Up to this point, my traveller’s life has involved ping-ponging across the Atlantic ‒ except for a few southerly dips to places like New Zealand and Bora Bora. But last week I added a third continent to my travels: South America. Brazil, to be exact.

I’d picked the rainforest mainly to check a bucket list box about seeing flocks of parrots fly in the wild. You don’t see these birds on Exmoor in England, or in the snow drifts of Wisconsin. But as I lived this long-awaited ‘parrot moment’, I found the most moving experience wasn’t the parrots at all. It was finding myself deep inside two million square miles of ancient forest.

I never got too excited about North American history. So much had been written over in order to fit what the early European settlers needed this continent to be; a blank slate. European history wasn’t my ‘thing’ either. I got an F grade in ‘O’ Level history. (Keep that to yourselves. My mother doesn’t know yet.) However, the older I get the more I appreciate ancient castles and abbeys, Roman ruins and Iron Age settlements; an attempt to understand one’s place in the world before leaving it, perhaps? That said, a few thousand years was the extent of my limited historical understanding.

That all changed in a split second in the Amazon rainforest.

I was on a small skiff, deep into a narrow tributary of the Rio Negro. Night was falling fast. The captain cut the engine. I sat, surrounded by the hums, cracks, buzzes, howls, screeches of the jungle. I became primordial, part of millions of years of history, evolution happening right in front of my face. Trees adapting to life in sunken status ‒ full of secret compounds and potions. Caiman staring from the waters, straight out of Jurassic Park. Tapirs – the likes of which I’d only pictured posed next to wax figures of early Man in museums – picking their way through the trees. As I stared in awed silence, I became a million-year-old tree frog, a pink-nosed Boto, a squirrel monkey, a seed pod so advanced it put NASA to shame. I mingled with the stars, the night so dark I reached up and pulled a planet into my lap. I asked it questions about its origins as it sparkled and nodded to its forest acquaintances. Or maybe I was just suffering the effects of the anti-malaria pills, known to give one strange dreams. No matter. The impact of that experience will rewrite my own history.

At the risk of sounding clichéd, I’m now hyperaware of how small I am, how much I don’t know, how an indigenous child understands more about life than I ever will, how pathetic the current US political situation is ‒ well, maybe I was already aware of that last one, but you get the idea.

Most importantly, I finally understand the line from ‘Desiderata’:

‘You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.’

I am changed. In this alien rainforest, the likes of which I’ve never seen, I realised something: I may still be an expat in a superficial, border-controlled manner. But as a being on this planet, I am home.

Image: author’s own

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