Hello folks. I’ve migrated my writing to my Substack publication, Numa.
A Sun Canoe
I love antique stores. Like a hound, I sniff about cobwebbed corners, seeking that special kind of musty, magnetic memory found in human things. I'll run my fingers over the imperfect handiwork of a long-deceased carpenter, and admire a homespun cloth of a woman who, I imagine, enjoyed the generous shade of giant trees now long gone.
I find that there is some memory—some mana—transferred through these objects, these handcrafted hymns of the human imagination.
So I want to share a story that, to me, is hauntingly beautiful. It’s a story about making a canoe in the Amazon rainforest.
I reckon I'll begin with where I enter into the story, or how the story first meshed into this life of mine. It started maybe a decade ago, when I first went to the Ecuadorian Amazon, based off of a tip from an ethnobotanist-associate of mine. Through him, I’d learn of a small community (population <800) called the Siekopai (or Secoya) who are regionally revered for having preserved an unparalleled knowledge of the botanical world—a cosmovision so wildly animated with spirits and cosmic creatures, so fantastical and fabulous, they could only be relegated to the realm of myth (or madness) in the world of my people.
The Siekopai are an indigenous community living in the far reaches of the Peruvian and Ecuadorian Amazon. The community I have grown to know and love live off of the banks of a river known as the Aguarico, in Ecuador. This name is somewhat ironic, as this river (translating from the Spanish ‘rich water’) is, in fact, heavily polluted with petroleum runoff from a mismanaged Chevron operation (then owned and operated by Texaco) back in 1964. This oil spill is often referred to by environmentalists as the “Chernobyl of the Amazon.”
Silent forests: palm oil plantations taking over the Amazon
Biologists freak out about this part of the world. It’s brimming with strange mushrooms, supersonic birdsong, mammals, and plants whose names have never made it to the pale pages of books in faraway Ivy League libraries. Some say Yasuní National Park, located just a ways south of Siekopai territory, boasts more plant and animal species in a single hectare than you’ll find in the entire North American continent. That’s a lot of existential creativity!
Perhaps you’ve heard the quote attributed to the Sufi poet Rumi, “you have to keep breaking your heart until it stays open.” I often think about this when reflecting on my first trips to Siekopai territory: my heart was broken so intensely, so profoundly, by the unfathomable destruction caused by palm oil and petroleum ventures, that it stayed wide open. As Donna Haraway put it, I “stay with the trouble” of this world, this deforestation. I ache, but I recognize the opportunity in it, and the capacity for feeling it sows in me.
I went back and forth a few times, and stopped eventually because, well, I am not a jungle person, nor am I a person of unlimited financial means. But I did develop a fierce passion for preserving what remains of the rainforest, inspired by what few tales I’d heard, and mind-bendingly magical moments I’d experienced with the last remaining elders of the Siekopai people.
Fast forward to last month, where I had the heart-swellingly, sweet, special pleasure and privilege to visit a young Siekopai woman who is rescuing rituals and ancient technologies from the edge of the bitching cliffs of extinction. Really—she is one of the last people of her community actively working to preserve crafts and customs like ceramics and communication with spirit-realms aided by plant medicines.
Her story is deep and wide, but I’ll stop there and carry on with my story about this canoe.
As I’ve come to understand it, within the Siekopai-universe, there are a number of key material allies that are crafted using very special materials. These material allies include things like hammocks, bags, bows and arrows. While they appear to be simple, they are actually odes to their ecology. A ceramic bowl, for example, only appears to be such: when looking deeper, you’ll see the particles of ash from a special tree, the earth of rainforest never before disturbed by humans, the fire made by a woman thinking good thoughts, red earthen paint collected from the riverbanks of the ancestral homelands of a people displaced. Elements arranged into living testimonies of survival, sentiment, sense.
Included in the limited canon of special objects is the canoe. For riverine communities, the practical significance of a canoe cannot be understated. It is the car, train and plane — it is THE way to get around. As things tend to be in forest communities, the material also has a metaphysical presence, and canoes also play a prominent role as the vehicles-of-choice for the spirits.
Paintings by Cesar Piaguaje, son of the great and highly-esteemed elder Cesario Piaguaje. The image on the right depicts a story from the Siekopai yagé cosmovision, of a spirit-boat, operated by spirit-boat-beings.
