Achuar Victory! A Dream Come True Is An Awakening

"We have fought long and hard against Talisman. Now we've achieved this, but it doesn't end here. We have to remain awake." Achuar (FENAP) President Peas Peas Ayui

See the Amazon Watch report 

Proof: international networks of civil society and allied global citizenry make unprecedented change in the policies of big business and government. 

See my past posts on the Achuar struggle (Here & Here & Here), and we must remain aligned!

__________

An acquaintance, a young African-Canadian woman, confident and jovial, meets with me on literary terms, to edit a short story of mine. The story is in its very beginning stages of development, only a few phrases and scattered ideas. She is diligent, and always supportive. As I begin to tell her the story, I penetrate the image-letters and enter into the mystery of its narrative continuity, to explore experientially.

The concrete walls, unfinished, breathe with shadow. A well-known author sits in a dim corner, incommunicative. He is deep in listening, with headphones on to gather the soundscape of the strange, even horrifying darkness surrounding. Then, I notice his subject, a grumbling bunch of ruffians thirsting in the mud of Mexican pain. They secrete primal sounds from unlit depths below, before trailing off into the endless night. In that moment, the famed author saunters off with recording equipment in hand, leaving me to the bare depths, an empty memory.

I bleed on through the folds, with pain-stricken mind, searching through memory, confronted with a hollow mixture of painted nostalgias. A university campus, brimming with beer gush fads and costumed throwbacks to the glorious sexual revolution of their parents, now filling their pockets with the fool’s gold of American savagery. As I wander through the woods, the clouds gather above, warning of a rainstorm.

On the forest path, exiting from the campus, a friend and I are spotted by a group of peaceful youth, with meditative eyes and friendly sight. One remarks on my shirt, a gift from Israel. Soon, I find he is from Israel. He asks me, “Why is it that Americans never emerge from the forest?” I understand his referring to the colonial history. I empathize with his heart, worn from the break of political waves crashing in mid-sea. The Mediterranean harbors of our once shared ancestral home are now given speed to the sacrificial meaning of e-state.

We clamber on, my friend, an Aboriginal man, and I, as he critically rethinks the statement by the Israeli, “Haifa is a place not unlike Halifax? A seaport, where you fly from America without heed to the other?” We walk on into the city, through art galleries, attendants offer free espressos and truffles, through the museums of old travesty, and in an off-white room, sightless without a spot of focal interest, we separate.

__________

your eyes crack open
with subtle wanting
in the cold

drop

mourning

...

with the unforgiving pull,
a soft whirr from the sky's clear vacuum
exhaling
the rusty kisses of lips gone stale
with a life
lived too long

- excerpt from "Morning Dew"

The Achuar and the Meaning of an Indigenous Map

“For many years these Achuar communities have dreamt of introducing themselves, their way of life and the beauty of their ancestral lands to the rest of the country and the world. For the Achuar, a dream is not simply a passing, nocturnal illusion without relation to one’s waking life. On the contrary, dreams are gateways allowing communication with the spirits of their ancestors, who come to visit and talk to the living, giving them advice and a vision of their future so that they can tread a clear path in life.” (Source)

_________

North America on a map, tangled in intercalated diagrammatic linearity. A pale shade of red loosely emboldens Native lands. The patchy splotches of coloration on the otherwise black and white delineation of national-political boundary displaces geography with a time-bound worshipping, a cultural veil of truancy, a wakeful respite from truth. Looking at the seemingly random collection of red area follow my eyes as my eyes follow easterly into the heart of New England, my mind is inundated with a series of educational videos on sexual abuse in reserve/reservation communities. Homoerotic visuals tear my stare into blurry remorse for the heady desperation and wasteful racism, looking away from the natural history, the undeserved step over fellow men. As I contemplate the madness of the contemporary imagery presented to me, I turn a corner atop a towering butte in the skyscraping mountainous land, hiking through a valley pass, immersed in the cold sky air, unobstructed by not but stone and hair. 

________

Map

"To dream of a map, or studying one, denotes a change will be contemplated in your business. Some disappointing thing swill occur, but much profit also will follow the change...To dream of following a map means you are going in the right direction in a real life situation. It also symbolizes emotional and spiritual growth...A confusing chart may indicate that you lack a clear sense of direction in your everyday life or are in the midst of changing long term plans." (iDream)

