Hello friends! In this episode I narrate the continuation of the story I began in Episode 7: Embrujo. I don't add more to let the story speak for itself, but I do attach some images of the people and places that accompanied me in this beautiful discovery.
My grief over the loss of my marriage and not having my daughter living with me lasted several months. During that time I cried almost every day and lived a roller coaster of emotions; I usually woke up startled after my recurrent nightmares with female ghosts and for a while I had to endure an emptiness in my chest that lasted until I managed to occupy my mind with work. However, distracting the mind was barely a temporary palliative; at any moment the memory of Angélica would come to my mind and my spirits would hit the floor.
On some occasions I felt a sudden desperation that led me to behave like an alienated man. Sometimes I left work or home hurriedly and began to wander the nearby streets, unsuccessfully trying to escape my own thoughts. Other times I felt the urge to call her and try to make up something to say to her that hadn't already proven its futility. I also took refuge in a couple of Catholic temples where I tried to feel something of the spiritual connection I once experienced. I asked God for forgiveness for having strayed from his path and failed as a Christian. I must say that although I never had any mystical experience or revelation of any kind, I did manage to find some calm that allowed me to return to the difficult daily life for a while longer.
Fortunately, at that time I had a boss whom I still consider one of the best I've ever had. He knew what was happening and had a lot of patience to accept my low performance without making major complaints, and instead gave me advice that I still remember with appreciation.
As time passed and I didn't feel a real improvement in my spiritual and mental disorder, I began to calculate the time that elapsed between my collapses, just as children count the time between two thunderclaps on a stormy night. I believe that during the first 6 months I barely managed to count 12 hours between two crises. At that point, I thought that's how my life would be from then on.
I also tried to meditate, but closing my eyes without sleep was a challenge for me: the inner emptiness intensified and the thoughts became more chaotic, so I tried a kind of spiritual retreat in Tayrona Park, one of the most beautiful natural parks in Colombia. I left wearing white garments, which I used to wear, despite not belonging to any indigenous or spiritual group. I went deep into the park and didn't camp as I had done several times with family or friends, but slept in a hammock to enjoy a couple of warm starry nights by the sea.
The place had a magic that gave me tranquility and for the first time in a long time, I felt that I could be alone without feeling uncomfortable. Of course, most of my thoughts were directed to Angélica but I felt calm, an unusual confidence that everything would be fixed at some point. However, all this progress came crashing down during the second night of my retreat. My rest was interrupted once again by a nightmare: this time it was again the ghost of a woman who tormented me with reproaches full of hatred and chilling threats: “You feel very safe because this is a dream, right? Well, here things are more real than there and if I want to torment you and even kill you in your reality, I can do it. I'm going to prove it to you…” suddenly she lunged at me and grabbed my right leg, pulled it toward her and the event was so vivid that I woke up instantly and to my surprise, or terror rather, my right leg was coming down toward the hammock, as if something or someone had held it in the air a few seconds before.
But that wasn't the only unpleasant surprise: unlike the previous night, when a little repellent was enough to keep at bay the undesirable mosquitoes typical of the park, this time I immediately noticed that my face had served as a banquet for dozens of mosquitoes that were buzzing above me. The sensation of perhaps a couple of dozen bites on my face only made that already gloomy moment even more surreal.
Needless to say, I couldn't sleep a wink for the rest of the night and my mental state went downhill from that moment on. The anguish of the separation returned and the desire to hear Angélica gradually became an anxiety to see her at any cost. To make matters worse, my cell phone had no service in that area and there was also no transportation to Santa Marta due to a truckers' strike that had set up about 20 km from there. But none of that was an obstacle to my delirium and I set off on foot toward the city, or at least until I could find transportation back.
It was finally a little more than 18 km that I walked that day until I reached the other side of the blockade and was able to board a bus. My feet ended up with numerous blisters caused by the sandals I was wearing. I called Angélica and she agreed to see me, perhaps intrigued by the story I had begun to tell her. Of course, the encounter only aggravated my already precarious emotional stability.
