Cesario, Who Received Seeds from the Sky: Howling for the Loss of a Siekopai Master

Last night while craning my neck at casting my eyes to the full moon, I wondered if the world could feel it—if some part of this sentient, mad, living world could feel the death of Don Cesario.

Cesario was already somewhere else the last time I saw him in Siekopai territory, deep in the Sucumbios region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Day in and out, he swayed in his thready hammock, no longer able to lift the weight of his own body. Heaven, or some other cloudy place, glazed over his eyes as he fiercely negotiated and communed with the spirits he’d courted for over 100 years, living in the forest, drinking the psychoactive botanical potion yajé.

The lush, sentient spiritual ecology of Cesario and the Siekopai is a vastly distant constellation from the world I called home. As a first-generation American raised by refugees of Soviet Russia, from a young age I was encouraged to pursue an education so I might capitalize on my skills and secure my right to American independence, freedom. This approach, while honestly-intentioned, came at the great cost of things that, to me, seemed to matter most: cultivating community, observing rituals, and tending a relationship with the earth. In my home, all deities, spirits and whispers of animacy were buried deep in sepia-tone rubble of the communist experiment. To remedy the bleak malaise of ecological isolation, as a young adult I found myself gravitating towards ethnobotany—the study of peoples’ uses of and relationships with plants.

I quickly and mysteriously connected with a quirky Ecuadorian Taoist, an ethnobotanist named Sparrow who had spent most of his life cataloguing plants and demarcating ancestral territories of Tucano indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest. Following his introduction, I periodically travelled to the rainforest to visit remote hamlets of the Siekopai people, a small community with a dwindling population, sometimes known by foreigners as victims of the 1964 Chevron-Texaco oil spill—an event called the “Chernobyl of the Amazon” by environmentalists. In this territory of leukemia, deformed limbs and rainbow, petroleum-slicked streams dwelled the last elders who tended to their multi-generational relationship with the Ñañe siekopaï—the spirits of the Amazon rainforest.

If I am honest, I hungrily absorbed the stories, dreams, animal cries and bird songs of the great forest which brought these orphaned parts of myself peace. If my family and friends were divorced from any sense of relationship with the non-human world, I found great solace in knowing the Siekopai elders tended to these integrated, magical, ecological perspectives. Their worldview, while so very different from mine, made sense. During interminable yajé ceremonies, the elders would sway in their hammocks and fiercely negotiate, commune, bargain, and develop relationships to spirits who revealed themselves in their visions. Life, in many ways, appeared simple and repetitive for the elders. But the real evolution of their cultural spirit occurred in the fertile darkness of the Amazon at night.

 If the children of Enlightenment-era thought approach life as a story of progress, the Siekopai’s might be thought of more like wobbling on a tightrope, maintaining stasis by dutifully tending to the delicate, exquisite balance of a perfect Earth they had inherited.

Ten years ago, it seemed a distant and impossible reality that they would go — and with them, the unlanguageably precious dimension of their peoples’ cosmovision. Time went on, and indeed, one by one, the last Siekopai masters died: Rogelio, Delfin, Tintin, and now Cesario. There were others I never met, whose presence we could all feel swinging in our chambira hammocks during those endless nights of yajé ceremonies with the cicadas, our madness, our ancestors, the king of boars, the spirits. Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin said it best: "Every time a shaman dies, it is as if a library burns down.” That only begins to explain the loss of these humans, so deeply shaped by the secrets of nature.

As these great elders die, as our attention dies, as our rivers die, as the animals die, as the clouds die, I wonder—where do these guardian spirits, trickster spirits, seductress spirits, doctor spirits, flower-umbrella spirits, tiger spirits go when a great shaman of a culture dies? Where do they go, and what do they leave here, on this flowering, fighting plane of reality?

Are they in the stones, the stars? Are they in the hawthorn who thanks us with her flowers as she's untangled from bittersweet and wisteria? Are they in the smooth pebble that calls us closer, shining in the creek by our home? They must be here.

After hearing the news of Cesario’s death, I roamed our garden in the moonlight. The ragwort, the cedar, the world was silver. I caught a glimpse of smouldering embers of a fire left behind by others in my community, abandoned but still bright. By its diminishing light I contemplated the mystery of spirits, and where they live, if beyond human mind.

The answer is simple, I know: they are everywhere and nowhere. They are a part of the Mind of Creation, just like us, just like everything. And yet, the dazzling universes these elders mutually tapped into—their common language in spirit-tongue, the mutually-occurring visions of boats and cities, demons and daemons, their stories of retrieving new seeds from heaven to plant in the wild soil of the Amazon—does it remain here? Will we ever visit these places again?

They are not my spirits, it is true. They were not incubated in the womb of my mother, or in the warm, private thoughts of my people. But they are still alive for my friends, the Siekopai. They are alive for my friends, and they are alive for me.

I am certain spirits once dwelled everywhere, when the land was alive—when we were alive. When we were alive with our presence, when our senses swayed with the wind, and we weren’t afraid to taste the soil or smell the blood. When we were bonded to our universe through intimate relationship with bones and branches—when we were woven more tightly into the fabric of this world by our loving presence.

The tighter we weave this web—this web that connects the elderflowers and spiders, our water and our urine, our dreams and our spells spoken into fires—the more, I suspect, we will call forth those spirits who keep us humans company.

I don’t spend too much time worrying about proving the existence of spirits. It’s largely a game of “make believe” for me. But this game of make believe keeps me awake, connected, and open to the possibility that there are entities residing over rivers and trees. The perspective keeps me treading tenderly. It also keeps my mind a little wild, a little diverse.

In an agricultural world where we cultivate and reproduce species, deliberately selecting for favorable qualities, we also eliminate a great deal. We would be foolish to think humans ourselves have not been domesticated in the process of domesticating the world. This is why, in a crucial way, communities who rely less on agrarian practices tend to remain attuned to the wilderness around them—the benevolent, the tricky, and the mysterious unknown. Their perspectives, often deliberately oppressed, deserve to live. Our legacy as humans will only benefit from standing in solidarity with those souls who, despite all odds, continue to court the wilderness of the forest.

To the Siekopai I share the deepest fragrance my flowering, grateful heart, for all of your continued efforts to keep these worlds alive. I am very sorry for the loss of Don Cesario.

I remember Christmas evening ten years ago, when I cried the saltiest, deep-ocean tears beneath a full moon whilst under the spell of yaj́e cooked by Cesario. The pejí (Brugmansia sp.) was in its full, intoxicating bloom. With my face in the grass, I received many instructions; a message from the stars, dying in the sky, decreeing that I live my life in service of remembering our elders, working for the health and integrity of the land in which their magic and memory dwells.

And so, last night, I looked to the fire, seeking instruction. From it emerged a word: tend. To bring these spirits back, simply tend to the Earth and her creatures, and they will return. Death is a lie, and these spirits merely go underground, patiently waiting for those who genuinely tend their spirit to sprout once more.

Spirits will return on heaven-bound canoes, barreling down the crystalline forks of Ivy, picking up hitchhiking acolytes and believers. Spirits will return to greet us at the thresholds of the misty groves they protect, where they dwell in trees and teach birds the songs that keep the forests alive. We will be healed once again by the doctor people, dressed in robes and feathers, humming as they tend to our wounds with precise pattern and presence.

Tend to the land and they will come back. They never die. They cannot die. I will not let them die. I’ll find whatever kindling I can, blow my hopeful heart’s breath, and tend to what remains of this fire. 

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