I did not go to the Amazon looking for the meaning of life. I arrived there after years of travel, questions, wrong turns, encounters, and a restless search that had begun long before I left France as a young man.
India had taught me to question authority, belief, and the ideas we inherit without examining them. Latin America taught me something different. It taught me to watch life as it unfolds.
For more than forty years, I lived and worked among Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, learning about medicinal plants, traditional healing, forest societies, and ways of seeing the world that were very different from the ones I had known in Europe.
One lesson returned again and again. Human beings suffer when they imagine themselves to be separate from everything around them.
In the forest, life does not appear divided in the way we often divide it in our minds. Rivers, animals, plants, people, weather, food, illness, birth, and death belong to the same living world. Indigenous knowledge often reflects this relationship. Health may involve the body, but it can also involve family, land, behavior, memory, balance, and the surrounding environment.
This does not mean that every traditional belief must be accepted without question. During my years in the Amazon, I also saw disagreements, fear, illness, cultural loss, and the limits of different systems of knowledge. Modern medicine can do things traditional medicine cannot. Traditional medicine can preserve forms of knowledge that hospitals and laboratories may never possess. The real loss begins when one side refuses to listen to the other.
I also learned that knowledge can disappear quietly. An elder dies. A plant is forgotten. A forest is cleared. A language is no longer spoken by children. What vanishes is not only information. An entire way of understanding life may disappear with it.
Perhaps the most important lesson came slowly.
For much of my life, I asked, “Who am I?” After decades beside rivers, inside forests, among healers, families, travelers, and friends, the question began to change.
What if life is not something we possess?
What if we are expressions of something far larger than the individual stories we tell about ourselves?
That question lies at the heart of my book, The Life That Lives Us.
It is the story of a journey across continents, cultures, spiritual traditions, Indigenous territories, personal relationships, and changing ideas about medicine, nature, and truth. More than anything, it is the story of one man trying to understand whether we are living life, or whether life itself is living through us.
The Life That Lives Us invites readers to travel that question for themselves.
Read this book now, available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0HB6WG7S2
