in the neighborhood

When I walk out of my front door, I love to see the kids out playing. It’s a sign of a healthy neighborhood ecology. The boys play soccer and the girls play volleyball in the streets. The doors and windows are all open and everyone can see into everyone else’s business. The storekeepers watch from windows and the women sit in the shade in rocking chairs. The abuelitas set up chairs and a table in front of their houses and sell grilled meat skewers and fish and soup and other staples. During the heat of the day, men come home for lunch and a siesta, and perhaps the door closes for a little while… later when the older kids come home from school, they gather around parked motorcars and hang out until it starts to get dark. Not a whole lot of ethnic diversity–a gringo walking by on foot is still enough to attract attention, in this neighborhood. But it’s all tranquilo here in this down-home village atmosphere.

Where I live is a funny mix of every socio-economic class, all living on the same block. The street from the main road passes the gated compound of the Mormon church, then a row of very nice, modern houses peeking out from behind high walls with electric fences. The carved wooden doors and ornate tiling look across the street to the brick and mortar row houses, some unpainted and others adorned with graffiti or political propaganda. Most of these have fenced front gardens with carefully maintained shrubbery and tropical flowers. Walk a bit further down the street and the paved walkway turns to dirt, and the houses become wooden clapboard affairs with open interior spaces and only a few rooms. Some have rotting thresholds or the entire frame is leaning to the side, or the wood has fallen away in places and has been patched over with bricks or rags or whatever is at hand. The poor, the middle class and the wealthy all share the same neighborhood, with hardly a discernible border, as the concept of zoning just does not exist. To me it seems very strange to see such high-end real estate on adjacent streets with shacks and hovels, but here it seems to be considered normal.

Most storefronts in the neighborhood, and throughout Iquitos in fact, are just the front room of someone’s house converted to a business, and you walk in and can look right through to where the family is cooking in the kitchen or sitting around in their living room. The boundary between public and private space dissolves completely. Peruvians are so used to living in this shared space, I don’t think they even it bothers them at all. They seem to embrace it. As an American, who moved here from my own little crackerbox of a house, on a hill away from the street, where I could seal myself in whenever I wished, this is quite a change. Privacy is really in the mind. I have learned to create that for myself, rather than looking for it in literal solitude and physical separation, which does not exist here unless you go to the jungle.

The good thing about this style of urbanization is that it’s pretty safe. There are eyes on the street all the time. When they say it takes a village to raise a child, this is what it literally looks like. It’s a social structure from earlier times, before wealth disparity gave people the luxury of isolation. There are still crimes of opportunity of course—don’t leave your house unlocked when you go out, or leave your shoes too close to the door, or someone might try to snag them through the gate with a coathanger–that sort of thing.

The downside of living here, in this gringo’s opinion, is the noise pollution. Peruvians love noise. I don’t know why. But it’s like no one can stand being in silence. Silence doesn’t exist here, it’s been forced into hiding and I don’t know where it lives now. I am personally unlucky to live downstairs from a woman who I could charitably describe as a crazy bitch. She yells at her kids constantly and browbeats her husband in between. I don’t know why she is unhappy, but she projects it onto her entire family and it’s something I wish I didn’t have to listen to every day. I usually put on some music, which makes her play her music, even louder, so she can be heard over it… bummer, man.

If it’s not the radio or TV, it’s the block parties that happen here frequently. They go on for hours. Then early in the morning and late at night, dogs and roosters help fill in the gaps. And then there’s the doorbell ringers. Someone rings at the door on a daily basis—sometimes it is neighborhood kids wanting to take your trash out or do some odd job for a tip. Other times it is people selling watches or sunglasses or religion. The Adventists rang the bell the other day, and I ignored it. The group of women sat out in front my door for ten minutes, just chatting, waiting for me to come out! They were in no hurry, they had all day to wait. They’ve been waiting for the world to end for more than 150 years, after all. I guess you get used to it.

