A bit on Amazonian healing:
As Ana said, the foundation of health here seems to be the ability to clean out the body, and the majority of the plants pointed out to us on our wet 12-hour rainforest hike are good for La Purga. One of the more powerful plants, Ayahuasca, grows as a crazily twisted vine that winds around and around itself, squeezing into layered pretzels and gripping trees with long tendrils until it sucks them dry.
(Side note: they keep playing the same song OVER AND OVER in this internet cafe!!!AAHHHHHH!!!!!)
Ayahuasca treatment purges both corporally and spiritually. Mixed with another plant called Chacuruna, it brings on intense visualizations and the natives here report seeing twisting serpents (not a surprise after seeing the vine), visualizing past traumatic events they had blocked out, and connecting with their ancestors. The treatment is a way of cleaning out one's fears, facing what is buried inside in order to learn from it and move on. In an informal conference at El Centro, held in French (my understanding was guesswork--although Manus' French lessons helped out, I leaned on Ana's translation skills), the curandero of El Centro talked about the importance of healing oneself, and espoused the belief that if someone cannot do the healing necessary within herself, then all the doctors in the world could not save her. Jacque raised a lot of questions within me about what illness means and the connection between emotional/spiritual struggles with physical health. It's not a stretch for me to see that they're related--for one, I feel like I inherited my dad's aching right knee after his death--but I'm not sure it works in a clear-cut cause and effect relationship. Most likely these factors go back and forth... I'm conscious of an ache in my knee and miss my father, I think of my father and tense my knee... I am far from coming to a conclusion about the nature of illness and its relationship to the rest of human experience; this is in fact the beginning of "la investigación" that Ana and I have embarked on. It's an exciting prospect to come to a better understanding of what is inside oneself and how that can accumulate and take effect. To imagine spiritual inheritance stretching back through the generations adds a depth that would be difficult to address in a regular check-up in the Dr.'s office, but I think that there's some truth in the passage of unspoken history on to each new life.
Time seemed especially tangible as Ana and I stood in a small clearing in the Amazon last week at Winston's curandero retreat near Llucanayacu. The stars here are not the ones I've known my whole life. This side of the ecuator receives the light of a different set of stars, and these stars have been sending their energy here for billions of years, looking over the rainforest and watching it grow. And, as we all learn in school, the light that was reaching us that night has traveled so far that the stars we see might not actually be there any more, might have extinguished billions of years ago. We rely on an idea of a fixed reality to go about our lives, but as Frederique, our new French anthropologist friend points out, reality is fixed within the context of its time and place. In one reality Ana and I stood beneath ancient stars while giant fireflies flitted their momentary lights. In another, stars are born and die, black holes tug on the fabric of spacetime, and a man meets his ancestor face to face. It is important to maintain a grasp on one's current reality, but not to hold on to it so tightly as to forget the variety. We're trying to keep this in mind as we learn from the people we meet what they see as true and real.
Much love to all of you!
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