Don’t Eat the Strawberry Shortcake There, Man

Coke bottles floating in the Amazon. White junkies sleeping on the street. That should have been the tip-off.

When I heard about Yage, also known as Ayahuasca, a hallucinatory vine that grows in the Amazon, I had to find it. I had heard the visions were life changing and I needed a new direction in life, as always. A jungle juice that would fix me. I’ve been searching for that elixir my entire life, or maybe I just wanted kicks. I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was not it.

There is a lot to this story, but in the interest of time, let’s just say my fiancé found a “healing retreat” on the internet, at my request, that she thought looked safe (a picture of the dude who ran the place I picked looked way too sketchy for her taste).

She is not into this kind of stuff, by the way.

The most damaged person at the Refugio was the “Shaman” himself, stinking drunk in soaking wet tighty-whities, A year later he fell, or was more likely pushed, out of one of the treehouses on his armed compound. Hopefully, by one of the many women he victimized, but this is not about him, and I am in no place to judge. God bless you, Scott.

“I’m gonna give you a large dose because you’re a big boy and I know you like to trip.”

He knows I came looking for kicks, but that’s not what this is. Thankfully, the spirit let me pass without hurting me. Serpents eating each other’s tails in a follow-the-leader of infinite figure eights.

“I don’t really know how this stuff works, but how often are ya in the Amazon?” he whispers in my ear with that stinking gravely breath.

I asked to be a good husband, father, son, brother, teacher – and the spirit told me I already was. I asked the spirit “what is my problem?” It told me that my problem is that I think I have a problem.

Rainbow lightening splits the hemispheres of my brain. Suddenly, I’m up to my ears in the toilet, singing “by bit, by ho, and there’s no more storm clouds arising.” This is my song of the Icaros. The toilet bowl had such resonance, my porcelain amphitheater, empty except for a small child.

I’m under a car, making repairs. I must be fixing myself; loosening this, tightening that. When I realized what I was doing, I found myself alone in the dark, with nothing in my heart but trouble and doubt. Worries, anxiety, and self-loathing took the form of black serpentine tentacles reaching around me, cutting off circulation, making it hard to breathe, and my wonderful new fiancé on the mat next to me appeared as shining orbs of light on the tips of these black arms that I concentrated on.

We’re just two meat sacks on a dirtball.

I could see a hardwood box around my heart, nailed shut with dark wood and brass rivets, like a treasure chest buried in the ocean by a fugitive pirate. With steady breathing and painful tears, I could crack the seams of the box and let the light of my love shine through, cutting through the infinite darkness like light leaking from a cracked closet door, giving solace to a frightened child. I saw my heart inside the box as a dark blue polished stone, sparkling in the light, the more I opened the box, the more my hardened heart took on a purple hue and became softer.

After hours of tears, the box became a rotted brown banana peel, I tugged and pushed at my heart with hands, breath, and tears, crying for my mother and brother, acknowledging the pain that has been with us so long that we mistake it for a member of the family, the tentacles began to recede, until the blockage around my heart was just a shadow. The hardwood box is now veiny tendrils, a rotted palm frond on the floor of the jungle, but the weeds kept growing back like a vine of trouble and doubt, and I could tell they were growing from my gut. I could pluck the weed and tear out the roots, but it kept growing back. I still have some gardening to do, but soon that weed will be gone, and my heart will be free. I am so close. It is hard work, but it feels so good.

I put the box there myself, I planted the weeds that grew into the wood. I was the one who nailed it shut. I can’t blame middle school or anyone else. For too long I have celebrated those things that equate loneliness with pleasure, which have only left me for years, alone with my pain. I need to stop putting bad things in my belly and mind. Lazy and thoughtless habits have closed off my heart from the world, closed it off from myself. I tried to control the world by taking away its power, always saying “whatever… it doesn’t matter,” always expecting the worst so that I’m not disappointed, not realizing that means I am always disappointed.

It’s so easy to learn a lesson when you’re away from home, as simple as saying the root chakra pollutes the heart chakra, but so difficult to apply it when you return. That’s the difference between thinking and believing, maybe, I don’t know. I was pretty fuckin’ high.

Spider monkeys join us for lunch the next day as the Shaman tells me that my energy is low because I live too passively, that I must be more active in my own life, the lives of those around me, and the life of the universe.

I will be, but right now I need to get my family out of the jungle.

The changes I need to make I need to make for myself, but I also have a family to take care of, a wife and future child to get off this island, and back home, safe and sound, and whole. I found love and that’s all I need, all I ever needed, and more. I am so thankful for what I have. I have a purpose and a focus that I never had before. I am a man, and I must start acting like it.

It’s not so much that my questions were answered, but that I learned why I was asking those questions.

I never felt so sick as when I tried to get well.