Reflecting on the Rainforest

I'm going to start writing about my experience, and post it once a week for whoever is interested. This first one is from Oct 26th to about Nov 3rd. I often have interesting experiences and many insights when I travel and I feel like its time to share.

It feels good to get back on the little horse that is microsoft word and make sense of the whole thing, peace everyone!

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We arrived in Puna on the wettest week since some time. The back of the truck, where we sat on small cinder blocks, was spewing water. Hit in the face with heavy mist, already drenched we glided through darkness toward home, a plot of land in the rainforest named The Shire. I had followed Ben to Hawaii on a whim, an energetic hunch of sorts. I found his uncanny ability for forming mental structure and love of time travel both interesting and beneficial to be around. Our other back-of-the-truck companion, Bacchus [who is as his name implies], let out a whoop of glee excited by the rain.

I set up my tent under a tarp structure wondering where I was. The only light came from the outdoor kitchen in camp. The mud was thick as was the foliage and frog songs. I had only met the people that lived here briefly. They left the mainland to start a new life, to be jungle psychonauts living the dream of paradise.

Yet paradise had a moldy underbelly and adaptation was not always the easiest process. Much of what was owned now, after three months, was rotting. This included body parts, the jungle so alive and consuming nibbled at their skins giving way to Staff infections and strange rashes. Critter, the girl of the troop who was always wearing cat-ears, had just recovered from Necrotic Fasciitis, the flesh eating bacteria. It almost claimed her foot. She was still troubled over the effects of the reconstructive surgery visible through her wet sandal. She talked about it a lot. I could hear in her voice a deeper wound healing, the emotional ordeal of it. I thought to myself: This is not MY paradise.

When the sun did appear a few days later I became more and more aware of the beauty, the majesty, of this place. Fruit trees were everywhere, lining the streets and filling the groves. As we sat in a tent listening to some music, the small speakers and wires seen in front of the window of green I became aware of the paradise, the breathing beating earth all around our little human camp.

It all depended on how I was looking at it; I saw that heaven and hell were born from the same image much like the illusion of a vase and two faces. For instance there was the guava forest; it looked like it was fabricated from a fantasy novel, beautiful thin red wooded fruit trees over a carpet of emerald moss. Then there is the part the fantasy novel left out: rotting fruit and millions of fruit flies, sheer fecundity. Somehow I found this juxtaposition satisfying. I began to see both images, the scenes of my life, like optical illusions to be played with. A friend I met in Mexico once told me before he died two days later “The same scene can be mountains of misery or mansions of myrrh depending on how you see it.”

I was awoken one morning at dawn by Ben. It was Halloween, his favorite day.

“Hey, are you awake?”

He informed me there was a field of grazing cows only a few miles away and that he could feel some mushrooms calling. Indeed, when we got there little baggies in hand the morning light glowed like a Christmas tree over the cow dung. Tiny clumps of mushrooms rose up from it.

We spent the rest of that day walking over lava fields, twisted pours hardened in sparkling black that flooded toward the ocean waves which cracked it into black sands for future beaches. We ate strange fruit along the way, Bacchus was especially fond of foraging, he would disappear and re-immerge periodically with purple and black and red berries. He would offer them to us to taste.

That night we ate the mushrooms in a cave under the guava forest canopy. Ben was observing his Saturn’s Return counting down to a moment in which he proclaimed that he is not living his next cycle to pay back karmic debt but to simply imbue the world with more love. We stumbled out into the clarity of night. A fire had already been lit, abandoned and left burning for us. The sky was full of stars. Sirius flickered a full spectrum of colors and Venus coed lovingly. Critter used her phone app to identify stars and planets and I took to tending the fire whose dry warmth was more than welcome.

At one point everyone left back to the cave. I stayed by the fire communing with stars until the clouds began to gather. I felt the epic tension between the water and the fire, the elemental spirits at play. I wanted to go to my tent before the rain. I started to walk through the jungle path whose high grass was just partially mowed that day into some kind of maze. As my flashlight dimmed and puttered out and I lost myself in winding pathways, the world, which already seemed a fantastic hallucination was enveloped by yet another layer of fractal flower patterns. Small dwellings I passed appeared to be humming spaceships. I felt like I was in a bizarre horror movie. It brought me to a place of being somewhat unnerved, as the character in the movie would be, while also laughing at the fact that I was in this movie. The mushrooms told me to not be nervous at all and just ask for what I needed. I said I would like to get back to my tent in a small that-would-be-nice kind of voice. I heard people talking just then. Critter and her partner Will walked out from a jungle path. Will, seeing that I was a little bit lost walked back with me.

I was looking toward the mushroom to clarify something. Where to go and what was the right path to take. It told me simply that all paths are fine, that the idea of right and wrong is an absurdity. It showed me that I was programmed that way by school. The multiple choice question with one correct and three incorrect little letter bulleted answers flashed in my mind. At first I was telling the mushroom “Yes there are wrong answers!” until it calmly pointed out that all those wrong answers are non-answers and not wrong paths. You cannot walk down a path that is wrong, you can only BELIEVE you are doing so and make it look wrong. You can fail to see the beauty that is everywhere but you have not “messed up” life you have only closed your eyes….

“What would like to do?”

I sometimes find myself living life like it’s a problem waiting to be solved, to be brought to completion. Perhaps it is more like a poem written on loose-leaf paper…