It’s three years old, but I can’t bring myself to delete it from my Facebook Messenger.
It was the shaman who had first served me ayahuasca four and a half years earlier. I’d been all over the world with him, and would spend a collective three months of my life with him over that time. Traveling and exploring sacred spaces, plant medicines, and energy.
About four months after he sent me that message, and about two months after I lost saw him, he would pass on from this world.
And it was unexpected.
I never did get to chat with him about marketing efforts. He never emailed me like he had planned to. And when I saw him in Utah for peyote journey, and then again in Ethiopia where we had two weeks… There was never an appropriate time to chat.
I waited for him to approach me about what he wanted to know. But he never did.
He was a very busy man.
Even after he and the other shamans put me in my “Vision Quest” spot in the forest brush in Utah, left me to begin my journey, and he walked back by an hour later… With me standing a few feet away out of his sight, in my vow of silence and scared by a snake I had just seen… He stopped, looked into the thicket, sensed something needed his attention in there… But couldn’t see it. So he kept walking. Lots of things needed his attention.
Even in Lalibela, at 5am one morning… After I had just turned worse with a flu I’d come down with (and would have for the remaining week and a half of the trip)… I remember walking over to the lobby to leave a message for him and the other leads on the trip that I would not be going with them for the day. But I didn’t have to. Because there he was on one of the couches, researching additional details for the day’s trip. I made my chat with him brief. He could see I was very sick. And encouraged me to get lots of rest. But I could see he was tired too. I imagined that he didn’t get much sleep in general. Always too many things to do.
And even in a dream I had about him after his death, he was a busy man.
In the dream I went up and said to him, “Hey! I never asked you what my purpose was here. Mostly because you are always surrounded by people and things needing your attention. I didn’t want to be high maintenance. But I am going to now. What is my purpose?”
He looked at me and said, “Heather, my lovely lady, you are here to make a lot of noise.”
And maybe that’s why I keep the only correspondence between us in my Messenger app, never planning to delete it…
It’s a reminder to make some noise.
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