My trip to the Amazon Rainforest

On Friday I wrote about dreams and the dream of me dying just before my Dad's recent death. I promised I would write about my trip to visit the Achuar tribe in the Amazon Rainforest. They live in a dream culture. Here is the content of the email that I sent to friends last January upon my return. Dear Friends, Lynne Twist, who organized the trip, told us not to look at it as vacation or adventure travel, because we will find it to be a pilgrimage. She said, "It will be a trip from which you will never get over." "Okay," I said to myself. I knew a dozen other people who had traveled with Lynne to the Amazon rainforest, and I was willing to visit it as a sacred place. I first met Lynne in the summer of 2005 and immediately fell in love with her and her passions for the people of the rainforest. With malaria pills in hand and a duffle bag stuffed with moisture-wicking clothing, I headed south, southeast on Christmas morning. 13 hours later I arrived in the 2-mile high city of Quito, capital of Ecuador, a small country of 12 million, about the size of Colorado straddling the equator in the upper left of South America, nestled among Columbia to the north and east, Peru to the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean to the west. There I met up with my fellow pilgrims in a charming hotel where hot water had more to do with timing than letting the faucet run. On the second morning we headed out, driving four hours through the Valley of the Volcanoes to Baňos where we stayed in mountain lodge, Luna Runtun. Here come four photos of a volcano, a glimpse into their culture and transportation, our lodge, and my friend (and Seeds of Enlightenment author) Jeddah and I reenacting an episode of "I Love Lucy." We headed out early in the morning for a two-hour drive to Puyo where we boarded small planes for the hour flight to Achuar territory deep into the Amazon basin. Here is a photo of where we would be staying. It took the Achuar community two years to clear the airstrip using machetes. The yellow boundaries to the airstrip were plants. The Achuar is a warring culture. We were told not to take pictures of people and not to expect them to be friendly, yet we were greeted with warmth, smiles, and waves of hello. As I climbed out of the plane and stepped onto the ground, I was overcome by unexpected and deep emotion. There was a palpable difference in the felt energy. Each inhale of warm air was remarkably soothing and seemed to have the perfect blend of humidity—I felt I could breathe it forever. And everything looked different. I'd say "brighter," but that wasn't it. It was more as if I had a new kind of sunglasses. Soon the ringing in my ears from the plane's engine gave way to an extraordinary silence with layers of chirping frogs, birds, and who knows what else. The Achuar wore western clothing. T-shirts, soccer shirts, shorts… along with striking face paint and colorfully woven headbands. Their skin and hair were beautiful. A half dozen people swarmed over the airplane, offloading our duffles and supplies. Planes come in loaded with supplies stuffed in and around the passengers on Mondays and Fridays and they leave with loads of inorganic trash. Now, it's possible that I was bit by mosquitoes the moment I landed, and that only after the sensory overwhelm subsided did I begin to feel dozens of annoying and stinging bites on every area of exposed skin. I stumbled through my backpack looking for Deet. I couldn't find it. I knew it was there. I kept looking. And sure enough, it was right where I put it, and it did work! We boarded canoes for a thirty minute ride to where we would be staying. The currents in the rivers were swift, although the waters were glossy smooth and without ripples or waves. They were unlike the waters here in Minnesota. Silt from the volcanoes kept the waters brown, but it was a good brown. And the vegetation seemed to reach over the rivers eliminating any sense of shoreline. It played games with my mind as everything would in the next few days. On the walk through the jungle to where we would sleep, I saw an iridescent blue butterfly that glowed as it fluttered. I remember it to have been about the size of a tea cup saucer, but my memory may be tainted by the surreal—although completely real—nature of my experiences. It was almost as if Walt Disney had created this perfect butterfly in a perfect jungle. Here's a picture of my fellow pilgrims as well as where we stayed. We awoke early one morning to canoe to the clay licks where dozens, if not hundreds of parrots and parakeets congregated each morning. A parrot in a zoo is always beautiful, but hundreds in the Amazon jungle challenges and stretches your imagination. It's almost impossible to get your mind around it. On the ride home to breakfast I plotted becoming an activist and freeing parrots from pet stores across the US. The rainforest is a vast 5.5 million square mile jewel. It is home to the densest concentration of plant, insect, and animal species on Earth. Rainforests cover less than two percent of the Earth's surface, yet it is home to 50 to 70 percent of all life forms on this planet. They are the most productive and most complex ecosystems on Earth. A single pond can sustain a greater variety of fish than is found in all of Europe's rivers. A 25-acre plot of rainforest may contain more than 700 species of trees—a number equal to the total tree diversity of North America. A single rainforest reserve is home to more species of birds than are found in the entire United States. Here is a spider web with hundreds of spiders. It is one of the few species of spiders that live in a community. One single tree was found to harbor forty-three different species of ants—a total that approximates the entire number of ant species in the British Isles. Here you can see a trail of ants carrying cut up pieces of leaves. The number of species of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number found in the entire Atlantic Ocean. The head of an Achuar family, with whom I shared chicha, told me the rainforest is their hardware store, pharmacy, clothing store, food store, and home improvement store. The Amazon rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it is continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 percent of the world's oxygen is produced in the this rainforest. At least 80% of the developed world's diet originated in the tropical rainforest. Its bountiful gifts include