25-Years of Shamanism—Part 4

Readers: This is the fourth part of an ongoing series related to some of the highlights of my experience working with Shamanism. This was originally planned as a talk I was to give at the 3rd Annual Shamanism Conference in Peru in July, 2007. I never gave it because on the day I was to speak I had need of emergency surgery. The other entries are also in this blog.--Peter Gorman


25-Years of Shamanism---Part 4

Two years later, in 1990, I had another extraordinary experience with ayahuasca at Julio’s. I was in Peru with my friend Larry. I’d been hired by an Italian scientist, Vittorio Erspamer, to bring back a live example of the frog the indigenous Matses utilized to make their sapo medicine. I’d already tried three times and failed at the task. This time out Larry and I were going to walk across the Peruvian jungle from Genero Herrera to the Rio Galvez. I hoped that my friend Pablo, seeing that I was willing to do such a difficult hike, would reward me/us with some of the frogs whose medicine I’d used a number of times, but which I’d actually never seen.
We left Iquitos via riverboat and 17-hours later reached Herrera. But instead of immediately heading off into the jungle we decided to go on to Julio’s house to drink ayahuasca before the trip. We all felt it would fortify us for the several days we’d be hiking under the canopy.
On the day we were to drink, Larry and I spent much of the time watching Julio prepare it. He was up before dawn cutting the wood for the day-long fire while a new woman he was living with, a beautiful old curandera named Sophia, filled the great iron pot with water from the Auchyacu. Despite their age they refused all offers for help and as they worked the years fell away from their faces. Julio especially: The sinewy muscles on his tiny frame seemed to grow younger and more taut with each stroke of his axe.
By noon the several gallons of liquid in the pot had been reduced to perhaps a quart. He strained it through an old pair of pantyhose into a large plastic container, cleaned the pot of the crushed vines, leaves and tree barks he’d cooked, then refilled it and began the process again. He worked quietly, intensely. Now and then he chanted softly or blew mapacho smoke into the pot. At one point he tossed in several whole mapacho cigarettes.
"Muy bueno por los espiritos," he said, smiling. Good for the spirits.
When the second pot full of liquid had also been reduced to a quart or so he strained it off again, cleaned the pot, then combined the reductions and cooked them down together. What had been maybe 20 gallons of water at the start was less than a quart when he was done.
I’d asked Sophia whether she would join us that evening. She had said no, ayahuasca was not for her. "It’s not a very friendly spirit to me," she said. "But it seems to like Julio quite a lot."
That evening, in the time when we generally sat silent before the ceremony, Larry asked Julio what his visions were like. Julio smiled. "I see many things. I see boats, planes, people, spirits. I talk with them and they tell me things. Some of them are dead family members or old friends. Some of them are the ancients, spirits I don’t know. There are a lot of different spirits that speak with me. Some of them are good and some of them are not. But they are only spirits. Some of them let me see what illness a person has and what plants I should use to cure them."
He chuckled, then stepped into the walled off bedroom of his otherwise wall-less platform hut to retrieve the medicine. Normally that was the moment when Moises stepped away from the little circle where we sat to take his position as a sort of guard to keep whomever was drinking from falling off the platform. This time he didn’t and I was surprised.
"I’m going to drink tonight."
I reminded him that I’d never seen him drink before.
"I’ve never done it before," he said.
"You’ve never done it?" I asked. "But you were the one who suggested we use it on that first trip!"
"Too dangerous," he answered. "But I have a feeling that I should use it tonight."
I resented him not telling us years ago that he’d never even tried it.
"If I start to wander into the river, stop me," he said quietly. I assured him he wouldn’t but that if he did, we would.
Julio returned and placed a sheet of blue plastic on the flooring in front of his chair. On it he put his mapachos, his perfume, a bottle of camphor, cumalunga and garlic teeth in cane liquor, a bottle of Agua Florida, his chacapa—a leaf rattle—his old stone axe-head and the bottle of ayahuasca. "Bueno," he smiled. "Ready?"
We all nodded. Julio reached for a mapacho, lit it, then pulled the shriveled piece of corn cob he’d used as a stopper from the bottle. He hunched over, held the bottle-neck close to his mouth and began to pray. With his free hand he smoked: Short, rapid puffs that he blew into the liquid. When he finished the first mapacho he lit a second, then put the bottle down, cleaned out a small plastic cup with smoke, filled it with ayahuasca and began to sing.
The words were clear, the song rich and beautiful. It seemed to echo off the trees around his house and fill the night air. When he finished he handed the cup to Larry, who closed his eyes and drank. The cup came to me next. The ayahuasca was as thick and dank and difficult to get down as always. Julio repeated the process for Moises and finally himself, chanting all the while. What power he possessed! With each song he seemed to grow stronger and more luminous in the light from the little kerosene lamp.
When we’d finished drinking and he’d passed the other things around for us to inhale—to help keep the ayahuasca down for at least a little while—he put the bottles to the side of the circle and flicked off the lamp with his chacapa. I closed my eyes and listened to the hissing of Julio’s fan as he shook it in time with the songs. In moments the visions began.
Green points of light appeared in front of me, like a dot matrix. They combined and made the skeleton of an archway and ceiling, a sort of luminous green skeleton of a cathedral ceiling. I opened my eyes: They lights didn’t disappear.
They didn’t last long either. In a few minutes I found myself in utter darkness, eyes opened or shut. I saw bright fruit handing from trees and realized I was in a forest full of trees bearing mangos, papayas and bananas. I reached for one of the bananas. To my surprise it began to peel itself. Instead of a banana it revealed a small beautiful reddish-brown monkey with shining eyes. It began to grin and I felt myself grinning back. But the monkey’s grin kept growing wider until it was a hideous, jabbering mouth screaming obscenities that broke off finally into a sort of insane laughter.
I recoiled and opened my eyes. I’d never had such a dream-like vision while using ayahuasca before. But when I closed my eyes the image returned. It laughed at me and when it did finally disappear it was followed by a series of visions I can only describe as a trip through a funhouse of desires and fears. I was in a place of roller coasters and huge slides. Faces appeared out of the darkness while I rode on the rides. There were demons and beautiful women. There were funhouse mirrors in which I saw a thousand versions of myself—some normal distortions, and some in which I watched myself—or was forced to relive—some of the worst things I’d ever done. It was a strange and haunting voyage, altogether different than what I’d expected or anticipated.
The women were cartoonish and sexy, with huge breasts and round hips and dark Peruvian eyes. They called to me. I wanted to be with them. All of them. And then I found myself as a tiny me facing a huge inverted ‘V’. It was a luscious vagina seen from below on a giantess of some sort. I began to hurtle towards her. As I grew close she turned and I realized to my horror that it wasn’t a woman at all, but a giant with a giant penis. I thought of the sexual connotations of the monkey in the banana peel and resigned myself to the homophobic implications of the naked giant. I was disgusted with what I thought was my mind playing a cruel joke on my sensibilities but as I moved closer I realized I was not titilating myself with a secret urge so much as I was being driven to confront myself. The closer I moved the more awful the thought of having sex with the giant became; simultaneously I felt I was supposed to embrace it, deal with the implications.
I resigned myself, but just as I got within inches the giant turned around and became the giantess again. She was beautiful, with brown hair and sparkling eyes and she was laughing. She danced above me, tantalizing, a fantastic bronze goddess. I shivered ecstatically and rushed toward her, burying myself in her inviting vagina.
But I didn’t stop. I found myself hurtling up the tunnel of her vagina. I grew younger and younger the deeper I went, younger till I was a child, a baby and then in the time before I was born, a kind of amorphous embryo buried in the deepest well-spring of life. I was surprised that I seemed to understand more about the nature of the universe than I’d ever known, as if in that state before birth all things were common knowledge. It was a brilliant state of awareness.
I looked around the space where I’d stopped. It was warm and soft on three sides; on the fourth there were prisonish bars. I was a prisoner of time and the moment of birth, afraid to regress further, afraid to come out of the cage. But something was prodding me to leave and I wasn’t strong enough to fight it: The bars gave way and I began to emerge. Down the tunnel I slid. There was a light at the end of it. With every moment closer to that light I could feel my knowledge and awareness slipping away. I wanted to stop. It was an awful and cruel joke played on humans by the universe.
The moment I emerged, the moment I was born I separated from the embryo and watched the baby emerge. All the knowledge I’d had just a moment ago was gone, all the awareness vanished except for the bitterness of knowing that I’d known and didn’t know any longer. I could feel immense loneliness coming from the baby’s tiny spirit.
The baby disappeared. The image gave way to a space filled with beautiful women draped in brilliantly colored materials. More than colors and material, they were draped in iridescent light the nature of which I can hardly describe. It was more vibrant and exciting than anything I’d ever seen was. I wanted to stay with them forever, but the patterns of light became a light glinting from the scales of a thousand snakes. One in particular seemed to notice me. Its head was triangular and glowing, but though I recognized it as a viper I knew it wouldn’t harm me. I tried to travel with it but it reared and wouldn’t allow that. I tried harder and lost the power of movement altogether. I couldn’t even open my eyes.
When I finally relaxed, beautiful feelings of warmth washed over me, filling me with joy. I basked in them but in an instant the joy was transformed to something ugly and paranoid. I felt so meager and weak, so cruel and unworthy. I was useless and had always been useless. I was small. It was a waste of life that had been given to me.
I was sure that the others could see me for what I really was and I wanted to hide. I could hardly live with seeing this, the real me, and certainly couldn’t live knowing that Larry and Julio and Moises had seen it as well. It occurred to me that hiding would not protect me from their awareness of my meanness. The only thing to do was to kill them all with my machete. I pictured myself hacking them up and tossing them into the river. I could return to Iquitos and explain that we’d had an accident in the canoes. By the time we returned to look for their bodies river predators would have finished them off.
I fought to control the urge and as I did I felt a warm wind on my face. I opened my eyes. It was Julio, blowing mapacho smoke on me and fanning me with his leaves. He chanted softly.
"You don’t have to act on everything you see on ayahuasca, Pedro," he said softly. "Still, I think I’ll just put the machete away."
I felt a wave of relief shudder through me and knew that the moment of uncertainty had passed. But I was breathing heavily and soaked with sweat. I lit a cigarette and looked around. Larry was walking in the trees nearby; Moises was leaning over the platform, vomiting with great heaves and gusto.
I listened to Julio chanting. It was so simple, so soothing and centering. I realized that Julio’s voice was the anchor to which I was meant to tether myself.
I wanted to vomit and left the porch. But vomiting wouldn’t come, Instead I began to excrete. I don’t mean to be graphic but the effect was similar to the vomiting: From deep within me I could fee motion, deeper than a body function, cleansing me of things I didn’t even know I’d bottled up inside.
When I returned to the porch I closed my eyes again. I was exhausted. I wanted only simple things: To fly with the bird or travel with the snake. I was tired of the extremes the other visions had produced.
I thought of my friends back home. Chuck, Alberta—the woman I was seeing—my sisters. As each crossed my mind I found myself looking in on them. I didn’t feel like I was traveling, I was just there. Chuck’s apartment was dark but familiar and I guessed he’d gone to sleep early. Alberta was sleeping as well, but her lights and television were still on. The clock next to her bed read 11:45. I lingered with her for a few moments. She looked so lovely, so peaceful, hidden beneath her great quilt, one of her cats balled up behind the crook of her legs. I tried to wake her; she brushed a hand up by her face as if I were a fly that was disturbing her sleep.
Suddenly the image of Clare crossed my mind. I still thought of her sometimes but we hadn’t been in touch since she’d gotten married and moved to Florida nearly four-years earlier. I hadn’t meant to think of her just then and didn’t want to visit her, so I tried to get rid of the thought. It wouldn’t leave. Worse, in a moment she unexpectedly appeared. She looked at me long and hard.
"Hello, P," she finally said.
"Hello, Clare," I answered. It felt like I said the words aloud but I don’t think anyone else could hear them. "I didn’t mean to bring you."
"I know. But I have to tell you something. You have to let me go."
"I already let you go."
"No. I mean you really have to let me go. I’m not coming back to you."
"I know."
"Part of you is holding on, P. But you’re holding on to the me that doesn’t exist anymore."
An empty feeling welled up in me. "I don’t mean to be holding on to you, Clare. I want to let you have whatever life you want."
"Don’t you see? It’s not your choice to let me have anything. Just let me go."
I started to get angry. I hadn’t meant what she thought. I just meant I loved her enough to let her go. "I didn’t mean that," I said.
"Yes, you did. That’s the problem."
"Okay. Maybe I did. But I’m trying to let you go. It’s just hard. Why couldn’t you even write one Christmas card just to say hello?"
"I just couldn’t. You’re not in my life."
"Will I ever see you again, even in the street?"
She thought for a moment. "Not like you think. Not until it doesn’t matter whether you do or not."
And then she was gone and I was crying. I suddenly understood what she meant, realized how much I’d been holding on and how all of the visions I’d had that night were about letting go. About desires and fears and how they held me back. The sadness that came with those realizations was deeper than I’d ever known. I felt cut lose from everything that I thought mattered to me. I felt hollow and weak and torn apart.
And then a voice began to speak. "Hello," it said.
There was no one I could see, just a voice, but not one I recognized.
"Hello," it said again.
"Who are you?" I asked, hoping it was just a voice I was inventing.
"You know who I am," it said plainly.
I did. I sensed it was the spirit of ayahuasca. I know that seems crazy and it seemed crazy to me as well, but I also knew it was true and I began to get terrified. I believed in the spirit of things, and I knew the power of ayahuasca, but I’d never imagined anything like that disembodied voice. It wasn’t just a spirit or a vision or anything like talking with Clare or even my mother. This was like being in the presence of something unfathomable.
I opened my eyes, hoping it would go away if I ignored it. It didn’t It was just waiting me out. "What do you want?" I asked finally.
"You’re the one who called me," it said. "You’re the one who keeps calling me."
"I don’t mean to. I just drank ayahuasca to get ready for the trip, and to travel and see things…"
The voice said that wasn’t true. It said I called because I needed things and I was getting what I needed: My immense sorrow, my confrontation with my desires and fears. The voice said that this was a time for cleansing, for emptying out, not for proving I could visit friends on ayahuasca.
What it said was true, and my initial fear of its presence began to subside. But then it asked me if I would let it enter. It was such a strange request that I was taken aback. The ayahuasca was already inside me, I said. The voice said no, that wasn’t what it meant.
Suddenly I had the vision of a snake wrapping itself around my head. I saw my head open and a side view of my brain, as if it had been cut in two and I was looking into it. It looked like the inside of a bee colony, all tunnels. Dozens of snakes appeared and began sliding into the tubes of my brain. At first it felt wonderful, like immense power and motion was sliding into me but then I wasn’t sure that I should let them. I thought that maybe I was being fooled. Julio had always warned that while some of the spirits we might meet were good, others were evil and I was afraid that this might be an evil one. What if it wasn’t ayahuasca, or if it was, what if it was some awful and dark part of it?
I asked the voice what the snakes meant, why they had to enter me, but I didn’t get an answer. Part of me thought it was a kind of test, but an other part of me thought it was a kind of trick, and that if the snakes were allowed to disappear in my brain I would never get them out. I don’t know what I thought that would mean but it was terrifying. Whatever it was, I knew it wasn’t the right thing, that I shouldn’t let those snakes into my brain. I began to pull them out by their tails. They were strong and hard to dislodge and the longer I fought the more I was sure that if it really had been the voice of ayahuasca speaking with me it wouldn’t have asked me to let it enter in such a terrifying way. I felt like I was fighting for my life, that if I lost I would be enslaved forever.
The moment I got the last of them out I was no longer sure I’d made the right choice. I felt I might have missed something extraordinary. I asked the voice why it hadn’t just talked with me, why everything seemed to be a test designed to make me fight it.
It answered that it had already given me so many gifts that I should have some faith and trust. It said I shouldn’t ask for so much without giving anything in return. The voice didn’t sound angry or disappointed, it just said those things then disappeared, and I knew my visions were done.
I opened my eyes and stood weakly. The ground was glistening and wet. It had rained at some point but now I stared at a sky full of falling stars and tried to absorb the lessons I’d been given. After a few minutes I stepped off the porch and joined Larry. I wanted to tell him everything I’d seen and heard but was afraid that if I did the voice might come back and I didn’t want that to happen. Instead we walked to the river quietly. He told me that he too had experienced the lesson of letting go, though neither of us talked about it in depth.
When we returned to the house Moises was asleep but Julio was waiting up for us. "Un noche fuerte," he said. "Bastante espiritos." A strong night, filled with spirits.
He asked us to sit, then sang a song for each of us. While he did he washed us down with mapacho smoke, then rubbed camphor on our hair and torsos. "To see the spirits don’t cling to you," he explained. He’d never done that before and it felt intimate and generous. I wondered whether he sensed or saw something of the nature of the experience that night which made him think it was necessary. He didn’t say. I remembered the incident with the machete and almost laughed. He’d seen everything. His cleansing was good: The moment he began to blow smoke on us my fears disappeared.
When Julio was finished he said goodnight and went to bed. I stayed on the porch for a long time, trying to figure what I’d seen and heard. It certainly felt real, and the lessons I’d been given were ones I needed to learn. I thought of what Moises had told me years earlier: Ayahuasca gives you what you need, not what you want.
I finally gave up thinking and just stared at the sky. I felt alive and unenslaved. I wanted to embrace the night and the trees and everything in the jungle, Probably an hour or two passed before I grew tired, got into my hammock and went to sleep.
Some months later I told Julio about the snakes and how I’d gotten them out of me. He chuckled. "Pedro, that was a gift. You missed a wonderful chance to know things."
"What do you mean?"
"Snakes know so much. It was probably the spirit of a snake talking with you, but to you it was a man’s voice. If you had let it in it would have lived in you. You would always know who your friends are and who are just pretending to be your friends. You would know many things."
I felt awful. "Will it come back? Will I get another chance?"
"I don’t know. It depends on the spirit."