Then there are the street vendors. Calling out your product as you walk through the neighborhood is one thing. But palta guy, come on, give me a break. Palta guy sells avocados from a pushcart, which he has rigged up to a freaking megaphone and amplifier, and when he comes around it sounds like a police raid, like he’s trying to scare you into buying avocadoes. Not cool. I’m never buying palta from you, palta guy. I think if a moment of silence ever graced this charming little neighborhood, people would think the world was ending. Which is why I am headed out to the store now, to buy myself some earplugs.

Ayahuasca: a love story

For several years now there has been an annual conference on shamanism held in Iquitos each July. Alan Shoemaker created this event and it attracts some fascinating people from around the world.  I stopped in for the final night of talks because several friends were doing presentations. There were many shamans there, of course, along with musicians and writers and therapists and visionary artists and cultural critics. And there was Peter Gorman, handing out doses of sapo, a neurotoxin that comes from the giant leaf frog, phyllomedusa bicolor, but that’s a whole other story.

These people had traveled from all over the world to hear speakers talk about shamanism, and healing, and the nature of creativity, and to hear new perspectives on the Meaning Of It All. The main focus was on ayahuasca, and to a lesser extent the San Pedro cactus that grows in the Andes. Both of these plant medicines have deep associations with indigenous spiritual traditions in Peru that span centuries if not millennia.

What I have to say here concerns ayahuasca, that infamous brew made from a specific vine and the leaves of a shrub that both grow in the Amazon. It was fresh on my mind that night at the conference, because I had done a ceremony the night before, in the jungle, with a local shaman named Ernesto. I had brought my own brew, it was some ayahuasca negro made by Ron Wheelock, and it was very powerful. And by powerful I mean physically difficult, with a lot of purging and discomfort. It also offered a tremendous amount of inner illumination, let’s say a sense of light in the body, a sensation that your body is filled with lightning. Many shamans use the terms ‘light’ and ‘strength’ as principal barometers of the ayahuasca experience, and this brew was formidable on both metrics.

The visionary qualities were intense as well, on this night. For me they were very personal, as they are for most people. Throughout the course of the evening, I experienced a wealth of personal insight into my life and the state of my interpersonal relationships with family and friends. It included counseling with regards to some issues that were creating stress and tension in my life. It was an ongoing dialogue that stretched far into the night, and by the end of the evening I was in a state of glowing acceptance of the nature of things, and radiating pure love and appreciation for the apparently infinite power and wisdom of the plant.

Whether this higher intelligence is contained in the plant or merely released by it, like a gatekeeper of the mind, no one can say. But I do know that these visions have a million manifestations, and the depth and breadth of their expressions appear limitless. I wish I could describe the jaw-dropping detail, precision, and complexity of ayahuasca visions. I simply cannot. They are so incredibly vivid, so specific in their architecture, and so vast in scale that often it’s hard to know where to begin to look. I could say there are elements of M.C. Escher, Alex Grey, Salvador Dali, Jackson Pollock and Dr. Seuss, but that’s only how they appear to me. For others they may look different.

Sometimes these visions manifest spirits or beings of higher intelligence, sometimes they are simply part of an ever-changing background, and other times the two are interwoven. It is a landscape more fantastical by far than any I could ever imagine on my own. Sometimes, the intensity of the visions is so great that it is difficult to know exactly what is going on until later, when you have some time to reflect on everything. Sometimes it is days, weeks or even months later before the wisdom or insight imparted by a moment’s unfolding in ayahuasca becomes clear. At other times there are entire chapters that are simply bewildering and beyond comprehension, and remain so.

On this particular night, the visions went beyond something you might see as a movie in the mind’s eye, and became a multi-dimensional world into which my entire consciousness was absorbed, so that I became only a small part of the larger fabric of the universe. To feel this boundary dissolve can be unsettling, and I believe it is a threshold that can only be crossed when you are willing to put your ego aside and relinquish a certain amount of control. Not everyone who drinks ayahuasca gets to this place. It requires turning inward and facing one’s demons, for which you must trust the medicine.  This trust is like a kind of faith. When things get rough, you know that’s when the medicine is working.

To work with the medicine in this way requires a very open mind. But in turn, ayahuasca has introduced me to some truly mystical and enlightened states of being. It has showed me what is possible, in this world and the next. I believe that this kind of experience is comparable to any other kind of spiritual or religious revelation to be found in the history books, in which the faithful seek out and receive divine knowledge.