avocados, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, bananas, guavas, pineapples, mangos, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, rice, winter squash, yams, black pepper, cayenne, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, sugar cane, tumeric, coffee, vanilla, and nuts. 25% of our pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, yet less than 1% of the tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists. On an hour walk through the forest one afternoon, our Achuar guide showed us many plants that they use to heal themselves. I couldn't help but wonder how they figured that out in the first place. I was told they have no cancers, heart disease, or the other major diseases that we in the west have. The most astounding fact of all is that the soil is infertile. Everything grows in top few inches of the soil, with roots snaking along the surface taking nutrients from whatever is decaying. The growth cycle in the rainforest is accelerated—nothing lives for a long time. Growth, decay, growth, decay. One of the largest organisms on the planet is a fungus, a sort of mushroom whose filaments go through the top layer of soil, providing anchors for plants and breaking down organic material so the nutrients can be reused. The Achuar people do not understand the concept of ownership. Everything is shared. It's community. I can understand it, because of the full abundance all around them. There is no scarcity. Plenty of land. Plenty of food. Whatever anyone wants, there is more than enough. When you walk into the store, there is no exchange of money. When someone kills a monkey, the community feasts. It is all shared. Their primary form of sustenance is chicha. All day women chew manioc root and spit it with their saliva into a bowl. They allow it to ferment overnight. In the morning they mix it with boiled river water, and they drink it all day. Some people call it a beer. The bowl that Jeddah holds below is the typical bowl they drink from. The bowl is made from unfired clay. What does it taste like? To me it had a citrusy flavor followed by a yeasty flavor. That's pretty much what it looks like. A watery yeasty substance. Could I drink it every day? If I had to, yes. One day we walked four hours through the jungle, slashing our way with machetes. How they are able to find their way is beyond me. Absolutely amazing. How can they possibly get their bearings? The sun is always straight up, because we were at the equator. Nonetheless, we came to a shaman's house in a clearing. We rested, swam in the river, and watched iridescent pink dolphins—I didn't have my good camera with me on that day, so I don't have pictures of the dolphins, but I think they were made by Walt Disney. Then we walked another thirty minutes to a community—they live in communities of 70 to 200 people—where we met two shamans who would lead our all night ceremony with Ayahuasca. I'm not going to write about the ceremony or my experiences. If you want to talk about it, I'll gladly share it, but not in writing. Suffice it to say that it would have fit perfectly in "Raiders of the Lost Ark." The Achuar is a dreaming culture. Every morning they arise at 4:00 to the mellow sound of someone blowing a conch-like shell. They gather to talk about their dreams and plan their day based on their dreams. No decision is made without reviewing their dreams with the shaman. Major decisions are made from interpreting the visions and dreams they have from using Ayahuasca—I understand that they use Ayahuasca on special occasions. It is a teaching plant, a teaching drug. For them using it is a sacred experience. Our night of Ayahuasca was to help purge stuff from our lives and give us profound insights, which we discussed the next day with the shamans, Achuar to Spanish to English. We left the rainforest all too soon, as far as I was concerned. I'd love to spend a year with them, but alas that is not to happen. We spent the next four days at resorts high in the Andes soaking in hot springs from the volcanoes, horseback riding, shopping in markets, and visiting local shamans. So…I reread this email and, sadly, it doesn't come close to describing my experiences. It was soul stirring, apparently beyond description. Seeing how the Achuar lived in complete harmony with the Earth was like watching a movie where I expected the actors to go back to "normal" western living when I was gone. They seemed so normal, just like people I would invite to my home for dinner. I never felt sorry for them and their living conditions as I have in other communities around the world. I guess it was because they truly lived in a world of abundance and not lack, even though they lacked much of what we believe to be essential. Years ago they began having dreams about other people destroying their lands for oil, mining, and cattle ranching. They reached out, and Lynne Twist, fellow TLCer and co-founder of the Pachamama Alliance, answered their call. The Alliance has raised millions to help with the Achuar air service, education, and working with governments, hiring teams of legal beagles and empowering the Achuar to lead the fight to protecting the rainforest, which they do with their lives. They live as one with Pachamama, Mother Earth, and they know its importance in the world. It makes no sense to them why we want to live in "our" world where most people have no connection with Pachamama. They know that the way we live is unsustainable, and they work with the Pachamama Alliance to change the dream of our world to an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, and socially just human presence. This will mean huge huge changes in the way we live, which will happen whether or not we actively go along with it. My dad and I were talking last week, and he said, "Don't people realize how they are destroying the earth?"  I hadn't had any previous conversations about this with him, so it seemed completely out of the blue. But he knows, and I know that if you're reading this email, you know. On some level you absolutely know. I encourage you to take a trip to the rainforest. It's expensive, but worth every nickel. Consider it a vacation or adventure travel. You'll come back knowing it was a pilgrimage. You can borrow my moisture wicking clothing, duffles, and left over malaria pills. If you have any questions about any aspect of my trip, the rainforest, or the Achuar, write back. I know a lot and wrote a little. -Pete (Posted on October 25, 2010)