would suggest, one must forge connection with one’s own spirit. It is the misalignment with the essential spiritual core of our being that is to blame for illnesses and accidents we unconsciously manifest in our lives in order to put aside false pursuits and tune in to existential truth. In short, illnesses are physical manifestations of being spiritually lost. This is exactly what is killing humanity on a global scale. Driven by ambitious, greedy mind away from harmonious co-existence with nature we are unwittingly committing suicide by developing sicknesses that science fails to understand, let alone cure by pharmaceuticals which only contribute to misbalance further increasing toxicity in the body that led to the problem in the first place being a result of disrespect to natural cycles responsible for sustainable regeneration of harmonious existence. By ignoring wholesomeness and holiness of life medical science shoots itself in the foot. This is why I am finding myself in the jungle, partaking of tree barks and cooking chapo on the fire, receiving medicinal vapours at three o’clock in the morning meditating on a rock doing nothing at all apart from listening to my heartbeat and feeling fluctuations of gentle breeze echoing under my skin. Our entire body is filled with vibrations and pulsations of life, tuned in to external environment unceasingly performing grand symphony for our senses as music of existence flows with the wind in the treetops, cascades down boisterous waterfalls and swirls away in the silent tranquillity of deep pools to re-emerge in tidal surf churning over pebbles and crushing seashells to manufacture soft cushion of beach sand for crabs and critters to burrow into. It is our choice to be present at the concert to hear the music or turn deaf ear to it. Price has been paid up front by being born but participation in life is not obligatory. As a good friend of mine is fond of saying, ‘how you play is what you win’. It’s ironic it took better part of my life to wake up just enough to realise I’ve been doped into indefinite slumber and missing out on the real thing, the mystery and the continuous surprise that keeps you on your toes and infuses one with invigorating freshness of the unknown waiting around the corner for one to discover. There’s no way to be ready and prepared for what comes next, apart from total relaxation and resting in good faith that whatever happens, happens for a reason and the reason being the learning.

And as far as learning goes, one learns infinitely more from bad experiences other than the good ones. They make you pause in your tracks and reflect. Speaking of reflecting, I should have written this as a prologue at the start, but here you have it - the few pages of unnecessary preamble that a reader normally skips to get into the actual story. I am in no way a master storyteller, and to be frank I still have a rather hazy understanding to why exactly I am compelled to deliver these chronicles as it takes an awful chunk of my time to do so, having to sit through the muggy heat of the day someplace half-suited for writing, bombarded by sound pollution driven by necessity beyond my comprehension. I trust, however, that comprehension is secondary. And so the story goes…

…when I came back to the house, having rested good few hours in preparation for the ceremony, everyone was tucked in bed under their mosquiteros. Gerardo was awake; he didn’t want to drink, however, complaining of being tired. The ceremony was off.

Next day our legendary contractors were off back to Pucallpa. While we had our good-bye chat with me being apologetic about turmoil and all the screaming commotion of the previous day, Gerardo told me he was well aware of distorted energies and didn’t want to drink for that very reason. But of course. The aftermath of a shitstorm would have to be dealt with in the medicine space. We all knew that. Being noble as he was, Gerardo thanked us for inviting him and encouraged our progress on the arduous medicine path to healing and knowledge. He wanted to come back asap and diet ayauma in the new tambo. I paid my friends what I could afford, some four hundred soles for five days of work, and gifted Miguel a booty headlamp that needed a pair of hard-to-find rechargeable batteries, which did not impede his adulation in the least.

Gerardo and Miguel gone, I refined the bottle of medicine Gerardo cooked for us in Pucallpa and we drank the next day, just me and Rachel. The brew was thick and sweeter than I expected. My doubts about its potency due to all the chaos reigning at Dina’s place where it was cooked, a stream of random folks and family pouring in sporadically to inquire about various matters and seeking Dina’s advice as she attended to her visitors lying prostrated on her bed of rough-sawn planks, was dispelled the moment I was flooded with warmth spreading through my body barely few minutes after drinking. I jumped on Kerry’s didge inherited by Bola as part of the land-gifting deal and which was now in my temporary possession to test-drive the instrument.

It was humming alright, albeit fashioned out of fibrous hemp mass heated and moulded into shape rather than employing expert termite-burrowing method of the aboriginal origin. Rachel fidgeted restlessly while I played and threw up her medicine in the process. Giving her a sopla, I could see she was well under the weather with full aya effect, however. I resumed my didge efforts, elevated by mapacho, and took my turn purging. It was naturally to be expected after all the chaos and messiness of the previous few weeks, fair share of what we’ve been throwing up directly related to distress and unbalanced energies absorbed in Pucallpa, not to mention downright dark stuff that toppled Dina off the tree as a result of a daño, a jealous curse of a brujo. Giving Dina massage every second day, much of it rubbed off on Rachel as she went through energy blockages undoing knots and clearing obstructions to facilitate internal healing. One must be acutely aware of one’s own mental and emotional states when dealing with patients due to depletion of personal energy in the process of helping others. We both fell sick in Pucallpa at the time with intestinal issues for this very reason (on this note, Cesar has advised me at a later date to protect oneself with an arcana before treating patients which makes a lot of sense since energies do jump across and the healer can be much affected by them).

After my purge Rachel gave me uncharacteristically sloppy of her aqua florida job that deteriorated into lingering touches of uncoordinated fingers I sought to escape, leaving her sprawled out half-way across hand-woven mesa cloth among ceremonial paraphernalia and went down to the rocks, my mareacion completely gone. By the time Rachel found her torch I left right by her side and made her way down, I was back in medicine space thanks to the magic of hot vapours. I’ve been singing; whenever I start to sing, I’ve noticed, Rachel comes right on cue. She sat down next to me and I sang again, calling in our up-coming dieta. While singing, I was sending much gratitude to Enrique, who gave us the keys both figuratively speaking in regards to unlocking magic of plant medicines through following protocols of dieta, and very literally ushering us into our house in our DIY paradise of Cachiyacu where we could give it a shot. We didn’t see much of him as of late but his presence was there in spirit.

The icaro finished, we sit together for a few minutes in the warm steaming vapour of mineral waters cascading down a miniature waterfall and I got up to give my prime spot on a slippery rock to my sweetheart, imparting my technique of balancing on the heels while squatting with arms locked around the knees and focusing on breathing to release tensions while leaning forward to receive incoming flushes of vapour. Rachel gaped at me incomprehensively, quite unable to follow simple instructions, her eyes telling me quite clearly she wasn’t present enough to receive me. Which was not unexpected when one is learning to navigate strong mareacion. When I got up to leave, saying I’m heading back for a mapacho and she should just relax and hang out with the hot water and the spirits in my place, making herself comfortable in whatever way works for her, she got upset. Because she didn’t want to go yet. “My thought, exactly,” I responded. “So what’s the problem?” “But you are going and I want to come with you.” “Okay, so which one is it? You want me to stay with you, is that it?” No answer. “Look, I’ve already had enough hot vapours, I’ve been steaming for a while before you got here. I can see you are not quite in your centre, and spending a few minutes meditating with the medicinal vapours is the best thing you can do right now. While you are at it, I’d pray for cleansing and balancing of energies to prepare you for your dieta. Spirits are listening, summoned by the icaro. You should use the opportunity and be alone with the spirits. Now is the time. In saying it, I ain’t stopping you from coming with me back to the house ‘cause that’s what I feel like doing. I am following my energy and so should you, otherwise we ain’t dancing. If you can’t let go of your convictions from time to time it restricts the movement of energy. It’s a recipe for disaster. Following this trajectory eventually one ends up trapped like a bird inside a cage. A bird without sky doesn’t sing; a marital graveyard is likewise not the best landscape to inhabit. You know what I mean?” I get a look of silent despondency from Rachel in return, who is feeling cornered against my best intentions to liberate her.

Being used to living in a cage, the bird won’t take off into the sky even when the cage door is flung open wide, for the fear of trusting the universe to provide for all its needs. I gather my clothes, pick up my walking stick and sing out resonantly in a way of a parting good-bye: “Trust your energy, where-e-ever it may lead you-u-u! I love you-u-u!” My inspired salutation holler landed in dead silence without en echo and as I started up the path, a sinking feeling of disconnectedness gradually replaced ambience of rich harmony I enjoyed until then. Everything turned against me as I stumbled past hostile vegetation into darkness ahead, the world around fragmented into a broken jigsaw puzzle of incoherency without a hint of direction. A painfully familiar from past lives dread of loneliness came over, summoned from the Deep by doubts: Have I bent the stick too much? Have I crossed the unseen line between the land of living into sinister terrain of the demented and the macabre on my own volition?

Alone, utterly alone, destined for banishment for my past sins and cruelty to others into the prison of my own making, hollow thoughts rebounding around my skull like a steel pellet in a pinball machine, too fast and unpredictable and unable to escape its tight confinement.

I stopped in my tracks, tempted to run back to Rachel and bail myself out with hugs and kisses and decided instead to go straight ahead to hell and see what happens. The irrational fear of losing one’s mind, otherwise referred to as a bad trip, turned up on my doorstep unexpectedly after long time no-see; running away from it makes things worse as experience proved in the past. You end up impaling yourself on pitchforks and goat horns, getting tangled in barbwire and shocked with blue zaps of electric fence charge supplied by twelve volt tractor battery while roaming up-and-down gorse-covered sand dunes bordering on mangled by cow hoofs farm fields in the middle of the night, completely naked, having previously lost your clothes somewhere along the beach. Your mind, if left to its own devices, will likely be consumed by reconstruction of past events that lead you to getting abovementioned shocks and impalements, as in I should have not drank from that bottle of vodka cactus infusion brought by Raramai and waited half an hour more on those two shots I swallowed earlier, and projecting all sorts of doom scenarios into the future, as in I’ll never get to see the light of day again ‘cause I’ve been quarantined inside a concrete water tank fitted with a portable blazing inferno stoked by Eden who has turned from a gallantly charming if somewhat devious Jack Sparrow character into morbidly sarcastic prison warden from Hell assigned to keep me in strict confinement for my deviant crimes for eternity to come. None of these help one in any way to calm the racing heartbeat and see the world as a friendly and inherently nurturing place.

Resolved to test myself and surrender to wherever my energy may lead me to, be it a trickle of a refreshing waterfall or a heart of darkness itself, I felt a sudden wave of nausea twisting my stomach just short of reaching hot pools. Soon as I started throwing up, it became clear I was purging on behalf of Rachel. It was a physical manifestation of her resistance to be by herself primarily caused by abandonment issue deeply embedded in her unconscious since early childhood.

Expelling no more than foul air, I felt immensely better. There was nothing in my stomach, save for small amount of bile. By the time I was through, everything realigned itself into peaceful harmony humming away with freshness and exuberance; once again I had clarity of vision and strength in my body while only a minute ago I was staggering and stumbling under weather like a drunken sailor on his first night in town. There: a torch was bouncing up and down the path, advising of Rachel’s coming. She appeared much more centred and in good spirit.

The purge has worked the magic. We took turns standing under the waterfall and climbed steep path back to the house to smoke mapacho, share the insights and discuss what happened by the friendly yellow light of a candle, much relieved to shed heavy vibrations of the past few weeks that saw us breaking down in utter desperation. Rachel’s face once again radiant, eyes shining with renewed brilliance and I bathed in it, rejoicing and welcoming as one welcomes sunshine after a bout of heavy rains.

Two days later we are back at the rocks, I am once again purging to my heart’s content, as there’s hardly any content in my stomach, until some deeply lodged salts come out, leaving mineral grit in my mouth. Rachel is not having as much fun as me, her medicine being somewhat distorted. Before coming down to hot pools, we attempted a yogic union posture with Rachel straddling me in the lotus position like Shiva’s consort, both of us completely naked. The Serpent failed to ascend to the heart chakra, however, having been hopelessly entangled around the base. Being used to keeping her spine straight as an arrow in her yoga practice, a concept of winding around me in a fashion a vine winds around a tree trunk wasn’t reaching her altogether and when I explained the spiralling and twisting of feminine and masculine energies, she misunderstood it completely as invitation for lovemaking and I had to abort the experiment rather hastily, which she in tern interpreted as rejection. I had to come back to it the following morning, emphasising the premise of staying ‘cool’ and motionless throughout the practice to be able to watch and cultivate sexual energy to harness the Serpent coiled in the base chakra activated by near proximity of the partner. One has to be super chilled out and conscious in order to enter into trance as a couple and we obviously we not ready quite yet.

Rachel was still very much churning over her perceived rejection sitting next to me on the rocks receiving vapours, which took her out of medicine space and she was not receptive to the powerful icaro that came through when I called on the plant spirits of upcoming dieta. She was so much out of alignment, locked in her mental tracks, that I had to tell her straight up she was not going to be able to enter her dieta. It would be a disaster if she did. I told her I am not a maestro to see her through the process which is potentially going to bring up some deep healing, and even if I was, plants are likely to fire back on a person who is not able to do his or her part. You have to be centred and calling the healing in in order to receive the blessings.

