After 5 hours of the most intense psychedelic experience of my life, my eyes meet with hers from across the maloka. Laura like a white shawl wrapped around a love puddle. She was glowing beyond a gentle exhaustion. We were both transfixed in the moment as I approached from across the floor. We had survived our first ayahuasca ceremony. While the rest of the group was chattering and dispersing to the cafeteria for soup and bread, I sat down next to Laura and turned towards her with an aching smile wanting to know about all about her world. I was no stranger to psychedelics but ayahuasca definitely was its own thing. The chanting of the icaros was spellbinding, the presence of Shaman and the phantom embodiments of different elements of the jungle carried me through different layers of consciousness and incarnations. I had the most vivid ego-death imagining my grandma, friends and family burying me at the cemetery and thinking that this maloka was where you go when you die. I remember the medicine women's faces, as if they were wearing makeup and masks, chanting in Spanish with their shakers and drums. They were ushering me through the bardos I thought. What a profound and important job to dwell in this threshold and support another's transpersonal journey. This is what happened to my father! He must have went to an ayahuasca ceremony and never came back, he didn't die because of his addiction but instead he found god and then dissolved naturally into cosmic consciousness where nothing is finite, nothing dies, nothing is born, ….it just always is! Despite this overwhelming sense of being dead, there was still a rational voice in the back of my mind telling me, "this is all part of the experience, you aren't dead, this will end and you'll go back home." I wasn't scared or sad, I wasn't grasping to have my life back. Instead I felt completely released of all my pain...my suffering...my nagging self-consciousness tugging on me like a weight. The feeling of release was so great that I thought for sure I peed myself. But even that embarrassment wouldn't be enough to snap me out of the transcended bliss. Somewhere in the matrices of my mind I landed in a small cathedral. The beautiful stained glass windows, I would one day build to surround the altar at our wedding, towered over me and I hit a note that soared like an ethereal cry I could only weep from hearing. Beauty and tragedy inexorably bound — their tension sustained in the overtone of my falsetto. Her eyes stayed on mine and we looked at each other with soft vulnerability. This was Laura's first psychedelic experience. I wasn't sure how it had affected her but she seemed mesmerized now. I asked her, "How are you?" She scoffed, and shook her head not sure how to answer such a broad question. Slowly she started to find her words... "I know my purpose. I asked the plant before drinking it to show me my purpose and it did. It showed me exactly what I'm supposed to do in this life and who I'm supposed to be." "Ok. What's your purpose?" I asked. "I'm meant to be a mother." She turned her eyes again towards me. "I know now, I came here to be a mother and everything else aside, it is the most important thing for my soul to do while I'm here. Everything else is just ancillary." I truly appreciated such crystal clarity. I could never figure out my purpose. It never hit me like that. Immediately we both felt the implication this insight had on our blossoming new relationship. I had never really considered fatherhood up until that point. Ayahuasca didn't reveal anything to me about my own necessity to be a parent during this lifetime. I was still convincing myself that I hadn't died and was in some purgatory realm as my casket was being lowered into the ground back on Staten Island. But something came over me, my own inner knowing activated and suddenly I was sure that I wanted to be the father to her child. I wanted to create a family with this woman. Every instinct of manhood within myself charged to the surface as I decided in that moment that I wanted to have a child with her. "Well then, let's have a baby." Laura smiled and wept as she fell into my arms. We weren't supposed to make physical contact in the maloka but the ceremony had been over for a while and we were the last of a few still lingering behind. A few days later after a second ceremony we were ready to leave the primal comfort of the Costa Rican rain forest and go back home but Laura and I both wanted some kind of souvenir or symbol to remember the impact this experience had on us. It was my idea to get tattoos. We weren't sure how since the flight was just later that day but apparently a traveling tattoo artist lived at the retreat site and had just arrived back that day and was game to do our tattoos. She imbued the ink with a few drops of ayahuasca and drew up the most perfect design for a songbird rising from the earth. The tattoos were only a few inches big and made with simple lines. The bird was based off a Polynesian symbol while the earth was reminiscent of ayahuasca vines. A triplet of dots soared from the bird's mouth representing the power of voice and expression — the bird's song. I got mine on the front of my biceps close the crease of my elbow and Laura got hers on the top part of her ribcage. As soon as the tattoos were done we grabbed our luggage and dashed towards the shuttle bus that was already making its way toward the gate. We made it on and descended down the mountain back below the clouds and towards civilization. --- *Next: Ch 04 — Miracle Mountain*