The Lords of Adaptation

It's funny to think that humans are somehow more sentient, more feeling than other beings. I believe other living beings are far more sentient - their bodies, instincts and senses taking score of change, always, as it comes. Plants, fungi, insects and non-human animals feel the impact of winds moving in new directions, pesticides in earth, chemicals in water and the sun shining stronger. Wings disintegrate. Forgotten pollen turns to dust. Mothers go missing and some eggs never hatch. Trees fall and soil grows weary.

They notice when something - or someone - in their food chain goes missing. Us, on the other hand - we carry on as if everything was just fine, blissfully disconnected from the delicate network of feeling and sense that is ecology.

We are the lords of adaptation, damned with the superpower to feel nothing at all.

Night Chant (a Navajo Poem)

House made of dawn,
House made of evening light,
House made of dark cloud...
Dark cloud is at the house's door
The trail out of it is dark cloud.
The zigzag lightning stands high upon it...

Happily may I walk,
Happily with abundant showers may I walk.
Happily, with abundant plants, may I walk.
Happily on the trail of pollen may I walk.
Happily may I walk.

May it be beautiful before me.
May it be beautiful behind me.
May it be beautiful below me.
May it be beautiful all around me.
In beauty it is finished.

***

I found this poem a year ago in Eduardo Galeano’s opus Memory of Fire (1982)

Chacras Integrales & Permaculture in the Peruvian Amazon

Some highlights from our 10 day Permaculture Design Course (PDC) in May 2019 at the Temple of the Way of Light, led by the one and only Tierra Martinez, founder of Na Lu’um Permaculture Center.

Enjoy! x

Nothing but God in the Way of Herself

Yesterday I protested with Extinction Rebellion and yelled up at the cold façade of the Brazilian embassy hoping someone would hear me. The day before that I wanted to write a hot post on Instagram - something that would get me lots of those red, heart-shaped dopamine hits - something like 'FUCK YOU BOLSONARO'. Today, I really wanted to punch a fascist. I am angry. I am grieving.

I'm not alone in my grief and despair. It's tempting to take that energy and ball it up into a fist. But I can't hold that first for long - especially when I zoom out and look at the bigger picture. They have the tanks, the guns, the budget, the surveillance, the data, the man-power, the petroleum. They have the fear. 'They' - the farmers, the politicians, the miners, the security guards - they're like us - just people chasing their beliefs like carrots on sticks while satisfying their needs. There is nobody to blame here, really. I mean, fuck Bolsonaro. And...it's not Bolsonaro's fault, or Trump's fault...they are just small men set into action to satisfy the needs of our rapacious endless-growth, cancerous systems of development and glory. It's so much bigger, older and deeper than any one of us can see.

The real work we have set out before us is simple. It's going to be in the way we react to this devastation and despair. The work is going to be in seeing how we reach out to our loved ones - how we come together, donating to these small organizations and supporting the rebirth of something new. The work is going to be in how we demonstrate our love for this beautiful life - how we affirm our desire as living organisms to have a thriving, interconnected global ecosystem guided by principals of cooperation, patience, and stewardship for the animals and plants, the forests and the waters. The work here is going to be in the small steps we take in the face of our own fear, our own cynicism, our own complacency and our own anger. The real work is in holding up the light - declaring our love for this experience with every glucosey gesture we are gifted in this life.

The Amazon is on Fire

Something changed in me seven years ago when I first visited the Ecuadorian Amazon. It's nearly impossible to explain with words - the holy hum of millions of creatures living and dying, singing, making love, fighting, calling, killing, crying. Ants, spiders, toads, snakes, lichen, ancient creaking trees, turning worms, howling people, whirring cicadas. Jurassic palm leaves blowing in the soft wind. Fish in the lakes. Canoes in the rivers. Rain - so much rain - rolling off of the petals of extra-terrestrial-looking flowers. And the birds...the rainbow birds. The stories of these creatures, their shapes and their sounds left a deep imprint in me. It is the Sistine Chapel of evolution - a singing testament to the miracle of life on this green planet.

I swear that the Amazon taught me how to be a human. It sounds crazy, but those sounds put me in my place in this world; I am a small, sun-loving mammal seeking love, eating and sleeping with dreams, aspirations and some creations to show for it. The forest made me realize how small I am. I take great comfort in that.

These fires have broken my heart. A part of me is dying. A part of you is dying too.