How real are these experiences? Take the testimonies of people like Moses, Muhammad, Joseph Smith or even Joan of Arc. They certainly had the courage of their convictions. You can choose to take them at their word, or not. Personally, I believe that there are many paths to the top of the mountain, and ayahuasca is one such path. In fact, I believe that helping humanity to get to the mountaintop is what it was specifically designed for.

I once asked a veteran shaman here in Iquitos, who is also a Christian, if it was difficult to reconcile religious dogma with the nature of ayahuasca. “Oh no,” he replied. “Quite the opposite. If you believe in Jesus Christ, you drink ayahuasca and feel his love more than ever. If you are a Muslim, you drink and feel the love of Allah more than ever.”

Imagine there is a veil between this world and the next. Drink ayahuasca, and that veil is lifted for a couple of hours. You enter a state that can only be described at the spirit world.  I call it the spirit world because these plants have made me a believer in spirits, and in Spirit. I am not a religious man, but I would be a fool to deny what I have experienced first-hand and found to be quite clearly of a divine origin. By this I mean that the experience derives from a higher order of consciousness, because the lesson by the end of the night is always about love. The importance of holding love in your heart, and sharing it with others. If that’s not something God would want us to reflect on, I don’t know what is.

I often think of Benny Shanon’s book, “The Antipodes of the Mind,” in which he attempts to chart the entire phenomenology of the ayahuasca experience through a very rigorous scientific methodology. One of the interesting things in his book is a list of common or near-universal visions that people have on ayahuasca. The most common visions are snakes, but many people see jaguars or other jungle animals, images of temples or palaces and figures of royalty or divinity.

Shanon came to the conference a few years back and caused a bit of a stir by suggesting that the spirit world did not actually exist, it was merely profoundly imagined. But why then do people drinking the brew in other parts of the world still see images from the jungle, even if they’ve never been there? He explained the universal images that people see as something emanating from a deep well of the unconscious. This wellspring of the creative unconscious contains some ancient archetypal images that all humans have in common without realizing it. I don’t believe think this explanation is accurate, but I can understand how a rational man of science (who has himself drunk ayahuasca many times) might come to that conclusion.

I bring all this up because I have spent years now privately reflecting on the complexity of the ayahuasca experience. Whatever the source of its Intelligence, it remains the greatest and wisest teacher I have ever known. It has changed my life in many ways, all of them positive. I remain awed and humbled by its powers. And yet… and yet, I hesitate to speak of these experiences publicly. As someone coming from a Western analytical tradition, I fully understand the kind of judgments people are going to make when you tell them you ingested a plant medicine (i.e. Schedule I drug) and experienced an ego-dissolving union with the Divine (i.e. tripped your face off).  The fact that ayahuasca contains the highly illegal drug DMT is enough for a lot of people to write it off as just another smoke-and-mirrors psychedelic trip.

But the human brain contains DMT as well. Curiously, its exact function is unknown. How can a substance manufactured by one’s own body be considered a dangerous drug?

This conflicting argument is the basic tenor of a conversation I had with my father recently, right before returning to Peru. He is a physician, and a very analytical guy, and he had done some research into this whole shamanism thing before broaching the subject with me. His concern was that it was a dangerous drug, and might be addictive. He clearly didn’t trust it and thought it might even do permanent damage.  He was even afraid to tell my mother for fear it would upset her too much. I suppose I shared that fear as well.

I respect the fact that my dad had concerns about this, and the fact that he took the trouble to do some research before talking to me about it. But I also have to say that reading about it in a book and having the experience yourself is the difference between reading about the burning bush, and actually climbing the mountain and beholding it with your own eyes.

I have spent years studying philosophy, history and literature in order to better grasp the fruits of knowledge; to learn how to be a good person and live a virtuous life. All of that study prepared me, and in fact led me to embrace a greater understanding of the world around me. There is a Buddhist saying, that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears.” Wherever we are lucky enough to recognize a master teacher, whether in a book or in a plant, should we not have sense enough to pay attention?

