Such nights cannot be forgotten… Drifting on a river in the middle of the Amazon with strangers from Ese Eja while watching with peace as the night comes. Stars were scattered across the sky, like a rash, as if the sky had been sick for twelve hours, and the only antidote for him was dawn. If I could name all the emotions that were boiling in me, it would be like a machine gun firing after the decimal point, the problem is that these are the emotions I have not known so far, the feelings I have never experienced. And so the virgin Amazon jungle, bore something new in me, as if for a moment it wanted to show me that there is nothing I can catch as a railing, even shadows of thoughts, experiences or feelings, everything around was new and unknown, and the only key to trying to understand what was happening now was respect and careful observation.
The jungle showed me one of the bigger paradoxes of our everyday life. It is a sense of security. All that civilization does is somehow based on ensuring that it is reliable. Everything created by Man measures in this myth of reliability, repetition, which brings safety. In the jungle, in Nature is different. Nature is the opposite of constancy, everything changes in it and the only thing in nature is change, nothing else.
Civilization has allowed us to believe in the myth of safety. We believe in love for the grave plank, we believe that the wedding will once give us love, we believe that work will provide us with stabilization, we believe that the house will provide us with a refuge, we believe that paying taxes will provide us with retirement and good old age, we do the law and the state will give us the illusion that anything in our lives will be “for sure”. And what is going on? Life plays tricks on us, but we still do not get rid of the illusion that we are a unique case in the world and tirelessly want anything “definitely.”
Peruvians and Indians quickly learned this strange longing for security. Not due to the overwhelming developed empathy, but the simplest in the world desire to profit. This safety myth can be bought; it is the only way to achieve security in our civilized world – money. There is no security for free, because in the world of nature the notion of security does not exist, it is an artificial creation for civilization, it is a derivative of materialism, the derivative of the word “I want”, and a derivative of the sense that we are able to take control of the unexplained. Or inevitable. Human domination over nature is based on this strange paradigm of sense of security.
The nature of every moment is trying to teach us humility and show that nothing can be predicted, existence is participation in the enigmatic process of change. Man, on the other hand, is trying to prove that every moment can be stopped, that every value can be ensured, and that the future can be predicted by science or existing laws of physics, chemistry, or other laboratory science verifiable, accurate, and certainly infallible. For people from the Amazon this kind of thinking is an abstraction.
The Indians, though increasingly buying watches and listening to the radio, however they would like to chill out with the goods of civilization, have not yet bought this myth of security. Instead, there is agreement. Consensus for the seventh child, consent to death during hunting, consent … This is not a consolation of surrender, of lack of struggle, but of putting more in your hand, something stronger, which leads in incomprehensible way to their lives, however clumsily or fortunately it He does, he feels he leads. It requires an irrational kind of confidence that not everything must understand that not everything has a deep sense, but it is just like day and night, like the stars and the rain like them. This creates an interesting kind of calm, extinguishes unnecessary emotions from the throat or squeezes them. And so, when the engine in the canoe ceased to function, there was neither a nervousness in the men, their movements were just as slow and calm. Their tranquility gave me and at this moment as they did, I decided to just accept it. This acceptance gives rise to another thought that whatever happens, I can do it. And it’s probably a stronger feeling than fear, rather than worrying, because it’s replaced by live curiosity, what will happen next.
When I was sitting in the bow of a canoe and watching the men repair the engine as the sky was getting darker, the moon was new and there was not a single light source around when suddenly I caught a glimpse of lightning on the horizon, I felt the smallest creature in the world Which has now passed on to the graces and dislikes of Nature. At the same time, in the middle of my chest, a strange kind of force fueled by adrenaline bursts, the force that goes out in safe house conditions is sluggish, it is asleep, and here suddenly it flashes, strangely ignited by the kind of fire that is easy to forget.
Continued next week! 🙂
And if you are hungry for other tales, I would recommend ordering a book – about the modern Maya!
Let’s go!
http://veroetnika.com/produkt/na-poczatku-jest-koniec/