Lua Cheia: São Paolo

Greetings from Porto Alegre! Fabio and I are staying with his mother and her husband in their new 14th floor condominium here for a few days before returning to Canoa Quebrada and after having spent a week and a half in São Paolo at a center in the forest called Lua Cheia, a Santo Daime Church and center for shamanic studies founded by Leo Artese seventeen years ago. The last night we were there was actually the birthday of the church, and we got to participate in a beautiful dancing work, singing Leo’s hinario which I had never sung before. Leo and Fany Carolina have come to our place in Canoa four times now with a shamanic ceremony called Vôo da Aguia, “flight of the eagle,” and we’ve had powerful experiences with them, so it was great to get to visit their place now and get to know the family of voyagers and seekers there, as well as a cast of visitors from all over the world. The first few days we were there we participated in a workshop called Medicina da Terra, mostly lectures about the shamanic paradigm and how it is rooted strongly in nature and nature’s cycles. One of the most important paradigm shifts that Leo’s teaching has brought to my attention is how our modern holidays have roots in pagan celebrations that were also totally based in nature’s cycles, rituals and celebrations to mark the solstices, and the passages of the seasons. Because of this it does not make sense to follow the same calendar of festivities the world over. In the south it’s winter when it’s summer in the north, and vice versa. We have divided the earth into North and South with this idea that North is cold and South is hot, but the further south you go once you pass the equator, the earth once again is cold and frozen, and due to the earth’s tilt we have this opposition between summer and winter in the two hemispheres, so that when we’re celebrating Spring in the North, and Easter for example, which is a celebration of resurrection, waking up after the dark winter, fertility, planting, and new hope, in the South it is Autumn, time of harvest and preparation for winter. But Easter is celebrated at the same time the world over, which is a reflection of the still dominant colonial mindset, a paradigm of oppression, of lack of respect, lack of sensitivity, and lack of awareness of nature’s power over us, or an unwillingness to accept this power, anyway.

Leo works with a chart of the seasons which flips the cardinal directions on its head in the South, which is as it should be, so that even East and West are reversed. This threw me for a pleasantly enriching loop when we had to each go into the forest and make prayer ties out of the colors for the four directions, white for north, black for west, red for south and yellow for east. However, as we’re in Brazil, south of the hemisphere, the proposal is to flip this all upside down so what I normally would consider south is now North again, and West is East, etc. Getting my barings in the forest in order to place my appropriately colored bundles of tobacco in the correct directions, I found myself referencing real places, like “home,” California, in order to orient myself. So in this case, home being Southeast, I could figure out where I was. As our consciousness expands, it makes more sense to me to want to know where we are in the grander scheme of things. Fabio and I have also recently taken an interest in star gazing and identifying celestial bodies, which is a comforting and orienting activity, reminding us of how small we are, but also where we are, and how good it is to exist within such an enormous universe. One time when I accompanied my Madrinha Luzia to a wedding ceremony she was conducting, a condescending gentleman in a bow tie questioned the prayers she had made to the four directions to open the ceremony, doubting whether they were even the correct directions and not understanding why it mattered. This, to me, exemplifies the small mindedness that has corrupted humanity. We are so comfortable in our little structures and freeways which take us where we want to go that we don’t even know which way is up or down, nor do we care. Most of us will not ever find ourselves lost in the woods, in which case knowing how to identify the directions might come in handy, just like most people will never know who their great great great grandparents were or where they came from. But if one is seeking to know oneself and understand who we are and why we are here, it might be of interest to study the greater cycles governing all of existence.

At the end of the four day workshop we had a Vôo da Aguia, an all night ceremony around a fire during which we pass various rites. We’ve participated in this ceremony several times at the Eco Aldeia in Canoa Quebrada, but this was the first time we got to participate there at Lua Cheia, which has a large hexagonal structure with a fire pit in the middle and a sun roof in the center which lets in light. It drew quite a crowd and as it took place the last night of the workshop and the night before the feitio began, there were about a hundred people participating. Usually we have about thirty in Canoa. Early in the ceremony there is a burning of anything negative that you don’t want in your life anymore, like addictions, egoism, unnecessary suffering, by way of throwing sticks into the fire. Then call in what we do want in our lives with tobacco. During the night we work with various plant medicines, the principal one being ayauasca, which we drink several times. Working with plant medicines is a perfect way to connect with our own plant heritage and our place in nature. The health benefits of working with these plants come to us through the spirit. Part of their healing is in waking us up to our relationship with them, that there is a grand design in nature that includes these plants and includes us, and we are not separate from them, and so when we work with them we are becoming more conscious of our natural state, which does not just include our minds, but our whole natural inheritance, from the first chakras up to our higher mental capacity, and within our cells. People often refer to “waking up” in this new age. It is as if the lower chakras have been suppressed into a dream state since Cartesian understanding took over, and now we are rediscovering our greater ancestry, which exists right inside of us, but also all around us all at the same time. These plant medicines are keys to unlock this ancient wisdom inside of our beings, but we must study how to use them, and that’s where ceremony is important. By the end of the ceremony as the sun was filling the space with light, we were dancing and singing like children around the fire, then sharing food together, and giving voice to all we had experienced and learned throughout the night.

