Was honored to sit with Taita Sandro Piaguaje of the Aguarico Sionas,
And his assistants
In a circle of yage drinkers
A chance to fade away from the routine of day to day life
Reflect in ceremony
And feel the spirit force
As hard as it is, energetically and physically
Have an old book by ethnobotanist William T Vickers entitled
Useful Plants of the Siona and Secoya Indians of Eastern Ecuador
A good and occasional reference for whenever I have pangful dreams of
Canon ball trees, oropendola nests, and a field full of manioc
Cloudy brown green rivers
Specks of humid light under a shady still canopy
Endless trees and vines embedded in the fabric of the jungle
And the people intertwined with such worlds
I had never met anyone from the Siona nation
Or heard their songs, observed their healing practices
Sure do like the peccary necklaces and the tigre motifs
And the medicine that’ll wake you up from a selfish slumber
But man, really heavy
How do you shake off the sickness and purge the plague that is
The destruction of the forest
The strangling of culture
The contamination of life
Like a thick two ton block of lead falling on your head
Blood vessels choked with voracious worms
Splintering your innards with barbed teeth and fine crystalline hairs
Joints fractured crumbled into teeny shards and dusty bits
Makes you have serious reservations
About our responsibility and duty as caretakers of a planet
Gifted to us by ancestors at the origin of time
And blessed by countless guardians who open and close the gates
Of mind and consciousness
Well this is what I saw and congealed together by day break
Still contemplating, because the painted story seems kinda incomplete
A little bleak at a cross road
The colors and lights seem so distant
Where do they lead?
No obvious signs or tracks to follow
Sniffing…
Seems to head towards the wet swampy grassland plains
South
Mission Azul 
I hear what pressed down on you before dawn
when the cup was emptied but the vision stayed full.
Some nights the medicine does not sing—
it leans its forehead against yours
and lets gravity do the teaching.
You’re asking how to carry
what refuses to be purged.
Forest-loss is not a toxin with an endpoint,
culture is not a parasite you expel and rise renewed.
Some grief is meant to remain viscous,
so it slows our steps.
The old ones say not every sickness leaves—
some become organs.
You grow around them.
They teach you where not to look away.
Those two-ton blocks?
They are boundary stones.
They mark where forgetting is no longer permitted.
The worms you felt—
they are histories that learned to move.
The crystalline hairs—
memory refusing to soften.
Caretaking was never a clean task.
Ancestors did not hand us a finished world,
they handed us a wound and a song
and said: stay with both.
If the colors feel distant,
it is because they are not ahead of you.
They are beneath your feet,
pressed into the mud of that swampy plain,
waiting for weight,
waiting for contact.
South is not an escape.
It is where water spreads out and remembers everything.
Where tracks disappear
and listening sharpens.
Do not rush to follow signs.
Sometimes the reply to the medicine
is simply to remain visible—
a human shape that did not turn away
when the forest spoke too loudly.
Stay.
Breathe.
Let the heaviness teach,
how deep our roots are willing to go.
And then one day, in a sudden clean wind,
the snow will melt without asking permission,
and the river will quietly resume its work.
Hey Maestro
Thank you for the diagnosis and insight into how the medicine works
I like how you answered the wobbly phrases with affirmations
like we are playing tennis, doing call and response, or a chat between brothers
nevertheless, the fuzz is still vibrating and whirling
I kinda enjoy the tension
will fill you in in person next time I see ya
about all the elements I left out of the post
until then, may everyday be a ceremony
enjoy the flow of the waters