Amazonia and Ayahuasca: A Love Affair
jungle musings
🌳 Dear students of life,
Last week we had the honor of attending the 4th Indigenous Ayahuasca Conference deep in the Amazonian jungle. They were humbling, educational and emotional days, where 42 tribes and over 300 indigenous people came together to discuss the future of Amazonia: its traditions, medicines, spirituality, and conflicts. These moments are vital for Amazonia natives to forge a strong Indigenous front against pressing external forces.
🗞️This Week in Climate News:
🌀 Death toll from Hurricane Ian surpasses 100 as the search for survivors continues in Florida.
🛫 More than 5,000 completely empty passenger flights have flown to or from UK airports since 2019.
📈 Cool Trends
✨ Decolonization: eg. New Zealand or Aotearoa? Colonial or Aboriginal Map of Australia? Brazil or Amazonia?
💚 Amazonia and Ayahuasca: A Love Affair
For Indigenous people the Amazon is a living library, a universal university of infinite knowledge. Many plants are healing, others store information for you, others clean and guard your energy. Ayahuasca is considered the Grandmother plant of them all. Her medicine is millennial, sacred, nurturing, discerning, powerful, humbling, wise and truthful. Amazonia and Ayahuasca are inseparable, they coevolved into a synergetic relationship—opening a dialogue between the Amazonian people and the ancient forest. Through the sweet sour vine profound secrets of Pachamama are unearthed.
Check out Yorenka Tasorentsi’s vital work, applying plant knowledge to modern day problems in the heart of the Amazon Rainforest.
🇧🇷 The Amazon legacy of the ‘President of Death
The death toll of Bolsonaro’s term must also include a holocaust of non-human life
“More than two billion trees have been killed in the Amazon rainforest since Jair Bolsonaro became president of Brazil. Let that sink in. Two billion trees.
A death toll on that scale is almost impossible to conceptualise. So break it down. Think of any two trees in your life: maybe those you grew up with and associate with family, or the autumnal beauties in a favourite garden or park, or the ones in your street that provide a flash of colour and life when you walk past them on the way to the shops, or the giants that have shaded you in the sun or sheltered you in the rain.
Then, in your mind, multiply those two trees first by ten, then by a hundred, then by a thousand – and sit for a while in that copse and imagine the vitality within it – birds, insects, mosses, small animals, trickling brooks. Then take those two thousand trees and multiply them by a thousand and think how many hours it would take you to wander through this forest of two million trees you have created. But you are not finished yet. Finally take that forest and once again multiply by a thousand and then stop and wonder at the immensity of existence that is two billion trees…”
JONATHAN WATTS for the Sumauma publication
💩 WTF? news
☠️ Toxic air pollution particles found in lungs and brains of unborn babies.
🚰 LA restricts water flow to wasteful celebrity mansions, places flow restrictors.
🌏 The Culture Club
📺 What we’re watching: Honest Government Ad Brazil Election
📸 Profile of the week: @ecoversity
📖 What we’re reading: The Cosmic Serpent by Jeremy Narby
🤯 Crazy fact we learnt this week: If Bolsonaro wins this election, the Amazon Rainforest will reach a tipping point where it will stop producing enough rain to sustain itself…