So I just got back from the jungle...

Synchronicity is a concept that I continually struggle with. Sometimes, I'm annoyed by how obsessively certain people seek them out, grasping at any little numerological coincidence that allows their confirmation bias to match their selection bias.

Yet sometimes events evolve so serendipitously that it seems like the fates themselves are weaving one's destiny, and the course of action is so clear that there is no room for doubt in choosing one's proper course. So it was that I found myself in Peru the past few weeks.

This wasn't my first trip to Peru. Three years ago, inspired by the chapter "Showdown in Cajamarca" in Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, I acquired a ticket to South America for two months, with no premeditated travel plans or contacts to speak of. Just a vague certainty that I needed to be down there.

Guides popped out of the woodwork, as wives of oil barons showed me around Lima, and a box containing a trio of coca leaves led me to a bar where I met an ayahuasquera who lives in an ecovillage in Madre de Dios. Before a week had passed I was in a maloca in Puerto Maldonado, slapping mosquitos off my neck as a curandero/botanist sang icaros in five languages. My reality melted into a live action version of "The Lorax", as an emerging cast of brillant artistic ecowarriors pitted themselves against greedy industrialists and careless miners, battling for the hearts and minds of the children and our shared future.

And then, in the blink of an eye, I was in the sacred valley, traipsing from village to village, following the same three coca leaves in the hat of a mystic guide. Instead of following the Inca trail, my path led me through a batch of huachuma up Machu Picchu and across the dimensional divide.

The next couple months the cactus led me to dozens more sacred huacos, from the town of Colan where Pizarro made first landfall, to las Huarinjas, the baths of the Inca in Cajamarca, Trujillo, Sipan, Kuelap and Chachapoyas, Chan Chan, Huanchaco, and the Temples of the Rainbow, Sun, and the Moon. Everywhere I went, guides emerged to teach me valuable lessons, like Ayni, Amistad, and Key Medicine.

My first trip ended, and key medicine unlocked a new career back home in sustainability. Peru still called, and I returned a year after my first trip for 7 more months. This time, I spent my time working, devoted to empowering the children to reimagine their communities. I started in the Rainforest with ANIA, Tierra de los Ninos, and then one day three organizations that I'd worked with all contacted me to go work in Pisco. For four months I was director of external relations for Burners Without Borders, helping the people of Pisco rebuild after 90% of their city fell down in the earthquake. My only break was a three week period where I studied martial arts and plant medicine up in the Sacred Valley.

In the end, I came back, and reacquainted myself with the incomparable Queen Bein'. We'd met a few weeks before my first Peru trip, and kept tabs on each other over the next couple years. When we bumped back into each other in the dark at Lightning in a Bottle, I knew we needed to spend more time together. Before long, we were dating, and with a group of friends we cofounded Growcology, where we now have a sustainable learning center.

A few months ago I spoke at an Evolver spore in Los Angeles on the subject of gifting, trying to give some perspective on international aid and disaster relief work, as well as the creation of sustainable gift economies at home. Last month, Queen Bein' spoke at an Evolver spore on psychedelics, and her discussion so impressed one of the audience members that he asked if she would go to Peru for a documentary and shamanic conference.

This is where the synchronicities come in. He asked her to go to Puerto Maldonado. Not Iquitos, the center of ayahuasca tourism in South America, or Pucallpa, the capital of the Shipibo culture. No, Puerto, the tiny little border town on the edge of the Brazilian and Bolivian borders, where I'd lived 2 months as I dedicated myself to my current life path of sustainable education.

When I investigated the gentleman who was referring Queen Bein' to this retreat, I realized he began his philanthropy the same time I was in Peru, right down the river from the martial arts retreat I went on in the sacred valley. He even took ayahuasca with the last person I had, Don Ignacio, only a week after I'd randomly found out on New Years that I was sharing my hotel with the narcoleptic octogenarian curandero from Infierno.

That was a pretty big coincidence. Don Ignacio is not a very well known maestro, with no web presence, no retreat center, a remote location, and a pending retirement.

When Bianca decided to go on the retreat, it was clear that chance had nothing to do with it. I informed her sponsors that I would like to connect them with my contacts down there and accompany her, and they agreed to allow me to attend for free if I could get a ticket. After a call to my airline, I had a free flight as well.

Two all expense paid trips to Peru, just like that.

I quickly logged on to Gmail to inform my Peruvian friends that we'd be coming down, and as I chatted with U an email popped into my inbox from an unrelated acquaintance. He wanted to know if two of his friends from Peru could come to hold ceremony at our center the weekend before our trip. When I asked U if she knew them, she excitedly responded that they were some of her closest friends, and she'd even traveled to Thailand with one of them.

So all of a sudden, Queen Bein' and I went from having no plans to travel in the near future, to having two all expense paid tickets and a sendoff consisting of a full land blessing and ceremony of the coming together of the eagle and condor.

