In May 2017, I was sitting on the floor of a bungalow in rural Southern Africa, a place that could only be reached by boat.
The ferryman was a local man, who knew nothing of the mythic relevance of his actions earlier that afternoon, in which he had brought me and my companions upstream and delivered us unceremoniously to the tiny jetty that served as the only access to that secluded place, and I remember a bank note was passed in lieu of the proverbial coin.
There was an a-frame hut, huddled between the river it faced and the mountain at its back. Fate is never devoid of irony, even if we miss the cues at the time. It was in that place I would be participating in my first sacrament of Ayahuasca.
It would not have been within my ability to articulate this then, but I was clinically depressed, struggling with an undiagnosed neurodivergence which made social adaption to marriage, family life and corporate work extremely challenging for myself and everyone I was in relationship with. This only exacerbated the undiagnosed PTSD and unresolved childhood trauma. As many men do, I believed that tenacity, grit, endurance and trying were the passport to a meaningful life. I did not yet have the wisdom of letting things break.
As with so many seekers who knock at that door, I was sick in my soul; I was 11 years into a marriage I had entered into reluctantly and had never managed to find peace and belonging in. I had never healed my childhood wounding, I had only the vaguest notion of what Shadow was, and I knew nothing of the experience I would face or the devastating ordeal I would endure over the next five years of my life.
Ayahuasca as a soul-healing medicine has been in the Western zeitgeist for several decades and now has become something of a fad. I had chosen this path out of a kind of desperation, as many people do, hoping as we do, in the power of a panacea—a medicine that will cure all our ills. I had no idea what to expect and no inkling of what I would yet experience, nor the life-changing cascade of events that would be triggered like tectonic dominoes.
The active ingredient is a psychoactive called Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) derived as an extract from the Chacruna plant, a compound that is naturally blocked by the stomach lining. For this reason, it is prepared along with an extract from the Caapi vine which contains Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOI), plant enzymes that allow the absorption of the DMT. The concentrated enzymes and alkaloids are harsh on the stomach which is why a strict diet is advocated, and also why the experience is always associated with nausea, typically oral purging and occasionally, diarrhoea. —One of several reasons why Ayahuasca is not a ‘party drug’.
At this stage in my life the only mind-altering experiences I had had, were related to alcohol and prescription pharmaceutical medications. For the record, neither of these provide any relatable analogous context of experience.
I happen to firmly believe as Wittgenstein said: “The limits of our language define the limits of our world.” —by nature, I had a scientific and sceptical mindset, and a reductionist worldview and I found the usual accounts of Ayahuasca and Psilocybin ‘trips’ to be juvenile and cartoonish. And even so, I was strongly called to be there and be doing this thing.
I did not have what is considered a typical experience.
The strongest recollection of those back-to-back evenings is of hearing a voice speak to me in the room, directly and clearly, that no one else heard. For reference, we were laid no more than a couple of meters apart and aside from some singing and humming and gentle hide drums, your neighbour’s voices could be easily heard in the small ceremony space.
The words puzzled me greatly, shamed me even, and did not reveal their meaning to me until many months later. But I remember the moment with clarity, both because it was such a surprising occurrence, and the words themselves jarred me. I excused myself and immediately wrote them down and they have remained emblazoned in my mind ever since. When I discovered at last their meaning, which was beyond profound, they emblazoned themselves also onto my heart:
“First the Child must learn True Gratitude. Then the father must learn the playfulness of a child. Finally the grandfather may learn to forget all. And not a single one of these words is wasted.”
With a perfect sense of irony that occurs to me only now as I write this, the name of the place we were staying was Vermaaklikheid, which translates to ‘as good as play’ or ‘recreative’. —The name of the river translates to ‘pigeon loft’, as in the place one would keep carrier pigeons between messenger missions.
None of this symbolic irony occurred to me at the time.
On the contrary, I felt sheepish at first, after having taken time off work, travelled for days to reach my destination, fasted and ritually prepared myself, taken time away from my family duties to “take sacred medicine”, to return only with a cryptic quatrain.
The key lay in the last line. Not a single one of these words is wasted. True Gratitude is something we generally do not understand. It is so very rare to find anyone able to authentically embody True Gratitude, devoid of the stories of “deserving” and “goodness” we subconsciously oblige ourselves and others with. Our rituals of Thanksgiving are a beautiful institution that is very becoming of our species, but despite being well-meaning, it is quaint and mostly wide of the mark. Similarly, our practices of gratitude journaling and the like are tantamount to the work of children and fail to make contact with the essence of True Gratitude.
True Gratitude is practised in degrees, to the degree that one understands and can begin to appreciate “the Cost of the Gift”. Most of what humans are complicit in when they think they are practising gratitude are actually forms of piety designed ultimately to showcase our “humility” and “goodness”. True Gratitude, is a treasure when expressed and shared, but by definition requires no witness and no external validation whatsoever.
As we enter this period of Thanksgiving I am called to share the nature of this challenge with anyone who will listen, because if one might begin to grasp the meaning of true gratitude and the profoundly liberating implication of the full quatrain, they can evolve, truly and the course of their lives can change, forever, set to the true north of our soul’s true calling.