So, canoes are usually made out of metal of whateverelse these days. And while I have seen traditional, hand-crafted wooden canoes (they seem to last a really long time!) apparently, the art of making them is also on the edge of oblivion. Only a handful of living Siekopai have seen the process, let alone participate in it.
This amazing young woman helped initiate the making of this flaming canoe you see pictured. For the sake of my own memory (and for anyone out there who is reading this!) I’m inclined to list a few steps of this ancient process. My hope that, if nothing else, inspires you to do the slower thing, for no other reason but to preserve what remains of the human soul we feel in the things left behind.
1) Collect wood from the chuncho (Cedrelinga cateniformis) tree. Cut it in half, and begin to shape the wood into a boat-shape.
2) After the halved-tree has been sufficiently contoured, proceed to hollow the trunk with an adze. Many hands make light work!
3) Once the tree starts to resemble a canoe, take hefty sticks and suspend it off of the ground. Retrieve dry fronds from the aguaje (neé in Paicoca) (Mauritia flexuosa) tree, and place these beneath the canoe. Light them on fire! Distribute smoke and heat evenly across the canoe. Repeat this on the other side. This tempers the canoe so it becomes impermeable.
4) While the canoe is still warm, take wooden poles and place them in the canoe to “stretch” the wood, kind of like a shoehorn. This ensures the canoe will maintain its form when it cools off and hardens.
5) When the fires have gone out, take hand-made chisels made from soft wood and go at shaving off the black ash from the canoe.
6) Enjoy the soft, solid contours of a spirit-worthy ship, made by the hands of a village.
(Important! Note that masato, the famous jungle-beverage of choice made from spit-fermented cassava, should be enjoyed throughout this process —you ain’t a part of the community until you’ve tried everyone’s masato!)
I suppose this whole process touches me so deeply because, well, I see it means the world to someone. Perhaps it doesn’t make MY world (I would have gone on just fine, having never seeing this rare, endangered process…) but it means somebody else’s world. Their rare, colorful, fragile, nearly-extinct world— a world where jubilant ancestors still glide on canoes through the velvety, dark, cosmic rivers of night, into the starry heavens, thanks to these vessels crafted by the weathered hands of humans humming with memories of more miraculous, mystical, marvelous times. I did not have the good fortune to be born into such a culture with such a colorful memory, but it means the world to me that they are still out there. I wish I could explain.
See, for example, the hammock—also a dying craft—was once the welcoming sling for laboring women to birth babies, the cocoon for the dizzy yagé voyagers, the lovenest for the newlywed couple, and the final cradle for the deceased. The hammock, made from the chambira (palm) fiber woven by hand by Siekopai men, is an old friend, a marvelous technology, a trusted companion throughout a humans life. I cannot think of any object imbued with as much soul as a Siekopai hammock, featured in this life of my own.
So I conemplate the disappearing arts of ancestral, communal crafting. I think about the thousands of hours of mastery, passed on through generations, remembered in the unassuming gestures of a people who still feel what it is to belong to a place, belong to the Earth. The belonging, I imagine, comes with those simple, repetitive gestures—collecting leaves, whittling wood, digging into the clay, collecting the seeds—that, like beads of dew on a spiders web, glisten so brilliantly, so delicately.
Wild Alchemy Lab AIR
Hi there! Long time no post.
I’m feeling fizzy inside sharing the news that Wild Alchemy Lab has just released AIR—an experimental homage full of phrases, photos and creative interpretations honoring the spirits of air.
Wild Alchemy AR Journal is a multi-sensory print edition of art, text, and smell with augmented audio-visual content exploring nature, science and esoterica. Each edition navigates one of the classical elements of earth, air, fire, water and aether.
AIR features work from over 60 scientists, artists, and writers including David Abram, Rupert Sheldrake, Merlin Sheldrake, Tommasso Parrinello, Tristan Gooley, and many more…
The journal features a piece I wrote, which explores my latest thoughts on pollen 🪲— how invisible forces and chemical communiqués of desire and disgust constantly animate and shape this dazzling web of life.
For a limited time, you can use the code POLLENPATH to receive 11% off the AIR journal.
Sun People
By Rene Treece/Luxe House
I am a student of the Sun
Absolutely, truly, totally.
