What Good...?

    If the above title were to end without the three periods (grammatically termed an ellipsis), the question would be simply one which was challenging in a sense, as in questioning what "good" came out of something or what "good" was there in the world (another example might be in presenting something and then asking, "what good" would that do?)   But with the ellipsis at the end, the question becomes far more open-ended.  What good...am I?  What good...are you?  What good...is a mosquito?  Much of this came from a piece by the late Ann Zwinger titled "What Good Is A Desert?"  I pull my sleeping bag close and think about the question of what good a desert is.  In this luminescent sparkling morning, such a query seems to me a nonquestion.  As well ask what good is a human, what good is a moon, what good is a spider, what good is a bat, what good is a butterfly whose brilliant colors delight us, what good is an exquisite caddis fly case made of infinitesimal snail shells, what good is an aspen leaf turning gold in the fall?...I rebel against the answer most easily given: A place is good only if it provides sustenance for mankind.  When I thought about it last night, listening to a couple of coyotes web the air with yodels, watching the brightness of the stars through the netting, feeling the frigid air flow into the tent, I was astonished to find that I could not accept the idea that a landscape is good only if it provides sustenance for humans -- food, medicinal plants, mineral wealth, what have you.  In that sense, the word good is a loaded on, totally anthropocentric, keying into a human's sense of right and wrong without taking into account nature's sense of right and wrong.

    This particular piece was from 1996 and part of a jumble of articles I had saved for some reason and had only now re-discovered upon clearing out my file cabinets (to give you some idea of how much I've shed, I was able to empty and discard both a 2-drawer and a 4-drawer cabinet, the latter being extra deep which allowed even more hidden cubbyholes).  But why save these dozen or so pieces?  Was it the writing (yes), the subject matter (yes), the themes (maybe), the explanatory nature of the pieces (probably); whatever the reason I had read them long ago and had decided that they were worth filing, worth putting away for another read even if that "read" wouldn't occur until some 20+ years later.  One of the saved articles was on predicting weather "the natural way," this being written during a time when computer model predictions for weather were just being considered and not yet the norm (the piece provided age-old methods such as ants walking in a straight line and birds taking dirt baths were accurate predictors of approaching rain); another article wrote of seagulls which, in addition to mating for life have other traits such as there being 43 additional species of gulls, the "sea" version being just one and it being far different than the gulls which live 12000 feet up in the Andes mountains; gulls can drink both fresh and sea water, it said, and can live for 40 or 50 years and that despite their pesky appearance at nearly every harbor and shore, there was a time in the start of the 20th century when the New England coast of the U.S. was virtually void of them (the result of bounty hunting for their feathers which were popular as decorations in hats and other fashions).  And then there was the piece on ayahuasca.

   This was a piece from the now-defunct offshoot of National Geographic when the magazine branched off into its "adventure" series, a sort of travel experience format; and this was also before the "experience" became mainstream and brought all sorts of fraudulent "shamans" and guides into the picture (the article was printed in 2006).  It brought to mind a piece I read some years ago on peyote, another natural plant hallucinogen, where the reporter tried it both with and without a proper ceremonial shaman and found herself experiencing two entirely different scenarios (the one without a shaman present was not recommended).  This was much the advice of both a podcast on ayahuasca and a blog* where the author of the blog actually went through the process of taking it (as a disclaimer, I've not taken either peyote or ayahuasca).  But here's the summation of the reporter from National Geographic Adventure who returned for her second ayahuasca "cleansing" and wrote: "I've got some more work to do," I say.  Here is a complicated question to answer.  And especially personal.  Lord knows I didn't have to come back.  I could have been content with the results of my last visit: no more morbid desires to die.  Waking up one morning in a hut in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.  Still, even after those victories I knew there were some stubborn enemies hiding out in my psyche: Fear and Shame.  They were taking potshots at my newfound joy, ambushing my successes.  How do you describe what it's like to want love from another but to be terrified of it at the same time?  To want good things to happen to you, while some disjointed part of you believes that you don't deserve them?  To look in a mirror and see only imperfections?  This was the meat and potatoes of my several years of therapy.  Expensive therapy.  Who did what --when-- why.  The constant excavation of memory.  The sleuth-work.  Patching together theory after theory.  Rational-emotive behavioral therapy.  Gestalt therapy.  Humanistic therapy.  Positive alternatives.  I am a beautiful person.  I deserve the best in life...Then, there's the impatience.  Thirty-three years old already, for chrissakes.  And in all that time, after all that therapy, only one thing worked on my depression -- an ayahuasca "cleansing" with Amazonian shamans.