Shortly after the separation, I received as roommates in my house two good friends who had been dealing with their own separations for some time. Clara and Gabriel became part of my family and unconditional support during this difficult time. Their company made much more bearable the new reality of having to live every day among so many memories that my house held, next to Angélica and Anita. However, I eventually decided to sell the property and move with my friends to an apartment in the center of the city, a few blocks from my workplace.
Although the change didn't solve my emotional puzzle, it helped greatly to ease the sadness and give me the sense of fresh start that my life needed. I acquired new furniture but above all new habits in an attempt to rediscover myself and rather redefine myself. One of those new habits would be a 180-degree turn on an old conviction I had never dared to challenge: I had begun to smoke marijuana occasionally.
By then my younger sister did it frequently but I still demonized the consumption of any hallucinogen, although I had no problem getting drunk on alcohol until losing consciousness. My friend Gabriel, who was — and still is — 12 years older than me, had never tried it either, so we decided it was time to break the paradigm.
Gabriel asked the building's doorman where he could get a “joint” and the persistent Inocencio told him that he could provide it, but that from then on he shouldn't call it a “bareto” to avoid problems with the chamizos, who, as I already narrated before, considered marijuana smokers a scourge, despite being themselves frequently avid consumers of cannabis and other stronger drugs. From that day on, a marijuana cigarette or joint came to be called a “tiquete”.
We established as a rule that we wouldn't buy more than one “tiquete” per month but we committed to smoking it at least with the same frequency. The experience with the plant was surprisingly very positive despite my precarious state of mental health. Invariably, the sensations that cannabis gave me were calm, fun, emotional and interesting. Perhaps it helped to share the experience with someone I appreciated and admired, who in addition to serving as my shoulder to cry on and confidant, was an excellent guitarist and performer. Our “ceremonies” with cannabis were bohemian moments of Beatles, Queen, Kant, Les Luthiers, Martha, Spinoza, Silvio Rodríguez, Angélica, other women and laughter. Like that, in no particular order but always extremely endearing.
There were many moments of deep reflections and sudden understandings, like that time when in the middle of my entheogenic trip I cried for a while thinking about how nice it would be to have a daughter — I had completely forgotten that I already had one, 7 years old! — I wished with all my strength that that dream would come true and then, all of a sudden as if it were an epiphany, I remembered that I already had the daughter I so desired and on that occasion, besides, she was at my house! Anita was there spending her vacation with me and of course she was sleeping at that hour, unaware of my curious cannabis revelation. I ran to the room and hugged and kissed her in tears, thanking God for the gift of having such a wonderful daughter with me.
There was one more revelation, however, that would be crucial in my life at that time. In another moment of bohemia with Gabriel, while we smoked on the balcony of our apartment, we discoursed about alien civilizations and dimensional portals until an unexpected fit of laughter diverted us to another topic, perhaps some embarrassment that either of us remembered about the other. Suddenly, in the middle of the laughter, my old executioner reached my chest, the emptiness that I felt less and less frequently but still much more often than one would expect from someone almost a year after a loss.
It was the first time I felt it while under the influence of marijuana, so this time, instead of surrendering to sadness and anxiety, I dedicated myself to observing them with the same scrutiny with which I sometimes analyzed an ant or the label of a bottle while on my cannabis trip. I discovered that the memory of Angélica felt like a cage. I looked around me and could feel the bars a few centimeters from my skin. I felt claustrophobia, desperation began to hover around me. Suddenly I opened my eyes as if wanting to increase the clarity of my vision and noticed that Gabriel was still laughing out loud. Then I felt stupid for ruining the moment with that memory, but then something occurred to me: “How can it be that I let myself be locked inside a memory? This cage doesn't exist, or at least it didn't exist five minutes ago. Angélica doesn't even know I'm thinking about her, she has nothing to do with what I'm feeling; it's a punishment I'm giving myself but it makes no sense, nobody cares, I have to get out of here”.