Welcome, rays, we welcome you…
Eight minutes ago you suddenly were, and millions of miles later you are, you arrive…
Having travelled through dark galaxies, the echoless, cold cosmos
Tell us, what messages do you carry from angels of space, birds of sky?
Shine through, greet us with this perfect kiss…
Dabbled through leaves of trees, illuminating vast deserts of glittering sand, sparkling upon Mother Water in dance with the Lord of Wind
A warm kiss that stirs us so—sleeping mice and resting lizards, sweating farmers and mating lovers, tender sprouts, infinite particles rising up to meet you…
Eternal embrace, nourishing and educating each and every body and soul with bright tales of timeless exploration, infinite iterations…
How, Sun, might I thank you today?
Nostos Algos
“I belong to summer,” I say, and
“I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes” elders say.
Weary visitors with heavy bags, soon it will be time to go,
And with them go memories of endless shores, cathedral forests, landline telephones, mighty mountains, dark skies, true adventure.
Nostos algos—nostalgia—an unappeased yearning to return.
Did you too come into the world
somehow missing it?
No baton, no team, just a tattered flag,
they pass, they pass, and
into soft palms deeds are passed—
relationship with land is a right, no more.
I have a confession, though! I need to feel this!
I sense our lives depend on
feeling it deeper, cultivating trust.
Nothing to prove, just
re-membering response-ability.
For towards the beds of moss, singing women, evening primrose, and clans of troubadours who cast aside their undergarments long ago, I lean…
Hungry, grateful for their sun,
Because these things feel true.
In ponds of lilies, I find my friends naked, contributing pearls of glistening tears, courageous things.
And we respond to the chipmunks
Respond to the blackbirds
Respond to the children
Respond to the laughter of fruit juice stained and shining through smiling teeth.
Respond, respond
To the bitter breath of winter
Respond to disease with roots and
hymns and the medicine of our time
Respond to death!
Respond with a sleeping dog’s sigh
at the break of dawn
Rejoice in the good morning,
My friends, who wave back at the leaves.
In a dream came a vision of
an empty wooden seat,
carved by creation, perfectly fit for our runner’s rumps, amongst a circle
of creatures—
Raccoons, seraphim, winter berries, seals, fireflies, ticks, and stones, and salamanders.
“Come back,” they say. “You are always welcome here,” they say. “It was only a scary dream, you were never cast away from this garden,” they say.
So sweet shyness, you may drop now,
like those first, blushing petals
protecting what was to come.
Now is the time to respond to this brilliant light, in all of our dank musks, frenzied color, and touch.
Shower rowdy blessings upon the bounty that remains.
This is how, to our children, we respond.
Disciple of Flowers
I am a free and constant disciple of flowers,
For no thing else invokes in me such wild respect.
Hushing torrents of thought, pure nectars of peace–
In flowers I taste the fruits of Heaven’s Mind.
Little sisters, wild roses, sparkle in evening waters.
Once a dew-licker, always a dew-licker.
I’ve wept in patches of Siberian irises,
And all summer long, Queen Anne’s Lace and I commune over fate.
Why these seasons of the spirit, I wonder—why do windows and doors open and close? Why the ebb, why the flow? Why do our hearts change?
In my younger years, I wished myself a dandelion—constant, bright, tough, true.
Jack in-the-pulpit days came, sporadic unfurling in bogs.
Meandering memories of peony season are easy to inhale—an absurdly luscious reveal!
Queen rose, sown so deep in me, perfumes the holy waters of the broken heart.
As sure as the early bird announces the return of the sun,
In flowers, I always find the answer.
My Paper Dragon
Yesterday the golden clock of the heavens registered my 29th birthday.
This morning marks 10 years since I emerged from my first dark night of yagé to discover the leaves of plants waving back at me.
I took luck and fortune by the hand, and together we journeyed:
I swung in hammocks with short, tunic-clad elders and communed with the celestial folks while gunshots rang out beyond the rivers.
In Spain, sweet souls sucked poison from my knees in a yurt nestled in dusty, sacred mountains. We found a neon-and-black newt paddling circles into the center of a spring water well.
I spent hundreds of nights in southern huts built on red earth. Rainy season brought out warped wooden bridges which connected the homes, which I walked in line with skinny dogs. Here, plants that reek of gasoline and ethereal, pink, sweet heart blossoms work hand-in-hand for our healing.
