MUSINGS - CACTUS JUICE!

This is one of a series of articles I wrote under the umbrella title:

EXPERIENCES FROM THE EDGE...

CACTUS JUICE

Vilcabamba is an unusually tranquil village in the far south of Ecuador. It lies in the ‘valley of longevity’, whose inhabitants are rumored to live to one hundred or more. Andean hills branch out across the landscape like ribs from the rib cage. Deep greens, purples, browns and pinks blend one into the other, forward rolling down slopes in a multicolored leotard. A distant cloud forest hovers over Vilcabamba like a hummingbird controlling the weather patterns. This is a sleepy town that periodically stirs, then retires indoors for another rest. It's a stoners wet dream...I was a 23 year old adventure seeker, traveling South America for one year of intrepid exploration and casual hedonism before I would return to my native (damp) UK and begin "the career" as a lawyer, or run a record label, or both?

I found a cheap bamboo hut on stilts that had a ladder leading up to the balcony. I settled down for a month. I soon learned that many travelers never leave Vilcabamba, especially disciples of Johnny Love Wisdom - an American guru who encourages his devoted to get rid of their teeth and eat a strict fructose diet. I had no intention of plucking my canines. My adventure to this time warped place was specifically purposed - to study quantum physics books that I'd laboriously carried around in my backpack for three months, and to trek in the wild. Moreover, one of the promises I made to myself when embarking on this journey to South America - I must be always-open to spontaneous opportunities that might never come my way had I stayed in London and started at a Law firm straight out of university. I rapidly discovered that when one is "open", very unexpected arrivals show up. During my final week in Vilcabamba that challenge manifested on my doorstep in the guise of a shamanic guru (with a little "g")...and I received a drill on cactus exploration.

He shouted up to me from the bottom of the ladder,

“Am I invited to the gig then wild thing?”

I nearly choked on my joint from embarrassment...I was apparently singing, loudly - belting my lungs out to an obnoxious tune. He was all sweaty smiles. The scouse accent threw me a bit - I hadn’t met any Brits for a while and this thirty something, tree-hugging hippie didn't resemble your average shell-suit wearing kleptomaniac from Merseyside.

“Of course you can," I said, "Climb on up!"

I was suddenly face to face with a scraggly haired, skinny man with turquoise eyes shaped like fish-eye lens'. Before introducing himself, he lit a wooden pipe in his left hand and the flame illuminated a seven ribbed cactus tattooed across his perspiring chest.

“My name’s Ise – pronounced Izzie – Ise Real. Greetings fair maiden!”

Izzie's royal iris' opened up like the Queen’s curtains and his huge pupils danced like pissed court jesters. I burst out laughing.

“Izzie Real? Are you taking the piss?”

“Sir Real to you!" he winked, "I'm an organic shaman - in harmony with nature, balancing the forces, tuning on in, like.”

Izzie had a smile like an alligator - reptilian lips with a lot of side teeth. It transpired that this Liverpudlian herptile, wearing nothing but a pair of men's briefs, was under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen that, along with very old people, inhabits the valley of longevity. My ears pricked up as Izzie told me all about the cactus of the four winds. Trichocerus pachanoi, otherwise known as San Pedro, contains mescaline. For over three thousand years, shamans throughout the Andes region have used it for divination and healing.

Izzie's bedraggled, unimpressive appearance was at odds with the eyes - eyes that had crossed through doors of perception and danced in ballrooms of ecstasy. I gazed into the goldfish bowl of his soul and felt that had Aldous Huxley done the same, he may have written Brave New Inner World and grasped infinity in a single glance. It was an odd feeling - the knowledge that a stranger has power over your superficial world, a power capable of getting to the nitty gritty beneath the physical frontiers.

"The cactus gives you clarity, like. We shall take communion together at dawn."

We were really gonna scoff it together? But we'd only just met? I was a tad nervous. Sir Real sensed my anxiety.

“Georgie, the use of natural hallucinogens has been part of human experience for almost as long as..."

He stared into me...Self-conscious, I tried not to blink too many times. Five minutes later, he continued. He didn't blink once.

"Even the master of visions and the priest of prophecy – Nostradamus – was partial to ingesting the naughty nutmeg to heighten his awareness.”

Captivated by his charismatic, albeit greasy, hand gesticulations, I rolled another joint and urged him to continue...

“Sacred hallucinogens were placed on this planet to trigger human evolution. It's dangerous to consume their spirit unless you’re ready. Preparation is important."

Flickering in the candlelight, Izzie's alligator grin suddenly cautioned my enthusiasm. I felt the fear of pre-indulgence paranoia swirl my already lunched-out brain.

“I appreciate what you're saying but surely psychedelics can also make you lose your nut? Did God screw up then? What about those people in the 60s drinking vats filled with trippy liquid - mental hospitals boomed in business...”

Izzie scratched his dripping scalp and I noticed that the seeming extent of his drug-wisdom, contrasted with his ever-youthful countenance, didn't add up. I figured he must be older than thirty, but not a single grey hair groped his head...

“I’m fifty-seven Georgie.”

I spat out a smoke ring...

“How the hell did you know what I was thinking?”

“It’s easy to ride the waves of telepathy when one is attuned by nature to do so. Eating the cactus today wasn’t just to get high. If I wanted a simple trip I’d munch a tab of acid and stay home to watch the Simpsons. This is is a religious experience. San Pedro is sacred, like...It frees the soul!”

The phrase "religious" caused me to quiver and, reading my mind, Sir Real expounded...