‘Ultimately, you are the healer. You need to be aligned and centred before embarking on a voyage of deep exploration into unknown territory to face the storms and rough seas. You should take a week off, just chill out and do the things that bring you joy to align yourself again. Take time to do your yoga, read, paint, relax. Tune in and decide what plant you are actually going to diet, be it shivavaco, capirona or machinga. All are powerful and strong doctors. And look after me while I take chuachakicaspi. It’s supposed to be real strong, on a par with taking ayahuaska. I could really do with being looked after and will be able to look after you in turn. How does that sound?” Needless to say, my pronouncement didn’t go down very well with Princess Cuddlepants. She had lots to process. Moreover, she was reduced to stumbling in the dark by her quickly fading headlamp that left her little choice but to accept my hand in pilgrimaging back to the house with a compulsory waterfall showering on the way.

Once at the house, Rachel is back on my case demanding explanations and unable to process my answers at the same time. At the base core of it is the feeling of being rejected as a woman and I am thus compromised to give her any clarity in this regard. Yet, it is me she wants to deliver her into the light of understanding; we are held, therefore, in impasse. The tension is palpable, distorting space and hanging heavy. It takes all my calmness and focus to remain unaffected while Rachel is pulled apart in front of my eyes, her skin warping around bony protrusions, spinal cord twisted like a jelly worm and head wobbling back and forth completely autonomous from the rest of the body. I’m no longer looking at Rachel; in front of me is Gollum groping with long fingers for his stolen ‘precious’. All I can do is watch it. A mapacho in my hand never gets lit. “No smoking mapacho is gonna help, either,” I tell the thing. “When you don’t know who you are.” The creature sprawls itself on the mattress, legs and arms moving sporadically with no coordination between themselves, eyes rolling in the circuits, lips curled up sneeringly, unmistakably carnal expression painted across its face. “It’s utterly futile for me to even try to communicate with you at this point because you are not altogether here. You can hear my words but you don’t know their meaning. If you did, I would have my friend back. As it is, any friendliness is out of question when your agenda is to consume the other. And this is not going to happen because I am in my centre, which makes me invincible. I am not going to say another word from this point until this thing gets the hell out of this body and lets me have my princess back in her full power and radiant glory.”

There was no other option but sit through it stoically, cultivating silence and watching the thingwrithing and squirming in front of me, trapped inside invisible cage by the power of my undivided presence. As much as I wished to lie down and listen to some chakra chants, it would break the spell and I’d have given it permission to cling and grab at me at will. After a good twenty minutes I finally lit the mapacho and gave Gollum a series of strong blows. Tobacco worked the magic in the end; the thing didn’t like it and slowly but surely faded back into unconscious where it came from and Rachel discovered herself once again, tired but relieved to return. She was quite unaware of what has happened, having suffered temporary amnesia. Or, more precisely, temporary insanity. I offered her a massage as a hands-on in-the-meantime solution, thinking to myself that I am better off saying nothing to Rachel next morning about her state as she wouldn’t believe it.

TAMBO. ONE WEEK LATER

…too much medicine is circling in my bloodstream making my heart race as I lay down next to Rachel in our new sanctuary erected with a single purpose of guiding diatero deep into the mystery of tree doctors. The plan was to have a ceremony together to conclude my strict phase of chuachakicaspi dieta and start Rachel on drinking capirona tree bark renowned for it rejuvenation magic. I drank my last dose of chuachakicaspi only yesterday, in conjunction with ajosacha agua de tiempo made of ajosacha root smashed into pulp and soaked overnight in water to be taken as refreshment throughout the following day. The compound effect had me flat on my back first five days of my strict dieta, the only exception being my customary predawn visit to the steaming rocks below the hot springs, which was much more like a moonwalk, really, on the account of my body flailing itself this way and that in futile attempts to deny gravitational hold while my head spun away as I watched the insect world rush by without minimum strength to salute overtaking me ants and slugs before they crawled ahead and disappeared in their equally unruly jungle of high grasses and weeds down below. Once on the rocks, I went through the motions of elementary yoga routine designed to battle rheumatism and restore vital energy flow, without which lying prostrated for the rest of the day would drive me restless. The only reason I could tear myself off the warm spot with bubbling hot water running in the small channel zigzagging through sandstone slabs festooned with deep-green algae thriving on perpetually moist edges and say adios to the tepid breath of mineral vapours was a promise of a flower bath waiting back up the creek that had magic powers to resuscitate me just long enough so I could scrape some chuachakicaspi bark from my next donor. As luck would have it, there were several chuachakicaspi trees a short scramble uphill from the tambo. Gerardo confirmed three trunks out of four; the forth one I found several days into my dieta and decided to utilize upon inspection of its bark scrapings, albeit its trunk didn’t have characteristic chuachakicaspi knobs along its length and shot up straight as a pillar. The bark was twice as thick as that from other trees and tasted woodier and stronger. I prayed into my glass each time before drinking, of course, but was never sure of correct dosage or of the correct origin of the bark, for that matter. In the absence of a maestro one relies heavily on the guidance of spirit in the wake of recalling every morsel of advice one ever got regarding dieting a particular plant. In addition to the rigorous rules of the strict dieta, I fasted first five days that made me much more sensitive to the effects of the plants and facilitated tuning in to the response of the body as I went through the healing process. It also kept me on my back for the duration of fasting. Soon as I was fed boiled rice and roasted plantain by Rachel on the sixth day, my mind became restlessly active, frog-jumping between latest news from back home as Xmas knocked on the door hard and persistent to send greetings and salutations and make offerings on the family altar which in my case was fairly small but utterly untended as it happens when your offerings are not appreciated. Given, some offerings are more challenging to accept than others, an offering of truth being the hardest. You end up disturbing deceptively peaceful truce with the unconscious, awaking one beast of an ego which was always ready to pounce and destroy any possibility of heart-opening and enlightenment for the same reason a parasite resists being removed from the host it feeds upon day and night regardless if one is awake or dreaming. So it came to pass that my mother has told me of late, in so many words, to go to hell, to vanish, and neither write nor send any messages. I’ve been feeling stumped what to say to her or the boys, for that matter, in the absence of Xmas spirit, a make-belief phantom in itself as it is. Failing in ingenuity for once and feeling impotent in the choice of words, I resorted to drawing the boys a picture with a big question mark left in the wake of a rogue axe-man walking away with the Xmas tree on his shoulder, stealing the one and only trunk in the otherwise desolate landscape lit by the nonchalant yellow moon rolling along the highway of stars stretching above. It has even got SPEED OF LIGHT restriction sign posted along it – a legit highway, indeed. Rachel blessed the canvas with a splash of gentle colours and it flew across the oceans on the wings of magic fairy that procured a connection window just for long enough to upload the image file while we stood on the hilltop overlooking the silky band of Pachitea river slithering through the jungle below, slapping mosquitoes and praying to mobile network gods.

After a week-long retreat in solitary tambo, being deeply immersed into the living womb of the jungle under influence of plant medicines, any interaction with outside world is extremely taxing on your energy levels, as I found out. Walking over to Santuario first thing in the morning on the last day of dieta to negotiate a supply of plantains for the next week after being flattened and made to meditate out of sheer necessity wasn’t the best thing to do but it had to be done in the name of chapo. Without chapo no meal on diatero’s menu is complete. The combined effect of physical exertion and exposure to other people’s energy fields made my heart race even as I laid down trying to rest before the ceremony. Too much medicine running in my bloodstream, I figured. It is dangerous to overstrain the system by introducing aya into equation, for it is bound to impact the heart. Therefore I made a deal: I’ll drink if I am able to fall asleep before 8 p.m., which left me just over an hour. That way I knew I can handle it.

Five past eight I wake up, refreshed by being briefly unconscious. Rachel is barely awake, having less luck with old Morpheus. As we crawl around the perimeter of the mosquitero folding blankets and arranging a small mesa, wind picks up with gusto, bringing by first drops of rain that quickly turn into proper shower hosing down the canopy of violently swinging trees. Proximity of the storm is felt strong enough for me to take a naked run back to the house to stash away boots and leftover washing hanging on the line. I return freshly showered upon to find Rachel seated in the yellow light of the candle, buckled up for the ride but seriously apprehensive of the journey ahead as if she was riding into the storm.

“We can always go back to the house if it gets out of hand,” I tell her addressing weather conditions and the prospect of getting rained out of tambo which hasn’t seen a torrential downpour yet. She takes my word for it and I mix one shot of Gerardo’s chaos medicine with some hot water warmed over the candle flame in a tin cup to go halves on. Five minutes later, I feel warmth flowing into my tummy. It gradually raises and doesn’t stop there, spreading through my entire body until I have to get up and pay a visit to the newly excavated ‘short drop’ for the first time in eight days since I’ve been dieting. The solid block in my colon, once released, takes me to another lever of mareacion, setting me on fire quite literally. The amount of heat generated in my body by aya on top of the chemistry present in my bloodstream from chuachakicaspi and ajosacha I’ve been taking is sufficient enough to burn my mind. I feel like atomic furnace stripping electrons off their orbits to fuse the noble elements, honoured by the privilege, if I can only survive in the process. Singing being the only way to disperse surplus heat in the state of melting boundaries, sound vibrations take over and flow out spontaneously reminding me of the biblical creation myths and Terrence McKenna’s riffs from his deep trance states. The first thing I can think of addressing was Espiritu Santo, The Holy Spirit, to pull me through the meltdown. Words flowed as I prayed for cleansing, tranquillity and peace to balance the energies. Miraculously, I was incinerated into ashes, emerging in one piece on the other side in the golden glowing ambience of the medicine space, surrounded and cradled by the plant spirits whose presence was beyond denial. This was the time to enter deep and explore new dimensions opened by my dieta. The best way was kneeling down in recovery position with my forehead pressed to the floor resting on palms of my hands, and I soon found myself floating weightlessly in the hollow chamber of my body, centred in the solar plexus. The palpitations of the heart reverberated alongside the chamber, echoing in expanding and contracting tissues. I started singing again into the resonant ambience of my body, this time praising and honouring chuachakicaspi spirit. Chuachakicaspi is legendary in the Peruvian Amazon where it is being considered to be a king of the forest. Chullachaqui himself is a four-feet-high prankster, a small stout fellow who walks around knocking on wood and stealing machetes and anything metallic or shining from camping sites left unattended by hunters and woodcutters. He will steal children likewise, taking appearance of one of the parents, if given a chance – at least this is how the folklore legend goes. Meet the downsized Mephistopheles performing metamorphosis for kicks and enjoying wreaking havoc to his heart’s content, being king of the forest and all… a wee boogie man to scare kids into behaving, be good or Chullachaqui will get you, on one hand and a keeper of magic with many hidden treasures, on the other.

I felt elated to be on the receiving end of dieta’s blessings, finally entering inner realms and mystery of the medicine space all on my own, unguided by the icaros of maestros-curanderos that give you a piggy-back ride every time. In the meanwhile, Rachel wasn’t ‘in’ yet. A sore tummy turned out to be where the block was. To remedy the problem, I charged agua florida with my breath, asking the spirits for help and assistance as I whistled into the bottle and proceeded to massage Rachel’s abdomen. She groaned under a lightest touch as I worked on the tensions until her right leg started twitching uncontrollably, as happens in a hyperthermia attack.

A lifetime ago I was participating in the final field exercise of basic core training for the Royal NZ Infantry intake in a place called Paradise Valley, aptly coined for unhospitable climate and terrain that only tough scraggly bushes and tussock could endure in. We were ordered to dig down to stage 3 bunkers and bury ourselves for the night to survive a possible artillery bombing. Paradise Valley giving us its warmest welcome, it rained for three days while we dug into wet clay with picks and shovels and all the trenches filled up with water. Orders being orders and exercise being a final test of determination to do whatever it takes, half of the entire intake of recruits had to be helicoptered straight to hospital with severe hyperthermia while the rest of us cleaned up the mess, picking up scattered helmets, webbing belts and rifles. When the body is taken beyond what it can handle, weird things start happening and it can get fairly scary. Dieting plants without supervision of a guide and a curandero is not dissimilar to launching oneself into open seas on a solo sailing mission. Pretty soon in the game there’s not a hint of land in sight and as seas get choppy butterflies start circling in your tummy. Being unqualified but eager to do everything in my power, I massaged Rachel’s hip, her thigh, her ankle and returned back to the hip with no improvement or alleviation as she continued to shake. After a good quarter of an hour of pressing my thumbs and knuckles in all and every nook and cranny I could find to release accumulated tension, I’ve all but given up when Rachel suddenly felt sick and crawled to the edge of the bed to throw up. And throw up she did, drowning in the waves of nausea while I sat by her side illuminating the ordeal with a headlamp to make sure she didn’t miss the spewing bowl completely. She really needed the cleansing to enter her dieta clean and we took it in good spirit lighting up a mapacho afterwards. In a fit of instant metamorphosis right out of fairy tales, Rachel was shining and much alleviated, gracias a la madre ayahuaska and her magic wand.