From National Geographic of a bombed city in Syria

    Tony Balbin, author of the blog entry mentioned above, had this to say about his experience: They say to avoid major life decisions prior to an Ayahuasca retreat as it could all be flipped on its head after the experience.  It’s completely true and not nearly stressed enough.  Many people have abruptly ended relationships, changed careers, moved cities, and made other radical shifts months following their retreats.  I’m no different.  Within weeks of flying back I made the decision to quit my job, travel long term, and dedicate my life to Warrior.*  They call it “Vine of Death” for a reason, as near-death experiences aren’t uncommon.  In the peak of my most powerful trip, I had an intense vision of my own death.  That experience rattled me to my core and something I’m still trying to wrap my head around to this day.  As terrifying as this sounds, it was one of the most important events of my life.  Here’s why…Life get’s fairly simple when we clear the noise.  If you’re unhappy in a relationship, then leave.  If you’re unfulfilled in your career, then quit.  If you’re around toxic people, then drop them.  Typically our hearts tell us exactly what we want, yet those whispers go unnoticed with the barrage of fears, self-doubt, and mental baggage blasting in our minds.  When you’ve had the slightest taste of death, the noise tends to silence leaving only what matters on the table.  Once this occurs, tough decisions you’ve struggled with for years suddenly becomes clear as day.  Chuck Palahniuk once wrote “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”
   
   A few months ago Smithsonian featured a cover story on Anne Frank's diary, her life in hiding captured on pages and providing us a record few would duplicate.  But she wasn't alone and the magazine notes that many of her notes --particularly the portion that read "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart"-- are embraced because we simply don't want to read beyond that (she was turned in and sent to be executed three weeks later).  Those who chronicled life in the camps, the tortures and starvation and such, simply didn't achieve the notoriety of Frank (the magazine notes that even Elie Weisel's book had to be toned down into a different version before becoming widely read).   But people did write, people such as Zalman Gradowski whose diary of what went on inside the camps was only discovered after his death, carefully buried in the earth (he was a prisoner at Auschwitz): It may be that these, the lines that I am now writing, will be the sole witness to what was my life, but I shall be happy if only my writings should reach you, citizen of the free world.  Perhaps a spark of my inner fire will ignite in you, and even should you sense only part of what we lived for, you will be compelled to avenge us -- avenge our deaths!  Dear discoverer of these writings!  I have a request of you: This is the real reason why I write, that my doomed life may attain some meaning, that my hellish days and hopeless tomorrows may find a purpose in the future.

   It seems that at times we are all searching, sometimes searching for an answer and sometimes just searching out of curiosity.  But how deep we search is often determined by just how much we want to discover.  Some of us are content to just "let sleeping dogs lie," as the saying goes, for uncovering what happened to us in the past can sometimes be painful or traumatic...or life altering.  Often we have to ask ourselves what is it that we truly want to discover or in some cases, uncover.  If stripped naked in a sense, with little time left or with little left to lose, how happy would we be with our current lifestyle, our relationships, our family, our job, our image of our self, our body, our past actions or regrets.  What changes would we seek, if any?  Your house burns down (or is bombed, something most of us simply can't imagine happening but is a reality for many as evidenced by the photo above taken in Syria), our body is unexpectedly paralyzed by an accident or disease, our savings are hacked and gone, our memory begins to fail.  We turn away from much of reality, the bombings and the animal slaughterhouses, the speaking up and the confrontations, the defending of what's morally correct and the held-out hand.  But sometimes we have to ask ourselves why?  Faced with a limited timeframe, a limited few months or minutes, would we be frightened or at peace?  And does something as "opening" as ayahuasca reveal a person we don't really know...our true selves?  It's difficult to know, for we are all just that, individual selves, and some of us are content to simply keep the status quo, to turn away, to pretend that all is well in the world (exemplified in one way in the movie, The Wife).  And it might just be, that everything is fine...but it would seem that if something as "simple" as a plant could strip away the inhibitions and guardrails of our minds, there may be other ways to find that something truly different could be hidden beneath.  And perhaps even without such a drastic step as ayahuasca, it wouldn't hurt to just begin looking...**


* I've purposely left out the link to the Warrior blog mentioned above because my security program lists it as "untested" which means, at least to me, not yet considered a "safe" site.  The blog's address is based in the Dominican Republic and is apparently written by Tony Balbin; but with the possibility of a malware or trojan sneaking into your device, it's best to be conservative in your exploring of such sites.  If you decide to visit the blog site anyway, you can simply type in a search of "ayahuasca warrior" and it'll pop up.  As far as venturing out and trying ayahuasca for yourself, that decision will be entirely up to you; but be aware that there are many "guides" out there who are only semi-trained or even fraudulent so be conservative there as well.  More can be found about this now trendy craze in a piece some years ago in The New Yorker.

**I'll leave you with something uplifting, a tale of standing up for justice and for what's right.  It's from an unrehearsed Moth Radio talk by Sheila Calloway and in my opinion, is worth a listen.