There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence, depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse, our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen
– William Wordsworth, The Prelude. Book 12. 208-218 (1850 edition)
Most of us have there “spots in time” that give us a moment of reprieve when life gets stressful and overwhelming. I have many of these moments scattered throughout my brain that emerge at random throughout the day.
The commute into town on the Amazon river.
I am often transported to the fall before last when I was staying in the outskirts of a little town in the Peruvian Amazon. I was there during rainy season and the jungle was hot and the river ran high. During the days I would sit on the second floor of my tambo (hut) listening to the sounds of the wood expanding and contracting with humidity, monkeys howling in the trees, the frogs singing in the bookshelves, and the distant sound of the Amazon river rushing while I read. Some days I would call Luis and ask him to take me into town a few miles upriver. These rides in Luis’ boat are the moments I most often think of. The hum of the motor, lapping water, distant sounds of people, wooden shacks propped up above the water like flamencos, sunsets that danced like flames down the river, rain drops falling into reflections of shattered clouds…
Houses on stilts on the Amazon river.
Although Wordsworth’s poems had lots of obvious religious influence he spoke of himself as a “worshiper of Nature” and I found this really interesting because it reminded me of the tribes in the jungle who quite literally do worship nature, often through drinking a root called ayahuasca.
An ayahuasca vine in the jungle.
Ayahuasca is a vine that can be found in the Amazon that has psychedelic properties and has been used in tribal ceremonies for hundreds, if not thousands of years. This vine is not only considered a vital component in ceremony in the jungle, it is considered to be a feminine spirit that is essentially “the soul of the dead” that inhabits the jungle. Ayahuasca brew is used in ceremonies in combination with repetitive ritualistic song sung by a shaman that is meant to summon this spirit who will guide and help the participant. Though the tribes believe in many other spirits that inhabit the jungle, I most often heard locals attributing strange winds in the jungle and abnormal nocturnal animal activity on the spirit of ayahuasca. In our case these strange occurrences were only a thief who was broke into the compound when “security” was sleeping—but that’s another story.
The Amazon at sunset.
In The Art of Travel, Alain de Botton connects the two broad concepts of indelible moments and “higher power” in a section about the sublime. In actuality, he was really writing about what makes up a sublime place but I think he perfectly described what makes experiences like taking a drug that’s meant to invoke “the soul of the dead” and accessing duende (who in mythology is an impishforest spirit who lures children into the forest and sometimes eats them) a euphoric, spiritual experience and not something that just scares the holy hell out of you.
“Sublime landscapes do not therefore introduce us to our inadequacy; rather, to touch on the crux of their appeal, they allow us to conceive of a familiar inadequacy in a new and more helpful way. Sublime places repeat in grand terms a lesson that ordinary life typically introduces viciously: that the universe is mightier than we are, that we are frail and temporary and have no alternative but to accept limitations on our will; that we must bow to necessities greater than ourselves.” (164)
When I think of my most reoccurring “spots of time” like navigating the Amazon river in a tiny wooden boat, I find that they are all moments in which I felt a strange serenity in realizing how small and inadequate I really am; typically when surrounded by some great natural wonder. Although I suppose it’s fairly obvious, thinking about duende in the same way helps make a bit more logical sense of a concept so strictly rooted in emotion.
Sunset on the Amazon river.