In 2017 my friend Daniel Pinchbeck called and asked if I’d help him conduct research about the global spread of a psychoactive Amazonian potion called ayahuasca. The result is a book we co-authored and published with Watkins Publishing in 2019, When Plants Dream: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Shamanism and the Global Psychedelic Renaissance.

While writing this book, we grappled with and marveled at the fractal paradoxes, mysteries, and magic of a potion—and more importantly, a body of Indigenous cultural heritage—that figured prominently into my formation as a human being since I was nineteen.

We conducted nearly a hundred interviews with shamans, neo-shamans, philanthropists, chemists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychedelic proselytizers. The pile of books I lived in was marvelous. From these conversations emerged a set of chapters we organized around the topics of the phenomenology, political ecology, chemistry, cultural appropriation, botany, legality, and mysterious origins of the brew.

I will forever lay the flowers of my heart at the feet of the elders of the Amazon rainforest—specifically, those I have gotten to know of the Siekopai of Sucumbíos, Ecuador and the Shipibo of Ucayali, Peru.

To each of the ancestors who prevailed in carrying on and evolving their sacred relationship with the greatest teachers—the plants—I thank you.