Given everything I have already said about my own experience with these plants, which is quite the opposite in every way from my father’s concerns, I tried to put his worries to rest. With regard to addiction (alcoholism runs in our family) ayahuasca has helped me immeasurably to walk a more level path. As for the trip itself, it is so intense, and contains so much material to process and learn from, that I would never want to do it very often– only when I had a specific reason, be it a physical healing session or an introspective voyage of self-inquiry.

I also consider myself a cautious and rational person who comes from a very Western, analytical paradigm in terms of investigating the world. So speaking of such things with my family, or with work colleagues for example, is a delicate matter. Frankly, I would rather manifest the lessons I have learned through my behavior, so that others can see it in my actions, rather than using words at all.

Because let’s be realistic. No one wants to come off as some kind of crackpot hippy mystic babbling on about holy visions and whatnot. At least I don’t!

My Dad argues that these beta-carbolines at work in the brew are drugs, and when you trip, it’s not that God is revealed, it’s just your brain on drugs. God doesn’t live in a drug, he said. Yes, I replied, but maybe He lives in a plant.

So I guess what it comes down to is that one man’s dangerous drug is another man’s spirit medicine.  That’s what Gonzales v. UDV came down to, after all. That was the Supreme Court case a few years back which pitted two competing statutes against one another: the Federal Controlled Substances Act and the Religious Freedoms Restoration Act. On the one hand, you have people taking DMT, which is illegal. On the other, who have people doing in as a sacrament in a spiritual context, as part of a serious, organized religion.  In a unanimous decision, and one of the first majority opinions written by new Chief Justice John Roberts, the court decided that the government had no compelling interest in controlling an individual’s religious freedom. That seems exactly spot-on to me.

So now that I have revealed my hand as someone who is interested in the nature and evolution of consciousness, and who is willing to ingest so-called dangerous drugs on special occasions in order to travel (by orders of magnitude!) further down the path, I hope my parents will read this and understand the spirit of genuine philosophical inquiry behind it.  Our conversation was about fear and addiction and danger, when it should be about love and illumination and higher knowledge. That’s the conversation I’m interested in, anyway. I hope that by talking openly of what this experience is really all about, we can begin to find some common ground.

Only now I see

What time has known: the fullness

Of understanding

synthetic plant medicine

In other news around Iquitos, it’s freakin’ hot. Back to you, Carlos.

So, last night I went over to Casa Fitzcarraldo, Walter Saxer’s lovely poolside bar/lounge/restaurant.  Dennis McKenna was there with a group of pharmacists doing an intensive three-week course in ethnobotany and visiting clinics in the jungle.  They had just finished their course and everyone was celebrating with a pizza party, which was awesome.

Dennis is a very smart and funny guy and also a wonderful writer, and I say that even though I managed to get through Invisible Landscape. Ha! Just joking. Bet seriously, it’s a grind. Anyway, I heard him speak a few years ago in Asheville on the subject of ayahuasca’s relationship to the medical community and the various pitfalls that have prevented anyone from doing any proper clinical trials. He was suggesting at the time that this was the next step in ayahuasca and DMT-based entheogens being able to gain some acceptance within the scientific community. This is important so that they can be more readily available for healing and therapeutic purposes in ‘civilized’ countries just like they have been here in the jungle for centuries. This is good, if you: a) believe in the efficacy of these plant medicines, and b) believe everyone should have equal access to them.

There are numerous retreat centers and organizations throughout the Amazon using these medicines to treat serious problems such as clinical depression and alcoholism and drug abuse. You can Google a well-known place like Takiwasi, for example, and find that they are getting some impressive results. There have been other informal studies done, on prison populations for example, and the results are equally amazing. So I asked Dennis, who has spent years researching this stuff, whether he thought clinical trials were still a good idea.

And to my surprise he said he no longer thought it was all that practical. For one thing, the same hassles exist, i.e. funding, and finding someone to put their name on the material as a domestic supplier. In addition, it is hard to make a traditional brew of ayahuasca and chacruna in a way that guarantees absolutely even samples throughout.  It’s easy enough to produce pharmahuasca in a laboratory, and Dennis says the lab version is practically identical to the botanical version, but then you have the more metaphysical question of ‘is this still the same experience?’ If you take it out of the context of shamanism and traditional healing, and put it into a controlled environment like medical clinic, are the effects going to be the same? Probably not.