In the face of this destruction, all I feel we can do is let the record show that we humans stood up to the strange, cannibalistic force that possessed our species. We stood up, collected seeds, created networks, showed kindness to our neighbors, shared our food with the animals, watered the plants, and prayed for all good things. We explored rituals and rites that helped us see with new eyes. We listened to those sounds that still remain with great courage, focus and patience. We believed in the perseverance of beauty and grace.

Teacher Plant: Toé

Brugmansia in Himchal Pradesh at the foothills of the Himalayas. 2014.

Angel’s Trumpet

Pejí, Toé

Latin Name: Brugmansia suaveolens

Solanacae: Nightshade Family

Description: Angel’s Trumpet is an herbaceous cultivated plant which usually reaches the size of a large shrub (3-4 meters). The leaves are slender and are alternate in arrangement, cordate to lanceolate in shape and have entire margins. They typically range in size from 8-15cm long by 3-5cm wide. The large pendant flower is a funnelform with a white or white base turning pink towards the apex, although buds may be yellowish. The flowers are showy and large (20-25 cm!) and bloom in abundance.

Uses: The leaves of Angel’s Trumpet are used to treat various aches and pains[1]. Several indigenous communities across the Amazon basin use the flowers of the plant as a master-level psychoactive potion. The leaves or flowers are one of the additives sometimes used in the ayahuasca sacrament and the infamous arrow-posion curare [2].

While researching When Plants Dream I learned that in 1880, Angel’s Trumpet (colloquially known throughout the Amazon basin today as toé - ‘toe-eh) was popularized in the West by the German chemist Albert Ladenburg who isolated hyoscine, also known as scopolamine. The alkaloid scopolamine was celebrated in the medical community for its ability to decrease the secretion of bodily fluids and relieve nausea related to motion sickness (in a 1914 issue of McClure’s Magazine, scopolamine was said to have “abolished the primal sentence of the scripture: in sorrow thou shall bring forth children.”) While it is no longer used to ease the pains of child birth, scopolamine is still used as an anesthetic in hospitals today.

A friend of mine once noted that toé only grows near human communities – it is a cultivated plant and is seldom found in the wild. The flowers emit a heady fragrance when in full bloom. I’ve observed it tends to flower most around full moon times.

No toé story is complete without mention of its more clandestine uses as a powerful disassociative and deliriant. Sometimes known as ‘devil’s breath’ in Colombia, a powder made from the seeds of the plant can intoxicate a person, temporarily transforming them into a complacent zombie happy to punch their PIN code into an ATM and fork cash over to their druggers.

The Secoya of Ecuador call this plant pejí. Its use is reserved for extremely-experienced ukuke-yaje (initiated yagé - or ayahuasca- drinkers). Ethnobotanist Jonathon Miller Weisberger, author of Rainforest Medicine (2013) told me the Secoya will cocoon the peji drinker in a hammock with rope to prevent the writhing, disassociated initiate from running off into the woods. One of my favorite descriptions of a toé ritual comes from Fernando Payaguaje (Secoya) in his book The Yagé Drinker:

“The truth is that it’s scary to swallow that thick pejí … it has a very unpleasant smell and a taste that’s even worse. Besides, you usually vomit instantly, but you do it into a bowl so you can swallow it again. If you vomit the pejí on the ground or on the floor, you won’t have visions. All you’ll see is an immense land where you remain as if you were buried. It’s so pasty that it’s not easy to swallow, so you have to push it down your throat with your fingers. All of this is embarrassing, disgusting, and also frightening.”

Considering its penchant for causing cardiac arrest and the regurgitation ordeal described by Payaguaje, I feel like it’s safe to say toé is not for the faint of heart.

Unfortunately toé has become a popular ayahuasca admixture for enterprising ayahuasqueros seeking to induce more dazzling changes in perception for Westerners visiting the Amazon, demanding a quick and easy visionary experience. This has caused unknown cases of abuse (sexual and other) and in one case, a death in 2014.

This plant is truly a ‘master plant’ whose use should be reserved only by those with many years of experience working with Amazonian plants under the supervision of someone who has also undergone the process of working with this plant.

[1] Schultes and Raffauf. The Healing Forest: Medicinal and Toxic Plants of Northwest Amazonia. 1996.

[2] Duke, James. Amazonian Ethnobotanical Dictionary. 1994.

Teacher Plant: Achiote

Names: Annatto, Achiote, Ucurum

Latin Name: Bixa orellana L.