Great Day at the Gormans!

Well, I finally pulled the trigger. Did it. It's done. Things are going to get sweet from here on out. Not sure I deserve the love, but what the heck, I'll take it! Hooray for us!
Madeleina had a sleepover last night. One of her girlfriends from Girl Scouts who's also on her new soccer team and I guess they had a good time, judgeing from the fact that when I got up to pee at 4:58 this AM they were building a fort out of the living room furniture and several sheets while watching a movie and listening to loud music all at the same time.
Italo went out with his pals and invited his livein gal, Sarah---she's been living with us almost two years (Italo, actually)--to join him at the Stockyards at midnight and they came wandering in just about the time I was taking my 5 AM pee. And Marco, who wasn't home then, was sleeping in his bed by my 6 AM wakeup, so he must have snuck in between 5 and 6.
This morning I got up and wrote a new section of my 25-Years of Shamanism piece that I don't think I'll post till you muthafukkas respond at least a few times to Part 3 of that work--then did a food review of the most family-ish family diner in all of Fort Worth, then made breakfast for Madeleina and her pal Liana, then headed out to the yard to test my stomach.
This surgery I've had has got me down. I've not done anything since June 20 except one 8 day trip to the jungle. Other than that I've been a lump and I feel like one. I can't work, I can't do anything but sit at this computer and still my guts are coming together in a gnarly way, like two big fists coming out of my stomach between my sternum and belly-button despite this goshdarned girdle I'm wearing.
So today I fired up the electric push lawn-mower and mowed one of our yards. Hurt like hell. When I finished I checked the stitches and discovered I'd ripped out two quarter-inches of flesh with two stitches, leaving about three in tact and 9 torn open, each having taken a triangle of flesh from the ripped side with them. I still think I have to test the muscles in my stomach or I will always be afraid to use them. The docs said not to lift and push anything till December. I'm impatient and did a heck of a job on the lawn. Of course it almost killed me, but at least I have an idea of where I stand. Not on very solid ground, I'll tell you that.
Followed that up with taking Chepa--who hasn't been nice for a week or so (maybe it's the pregnancy)--out to eat at Wild Buffalo Wings with Madeleina and Sierra. Sarah was working so that was fun. Blew $50 on chicken wings, salad, a beer for Chepa, couple of Jim Beams for me and a couple of virgin pina coladas for Madeleina and Sierra, who blow-gunned a number of patrons via straw with the frozen concoction, creating quite a stir.
And then I came home, and looked into my mail and discovered that a distant relative in Burkina Faso had died and left me, as the only living relative, several millions that are rotting in an English bank. So I wrote to collect them and expect that within a couple of weeks the money will arrive in my bank. HOORAY! Who cares about spending $50 at Buffalo Wild Wings if you've got millions coming in a couple of weeks?
And then since that made me feel so good I went ahead and signed up for a cream that is guaranteed to make my penis twice as fat and 4-6 inches longer. Eat your heart out John Holmes! I'm hot today. Give me a month and I'll be starring in pornos with Brianna Banks. HA!
Today's my day alright. With my new bigger bank account and guaranteed bigger, more desireable penis, I feel strong enough to maybe even sign up for a Master's Degree via the internet, guaranteed in one year or less.
Hoo boy, don't touch me wihout asbestos, cause I'm hot today!

25 Years of Shamanism--Part 3

Readers: This is Pert 3 of 25 Years of Shamanism, a talk I was to have given at the 3rd Annual Shamanism Conference in Iquitos in July, 2007. I didn't give it because I had had emergency surgery just a couple of hours before I was to speak. And thank god, because it would have taken several hours to say all this and the audience would have gone to sleep before I was through it.