So I have to say that Dennis makes a good point that the medicine as it is practiced here, should probably stay here where it was discovered and among the people who perfected indigenous healing techniques. People should come here to try it, he says, and experience it in its native habitat.  Otherwise, there are plenty of other pharmacological options available that your doctor can prescribe.

warning: defections may occur

Another Perspective on Deforestation

I have a letter here from a friend in Iquitos who has been in the logging industry for many years. While he and I do not always agree on everything, I value his opinions on the deforestation problem in the upper Amazon, because he has decades of experience in this area. So I thought it was only fair to cite a few excerpts here on what Mr. J, let’s call him, thinks is the real problem.

“I see with big letters everywhere that logging is included in the deforestation problem. This is simply not true. The lumber industry in the tropics is insignificant . . . if there was in fact an organized and viable lumber industry, the tropical forests would be under much, much less pressure.

“The tropical forest is as the ‘Ecology Industry’ says—it is a very biologically diverse part of our world. This fact makes the tropical forest an inhospitable host for any type of large scale logging or timber production. Why? Because of the hundreds and possibly thousands of forest species in the Amazon, less than 30 have any market value. It is not profitable for a professional logger or a serious company to profit from the harvest of a tree every five hectares—the costs are prohibitive.

“The ‘Ecology Industry’ is the biggest deforestation problem in the Amazon. It has endorsed laws to prohibit and make impossible small scale lumber production . . . this is not surprising as they do not have people on staff who either have experience in the wood industry or in the Amazon . . .

“Why is the ‘Ecology Industry’ a danger to the tropical forests? The forestry laws as they stand today, that were lobbied into law, are absolutely wrong. Because local people of the Amazon cannot meet the requirements of the local laws and bureaucracy to harvest legally and take their wood to market, they must clear-cut and destroy the forest to survive by subsistence farming and cocaine production. If any of the ‘Eco Industry’ groups knew what they were doing, they would be promoting sustainable low impact forestry for the benefit of the local people.

“The ‘Eco Industry’ is forcing people to live in poverty . . . the force families to slash and burn for subsistence farming and cocaine production—all this in one of the richest parts of the world (in terms of biodiversity). The people sending their donation to the ‘Eco Industry’ have no idea of the type of activities they are promoting and what they are participating in.

“Buy tropical wood when it is available, and help save the tropical forests from senseless slash and burn.”

You might infer that Mr. J has a big problem with some of the non-profit organizations lobbying for legislation here in Peru. In particular I believe he has the WWF, the World Wildlife Fund, in mind.

In essence, the problem seems to be that the little guys are not allowed a level playing field due to forestry legislation that makes it difficult to do things legally. What I want to know is, how big a footprint are they making, really, compared to the pros? Mr. J claims that the entire annual lumber production of the eight countries where the Amazon is located is about equal to lumber production in the US state of Oregon. That doesn’t sound so bad at all. But where do these statistics come from?

I’d get my people to look into it, if I had people.

more on Brother Paul

I went by Casa Azul and got a chance to talk with Paul McAuley. Slocum was there with a big map of all the oil and timber leases in northern Peru along with the multimedia photos from his traveling show. Slocum and Paul are sort of brothers in arms for the cause of indigenous rights, which goes hand in hand with the issue of environmental protection here in the jungle. They are really one and the same.

Listening to them talk about the many documented cases of oil contamination, and looking at the pictures of creeks full of sludge and people with skin lesions and terrible physical disorders from environmental pollution, it makes one realize that the stakes in this fight really are life and death.  I have sympathy for their situation and begin to understand how the episodes at Bagua and Andoas came to pass. These people are standing up for their rights, for their very lives. How differently would you or I react if someone poisoned our land or ruined our livelihood?