I breathed deeply and decided I didn't want to be in that cage anymore. When I dismantled it with my mind and felt myself again there and in that moment next to my friend, I knew that for the first time I had managed to get out of my abyss. The other times I had simply waited for it to pass, but at that moment I had been able to feel calm again without having to go through that little hell that consumed me every time the emptiness visited me.
It wasn't the last time I felt the anxiety, but after that it finally began to become less and less frequent and less intense. I remembered the cage and what I had done to get out of it that night and I managed to recompose myself with increasing effectiveness. After a few months, I had the opportunity to see Angélica face to face again, after several months of sporadic phone contact. I realized that neither of us was anymore the person we had fallen in love with and, very calmly, without resentment or anguish, I was able to tell her that I wanted to continue my life without her.
The year 2006 welcomed me with a strong renal colic that began on the night of December 31 and which I managed to alleviate with the analgesic effects of my magic “tiquete”, but also with the news I had been waiting for for a good while: my company would authorize my transfer to the capital of the country, Bogotá, where my parents and sisters were waiting for me anxiously to resume the family life that seemed to elude me on my own. It was as if Santa Marta wasn't going to let me go until I completed the lesson it had for me. That naive and arrogant young man who had arrived at his paradise with everything he believed he could desire, was now a more humble man and with an experience still to digest.
I took advantage of those last months in the beautiful Samaria bay to enjoy the colorful sunsets on Taganga beach and to get to know the places I hadn't had the opportunity to visit. My experience with marijuana had created in me a new restlessness for topics related to sacred plants and the knowledge that the indigenous communities that inhabited the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a few kilometers from the city, were said to treasure. Next to a friend I knew as Jaba, I made a trip to the Ciénaga Grande del Magdalena, discovering the beauty of the mangroves, the misery of its shores and the monstrous pollution created by the American coal company Drummond.
A second trip with Jaba finally took me to the Sierra Nevada along with a couple of Arhuaco indigenous people who told us about their magical and mystical vision of everything we saw. I tried for the first time the coca leaf or hayu as the Arhuacos call it, and then I got to know the “Punto Rojo” marijuana grown hydroponically near the municipality of Minca. I don't remember the name of the young Arhuaco who served as our guide, but I do remember that halfway through the route we were conversing animatedly about his worldview and customs. Seeing our interest in the topic, he told us he would take us to a sacred place: the lagoon of the mamos, who are the highest authorities of their community.
It was a small lagoon, more like a pool hidden in the forest, flanked by enormous rocks. The guide invited us to enter the pool and pointed out on one of the rocks a curious shape carved about 70 or 80 centimeters above the water level. It was a human hand carved into the rock, about two centimeters deep. Its edges, however, showed no sign of chisel or any tool, since the surface of the rock didn't change color or texture and simply sank, forming a palm with four fingers and a thumb of normal size.
The Arhuaco explained to us that this was a ceremonial lagoon where aspiring mamos went to be ordained as such. Each mamo had to submerge himself in the cold water coming from the snow-capped peaks and place his right hand on the same spot where thousands of hands had done the same since time immemorial. He told us that the hand wasn't chiseled but carved naturally by the imposition of the hand on the same point through the centuries.
I stayed observing that mystical hand for a good while and, thanks to the effect of the entheogens I had received, I no longer felt the cold of the water in which I was submerged from the navel down, and I visualized in my imagination an army of mamos dressed in their white garments and their characteristic tutusuma or headdress, placing their hands on that same rock that was in front of me. I wasn't able to try to put my hand on the carved hand out of respect for what I perceived as highly sacred.
Suddenly, the guide interrupted my musing with a surprising question: “Are you ready for the baptism?” I could barely think about what he was telling me when my own voice surprised me by answering “Yes”. Without saying a word, the Arhuaco put his hand on my head and pushed me down until I found myself totally submerged in the cold water of the sacred place. I don't know how long he kept me underwater because my mind went completely blank. I don't remember having any thought or sensation. It was a warm silence with a slight swaying in my whole body caused by the waves of the water around me.
Until the Arhuaco took me by the arm and pulled me to the surface. I took a gulp of air and when my sight cleared, I looked into his eyes as he told me: “Welcome, you were born again today.”