“If you want to understand the jungle, you can't be content just to sail back and forth near the shore. You've got to get into it, no matter how strange and frightening it might seem.”
– Carl Jung
It is said in the Western Amazon of Peru, that upon entering the hollow space within the mature strangler fig tree that has murdered its host tree, you pass into another dimension.
In the Madre de Dios (“Mother of God”) region, where the Amazon River begins, trekking through the secretive rain forest, all velvet browns, Venetian greens and aubergine, the unlikely opportunity of doing just this presents itself. A kind of encounter that you feel in the body, sinews still growing, curtaining the blackness of its center, like a shroud, the fig tree, a mesmerizing behemoth with its own existence, calls you inward. By hauling myself over bellied-out tubers standing tall and spell-sapped I would land inside the moist, latticed trunk of the iconic epiphyte. Of the genus Ficus, it begins as a sticky seed carried in the hot droppings of birds, primates and other forest beings, eventually germinating, a bloom on the bough of another plant. “Follow the light,” my guide, Gabriel Granados Olivera says, “and you'll come out on the opposite side of where you are now.”
The fantastical opportunity, rare in a lifetime, is enticing. I am in the early stages of healing from a bloody, dramatically-bruised injury, however, a deep, four-inch gash above my right knee. Staying at an earth-friendly resort north of Puerto Maldonado, gateway to the Peruvian jungle, I acquired the glittering wound days earlier in a shocking fall from glassy, moss-covered wooden steps. I am the split, purple-haze fig fruit of the tree, overripe, showing ruby-red through the violet rip. In addition, the cylinder of roots where the rotted host once was holds places providing shelter and breeding sites for avians, bats and other creatures. The opening, womb-like, is dark and damp, teaming with mosquitoes seeking a blood meal (me) and possibly carrying parasitic botfly eggs. Olivera is not venturing inside, and I, pragmatic, bound, not flower-petaled, in a gauze bandage, follow his lead.
Within the latitudes 28 degrees north or south of the equator, the rain forest drips with mystery. Its magnetic pull is apparent even from the sky and immediately upon disembarking on the tarmac after the one-hour flight from Cuzco to Padre Aldamiz International Airport, less than 4.5 miles from the city center of steamy Puerto Maldonado. From the mountainous, relatively dry central altiplano of Peru, a person can, within less than 60 minutes, find themselves in another landscape entirely. In a few short miles, a traveler passes through as many ecological zones as there are from the North Pole to the tropics. Surrounding Puerto Maldonado, in Amazonia, for eons, environmental conditions have been favorable to a profusion of life. Over 400 billion trees from about 16,000 species, their bark, leaves, seeds, sap, roots and fruit crammed with several million varieties of sentient life, emit an alien, riotous smell, fecund and luxurious. It penetrates the nostrils to the point of being vulgar.
“Magic is the science of the jungle” is a quote sometimes attributed to Carl Jung. My cabin at Andean Wings Sotupa Eco Lodge is open-air and on stilts, enclosed entirely by netting. A porch overlooks the Tambopata River – ancient, winding receptacle of time and memory, reflecting light in shades of chocolate. In the fading rays of evening, the language of insects enfolds you, reverberations in space that form sound sculptures in relationship to each other, like habitats you can walk inside. A warm breeze rolls across my deck. Looking down into the darkness, edges disappear. Dissolved are the boundaries between your sense of self and the world. Illuminated only by fireflies, the thicket becomes a field of dreams released into the infinity of the subconscious. Trees walk, shed their skin like snakes, and in words akin to soft thunder, even the jaguar speaks.
Dawn breaks to the chattering of parrots and scarlet macaws. Barring overcast weather, as many as 300 gather at sunrise, descending from the roof of the rain forest and beginning to fly in low circles, a dance that may last as long as 15 minutes, before landing at the colpa clay lick below my balcony. They consume the soft, mineral-rich rock to neutralize toxins ingested in their regular diets and as a sodium supplement. Hearing the joyful morning chorus, not only with my ears, but also in my imagination, my own wild heart connects at nature's deepest level with bird mind. We are many-eyed, ever-alert, our focus on cooperation, community, safety and protection from eagles, hawks and falcons. Listen with your whole body for, in our glorious, color-burst flash and flutter, we have something to teach.