I wonder what kind of compromise is ultimately possible. Paul acknowledges that the deck is stacked heavily in favor of those with deep pockets and access to the corridors of power. This much is obvious. But perhaps there is a way of showing some of these corporations the wisdom of good PR, by working with representatives of the indigenous groups in a way that would make them feel that they have a seat at the table. I believe that’s what they are asking for, and it wouldn’t even cost these companies very much money, in the grand scheme.  One thing is for certain, this problem is not going to go away as long as people like Paul are brave enough to put themselves in the line of fire.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as they say, and I applaud all those who are working every day to shine a light into the darker corners of industrial logging, mining and oil drilling in the upper Amazon.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. Every country has the right, even the responsibility, to develop their natural resources. But it can be and should be done responsibly and sustainably. I have heard arguments to the effect that this is the case in Peru, but I don’t believe it. I have seen too much evidence to the contrary. Slocum often compares these multinationals to the new conquistadors, coming to plunder Peru’s natural wealth and ship it back to the mother country.  That’s probably a pretty good analogy, but what’s disturbing is that Peru’s own government seems complicit in enabling these new conquistadors in their plunder. The pockets of a very few are being lined at the expense of a great many. This is not a new story, but it’s happening in a very visceral way here in the jungle, and it just seems like mankind is ruining everything, once again.   And then there’s Paul, like the Lorax, standing up and trying to make people listen before it’s too late.

I have friends in Iquitos, who work in industries such as tourism and logging, who say that Paul is not what he appears to be. That he is milking the publicity to make money for his organization like a common shyster or con man. They even take shots at his personal life. To these friends of mine, I must say that if you think Paul is an agitator, then we need more agitators. His actions speak for themselves. Is he a nuisance to the government? Without a doubt. Is he disingenuous in his motives? Absolutely not. Paul has spent his entire career out there on the front lines, lobbying for positive change. How many of us have ever spent a fraction of that time thinking of anyone else’s best interests but our own?

making movies

What a busy week it has been. I got to spend the week filming a documentary with Edward Tyndall of Mobius Productions at locations around Iquitos.  Edward is an old friend of mine and he now teaches film at UT-Corpus Christi. He has been working on his current movie for about a year, and recently he got a grant that will allow him to finish it. I’ve had a chance to see the rough cut of his film, which is loosely modeled on Errol Morris’ “Fast, Cheap and Out of Control,” and it’s pretty interesting stuff if I do say so.

Morris’ film, you may recall, featured a topiary gardener, a lion tamer, a robotics engineer, and a biologist who specialized in the naked mole rat. Edward’s film also has four characters, and the unifying theme involves change or a turning from one path to another: there’s an investment banker who became the director of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va. There’s a musician who became a neuroscientist interested in using technology to replicate consciousness and store human memories on hard drives, thus achieving a kind of immortality. There’s Eustace Conway, who is already famous from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book about him, “The Last American Man.” He lives up near Boone and teaches self-reliance and wilderness survival skills. He reminds me of what would have happened to the kid in “My Side of the Mountain” if he’d just kept living in the woods his whole adult life. And then there’s yours truly, a teacher and corporate headhunter who became interested in ontology and the nature of consciousness, and set out to explore it as a self-fashioned psychonaut using the platform of indigenous plant medicines. At least, that’s my storyline in the film.

And so Edward and I traveled back to Iquitos together, along with producer Patrick Weaver and cinematographer David Lowery. Over the course of four days they shot six hours of film in at least a dozen locations.  He had every single shot outlined, and I marveled at his focus and work ethic in setting up and filming every frame he’d imagined getting on film before leaving the States. They even filmed an ayahuasca ceremony in a very natural and unobtrusive way, which is not an easy thing to do.  Ernesto, our shaman, was very cool about the whole thing. Ernesto, incidentally, was the national kung-fu champion of Peru in his weight class a few years back. Edward and I decided that any proceeds from his film should be funneled into the making of “Kung-Fu Shaman,” starring Samuel L. Jackson if possible, and if not, maybe Gary Busey or someone like that.

But I kid. Anyway, These guys were so efficient in the field at setting up and filming everything that we finished two days ahead of schedule. This was good, because Edward caught the Montezuma’s Revenge and was laid up in bed within a few hours of wrapping up the last day of filming.

