Yesterday we walked 15km through jungle mud in knee-high wellies. Memories of difficult, unpleasant, painful times came up with every laboured step. It was like walking through my own personal Hell.
At first, I did not understand – or even wonder – why these memories were flooding my mind and heart. The monkeys jumped and screeched around me, the leaf-cutter ants carried on their harvesting work, trees soaked up sunshine high in the canopy, and my feet picked their way along the muddy paths. Memories came from long ago, of pain I felt, pain I caused, pain I witnessed… Betrayals, deceit, manipulation, lies, and broken hearts. More recent memories too, of loss, misunderstandings, disappointments, exposure, and guilt.
It was sticky, hot and humid, both in the jungle around me and in the melting pot of memories inside me.
The sanipanga plant dye on my face was supposed to protect me from evil spirits on this journey into the Amazon… perhaps it created a barrier so strong that all my own “ghosts” were left to boil inside it without outside dilution or interference?
It was only when I started noticing the persistent negative theme of the memories that I was able to take a step back, and observe the scenery unfolding inside me, as the muddy trek went on and on around me. Turning into an observer of the memories, instead of being in them and reliving them in their intensity, was an immediate relief. The image came to me that all these emotions I had buried inside, held on to, hidden, were streaming out of my emotional body like all this Amazonian mud around me: heavy, sticky and unavoidable, just waiting for the time I would pull on my wellies and wade in.
The only way forward was through it. Every step through this gunk was another step towards peace and inner joy.
This was heavy “homework” for my soul, but letting my body catalyse it in this way, through physical hardship, was so much easier than having to analyse it all piece by piece and find mental ways of dealing with it. I did not have to do anything with the memories as they came streaming in, I just watched them in a detached way like trailers in a cinema. And they poured in and on and on, as I took step after soggy, sticky step through the Amazonian forest floor.
This was a jungle purge, delivered right in the middle of my own muddy memories.
And still, the fire ants protected their secropia trees, termites mulched fallen wood, flowers blossomed, and butterflies flitted about in this vast ecosystem where all is so delicately interdependent.
Inside me, just as many wondrous processes were taking place, beyond the level of my conscious thought: muscles were using energy provided by my reserves of glycogen, oxygen was being received through my lungs and circulated through my bloodstream, electrical impulses were jumping up and down my nervous system coordinating my forward motion, tiny rod and cone cells in my eyes were receiving photons of light and sending signals on to my brain for fluid vision…
I suddenly started feeling the oneness of it all – the jungle and all the life in it, including this body and soul that is Marcus. This was simply spirit moving through spirit. Living energy in motion.
And yet, the jungle and I are not the same. We come from the same source, but we are different expressions of it. As I walked, I was leaving footprints through the jungle mud, and the jungle was leaving its footprint in me… We were changing each other, however grossly or subtly, on this unfolding journey.
On the return journey from Lake Sachavacayoc, I could no longer see which footsteps on the jungle floor were mine. They had partly been reabsorbed in the mud, and partly hidden by other travellers’ traces.
By dusk, as I was resting in the lodge by the Tambopata riverside, my feet and legs throbbed. I felt heavy but lighter at the same time. The sanipanga dye had turned deep purple in streaks over my cheekbones, and there was no sign of evil…
I left more than disappearing footprints behind in the Amazonian jungle.