In 1988, I had another extraordinary shamanic experience. I spent another month with Moises, this time walking across a good section of the jungle from the Tamischaku River to the Rio Midi, which emptied into the Jivari about 100 bird-flight miles north of where the Galvez did. We’d made our way down to Letecia—the point where the Jivari joins the Amazon—by raft and small motor boat (which we’d commandeered at gunpoint and later returned to the owner with many thanks, but that’s another story), then took a riverboat back to Iquitos. On board was a fellow named Roberto whom I’d know for a couple of years in Iquitos, As his game was bilking tourists for phony environmental causes we weren’t close. Still, we talked occasionally.
"Hello, Peter," he said when we both found ourselves at the ferry’s refreshment stand. "Have you done any ayahuasca lately?"
"No."
"There’s a fantastic curandero now living in Pevas you should see. I’ve taken lots of tourists. What visions they have! Much better than that old man you see. Maybe I’ll take you."
"Thanks, Roberto. No need."
"Well, then, have you heard about the ayahuasquero fight?"
"No."
"You probably don’t know anything about them."
I told him I didn’t, and he explained that many ayahuasqueros used their spirit connections to accumulate personal power or wealth, frequently by making bad things happen to people at the behest of their enemies—what is called brujeria. The brujeria needed to be countered by a curandero working for the good, which supposedly led to great battles between good and evil ayahuasqueros. Those battles were said to be fought with invisible darts called virotes, which could inflict great physical harm or even death. I’d heard something about those battles somewhere but had never believed they were taken seriously.
"Well," Roberto said, drinking a beer I’d bought him in exchange for his story. "One ayahuasquero in Santa Clara has been slowly poisoning another in Iquitos. Very well done. By the time the man in Iquitos realized his illness came from virotes it was almost too late.
Fortunately, one of his sons has been studying with him and now he too is in the fight. Everyone says that all three of them will be dead before long."
While I acted skeptical at the time, when we reached Iquitos I decided to see Julio to ask him about this aspect of the medicine. I had no real intention of asking him to make ayahuasca for me, but while I was still in Iquitos I had a dream which changed my mind. It was about my father, who had been dead for nearly 16-years at that time. In the dream he told me that he could no longer see my mother—also dead several years—and asked me to find her and find out why. It was an eerie dream and I decided to use ayahuasca to try to discover what it meant. I don’t know what I expected, or whether it was just an excuse to use ayahuasca again, but it made sense to me that that was what I should do.
I brought along a friend from Iquitos who had never been to the Auchyako, and at the last minute discovered that Moises had found four tourists who would also be going. But Junior and Mauro—the second man in the canoe the night I associated with the snake—a would be accompanying them—Moises did not come—which made our party enormous. Worse, when Moises learned that my friend, Jarli, and I were planning to use ayahasca he immediately sold the idea to his group.
Despite the size of our party the time we spent on the little river was glorious. Mauro and Junior took care of Moises’ gang, while Jarli and I were left to our own devices. I was saddened to learn that Salis Navarro, Julio’s apprentice, had been killed by Antonio, one of Papa Vieho’s sons. It seems that Salis had been recruited by one of the big tour companies operating out of Iquitos to offer ayahuasca once a week to large groups at a camp just outside the city. It had evidently gone to his head that he was important and when back on the little Auchyako he took advantage of his position and money to seduce some of the women there. Among them was the main wife of Antonio, who, like Salis, had been my friend for a couple of years. The seduction evidently occurred while Antonio was out in the jungle hunting for a few days: When he returned and was told of it Antonio put a shotgun to Salis’ belly and fired, then headed off with his other wives and children to Brazil.
When I raised the subject of virotes with Julio he was at first reluctant to discuss it. And even when he finally agreed he prefaced his remarks with the comment that I wouldn’t really understand what he was talking about.
"This is not something for people to talk about," he said, "so I won’t say too much. You ask if there are spirit arrows. Of course. When I was younger and still in Pulcallpa there was a brujo there who hated me. At first he used them on my house and chickens. I would come home from fishing and find everything in disarray, or some chickens dead. Healthy chickens he killed with his invisible arrows.
"And then he began to use them on me. One day I could no longer walk. I stood at my table and just fell over."
"What happened?" I asked.
"I took them out. And when I could walk again I went into the woods to talk with the plants. I didn’t know what else to do. I really thought he was going to kill me. There I found this." He took out a small stone ax-head. It was very old and perfectly crafted. I’d seen it once before but didn’t know anything about it. "This from the Incas, the ancients," he said. "It has a lot of power. It saved me from that brujo."
He stared at me to see if I understood. I didn’t.
"I said you wouldn’t understand. Look: Ayahuasca is a strong medicine. That is why we call the four colors in our song: Red, green, white and black. Each represents a different kind of magic. Some people practice only one or two of them. But if your know four and concentrate only on one there is no balance and the magic can take you over. Some people fall in love with money, or power or women. All different things. But they do not control the magic that brings those things, the magic controls them. Entiendas? Understand?"
Again I shook my head.
"Everything has a spirit. This house, these trees, the river, the fish in the river. You might say that ayahuasca helps you reach those spirits. But when people learn to work with those spirits there is a temptation to forget that they are only the doctor, not the medicine, and they lose their balance. They are they ones to watch out for. Muy peligroso. Very Dangerous. They are drunk with power."
I’d never heard Julio speak so much and though I knew I’d missed a great deal of detail with my weak translation, I was thrilled. I still didn’t really understand the concept of invisible arrows, but I didn’t press him further.
I did ask if he would make ayahuasca the following night. He asked for how many and then why. I told him about my dream.
"You’ll have to go to the world of the dead," he said. "Muy lejos. Very far. I’ll make it strong." He said it plainly, as though it wasn’t much different than taking the ferry to Iquitos.
By dawn we could hear the sound of Julio chopping wood for the ayahuasca fire and that evening at eight our whole group set off on the short walk from the small house where we were staying to Julio’s. All but Junior and Mauro sat in the circle around blue plastic sheeting on the porch on which Julio had put his mapachos, his perfume, his Florida Water and some other things. We sat quietly for an hour before Julio brought out the ayahuasca, began to chant, then passed the gourd.
I had spoken to the others about what they might expect but as they drank they were on their own. When the gourd reached me I almost choked getting the ayahuasca down. It was thick and still warm, burnt grapefruit and dank smoke, and I knew I would vomit easily and soon.
Julio’s chanting was clear and strong, the tunes something I always forgot, until the moment I heard the first notes again. I suddenly leaned for the edge of the platform to retch: Violent empty bursts swelled and pulled deeply from within me. In the back of my head I could hear the words Julio sand: "Limpia, limpia, cualpamine, cualpamine…" urging my body to cleanse itself. Over and over my stomach contracted tumultuously. The sounds seemed to come from a far place, echoing from across the river, water cascading onto stone. I’d never felt that kind of power course through my body and though I was utterly helpless I felt fantastically strong.
When my stomach settled I closed my eyes. All around me were insects, visions of marching insects crawling over me, alternately tickling and annoying. Like a movie the insect wings became the scales on a boa so broad and long I could only see a small portion of it at one time. It was undulating gently, slowly. In the black pitch of its scales glinted a hundred hues of red and blue. I was mesmerized. It turned its head to me and flicked its tongue. Its eyes, almost s large as the scope of my vision, were a fine black and yellow. Its underbelly was strong and white.
In an instant it changed its size to normal dimensions and we moved underwater. Eels and boas swam gracefully amid rocks. I followed their motion and tried to swim with them. I was awkward and ungainly and they ignored me.
The sound of vomiting brought me back to the porch. One of the others, a British fellow named Mark, was leaning over the platform’s edge and retching violently. He tried to stand and I reached to calm him. He told me he was about to shit; I tried to help him but could hardly find my own footing and called to Junior to lend a hand. One of the others was beginning to get ill as well.
I closed my eyes again and thought about the dream I’d had. Suddenly I felt myself moving. I wasn’t with the snake and I wasn’t flying. I don’t know how to describe it except to say that perhaps I was still and the world was rushing past me. In moments I was surrounded by darkness. More than that I was hurtling through a kind of vacuum with no body, no sensations. I don’t know how long I continued but I suddenly found myself stopping abruptly at a sort of white wall. It wasn’t a solid wall, but it wasn’t passable either, like a wall of gauze or clouds. I sensed that it was the wall to the world of the dead. Even as I admitted that thought it seemed preposterous and I began to scratch at it. It fell away like fog in my hands, but however much I tore at it I didn’t get through and suspected that I would never get through no matter how long I tore at it.
I began to cal out to my mother while I worked: After some time had passed a figure began to appear on the other side of the wall, just out of reach. Not really on the other side of the wall, but coming together from the stuff of the wall itself, recognizable but as flimsy as the ether. It was my mother. I watched her for a long time, then said hello and told her why I’d come. I expected her to smile but she didn’t.
"Hello, Peter," she said, finally. "It’s good to see you but you have to stop calling me like this. It’s so hard to come together in a shape you can recognize as me."
"Where are you?" I asked. "What are you doing?"
"It’s not something you could understand. Things are different here. I’m not your mother anymore, but you won’t understand until you get to this place."
A feeling of abandonment like I’d never known washed through me. "What place? What do you mean you’re not my mother anymore?"
"I’m doing something else now."
"But what about Tom?" I asked, referring to my father, whom we always called by his first name. "Why can’t he see you anymore?"
"Don’t worry about Tom. That was just a dream you had. When it’s time for us to be together we will be but you needn’t worry about him. Or me either. Things are good here. Trust me." Her voice began to grow heavy, as if talking was a strain. "Just know that I love you and the gang and I always will. But don’t call me. It’s just too difficult and I’m doing something else now. If you really need me I’ll come, but you can’t just call me like this or in your dreams anymore. I love you, kiddo."
She began to disappear back into the gauze and I was back on the porch, crying, wondering whether I’d really seen what I’d seen. In all the reaches of my imagination I couldn’t have imagined her saying what she’d said, but I knew it was crazy to think I’d gone to the world of the dead, if such a place even existed.
I sat on the porch, confused, angry, abandoned, unable to distinguish one reality from another, the dreams from the visions. And then Julio’s song caught me again and I was a snake. I was not traveling with a snake. I didn’t see a snake. I simply knew I was a snake, or that the snakeness in me had come out for a time. It was fun, sensual. I invited the mosquitoes and other insects to land on my arms and hands, watched them with flat eyes, then ate them. Mark began to trip up the notched ladder back to the porch, reeling in a spooky windmill motion, his great scarecrow arms and legs nearly disconnected form his body. I had to stop myself from grinning at him like easy prey.
Suddenly everyone was vomiting at once and there was moaning and groaning. It was not good vomiting, it was sick vomiting and I found out later that nearly everyone had ignored my request that they not eat past breakfast. One of the tourists kept saying he couldn’t breathe and was going to die. I pulled free of my snake-fiction to calm him down, to breathe with him. Two of us had to carry him back to the small house and sit up with him all night.
The next day I washed in the river early, and though I was weak and still upset from my encounter the night before, I knew I was well. I noted that I couldn’t find any bites from the insects, though I know I felt them all over me. Either I was just hallucinating them or I ate more than I remembered.
Later, that evening’s encounter became my bell-weather for distinguishing between hallucinations and genuine visions. I realized that if I’d had an endless supply of paper and pens and all the time in the world, and I made a list of 10,000 things my mother might say to me if I met her after she’d been dead 20 years, what she actually said—"…you have to stop calling me like this. It’s so hard to come together in a shape you can recognize as me."—would not have been on it. When I realized that I realized I knew the difference between a vision and an hallucination. I had a workable way to think about it, anyway. If something wasn’t on a list of 10.000 possibilities, it was probably a vision.
So seeing my mother was a vision. So was eating the fish with the bird and eating the frog with the snake. Picking at the insects in reptilian mode might have been but might just as well have been a simple hallucination.

New Fleet of Cars

It's rainin' down in Texas,
All of the telephone lines are down.
It's rainin' down in Texas,
All of the telephone lines are down.
I'm tryin' to call my baby
But she's nowhere to be found.
(Something like that; Stevie Ray Vaughn)
Storm's coming in and Chepa just took the new car I bought her out for a spin. It's a Mazda XR6, 1994 with 199,913 miles on it and I bought it for $1,500 from Italo's pal, D-Ray. I hope it works.
It's car number four in the Gorman Fleet. Car one is a 1994 Ford Ranger 4-cylinder XLT with 273,000 miles. Car two is a 1998 Ford Ranger XLT 4-cylinder with 115,000 miles. Car number 3 is 1994 Ford Probe with 140,000 miles. So the new addition will fit right in with the rest of the fleet.
I think if you have four cars you can call it a fleet. Growing up in NYC, the only vehicles I ever owned were a 1946 Ford Hydrolic Dump Truck I bought with a friend for $25 at an auction to use on our separate pieces of land in Maine in the early 1970s--a great truck and with the words "farm vehicle" painted on the door never needed insurance or inspection as long as we never left a 25-mile radius from either his land or mine. That was great.
Later, while with Clare I bought a 1968 Volks Hatchback with about 250,000 miles on it. We drove that from NYC to LA and Clare used it for two years there then sold it to a friend who totalled it leaving the drivway after paying Clare for it.
I was around cars my whole life, but didn't own them.
So owning four--even if it's mostly for insurance purpses as it's easier and cheaper for me to pay for four cars than have Chepa and Italo pay seperately--makes me feel like a fleet owner.
Heck, I feel like a gansta rapper. I feel like rappin right now. I got a fleet. Neat. Okay, that's enough rapping.
Still, I look out into that driveway and see what orininally cost more than $80 thousand dollars in vehicles and knowing they're mine is a crazy-jane sort of feeling. Knowing I paid a total of less than $9,000 for all of them and don't owe the bank or anyone else a cent is a really good feeling.
I'm thinking I might open up a Taxi Company: The Gorman Fleet. An Aggregate 710,000 Miles. Old Cars That will Get You There. Or Not. Depending on the Day

25 Years of Shamanism--Part 2

READERS: This is the second section in an ongoing piece called 25 Years of Shamanism, which is based on notes for a talk I was to give at the 3rd Annual Shamanism Conference in Iquitos--a talk that wasn't given due to a surgery I needed on the day I was to give it.


