Second half of my travel blog...

Ok so it´s been a good long while since I´ve updated...

I am [was] in the town of Salento, Colombia.  This place is sort of like a magic fairy land... It´s in the low mountains of Western Colombia.  Salento is definitely a tourist town, but in the sort of way where you show up, and you think, "holy shit, this is amazing, I want to bring everyone I love to this place...!"

I came here straight from a Hari Krishna farm about an hour away.  The Hari Krishna farm had sort of a weird vibe [more analysis of that for other posts], so I ran away for the weekend, with two nice dudes from Portland.  Austin and Travis are lovely, and when they said they were leaving the Hari Krishna farm, headed for this magical place called Salento, where psychedelic mushrooms can be found in the cow paddies all ´round the town... I decided to tag along with them for the weekend.  What I found was waaay more than I expected, though.

When I started out this journey, I set an intention to seek out and explore healing sanctuaries.  Well, I didn´t really have any idea how to find them, and after the melodrama of loosing my shit in the first week of my trip, and scary intimidation of being in a foreign country, and language barriers, and upfront and intense experience of intense misogyny and being harassed on the street simply for being female... I had sort of lost the thread of that intention.  While I was still at the farm outside of Bogota (where they have solid internet), I was stressing myself out with neurotic anxiety, trying to figure out WHERE AM I GOING AND WHAT AM I DOING ON THIS TRIP???  I bounced back and forth between trying to find a gig teaching art to kids, deciding whether to spend money on Spanish lessons, going to the jungle, going to Ecuador... OMG, so many potential options!  At various points, I nearly hyperventilated. 

And then I landed in Salento... and my first night there, chatting with another person at the fabled hostel nested in the middle of mushroom-sprouting cow fields... I heard tell of an Ayhuaska ceremony... Now, I´ve heard a lot of things about this "drug", Ayhuaska.  It´s culturally equivalent to Peyote, which is used by shamans in the deserts of North America.  But Ayhuaska is a jungle plant, grows only in the Amazon.  And in order to brew and administer it, a person is supposed to be a fully trained shaman.  It´s NOT a recreational drug.  In fact, for those using it without the right intention (healing, spiritual exploration), it often just make them nauseous and vomitty.  It makes most people nauseous and vomitty, but also gives you visions about the world and it can teach you to understand yourself.

And so, with only a day´s notice, I found myself signing up for this ceremony.  I was a little nervous, since I´d heard horror stories about opportunistic people rounding up a gang of gringoes, handing them a cup of ayhyaska brew to drink, and then abandoning them to the experience without support or guidance on the journey... But the people at the hostel assured me that this ceremony had no relation to those stories.

And in fact, they turned out to be right.  What I had found was a healing sanctuary.  A healing sanctuary of indigenous, South America culture and spirituality. That's pretty much what I had been looking for. At this point, I was a little more than a month into my trip, and even though all sorts of other amazing places in South America were pulling at me, I realized that this place... well there was no way I could find another equally good place to hang out within my small remaining time window of two months. 

The best part about the maloka and community surrounding Taita Carlos in Armenia is that fact that there are all sorts of healing communities I could have found... including farms and monestaries and yoga centers... but the main issue I had with most of those places, is that they were run by rich (by local standards, at least) white people from the US or Europe, who had gone to cheap, "unstable" countries, and are working to "teach & develop" the local people. Well, as much as I'm sure those people have good intentions, they're also full of privilege, racism, and bullshit. I hadn't thought this all through totally before this trip, but it was there in my head, and I'm very glad I ended up where I did.

What I liked about the healing community of Taita Carlos is that it is a place where the travellers are students of the local people, and the local people are in charge, and they are consciously inviting foreign travellers to come learn with them.  This is a crucial distinction, and will certainly inform the course of my future travels.

So, there are lots and lots of stories I could tell about my experiences at this healing center; some real, but more fantastical.  But I don't think I'm gonna write them all out in this blog.  I will turn them into fantastical stories and paintings and art.

So now I am home. I've been home for about a week. At this rate, I've got a continuing backlog of nearly a whole month on my blog, and sometimes thinking about all of the things I want to write about stresses me out... But mostly I'm working to practice the lessons I learned from my experiences.