07- Inward Forest

Have you ever set foot deep in virgin forest? There is something that happens to your senses deep in an aboriginal forest. It is hard to reduce it to science, yet there is profound science to it. The very science of Life. Part of this science is that we come from the forest. In the dawns of time – the deep time of our species – we came down from the trees and moved onto the grasslands. Perhaps it was because of a change in climate. From out of the trees we moved onto the savannah, and shifted from climbing in trees to walking upright, at some point likely about 7 million years ago, this shift in orthogonality transforming not simply our view of the landscape, but of time itself. And yet, if you get still enough in original forest, you can find again this ancient affinity with the source context. It is palpable. You can feel it.

I remember sitting in an ayahuasca ceremony in Brasil, one of the first times I drank the sacred tea there, and having a bone-deep realization that I am a forest creature. It came over me as a full-body awakening: a sort of home-coming. We are all forest creatures.

Part of it is the plant life around us. The magnificence of the trees themselves. I remember the feeling of the forest on my first trip really deep into virgin forest in the Amazon, a place called Tefé, two hundred miles up the Rio Solimoes (Solomon's River). I was with a group of locals native to the place. Flying in, on a propellor plane from Amazonas, the capital city, was to fly over an ocean of forest as far as the eye could see. In the clouds of vapor puffed above it, clinging to it in some places like a blanket, you could witness the forest exhaling, creating its own weather.