My second extraordinary experience with shamanism occurred just two years later. Before I get to that I should mention that after the trip with Chuck and Larry I really did seem to have the jungle in my blood and so the following year arranged to study jungle survival with Moises Torres Vienna. It was just the two of us.
I’d asked him to take me back to Alphonso’s before we went into the jungle to study, but he said Alphonse had moved away and he didn’t know where. On the other hand, he said, he’d learned of a very good curandero named Julio Jerena that we would visit as he was on the same river we’d use for the survival course. I was disappointed but said okay.
We traveled on a large flat-bottomed riverboat that was wildly over-crowded to a small town called Genero Herrera, just a couple of hours short of Requena. We then spent some hours arranging for a smaller boat—a peque-peque, an oversized canoe with a small motor notable for its long propeller shaft that allowed it to maneuver in very shallow water—that took us up a little river called the Auchyacu. That river would become my jungle home for a quarter of a century.
There was a small town on the Auchyacu, and then individual homes every half-mile or so for perhaps 10 miles. In all, maybe 20 or 30 families lived there. Among them was Julio.
Four things of note occurred on that trip: the first was that Moises sent me out with a young fellow in a canoe on our first night in the jungle. The fellow, Alberto, was to let me listen to the jungle. Instead, he shot a cayman, a money, a large rodent called a mahas, and wounded an ocelot. When we returned I was furious with Moises. I told him I hadn’t paid him to kill endangered species and that if that’s what this trip was about then we should just cancel it. Moises stood his ground and explained that this was simple life in the jungle: Killing was part of living, and that if I wanted to learn about the jungle I’d better damned well get used to killing.
The second thing was meeting Julio and his then-apprentice, Salis Navarro. They did an ayahuasca ceremony that was powerful—they sang together, and the chanting of the two curanderos began to echo in my head, a resounding noise that seemed to pull me apart, as though a wedge were splitting me in half. I grew terrified of what might happen if I allowed the parts of me to separate. It seemed, on one hand, to make sense: I needed to be pulled apart if I was ever going to become whole. At the same time I didn’t know whether I would ever come together again. It was a frightening experience, one I wasn’t prepared for. Louder and louder the chants resounded, deeper and deeper went the wedge, until I finally fled the porch for the safety of the river’s edge. Moises followed and warned me against going into the water. His voice was like an anchor that pulled me back from the edge of some horrific abyss. I turned to thank him. He was still on the porch.
Suddenly more afraid of the voice than of the doctors, I returned to the circle. This time the chanting was no longer frightening. It was soothing and beautiful and I soon fell asleep. When I awoke Moises and I returned to our hut.
After a river wash the next morning I asked Moises what had happened and why I hadn’t been able to fly with the bird again. He said that while I was asleep Julio had explained that I needed to be opened up so that some personal things that were holding me back could be removed. That was what Salis and he had done. Moises also said that the magical effects of ayahuasca that I’d experienced the first time were not to be sought or missed. When I needed to bird the bird would guide me. When I needed to become friendly with the jungle ayahuasca would guide me in a different way. "Ayahuasca gives you what you need," he said, "not what you want."
The third thing of note on the trip was that when we left Julio’s we headed up the Auchyacu by canoe for three days before disembarking and walking nearly three days into the jungle to make camp. By the time we reached our destination Moises had gotten rid of all of our food. Each morning he’d go out and hunt, bringing back a monkey or a macaw, and roast it. I refused to eat the animals and so he’d go and collect edible plants for me. On my fourth day without real food—I think it was my fourth—Moises went out hunting early and by the time I awoke there were a couple of birds on a spit over the fire but Moises was nowhere in sight.
I was starving. I could smell the roasting birds. I tried to ignore them but finally walked over to the fire, pulled one off the spit and began to eat it. Just then Moises stepped out from where he’d apparently been hiding and announced: "That’s the first right thing you’ve done in the jungle! If you don’t eat you will die here. That’s the most important lesson."
I was embarrassed but never again complained about hunting for food.
The fourth important thing that happened during that month occurred perhaps a day or two after my stealing-the-bird event. It was mid-morning. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a young man walked into our little camp. He was dark and wiry. His hair was black. He was barefoot, wore a pair of old shorts and had two strips of what looked like bark-strips wrapped around his chest and stomach. Most unusual though was his face: He had a hash-mark tatoo that circled his mouth and ran across his cheeks nearly to his ears. He also had thin, six-inch splints, like whiskers, in his upper lip. And his forehead was painted a ruddy red. He looked very much like a jaguar. I was scared to death.
Moises, however, simply said some words in a language I didn’t know—"Biram-bo! Biram-bo, bu-chi!"—and the young man smiled and returned the greeting. The man then pointed to our shotgun, which was standing against a nearby tree. Moises nodded and made a hand gesture that indicated that it was to be returned. The man nodded and picked up the gun. Moises reached into his pocket and pulled out three shells. The man took them and walked into the forest.
When he was gone Moises explained that the man was a Matses Indian, though they were often called the Mayoruna. While in the military he had led a jungle unit in a ground war against them in the early 1970s in retaliation for a raid they’d made on Genero Herrera.
"They stole machetes, shotguns, ax heads. They also took several women captive. Among those taken were two young Franciscan friars, who wore long brown robes and kept their hair long. The friars were later found with their genitals crudely cut off—probably when the Matses discovered they weren’t women."
The conflict lasted four days. The Peruvian military won. In its aftermath, the Peruvian military built a small base at the confluence of the Javari and Galvez rivers on which most of the Matses camps were built, effectively preventing further raids.
Twenty minutes into Moises’ story, we heard a shotgun blast, and a few minutes later, another. Twenty minutes after the last the young man walked back into our camp. He carried two large monkeys he’d shot in sacks fashioned from leaves that hung from templines around his forehead. On his head, clinging to his hair, was a baby monkey. He replaced our shotgun against the tree, and then put one of the sacks next to it. Then he turned and started walking in the direction from which he’d originally come.
Moises picked up the gun and a machete and said we should follow. He’d heard a rumor that there was a new Matses camp nearby but had never seen it. We walked quickly through the jungle for perhaps an hour, before coming on a clearing.
The clearing was demarked by posts, on each of which was the skull of a wild boar. At the rear of it a large hut was being built; closer to the near side there were three or four very low temporary shelters. There were more than a dozen children milling around as well as several women, two of whom were tending an open fire. The young man handed the sack he had to one of them. The woman quickly unwrapped the monkey and she and the other woman stretched it over the fire and began burning off its hair. To my horror, the monkey began to scream and thrash about, trying to get out of the flames. The women didn’t seem to notice.
While the large monkey screamed, the young man walked over to a young woman who was nursing and handed her the baby monkey. Without hesitation she put it on her free nipple.
In ten seconds I had witnessed both the cruelest and kindest acts I’d ever seen.
Moments later, an elderly man I later knew as Papa Viejo—old papa—came running at us. He held a shotgun and pointed it at Moises and began shouting. Moises raised his shotgun and began shouting back. I felt like I was watching two silverbacks in a dominance challenge. The shouting and threatening continued for perhaps 30-seconds and then, abruptly, both men put down their weapons and began to talk. Some of it was in Spanish, a little was in Matses, much was in hand signals. A few minutes later Moises said it was time to go and we left.
On the way back to camp he explained that the Matses, like most indigenous Amazon groups, always challenged visitors. If you buckled, they’d have everything you owned. If you didn’t you were generally welcomed. He said he was proud I had stood my ground with him, but that in this case there was not much to fear: "He had no shells for the gun," he laughed. "If he did his son wouldn’t have borrowed ours."
The incident marked me. If ayahuasca had put the jungle in my blood, then seeing the Matses gave me a destination: I would return to spend time with them.

The following year I did, taking a seaplane with my brother-in-law Steve Flores and Moises out to the military post of Angamos on the Galvez river where we rented two peque-peques and bought fuel, then headed up the river to the Matses camps. At one of them there was a unique and amazing headman named Pablo—who later became a great friend and teacher—who introduced me to the two primary Matses medicines: sapo and nu-nu, which I’ve written about elsewhere.
We’d been on the Galvez nearly three weeks when we decided to take a hike with two Matses men from their village of Remoyako to a village called Buenas Lomas. It was to be a two-day hike, but by the end of the first day Moises decided to abort. There was something about the behavior of the Matses men that he found threatening and he didn’t think they’d actually get us to where we were going. So we returned to Remoyako village the following afternoon and left not long after that, heading in our peque-peque downstream to Pablo’s village.
The next morning a man from Remoyako arrived just before dawn to say that a jaguar had attacked a young man who had been rummaging through the hut we’d used there, probably looking for things we might have left behind. The jaguar must have smelled our scent and come looking for prey. The man wanted our peque-peque to return to Remoyako and transport the young man to the infirmary at the military post of Angamos. We let him have it and he left.
Late that evening he returned with news that the boy had died. The Matses at Remoyako and its sister village of Buen Peru were out hunting the animal, and when they found it they would burn it and the two villages as well, then make balsa rafts and float down the Galvez looking for a good place to build new villages.
Moises said that we’d have to leave, that it was "going to get very Indian on the river" for a while and we wouldn’t be welcome.
Our plan had been to hike back across the jungle from the Galvez to the Auchyacu but not from Pablo’s village. As it was we had to change plans, and as Moises didn’t know the route from that spot on the river, Pablo had one of his young sons accompany us.
The son didn’t know the route either, it turned out, and after four days the boy simply disappeared one morning after we’d reached a small river called the Rio Lobo. With supplies running very low, Moises said the best plan would be that he’d return to Pablo’s, secure us a boat or peque-peque, and return for us. He left with only his machete and a canteen of river water, leaving Steve and I to make a camp while we waited for him. He returned the following afternoon—he said we’d basically walked in circles for four days—and we took off down the Lobo. That night, as we neared the confluence of the Lobo and the Galvez we passed a small flotilla of Matses balsa rafts lit by jungle copal torches and crowded with people and goods. They were the people of Remoyako and Buen Peru, searching for a place to build their new villages.
We continued down the Galvez to Angamos, where we were lucky enough to get seats in a small military plane headed out the next morning to Iquitos.
From there we caught an afternoon boat back to Genero Herrera and arrived at Julio’s home the following day. We arranged to drink ayahuasca that night, but before we did, Moises asked me to drink ayahuasca with the idea of finding his son Junior, whom he said was in the jungle, waiting for us with new supplies at the Rio Matanza. We were to have met up with him but because we’d left by a different route, hadn’t, and now Moises wanted me to somehow find Junior and tell him that we were already safe and to meet us at Julio’s. The request stunned me. I had no idea how to do what Moises asked, but I couldn’t refuse trying.
That night, during the ceremony, I tried to do what Moises asked but failed. In fact, I felt nothing the whole time, except for the beautiful calm that came from listening to Julio sing his icaros, and finally went to my hammock. No sooner did I lie down than I found myself feeling as though I were in the river, near some brush. But there was something odd about my eyesight: It was flattened out and very near the water, as though I was submerged up to my eyes. I could make out shapes in a logical way but not the particulars of things. It was very disorienting, until I realized that I felt tremendously strong and fantastically limber. I looked around at myself and realized I had somehow connected, as I had with the bird, with a huge snake. Of course I knew it was impossible, but as had happened with the bird, just when I was sure I was inventing the entire episode, I felt my mouth opening and my tongue shot out and grabbed a large frog. I, we, ate, swallowing it whole and quickly squeezing it to death with our powerful throat muscles before passing it on to the stomach.
The event was wholly unexpected. The absolutely tactile sensation of feeling the snake’s (and my) muscles squeezing the life out of the uncooperative and squirming frog gave me enough confidence to simply ask the snake if it knew where Junior might be. I’d no sooner asked the question—and felt foolish for doing it, since I knew it was all in my head—than the snake began moving upstream. We moved quickly and it was a thrill to feel myself able to move my muscles in that serpentine manner that propelled us forward. We moved through the water for some time and then finally turned off the river and into the forest. I began to shout "Junior! Junior!" but no one responded. We moved deeper until we came to another riverbank where there appeared to have been a recent camp. I didn’t actually see any camp, just the shapes of trees around a small clearing and then an opening took to be a river, but sensed that there was acrid smoke in the air. But it felt lifeless, as though it had been abandoned.
With that realization the snake and I returned to the Auchyacu and began heading downstream back toward Julio’s. We were moving very quickly, but slowed when we neared what appeared to be a long object with a mound at either end. The mounds were moving, and I realized it was probably a canoe with a person paddling at both the bow and the stern. Moments later the snake disappeared and I was once again just lying in my hammock.
I woke Steve, in the next hammock, and told him about the extraordinary experience, then asked him if I should tell Moises. I was hesitant because I had no idea if I’d seen what I seemed to have seen, or if I’d made it up. Too, the canoe I’d seen, if that’s what it was, had two people in it, not one, and we were looking for Junior, so it probably wasn’t him.
Steve said that he’d asked me to look for Junior, and so I should simply tell him what I’d seen.
So I got out of the hammock and did. To my surprise, Moises asked me if I could remember what part of the river I’d seen the canoe on. I couldn’t exactly, but I was able to say that I thought it was just downstream of the small river camp we’d made a year earlier before heading off into the forest, and he estimated that the canoe would reach Julio’s by noon.
Let me emphasize that I didn’t believe I’d actually found anyone, but at the same time the eating of the frog and the vision of travelling with the snake—which might have taken as little as a few seconds or as long as a few minutes—seemed so real that I knew I might have been hallucinating but I couldn’t have been inventing.
The canoe showed up at Julio’s the following day at quarter past noon with Junior and another man on board. Moises berated them for being late. Julio just laughed.
Steve and I were the only ones surprised.
Moises explained that he’d known I’d seen Junior in the river when I told him that I’d seen two mounds, not one. "I only told you about one, Junior, because I didn’t want you to make anything up."
I was simply dumbfounded.
Moises said that ayahuasca was used in the jungle because it worked.