The next day after resting a bit we went right into the feitio, which is a very special time in which we make the Daime or ayauasca tea. Usually feitios are done over at least a week in order to make enough for the whole community to last over a long stretch of time. In this feitio we made about 700 litres of Daime. At the end of the Vôo da Aguia as we were passing the talking stick I mentioned that I was “super animada” or really excited for the feitio! Fany then said that she would remind me of this later as the feitio went on, becuase as well as being a very spiritually rich time of transformation and cleansing, feitio is also a time of much hard work, long days and often long nights, as there are many factors that have to come together and work must continue until all of the material has been used. Daime is made from two plants - the vine which is called Jagube, which is the masculine element, and the leaf or Rainha (Queen,) which is called chacrona, and is the feminine element. The

DMT which brings on visions and the revelatory teachings we associate with the tea come from the chacrona, and the Jagube has an element which allows the DMT to become active in our bodies, resulting in a perfect union between the feminine and masculine. During the feitio the men clean and pound the Jagube, keep the fire going, and man the large pots in which the tea is made, and the women gather and clean the chacrona leaves, and make the food for everyone. I’ve participated in about ten feitios so far, and each time I learn a bit more, but mostly my respect and awe for this medicine grows, as it in no easy task to bring all of these elements together, most importantly the human element and the people who come together to do the work.

In this feitio as well as the last one I participated in in Cascavel last November, the feitio started with an announcement that there was no water! We know that we are entering a critical time worldwide in our relationship with water, and that the earth’s water is sick, and now that it’s 2015 it is really starting to hit home. São Paolo has been in a water crisis for a while now, with over a million people lacking water, and the several nights we stayed in the city the water came and went so showers were brief, for example. But when you have about 80 people together in the woods for a feitio and no water, it is easy to suddenly understand the value of water and why it is to be praised, thanked, and treated as the precious resource that it is. Water is an important ingredient in the making of ayauasca - we take Rainha, Jagube, water and fire, and the magic happens. But then consider cooking, washing dishes, showers, and drinking water. The organizers were able to bring water in and we were all fine and the feitio went forward, but deeper wells will have to be dug, and everywhere it is time to start building systems to collect rain water, as it rained quite a bit during the feitio, and one night we were even forced to move inside the church as the water from the sky started soaking our tent, even as we lacked potable water, which of course makes one stop and think.

A powerful reminder of the unstoppable thurst of progress and industry that runs through the middle of Ceu da Lua Cheia was the blast of a train’s whistle which would mark it’s passage and shake us all up at regular intervals. People commented that it seemed like the train’s passing was coordinated with the ceremonies and activities on the land to give proper emphasis like shouting “Viva!” or “Amen!” and I also noticed this. The tracks run between the main part of the land which houses the kitchen, church and several other buildings, and the feitio house where obviously much activity was taking place during the feitio, so that it was not uncommon for people to be stranded on one side as the train passed, which takes several minutes. Santo Daime and shamanism, which come from forested or rural areas and serve to usher ancient wisdom into the modern era, can now be found all over the world in urban centers. We can’t go back in time, but we must go forward bravely and fight for health and happiness for all whether one lives in a skyscraper or in a hut on a river. It doesn’t do us any good now to be angry at industry and urban sprawl. It’s here and it’s happening. Watching a train go by is a humbling reminder of how little I can do to stop this growth and forward momentum. In fact the day we arrived here in Porto Alegre I saw on the news that there was a serious train wreck in New York in which several people died. I can, however, be responsible for my own life and my own decisions about my relationship to industry and my relationship to nature. Unlike industry, nature is me, so I choose to give my energy more to studying how to live more in harmony with my God given “nature” than to lament the monstrous growth of industry sprawling all around us and crashing through our forests. I wonder what it was like for the people who lived here before the colonists came when they saw the first train come through their land?