The howler monkey, of course, acts as one of those seed-dispersal agents in the rain forest that the strangler fig tree needs to propagate itself. In this way, it helps to choreograph the terrain. My first time visiting Tambopata Province, I hear the vocalization of the male howler without knowing what it is I am hearing. Alone in my open-air cabin at dusk, it seems apparent that gale-force winds are blowing somewhere in the distance. During the rainy season, which I am in, violent storms quickly gather force and explode with full blast. Cruising in a shallow, flat-bottomed skiff on the water days earlier, I experience one such storm where lightning flashes viridescent and the wilderness on either shore groans and buckles, growing ominously darker to the clatter and pounding of debris as it falls to earth in the sudden, churning tempest. The river can rise as much as 40 feet within hours. In the immediate area where I am, however, no movement is detectable in the maze of inky foliage and mute trees outside, and I have no sense of from which direction the din might be coming.
“That's the roar of the howler monkey,” Olivera informs me when we hear the sound together later. “Males call to let other males know where their territory is, alerting them to stay away.” Some unknown force causes us to move instinctively yards away from the trail. High in the sunlit canopy layer from which most animals rarely descend, we immediately spy a pair of adult howlers and two juveniles, clearly their babies. Olivera grabs my shoulders from behind and adjusts my position so I get a clearer view of the largest and loudest of all monkeys in the Americas. To my great feeling of accomplishment, I come to distinguish easily their airy, whooping bark from other sounds coming from the tropical habitat surrounding me. The haunted peal is such that Steven Spielberg used it in his movie Jurassic Park. It is a potent cry, yet musical, sometimes improvisatory like jazz, yet with an organizing principal employing elements of tone, interval and rhythm, giving exclamation to the fiery vitality of the greatest jungle on earth.
I like Puerto Maldonado with its charming coffee shops and restaurants, the intensity of its human presence. Olivera, not only an expert guide but also a motorcycle taxi driver, has driven me around his favorite haunts on the back of his Honda. We sample sweet aguaje (from the aguaje palm) and copazu (white cacao) juices on the street corner, savor ambrosial maracuyá (passion fruit) ice cream, buy Brazil nuts at the bustling market, and climb La Torre (The Tower) in the center of town to get a view of the expanse of emerald extending to the horizon on all sides of the city.
But my heart belongs to the jungle. Paul Rosolie's astonishing book, “Mother Of God,” is what attracted me to her in the first place. Feeling even the smallest compulsion to be in this wild west of the natural world, nevertheless, comes as an unexpected surprise. Experiencing the Madre de Dios region from the inside out in all her virgin splendor is a reckoning. The heat and humidity is punishing. We try to stay on the river to stay sane. Should I put myself in this environment of the multitude of toxic insects all over again? Biting flies are as big as helicopters, and I am almost eaten alive. One month later, I still have puncture marks, like pea-shaped shrapnel peppered across my skin, to prove it.
Yet, in our marrow, we crave such rich, multisensory, crazy-fierce confrontations, not only as unique adventure, but as a vital potion that tells us who we are. The uncanny potency of the rain forest must, indeed, echo that of another dimension, a dimension holding the soul of holy space, not merely a fragment of universal energy, but a reflection of the beauty and spectacle of the whole. Undergoing and passing the test that she offers means we can move through chaos and come out more acutely creative and alive on the other side, each of us primed to bring our unique contribution to the planet. In this global era of uncertainty and madness, perhaps it is called upon us, both individually and also collectively, to do exactly this, to move out of the shallows and into deep water. To converse with a reality older, wiser and more mystical than that to which we are accustomed, reimagining and affirming a humankind of wholesome emotions, ethical dignity, humility and respect for the One Spirit of all living things of which we are but a minuscule part.
Janice Jada Griffin is a graduate of Sotheby’s Institute Of Art in London, a designer and an internationally-sold painter who owned her own art gallery in Portland, Oregon, for a decade. She lives and works in Santa Fe, and is currently writing a book based on her ongoing experiences in Peru. For more information visit avant-garde-art.com or email her at soul@avant-garde-art.com.
