The Jungle Was My First Classroom

The jungle was my first classroom. 

From the time I was two or three until my early twenties, my sisters and I followed our father — a botanist and explorer — through the forests of Central and South America. We hiked for hours along jaguar paths as guides cleared the way with machetes, climbing toward places the maps never named — searching for the elusive orchid or begonia hiding in shadows, along waterfall edges, mountain ledges, and rock cliffs slick with moss. The air was thick with rain and resin, every step alive beneath our feet, every rustle a reminder that we were being watched.

In the heat of the afternoons, we swam in waterfall pools — water cold and wild, visited by leeches, monkeys, and bright blue morpho butterflies that circled like blessings. Every surface shimmered with life, from the moss on our skin to the current that tugged at our ankles.

At day’s end, we slept in the hand-built huts of elders, chiefs, and medicine women, or camped on bamboo platforms suspended above the jungle floor. The nights breathed with us — the tamamuri trees exhaling mist through their bark, the philodendrons expanding and contracting like slow lungs, the strangler figs and ceiba trees humming softly through the dark. The air shimmered with life, dense and tender, as if the forest itself was aware of our presence. Frogs called, insects drummed, and the wind moved through the canopy like a slow, unseen animal.

Through that music came other songs — drifting from far-off villages, haunting and luminous. I didn’t know then what I know now: that they were ícaros, the sacred songs of ayahuasca ceremonies, sung for millennia to cleanse the body and spirit. I only knew that they entered me — wordless and alive — a medicine I could feel but not yet name.

Our days were a rhythm of awe and precision. My father would kneel before some unrecorded species, brushing soil from its roots, and whisper, “And who are you? What do we have here?” We took cuttings carefully, labeling them with elevation, companion plants, and symbiotic allies. Each note, each specimen, was both science and prayer.

Even now, I still find myself in conversation with the living world — with plants and animals, with wind and cloud and water. It isn’t something I try to do; it’s simply how I listen. The same way my father once leaned close to a vine and asked its name, I lean toward the world and it answers — in movement, in song, in silence.

Somewhere in those years, the call began. Not as words or visions, but as a knowing that lived beneath language — a quiet, relentless pulse that tugged at the edges of everything I became. I felt it when I heard the jungle breathe, when the songs brushed against my skin, when silence itself felt full.

For decades, I tried to outpace it — running into titles, money, brand names, and all the mind’s disguises of meaning. But everything I was chasing had already found me. The path of service, ceremony, and ancestry was planted in my spirit on those jungle nights, among the moss and the vines, while my father whispered to the earth.

Thirty-Five years later, I have returned. Still to witness. Always to witness. But now to serve what I once only felt — to walk the vow that began as a child beneath the canopy, when the songs of the forest first found me and became the pulse and the prayer; the remembering and the silence.