Poodling down the amazon in your little canoe, the outboard whirring like an egg beater and the jungle looking like green wool, all knotted up with sticks and tree stumps, it{s easy to think you have arrived in the {real wilderness{. You think that as you drape your fingers in the muddy water - Amazon mud - Amazon water, and as you watch big chest-beating clouds gather ahead for a yodelling session of Pantheon proportions, as you dodge the plate-sized butterflies and the fork-equipped bugs. You think that until somebody cuts the engine.
Then! Then you realise that you are not in the wilderness until you are in its silence. Being freed of the engine fast-tracks you out of what you thought was {peace{ into what IS peace. And the biggest surprise of it, the thing that{s a little sad about it, is that it{s the sort of peace we have forgotten to remember. Silence without the buzz. Without the engines of thought, tv, worries, schemes, doubts and all... a silence so delicate as to be lost eclipsed entirely by an errant idea, but so gargantuan and everlasting that it stretches toward infinity in all directions, the home base of everything that was ever born, in flesh, in wood, in water or wonder on this planet and all the others.
Ancient silence. Delicious.
With this awareness you see, for the first time, the effects of your speed, of your noise and your canoe - even though it seems so small on this river. You see the ripples of your being here eating bites out of the river bank, tugging at plant roots, sending birds into the air and causing fish to fly. You see women on their floating rafts doing laundry tossed about, and children paddling to school thrown around like leaves on your wake. You realise that even this tiny amount of force, even this extra speed, perhaps just a couple of knots faster than jungle-time, is separating you from the world here, cutting you off from how it really is, how it works. From balance.
Girls on Top has officially disbanded for 2008, with the team all home now in Oz, and one happily at home in Cusco, the magical centre of Peru. Now the adventure is ended, and all the work and our goals achieved, the ripples have extended out for me here in the Amazon where I have stayed on to work a little more with our charities here in the jungle.
My days are filled with sketching the new school to build at the Amazon Rescue Centre - how many nails? how many leaves for the roof? how do we keep the monkeys from pissing on the children? do we need light? can we arrange posters? or I am working a little with Amazon Promise as their volunteer team of 20 doctors arrives from around the world to pack their mobile clinic around the jungle and its villages and towns to treat hundreds of people with a myriad of needs. Already, here in Iquitos, Amazon Promise have seen more than 300 people from the floating slum city, Belen, tomorrow we all leave for deeper jungle where clinics will be conjured out of plastic tubs, packs and canoes to see perhaps hundreds more every day for 2 weeks... people who have nothing for the simplest injuries, burns, cuts, bites, welts and headaches... through to those with long-term tumours, cancer, TB, HIV and a host of mysterious ailments that no doctor has seen in the book, let alone attended to.
My role (nurse Jade) will be assistant in the pharmacy, or perhaps something else. I am traveling as a volunteer helper, and reporter for the crew and it is my honour to see Amazon Promise in action, as well as to be involved, on the ground, with a charity we have helped fund in its work.}
In my own world here, the jungle has teased out of me an old, strange illness that has covered me in welts, blotches and swollen roses of my own. typically, no doctor has seen such a rash, and even in the company of 20 wonderful, curious and passionate western healers I am something of a mystery. Luckily, this is the jungle, and there is always another way.
I have tucked myself under the wing of an Indian Shaman witch, Rossa, who is taking me on another journey, one into the healing arcana of the magical plants of the Amazon. All week I have been drinking her bitter curing teas and watching her cable tv. I am learning the ways of the plants, which are very jealous medicines, very strong and not to be treated lightly. An {appointment{ with Rossa can take half a day and involves many stories, many legends, some gossip, lots of laughing and chanel surfing on her tiny television. She tells me I have bad problems with my liver. Some anger that needs to let go. Some unspoken needs. She tells me I have astral parasites too (you know who you are) and she is working on clearing all those from my aura, and protecting me from bad forces, poor mojo, black magic and dickheads.
I leave for the jungle expedition tomorrow with bags full of powdered leaves, shaved wood and bark chips. I will boil them up, smoking big fat mupacho cigarettes that ward off evil and sing love songs in smoke plumes to the plant medicine. i will drink them under the full moon. After my work with Amazon Promise healing others, I will travel with Rossa to her jungle hut where she will spend the next two weeks healing me.