By Chris Dodds, at Yulcatan piramyd.jpg
 

“What You Seek is Seeking You”

-Rumi

In my life, I always searched for ayahuasca, aka the Vine of the Soul, despite not knowing it. But in the variety of subjects of my texts, there is a simultaneous search for God and for myself that found closure with the revelations of ayahuasca. Like it happens with a Zoetrope - a 19th century optical toy consisting of a cylinder with a series of pictures on its inner surface, which appear in continuous motion when viewed through slits as the cylinder rotates- my work expresses the unfolding of this common search through a metaphorical rotating movement around the person I discovered myself to be with the help of the Vine.

Excepting the book Pulsação, which is a collection of often humorous and fictional short stories on the ambivalent nature of sexuality, my writing is confessional, and although each text makes sense by itself, it is yet part of the path that led me to ayahuasca.

From Apollo’s Lover- based on real facts of my adolescence concerning the identification between the wild, atavistic nature of love with the religious dimension of it- to From Mars to Marceline and Disneyssense- reflections on my early bonding with the art of Walt Disney, as well as on the reasons of its influence on culture and on contemporary art- to The Most “too” Cute of all Cutes and A King in his Innocence -journals about the first years of my children, orbiting around the awe inspiring revelation of the world by their prelogical merging of metaphysical and poetic thinking- I was inevitably led to a long experience with ayahuasca. While Ayahuasca Anchor is a collection of short stories, Ayahuasca Is concerns a recovery of my life through the lens of the Vine.

My initial compulsion to write aimed at verbalizing my individual, personal quest as I first sensed it and came to fully discover in the revelations it inevitably led to, beginning and conclusion meeting like closing a circle. It was this inevitability that made me realize that, as the mystical poet Rumi said in the quotation above, I was seeking ayahuasca and ayahuasca was seeking me.