Jeez Louise! I'm Not Quite Ready for This

Well, I was sitting at the desk catching up on a few emails that needed real responses when I remembered that I needed to get copies of a couple of papers that Chepa has. So I called over to her house, woke her and asked if she'd pulled the papers yet. They just relate to getting everyone's passports renewed, nothing great, but I'd earmarked today for that so was getting to it.
And while on the phone I asked if she wanted to go for coffee and danish at a place nearby the copy center.
In a sleepy and indescribably delicious voice she said "The girls are in La-la land. You want to take us for coffee, you come over here and wake them up. I'm not even going to try."
I told her I would in a while, and she said she'd try to find the papers I needed.
Well I guess she mentioned the coffee and cake part to my beautiful Madeleina--who just started playing soccer with a club and has a great coach and absolutely loves it--because in a few mintutes I got a call from her.
"Hey dad. You know in my room...?"
"Yeah, baby. What do you need?"
"Well on the bed--I think I forgot to make it but don't worry , I'll do it later--there should be a pair of capri pants, a blouse with green and red hearts on it and a bra. Can you bring those when you come to take us for breakfast?"
I said I would, hung up and collected the clothing for her.
A bra. A lady's undergarment. My daughter Madeleina is 10-and-a-half years old and she has a bra. I'm not ready for that. Heck, she was younger than Sierra--who is 19 months--and talking the same full-sentence baby talk as Sierra just last month, wasn't she? And now she has a bra? What's next? A boyfriend?
Gee whillakers, I'm simply not ready at all for my little baby to be wearing lady's undergarments.
I don't mind time flying, really, but this is beyond the beyond.
Gonna be a great day, I guess, if I can just catch up with it.

25 Years of Shamanism

NOTE: I'm going to try to get this thing written as a whole, but will deliver it in installments until I do. Here's the first installment.
PG