Bixacae: Annatto Family

Description: Annatto grows in bush-like or shrubby forms which can reach up to 4-5 meters in height. The leaves are simple, alternate and have slightly wavy entire margins. Leaves are generally ovate with an extended tip, which from some angles makes them appear triangular. They range in size from 20-25cm long to 10-12cm wide, with a long (8-10cm) woody petiole (fruit stem). Five veins radiate out palmately from the base. The whiteish and pinkish flowers are clustered at the end of branches, and the flowers have five petals with stamens 3-4cm in diameter. The most showy feature of this plant are the oval, almond-shaped capsules at the end of branches covered with soft, bristly hairs. These capsules are 5-8cm in length and dark red (or sometimes yellow, depending on variety). The capsules are easily split open, revealing 20-60 seeds coated in a velvety red paste.

Uses: Annatto has been cultivated for centuries in Latin America. It is the source of the famous red-orange dye that is derived from the seeds in the capsules. The carotenoid pigment (bixin) produced in the plant is used widely by Amazonian communities as a body paint, insect repellent and sun block.

Some early Mexican religious manuscripts were written with the paint of this plant, and indigenous communities from Ecuador to Brazil such as the Secoya or Ashaninka often use this plant to draw bright red sigils onto the body. The Shipibo of the Ucayali region of Peru use the dye in traditional crafts to color fabrics and as a cosmetic rouge.

Achoite is used medicinally in Southern Mexico to treat small pox and rashes. The plant has also been used as a treatment for digestive issues like diarrhea, abdominal pain, indigestion and dysentery.

Ethnobotanical documents also encounter cases where the plant is used to treat illnesses including hepatitis, dermatitis, and venereal disease and in some cases tonsillitis.

The seed coating tastes slightly peppery and the perfume of the paint is light and lovely.

This plant is best known in industrialized societies for its use as a cosmetic dye and food coloring, often featured in cheeses, butters and rice dishes. It was an important cash crop for Latin America before the advent of Red Dye Number 3. Today the largest producers of the plant are Kenya, Peru and Brazil.

Bixin, the major apocarotenoid organic compound found in the annatto plant. Take a look at those squiggles! Thanks for the pic, Wikipedia.

Shipibo Women Healers on the Challenges and Opportunities of the Global Ayahuasca Boom

As a part of my series Ayahuasca and the Global Marketplace published by Psymposia, I asked Adam Aronovich to interview Shipiba healers Laura and Lila Lopez-Sanchez on the evolving dynamics of the recent influx of ayahuasca tourism. Below is my introduction to the interview.

***

On August 19, 2018 in the largely Shipibo populated Amazonian town of Yarinacocha, nearly one hundred traditional healers, local political figures, and nonprofit allies gathered with the intention of addressing the complexities that come with the influx of foreigners seeking ayahuasca. The meeting resulted in the formation of a first of its kind ‘healers union’ – the Association of Shipibo-Konibo Traditional Medical Onayabo (Asociación de Onayabo Medico Ancestrales Shipibo-Konibo).

Onaya is a Shipibo term which refers to the traditional healers who work with oni, the Shipibo word for ayahuasca whose meaning is “knowledge” or “wisdom.” Onaya therefore translates to “the one who knows,” with the suffix –bo denoting plural. The terms onaya and onayabo were claimed by the union  instead of the more commonly used but inappropriate word “shaman.”

In the Declaration of Yarinacocha, members of the group voiced their concerns over several issues exacerbated with the ‘boom’ of ayahuasca visitors in the Amazon – namely, 1) the diminishing transmission of traditional knowledge to youth within indigenous communities, 2) the opportunities and dangers that come with increased foreign interest in so-called spiritual tourism and 3) the need for intercultural, collaborative efforts to support Shipibo cultural and economic sovereignty.

The declaration shines a light on the shadowy aspects of the ayahuasca boom: foreigners seeking personal healing from an exotic medicine and culture that tends to conveniently gloss over the lived political and economic realities of indigenous communities in the Amazon.

While this as a reality, it’s also worth considering the value in these intercultural exchanges. Visitors seeking healthcare and traditional knowledge from indigenous communities play a role in supporting traditional livelihoods of the Shipibo people with their contributions (financial and other), subsequently contributing to the  revitalization of their cultural identity, landscapes and practices.