On a hill in higher land, I felt rare jungle breezes clear thoughts from my humble home and my mind as butterflies and monkeys guarded the perimeter in play. There, I planted trees for eating, for dreaming and for healing. I bled WWII into the earth by squatting above a small mound. Some things there are hidden forever, only to be remembered by the forest.
These are beautiful moments of my life. I watch them from here like a dragon-shaped kite flying above as I stand on cold, hard earth. I remind myself that I hold the string, but the wind is Master.
Now, quiet, I see white-on-white; tracks of brown deer browsing in birch forests.
Mystery lowers you deeper into the well, deeper into the cave; darker into the night, darker into the past. Time has taught me the memory-cave only gets deeper. And so, like a spelunker, you descend with your light to seek the gems, to re-member.
At times it is terrifying—but I have a saving grace, and it goes by the name of curiosity.
Neversink
At the dam I lay down flowers
in tribute to a time
when water ran free.
My love for this place shimmers
like a rainbow trout in cold water.
I wear it like a banner, happy and humble -
a sun-baked quilt pinned to the barn.
In small vials I collect the mud from my boots. They will go in a museum.
I will visit this place tucked in bed,
before I fall asleep.
So many microbes and other microscopic beings I’ve met along the way.
When left alone for a while,
they form strange congregations.
All of these memories mingle, morph.
Eventually they will melt, like snow -
glistening through the ridges of the Catskills,
trickling like bells
ringing in the forever-new
on their descent to Neversink.
Venus Conjunct Saturn
I’m going to listen with you.
I’m going to listen with the twigs quivering, remembering red berries past and red berries to come.
I’m going to listen with you,
I’m going to listen with snow melting in this mouth, quenching me with a story from Heaven.
I’m going to listen with you,
Listen with cold Earth, frozen and deep below coats of snow, dreaming of green.
I’m going to listen with you -
To the memories that didn’t make it.
Listen with you,
To the last sparks of embers flying, fledglings of a younger heart.
I’m going to listen to you,
Charioteer arriving in dreams, Indigo-clad wrapped in rings,
Chanting to me lessons I do not want, yet ones I need.
I need to want to listen to hear
These messengers.
I listen to cold silence of a dark horizon in Aquarius -
Observe quietly how cool light of the stars’ glow
Relax a restless mare.
I’m going to listen with you,
I give you my sailor’s knot, my promise -
I’m going to submit to the wisdom of the winds,
Commit to the beauty of the body,
Tend fire,
Care ever so carefully,
Spin white, silken thoughts into a robe so I may present myself to you,
Hallowed be thy name,
To kneel before the pillar of knowledge,
To kneel before the pillar of love,
To crystallize here,
Still and strong,
Bright and sure,
Perfectly prepared for Truth to bloom.
Jericho
Must we always feel so young towards the end of things?
Like a kid stunned and kneeling on scraped knees,
Looking up to the circle of the sun, past a ring of ancient faces,
Laughing smooth our furrowed brows?
We are the roses of Jericho, and every time the sky was blue, we marveled at nature’s ambivalence.
Every time we thought about those who’d felt the fall before, we cast a line towards the future with a message for the pristine realms of darkness; the unborn, our angels.
Every time we send smoke signals to those very distant relatives, seeking advice from stars.
And we continue to love strangers, understanding we’d shared hay beds with them in past lives,
Or sat on the steps of Alexandria’s library studying the glint of dusk in their eyes,
Or breathed into each other’s clothes on the darkest of nights, perched atop ancient trees, nipped by the cold tips of screeching metallic entities during future manifestations for freedom.
I’ll keep mothering myself
Holding my wings out as I take my first steps and fall, eventually crawl.
I’ll keep fathering myself
Inviting my aching aspects to heal in the alabaster chambers of the old soul.
I’ll keep crying for my daughter and son,
The holy waters of our broken hearts,
So that their blessings may be quenched,
As they carry our torch, our banner of love,
Onwards, on their journey through infinite orbits,
Of tension and resolution,
That special dance only we know,
Taming the power of the Great,
Singing in praise of the Maker of the Trees.
I keep my eyes open for their records,
To help them draw the map back home.