25 Years of Shamanism



I was asked to speak at the 2007 3rd Annual Conference on Shamanism in Iquitos Peru, as I’ve been asked the previous two years. This year, unfortunately, I had emergency surgery in the very hotel where the conference was being held just two hours before I was to make my presentation. As a result, I was weak, in pain, on painkillers and simply unable to speak.
Had I been able to give my talk, these are some of the points I would have liked to make concerning my very long—25-year—apprenticeship to the very kind and wonderful curandero Julio Jerena (spelled Llerena in Spanish).
Apprenticeship might be an exaggeration: I was introduced to Julio in 1985, the year after I drank my first cup of Ayahuasca with a curandero named Alphonso, and over the course of the next two decades drank with him sometimes once a year, sometimes 10 times a year. We had no structure—I’d never heard of an ayahuasca dieta until probably three or four years ago—and Julio never suggested I come and stay with him to drink regularly. I’d simply show up, and if he was available, he’d make me ayahuasca the following day, after which I’d generally return to Iquitos or head further up the Auchyacu, the little river he lived on some 212 kilometers upriver from Iquitos. But whatever I was doing, wherever I was exploring in Peru’s Amazonia, I always made a point of visiting Julio, generally at the start of a trip, but sometimes at the end as well. And during those three years when I lived in Iquitos, 1998 through 2000, I sometimes went to visit him once a month or more.
So it wasn’t a formal apprenticeship at all. I wasn’t trying to become a curandero: I didn’t want to live on the Auchyacu and fish for my dinner out of a dugout canoe like he did, while ministering the 20 or so families who lived on the river. They’d come to him with all manner of ailments: some brought their babies who were unable to stop vomiting; others came with bushmaster snake bites; still others brought their parents or spouses who’d lost their souls and with them the will to live.And Julio treated them all to hours of work with very little reward: a chicken here or there, some fish, a shirt, a baby piglet and other similar things. It was a wonderful life for Julio—made even richer by having several of his children and a sister live nearby on the river—but not something I ever considered.
Still, over the years it became something of an informal apprenticeship. We each looked forward to the other’s company and loved doing ceremony together, him running it, me being taught some of the endless lessons ayahuasca has to teach.
Now I’ve been asked to talk about the highlights of 25 or so years of shamanic work. That’s not easy. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of highlights. How do you pick one over another when so many helped me at crucial points in my life? I’m not sure.
Given that codicil, I’ll try to touch on several moments that standout, knowing that I’m omitting a lot of others that could just as easily be included here.
The first unforgettable highlight occurred during my very first ayahuasca ceremony. I was in Peru in 1984 with two great friends. We’d spent several weeks on the coast and in the highlands before heading to the jungle, the place that seemed to be calling me more than the others. With no roads into the jungle we took a flight into Iquitos, a city just north of the point where the Amazon begins being called the Amazon. It was quite an unusual town. City is more like it, because of its size, perhaps 150,000 at that time, but with very few paved roads and not much sense of organization it had the feel of a wild west town to this city boy.
There was some tourism, but not of the kind we were interested in: We wanted to go into the jungle, deep jungle like we imagined was there, and no one we spoke with seemed interested or able to do that.
Except for one fellow. His name was Moises Torres Vienna. He was short, dark and muscular. He had a tatoo of a woman on one arm and his initials—MTV—tatooed in a heart on the other. He said he could show us the real jungle.
For some reason, despite him offering us exactly what we wanted, I didn’t want to travel with him. Instead, I insisted that we take a riverboat up the river somewhere, where I was sure we’d find real indians and real jungle. Moises said that no one up the river or down the river would take us into the jungle. He said people were afraid of the jungle and only lived near the riverbanks. I thought he was crazy.
He wasn’t. In nearly ten days in a little town called Requena—an absolutely crazy place that requires its own story—we couldn’t find anyone to take us out under the canopy. They took us to their fields, which were sometimes a kilometer or so deep, but when we asked to go further we were always told that there were too many snakes, jaguars and Indians there. Not to mention tunchis—jungle spirits that would make you lose your way home.
Interestingly, on the day of our return to Iquitos, Moises found us and asked if we were ready to see the real jungle and maybe do something called ayahuasca. We’d never heard of it, whatever it was, and I still wasn’t keen on Moises, but he was apparently our only shot at going deeply into the jungle. Chuck and Larry were also only so-so on him, but then he explained that ayahuasca was an hallucinogen—"Like LSD," he said, roping us old hippies in effortlessly. We agreed to let him take us out.
We spent the next half-hour haggling over price until Moises agreed to $20 per day each. And the minute he agreed his demeanor changed. He switched from salesman to guide in an instant.
"Okay. Half now, half when we come back. I need to buy supplies and leave my family food money. We’ll leave at 7 AM. Sharp. I’ll be here with supplies at 6:30. Don’t bring much. You can leave your bags with the lady of the hotel. Bring your passport or a copy in case we run into soldiers."
"Do we need machetes or anything?" I asked naively.
"No. I don’t want you to get hurt."
He collected the money, shook hands, saluted and was gone.
"He’s going to be good," Larry predicted.
The next morning Moises knocked on our doors promptly at 6:30. "Good morning!" he called. "Time to go. Hurry."
He wore a tee-shirt and camoflauge pants with old military boots instead of his city outfit, and had a green rucksack from which the black handle of a machete was protruding. He was all business, telling us to hurry, collecting the things we were not bringing and having them put into a locked room behind the hotel lobby, then checking the rooms to make sure we hadn’t left anything. Satisfied, he stepped into the street and hailed two motorcars and gave them a destination.
We stopped at a market not far from where we’d caught the boat to Requena. Moises—who constantly amazed me with his ability to communicate clearly despite his limited English and my limited Spanish—pulled a large plastic ladies shopping bag from his pocket and began to stride through the market. The building was large and open aired, with dozens of vendors selling everything from fish and meat to fruits and vegetables, dry goods and breakfast. He turned to us and pointed to his eyes, and then our bags, signaling that we should keep our eyes open for thieves, then began picking up our supplies. He bought an empty quart bottle from one vendor and had it filled with aguar diente—"good quality, no kerosene," he said—from another. He bought a dozen .16 gauge shotgun shells, some fishing line and hooks, a bundle of black-tobacco cigarettes from a man who was rolling them, salt, toilet paper, sugar, tins of coffee, canned sardines, rice, ketchup and three huge pineapples.
He was a lesson in Third World purchasing: he knew what he wanted from each vendor and asked its price before he ordered. He didn’t haggle. He just walked away if he didn’t like it. Not angry, just walked to the next vendor. He double-checked each package and said aloud what he bought and what it cost, as if there was a calculator in his head, keeping the tally. He was quick but courteous. In minutes the shopping bag was full and he asked us if we were ready to go. We all said we wanted coffee, and he wove through the market and brought us to probably the only person in the market with it.
Coffee finished, he pointed us toward a wooden stairway built out over a steep bank. At the base of the 50-foot stairway, tethered to a post, was a floating dock with a one-room house on it. Around the dock were a dozen thatched-roof boat. Moises put his things down between Chuck and I, pointed to his eyes and then to the bags, then went to talk with someone at one of the boats. In a few moments he moved to another boat, pointed to us, nodded and then returned.
"Okay, let’s go," he started, then, looking down at his shopping bag, asked Chuck and I where the kilo of salt was. We didn’t know. Now that he mentioned it, I remembered it being on top, but it was no longer there. "Look. Eyes. Thieves," he said, berating us. He looked up the stairway and we followed his gaze: halfway up a young man held a kilo of salt and laughed at us, then turned and continued up the stairway.
Moises made a snatching motion with is hand in imitation of the thief and to show us how fast it was done. "Olvida," he said. "Forget it. But you have no salt now. If I say look," he pointed to his eyes, "look. Military style. The jungle is dangerous. One mistake…" he made a throat-slitting motion with his hand, then picked up his things and walked to the boat.
Chuck and I could hardly have felt worse. It was only salt, but we’d been standing on either side of the bag, not 24-inches from it at any time. The thief risked getting caught for maybe $.30 and he knew he could get away with it. It felt like we had "FIRST TIMERS" written on our foreheads.
The boat was long and narrow with benches on either side. The hull came up just to the middle of our backs, leaving an open space between it and the thatch of the roof. A few minutes later we were back out on the river.
It was a different river from our new vantage point: fishermen were close by and we could watch them throwing out the nets, or hauling them in with their bright, shining fish. We ran much more slowly than the slow riverboat, and crossing the river at the bends was a much more laborious process. But we only traveled about two hours before Moises was telling us to collect our things and the boat was pulling up to a bank.
We stepped out onto the tiny bow of the boat, then jumped the 4-feet or so from it to the soft mud below, sinking up to our ankles. Moises turned when we were off and pushed the boat back out into free water and they were off.
There were no houses near the bank, and we asked Moises where we were. "Survival camp. This way please."
There were several logs embedded in the mud that made a sort of trail up the bank and onto drier land, where a foot path was cut through an otherwise closed wall of young forest. Ten minutes into that and the canopy suddenly soared higher. "Jungle," said Moises. "Not virgin."
I guessed he meant secondary jungle, jungle that had previously been cut and had grown back. It was real jungle none the less, with tall trees soaring skyward, though there wasn’t much sky to be seen, only tiny patches between the foliage of the canopy. The air was humid and hot. In minutes I was as wet as if I’d been caught in a storm. Thick and thin vines hung from trees everywhere, and there was little ground growth, just a thick carpet of leaves and some young bushes and trees fighting for sunlight. Unexpected was the smell, a combination of fresh growth and decay, of living and dying, growing things and rotting vegetation. As we walked on the well-marked path I began to notice that every tree trunk had other vegetation living on it. Some had vines climbing on them, their fresh green leaves clinging to the bark in fantastic patterns; others were covered in thick moss or had air plants up in their branches dropping down 20, 30, 50 foot dangling roots that might have been the tendrils of octopii had we been in the ocean. Ants and insects were everywhere. Just stopping for a moment allowed me to see that the whole jungle floor seemed to be moving in tiny pieces.
"Pedro! Rapido!" It was Moises, interrupting my reverie. Chuck and Larry were already out of sight up a hill, and I hurried to catch up. A little while later we turned off the path and onto a narrower one, and a few hundred yards into that we came on a clearing with two buildings, both of them fairly small and low to the ground. Unlike most of the other buildings we’d seen near the river though, these were well built with thick planks painted Army green. One was a sleeping quarters for maybe up to a dozen men. The other was a small school house, but it wasn’t for children; this was a Peruvian Special Jungle Forces training center. The ground area around the buildings was well kept. Moises showed us the generator building behind the two larger buildings, and a latrine off a clearly marked path nearby.
There was no one else at the camp when we arrived and so we were free to look around. One wall of the schoolhouse was a sort of display of perhaps 30 stuffed animals that included a jaguar, an ocelot—a variety of smaller cats—a caiman, an anaconda, a tree-sloth, a couple of wild boars and a variety of turtles, lizards and fish, including several different colored piranhas. They were easy to identify with their narrow, meaty heads and the row of razor-sharp little teeth in their bulldog-like jaws. One yellow piranha had two-rows of teeth and Moises explained that the indigenous called that a yarawashi, though he added that much that we knew about piranhas was probably exaggerated. "They are no problem in the rivers. Only in small pools with not enough food. No hands in pools, no problem in the river."
I asked him where the kitchen was and he asked if I was hungry. I said no, I just wondered where the kitchen was. He explained there was none. "The kitchen is the jungle. It’s a training school for soldiers. Oh, and no television," he laughed.
He didn’t believe I wasn’t hungry, though, and took out his machete and walked to where Larry had put down the pineapples. He held one up by its stalk and snapped his machete, cutting off the sharp leaves, then snapped again and again and in 10 seconds had a perfectly cleaned pineapple ready. He handed it to Chuck by its stalk then did the same with the others. We asked Moises where his was and he laughed and disappeared down a path. We heard a whack, and he returned a few moments later with a long piece of sugar cane. He trimmed its outer hard skin expertly with his machete, then bit into its sweet core. "Cane," he said. "Like pineapple. The jungle is full of food."
Eating a whole pineapple while holding it’s stalk made it feel like some huge and dripping ice cream cone. Sugar slid down our chins and onto our hands. When we were finished we rinsed with water from a barrel outside the bunkhouse, then Moises took a bottle of alcohol from his bag and poured a little into our cupped hands and had us wash with that.
"Protection from insects that like sugar."
We did as told and wondered what his next trick would be. There wasn’t any. He had us leave our things and head back to the main trail and deeper into the jungle. He told us we were going to see a Shipibo curandera. "Shipibo," he explained, "Indian people that live close to Pulcallpa. Experts with ayahuasca. Not primitive."
We arrived at the woman’s house—a platform hut set apart from several others that made up the village, not far from a small running river, in about 15 minutes. She was a beautiful woman, strong and old, but when Moises told her what we wanted she said no, and no amount of pleading on Moises’ part would change her mind. We asked what she was saying and he explained that she’d told him we were dilettantes who had no business using ayahuasca.
She wasn’t entirely useless to us, though. She did let Moises barter for the use of two dugout canoes pulled up on the nearby bank for a trip to another curandero Moises knew.
With the help of two of her sons, who were also our canoe men, we got into the impossibly unsteady dugouts and began to head upriver. Moises told us to be still and they wouldn’t sink. I wasn’t certain: their sides were within an inch of the waterline, so the smallest motion would flood the boat. We traveled upstream perhaps half-an-hour to another village where we disembarked and walked up the bank to the home of someone named Alphonso. His home, like the Shipibo woman’s was set apart from the other huts in the village. A surprisingly fat woman surrounded by a handful of children told us Alphonso was out in his fields. Moises cajoled the woman until she sent one of her children to go get him and it wasn’t long before a bull of a man came walking out of the woods with two ramas of plantains on his shoulders. He wore raggedy clothing and an old painter's cap. His feet were bare, covered with small scars and thick calluses. But he had a radiant smile that split his face in half and showed a full set of teeth.
Moises greeted him like an old friend and told him what we wanted. As he did he made gifts of several of the items we’d picked up at the market: the black tobacco cigarettes, which Moises called mapachos, the aguar diente, the shotgun shells and some fish hooks and line. Alphonso took the presents with a grin and climbed the three-step ladder to his house, then told us to come back at eight that evening.
"Let’s go back to the training camp to rest," Moises suggested.
I started back toward the river, but Moises said the boys had already left and that we’d be walking this time, then started past Alphono’s house and onto a jungle path. It wasn’t very well used and Moises had to cut plants that grew across it. He pointed out trees covered in long spines, like thick porcupine quills with no bend that we were to avoid. There were muddy patches and places where large trees had fallen across the path that we had to clamber over. It was hot and sticky and there were plenty of mosquitoes and the jungle floor was frequently covered in tangles of exposed roots. There were several places were trees had been cut and served as single-log bridges over creek beds, and I slipped into the creeks more than once.
Along the way, Moises entertained us with a course in Jungle 101. He pointed out trees and bushes that were used for medicine, and cut several sections from a thick vine called pawfil chawki, then held them one at a time and had us drink the mineral water that dripped from the thin-straw-like tubes making up the vine’s meat. "Very good water. It will save your life. But don’t pick the wrong vine, it may be poison. Rule number one in the jungle: taste it. If it’s bitter, don’t eat it or drink it. If it’s sweet, eat or drink a little. Wait half-an-hour. If you’re not sick, go ahead and eat or drink."
He pointed out animal holes and tracks and droppings, a band of monkeys in the canopy overhead and several birds we would have otherwise missed. "Full jungle. You just need new eyes."
At one point just before we reached the Shipibo woman’s village where there was a single log spanning a 25 or 30 foot near dry creek bed that was probably 15 feet deep. There was a flimsy hand rail set up next to it but the moment you put your weight on it it gave way, so wouldn’t be much help at all.
Moises crossed first to establish it’s worthiness—to him it was just walking—then told us to follow, one at a time. Larry went first and though the log was narrow and rounded he was a terrific athlete and had no problem. When he reached the other side he turned and told me to just "put you chi in your feet and don’t look down. Just cross."
It wasn’t my favorite thing, but I managed, slowly, despite several near falls. Chuck was a little better than me but not much.
"We’re never going to do this at night," he said. "Especially stoned."
"I know," I answered.
The path from the Shipibo woman’s house was well used and easy walking. Back at the training camp Moises told us just to rest. He offered to make some tea if we wanted but told us that on days you drank ayahuasca you couldn’t eat after breakfast. "It interferes with the medicine," he said.
When we asked how we were going to manage the log bridges at night he said going would be the problem, but coming back after ayahuasca would be easy. "Ayahuasca makes the jungle your friend," he said. "It puts the jungle in your blood and lets you see in the dark. Don’t worry. No problem."
Despite Moises’ assurances, we insisted we leave early, while there was still at least a little light left to the day, and even then we moved slowly and carefully to avoid getting hurt. Moises thought we were hilarious and laughed at us the whole way.
We arrived at Alphonso’s before seven to find him at a small hut not far from the house where he was straining off a small amount of thick brown liquid from a big aluminum pot through an old shirt into a little pot. "Medicina," he smiled. "Bueno."
When the liquid was ready he covered the pot and carried it to his home. He invited us up the little ladder and offered us seats on small benches he’d put out for us. He told us we’d drink when the medicine cooled down and it was time.
I looked around the platform: there was a small walled off section that I figured for the bedroom, though there were also several white mosquito nets hanging in the open platform area as well. All of his childen were already sleeping.
The night bugs were awful and our repellents were worthless. Alphonso watched us for a few minutes, then laughed and promised that after we drank ayahuasca the insects wouldn’t bother us. Moises reiterated that we were not to be surprised if we got ill, and showed us where we were to go to vomit if that happened. He pulled a handful of hard lemon candies from a pocket and gave us each a couple to clean the taste out of our mouths if that happened. He also said that we might not like the taste of the medicine, but that we should drink all that we were given at one time.
Alphonso suggested an hour of silence before we drank and we sat quietly, listening to the sounds of nearby chickens and the rustle of night animals foraging in the brush.
When the hour was up Alphonso retreated to a corner of the house and returned with the small pot, a serving gourd, the aguar diente and mapacho cigarettes we’d brought, a small bottle he said had camphor and gasoline, another labeled Agua de Florida and a sort of fan made of leaves which made a percussive sound when shaken. He placed all of the articles carefully on the platform floor in front of him. "Yeah?" he asked.
"Si, professor," answered Moises.
Without any more fanfare, Alphonso lit a black tobacco cigarette and began to chant quietly. Moises had us form a semi-circle on the floor in front of him, although he didn’t join. "Watcher," he said, pointing to his eyes and then us. "Someone has to look out for you guys."
It was unsettling to realize that we were on our own with Alphonso but he reassured us that someone always had to watch if for no other reason than to make sure no one left the circle.
Alphonso ignored us and picked up the little pot. He took the lid off and blew smoke into it while he chanted. Then he filled the little gourd—it couldn’t have held more than four ounces, and passed it to Chuck. Chuck drank and made a face as he did, as if he’d just bitten into sour fruit, then passed the gourd back to Alphonso, who handed him the bottle of camphor and gasoline and told him to hold it to his nostrils and breath deeply. When he was finished with that Alphonso told him to cup his hands and then poured a little of the Agua de Florida into them and had him wipe his face with it. It smelled like sweet oranges, a cheap aftershave.
I suddenly found myself anxious. What did I know about these people. Yesterday I thought Moises was a smarmy little huckster. Had anything changed? Who was this fellow Alphonso? What the heck were we drinking anyway? For all I knew it was poison. Or even if it was an hallucinogen, what if I had a bad trip out in the middle of the Amazon?
I pushed those negative thoughts aside. Chuck drank. I’d drink, and when the gourd was passed to me I put it to my lips and did. The liquid was thick and warm, the consistency of spit, and it tasted like burned grapefruit infused with dank smoke. I nearly choked. I didn’t though, and inhaled the camphor and gasoline deeply when it was passed to me, then rubbed my face with the orange water. Its smell kept me from throwing up right then.
Alphonse was the last to drink. Afterwards, he invited us to each take a few of the black tobacco cigarettes, then he blew out the candles, putting us in a pitch dark. Nothing happened. We were just sitting in the dark, listening to Alphonso chant quietly to the rhythm of the leaves he shook. Then, suddenly and without warning, Alphonso leaded over the edge of the platform and began to vomit. I’d never heard a sound like the sound he made. His vomiting sounded like a rushing river washing through the jungle. It came in waves, louder and louder until it had the clarity of a mad spring, but it came from deep within him like molten lava making its way boiling up from the depths and exploding out of him. It drowned out all other jungle sounds, moving, powerful, thrilling; long after he could conceivably have anything left in his stomach to eliminate his rich sounds echoed off the jungle walls. I wondered if Chuck and Larry had heard the same thing I had.
And then suddenly I realized that I too was beginning to vomit. I lunged for the edge of the platform and let heave, though my own was much more ordinary than Alphonso’s.
Through with being sick, Alphonso began chain-smoking the awful cigarettes and had us do the same. We were told to make ourselves comfortable and we took positions near one another on the platform. Only Moises stayed alert, assuring us he would maintain watch over our external world. "Just relax and don’t try to see or do anything. Enjoy the night."
Alphonso changed the rhythm of his fan and along with it his chant. It was an eerie song full of Spanish and Latin and what sounded like Indian dialect, but it was somehow a clear and beautiful, repetitious, thrilling, powerful.
The night grew peaceful. The mosquitoes stopped bothering me. And then, suddenly, an image appeared before me, within me: A bird flying over show-crested mountains, a huge brown bird with dense wings tipped in white. I was looking at the bird from a great distance one moment, and the next I felt as though I was merging with it. I began to see from the bird's perspective: my sharp eyes picked out the most minute details from the landscape. I flew over a range of mountains, searching for something—I had no idea what. I only knew that we were travelling with such speed, such airlessness that in moments we had traveled halfway around the world. Oceans passed beneath us, islands were inspected and passed and great stretches of land appeared and disappeared behind us in what seemed an instant.
I found us slowing, peering into a stream: I could see blue and green fish in the shallow water moving slowly from our perspective. We were thousands of feet above a mountain stream and I could look into the stream and pick out fish scales: the colors were unimaginably rich! And then, suddenly we, the bird and I, tipped off the face of the earth. Down we raced! Nearly visionless we plummeted toward the stream! I don't remember any feelings of fear: I knew we were hungry and wanted a fish; we split the water with the tiniest of splashes and in an instant were headed skyward again, the fish in our beak split in half, unchewed, the pieces sliding into my stomach whole.
I thought it an unusual way to eat: the moment I did, the minute I thought of myself apart from the bird I was back in Alphonso's house, sitting on a platform with my friends. How sad that my flight was over. I tried to bring the image back, tried to fight my loss, but nothing except blackness filled my mind. No images, nothing. I wanted desperately to see with my new perspective!
Only when I let my desire go did the image return: suddenly I would be flying again, with the bird or some moments just below it, admiring the arrangement of feathers and realizing that each feather moved independently of the others; each hair on each feather seemed to be controlled by an act of will, by separate muscle. I'd never thought of a bird as so complex before; and then, of course, the moment I thought that way I was back at Alphonso's home with that incredible longing in my stomach.
Twice during the night I was able to direct the flight of the beautiful bird: the first was to see Clare—my estranged wife—in Los Angeles. Instantly on thinking of her I was in her room, hovering on her ceiling. I watched her making love with someone new and nausea flooded me—there was a saving grace in the jealous rage: my ego brought me back to the jungle hut, away from the unexpected and awful sight.
The second image was of our—my—apartment in New York now that Clare was in LA, and of our friends who were staying there while we were gone. There was a comforting quality in the scene, two friends sitting in the living room, reading. But something was different—I realized our furniture had all been rearranged. (On returning home, I found that it had indeed been rearranged.)
At one point, when I thought the vision of my bird was returning something happened, and instead of soaring, I found myself reduced in size and moving about a birch tree. The start of the image was like looking through a camera lens or a pair of backwards binoculars: I saw the birch at the end of darkened cone, opening up onto it, and then I traveled through the tunnel. The vision zoomed in on one of the birch's burls and I saw thousands of ants moving around. But I didn't just see ants. I saw ants in such detail that I could study the way they worked, how their bodies moved one section at a time, could see them holographically; red and black ants moving on the same burl, working side by side on different tasks. I was so close to them that I could count the hairs on their bodies. I was unimaginably small; so tiny that the rings on the burl seemed like vast plains before me.
There were other images too, but they were less clear. Some of them appeared and disappeared with such speed that I simply hadn't time to focus on them.
And then suddenly I heard talking. The others were saying they weren't having much effect from the drink and all they were feeling was ill. I protested but was overruled and in a few minutes we prepared to leave.
I threw up once more, this time effortlessly, after I'd stepped from the platform. We thanked Alphonso and left his clearing and started back to our camp. We walked in silence for some time, and then Chuck and Larry began to grumble that it had been an effectless night. I laughed to myself. It had been a most incredible night. Moises laughed too, and pointed out that none of us were using our flashlights, even over the log crossings. "You don’t need light," he said, "when the jungle is your friend."
Later that night while I slept I flew with my bird all over the world, seeing cities and mountains; pulling fish from the sea and resting on small ocean rocks; crossing vast dunes and peering into thunder clouds.
For my friends it had not been a visionary; I felt differently. I felt as if I’d been given an extraordinary glimpse into something possible that all the drugs and drinking I’d done had never been able to show me. I felt like me in my own skin and I liked it. I wanted to learn what Moises knew, what Alphonso knew. I knew I was a bumbler, would take a long time to learn, but I felt it would be worth it. This was what people were talking about when they said you know when you find your path.
That was my first extraordinary experience with Shamanism.

