Ideas and Practices: Learning from life in the Amazon

We spent the month of January in Iquitos, the biggest city in the Amazon. We thought a month would be a good amount of time to spend there and booked a flight out before arriving. But once we got there, we realized we were going to have to be creative to fill the time. We spent a few days on a now-abandoned farm that my sister had volunteered at years back, took a seven-day jungle tour, and rented a room from a woman we met at a museum.

I'm posting a few entries from my personal journal, which I've left mostly uncut, because I think they get across some of the personal struggles I was going through. They're a little more open and vulnerable than most of my writing, but that's probably a good practice for me. They make it clear that being in the jungle wasn't all excitement. But if you're more interested in the fun stuff, just scroll through the pictures.

Thursday, January 13, 2022

Muggy Iquitos

Where there's too much time to kill

Trapped, body and mind

I wonder to what degree the climate in Iquitos is responsible for the melancholy, mental malaise, and general feeling of hopelessness that follows me around here. I have to assume it affects me a lot, but that fact doesn't do much to comfort me when my thoughts get strung up in the ever-churning gears of self-flagellation. We still have 22 days here; that I'm aware of the exact amount should indicate how I'm feeling. I do generally feel, in a complete shift from the western mentality toward time that I'm plagued with, like I want the days here to end quickly, that there's nothing I could be doing to “make use” of the time. It's like surviving is the only thing my brain has space for: water, food (though we consume less of that), and shade—AC if very lucky. Instead of looking for something fun or interesting or stimulating to "make use" of the time, I just want it to pass. Perhaps that is what the universe is trying to teach me in this rugged circumstance: simply to accept what is, and stop trying to make my life or myself more interesting, stimulating, or worthy. But even with that proposition, my mind plays tricks: it is unwilling to spend a fully wasted month in Iquitos; only if the “suffering” of boredom leads to some kind of personal or spiritual advancement will it feel worthwhile and therefore acceptable. Otherwise, if I can't look forward to some tangible benefit, I want out. Bumping the flight up already feels more and more appealing. The main force within me arguing against doing that is my self-sacrificing impulse that sees suffering as growth.

One of the main struggles for me personally right now is the constant back and forth my mind is engaged in with itself. Should I do this or should I do that? Which one is the correct choice? Which will lead me to be happier? Which will make me feel better about myself morally? And not only about the present and the near and distant future, but directly and even long after I've made even the smallest decision, I go over it again and again in my head until I've decided what I did or said was okay, in which case I can finally move on. But if I decide that I decided wrong, the judge in me punishes me heavily, and a long period of repentance and atonement follows.

I'm not sure if it's the climate, the poverty—and my own non-poverty—or simply something I'm cycling through, but Iquitos has brought this struggle on in me in a more forceful way than I've felt in awhile.

I wrote that on the very first of our 3-night stay on the farm we stayed at. Things got better, as hopefully these pictures indicate, but a lot of what I described stuck with us.

Our first night the mosquito net was too
small, which meant we were eaten alive. Another
example of being forced to roll with the punches.

Wild grapes

Mere weaved a basket with vines from the jungle.

More open-fire cooking

When it got dark, that was it. No electricity.

Friday, January 27, 2022,

Looking forward to this trip, I was expecting that I would be “filled up” with something. I guess that something was knowledge, especially of how to live a more “whole” life. But more and more throughout our journey, I sense that the universe is leading me toward the opposite: an “emptying out.” More and more I feel called to empty myself of pretensions, of preconceived notions of how things “should” turn out, and simply "surrender to the current" of our circumstances, and see it as a part of the oneness of all things. Seeing how people live in the jungle, "surrendering to the current" of the Amazon, is my biggest instructor. “We can sleep anywhere,” our guide tells us when we found out his assistant would be sleeping under plastic with no hammock or mosquito net, after they spent close to an hour setting ours up. When, feeling guilty, I ask him the next morning how he slept, he responds “Bien!” with bright eyes and a smile. The night hike through untamed jungle with dozens of mosquitoes and other bugs buzzing at the ears: what more could I do but surrender? We made it through and it made us stronger. I surmise that only through accepting my lot and contenting myself with it will I overcome the curse of anxiety of always feeling like I need to figure out and then pursue the “right” course of action.

Didn't expect to see a gerbil in the rainforest, but..

