I followed the half-blind man with the machete into the forest at sunset. The blind leading the blind, I chortled to myself, catching my footing every few meters as I stumbled over thick roots and traipsed through sticky mud that coated my shoes and tanned my legs. He spoke to me in Spanish; I pretended to know what he was saying. "Dónde está la biblioteca" was not particularly useful vocabulary in the Amazon.
A "guided forest walk" is what I had been sold, and I didn't entirely know what to expect. I was mildly terrified of a poisonous bug falling off of a tree and latching itself into my skin and dying a slow, painful death while the tribe prepared my cremation ceremony. This wasn't a realistic fear, though; this tribe buries their dead.
With a swift motion he whacked at the long green leaves next to my ear and I thought, This is it. Either he just killed a deadly spider or...
His hands worked quickly at the leaves.
"Bolso," he said smiling, handing me the package that now, in fact, did resemble a handbag.
Vocab 1 - Death 0.
I took the leafy handbag and he must have caught the puzzled look on my face because he added: "Para coleccionar."
I make up for what I lack in Spanish vocabulary with my cleverness and deduction skills and reasoned that on this forest walk we would be collecting souvenirs.
Hopefully just not any souvenirs that crawl.
Over the course of the next hour he showed me tree milk and plants that could cure diseases I can't pronounce (in Spanish). He heard songs in the trees and the rustles of leaves and he knew from which animal they came. He didn't need vision; he had trained all of his other senses to speak the language of the Amazon.
With his fingertips he read the bark of a tree like braille until he peeled a dense, black orb off the side and placed it into the palm of my hand. He said something quickly and I shook my head to indicate that I didn't understand, and so he gestured with his hand, opening his fist rapidly.
"Fuego."
My eyes grew wide and he nodded. I was holding nature's fire starter. The very discovery that made us human. Contained within that orb was magic, history, sustenance, and evolution.
I was amazed by how much he knew about the jungle, and how everything he saw was something that had a purpose. I came from the concrete jungle, where we drop people into environments like this and watch them struggle to survive for fun.
How had we gotten so far from the land?
There is a growing movement in the U.S. of people who are opting out of the capitalist system, rejecting consumerism and corporate life to live off of the land, off-grid, returning to our roots as humans.
The implicit question driving this lifestyle is: "Will we be happier and healthier this way?"
It's almost not a question anymore of whether modern life is making us unhappy and unhealthy. Social media is engineered to be addicting. Food is engineered to be addicting. Entertainment is engineered to be addicting.
Our participation in capitalism itself is engineered to be addicting; the stock market is gambling with a promise of winning long term, except your portfolio goes up when you and thousands of your colleagues get laid off.
Modern life is dysregulating our nervous systems, and for what?
The question really is whether modern life is delivering on the promise that makes all of this worth it.
I wound up in the Amazon living with a tribe after diving into a rabbit hole on the internet.
