Ayahuasca Mind Part 7

Tranquil Revolutions

 

 

Time for Coca

 

The hastily spread dollop of jam slithers down my empty-tunnel throat as I jump into a motocar and yell  (with unintentional gusto) “downtown please!”
 

......
 

We stare at each other.
 

“Que?”  The driver asks.
 

..........
 

We stare at each other.
 

“…why... did I assume he knew english?” I ask myself dumbfounded, before brushing aside this flawed assumption and cobbling together a bit of spanish, “uhh…ir…al…plaza de armas…por favor”. Off we go snaking through the half-finished maze of Iquitos’ streets.
 

J. and M. sit calmly beneath the burgeoning sun. I walk up, we chat a bit, and then head on down to the surreal and every-busy Belen Market. Zigzaging around people, motorcycles, and overflowing displays of food, we arrive at stall number 23 and purchase ayahuasca vines and chacruna leaves.
 

I waddle down the slim aisle of an overcrowded bus and sit in the back, peering out the dusty window as we barrel down the highway. At marker 23 the bus comes to a slow halt, we pay the fare, and begin walking down a long dirt road that vanishes into the jungle. A deep blue interspersed with wisps of cotton-white paints itself across the dome sky as we travel toward a jungle house to grab some coca leaves and a machete. Throughout the day, I chew and make leaf-wads of this amazing energy-boosting, appetite-suppressing plant.

Making Ayahuasca

 

Making ayahuasca is easy to do, provided you have all the plants. But how did those early folks figure out the plant combinations? Trial and error seems way too tedious in a jungle of 80,000 species! 
 

First gather the basics --- ayahuasca vine, a hammer, a pot to cook in, and chacruna leaves. Although their isn’t one formula for making ayahuasca (this isn’t some type of Betty Crocker shit!), this is pretty standard, but you can also tweak it a bit by mixing in other species like chiricsanango or tobacco if you please.
 

Grab the vines and smash them open with a hammer (without smashing your grabbing hand) and place them inside a large pot. Add some chacruna leaves, bless it with mapacho smoke, and pour some water in. Seal it up by placing a few large leaves on top and fastening them in and then let it simmer over fire for a few hours.
 

The world with all its simultaneously happenings goes about its business of maintaining its continuous creations as we sit and wait, smoking mapacho’s and listening.
 

“Muy tranquilo” M. says intermittantly.
 

Our little patch of earth revolves away from the sun and dusk rises. Our magical-medicinal bitter-brew is nearly ready. The vine and leaves are thrown aside and the remaining liquid is sifted through an old shirt, a cleaning process that precedes one last refinement.
Bam! Pow! and other onomatopeitic (?) phrases abound (if only in my head) as 300ml of medicine is poured into an empty water bottle. Mapacho smoke blesssings and a bit of shaking put on the finishing touches. 

gather chacruna leaves

 

 

 

gather ayahuasca vines, a hammer, and a cooking pot

smash the vines

put vine in cooking pot

bless the vine with mapacho smoke

sprinkle some tobacco on top

add some more ayahuasca

pour water into the pot

seal off the top

discard ayahuasca after it has simmered

photograph discarded ayahuasca and put caption underneath

sift remaining ayahuasca through a cloth

take the remaining ayahuasca and refine it further

finished ayahuasca

bless the ayahuasca with mapacho smoke

 

 

 Ceremony: Tattered Nostalgia

 

The Sun exits stage west and hides its masculine solar-flesh to allow the moon to glow in its full feminine glory. Beneath the wooden roof of M.’s old jungle house, we set up for the ceremony by sitting close to each other and ritually blowing mapacho smoke.  The bottom of an empty water bottle becomes the ad-hoc sacramental cup. I carefully raise it to my lips, breath deeply, and gulp it down.
 

A half hour later and I’m still feeling little.
 

“Would you like to drink a second cup?”
 

That damn question! My brain screams “yes yes drink more” while my stomach, having to deal with the digestive repercussions, is much more wary. So I reside in limbo, vacillating between “it’s not worth it” to “you must drink”, as J. knits another aural tapestry. The icaro ends and the jungle continues with an encore.
 

“Hwoo” I exhale, “yeah, I’ll take another cup.”
 

Another full cup almost climbs down my throat, but I guess it was fearful of the digestive process so it opts to climb back out. An acidic citrus-flavored stream catapults itself from my open mouth. Although the actual experience of throwing up wasn’t pleasant, the after-effects were. My theatrical mind plays a show of nostalgia; old friends and family members appear on stage. The little man inside me begins judging and clothing these people in prejudicial costumes that are often many years worn out. The little man turns to look at himself and notices the same tattered clothes.
 

“Why do I do this? how often do I do this?” the little man wonders.
 

The little man sits with this thought for a while.
 

“There is no reason to be doing this” he concludes, and so one by one the constricting and tattered clothes peel away as the personalities behind are set free. That immensely powerful fourth chakra, the heart center, beats thunderously with a deep love that stays long after the mareado subsides. As the ceremony ends, I curl up close to the uneven floor’s edge and glimpse the vibrating night sky.

Leaving The Amazon

On one shoulder lies a deeply sad character and on the other dances a happy angel. I’ll miss that jet-black sky dotted with the invisible electrical wiring of pin-point stars as I balance on a string between two worlds.  I’m going to miss ayahuasca and all it entails –the insights and purging, the jungle nights and inspiring people– but it’s time to live what I’ve learned. So I head away from the chaos of Iquitos and into the chaos of the United States.

The Florida airport becomes a jarring experience for me—I can suddenly understand the language people speak, but the pompous way in which two men discuss their financial investments makes me wish I didn’t. Even though I’ve lived in this country my whole life, I feel like a foreigner. The people here seem plastic, molded from a rigid factory headed by inhumane bureaucrats who lost their sense of possibility long ago.
 

Life seems to be a series of phases that we grow through, in many ways reflecting the cycle of day and night. The shimmering rays of the midday sun don’t need, nor do they cling to, the early morning ascent. People, like the shimmering rays, die not only at the “end” of their lives, but through the whole progression of it; we have our early morning rise, the midday shine, and an evening descent. Forgetting this knowledge, people tend to carry around corpses simply because they don’t know what to do with them! Whether young or old, it’s sad to see people unable to embrace the phase they’re in, to see old women longing for an early morning rise. Unlike traditional societies, our society has no ritual that commemorates the death of one phase and the birth of another, perhaps by constructing a little ritual-death people can help to let go of the older phases and jump full force into the new.
 

Hypothetical ritual: gather some old journals and distill the essence of what you’ve written into a few paragraphs that you integrate into a caricature of your old-self, go to a secluded area and clear your mind (meditate, light some incense, or smoke a mapacho), dig a hole and place the objects in it—light the hole on fire! Stand up and (live) get on with your life. Salud!