It’s been a hell of a ride, purging stagnant energies accumulated over a lifetime of conditioning and shedding back-breaking weight of guilt one gets so used to that it becomes integral part of one’s psyche, making one’s face drop with folds of worry and concern, taking the glint out of one’s eye by stealing the spark of joy that being alive brings. Without a spark one is a somnambulist, a walking phantom of a man going through the motions of living but not really being there. One gets used to a dim state of perpetual dusk for the lack of exalted openings when one is singing and laughing from the belly.

Rachel commended me on my dieta, expressing her admiration for my resolve to make it happen and spending first five days lying flat solidly in the tambo. I had no choice, I told her, crediting chuachakicaspi for keeping me down. It took a king of the forest to knock me out, rendering me listless and soft, and I was only too happy to oblige to absorb vibrations and enjoy tranquillity for once in my prostrated state, meditating most of the day and savouring excerpts from the finishing chapters of Martin Pratchel’s epic story Secrets of a Talking Jaguar, a first-hand account of shamanic initiation that I now worship as a testament of a spiritual rebirth, drawing strength, insight and inspiration on my own, albeit far from so far out-of-it, but nonetheless magical, journey. A dear friend of mine that has great affinity with a Mayan calendar and regularly holds workshops dedicated to interpretation of individual star-maps and divination of upcoming events using Tzolkin counter to navigate through celestial alignments has confined Martin’s book to the lazy-day-while-reclining-in-a-hammock-under-a-palm-tree-with-nothing-else-to-do reading category. Shame. Martin had a rare privilege to be initiated into what is essentially a mystic school in still-then intact Mayan village, unchanged in its ways since the pyramids and temples of worship were built, to receive transmissions only passed on to a chosen few indigenous people, transmissions that transcend boundaries of culture and time. Anyone on a spiritual journey will benefit tremendously by reading it, not to mention if one holds fascination for forces and deities depicted in Mayan glyphs. A major point to consider here is that a Tzutujil shaman embodies knowledge in his living flesh, literally wearing multi-layered garments of re-acquired remembrance, having matured and ripened through the process of reacquisition of one’s spiritual essence, thus eliminating fumbling in the dark deciphering complex system of symbols and glyphs that only constitute a surface layer of mystic knowledge fully unlocked to the initiated who hold the keys to transmissions. Initiation in itself is an ordeal that not every aspiring shaman survives even after years of intense training and preparation. In other words, do you really want to know how deep the rabbit hole goes? Are you willing to risk your life to get to the bottom of it? It is one thing to believe in immortality of the soul and another is to taste the eternal. Vast majority of literature is meandering in the contrived landscape of the intellectual guesswork delivered by those soundly asleep who have never awaken to know the reality. I was going to write my appraisal to Martin Pretchel’s book in a separate post, but here we go, takes the pressure away.

Now back to the story. After a purge, it’s a good idea to sopla the person who purged and smoke a mapacho. Relaxed after the ordeal, Rachel’s face now glowed warmly in the candlelight, unburdened from earlier discomforts that kept her down. Grace and elegance of her gestures enchanted me as when we met for the first time back in Aotearoa. She mentioned that the way I blew tobacco during sopla made her think of my legendary uncle who passed away at the beginning of the year. Mapacho is blown hard when clearing energies, like a gust of strong wind that clears the old and stagnant that doesn’t serve and brings freshness of rejuvenation and renewal. My uncle smoked a lot, perpetually followed by a wisp of tobacco smoke wherever he went. Same as my aunty, come to think of it, who is now alone in her hundred-and-eighty year-old log house, held tight in the suffocating grip of grievance that won’t allow a single ray of light to reach her, let alone voice messages and letters of her crazy vagabond nephew broadcasting his affection from deep in the jungle where monkey wind roams the treetops.

My uncle in many ways filled the space of a missing father, whom I never knew, imparting strength and inexhaustible enthusiasm and joy of living a life to the max, sweating out hard yards and finding time aplenty to exalt in simplest of things. A ping-pong table made of plywood sheet surrounded by neatly stacked birch and fur firewood is a good illustration of this. It took couple of weeks of solid wood-chopping to fill the stacks in early summer while every night my uncle and aunt challenged each other and their guests to a table tennis match, crying out in accompaniment of each victorious volley and laughing merrily between puffs of smoke from the cigarettes that seemed to be glued to the corners of their mouths for they hardly left it. My uncle was a boxing champ and drove trucks after the army, until one day he came to the old village of Staraya Ladoga and fell in love with the place that once was chosen to unite druidic tribes in common faith brought all the way from Greece by a noble party of select representatives of whose journey the chronicles speak in eloquent verse. The gentle land is rich in humus, lavish hills stretching voluptuously into the distance dotted with ancient burial mounds holding remains of legendary heroes and rulers that paid the price with their heads for the privilege of sung remembrance. A fortress was erected on a river bank, and it was there that my aunty, a visiting student of arts on out-of-town excursion, met a handsome and cocky lecturer in red shirt expounding authoritatively on the subject of old legends and frescoes depicting biblical scenes naively conjured up from inspired imagination of devout painters a millennia ago and now lying in fragmented ruins under the walls of monasteries awaiting their miraculous resurrection. All of this took place in the sterile and spiritually-suffocating ambience of Soviet Union, mind you, and my uncle would scoff sarcastically at die-hard religious devotion and Christian beliefs that held a spiritually frail man in need of existential consolation at ransom, milking one for what it’s worth.

My uncle told me categorically that once he was dead, he will be eaten by worms and become compost matter to be recycled by plants and that’s all there was to it. His statement appalled me at the time, dry unapologetic logic of impenitent academic leaving no room for any doubt, mystery and god forbid, religious nonsense. To gain credence in his beloved field of research, my uncle muscled his way into academic studies, becoming an art critic with PhD in history and archaeology in his late forties, having to previous tertiary education to speak of as he was too busy laying punches in the ring and running up and down flights of stairs with a sandbag strapped to his back that gave his stride a permanent ducking motion as his legs assumed a shape of an arc and remained thus wheeling him around. He often shamed me for the lack of erudite knowledge concerning Italian and French architects imported to Saint Petersburg, a capital of Russia at the time, by various royalties to erect buildings that later housed famous painters, poets and writers whom I should have been intimately acquainted with, according to my uncle, was I not using the likes of Dostoevsky’s Idiot as a decoy cover on top of Ray Bradbury’s volume of Martian Chronicles sneaked underneath as a preferred reading material in literature classes back at school, shamelessly disregarding compulsory study of Russian classics.

To paint a full sketch of my uncle, he claimed singing in opera in his hay-day and as an occasion presented itself would inevitably pull down from the nail his seven-string guitar to serenade the gathering of merrily inebriated friends and relatives whose visitations to my uncle’s house in Staraya Ladoga was as good a reason as any to cook up a feast.

The table spread always featured freshly picked or marinated mushrooms, sauerkraut cabbage, apple and blueberry pies baked in the infamous brick-laid Russian oven and a pick choice of wild berry preserves and jams in addition to borsch, spuds, fresh sour cream and dark rye bread from the local gastronom, one whiff of which would make your saliva run. In the middle of the table gathering, with a hot samovar and a collection of fine china steaming with strong black tea of Georgian origin (Georgia being one of Soviet republics at the time) on the table busting with treats, my uncle would perform a hand-stand on the armrests of his old wooden chair with acrobatic ease of a gymnast.

My aunt spent better part of her life basking in the warmth of loving affection by the proxy of my uncle’s cranking fire well-stoked with laughter and jokes, drawing inspiration for her paintings and lithographic works from the village life and timeless folk wisdom of past generations that owed to living intimately close to the land and observing cycles of nature. Russian people have a big heart to pull them through the darkness and oppression, being by far the worst enemy to themselves throughout the history full of despotism and idiocy. Dark times breed their legends and heroic figures in great multitudes; my uncle has likewise acquired a prominent aura of glory in my eyes that I now see shining brighter than ever. Needless to say, his grin adorned many a painting and a print impressed from a master stone by my aunt, one of the few remaining artists to use laborious technique now all but abandoned, private sales of which provided unsteady income for the affordable idyll of living inside a fairy-tale story filled with everyday magic. To cap it off, contrary to my uncle’s expressed conviction of inhabiting a godless and technically soul-less universe, he embodied the soul and spirit in the flesh all along. And ironically enough, he dedicated major chunk of his life to digging up fragments of crumbled-down frescoes depicting hallowed saints on their pilgrimage to the promised land and prophets returned to hail Holy Spirit and Mother of our Lord, reconstructing lost heritage of the faithful guided by nothing short of sixth sense and uncanny intuition to puzzle together a thousand unknowns.

To know oneself, he instructed me, is impossible without knowing where one comes from, without knowing one’s roots. To be completely honest, though, my uncle was a major pain in the arse for as long as I’ve known him. As a boy I spent a lot of time sick in bed and took to sketching brick-laid fortifications, turret-heavy tanks and laser gun battles, proudly showing off my master pieces to the visiting uncle until one day he requested that I painted him a forest. I did my best, coming up with a blotted entanglement for having never given a thought to the way trees brunch out to support the foliage, which I found impossible to paint in detail rendering whole thing a messy affair. The job of the art critic being to criticise, my uncle excelled in ruining your day and I got served a good scoop of bitter truth regarding my painting skills and the whole inadequacy of my supreme effort. I got so disheartened I stopped drawing altogether, devoting my sick hours to sulking instead. To be objective art critic stands aloof in a stance of cold analysis, functioning as an algorithm of comparison with a database of known influences and devices employed by painters of forgone epochs. Lush nature, semi-naked Greeks reclining on marble slabs by the cool fountains and plum cherubims hanging out in puffy white clouds belong to Renaissance; one cannot get away with employing same lavish palette and brushstroke of a Renaissance painter five centuries later, no matter how much lustre is spilled on the canvas. Furthermore, every art critic is a wanna-be artist deep down who never got a chance to have a love affair with painting, a sad state of affairs that contributes to bitterness and resentment often felt in critical remarks of their analytical assessments and verdicts which I couldn’t help but take rather personally being a nephew and all.

Years later, visiting Staraya Ladoga all the way from New Zealand, I brought a selection of my Photoshop art as a present. My uncle selected only two out of a dozen and a half, pronouncing the rest to be rubbish in most unambiguous terms. His influence was so great on me that instead of taking it on the chin I once again abandoned visual arts for a number of years. In my uncle’s defence I have to admit that albeit he easily drove anyone mad only to crack a joke a minute later before dust had a chance to settle in the blast zone, concurrently changing the subject to something mundane and altogether irrelevant to a previously heated conversation. In winter he fed birds bereft of provisional berries that were lying buried under the snow with acorns he collected in autumn from an oak tree growing in his backyard next to the ping-pong table, which brought him joy in the breaks between labouring away at his dissertations and academic texts dedicated to the origins and cultural significance of frescoes that were impossible to fathom unless you were already a scholar intimately familiar with historical events dating back to 900 A.D. or whereabouts. He was concerned neither with faith nor with exalted states of past visionaries that painted the images; his entire dedication went to methodological analysis of techniques and influences employed by the latter. Thus my aunty spoke with indignation about provisional wooden cross erected by orthodox congregation on my uncle’s grave without prior consulting her. Seeking redemption of uncle’s spirit, she decorated the symbol beyond recognition at the first opportunity, effectively turning it into a pagan altar that had nothing to do with Jesus getting crucified in the name of Father in Heaven, not to mention Holy Spirit and the rest of them angels.

Having survived three heart attacks, through which my uncle continued to smoke like a regular chimney, his passing away was no big surprise to me. I felt his spirit going while dieting renakilla earlier in the year given to me and Rachel by Dina in Santuario. Dieting now, we both tune in to our heart connections and think of our beloved friends and relations that are felt closer than ever in spite of great distances that separate us. My aunty comes up often in medicine space because for almost a year she’s been in a state of torment, stuck in the quagmire of depression up to her throat and complaining to me in each conversation she’s short of a reliable friend to dispatch her in order to join her love on the other side, regardless how cold and unhospitable a void of death is to a convinced atheist. Everything I say she twists around in a negative defeatist way, biting with spite at my attempts to reach her like a wounded animal. She accepts a typed paragraph of greeting, but ignores any significant conversation beyond that. She worships a dead deity, unable to connect with the living spirit of my uncle and I plainly refuse to acknowledge her self-imposed banishment. What pains me is being a witness to her drowning in misery and self-pity, unable to do anything but wait and send my prayers and songs of affection.