Edward says it should take about another year to complete the film and submit it to film festivals. Aside from a Civil War documentary, “Confederate Goliath,” this is Edward’s first major feature-length project and one which I hope will open up many new career opportunities for him, because having watched him work up close, I can see that his talent as a filmmaker is real and formidable.  I can’t wait to see the finished film! And I’m not just saying that ‘cause I’m in it.

So the Mobius crew left yesterday, but I am still in Iquitos. It is unseasonably cold and everyone is wearing sweaters and long pants and complaining about the weather, which has been overcast and in the mid-60’s. That’s serious winter conditions for the jungle!

This week has been so full and rich in experience. Every day brought so many new impressions. We arranged a police escort to go to lower Belen and then filmed little girls playing with a conquistador helmet. We went to the zoo and saw jaguars and monkeys and anaconda and a pink dolphin with a full-on erection. We got up before dawn and took a boat out on the Itaya in the crepuscular mist to film a scene that is supposed to represent, in the film, the end of one’s life and the passing from one world into the next. I was the actor in a scene that was the allegory of my own eventual death, in other words.

Then we went to the Belen meat market, yikes. A man saw the camera and picked up a skinned caiman carcass and made it dance like Charlie Chaplin. That was hilarious. We went out to Slocum’s land and walked through the raw jungle in the rain. We found a Bora snake dancer and hired her perform for us on the Malecon with a drummer and flute player. Later that day, Kathy and I went to Alan Shoemaker’s Shamanism Conference, which was also going on this week, and got to hear some of the speakers and also see the same Bora girl perform again. If life was like this all the time, it would be all too much. A little reflection and digestion is needed now and then, to make sense of it all, or else the parade begins to blur together. Here in Iquitos, the parade never stops. It just keeps going on and on until you get tired and need to go home and sleep!

This afternoon I am going over to Slocum’s to say hello to Paul McAuley. Paul is a lay member of the De La Salle Christian Brothers, and he has been working tirelessly for ten years around Iquitos to protect and lobby for the rights of the indigenous. He has made a lot of enemies along the way. Recently the government somewhat suddenly and mysteriously decided that Paul is an agitator and his presence is no longer desired. They tried to expel him from the country, but Paul has the backing of the Roman Catholic church, somewhat reluctantly I suspect but still they have come out publicly to support him, along with Amnesty International and many other prominent human rights organizations. I don’t think the government expected this incident to get so much publicity, as he has been on the cover of lots of magazines and the story is getting international attention. Their gambit appears to have backfired, as the plight of the indigenous is now in the news more than ever, and Brother McAuley finds himself standing prominently at the nexus of some immensely powerful and conflicting forces here in Peru.  At the moment, he remains in Iquitos, but things are still developing. More on this later.

Asheville to Iquitos

Goodness, time like a river just keeps flowin’ around the bend. Here it is July, and in two days I will be back in Iquitos again. There’s a lot going on there right now. Aside from Asheville, it’s my favorite place to live.  Both cities have incredible natural beauty and both are brimming with weird and wonderful characters. There’s a delightful eccentricity to the vibes. Life seems more interesting in places like these. I feel grateful that I have the luxury of such a choice, to live in places like these that have so much going on.  Once upon a time, Asheville and Iquitos both had a feeling of being well-kept secrets. Of something unique, best kept off the beaten track. I think those days are probably over now. Both my hometown in the NC mountains and my adopted home in the Peruvian jungle are getting a lot of attention, a lot of visitors and new residents. And perhaps that’s not all bad. They are, after all, real treasures. But I hope that what is essential and special about these places doesn’t change too much.  It’s like my friend’s favorite fly-fishing hole up in Pisgah. The trout are always biting up there, and it’s a spectacular spot. He wants to tell his fishing buddies about it, but he never will. It’s only a matter of time before someone else finds it anyway, and then he’ll have to share it. So might as well enjoy it while you can.

Asheville, goodbye for now. I’ll be back again someday. And you know what Asheville’s most famous native son said about that… well don’t you believe it. You can always go home again. It just won’t be the same as you remembered it.

Iquitos, I can’t wait to see you again. Let’s pick up right where we left off.