True Gratitude Part I
I am not
tenaciously excavating
for hidden answers
any more.
I am lighting candles
and leaving a light on
for them,
so that
they may find
their way
home,
to me.
When we are
both
ripe and
ready.
True Gratitude Part II
I am still
seeking and searching,
most earnestly...
—it's just that
curiosity it turns out
is a better spyglass
than desperation
and grace
a wiser guide
than raw defiance,
and love—oh love!
a far, far better compass
than fear.
The Invitation in our Aloneness
My regular reflection at Thanksgiving is this:
You are the only companion you will ever have, truly. Even when people are with you, how you show up will determine much of how they are able to love you.
Even if you are a twin, you came into this world alone. You struggled from the place of infinite holding, through pain and trauma, into this life, alone.
When you are with your thoughts, you are alone, and when you take difficult steps, you may be encouraged and loved, but if you are taking true steps, you take them alone.
How you speak to yourself, what forgiveness you allow for others and somehow withhold from yourself, determines how that relationship is.
When we realise how unutterably alone we are, we begin to feel compassion for ourselves and through this we learn a gentleness with the world, realising, everyone is dealing with the same sense of being alone.
Connection is what we are all seeking. Secretly it is the question within every question but also the answer within all answers. And yet, until we connect with ourselves, and allow ourselves to bud and bloom, we can never fully connect with others, not fully.
Until we connect with our gifts and understand their costs, we cannot connect with the gifts of others or appreciate the costs of their gifts.
We have this one moment, Now, where we are so impossibly empowered, to make changes, to embrace courage, to throw off the yoke of our smallness and to define the steps that will lead us to the life we want to live and the relationship we want to have with the world. The depth of the relationship with the world is tied, inextricably, to the quality and depth of the relationship you have with yourself.
What I Give Thanks For
I have come to understand that we can appreciate in value. The more we appreciate in the world, privately and vulnerably, without the genuflections and outer affectations of a cosmetic sincerity we were forced to enact as a child, and which we have convinced ourselves are the requisite benchmark for “goodness”, the more we grow as souls.
Soul, is the human thirst and capacity for connection, purpose and belonging from which we draw our creativity, our vitality and ultimately our sense of Meaning. Soul is both well and wellspring.
To connect deeply, with anything, no less our own lives, means to “put down” as David Whyte says “the weight of our aloneness”—the troubling drama of it all, and encounter simply and fully, what is. To drink a sip of whisky, or allow a poem to truly touch us, to listen to a piece of music and in that to suspend our insatiable need for enjoyment, for a moment, we stand to appreciate it for what it is, for its innate essence and being and the invitation such encounters always hold in their hands. Appreciation appreciates. This is the meaning I believe, of the Zen Koan: “Not knowing, is most intimate.”
This is how a Soul might grow. I give thanks that this fact is self-affirming and true. And I give thanks that Curiosity & Self-Permission are the two wings of that Soul.
I give thanks that myself, and other humans, have the ability to take, or hold a single breath, on purpose, and for the vast field of implication and invitation that is opened beyond that simple and profound door.
I give thanks that our current limits are not our permanent limitations.
I give thanks that I am able to understand that the enormous and humbling poignancy of the fundamental nature of life, existence and being, is Giving & Receiving, and that I am an intricate and essential part of that infinite miracle.
I give thanks that I am able, and free, to receive with grace, most especially when I seemingly have nothing to offer in exchange.
I give thanks for the deep longing for meaning and shelter that lives so loudly and irrepressibly in my heart, without which I would never be called to create that which I long for and cannot find. I give thanks for the silent prayer that will not itself be silenced—to be whole and to be home—that we all share, even in our aloneness, and perhaps most especially so.
I give thanks that the road is sometimes “seen and then not seen”, without which there would be no prospect of growth or adventure. I give thanks for Reason and Consciousness without which there could be no experience, no discernment, no appreciation and ultimately no Meaning.
I give thanks for the seasonality of life, which allows everything to have its own time. I give thanks that there is an order that arranges everything, and even for the destructive principle of chaos which allows tired things to be broken down to make way for the new, and in that, also the void of infinite possibility into which I may yet create something of beauty and relevance and meaning.
I give thanks that healing is possible, that the nature of Nature is abundance and regeneration, and that I can practice Forgiveness, on both sides of that sacred exchange.
And I give thanks for the healing, empowering and transformative nature of True Gratitude, and the grace by which its arms are always open, its door always unlocked and its wellspring always abundant.
Won’t you join me?
Happy Thanksgiving to all our American friends, and to all:
May the light shine through me. May the great song ring out from my heart. May the medicine of understanding be not the taking from, but the giving in you as it is for me.
With love
Rocco
Thank you Rocco for this beautiful essay on gratitude, aloneness and connection. Your thoughts on these topics have validated so much of what I have been feeling for a while now. In the true sense of the words, aloneness and connection are antonyms, and yet as concepts they are so intertwined. Truly ironic. And thank you for discerning true gratitude from the journaled kind. I see it so clearly now. Blessings to you my friend.🙏🏻
“Curiosity is a better spyglass then desperation”
Stance is something that you’ve taught me that I will forever be grateful for🙏