If You Don't Write, I Don't Know You're There...

Listen up, readers. The last week I've had about 50-people a day come to this site. I work hard trying to keep it interesting. Just since July 30, I've written about datura, my Irish-Twin sisters, about my second son moving back home at 19, my friend/enemy Lengua--The Tongue--trying to kill me, and Matses Indian women stealing. I've also written three pieces I've taken off until I can write them better: Two about a few stinking, rotten apples I had on a trip in June and one about my wife's new baby that I love way too much for someone who is never going to be called daddy.
I'll repost those three when there is not so much emotion involved: I don't mind sharing my real heart but I get embarrassed sharing my anger/pain/love with nothing to back it up.
Still, if you all think I am going to spend hours daily trying to write interesting stories and you won't even click on one stinking advertiser to let them know we love them and want them there, then you're more innocent than I think you are.
And if you won't write responses to my work: "I hate you, idiot"; "This sucked. My girlfriend forced me to read it," and so forth, then I am going to stop writing the kind of truth that hurts to write. Heck, you want me to write about a movie I saw? (I havn't been to a movie in 7 years, but pretend I go regularly). I can do that. You want me to write about nonsense just to fill a page? I can do that.
But you want me to write to make you laugh and cry? You want me to write to make you evaluate your station in life, to tell you the truth about being a dad in a busted marriage, then I damned well expect you to visit my sponsors and I very very damned well expect you to respond to my missives.
Cause I'm way too old to be writing into a mirror that only I will see.
Peter G

Just a Little on Old Style Matses People Stealing

I got a letter this morning from someone I don't know who said he'd spent time on the Rio Galvez in Peru, which is home to several villages of ingigenous Matses. The fellow said he'd heard about a fierce group called the Boca Negras and wondered if I knew anything about them. I told him I'd often heard my friend, the amazing Matses headman Pablo, talk about them, and that there used to be at least one kidnapped Boca Negra woman living at the village of Remoyako on the Galvez. She had the same hash-mark tatoo from ear to ear and around her mouth as the Matses wore, but while the Matses tatoo is blueish and made from an extraction of huitochado, the Boca Negra woman's tatoo came from charcoal embedded under the skin,and so was a bit thicker than the Matses and very black. In addition, the woman had several nipples tatooed on each of her breasts, I think to ensure plenty of milk for her babies. Not having seen other Boca Negra women I can't say if that's standard for them.
But remembering that stolen woman--who was fully adapted to now being a Matses woman, I remembered by friend Wilfredo and his mom. Wilfredo, sporting a Matses facial tatoo was a great Matses headman and curandero. He was one of two--Pablo was the other--Matses with whom I collected medicinal plants for Shaman Pharmaceuticals in the early 1990s. He was extraordinary in the jungle.
But on my second or third trip to his camp--shared by two wives, his mother and brother and one or two other Matses families (though there were often visitors as his camp was very close to the Peruvian military post of Angamos which the Matses often frequented)--I discovered something interesting.
While I was out plant collecting with Wilfredo, Chepa, who would later be my wife and is now my estranged wife, spent the day speaking with Wilfredo's elderly mom. And she'd taped part of the conversation.
What the woman told her was that she'd grown up in the Iquitos area, and had married a fisherman. He grew tired of the city and moved them out to the Jivari river, the border between Peru and Brazil, and they'd carved fields out of the jungle, built a house and had three children. And one day while she and her husband and the youngsters were out in the chacra--their plantain and yucca field--they suddenly found themselves surrounded by several Matses men armed with bows and arrows. Her husband was killed, as were her two young daughters. But she and her son, Wilfredo, were taken captive.
She told Chepa the Matses ran her for 18 days, stopping only at night at camps to sleep. Her head was shaved with fish teeth, roughly, and she ate little. She described it as a sort of brainwashing. But she also said the man who took her, the headman it turned out, also bathed her in the river each night several times, and that by the end of the 18 days she'd fallen in love with him and once she had the running from camp-to-camp was over and they were able to settle down. She bore him at least one other son whom I know, Wilfredo's brother, who lives at the camp he started when their mother decided to run away from Buena Lomas, where they lived, following the death of her husband and the appearance of some bad anthropologists who were taking genetic samples at that camp.
Wilfredo was raised as a Matses man, tatoo and all, and became a wonderful headman.
The woman told the story very simply, the way a riverino would, as if it happens all the time. And I guess that in the old days, up until about 30- years ago, it did. I know that Pablo once asked me--just 15-years ago-- to go on a raid with him to get champi--young girls--so that he could add to his then-four wives.
I didn't take him up on the offer, though I've occasionally wished I had, just to see how they did it. At the time I didn't want to be party to the bloodshed that would probably be involved and that was the right choice.
Anyway, I thought it was interesting that a Matses headman wasn't a Matses at all. I also learned a great lesson that day: that the most important collection of the day wasn't my plant collecting, it was Chepa's collecting and recording of that story--one of the only modern day stories verifying Matses people-stealing. And it was a story I'd never have gotten out of Wilfredo's mother: it was only talking with Chepa about Iquitos that brought it up.
And since then I've always tried to bring others with me on any expedition: my sons once got some fantastic stories from some young kids that their father's were too embarassed to repeat to me. But the kids had gotten the stories--they involved a fossil bed and the bad dreams of dinosaurs that came to the people who sleep near the fossils they dig up--from their grandpa.
And I think that in the future if I get a chance to do some more real explorations, I'll try to bring out a whole team--a botanist, a geologist, an anthropologist, a woman from Iquitos and some sharp kids--so that we get as much information as we can all at once.

Lengua

Not long ago a friend who's been studying Spanish, wrote me an email titled Lengua. He meant idioma, but rather than correct him I thought I'd tell him a story about a guy I used to know called Lengua. Here it is.