________

to the racist, sexist and conservative religious wine,
intoxicating the West
with a throat climbing upwards
to vomit the female's adam apple,
now so dry, shriveled with frost,
cracked and permanently wasted,
not a thought to re-cycle,
only the Mother (Mater/Matter) abuse,
to forgive latent mindreaders
stating new thought dictionary entries

new, with fresh ink over the staircase travelogue,
leading yet leaderless,
wading in the warm bathwater
fresh and awash with the purest feeling,
drinking earth and swaying so slightly
atop family trees brushing neatly
along the skin-touched pages
leafing soundly into a freed paradigm
lonesome with radical imagination,
to resist the sufferer's cold throne and sleep
instead in the deadly fog of oblivion,
away from the driven masses
who prepare to wake
...
who failed to swear an addiction into existence
over the creator's blue telephone,
hushing the musical light from beyond
into anonymity,
whose authoritarian drug was fixed by the word,
and now silent to the punch,
a subtle dream

slaking the thirst for lucidity to be
in modern consciousness,
say

"it is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a sick society" (J. Krishnamurti)

...

a healthy wave reaches sky's peopled shores,
wherein all are recognized within the womb,
unborn demigods come to that awareness,
giving lush expressions to instantaneous action,
rousing impassioned need to flow with an artistic palette,
swimming above extinction in winter's unprepared lulls,
choking the urge toward movement within,
a mental pride

singing zealous
while sad, and diving earnestly
into depression's darkest ignorance

shadow's dust so remote
now only found in greed, sick corners
within a Southerly, Global hate,
trading laws with resistance,
scheming out of natural dependence,
realizing childish humility, and finally
forgiving the precious sources of Love,
kneeling before forests,
swamps, wetlands, rains, fogs,
winds, grasses, bushes, trees,
soils, shores, stones, and all measure of fungal being
as barefoot sleepers,
smiling at the unknown,
unknowingly

- excerpts from "truth, judgment or unknowns"

No Country Mother West, Birth of Father Sun East

"...it was like we was both back in the older times, and I was a horseback going through the mountains in the night, going through this pass in the mountains, it was cold and there was snow on the ground, he rode past me and kept on going, never said nothing going by just rode on past, he had his blanket wrapped around him with his head down, when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do, and I could see the horn from the light inside of it about the color of the moon. In the dream I knew that he was going on ahead and he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark, in all that cold, and I knew that whenever I got there he’d be there..." from No Country for Old Men by The Coen Brothers

_______

The road from the American Southwest opens in a lightning flash northward. A literal streak of beaming spectral intensity whitens the sand-whipped pavement unto the Canadian border beyond. This is my road, from Mother’s home of her dreams, to the creative migrant’s expatriate sway. A great triangle figures over the backdrop of North American flight. A sweet host of ethereal musing enlightens our unforeseen paths with adamantine wisdom. More southerly, the Peruvian fleet screams in my head with a need to lie beneath a doctor’s analyses, feet pointed horizontally, outstretched and fixed on the meridian point of loosened stress. Though, I am always late.

Waking up, exhausted and bedraggled, I find a representative from Amazon Watch at a doctor’s office, telling me I’ll be seen on the morrow. He’s an astute Englishman, proud and busy. I head back to Mom’s. A car pulls up in our driveway as we serve dinner. A human rights organization representative accompanies my old friend from Sudan.

My heart flies to cerulean heights under the darkening late feast of sky. His African build glows through a rejuvenated skin. His head, bald as usual, is unblemished and perfectly globular, fitting for such an astounding brilliant balanced mind. He greets us and I immediately have my mother fix him a decadent plate of meat. After dinner, he and his organizational representatives stay for conversation. My parents have retired upstairs.

“You have been a father and a friend,” my eyes tear with conviction at understanding our separate paths, crossed by pure benediction in our shape-shifting inglorious world. “Thank you for visiting me in person.” I am ever relieved to see him healthy, glowing and taking on his dream of working for his people, forced migrants of Egypt, in the comfort of a socially and technologically developed country as we enjoy in the West. His road is unlighted. With pronounced intent, their vehicle sets off into the unforgiving American night.

_______

West
To dream of going west represents fulfillment, opportunities, and growth. Alternatively, west symbolizes death, old age or an ending of something. (Source)

_______

western civility estranged
captivity in genital awareness
a rough and tumble, hide
and seek gathering
pushing into skin
draped exotic
law, broken by
caress and
gentle magic,
winning over
the ravaged tragedy
of attraction:
a sounding
for the war
on sex

- excerpt from "monosexuality"

  

The Achuar Awaken the Modern Dreamer

Achuar Chief Peas Peas Ayui visited my city this month. He came to stand before the CEO of a company destroying his homeland, poisoning his children, and tearing from the riverine soils our one community of all Earthly life, the very biodiversity of the Amazon: OUR LUNGS.

Through Pachamama Alliance

The Pachamama Alliance noted that the Achuar have a "Self-Sufficient Dream Culture" who, "In all aspects of their culture reflect a spirituality oriented around dreams and visions. The Achuar have many ancient, and refined rituals to access dreams and integrate them into daily life." (source)


Based on a travel account into Achuar territory, we may learn more about the importance of dreaming:


For Information on the Achuar, Oil "Development" and the Perils of the Modern Dream
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