When You Can't Go Forward And You Can't Go Back

The Leaf And The Vine

The first time I was with Aya, there was no shaman, no sitter, no group. Just two sealed bags arriving in the mail one day, signed over by a cheery, yet distracted postman, who had no idea of the contents. 

I set a day aside to brew the contents, in two separate stainless steel pots on the stove. It took many hours and all my concentration. The cramped little kitchen filled with steam and heat. After a half day of simmering, reduction, adding more water, bringing to the boil, then more reduction, I was left  with a small amount of brown liquid in each pot and a lot of denatured plant matter. Later, I would take the old and useless plant matter and bury it in the garden, as a sign of respect to the plants, chacruna and caapi; together, Ayahuasca.

In the evening, I drank the medicine. I swilled it down in two huge gulps and forced myself to accept and taste it, to enjoy the pungent forest tea. It tasted of jungle; leaf and twig, bark and moss. It had the smell of the rainforest on it, I knew it, even though I'd never been there.

I sat on the bed in my sparse room with its white walls, few features to interrupt the monotony. Nothing happened for an hour or more. Then I went down to the kitchen and ate a small piece of cheese. This can open the gate. Medically speaking, sometimes the gall bladder absorbs two much of the caapi, and won't let it down to the chacruna where they can work together. A little bit of food, something fatty and rich, or fruit, can release it all and bring on the journey.

First, a rising feeling, an excitement as all the cells of the body started to hum and sing. Then the wall went whiter than white, then it was breaking out into different colours, but these colours were somehow more. They were brighter and deeper and more real than colours I had ever seen, like every colour of the material world was an imitation, some cosmic hand-me-down from these, the true and orginal colours. Neon fuschias, blues like fairy-tale stormclouds, greens like waves of funhouse acid. 

Then my leg, which was tucked up with the knee pointing to the ceiling begins to change. It became a face, then a tree with a face in it; a primordial nature spirit face. I see the faces in trees all the time, sometimes speaking to me, but this was the first time a part of me had become a tree. It was a dark-brown barked one with big lips and eyebrows. And I could feel the jungle all around me, the throbbing, teeming, life of it; the smell, the danger. This was in all probability, the spirit of the chacruna leaf that I saw in my leg. 

My normal three dimensional understanding of space was beginning to dissolve. No longer was it composed of the rapidly changing colours of the wall in the background, and my stern and antedeluvian leg-tree in the foreground. Everything was a very bright and pale, electric blue. As if to help make sense of things, grid-lines started to appear. I got the sensation of rushing and movement. I was in a vast environment and I was coming upon an entity. 

I rushed up to meet her. She was a goddess, standing a thousand metres tall, and she was made up of points of light in regular distributions. The outlines of a beautiful and fertile, nature goddess. A divinely feminine being. To explain how she appeared to me with the points of light, it is necessary to imagine painting a grid onto a beautiful woman, then taking only the points where the lines intersect, then these become brilliant white suns. 

I flew from her feet, up her body, to her face. It was incredible to meet her like this. We didn't say or communicate too much, we just recognised each other. We acknowledged our connection and our relationship. It was a truly holy moment.

It is hard to say how one thing transitioned to another, I may have rushed into her body by means of the point of light in her forehead. I was always moving. But in the next stage it was everything else that was moving, even the attempt at three dimensional space was dropped. I saw things as a pastiche, a large scene with many things happening at once. With so much going on I found it impossible to concentrate. Many things that I saw had a Guatamalan or a Mexican feel to them; deserts and strange plants, multi-coloured fabrics and sombreros. I felt at that the time that this was meant to be somewhere I would go, or something I would do.