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Good Reading : October 2014
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GOOD READING OCTOBER 2014 53 Speaking of religion, I have none. Chasing El Dorado is not just a love story or a Latin American travelogue but also an existential road trip. Despite being raised as a strict atheist, I became fixated on gaining a better understanding of life, the universe and everything. I became driven to travel from Rio de Janeiro to the US by bus, boat and donkey – over the Andes, through the Amazon Jungle and into the deserts of Mexico. It also became the narrative arc of my latest book. As a result of this journey, I am today a reluctant agnostic, happily wiser knowing that I, like all of us, ultimately know nothing. I am still uncomfortable with the G-word, but from my time spent with various Amerindian tribes and shamans, I now have an appreciation of the unfathomable – the multidimensional layer cake of existence and our fleeting moment in it. My struggle to find meaning in my life, which ironically resulted in discovering (and finding peace in) the ultimate meaninglessness of existence, stemmed from the collective cultural, spiritual and environmental decay that marks our era. I, like many, suffer the malaise of modernity, the disconnect our head-and-gut driven society has from our hearts. Our focus on logic and scientific reductionism and what happens in our heads, together with our insatiable greed for money, power, food and sex, has totally disconnected us from our intuition and sense of what is right in our heart. We’ve also become desensitised to our neighbours, our brethren of all sentient life for ms here on this third rock from the sun. And we have a total disregard for the very elements of air, earth and water that sustain us. But don’t get me wrong, I’m no hippie, despite periods of studying yoga and once having hair growing down to my waist. No, I like to fish, eat red meat, and I’m thinking of patenting a car bumper sticker that says, ‘I hunt, I fish, I vote Green’. Not that I hunt, but I wouldn’t be opposed to filling the freezer with ’roo a couple of times a year; and I only vote Green as a protest to a failing and powerless political system. I have, however, been angry at the way we treat each other and the world for a very long time, which I have expressed in different ways throughout my life. In my teens, it was frontline protesting to help save the Franklin River. In my early 20s I got a degree in environmental science and then felt despondent at the hopelessness of it all and slid into a self-destructive world of booze, hard drugs and ’90s grunge rock when I was a pub musician. I was unable to self-destruct, and I emerged from the haze and a bad marr iage in my mid-30s, threw it all to the wind and hit the road. Now in my mid-40s, I have long since done away with drugs and self-loathing and tempered my seething to the wr itten form. BEHIND THE BOOK October 2014 main Viviane and Aaron in costume for Carnival in Rio. Aaron at Shipibo Indian spiritual retreat, Peruvian Amazon. 52_54_behind_book.indd 53 12/09/14 12:27 PM
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