I know all too well how inhospitable my country can be, especially to their own. Staraya Ladoga with its idyllic landscape in not exception. One pleasant summer afternoon a bunch of drunken young fellows barged into my uncle’s front yard and started laying punches on him without a warning, like a pack of rabid dogs attacking their solo victim with a lethal intent. My uncle retaliated in self-defence, knocking one guy out and delivering home a few solid blows that exacerbated the rage until he got hit on the back of his head with a vine bottle and slid down in a heap, punch-drunk. My aunty was by his side all along, pleading, wailing and swearing as his face got pummelled into a bloody mess. It went for longer than one could possibly endure, it felt, but at some point the ravenous hooligans sobered up from sheer exhaustion and vacated dismal site of their brutal onslaught. I watched the whole thing from several yards away, being thirteen years of age at the time.

Brutal and oppressive are two adjectives one cannot avoid when reflecting on Russian cultural climate and it ain’t hard to give in to collective unconscious that tugs and pulls you down under like a treacherous marshland. Every time I hear the news of ongoing madness as Russia and Ukraine exchange bombings and death blows of mutual extermination I think of my aunty in her snow-capped sanctuary squandering gift of existence away instead of integrating the warmth of a blazing fire that cranked inside my uncle and passing on his transmissions of inexhaustible joy and being in awe of Creation that animated his life and from which I draw my inspiration and strength to this day, illuminated by the light of remembrance. Speaking of knowing my roots, doing so helps indeed to stand on my own two feet and journey ahead in good faith and great company of legendary aunts and uncles, alive and present in spirit whenever and wherever I may call upon them. Holy smoke, indeed. Gracias a tabaco.

“You should write a book about your uncle,” nudges me Rachel who has precipitated the whole conversation. Instead of answering, I reach out for the orange piss pot and start throwing up violently. Momma Russia, won’t you stop chasing me after all these years?

There isn’t much in my stomach, and I know I am at the end of it when pure bile comes out. “Thanks god it’s over,” I tell Rachel while rinsing my mouth. The medicine effect comes in strong all of a sudden, and I can barely sit up to sopla into the bottle of water asking for cleansing. One has to do it properly, putting the energy in to charge the water with spiritual strength in spite of one’s bodily weakness in order to receive what is being asked for and rebound quickly. “What was that about?” inquires Rachel, referring to the purge. “Just healing. Healing the past and channelling my aunty in her present sad state.” “Unbelievable… how can she get so lost… your uncle is so light and radiant in that picture of him she painted… just beaming! Spirit shining in all its glory… how can you miss that?!” “Which picture?” “You know the one where he’s rowing in a boat? With a cranking smile and wispy hair floating around, like a dandelion flower in blossom?” “Oh yes, of course. Last one she did. That’s exactly right – how can you paint that joy and remain so fondly attached to your personal misery and loss? It’s a paradox.”

It is indeed a paradox. Just looking at that picture of my uncle invokes pure joy and seeds confirmation of life in all its splendorous glory. In front of your eyes is illustrated testimony to a golden glow awaiting a man of accomplishment in his ripe old age, his beaming contented smile a gift of deep gratitude to the universe for having been born on this earth… to channel that and remain aloof to the presence of spirit one must be split internally in to two. Rachel looks at me imploringly and busts out, “she will come through, shining!” “I hope she does. I really hope she does. Russian conditioning goes deep. All I can do it wait till she accepts my extended hand and send her prayers in the meantime.” “You don’t want to write to her again?” “No point. At this stage all one can do is address the spirit.”

I suggest we do exactly that and meditate connecting with our loved ones and hit the rocks after medicine subsides somewhat. Soon as I lie down, trance follows. Rachel, however, is not altogether comfortable and complains of being cold. I tell her to snuggle up to me, being unable to move for all intents and purposes, my body straight as a dagger and merging with the earth, courtesy of its irresistible gravitational pull growing stronger by the minute. She shuffles over to my side, tries to find a comfy position to rest and eventually pulls away with a sudden jerk. I register her movements but remain with my process, feeling the medicine working on different parts of my body, untangling internal knots and activating healing flow as pulsations spread through the deep tissues and tiny capilaries resonate in response.

When I finally come out and inquire if Rachel feels like going down to receive some medicinal vapours, she snaps back at me. It turns out my invitation to ‘snuggle up’ lacked any opening on my end, not to mention the absence of a cushioning shoulder to rest upon. I tell her about my predicament of being somewhat stoned into immobility and enjoying absolute stillness, asking her pardon for misleading her with my wording whereas indeed what I meant to say was ‘come closer and warm up against me’. My apology is not sufficient and I get up, unwilling to deal with latent abandonment issue surfacing up out of nowhere and distorting vibrations of the medicine space.

Rachel follows suit, donning her clothes furiously and stands at the ready like a soldier before being ordered to charge barbwire escarpment across the minefield into the enemy trenches, her headlight beaming on high and adrenalin pumping. I have to ask her several times to turn the torch off and listen carefully to what I am going to say. She fumbles for the switch with nervous fingers and finally manages to kill the bright light. We stand in dense silence for a minute, stretching it for all its worth in the absence of adequate address until tension is elevated to its breaking point. “You are not coming with me in a state you are in,” I tell Princess Cuddlepants. “I am not taking the path, I am going down the creek and you are likely to get hurt being agitated and unbalanced as you are. It’s dangerously slippery after the rain and I am not taking responsibility for your stumbling through the wet obstacle course of fallen trees and climbing down waterfalls. You fall over, say good-bye to your dieta. You understand?” She doesn’t, of course. I have to raise pitch of my voice, screaming forcefully that she ain’t coming with me as I am going alone. The dead of night absorbs the outburst like a sponge, crickets churning away their rickety cadence without as much as a pause. I leave Rachel standing at the entrance to the tambo and make my way down the stream, feeling tremendous relief to get away from the battlefield and warring nations.

Down by the rocks I barely have a chance to meditate when my warrior princess turns up, having followed the stream down same as I did, as I learn later. She squats on the ledge, hugging her knees and shivering, until I urge her to sit in the hot vapours of the gushing waterfall and warm up. I sing an icaro that comes, asking plant spirits for help and healing as Rachel is about to embark on her dieta. Rachel apologises, so do I, and we return back to tambo to smoke another mapacho and talk things over.

I give her a massage and we meet dawn meditating in bed next to each other wide awake, listening to smoothing drizzle of light rain. Apart from scraping some capirona bark, the day is free for chilling out and doing nothing at all; isn’t it wonderful?...

In the late afternoon, having rested whole day, I am animated enough to climb the hill and place a call to Gerardo to bring Dina over, carry her if he needs to and if she passes out so much better as she won’t feel the pain. There’s no healing possible for her broken back in Pucallpa, and no one to look after her. I donated few hundred soles to fly her youngest daughter Freysi for that very purpose and was taken aback when Freysi did turn up as I could barely recognise her inside puffed-up doll face she has acquired since leaving for Lima back in July.

Freysi had three kids in tow, including her new-born toddler and was in no position to care for anyone, let alone Dina in her grave condition. It was a joke. While dieting and concurrently looking after Dina we could do much better job and learn the ropes at the same time, as long as we had provisional medicines Dina needed. If Gerardo would rise to the task of delivering Dina, however, I needed to fork out for travel expenses and extra food. Counting the bills, I had some three hundred fifty soles in my possession all up. It wasn’t quite enough, considering we needed veges and plantains for another month of dieta and our own fare back to Pucallpa. Rachel’s face went sour the moment I asked how much cash she had on her. “What for?” she inquired furtively. I studied her for a brief moment. “To bring Dina over. Who do you think is going to pay for it? Santa Claus?”

I could see the internal struggle in Rachel as clear as one sees fish swimming in the bowl of water, going around in futile circles. Sulking, she finally agreed to count her spare cash. She had hundred and fifty soles but a prospect of parting with her money was somewhat similar to Bilbo Baggins’ predicament of passing his precious ring to Frodo and it took a towering shadow of Gandalf the Grey to assist him in doing so.

“That’s all I got,” complained Rachel bitterly, her restless mind compelling her to fidget around. I read the symptoms of internal misery loud and clear. “What’s it worth saving Dina to you?” I asked. “You know perfectly well she ain’t gonna get better in Pucallpa. It’s not the place to heal, not with all those crazy energies going around, infernal noise and dedicated drunkenness especially around Xmas and New Year coming up when people make extra effort to escape their daily torment getting merrily inebriated till they pass into unconscious stupor. We talked about it last night and you yourself put the notion forward. Did you not?” Rachel wouldn’t bulge, locked into her belief of being impoverished from birth cultivated from early age with dogmatic assumption that one must work hard for peanuts saving what crumbs one can to get anywhere in life. Stupendously widespread and dangerously close to religious fanaticism kind of conditioning. Good old Britain is smeared nice and thick all over Aotearoa, its rotten canons implanted in a foreign soil spawn equally unhealthy growth.

“You remember that chapter in Martin Pretchel book where old Chiviliu busts into his house one day and tells him to fork out all the money he’s got on Holy Boy? To buy offerings of candles, perfumes and liquor with all his savings till nothing is left and dance the effigy till he passes out? You got to trust the medicine, and please the deities sacrificing everything, every last cent. Otherwise there’s nothing. If you hold back, no blessings are possible. No healing, no mysteries revealed. No connections made. You got to pay the price to heal Dina just the same. If you want her to get well, that is.” “You ain’t listening to me! I got nothing! I have no money in my bank account! A couple of hundred dollars at the most!” “I heard you the first time,” I throw over my shoulder and stomp out the door, then turn back to remind Rachel of the fact that I gave her the money she had in her wallet in the first place, as well as providing her with tidy wads of cash and paying for all her expenses all along ever since she landed in Peru back year and a half ago. I leave Rachel in silent absorption of the tirade she had nothing to respond to and walk down to the creek, oxygenated enough by the briskness of my departure to holler one last statement to sum it all up: “all your love is worth nothing!”

Once on the hill, I get enough reception bars to place a call to Gerardo and as luck would have it, he happens to be at Dina’s house. I explain to him the nature of my request briefly and he passes me to Dina who is cooking medicine, that is to say giving Freysi instructions how to handle the pots from the hammock. She’s in pain and as always broke, hence doing one and only thing she can to put food on the table – cooking ayahuaska. Her first question is, do I know someone who wants to buy some medicine? Her voice is dead tired, despondency writ all over it. Last time when I spoke to Dina she was in high spirits and super excited about coming to Cachiyacu to do dieta, she was going to make it si o si, even if she had to walk with a stick to haul herself here. This time the notion falls flat on her ears, the sheer impossibility of reaching us spawning a precipice that a phone call cannot bridge. After a silent pause, Dina inquires in a defeated voice how can she make it, asking me to explain. Before I can come up with a response, connection cuts and line goes dead. Redialling Gerardo’s number doesn’t work. I got no reception. Perfect! First week into my dieta, Rachel is in shambles all over again, just before entering tambo to commence her fasting stint. There’s no question of going back to Pucallpa to resuscitate Dina from her desperate state, it’s a task unfit for a mortal considering all Dina’s life is one prolonged self-crucifixion in the name of Our Lord, whoever he may be in her imagination.

Like any faithful simple-minded and well-indoctrinated as a child Christian, she believes in a mighty patriarch who slapped first progeny of a man out of clay admiring his own reflection in the mirror on a lazy afternoon after a busy week of putting the world together and followed up impregnating unsuspecting virgin with Holy Spirit consecutively to sacrifice his only son, Jesus Christ, to a roman mob as a last hope of salvation for all of us sinners compromised by proxy of being born to dutifully stick to prescribed from above commandments or face eternal fires of hell. Since poverty, in the biblical context, is considered as virtue, it explains a lot about Dina’s state of affairs: never charging for her work as a healer, selling medicine way below what it’s worth to harvest and prepare it, living in a dishevelled leaking hovel, etc. etc. And deep inside she is unhappily lamenting her trails and ordeals perpetually presenting themselves through the course of her life in response to the lack of balance. Old Nestor, having fathered multiple offsprings with Mama Dina while repeatedly beating her up in a drunken stupor and taking promiscuous sojourns in the neighbourhood is happily quartering himself in the only dry room in her house, rent free, totally aloof. Grudgingly, Dina puts up with his pestilent and ghostly presence, ignoring sporadic visitations of Nestor’s mistress, an old craggy woman shuffling her way around without salutations or any kind of acknowledgement, for there’s no possibility of Dina communicating her will to the old man whom she wants no more than a piece of broken furniture clogging up the space. He is simply not there to receive the motion, however, being quite literally a lost soul.

