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If you are as old as I am, you remember growing up with the Golden Guide books — sturdy, profusely illustrated, pocket-sized guides to such topics as flowers, planets, spiders, birds, stars, painting, pond life, photography, and rocks and minerals, intended for a young audience. They were perfect for taking along on field trips for identification purposes. The series began in 1949 with Birds and continued — remarkably — until Endangered Animals in 1995. There is, of course, a collector’s website with details about every Golden Guide ever published.
Since we’ve been talking about the Amazon River lately, I thought we might listen to some Amazon River music. The story of this particular piece brings together three significant artists — the dance company Grupo Corpo, the instrumental group Uakti, and composer Philip Glass.
I have spoken before about my plant teacher doña María Luisa Tuesta Flores. She was born in September 1940, in the town of Lamas in the province of San Martín, and she died, the victim of sorcery, in July 2006. She had begun her healing career as an oracionista, a prayer healer, and, even after she became an ayahuasquera, her icaros, magic songs, remained inflected with the rhythms and melodies of prayers.
The quirky television series Weeds was a surprise hit for Showtime. It was the channel’s highest rated series in its first year, and its fourth season premier attracted 1.3 million viewers, Showtime’s highest-ever viewership. Mary-Louise Parker, as the lead character Nancy Botwin, won a Golden Globe for her performance on the show. She also drank ayahuasca.
I was staying with my teacher don Rómulo Magin in his hut in the jungle. He was playing an ancient transistor radio for me, barely bringing in the scratchy music of a distant station. The music was infectiously lively, and I asked him what it was. La música de la selva, he told me, grinning. Jungle music.
Since at least the 1970s, a tenacious meme has circulated among a generally progressive youthful demographic, some of whom have now carried that meme with them into their elderhood. The meme states that there is a connection between our ecological crisis and our loss of earth-connected spirituality — a connection to both earth and spirit that we once possessed but have now lost, and which is still preserved for us by some indigenous peoples. Still, the meme says, there is hope. A spiritual awakening is coming, associated with the Age of Aquarius, or the fifth pachakuti, or the culmination of the Mayan calendar in the year 2012.
The documentary Fire on the Mountain: A Gathering of Shamans was filmed in 1997 at a ten-day gathering of tribal elders, wisdom keepers, and medicine women from five continents, who had travelled to Karma Ling, a Tibetan Buddhist retreat center in the French Alps, to discuss their concerns with the Dalai Lama and representatives of the world’s religions.
For some time, Thomas McKinnon and AyasminA — that’s her name — have been working on a still uncompleted documentary film, entitled In Search of the Divine Vegetal, about the healing power of ayahuasca. AyasminA describes the project as exploring “the nexus between Western and Indigenous cosmologies in relation to plant intelligence.” The goal, she says, is to “help nurture a species of hybrid consciousness consisting of Western science, Indigenous magic, phytospirituality, and the Great Unknown.”
It’s actually not a bad idea for a television reality show. Get several very minor celebrities, pack them off away from their home comforts, and subject them to a range of programs that claim to enhance inner peace, happiness, and understanding. That at least was the premise of a short-lived BBC program called, naturally enough, Extreme Celebrity Detox, on which the guest celebrities performed t’ai-chi exercises in the Slovenian Alps, practiced Taoist sexual yoga in Thailand, did body-cleansing hatha yoga in the Himalayas — and drank ayahuasca in the Peruvian Amazon.
For those with an interest in sacred plants, the Fall 1989 issue of the Whole Earth Review holds a special place in our hearts. The issue is subtitled The Alien Intelligence of Plants, and it contains any number of delights — articles by Terence and Dennis McKenna; reviews of classic books on South American shamanism by Michael Taussig and Johannes Wilbert; articles on ethnobotany, plant intelligence, and the political economy of deforestation; and all of the small intriguing sidebar reviews and discussions that are characteristic of the Whole Earth style.