Of course, nothing goes without a hitch. We lost our luggage en route, after our first flight was delayed and we missed our next two connections. We arrived at Chimbre a day and a half late, without a change of clothes or any toiletries. Fortunately for us, the staff were incredibly kind, giving us t-shirts, towels, and soap, and four days later arranging for our bags to arrive from the airport.

The retreat itself was incredible. The center is perched just above the canopy of a huge expanse of old-growth rainforest, and an Escher-esque stairway leads past several Chavin de Huantar stela replicas to a series of raised wooden walkways and platforms. The buildings above are gorgeous, although they were still under construction when we arrived. The pathways between the ceremonial and housing structures, or lack thereof, were chaotic and disorienting, but as the organizers finish construction I'm sure they'll implement some truly inspirational means of getting from point A to point B, just as they did with the boardwalk down in the jungle.

The maestro is an intriguing man. Don Jose, or Mancoluto as he goes by now, is from las Huarinjas, the center of Peruvian huachuma curanderismo. He employs none of the Christian syncretic traditions or the weak cactus brews of his compatriots though, instead relying on a Nietzchian psychological message of higher sensory awareness and "the human being of the future". Decrying philosophy and religion as "primitive" attempts by the muggles to dogmatize the conscious revelations of true masters, he practiced a form of tough shamanism where participants in ceremony would get just a brief song and dance before being marched into the jungle to face their demons and awaken their higher senses by themselves.

Maestro Mancoluto also referred to his family's origins in Chavin de Huantar, where he studied the petroglyphs known as stela with his sixth and seventh senses. He claims to have been born a Shaman of the first level, with only a handful of peers on the planet, and traces his lineage through Chavin to ancient, prehistoric civilizations living in Atlantis, Lemuria, all the way to Mars.

Its rare to hear someone refer to themselves as a shaman with any bit of authenticity, let alone claiming to be a living, breathing martian. And yet, despite my incredulity, part of me believed him. He DID kind of resemble the figure in the Stela Raimundi, with his snaggle teeth, paunch, and big feline eyes. He claimed to use plants to re-awaken our hidden genetic heritage, initiating us into higher levels of sensory perception like clairvoyance, telepathy, and more.

Needless to say, his message didn't resonate with many of the participants of the retreat. Some had come for genuine physical and emotional healing, yet the maestro refused to use inferior methods like icaros or night-long intentional ceremony circles to give the attendees feel-good 'therapy'. No, if you wanted to heal, he said the best way would be to heal yourself, without externalizing it and attributing your recovery to someone or something outside of you.

Some of what he said rang true, but sometimes people NEED therapy. The songs, or icaros, are powerful medicine, and quite a few of the retreat participants were working with Ayahuasca and San Pedro for their first time. To make matters worse, while a group would be imbibing and beginning ceremony, the rest of us would be milling around outside, talking, smoking, and laughing in a very distracting manner.

Fortunately, Queen Bein' introduced a concept she learned on a Mayan retreat known as 'holding space', where those not participating in a ceremony form a circle and meditate/pray for those who are. Their intent is to provide them the space, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, to do the work they're set out to do. It really helped the overall vibe of the place, and many people (though not all) expressed their gratitude to Bianca for her contribution.

I shared some of the martial arts I've learned over the years, including some from the retreat I attended in the sacred valley. Many of them are about cultivating and directing energy in a manner similar to Qi Gong, which was very appropriate for the medicines we were working with. One meditation I shared, in particular, the rainbow meditation, seemed to speak directly to the seven sense that the maestro spoke of.

During my second and final ceremony at Chimbre, I and two other participants used some of those techniques to harmonize the energy at the place and open a portal to another dimension. It was a truly unbelievable experience, and called alot of things into question that I'd taken for granted for so many years. My rational mind still has difficulty understanding all that happened that night, but suffice to say that while the Maestro claimed Mars as his planet of origin, we were visited by beings from other planets who warned us of the difference between respect and trust, between habitation and consumption. I'll be processing that experience for some time.

After the retreat ended, Queen Bein' and I visited my friends in their ecovillage. They'd visited us on the retreat, hopefully to connect Chimbre with their nonprofit and do some consulting on jungle horticulture and implementing permaculture principles into their plans. Now, we could relax, and we visited their 45 hectare orchid preserve and food forest. We practiced yoga and participated in a Hindu fire ceremony, cleansing pranic energy and blessing the land in a way I'd never even imagined possible.

Before we left, I asked B to marry me. She was standing in the Maloca in the heart of Kapievi, telling me about her dreams for having a place like that to inspire our friends. While she spoke, eyes closed, I busily fashioned a ring for her from an orchid blossom and a Peruvian chili pepper, and when she opened her eyes I was on one knee.

I know I want to spend the rest of my life with this woman, and create something as beautiful as our friends in Kapievi already have, and our friends at Chimbre are trying to build.

I know we will...