“While I was in Mexico, a long time ago, I took the peyote cactus in the desert and an Indian guided me. He told me the white man goes into his church house and talks about Jesus. The Indian goes into his tepee and talks to Jesus."

Izzie's smile stretched beyond alligator proportions.

"It provides a religious experience, for those who are heart-erm-receptive, because it's a tool to communicate with the Divine. These psychedelics are sacred medicines.”

Hmmm? Reality check juncture. Have you ever experienced those moments when time stands still like a comedic statue? - I couldn't believe I was sat on a bamboo balcony, in the heart of South America, smoking pot with a bloke older than my father - a guy who nibbled psychedelics like sweeties and turned out to be an ex-con armed robber / reformed fully fledged shamanic doctor. And he was sweaty, with a reptilian smile.

Like a perfect salesman, Izzie convinced me...coerced?...attracted me to agree to...well...in five hours I was going to slurp the loopy juice with this rather unique scouse imp.

“Ok Izzie, you win. I’ll take cactus communion!”

Izzie chuckled a grin so wide, I could have reached out and touched his wisdoms.

“There’s no winning or losing twinkle toes. There’s only yielding and loving...”

Izzie disappeared into the night and I passed out. At five am I awoke to find a ghostly apparition at the bottom of my bed - Izzie was holding a torch under his chin.

"Snap snap...up you get, like?"

We commenced to climb the rocky, coiling path, which rambled up the mountain. Izzie beat a hand-drum on route. As we ascended, the dawn air became lighter and soon we hit a beautiful green plateau. Izzie led the way through some swaying trees and we passed armies of San Pedro all standing dead still like breathing corpses. I felt my tummy jolt in anticipation. We reached a clearing right on the edge of the mountain. Our spot afforded a panoramic of the entire valley.

“Time to down the holy nectar kiddo. Listen to the heart-beat of my drum."

Izzie removed a transparent bag from a secret pocket inside his underwear. He held it up with the excitement of a child. The liquid was a deep, dark, witch-face green.

It smelt and tasted vile. I pinched my nose and necked back the potent smelling, shampoo-tasting, Cactus of the Four Winds. Ugh! I wanted to vomit immediately but the heave turned into a heavenly floaty sensation, whereupon the drumming suddenly began to be felt from within me. While Izzie sat in lotus position as Buddha the Scouse, feather tucked behind his clammy ear, I spontaneously meditated and danced the next seventeen hours away in ecstatic union with Mother Earth. I didn't even know who she was, but by the end of the "trip" she was my best buddy.

It was early morning and two huge rainbows arched across the sky. Everything appeared to breathe, pulsate and blend together. As insane as it sounds (especially to a chick who had graduated with a BA/MA in Law and is, apart from occasional poetic rants and stoner sessions, predominantly left brain-attuned), I felt a universe open up inside me. I communicated with PLANTS! I morphed with the clouds. My right brain decided to join the party and then both sides of the brain took a vacation. While they were on holiday, I was given a glimpse of no-mind freedom.

“Izzie!” I was almost crying with joy. “There’s no separation between us in reality. We are simply swirling particles in a bleep of space-time. The animate and the inanimate are nothing more than a congerie of particle-waves – super-hologram images. Jesus wept!”

Whether he heard me or not, whether I spoke it out loud or not, only God knows? And as these esoteric secrets and long sought after revelations streamed through my consciousness, I felt the Grace of the Mystery that breathes you and me infill my dumb-ass ego-self.

Izzie's side teeth chattered away as he continued to feed me energy in silence. Occasionally, I would come back from "the other side" to an awareness of the heart-beats jiving from Izzie's drum. I was high as a kite, bird, treetop, cloud, pyramid peak or rig of very tall scaffolding. I was up there, out there, earthed and rooted all at the same time. The valley of longevity - a timeless place where cactus’ spend hundreds of years in the silence of contemplation - had given me a great insight to the edge of normality. How to communicate such a gift?

As night began to lower its charcoal cloak over the sun drenched hills, Izzie started to chant. I was breathing more deeply than I had known possible. At times my breath suspended...It felt like each breath was a gentle wave rolling in and I was the witness-surfer, gliding on the crest of Reality. Izzie kept chanting and for a moment I remembered that I was on a mountain with a strange-stranger, it was getting dark, we had no torch and home might well be a few hours away...

Suddenly, as if to challenge my pinch of concern, a dozen or so fire flies hovered above our heads. Izzie nodded to me and got up to leave. This is when one of the most spectacular, and never-in-a-million-years anticipated, occasions happened. The fire-flies led us down the rocky, winding mountain path. They simply did. This was no hallucination. A group of wandering luminescent pilgrims, shepherded myself and this content sweat-box, all the way to my bamboo hut...

Izzie had not spoken from the moment I consumed the San Pedro earlier that morning. And yet we felt totally connected. Words weren't necessary. Silence really is golden. And in the space of silence so much had been conducted. The chalice of my body-mind had received an overwhelming amount of love. And the indebtedness I felt to this crazy-wise psuedo-sage...well...

I bid farewell to the organic shaman and hoped to meet Sir Real again for another adventure. He gave me a big scouse-like squeeze, more like a moist rugby tackle than a hug, and accused me of causing the first hair on his head to go grey. I waved goodbye,

“See ya around grease bucket, I’ll catch you on the astral plane.”

Izzie Real went on retreat with Johnny Love Wisdom and I took the first bus to the Peruvian boarder, pondering the beauty of an ex-armed robber obsessed with nature. Then eight months later I bumped into him in Mexico...and that is another story...

© G3 July, 1996