In the follow-up conversation with Dina when I brought up the above mentioned, she confirmed it with a single statement that in these three weeks of lying prostrated in her bed paralysed below her waist and no one around to look after her, old Nestor didn’t do as much as bring a glass of water. This says it all, really. You have to be in a state of total blasé or permanently sedated on powerful tranquilisers to pass by Mama Dina’s room every day, catching the glimpse of her incapacitated body flattened by a grave injury and not inquire about her state, having successfully impregnated the woman at least twenty-two times in the past. That’s right, it’s totally bizarre beyond comprehension yet very much an everyday reality.

Speaking of ‘beyond comprehension’, I will have to explain myself to Rachel waiting for me on veranda in a state of desperate agitation in regards to my last hollering remark that her love is worth nothing. Because she loves me! Is her love for me worth nothing?! Without looking I can see her face distorted by grimace of suffrage and inward pain. Well, there’s all kinds of love out there, most common stemming from passion. Passion is a kind of love that easily spills juice of life without consideration and inexorably manifests in a house of flying daggers in the heat of unrequited affection. When entering meditation, however, one becomes dispassionate as boundaries are dissolved in the act of conscious awareness.

Passion is directed towards a person or an object; pure awareness does not differentiate. It imbibes of all fragrance, partakes of every ambience, everything is included. In a state of pure awareness, compassion arises. True love is a love of a Bodhisattva, unknown by uninitiated. We are only learning what love is. Paper bills decorated with portraits of national heroes have no meaningful significance apart from the vested interest of the bargaining mind; love is felt in every fibre of your being, revitalizing you on a cellular level with its healing vibration and harmonic resonance. If you cannot prioritise connection of the beating heart over paper bills, I pity your dieta, my friend. Rachel looks at me with desperation. “I can’t enter my dieta like this.” “Exactly my sentiment. Mapacho?”

As we smoke, Rachel tells me she’s been very apprehensive of the dieta and fearing it at the same time. But of course! Everything is coming up, and you will plough graciously and successfully through everything and it’s good to know exactly what you are dealing with beforehand rather than being ambushed blindly by your unconscious, I tell her. It’s a good sign! “So you still love me?” “Of course I do, I love your spirit of a Jedi warrior princess and honour it with every breath I take in your presence. I always give you nothing short of my very best, believe it or not.” “Will you take care of me while I’m in the tambo?” “Of course I will, this is why I suggested we stagger the dietas in the first place, to look after each other.”

Tabaco grounds the energies, and we hit the sack much relieved and in good faith, empowered by our ability overcome the obstacles and feeling at peace as one should before embarking on a long-awaited spiritual exploit deep inside one’s own being.

* * *

I’m digging steps on the steep stretch of path leading down to the tambo from the house, a pile of freshly cut sticks and old hardwood planks by my side, when a hooting cry announces a visitor from over the hill. It’s Johanka, of course, in her jungle fatigues of slick kaki leggings and buttoned-up Gore-Tex jacket to keep the mosquitos at bay. I greet her in the kitchen. She’s been dieting manchinga for close to six weeks in a tambo seclusion. I get to see a preview of her painting: a yogic couple in cross-legged embrace on top of a giant lotus with equally huge yellow moon in the background that she showed to Rachel couple of days ago when we rocked up to Santuario looking for plantains. She’s returning the visit and inquiring about Gerardo’s medicine. I praise it a great deal, explaining that Gerardo has pure heart and strength of spirit which imparts medicine its vibrant energy and offer Johanka a sample dose to take with her. She pockets the jar and I show her the way down to converse with Rachel.

It takes a good couple of hours before Johanka emerges out of the tambo and strides happily up the path now improved with steps, one of favourite paintings of Rachel’s in hand. A gift, no less! “Lucky you!” I ask to look at the vision of the plant spirit dressed in aquarelle finesse one more time. “It’s a good one”. Johanka is in much better mood, telling me Rachel will share what they talked about and asking for a parting hug which I cannot offer on account of dieta. “I hug you in spirit” I yell after her. “Keep your hug. I don’t want it”. “I can’t! It will chase after you and heat up your tummy with all the glowing goodness of a Russian oven, smell those blueberry pies with golden crust!’ Czech Republic simply doesn’t get cold enough to require laying of brick oven in every longhouse, and I have to briefly educate my friend that those brick ovens are big enough to sleep on top and, once stoked, will keep the house toasty well into the following morning. Ilya Murometz, one of the principal heroes in Russian fairy tales, spent thirty-three years of his life on top of a brick fireplace, considered a lazy arse imbecile by the rest of the village while cultivating his mighty superhuman strength that came in handy defeating dragons and crazy wizards and invading marauders from foreign lands once he got off his internally-heated oven. Ivan the fool was often depicted riding his infamous oven on various impossible errands to win the king’s daughter in marriage hooning around snow-laden wilderness like a derailed steam engine, bellowing smoke as it went.

The content of the conversation Johanka held with Rachel did not altogether escape my attention. As the saying goes, there ain’t no secrets in the medicine family. There is also not many gringos that end up visiting Santuario due to the mayhem and ongoing apocalypse in the world, let alone staying for several months in dieta as was the case with Johanka. It was during our last ceremony with Enrique when our koha donations were still welcome that we heard her sing. It was mesmerizingly beautiful. She really had it, soaring gracefully with readily recognized medicine songs of Danit and chanting bajans to invite tantric spirits worshipped by sadhus.

Unbelievably, Johanka started singing for the first time only a few months prior to her arrival at Santuario. She did have a classical piano background, which explained her well-tuned ear. And she broke down in tears at the end of the first ceremony we had together, having sung her heart out.

Naturally we hugged her and held her in our arms until tremors of sadness subsided. Johanka was one of those individuals who come resolved and dedicated to have their process, seeking true transformation and as such it was inevitable to make friends on a medicine journey that brings people together through sheer resonance of vibrations we all tune into. One thing I noticed that her yin energy was hardly contained and easily spilled out, causing certain magnetism affecting men around her, unchecked and purely pheromonal. She was young and obviously cultivated her energy through meditation, yoga (as it turned out), and singing, thereby channelling and aligning it. I was right to assume she was single. To complicate matters, she was a student of psychology, seeking answers in the past to resolve traumas. Why else would you ride unending carousel of questions and answers never pausing for a single moment to allow any significant movement towards one’s true centre to occur? Analytical mind only takes you to the point where actual healing work is to begin, ninety percent of all illnesses being caused by the mind in the first place. It takes a while for understanding to sink in that one cannot use the same tool to mend things which was employed for breaking them in the first place, the same way a hammer cannot be used to repair a clay pot; ceramic glue and sealant are needed. Likewise healing is beyond the mind, being a movement of the heart, hence ‘healing love’ missing both in ready-made pharmaceutical solutions and psychotherapy which demands distance and separation of psychiatrist from the patient.

I figured Johanka had drifted towards Rachel feeling safe to confide in her, just like a sail boat seeks out safe harbour to mend torn canvas and busted hulls after rough seas. As we smoked mapacho in the wake of Johanka’s visit, Enrique’s name featured prominently in conjunction with her dieta of a powerful manchinga tree. Or rather a stump, for the tree has fallen in the storm some years ago; surprisingly, the sap still flowed in its mighty roots hugging the ground like a giant octopus from Mariana’s trench washed up inexplicably in the neighbouring jungle. Enrique, not the most talkative fellow at the best of times, had given next to no commentary nor feedback in regards to Johanka’s progress in dieta apart from his trademark reassurance expressed in a short concise tranquilo, todo esta bien – chill out, all is good! He was, however, utmost generous with his hugs and their unusually excessive heat made Johanka uncomfortable in his presence. These went together with Enrique’s repeated rhetoric of teaching her trade of a curandero healer she had a calling for that did not materialize in any substantial way while she stuck around in her tambo, frequently waiting on Belisario to deliver the medicine and slapping his forgetful head instead. Having time on her hands to ponder things over, Johanka started questioning integrity of her dieta. Enrique’s closure stirred up subliminal violence of unwelcome intrusion she suffered in her past which was now floating up phantasmagorically to the surface from the unconscious and made her struggle to find support and stay afloat while being vulnerably open to the maestro giving her dieta. Underlying everything was the issue of trust and being compromised by misaligned masculine energy. Two hours that it took to plough through Johanka’s case substantially drained Rachel and I consequently threw up on behalf of Enrique when I drunk aya later on in the night. This is why one does solitary time in the tambo, seeking refuge from other people’s energies and their unruly hurricanes of spinning turmoil and grievances in order to focus on one’s own process and receive deep healing. Being open the healing, how can one close the door on a friend? Temple of the heart is open 24/7, no breaks and no days off. You never know when a pilgrim may show up seeking to smoke a mapacho and make a confession or two.

Johanka was back the following day, unburdened and much lighter compared to her first visit. This time I joined the girls to smoke a big fat mapacho in Rachel’s tambo and talk things over. Having walked out in Enrique’s ceremony, Johanka felt like running away from Santuario for a spell and asked if she could stay with us to integrate her dieta in the last few days before she was due out. Sure thing, we could accommodate her on a spare bunk, but it would much more beneficial for her to face the music and finish her process where she was, claiming back her power of scared feminine. It was an ideal opportunity for her and Enrique at the same time to grow and evolve through clarity and all due respect.

Enrique, like every Peruvian, was subject to Peruvian conditioning stemming from Spanish oppression and despotism that plagued the land for the last half millennia ever since Pissarro murdered noble Inca to his heart’s content, establishing a state of slavery on the ruins of their great empire. Shooting dead an indigenous person was no different from shooting a dog as recently as two generations back. Heavy religious indoctrination came in the wake of conquistador’s invasions, poisoning through condemnation of original sin the fountain of vital energy involved in procreation, implanting a sense of guilt and shame whenever natural impulses of the body were aroused. This is why nakedness is nowhere seen in Peru, only savages from the jungle are privileged to bathe naked, having escaped the fate of the nation hiding out in the thick of the forest. The rest are dutifully wearing long sleeves and shorts going down to the river for a splash. Same awkwardness permeates public festivities inevitably involving large quantities of beer to facilitate overcoming of inhibitions and eardrum splitting Cumba music rendering any possible communication utterly futile, apart from fuelled by liquor monosyllabic shouting. Lyrics to popular tunes are similarly infantile, praising inebriation as one and only cure of a broken heart trampled upon by the unfaithful beloved. Being immersed in a culture thus handicapped, the only breath of fresh air comes from visiting gringos who have left their inhibitions behind and are happily treading tantrica’s paths, thanks to Woodstock, free love and the beatnik’s trail blazing the way back in sixties. To understand Enrique, one needed to understand where he comes from in the first place and factor it into consideration, accounting for fact that he does run one of the best medicine centres in the Peruvian jungle and readily shares his reverence towards plant medicines upholding them as true maestros both in healing and teaching aspired disciples. And as far as myself and Rachel are concerned, our private paradise in the protected jungle territory of Cachiyacu with hot steaming vapours wafting up to the veranda of the rent-free house from down below is a testimony of Enrique’s open heart and good nature which is worth all our support and prayers. Last thing I wanted to do was to be blamed for stealing Johanka in the last days prior to her departure. Ridiculous as it sounds, I could easily become the scapegoat for unrequited affection be bestowed on the young lady.

I relayed this much to Belisario and Mariela next morning on my visit to Santuario in the absence of Enrique, who I came to see regarding the matter, a proverbial bag of farina in my hand brought as a peace offering.

Johanka ended up staying in Santuario to complete her process and she had one more ceremony with Enrique who returned later in the day to drink the medicine. She held her presence and accepted her ‘sung’ mapacho at the conclusion of the ceremony, informing maestro she nurtured no amorous feelings towards him. Enrique laughed, reassuring Johanka of his friendliness, which wasn’t exactly the response she had expected in calling him out but she took it in stride and parted ways with a hug and well wishes, empowered by the experience that ultimately taught her to trust her intuition above all else, for her true maestro is to be found inside herself. Our paths with Johanka are not dissimilar; in fact we are walking the same path of recognizing our luminous essence, being nudged ever closer to our centre of being, our intrinsic palpitations and our heartbeat that give motion to expressions of love in our art, our music, poetry and emerge to manifest in every aspect of our daily interactions. True wealth of spirit grows exponentially and multiplies every time you share it.

