The Amazon, Again.

Out and back in less than 5 months.

It was a bit difficult to figure out who had the earrings I’d noticed earlier. Twenty or so Huaorani women stared at me, with a handful of wide-eyed kids peering out from between their legs and behind their hips. They all had various collections of handicrafts crammed into bags, and I’m pretty sure very few of them spoke much Spanish. They laughed and chatted away in their language ‘Wao Terero,’ while I perused some of their jewelry, satchels, headdresses, and other beautiful crafts all made entirely from forest products they themselves had gathered nearby. They told me that the Chambira Palm, Astrocaryum chambira, provided most of the fibers that they wove into everything from hammocks to bracelets to baskets. Wao Terero is a linguistic isolate, much like Esselen is believed to have been while it was still spoken by indigenous Californians in northern Big Sur. This means that it shows no linguistic similarities to any other language in the world—no one knows from which language family it might have evolved, or from where those who carry it on their tongue may have come. We can really only say that they have in all likelihood maintained a long isolation from nearby groups, or else evidence of such interactions would be found in terms and names exchanged between them and others. First contacted by the outside world only 70 years ago, today some of them sell handmade jewelry to an American ecologist at Yasuní Scientific Station in El Oriente—Ecuador’s Amazonian east. A land of extreme diversity, ever-wet forests traversed by numerous streams and rivers, and a place where two clans of the Huaorani still live fully removed from western civilization (by choice, I might add), hunting and gathering as they always have.

“El Corazón de Yasuní” - Ceiba Pentandra

When I left the Amazon at the end of December last year, I remember being very unsure if I’d ever be returning. That last day, my Matsigenka friend Jhonatan and I were camped out at the most glorious of spots: a beach on the banks of the Alto Madre de Dios river, surrounded by lush rainforest vegetation, from which you could look west and see up past the numerous ridges of cloud forests all the way to snow-capped Andean peaks, gleaming in the distance. It was a juxtaposition of the sort one usually only expects from a dream. We sat and chatted over coffee, and I was surprisingly calm despite being at the end of such a life-altering half-year in the forest. I knew I was headed up into those mountains to catch New Year’s Eve in Cusco with some Peruvians I had met 6-months prior on my way in, and I knew that after that I would wander down into the south of Chile. Perhaps most importantly, I knew that after that I would head home. And at that point, despite my love for the people and places I’d come to know in South America, home was about the only thing that mattered to me anymore. That was Amazonia’s great lesson to me. I had seen people shaped by and anchored to their home environment in a way I’d never seen before and it has left an indelible mark on my psyche, on my own personal desires. Naturally, I wanted to apply that lesson in my own life—to make a homecoming of epic personal proportions, and never forget what I’d learned. Only, that homecoming came and went like a prairie fire and now I’m back in the place that had just told me to get lost, to go home.

Alan Watts used to say, in reference to the taking of psychedelics, “If you get the message, hang up the phone.” To that extent being back here is weird. I left California two years ago because I sensed that Amazonia had an important lesson to teach me. It did in fact, and I was a receptive pupil. It spoke to me in my dreams and mercifully gifted me with the revelation I just mentioned. Which begs the question, have I ignored the message and picked the phone back up just to be entranced by the alluring sound of the messenger’s voice, like fabled sailors drawn to the sirens? Or does Amazonia have more to teach me? I thought I already knew what I needed to know. I was calm that morning with Jhonatan on the riverbank staring up into the Andes because I felt myself in the earliest stages of enacting that greatest of lessons—I was making my (roundabout) way home to get there, sniff sagebrush, watch the 20,000-some sunsets (or whatever I was given), and stay put until my bones met the serpentine soil and gave up their phosphorous to the elemental maelstrom that comes after living.

In response to me explaining my predicament, a wise lady told me, “sometimes decisions get made for us. California will always be here.” Sometimes decisions get made for us. Her words still ring around my mind whenever I wonder what’s become of that message I had received like a hallowed text not long ago. It slid through my fingers like warm, silted water. Like the moon eclipsing the sun it made the briefest but most dramatic of impressions and then was lost to the brightening afternoon and the oddest of memories. We all chase meaning—I consider myself lucky to have found it and perhaps a moron for throwing it away. Then again, sometimes decisions get made for us. It is, after all, pretty wonderful to be back in this forest. And California will always be there, I suppose. But if I’m not there watching the golden eagles leap from their eyrie, seven feet on the wing and feathered to the talon, what good is it to know they still exist somewhere out there? I guess its like bait to draw me back again some day. And I guess I smile to know that Brian’s opal ceiling is so wildly adorned.