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Journal

Missing the rainforest

7/13/2019

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this post on instagram @za_ispharazi 
As Rochester experiences some humid summer days, I find myself missing the Rainforest more and more. (Tarantulas and all.)
    After five years of consistent visits and long term live-ins in Peru, coming back to the States with the intent to spread my roots, is still remarkably challenging 2 years later. (Though I was born and raised in NY.)
    You see, living in nature has its obvious threats like snakes, insects, and arachnids, but here in our modern cities the threats are more subtle. For example the way laws, economics, and infrastructure are currently designed for poor or working class people (experiencing an emergency room visit recently in D.C. with insurance that is bound to NY, shook me); the shiny packages at those glorious supermarkets that contain disease causing chemicals, and not to mention the pollution of the very air we breathe, among other things.
    And yet, being back in the States reminds me that NY is one of the best places in the world to live, evolve, and that we, especially at the grassroots level, have the opportunity to continue shaping it to be even better. 
    I’ve been finding that the key to wellness here, is to be aware of the Disease of Affluence
( #diseaseofaffluence ), caused by the willpower draining abundance we enjoy daily. The pleasures and luxuries of modern lifestyle induce a kind of waking slumber on us. 

  But! There is an antidote to this, and that is, the presentness the natural places of the world unequivocally require from us. 
   The cure in nature acts upon us, quite naturally. 
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Rhetorical experiences: tobacco

4/13/2018

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Picture
Image 1. Tambo (by the author).

​Prelude: In Isolation circa 2013


The quiet evening song grows into a cacophony of noisy nocturnal dwellers as the inky darkness of the waning moon takes hold of the densely vegetated landscape of the Peruvian Rainforest. Hayy is alone in a tambo or a choza (Quechua terms for huts used for living in isolation during plant fasts) that has four thick wooden posts, a thatched hut made of leyarina (a type of palm leaf), and a foam mattress placed on top of a wooden platform with a mosquitero (mosquito net) around it. No walls and no floor, just the open air and sandy jungle soil.
A machete remains by Hayy’s side for the twenty days of his isolation as a kind of mental comfort for fear of some kind of unexpected animal attack, but it turns out that though it is useful as a weight to hold down the mosquitero and as a tool to clear dense vegetation on hikes during the day, it isn’t used for much else. Apart from water from a nearby stream and food (boiled green plantains and rice without any seasoning) delivered once a day by the curandero’s apprentice, the most important thing to Hayy unexpectedly turns out to be tobacco. To mark territory against animals (and spirits, as the natives would say), to drive away hornets that had made a nest close to his bed, to deter little gray scorpions seeking shelter on the platform Hayy’s bed was on during rainstorms, as mosquito repellent, as anti-itch salve, antiparasitic tea, mouthwash, and yet also, according to the almost all native Amazonian cultures, tobacco is used as a way to amplify prayers and intentions.

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