Rachel, having to rise to the occasion in meeting Johanka in her unsettled state at the time, has benefited from doing so as she had to resolve her own issues pertaining to traumatic relationships in order to hold space for her fellow diatero. One is always apprehensive about entering a dieta with master plants, but it’s a total surprise to behold the challenges coming at you at odd angles, never expected, totally unpredictable. On my way back from Santuario, talking about unexpected, I suddenly got three bars of reception and was able to check my messages at last. One was from Egor, advising me they don’t use calendars as there’s one already hanging on Deva’s wall in the living room, and they are going to pass my Xmas gift to David who took over as Santa from my mother as was conceived per my original designation, after she turned cold turkey on me refusing to communicate or, god forbid, distribute my calendar gifts to share with dear friends and accompany their new year day by day as they flipped through the monthly layout of carefully selected epicness from mine and Rachel’s journey so far prominently featuring high places and glacier caves, abode of condors and undefeated soaring spirits. In no two words, it told me that the boys neither value nor understand my ongoing love affair with Rachel who embellished wild landscapes with her graceful presence and this rejection primarily issued from my mother. Right after my departure for Peru in June 2021 Rachel took to visiting Deva’s place, painting the boys room and gardening for long hours until Deva become uncomfortable with Rachel’s unconditional generosity fuelled by affection towards me. My mother having become used to making deals and contracts could not reciprocate. Our immediate heart connection perplexed her, for she was receiving no satisfactory to her judgment answer to the question ‘why are you doing this?’ (implicitly, what are you intending to get out of your voluntary contributions apart from being around her son’s home base to feel his presence?) Deva insisted on paying Rachel with a symbolic fifty dollar bill which Rachel in turn refused to accept until it become obvious that the Great Wall of China is not to be circumnavigated and the bribe must be accepted. The real reason for the stand-off, however, was my request to lend Rachel my van Deva was looking after for me, which she flatly refused to do. Rachel’s car broke down and she was strained in the midst of the lockdown without a vehicle when she asked my mother for the keys to the van my mother wasn’t using anyway, and which didn’t belong to her, Deva came up with a ridiculous argument that since the van wasn’t insured, Rachel wouldn’t be able to pay me if she crashed it! Consequently when Rachel turned up with an offering of her homemade organic cake to say good-bye before embarking on the journey into the unknown following in the footsteps of her beloved, my mother barred the doorway till Serafim lent his helpful hands to welcome the treat having got the wind - or rather the aroma - of culinary delight on offer. Having had no luck in love affairs of her own, my mother treated with grave suspicion my heart connections. She insisted I spend four years in a relationship before she’d accept my beloved, telling me I’m welcome back anytime, but not Rachel till four years has lapsed, as if I had a choice to split my heart and affection in two separate containers in order not to mix my feelings between love for my family and love for my woman of choosing. I don’t know what Deva was telling the boys, but it obviously rubbed off on them, hence their rejection.

I couldn’t help but feel wounded reading Egor’s Iaconic message, a steel blade entering under my ribs; the calendar was made for them first and foremost, to share our adventures, our smiling faces and our love for each other with Rachel. I was gonna ask which month they liked the most but there was no point as my previous five messages to Egor went unanswered.

Serafim had his phone confiscated by Deva after his credit card fraud and it left me with one option only, to call my mother. Surprisingly, my call was taken. After some fumbling around, I heard Serafims’s voice on the other end. Not a minute into the conversation, having dispensed was rudimentary greetings and salutations, he informed me they were having breakfast and could I call them later. I had to explain I was on a hilltop in the middle of the jungle getting bitten by mosquitoes descending on my like tiny replicas of Darth Vader’s battle fighters freshly spilled out from their mothership, and that is far from every day that we are blessed with signal to make communication possible at all. Besides, it was nearly two months since I had a chance to speak to him and brought me joy to hear his voice. How you doing anyway? Any luck to pay your debt back? Yes, he was only hundred fifty dollars short of reclaiming his phone – good news, he must have worked hard, earning seven hundred in the weekends chasing after sheep at Ross’s farm. Proud of you! I see you don’t use calendars and there is one in Deva’s living room… I heard that much from Egor. Was he reading the letters though? What letter? The one I sent for Xmas, handwritten on five pages with a picture of a stump and a guy walking away with a Xmas tree. ‘Who stole the xmas’ picture. Nope, never got it, never read it. Merry xmas to you too. I got to go. Alright pal, I’ll send it again right now, and I’ve drawn you a b-day picture too, which Rachel is painting today, so you’ll get it as soon as she’s done. Love you lots, hugs to Egor and Deva if she’s open to receive it. The call disconnects, leaving me with overwhelming feeling of sadness and loss, my heart aches. I leave a voice message to my mother, stumbling through truncated delivery of what I’ve been feeling as of late in regards to her crossing me out from her list of friends and acquaintances with one singles stroke of screaming outrage, full of such spite and condemnation you felt like being flattened by an oncoming freight truck listening to her punch-line seven-second voice recording removed by the breadth of the Pacific Ocean, no less, from the original seismic activity that produced it in the first place. Your hand automatically goes to wipe spit from your face, as if a spray of raw saliva could be delivered in its airborne wetness over a cell-phone network. My mother’s capacity for spitefulness astounds me to no end. It used to make me angry, nowadays it just makes me sad, because there is no need to dig a war trench and pile up barbwire of callous unspoken accusations which one cannot possibly navigate without profound apology which in turn in likewise impossible to materialize in all sincerity because the feeling of having done wrong is not there in the first place. Apologizing for something you haven’t done is phony. In one of his discourses Osho remarks that unenlightened man knows nothing of love and of the heart; we’re living and speaking from our heads and know everything about hate for the simple reason that if one doesn’t dwell in one’s heart, hate is the only thing one will know. Society is lubricated by hate, circulating cold venom in its veins to control an individual, rendering man a cog in the reactionary mechanism of ‘healthy’ competition’ and achievement. That inevitably fuels conflict and spills out in violence, murder and war; hence the need for barbwire and trenches.

What can you do? Spew out your guts and march on, enlightened by the loss of rubbish towards the bright portal of medicine and blissful joy of existence, singing praise to the masters. Heart has its own justice, denying logic and worship of social dogma that tears one away from the source. As far as healing is concerned, negativity raises toxicity levels in the body to the determent of living tissues and eventual failure of organs. It is a slow suicide manifested as sickness and cancerous growth consuming humanity on planetary scale that no injections can fix. Purifying one’s heart is thus paramount.

Upon returning to our private paradise Cachiyacu, I delivered myself into the warm embrace of beloved Rachel awaiting me in her tambo, radiant and light after five days of fasting and tuning in with plant spirits. After a brief recount of my phone conversations and news from the family front, I told her she is the closest and dearest companion to me on this crazy journey and how much I love and appreciate her presence, kneeling down in front of her in blissful surrender and feeling truly happy at home. She stroked my hair, warmth spilling and overflowing out hearts in saturated silence, the palpable truth of it pulsating in our veins. Rachel consoled me and showed her progress in colouring my drawing intended as a birthday present to Serafim. I’d be a fool to send him money, or buy skateboards and scooters as I’ve done in the past, since he’s already been busy buying his own presents with stolen credit cards and I didn’t wish to encourage him. Knowing his love to speeding vehicles, I envisioned drawing him a jungle-mobile starting with a solid log that inexplicably and mysteriously evolved into an elegant tricycle powered by nothing less than Free Spirit, which would deliver adventurous young man to friendly tribes in the neighbourhood and beyond while I sang my joy overlooking his locomotion from Cloud 9 floating leisurely above the landscape on a sun-shinny day. A splash of aquarelle magic artistically applied by Rachel made my heart sing with joy, infusing ink pen bare bone drawing with living flesh and tenderness. Inspired by Rachel’s contribution to explore the vision further, I reclined into the hammock and following lines come out:

Tidy savings in his pocket

First he thought to build a rocket

But upon a second thought

Rockets cost an awful lot

He was aiming for the Moon

Wishing to be there soon

(one cannot procrastinate when it comes to perfect date!)

Never fond of compromise

He came up with a device

Using his imagination

As a tool in the creation

He constructed whole lot

From his brightest loving thought

Powered by Breath of Life

It makes one truly feel alive

As you ride through countryside

On your way to friendly tribe

Comfy seat and handle bars

Desert-coloured like old Mars

Friction-free design that lasts

Watch them wheels kick up the dust

Speeding forward with a grin

'Cause instead of gasoline

Strength of Spirit From Within

Is what makes the engine spin

Lover Boy you know the art

How to wear up-front your heart

And seeing how bright you shine

I am up on cloud 9

Come and visit me sometime

Sing some songs, compose some rhymes

Now that you have the means (and I know you got the beans)

In this very incarnation

Let us taste the jubilation

I shall wait for you my friend

To see this birthing to the end

Which is really a beginning

But I know you get my meaning

Tending tender heart-felt growth

Cherish gifts the stars bestow

Many blessings on your way

And may this verse light up your day

Hooray!

If Makete Roesch of Mad Hallelujah takes my request for providing a tune to the couplets seriously, Serafim will have the whole package to remember his 13th birthday! Perhaps I should have also sent it to Craig Denham and his Alpaca Social Club with the similar request as Craig has great appreciation for all things whimsical.

“How are your boys”, Rachel asks “did you reply yet?” That would imply reading my letter first to precipitate an answer. I asked them to take their time and meditate on the nature of friendship which requires a mutual motion of sharing as so far it’s been one-way traffic. Circulation implies gaining and waning of tidal currents; without reciprocal interest heart affairs are meaningless. That was the main point I bought up in my message trying to resuscitate the connection with the kids which I felt was dwindling away irrevocably. There was no sense in engaging the sentiments any further; they were old enough to make their own choice which world they wished to inhabit: one where they had me as a friend or one without. Me being there in the flesh alone was meaningless as I plainly refused to play parental game of conditional affection and bargaining to stave off enough time till they graduate into adulthood to run the gauntlet of ego refinement and struggling to scale up social pyramid only to find a soulless vista of utter disillusionment at the top. Nothing fails like success indeed. I’d like to save them standing on a roof ledge of a high-rise looking down at toy size cars in the parking lot below, a suicide note in my pocket stating impotence of the mind to comprehend any meaningful design behind human endeavour, completely divorced from the comforting joy of belonging. One can extend the hand, but it’s up to the individual to reach out and take it. Choice is yours, just like in the address to neo by Morpheus. And at the end of the day we are all individuals endowed with strength of spirit and ageless soul that chooses its own journey through many lifetimes to learn the art of shinning and radiating warmth from within. Friendship inspires warm affection through movement of the heart, it ain’t a one-way street. There’s no road signs and no speed limit either.

* * *

“…if you can’t look someone in the eye after a ceremony, it says a lot.”

“I gave everything last night and it wasn’t enough!”

But of course; I get up and leave kitchen table before Princess Cuddlepants has a chance to finish her sentence. She’s been ghosting around all morning, her body moving but there’s nobody inside. You can count on the princess to wake up in the same oppressed state she went to bed with and unable to do anything about it, just rolling in the mud of the day and being abrasive. Makes you feel like you’re sharing space with a disgruntled flatmate who silently accuses you of nicking her extra virgin olive oil and raiding condiments from her pantry shelf but she has no solid proof to present in a court of law. An altogether unpleasant state of affairs, much more so since it’s your one and only beloved companion you’ve been sharing your life and adventures with we are talking about.

How many times the princess apologised for being stuck in her mind is beyond recounting. I just shrug my shoulders now, saying, as always, you got nothing to be sorry for. It takes lifetimes to vacate the mind for good, if one is to believe rhetoric of sages. And more you struggle to fight your mind, longer it takes. It’s like throwing more sticks on the fire instead of watching it and letting it die out, doing nothing, on the contrary. Responding to conflict with fighting is so deeply entrenched in the unconscious that one has great difficulty simply chilling out and doing nothing at all, enjoying vibrations and watching one’s breath going in and out over and over and over again. Knowing thyself is all about realising that mind is a non-existent entity, a total fabrication and any effort to focus on it in order to avoid getting hopelessly caught in its perpetual and ultimately sickening merry-go-around ride with missing stop breaks is bound to fail. Same as chasing after a rainbow’s end that is illusory in nature, a continually shifting mirage.

Besides, all manifested phenomena is subject to decay, disassembly and recycling of elementary particles brought together into alignment by a magic wand of a greater universal intelligence to perform its dance and sing its part in the symphony of existence and fade into the background hum whence it came from.