Saturday January 29, 2022,

Well, we made it through a week in “la selva amazonica,” and it was quite an adventure. We are tired, but surprisingly not too much so. If anything, it's the heat of the beating sun over the past two days that has us frazzled. But what a great experience disconnecting, yet again, for a relatively extended period, and adventuring deep into the Amazon.

Life in the jungle was rough for us. For the folks that live there, it's what they're used to. “The sun doesn't bother us, nor the mosquitos,” one woman from San Rafael, the small town of 80-100 people that we visited on our last night, told us as she cooked us tacacho and pescado. “We're accustomed to it.” The water, too, they can drink straight from the river, but our guide made sure we had fresh water because we'd get sick if we drank from the Amazon. (In fact, I did get sick with something, but we were able to cure it with a drink made by boiling the bark of the Ubo tree, which apparently is "hog plum" in English.) The fact that for half the year the whole Amazon floods, submerging all the towns so deeply that they have to use canoes to get anywhere from their house, is hard for me to even fathom. But again, they're used to it. And yet still, you couldn't say life is “easy” there. Our guide insisted that there was at least enough food. “We have poverty of clothes here. We don't have poverty of food. Everyone knows how to fish.” But people get by with very little, and in difficult weather conditions. And yet the life seems to be simple and... quite nice.

So my goal for the week, I guess for the whole month, because you see traces of this in Iquitos, has been to take lessons from the people of the Amazon in accepting life as it comes. I suppose this has been my mission for at least a few years, in some way or another. It's hard to even explain what I mean. I think living in the city, in the modern world, in the cyber-world, with the constant input of information and stimulation into us, creates in me at least a kind of paranoid volatility of emotion. The cycle is like this:

Stimulus
Trigger
Emotional jolt
Self-soothing OR unconscious and unhealthy reaction to the emotional jolt.

The initial stimulus could be anything, from something I read online, to something someone says or does that causes me to feel triggered. The emotional jolt—usually anxiety, anger, guilt, sadness, disgust—is strong, too strong of a feeling to be able to digest when experiencing it on a daily, hourly, minutely basis. And then since it's such a strong emotion, I often react to it by lashing out at someone around me, or engaging in some unhealthy form of self-medicating, or, the best option of the three, sitting there meditating and self-soothing for a time. But the self-soothing isn't easy when we have to do it so often. And then our emotions are heightened, while our ability to deal with them is diminished, so the next time a new triggering stimulus comes (which could be seconds later in this digital age), it's even harder for us to deal with, and the cycle continues in a downward spiral. I have to imagine that the people I visited with here in the jungle don't deal with that cycle NEARLY as much. Sometimes, of course, but in bearable amounts.

So what I tried to do with the week was just take things as they come. To shed myself of the pretentions I have of how things “should” or “shouldn't” be, and just take life as it came at me. Throughout the week there were endless circumstances that for John Klingler, and what I am accustomed to, were inconvenient, uncomfortable, annoying, etc. But I thought about the sun, and the mosquitos, and the 30ft of rainfall that folks here have to deal with their whole lives, all while using outhouses and living with chickens brooding in the kitchen and sleeping on the floor or in hammocks—and how they just get used to it, and don't worry too much about it. All the while they seem much more calm, embodied, and level-spirited than the vast majority of us up north, at least us white folks, especially those with money.

But of course I was also left wondering how I will apply all these realizations once I'm back home, where the culture constantly hurls commands at us of what we "should" be doing. My whole adult life I've lived by the principle that I need to constantly be questioning my behavior and trying to be “better.” I sometimes wonder if that's a direct influence of American Christianity, even if my idea of what it means to be “good” doesn't exactly line up with the standard Christian one. I don't think that people down here have the privilege to be so obsessed with what's "good." Their goal is mere survival. I don't mean that in a desperate sense, because most people didn't strike me as desperate, though they were poor. I just mean that that is what takes up their time: focusing on how to survive, to create and sustain a family. And I'm sure plenty of "good" is done that way, without being hyper-focused on it. I envy that for myself back home. I suppose it is possible, but it would require a lot of giving up.

For fun I wrote a haiku at the end of each day of our jungle tour. Here they are, along with pictures from that day.

1/23/22

Amazon Jungle

Breathtaking beauty and sounds

Still, thoughts bombard me