Shipibo, Asháninka, and other communities in the region who make a living  from the ayahuasca-curious are offered an alternative to working for violent, extractive industries. Communities who remain in the forest often continue to play a vital role in protecting biodiversity and mitigating climate change. Meanwhile, ayahuasca centers can help to fund non-profit organizations like The Chaikuni Institute  who coordinate programs to support human rights, regenerative agriculture, and health projects in the Loreto region of Peru, or Alianza Arkana who works together with Shipibo communities to support reforestation, youth empowerment and women’s rights. Denouncing ayahuasca tourism altogether (see ‘Ayahuasca Tourism is Ripping off Indigenous Amazonians’ published by VICE) is a conveniently simplified  perspective which ignores the nuanced, dynamic reality for many.

While much has been written about the globalization and expansion of ayahuasca from a western perspective, very few indigenous voices have been given the stage. PhD candidate Adam Aronovich, medical anthropologist and research coordinator at the Temple of the Way of Light sat down with Shipibo onayabo Laura (56) and Lila Lopez Sanchez (46), members of the newly formed association, to discuss their perspectives on these issues. The conversation took place in Niwe Rao Xobo, a center owned and operated by the Lopez family near San Francisco de Yarinacocha in the Ucayali region of Peru.

***

Read the full interview here.

Mathilde and the Thousand Endangered Cosmograms

OP October 26, 2015

Yesterday I learned the oldest member of the Secoya tribe, Matilde Payaguaje, passed away. Her precise age was unknown, but she was believed to have been over one hundred years old. I wonder what life was like one hundred years ago at coordinates 0°58′26″S 75°11′49″W, in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest.

The dwindling Secoya (or Siekopai) population of approximately 650 live in small multi-family plots of land along Rio Aguarico, in the Sucumbíos region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. The Secoya are classified as members of the Tucanoan ethno-linguistic group, along with the Sinoa, Coreguaje, and Macaguaje of Colombia, and the Maijuna and Tetete of Peru — all tribes who inhabit the area between the Napo and Putumayo Rivers. Like many communities indigenous to this region, demands from the paradigm of Western economic growth for commodities such as rubber, timber, ‘preciosities’ — and most recently palm oil and petroleum — has had woeful effects on nearly every aspect of their livelihood. From blunt force ethnocide and slavery to disease and forced acculturation, a devastating legacy of Occidential presence in the Amazon has effectively destroyed what was once a robust population, culture, and identity, and jungle.

I always thought calendars looked dissonant and displaced, nailed into the wooden planks of the stilted houses, hidden beneath tree canopies whose leaves often outsized the people living beneath them. Calendars, I thought, didn’t belong there. Time was a concept enforced by agenda makers and job takers from Northern lands, where I am from. Time was an imposter. Time seemed a tacky and irrelevant social structure, awkwardly inserted in an environment so dense with life and death.

Some people donned old, broken-faced watches on their wrists - yet I felt other notions of time-keeping prevailed amongst the Secoya. Eventually I learned rather than the linear, 60 minute, 24 hour, 12 month, 365 day to a year calendar, there are three seasons, perceived cyclically, in the traditional Secoya cosmovision. They are called Ometëkawe, Okotekawe, and Kakotekawe. The rest of the timekeeping is simply up to the sun.

+ Ometëkawe can be recognized when turtles bury their eggs in the shores of the rivers. It is also when the Orion’s belt is in the center of the sky or East, which indicates the best conditions to plant paihuea (corn), a’so (yucca), ñajo (tubers), and u’kuisi — a pearly seeded cardamom-like plant.

+ Okotekawe is the season that follows Ometëkawe, characterized by heavy rain. It is monkey hunting season.

+ Kakotekawe is the ‘season of the cicadas,’ which coincides with what we call August, September, and October. The rainfall diminishes, once again the rivers become shallow — yielding favorable conditions for fishing. It is an auspicious time for inter-planetary communion with the celestial spirits, nañe siekopaï, mediated by the ritualized consumption of yagé.

I imagine Matilde also saw time as an anomaly. Her mere presence was a portal into the past — her life, a testimony to the unprecedented speed of global change.

In her one hundred years, Matilde saw the beginning and the end of many things. She saw the construction of asphalt roads swerving through her emerald green jungle like strange dark veins. Upon these roads traveled loud sixteen-wheeled creatures, with big silver barrels carrying black sludge that white cultures run on. Fossil fuels — a technological feat of time travel — digging into the geological archives of planet earth to feed a people with a different appetite for life. And along these roads, pipes carry this sludge, stretching into distant horizons. Electricity, packaged food, motorcycles. Ecuadorian soap operas, chewing gum, key chains (but no doors in the village yet), guns.

And in her hand-woven hammock, when she was young, during interminable yagé nights, she communed the ‘rainbow people,’ only willing themselves visible in deep hypnogogic trances, mediated by the power and grace of yagé — an Amazonian admixture of the highest alchemical mastery.