“If you can’t give up affection for your stubborn resistance to dropping your ego, you will be better off with someone who is not such a heartless bastard as I am to tell you these things straight up,” I suggest to Princess Cuddlepants eyeing me intently across the table. “I’ve taken you as far as I could and without your willingness to evolve it’s a desperately hopeless affair.” “But you are not a heartless bastard!” “I can’t help but feel like one. You’ve been on my case ever since I’ve given you feedback from last night. Likewise I gave you everything and my best ain’t good enough. It’s a given, I make mistakes and say wrong things but you don’t have it in your heart to forgive me either. There’s no point dwelling in this stalemate of misery.” “You want to break up?” “No! We can dance away singing merrily with deep gratitude to each other and bestowing many blessings.” “But you said we were connected by an umbilical cord…” “Sure thing. I’ll love you always, regardless whether or not you are loving or hating me, happy or upset with me, near or far away from me. This is what ‘unconditional love’ means. If all you know is passion that turns against the object of your affection the moment your demands and expectations are not met, you won’t know where I’m coming from. Understanding of love varies from person to person; true love stems from impersonal compassion that transcends the boundaries of the object to include the whole existence. Until you start listening to what I am saying instead of just hearing my words bounce around your head like renegade criminals to be apprehended and dealt with accordingly by a higher authority that knows better, there’s no way for any understanding to dawn, let alone any illumination to penetrate the darkness and impart clarity you’ve been asking for all morning. All I can do is reiterate for the third time what I’ve already told you twice last night and you still ain’t gonna get it because your heart isn’t open to receive me. This is how transmission works, heart-to-heart. These words are meaningful to me because my beating heart is right behind them. The moment they leave my mouth, they become empty shells. Their meaning is supplied by your heart the moment they reach you, decompressed and deciphered by your personal experience. If your heart isn’t open, communication isn’t possible. It is just draining me and makes me super tired, a waste of energy and breath. This is why I say ‘centre yourself’. One look at your face tells me everything. Your drooping shoulders and abrasive gestures speak volumes. The crease of worry between your eyebrows, your downcast gaze betray the inner turmoil you are in. They make you look old and haggard. Why perpetuate this misery? I’m not interested in it in any way. It’s ugly. It impedes the medicine work. Instead of going deep into the healing and the mystery of working with plants, we remain shuffling back and forth on the surface. Furthermore, it undermines a prospect of intimacy in the near future because once garden of love has been trampled upon it must be cultivated again and it takes time to sprout new growth. Flowers are delicate and vulnerable and one must tread carefully not to damage them. After a stampede like this, what do you expect? It’s foolish and destructive. Instead of exploring the depth of our connection, we find ourselves like two total strangers in arranged convivence with each other, completely circumstantial. What Osho refers to as ‘a graveyard of marriage’. Once we murder each other emotionally and spiritually, all that’s left is two empty shells going through the motions of living together for convenience’s sake, unable to let go of our vested interest. You cook, I buy groceries kinda thing. Or paying mortgage on the house for a dozen years, try and turn the clock back on all the hard work. Still worse if we had kids together. The institution of marriage is deeply entrenched in our subconscious, one doesn’t need to be married on paper to be a subject to conditioning that keeps you tethered nice and tight on a short length of rope like domesticated animal, milking you for what it’s worth. I find it ironic that a receipt of purchasing a fridge and shared possession of a washing machine serves as admissible proof of love for the immigration purposes in the Department of Internal Affairs. All they want is to see you pay electricity bill from common bank account as far as being together is concerned. Not the love letters, not the sweet smiles, not the laughter shared. Forget about storming immigration office in full bridal regalia wielding bouquet of roses fresh from civil union ceremony held with a singular purpose of pleading to extend the visa of your beloved. Been there, done that...” I sigh. Rachel is silent. “Anyway. I’ve been giving you my best every step of the way, and since it’s not enough for you to open your heart to me, it seems logical to dance away in good faith that the Universe will provide the companion who will be better suited to you.” “But I love you…” Rachel protests desperately. “Yes you said that much. Osho has a word he’s rather fond of whenever he refers to people who say one thing and mean exactly the opposite… ‘phony’. Like last night when you were ‘giving’ me a mapacho long put out in the ashtray I couldn’t possibly see it in the dark. You were ‘giving’ it to me the same way you say you ‘love’ me now. There’s no corresponding feeling, no warmth, no opening in it. It’s hollow.” Tears that have been welling up in Rachel’s eyes finally flow over the brim and start rolling down her cheeks. Her composure softens and melting takes over which I feel by proxy of that very umbilical cord connecting us, warming up my chest from inside. “I’m sorry… mind is so strong… I love you very much, Platt.” “I know you do.” “You said you loved me even more after the episode last night… how is it possible?!” “Because I know you always come through in the end. It may take an odd ice age or two, but you always come through. I know your essence, your beauty and your potential, perhaps more than you do… and even if you didn’t come through for me, the kind of love that is worth having comes with no demands and no conditions imposed on the other person. You don’t divorce you kids when they wreak havoc and cause you grief. You don’t throw a kitten out when it pees on your rug. You deal with the damage and clean up because you love them.” “I don’t know why I can’t get it and just be in my heart, it’s so fucking stupid…” “Don’t apologise. You have nothing to be sorry for. You are going through a process and it takes time. I’m so glad to have you back, Rachel. If it wasn’t for the dieta I’d be inclined to make love to you right now.” “But you said we can’t be intimate after all this…” “Let’s say love has its own rules, it is magic and healing… it defies ‘common’ sense.”

Ironically, we didn’t even plan to drink the previous day. What happened was, we went to Santuario first thing in the morning to inquire if Enrique put money on my phone as I asked him. We found him in cheerful mood eating his breakfast in the staff kitchen. Naturally, we got to talking about our dieta as Rachel’s hands have been going numb during the night and her knees painfully swelling up. It got so bad that two days prior to our visit she could barely walk. Upon hearing details of our protocol, Enrique shook his head and told us that you don´t drink capirona and ajosacha in the same dieta: “It´s like pouring petrol into the mixture on which your heart engine runs. It makes it explosive. Two incompatible medicines can cause all sorts of damage in the body when they start fighting each other.” Of course. This is what is referred to as ‘jealousy’ of plant spirits… “You should have asked me beforehand.” Right. We would have, if you were around, maestro. “What have you been eating?” Soon as we describe our simple diet, we find out legumes are not to be eaten when dieting capirona. I knew that much about oje; oje is a powerful parasite killer and strips your stomach clean. It turns out that since beans ferment, it contributes to swelling. Good to know. So we crossed our dieta, once again.

Walking back to Cachiyacu I can’t help but feel like a beaten-up contender with a black eye and a swollen bleeding lip after a prolonged bout in the ring, losing by a marginal point to his opponent. Except I am the opponent I’ve been fighting against.

By the time we cook our rice and chapo back at the house it’s already midday and I put the notion forward to sit with the medicine same night to reconcile our dieta. Rachel accepts. Fast-forward to the nightfall; the medicine space doesn’t fully open until we saunter over to the rocks, but when it does a couple of really beautiful icaros come through. I’m over the moon, singing praise to plant spirits we’ve been tapping into and realigning healing action of ingested barks so that they work harmoniously together. Whenever one asks sincerely and whole-heartedly, spirits oblige. It is this unspoken pact that delivers the magic if one surrenders in admonition of one’s need for help from the spiritual realm. I let Rachel have the prime spot I’ve been occupying bathing in vapours and proceed to purge surprisingly deep stuff from the pit of my stomach that leaves crunchy mineral debris in my mouth. This often happens when plants are clearing passages in the wake of channelling a particularly powerful song as their gift of cleansing to be accepted with grace and gratitude. One feels lighter, as if bumped up to a higher vibrational level.

In due time, having rested in meditation, I join Rachel who’s singing next to a small gushing waterfall where I left her. Her pitch is harmonious and strong at the start of her breath but she struggles to maintain her investment at the end, compensating with unnecessarily forced effort as one does when not being able to remain in the heart and heart alone. I join in, humming alongside a companion tune to guide her back home to gentle vibration of love. We are born out of love and if we die in love it is a life well lived; similarly, each breath is a complete cycle of birthing and dying.

For a spell it feels that it works, but instead of harmonizing with me Rachel starts pumping more breath into the struggle, fighting phantoms of her past and going further astray until I turn up the volume and start singing an icaro with measured cadence calling her back to base to the warm embrace of a beating heart. Instead of following, she runs with desperation in the opposite direction, feeling the power but using it to fuel her crusade for justice the way Joan of Arc did when leading subjugated France into a bloody slaughter against its invading oppressors from over the ditch. I admire the spirit of rebellion in her legendary figure a great deal, but al fin de dia violent heroics ain’t a feminine domain, uncalled-for on otherwise tranquil and idyllic night by the hot springs with tepid breath of medicinal vapours rising all around, dark silhouettes of lush plantain leaves moving in the soft breeze and shining stars above merrily twinkling. Once you invest energy into the song, you want to see it flower and blossom with sweet aroma and partake of the fruits of your labour. I resort to calling Don Felipe and ancestral Shipibo lineage he represents, marching home with upbeat tempo of his legendary icaros and singing of nourishment of the land we cultivate each God-given morning to bring wholesome goodies to our table. Even that call failed and I went silent, seeing impossibility of stopping derailed train driven by Rachel’s run-away gusto off the cliff, which is exactly what happened as I stood on a side and watched her plunge off the edge with no safe landing in sight. Her sheer momentum did it. She squeezed last few moans out of her vocal cords and faded to silence. “Why did you stop?” she asked me. “Well… there was no point to continue, really. I just can’t keep up with you.” “What do you mean?” “Your energy is way too strong and… unsustainable. I tried to guide you back but you weren’t listening.” “But I was listening!” “No. There’s a world of difference between hearing and listening. When you listen, you tune in with your heart and vibrations are harmonized. I tried my best, giving you everything I got, and it wasn’t enough.” “So you didn’t like my song?” Princess Cuddlepants complained and followed by protesting, “I also gave it everything I had. I was in my heart!” “No you weren’t. When you are coming from your heart, your vibrations are harmonious. You disappear, letting spirit take over…” “I did!” “If you did, I wouldn’t open my mouth in the first place. I’d be mesmerized and enchanted. Which is what happens when spirit is doing the singing.” “So you didn’t like it!” Jeepers. And so it goes, circles inside circles. Asking for explanation and unable to digest any of it. Sighing, once again I summon diligent patience: “I did like it. But you were stumbling and I started singing along to help you, give you more energy.” “If you didn’t like it, I don’t know what else I can do!” dramatic desperation in her voice, “I gave it everything, straight from the heart…” A pause follows. “…can you explain what you mean?” I assess the chances of penetrating to a meaningful depth. “Not here. I need a mapacho. Can we please go to the house and I promise I will come back to you?” “No, this is important!” “I understand that, that’s why I promise to deliver.” Rachel doesn’t bulge. “Come, before we get punished.” “What for?” Her eyes become rounded with apprehension of having done wrong. “For procrastinating without moving from the spot when we could be smoking mapacho, of course! C’mon, let’s say good-bye to the waters and go. Please?” Reluctantly, she makes a move.

I have to deliver same rhetoric second time just further upstream, reclining nakedly on the rocks like a vagrant philosopher transported all the way to a DIY paradise of Cachiyacu from one of the Greek mystery schools of old fabled times with similarly dejected reception as enjoyed by Socrates at the end of his days from Rachel who wouldn’t let go of her afflicted feelings being demonstrably hurt by my feedback. On my end I feel too darn good to argue, filled to the rim by the vibrations of the plants in my body activated by the icaros sung and the magic of vapours flowing through me. I take the climb up the steep path with pleasant ease and agility of a twenty-year old, full of vitality and strength I haven’t enjoyed in a long time.

Finally inside the house, I light the promised mapacho by the yellow light of a candle. Rachel is staring at me expectantly, suggesting I come through with apology for corrupting Roman youth or down a healthy dose of hemlock. “I can tell you same thing for the third time, but there’s no point as you are not prepared to listen.” “I am listening!” Rachel instantly injects. “No you are not. You are all pins and needles inside. You have to be in your centre in order to listen. And what I can tell you does not matter in the least anyway because nobody can help you to know thyself. Being elevated and dissolved in the vibrations of singing gives one such joy and contentment that no matter how others remark on it, the glory can’t be taken away from you so easily. It hangs around like a shimmering areole depicted in crumbling frescos, making you bulletproof to passing of judgement – even from closest people to you, boyfriends included. “But you told me you felt I wasn’t in my heart. And I was totally in my heart, giving it everything and if this is not enough I don’t know how you can love me…” There’s no use saying anything; I blow out the candle and we sit in silence a good minute. “May I have some mapacho?” I finally ask, having waited long enough for the offer. “Sure, I am giving it to you.” Rachel’s voice comes from cold, uninviting distance. I try to find her hand in the dark, it is nowhere near being extended. Both of her hands turn out to be clasped under her chin upon close forensic investigation. “Well, here are your hands,” I report, “but no mapacho.” “It’s in the ashtray.” “I see.” I don’t actually see anything as mapacho went out last winter and hasn’t sprouted any new growth. I turn the headlamp on and relight it, take a long puff and savour forthcoming departure to the land of Morpheus. It will be first ceremony ever that we didn’t pull through into the light and harmony, ever.

One can only do so much for the other… sometimes you just have to call it a day, fold your hands on your heart and go to sleep praying for the New Dawn and New Light of understanding to descend by Grace From Above. Amen!

