…from my ayahuasca tour in Peru! It was the hardest, most horrible, terrifying, magical, healing, eye-opening, amazing experience of my life. I returned a week ago and I’m still in awe of the medicine, and all I saw, received, and felt. It truly defies description…

I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I’ve come back a believer. There is an intelligence in the medicine, an energy in that place, something electric moving in the air way down there in the jungle that cannot be rationally explained. But I experienced it, I can tell you it’s ALL real, and it’s changed me forever. I’m so grateful for the experience, the people I met, the time I spent in that magical place.

Iquitos, I’ll be back, but I’ll never be the same. As Don Alberto says, “The medicine is unending.”

Sweet Mystery, I pray,
Let me be light.
Let me be pure.
Let me be good.

Mystery guffaws.
She’s heard that one before.

Tonight, I will dream a clarity,
A new prayer.
Sweet Mystery, I will pray,
Let me enter into my darkness.

Mystery nods.
Closer.

Encouraged, I go on.
Let my broken heart beat louder than the wings of my conceit.
Let my shrouded rage burn away my pure and lifeless pieties.
Let my dark druthers yelp and claw at the scabs of my sanctity.

Mystery quickens,
Eyes expectant.

I continue.
Dear One, help me uncage the dark bird.
Let me behold that which I am and appear not.
Let me - shaking with intensity of sudden desire - be All.

Mystery smiles, and answers.
You were created for your shadow, and your shadow for you.
Love one another, and be not ashamed.
You will be amazed at what parts of you are meant to fly.

-Howard Jacobson

(I’m heading to Peru on an ayahuasca tour in 24 days… this pretty much sums it ALL up I think…)

Doing art is messy. It doesn’t matter what kind of art you do. If you’re a painter, you’re going to get paint smears everywhere: your furniture, your clothes, your elbow. If you’re a chef, you’re going to make a sink full of dirty dishes and slew of slop-covered spoons, and probably leave the kitchen with food in your hair. Even if you’re, say, a writer, doing art is messy. You’re going to create some magnificently amazingly shitty first drafts. But this is the process. Perhaps it’s one of the great laws of nature: that things must get messy before they become beautiful. That things must turn to complete chaos before becoming peaceful and calm. That you must reach the point where you doubt everything before anything starts to make sense. This is doing ART, and this is doing LIFE. We’re all always writing shitty first drafts.