FRIENDS AND SHAMANS

It was a Navajo couple that we have traveled with doing shows and exhibitions throughout the South West U.S.

We spend days together and visit incessantly in between our customers.

They are quite traditional Navajo but have extended themselves beyond the reservation.

The customers they acquire are from all walks of life and yet they revere and honor most all of their native customs.

The one of the last times we met sickness had befallen the husband with a cancer and the prognosis held limited optimism.

Searching for hope amongst the scientific community they found little hope or promise and began a journey into their primal past…looking for hope.

He boarded a plane for South America to the Amazon and landed in ————Manos———— from there he took a motorboat ride two days up river and then transferred to a dugout canoe for another two days.

He found himself in an exceedingly remote village along with a most revered  Shaman.  

This was the type of Shaman that without hesitation would spit and blow the psychotropic mixture of blowfish up your nose.

Making modern psychotropic medicine administered by a trained professional look tame.

This was the Wild West of the human brain experience.

Later the next year, I visited with him about his experience……he seemed to have become a different person.

His face and his expressional gestures seemed altered.

HIs demeanor seem changed in a way that was haunting.

He was no longer the person we had known and yet we were talking to the person we knew.

Our educated society tends to make “romance” of primitive societies in that they may hold a curious key to things of interest in this world.

After all it was Alfred Von Bayer that after visiting and researching with a Shaman in South America that the world came to appreciate the common ASPRIN.

Folk medicines had some curative properties though many went without quantifiable measure.

Before me sat my friend who had come back from his South American journey hoping to find a way toward longevity.

His eyes were hollow, his bones looked weak, as importantly his spirit seemed nearly broken.

He told me, “When you put yourself in the hands of shaman healer in South America…..you relinquish your understanding of life.”

“I was fully under the mental and physical control of a shaman healer”.

I did not get the sense that he felt it was a prudent decision and he was now just struggling to maintain what he had left of his life.

The covid epidemic had occurred and our friendships trailed off like an accidental wrong turn on a well worn path.

We now ponder our friends, our friendships and his fate? BILLKEITEL