The Iquitos Port of Mastranza, on which sat my Cold Beer Blues Bar/Cevicheria Madeleina, was considered by many locals to be the single toughest block in Iquitos. During high water season the port, the oldest in the city, would have as many as 15 large riverboats each loading or unloading their hundreds of tons of goods and hundreds of passengers daily. All of those goods, from freezers to motorcycles to bags of cement, had to be carried up and down a muddy slope from street level to the boats, and the cargonderos, the cargo men, were a strong and underpaid lot.
The street at the top of the hill, Pablo Rossel, was one of two streets in Iquitos where trucks were permitted to park while waiting for a contract to move the cargo from the boats to wherever it was going. And the men who worked those trucks, the men who loaded and unloaded all the cargo the cargonderos carried up the muddy slope, were also strong and underpaid.
Both groups were moving unimaginable tonnage in the course of the day, much of it in the heat of the day, and were generally fueled by aguar diente--cane liquor--cut with kerosene. In the evenings many smoked pasta--unrefined cocaine base still heavy with lyme. Either can make a man want to fight. Both together after a day of carrying 300 pound motorcycles up and down a slippery hill on 140-pound shoulders only increased the desire to want to take on the world.
And of all the men who worked both the boats and the trucks, the strongest was Lengua. Lengua grew up in a little house at the top of the port, across the street from my bar. He was a full-size bigger than most of the other men, at maybe 5' 10" and 170-pounds of pure muscle. At his best he could carry five 92-pound sacks of cement on a templine up the hill, nearly triple his body weight. He had long arms that hung low from broad shoulders and earned the moniker Lengua--the tongue--because after his extraordinary feats of strength he'd often leave his very long tongue hanging out of his mouth to help cool off, like dogs do.
Lengua had two vices: He drank aguar diente and smoked pasta and nearly every day he'd pick out one or two workers to take out his wrath on: I'd often stand at the door of my bar and watch his victims run from him, screaming. Those he caught he'd hit mercilessly until he was pulled off--or more often, lured off by the offer of a good drink.
Lengua had a sister. She was a lovely girl who knew my wife, Chepa, and would sometimes come into the bar and they'd visit. She also had an ex-husband with a bad temper.
One day she came in looking for Chepa while I had a friend who was getting quite drunk sitting with a couple of other pals at the bar. My friend, who had a lovely wife of his own, took one look at Lengua's sister and fell in love. I'd never seen him behave the way he did in the next hour. He sent her a drink, introduced himself, asked me to put on some good dancing music, moved some tables and danced with her. Lengua's sister behaved just as oddly: she drank and got giddy, danced with my friend, and in an hour agreed to leave with him.
They climbed into his old jeep and started off down the road.
In five minutes my friend was back. I asked him what happened.
"Well, I was going to take her to a hotel. I've never wanted a woman so much, so instantly, before," he said. "But by the time I had driven about five blocks I realized what I might do to my marriage if someone saw me with her and so I changed my mind, drove back and here I am."
"And where is she?"
"Oh, you didn't see me drop her off across the street at her house?"
I told him I hadn't but took his word for it. He sat back down at the bar and ordered another beer.
A few minutes later we heard a terrible, piercing screaming coming from across the street. We all went to the windows to see what it was: Lengua's sister's ex-husband was beating her senseless.
We had the police there in no time and they took him away in one car and her in another. My friend offered to ride with her to the police station; she insisted that he not.
In a little while the officers came in to get some free beer while they explained that someone had seen her leaving in my friend's car and alerted the ex-husband, who lived not far away and had been drinking aguar diente and kerosene that day. So he'd come to kill her.
"So lucky we were nearby," said one of the officers. "Let's have another beer, eh?"
I served them up. It's just how business is done in Iquitos.
What happened next I only discovered a couple of days later.
It seems that while Lengua's sister was at the police station giving a statement, the fact that a gringo--my friend--was part of the story came up. The police immediately brought in a US Drug Enforcement Administration agent. The agent, since dismissed I'm told, took the woman aside and while talking with her convinced her to have sex. Or at least that was his side, explained another DEA agent who frequented my bar and told me the story.
Her story was that he'd simply raped her.
In any event, according to the agent who told me that part of the story, the woman was quieted by an official US Embassy offer to produce for both her and her children US passports, plane tickets to Dallas and a free home there. So long as she never mentioned rape by a DEA agent again. Lengua's sister took them up on the offer and was gone from Iquitos the next day. I hope she got what was promised.
But Lengua didn't like it at all. And because the whole thing started in my bar, he blamed me.
I didn't realize that until about three days after his sister had gone. It was closing time and my small staff had gone home. I'd closed the big wooden windows and even the oversized metal door, but hadn't closed the small door within the large door that I would leave by.
I was behind the bar, having a drink before I went home. Suddenly I saw Lengua's long arms, then head and shoulders, come through the small door. He was drunk and he was high and he stood there just inside the door swinging his arms, his tongue hanging from his mouth. He said that I'd ruined his life. He said that I'd caused his sister to have to leave the country and that I was probably friends with the man who raped her. He said he was going to kill me.
If I could have gotten around him I'd have run for my life. That wasn't an option.
He took a step toward me. "I'm going to kill you now."
My mind raced. I had a bat under the bar, but if I took it out I'd have to use it, and if I was going to use it successfully I'd have to try to kill him. I didn't want to do that because I didn't think he'd actually kill me. But I did think he'd beat me to within an inch of it and didn't want that to happen either.
So I stepped out from behind the bar without the bat and without a plan, praying that something would come to me in the four or five short steps it would take me to reach him.
On maybe the third step, just outside the range of his arms, lightning struck.
"You're going to kill me?" I asked, much too hesitatingly to sound tough.
"Yes."
"You're going to kill me now?" My voice had much more conviction in it.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because you ruined my life...my sister is not here anymore..."
"Not why are you going to kill me, Lengua, why are you going to kill me now?"
"What?"
"Why now? If you kill me now, who will know? What are you going to tell the cargonderos and truck crews tomorrow? That you killed me?"
"Yes."
"So what? Who will believe you? You kill me now, in here, with all the windows closed and no one here and it means nothing. You wait and come and kill me at 7 AM when there are two hundred men her and you'll be famous! You'll still get to kill me, but at least they'll get to watch you do it!"
He looked at me--I thought he might just reach out and grab my throat and do it right then--then began to nod. "Yeah. That's much better. I'll kill you in the morning because you ruined my life. And everyone will see me do it. I'll kill you on the street at seven in the morning."
He paused, said "Don't be late and don't try not to show up because I'll find you," then turned and walked out through the little door in the big door and was gone.
I closed the door behind him, thanked whatever god I believe in for the inspiration, and shivered in fear and relief for a few minutes. Then I headed home.
I was there at the bar by 6:30 AM. The minutes waiting for Lengua to appear were some of the longest in my life. But at 7:02 I stepped into the bar and started working. At 7:10 Lengua appeared and said he was ready to kill me.
I told him it was too late. I had a bar to get open. He should have been there on time. As it was, he'd have to wait until the next morning. He said alright.
And by the next morning he'd forgotten all about it.
About six months later the dock got fixed up a bit and a wooden stairway was put in that ran part of the way down to the port. Shortly after it was completed Lengua, drunk, stepped out of his house, missed the top stair and fell, breaking his neck.
It was a sad end for the strongest guy on the port.

Quite a Week at the Gorman's

One of the things that seems to happen when I return from Peru--and has been happening more and more the past couple of years--is that I seem to bring back a sort of strange energy that interferes with electrical devices. I know that probably sounds odd, but I don't think I'm crazy on this count, as my kids make jokes that I shouldn't touch anything for fear I'll put it on the fritz.
Now I'm home three weeks now. This last week has been the loopiest. When I first came home the phone by my desk went out. It's a walk-around cordless phone, pretty new, and it simply stopped working. So we replaced that. Then my son's car, after he lent it to me, wouldn't start for him. Could be just that it's old, right? Then the sink stopped up--I know that's not electrical but still, it just stopped up. Again, no big deal.
But this week our microwave simply stopped working. As did my coffee maker. Both good machines. Then my truck just wouldn't start. Brand new battery--maybe four months old--and it wouldn't even take a charge. Changed that, checked the alternator/generator--both fine--and then the ignition went out. Not for everyone, just when I tried to start it. Kids worked on that to no avail, until we blew a little Florida Water--cleansing stuff--onto it: That did the trick.
But then the fridge, just 5 years old and a Kenmore from Sears, went out. Just like that, with no warning. Brought in a repairman who said it wouldn't be worth fixing. And then the keyboard on my Apple G-3 died. We had another one in the garage, by luck.
So yesterday we sucked it up and bought a new fridge and microwave at Home Depot (where my credit is good)and just to insure against more family car problems I bought a 1995 Mazda from a friend for $1,500. Works like a charm.
Until I got into it, of course. Then it wouldn't even start. The heck with it: I bought it for Chepa to use anyway, so that I can get my other old truck--the one she's been using for a couple of months--back. And it works for everyone else, so that's good enough for me.
And now I'm gonna go give myself a good washdown with Florida Water to try to neutralize this energy before I ruin any more stuff.
Life's full of mysteries, ain't it? That's what keeps it rich.

My Irish Twin Sisters

Couple of days ago it was two of my sisters' birthdays. Irish twins, Pat and Regina were both born on the same day, July 28, but eight years apart. Pat's the second of our 6; Regina the baby of the family. Every time they have another birthday I can't help but think what people must think when I refer to Regina as the baby: Heck, we're all past 50, though I think we all still consider ourselves just kids with a couple of years and some good experience under our belts.
Pat, who's four years older than me, was/is an amazing sister. When we were kids she'd give us pony rides on her back, and had different temperments for the different ponies she pretended to be. She once had us all collecting money for a real horse until our mom realized we were serious--I think we were up over $100--and broke the truth to us that there would be no pony as our yard, 75 X 100, just 1/6 of an acre, wasn't big enough to keep one.
Pat was also an excellent baton twirler: with my sister Peg--just between Pat and myself--they started a baton twirling group, the Whitestone Twirlers, and got good enough that they were finally invited to participate in the St. Paddy's Day Parade up 5th Avenue in New York City. Pat, like Peg, also had a shelf of trophies for both individual competitions and as a duo together.
But Pat's greatest love was being an artist: as a kid of 10 she won the Annual Whitestone (Queens, New York) store window painting competition held on Halloween, and later got a full scholarship to Pratt Institute. As an adult she turned to design, and with her partner Frank Olinsky designed the MTV logo and that earned them Time Magazine's Design of the Decade and a slot in Time's 100 Top Designs of the Century. She also did a host of album covers when those still counted, including some for Sting and the pretty famous The Cars Greatest Hits--which featured my sister Peg's legs sitting on the front hood of a car, looking real fine.
She found time to become a Tai Chi teacher and then an accupuncturist as well, while remaining a fine fine artist.
And she was always, to me, both an inspiration and a sounding board for both my life and my writing. She designed the sets for several of my plays that were produced in the 1970s on the Off Off Broadway circuit; she took chances with life that inspired me to take chances with life. The girl had/has guts, heart and creativity all at once.
Regina, on the other hand, was four years younger than me, was my baby when I was a kid. At four I was old enough to change her, and later, to be the one to give her pony rides on my back. I taught her how to ride a bike and when she got in over her head with boys she'd come to me to help solve it. When I was working as a chef in NYC, she got a job as a waitress at the next place over. And what a waitress she was: She could be thanking one table at the same time she was telling another that they shouldn't order a dish if they don't know what it is, and leave both tables happy, somehow.
And when she married, it was to the toughest guy in New York, Tommy Leonard, from the legendary Leonard family of New York Policemen. Tommy wasn't a cop, but he was a tough as one, while still having an Irish twinkle in his eye.
And Regina, at about age 30, got fed up with herself for not having frinished high school, so she did. Then she enrolled at Hunter College of the City University of New York and finished that. Then she became a teacher and got her Masters and raised a great son, my nephew Tommy, all a the same time. And she twice won Teacher of the Year for her school, an award voted on by the other teachers. Not bad for a High School dropout.
And somewhere along the line she became my sounding board as an adult. For years she's been the one straightening me out when I'm lost, or at least making me look at myself differently enough to see what I might do to fix this or that about myself.
Those are my Irish twin sisters and I think I was a pretty lucky to have them and have them still.
Happy birthday Pat. Happy birthday Reg. I hope you both have great years. You deserve them.