Yeah… I know, the correct way to put is petitioning for New Dawn as one cannot pray for anything without stretching a hand in expectant hand-out, no matter what deity is being called upon. Prayer in itself is but a vibration activated by movement of rising energy being an expression of exalted state of cosmic union that requires no forms of linguistic address whatsoever. Given enough pressure to spark up the spirit, divine union is happening inside each and every pilgrim on the medicine path, an apex of all love affairs manifest in the entwining dance of masculine and feminine energies. Considering that life provided us with impeccably functioning and complex beyond imagination workings of a human body, building it up from just two tiny cells too small to be seen by the naked eye, healing is a matter of relatively simple readjustment in the existing structure of cells requiring much less energy than what it took to assemble it in the first place. All one needs to do is to be open to receive it and join the cosmic revelry that inspires birdsong, blossoming of flowers and sparkling rainbows refracted in every dewdrop at dawn.

* * *

…I come back with a bucket of washed clothing and a bunch of plantains flung over my shoulder, announcing myself: “maestro Chapo is back with bananas!” Rachel tells me chapo is ready and I ask her to give me a hand hanging the washing out. I’m hungry. Nearly didn’t make it down to do the chores, which is normally my favourite part of the day. I was tired to drink the medicine in the first place, after two days of chain-sawing and wood chopping, and weakness only gets worse after a night of almost no sleep. Having finished decorating clothesline with ayahuaska-stained shirts and stripy socks perforated by holes for extra aeration, I notice that my pillow case has jumped up a plank and I lower it down back to where I had it in the first place. It cause instantaneous outburst from Rachel, “why did you do that?! Can’t you see I put it there?” Her sudden explosion leaves me dumbfounded for a second; you just don’t expect stepping on a landmine strolling through a park on a pleasant afternoon, gripping a French stick bread in your hands as a crumbling offering to the duck escadra (flotilia) when kaboom!... man… not again… “Why do you always have to change the way I do things?! (meaning: whatever I do is not good enough for you) “Rachel, calm down please. It is rather hypocritical for you to say that, considering I simply returned it to where I hung it to begin with.” Rachel does about-turn and double-marches herself into the kitchen at the back of the house, immersed in her justified indignation. I give her a minute and follow suit, salivating at the thought of roasted plantains and a cup of hibiscus tea. “Are you back yet?” I inquire, scanning her composure for signs of benevolence. It tells me everything at a glance: Rachel is cooking up one of her internal storms that will tear up the landscape in a minute and there’s no way of avoiding it. “You always change the way I do things,” she reiterates herself and steps it up: “Nothing I do is good enough for you!” “Rachel, this is ridiculous. You are creating drama out of nothing in the first place, and being completely unfair in the second place. There’s no reason for any of it!”

“I hung it closer to the sun and you changed it!” She is on a runaway train of derailed emotions, being pushed crashing through anything and everything by her own momentum. I step aside to let it through. “Look, you are winding yourself up unnecessarily and I’d rather not be a part of it. I am neither frustrated nor do I want to argue with you. Let’s just drop the silly thing and enjoy the chapo...” “You are being an arsehole cutting me off all the time…” “Shut up! Shut up!” I yell in rapid double-tap at full volume, a cup of hot chapo in my hands as tasty as Matrix gloop served to the crew of Nebuchadnezzar, containing a mash of mashed green plantain and nothing else. Sheer force of my breath shook Rachel to a state of immediate apprehension. Real anger has that effect, leaving one trembling from head to toe as if one has been bucketed with cold water. We both became apprehensive but for different reasons. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scream. Shall I serve you some chapo?” “Yes, please.”

We sit down opposite each other as always, a stone hotplate and a quickly dwindling fariña in a plastic jar between us. Barely two mouthfuls into her breakfast, my princess is once again on my case, swinging back to action like a broken pendulum. “I'm done with being on the receiving end of your hypocritical accusations and insults,” I tell her. “What do you mean?” “You don't even remember what you said a minute ago? Jesus, Rachel,” I look her in the eye, considering my options. The gap between us is immense and unbridgeable. At least not linguistically; yet this is what is demanded of me by the Battle Warrior Princess Cuddlepants from her side of the precipice, to erect a verbal traverse, her Prancing Pony snorting fire from its furry nostrils, eyes ignited with unfriendly sparks and no trace of soft-toy cuteness whatsoever. The futility of trying and my exhaustion leave me no option but to resort for bringing in the cavalry of my own, borrowed for the occasion from Armageddon’s chariot. I wait till silence is pressurised into palpable heartbeat and expel my breath into the air between us, “Fuck you, FUCK YOU! How does that feel?” The space is ozonised at once as happens in the wake of a lightning discharge. “I don't understand...” “You dumb fucking bitch! Here, I said it, feast on that if you will.”

Rachel is flushed from behind the table in an instant, leaving me staring at hardly touched cup of chapo and half-eaten plantain. There is no point denying what just happened; relationship doesn't get uglier than that. Total loss of respect and no turning back. I willingly took the plunge, knowing that one has go through and beyond one’s personal Armageddon in plain consciousness. There is no getting around it or swiping it under the carpet; no dancing away from it, either. One must transcend oneself. The great value of having a partner is that a partner presents a mirror to catch a glimpse of both the beauty and ugliness of human condition. By accepting them both, one can go beyond towards totality of existence. At least that's what I remembered from one of the Osho's talks. Perhaps I missed the point.

A minute later, I come around to the veranda to ask Rachel if she can join me from a mapacho to talk about things. She accepts. “First thing first. I'm not going to apologize. I meant what I said.” “You meant it?! Oh, my God! You called me a fucking bitch, and you meant it!” Rachel's eyes are swivelling around her moist eye circuits, short of popping out completely. It's a promised Armageddon come. The judgment day is upon us, kind of look, screaming out, I can't believe it! Well, you better believe it. “We've come to the point of significance here. Whatever it might mean, things ain't going to be the same anymore. “Dumb fucking bitch,” I correct her. “Dumb fucking bitch,” she repeats, savouring every word with decadent despicability. “And you meant it! Dumb fucking bitch...” “Dumb stands for foolishness. Fucking digs down to the base level and the fountain of vital energy. Bitch is in reference to being stubborn.” “Dumb fucking bitch,” Rachel is enchanted with a phrase beyond imagination. “That's right. You can play it in your head over and over as a broken gramophone record until it becomes permanently etched into your skin. Or better still, tattoo it on your forehead backwards so you can see it spelled out in indelible ink so you can see it every time you look in the mirror.” Tobacco is strong and fresh. I exhale a plume of wispy bluish smoke and watch it swirl up to the ceiling in spinning eddies, progressively getting thinner and eventually fading out into the ether. “Mapacho?” Rachel takes a glowing stick with her delicate fingers. “Swearing is an expression of underlying energy. Don't look at me like that. I'm just honest enough to swear wholeheartedly, letting it come out. I'm not taking any of your garbage you'd like to dump on me. Never have and never will. You know perfectly well you instigated the whole thing and being stubborn as you are, pushed it over the edge. Some sort of suicidal instinct. I'm not a goddamn saint, however, to remain calm and placid like a Hindu cow and just watch it. Neither am I enlightened. Besides, it is my washing and my pillowcase. And it's me who is going to sleep on it at the end of the day. Not you. You got no leg to stand on, giving me grief over your inflated ego suffering a demise, as far as I'm concerned. So we did go over the edge because you can't stop pushing it. It's getting pretty destructive, undermining all medicine work. And as much as I love you and appreciate your gifts and talents, I can't deal with these episodes on a daily basis, especially straight after ceremony. You must choose between your attitude and me. It's your choice. You must drop one.” “So you'd prefer we break up?” “Not at all. But I can't live with destructive energy of your ego. Your choice. Which one is going to be?”

Half an hour later, I'm having a cup of tea in the kitchen when Rachel comes in and plonks down on the bench across the table. She's been meditating in a tambo. Her features softened and her appearance calm. “I'm sorry, please forgive me. It takes me a lot longer to see my mind clearly and catch up with you as you are so much faster than me.” I sigh in relief as the tightness I wasn't aware of releases my stomach. “You know, even if we follow our dieta through perfectly, eating what we are supposed to eat and observing the protocols, it's still going to be crossed every time because you can't stop arguing and fighting me for more than a day. It's utterly futile and depleting on emotional and mental level. A complete waste of time, in other birds.” “I know…” “Might as well be clear about it. Without honesty, admitting where you are, there is no progress possible.” “I'm changing, Platt. I'm making progress even if you don't see it. Mind is so stubborn. It's unfathomable how diehard it is.” Rachel places her hand on top of mine and we sit in silence, a cup of steaming tea exuding sweet aroma of hibiscus flower between us.

I spend the night in a tambo, falling asleep to a Dhammapada discourse by Osho in which he happens to recount Columbus's story of his seafaring voyage towards the edge of the Earth. His crew are made up entirely of faithful Catholics, a notion of inhabiting a round planet was scoffed at at the time as a sacrilegious and our fabled explorer, considered mad by his own crew, was excluded from clandestine meeting held after three months of the prolonged voyage still with no land in sight. Provisions ran low, a unanimous vote was cast to throw their captain into the sea and turn back the way they came from. Understandably, none of handsomely paid sailors wanted to die or fall off the edge of the Earth if they happened to actually reach it. Columbus, who wasn't as sound asleep as it was assumed, came out of his hiding place in that instance and announced that he will willingly jump overboard and swim the rest of the way to India if the crew decided to head back. However, by doing so, he told the gathering, they would surely perish as food was provisioned only to get them across the ocean. In three days' time, birds were seen hailing land close by and at dawn America was discovered, an entire continent existing incognito, out of sight and beyond imagination as far as Europeans were concerned.

To turn back on our dieta after two months of trials and ordeals in the jungle, sailing our schooner with flags on high mass into the unknown towards the promised mystery of spiritual connection, healing and abundance, would equate to throwing our captain overboard and meeting a sure end from starvation, trying to span uncounted miles it took just to get where we are. Luckily, both I and Rachel could see the logic.

I got up in the morning fairly weak in the body, having slept a good number of hours for a change, awakening only to play hit-the-rat-with-a-stick game without scoring success. I missed all three times in spite that rodent targets didn’t get any bigger or fatter than the specimen visiting our tambo that took to gnashing its teeth on a bedpost in the dead of night.

Sitting on the rocks in predawn hour with my back bathing in a warm, moist breath of hot spring water rushing by in a sandstone channel, there is no other way to transition into the day I can think of. Crickets change cadence, cranking their staccato up a notch. It dawns. Amazingly, I'm able to complete my qigong routine learned from Uncle Kerry, whose old pair of Shipibo pants I'm wearing back in the house after gardening and chain-sawing firewood.

I stumble into the chakra, brushing past lush plantain leaves and young trunks of papaya trees either flowering or generously decorated with unbelievably massive for their size green bulbs of papayas which I admire from the distance, since we can't have them in our dieta. Odd weeds get me bending down; there is a few plantain that could really do with transplanting, and before I know it I forget my weakness as garden takes over possession of my hands and my body using it to make new clearing for itself, slashing with machete and yanking at the snaky roots of pestilent vines and creepers endangering chakra with hostile takeover if left in the ground sending marathon runners in every direction that don't stop after the finish line because it's a wild jungle we are talking about.

I can't help but reflect on the irony of the situation. After a year of being here, just about, chakra is doing really well, while my medicine work and healing progress stumbles and drags at the back, weak and swaying in the slightest breeze, just like myself. Perhaps we are three days from seeing the harbingers of a new continent to be discovered, the land of plenty and long-awaited nourishment. Can one hope, though? Are we prepared to jump overboard and swim for it, if we have to? Because going back is impossibility at this stage in this trans­­atlantic voyage. We have long gone past the point of no return; Rachel keeps telling me so, and she is right, of course. I applaud her arrival to her heart every time, with same joy of relief as known by one who enters safe harbour after a storm in open seas basking in radiant warmth with arms and legs outstretched on yellow sand, gentle tide lapping and healing the memories of wounds suffered to be here, now.

PS We had one more ceremony before heading back to Pucallpa to clear the energies and come back in force with smiles painted on our faces. Gracias a las plantas and spirits, we got all the blessings we could ask for. We ended up entering the cave tunnel heated by hot vapours in the middle of the night and taking turns lying down in the mud at the narrow end to receive the healing and then singing our hearts afterwards crouching next to each other like two cavemen, covered in mud, foreheads touching. Life is but a moment stretching into eternity; a pilgrimage into unknown. We are learning how to fly, for mind and language can only take one to a certain point… and although nothing can be said about love, enlightenment and bliss, much can be said of what the blessed state is not and of the trials and tribulations that await the pilgrim. Hence, Dhammapada Diaries of Battling Warrior Princess Cuddlepants by Maestro Chapo, god bless you for enjoying the goodies!