And a year before the passed away, in that same hammock, she sang to me songs she learned from Evangelical missionaries.

Jesus, chickens, blonde white-skinned bug-bitten New Yorkers like me, the Gregorian calendar, dollar bills. She was a traditional healer turned Evangelist, friend, mother, singer and artist. And amongst these many identities emerged one that, to me, is nothing short of extraordinary. Matilde was a trusted keeper of her people’s stories.

In her youth, Matilde began to draw small, colorful images resembling sigils. In her austerely furnished house, two beaten-up blue suitcases hid beneath her bed. In these suitcases were piles of paper with these drawings — hundreds of drawings. When I would come to her house, she’d carefully unzip the suitcases and with a shaking and crooked finger, deciphering the images one-by-one, explaining stories of her cultural memory. War strategies. Fatalities involving monkeys dropping coconuts on people’s heads. A tender, heavy release of breath and click of the tongue; sometimes she would blink hard and skip to the next. A butterfly. Beneath Matilde’s bed was a treasure chest of Secoya cosmograms.

With the loss of Matilde, the heart of humanity also lost the memories of an extraordinary one hundred years on earth. To the best of my knowledge, someone worked to archive Matilde’s depiction of her world. And yet, my heart grows heavy knowing all that is left of her people’s environmental knowledge, inside jokes, love stories, and deities will be left to sit still and dark, folded and forgotten between the binding of a book.

I do not mourn the Secoya. In the town of San Pablo de Catetsiaya where the Secoya are most densely populated with around 250 inhabitants, there are regular gatherings where elders and youth alike celebrate the changing of the seasons. They dress in bright colors, with their faces painted with red pigment from the pon-sá plant, often with drawings like the ones Matilde has recorded. In schools, children learn their mother tongue Païcoca. Païcoca is a language laden with many vowels — when the Secoya speak quickly amongst each other, sometimes I find they sound like birds.

And yet, every time I had gone to see the Secoya, I noticed the town grew brighter and brighter with electricity provided by petroleum extractors as ‘a gift’ for the village. Teenagers now walk on the forest floor with Nike knockoffs, and drown out the sound of the Amazon with handheld radios. Globalization happened. I wonder how the Secoya’s cultural identity and knowledge will adapt to the pace of this change.

Thanks to Matilde, who helped me learn there are infinite webs of spiritual and cultural memory with which we can weave our perception of life. May we tread lightly on earth, remembering that in the periphery of our global culture live people who, through millennia of living in forests, see with different eyes.

Mexican Moss

465 million years ago the celestial soup began to settle. Carbon cradled our atmosphere, and from the blue emerged green. Algae was born. The tiny photosynthesizers were the only vegetable residents of earth for half a billion years. They congealed, forming mats that clung onto the shorelines. Land ho. Edging away from the ocean, they evolved into a species known as bryophytes — the first plants to colonize land. As small non-vascular creatures, bryophytes began their excursions clinging closely to the ground, growing soft blankets of moss over the naked, stony land.

And over the course of some 65 million years vascular plants appeared, equipped with tough cell walls and increased physical strength, allowing for more adventurous architectural experimentation. The geometry of life radiated and diversified. The plants went on and discovered more land. For a long time they were bare-boned, simply branches reaching in a fractal gesture above and below. According to archeologists, these evolved into the now-extinct ancestors of ferns; a species known as archaeopteris.

Carbon levels gradually declined, and to adapt leaves unfurled from the solid stems, fanning outwards acting as solar panels. Next came gymnosperms, marking the sexual revolution from spores to seeds. The great gingko tree is a founding member of this club. And then 140 million years ago arrived the angiosperms — flowering plants, peppering the green world with color, suffusing the air with the chemicals of communication.

From these flowers wafted fragrance — indicators of the mysterious world of chemical artistry, developed through dramatic existential saga of seduction and repulsion with the insect world. These chemical mechanisms, secondary metabolites — toxic and intoxicating — can produce visionary experiences when consumed by larger mammals.

Some think it’s just a cool coincidence or ‘epiphenomenon’ that these visionary compounds produce extra-ordinary states of consciousness, and different ways to perceive and understand this human experience. Others say it’s the gift of an omnipotent agent. Be it a lucky chemical quirk or by divine design, it’s a beautiful thing to share a world with plants that cleanse our perception, and remind us their story is not so different from ours: a long, amazing experiment in adaptation, creativity, chemistry and curiosity we call life.