6:56 PM
There are many
things that man has not been able to achieve, things that science can not
quantify. And like everything man does, nothing is perfect. Take Earth for example, there are plants and creatures some
of us have not found, rifts still left unexplored, and elements not yet
discovered.
Living in the Amazon
isolated from modern science, you have to develop what the Western world would lovingly call "alternative" cultures and "alternative" medicines. A lot of these remedies are passed from generation to
generation. Plants with healing or poisonous properties are
kept hidden from the Western world deep in the forest with their maps being passed
on only to the elders of the small communities and only to shamans or healing persons, usually women trained by their predecessors. In this way, mystic tradition is passed on for thousands of years. This power is not unique to plants and herbs, it is innate within our DNA; in natural accordance, we can train ourselves to manipulate
fire and lightning. Shamans aren't the only ones trained to develop these
skills, we have guards who are in charge of the village's security and regular civilians who may have some basic training in this 'art' which I will
from now on refer to as Elementalism as those of us in the Secret World do.
There are others as
well, those who rely on more than their innate human ability. They are the ones
who have been chosen by the Gods to have power beyond the rest. These 'chosen'
ones have the burden of remaining in the village and protecting it against outsiders.
The Gods act through bees, who are revered in my culture as powerful beings
from another dimension; they enter your body and imbue you with power granted
by the Earth Goddess. They come from the portal to Agartha, which the indigenous
people call Kiga Pakori.
My mother was one of
the chosen and, as is often the case, the burden was expected to also be
passed on to me. However, I would have to leave the family farm but I felt safe
knowing that I could use these skills for
my protection. There really isn't much space in a family of six,
surrounded by ox and clucking chickens. Our culture and tradition would soon be consumed by the West
and the ever growing government presence looming beyond the treetops. Our economy was beginning to grow
dependent on the outside, we were forced to use our land the way that
Greenpeace and other intrusive foreign organizations prescribed lest it be
taken by the government. They had come multiple times to warn us we'd be kicked
out of our land if we didn't use it. Depending on the little land we had and an ever declining soy
market, there wasn't much hope outside of the big city. My ancestors moved to
Brazil after the unification of Italy, my great-grandfather was a landless
peasant who stumbled upon unsettled land surrounded by an Indian community.
There were other white families there too, but they were accepted into the
community as if there was no difference between them. We had been there since
the beginning of the twentieth century and I, at the age of fourteen, was to
be the first in my line to leave the land we've inhabited for more than a
century.
I took a bus to
Teresina. My parents had already spoken to some friends they had in the city
and they would find me a house in which I would work as a domestic worker.
Other girls from my village had ended up working as house maids in the middle
class neighborhoods of Teresina or far away in Rio de Janeiro, some unlucky
ones were even sold into sex slavery and shipped to some other country they
would never have a chance of leaving. My destiny would lead me somewhere else beyond Teresina and yellow cleaning gloves, beyond even where my imagination could stretch.
