About me

Hi. My name is Matt Thomas, and I…am a teacher of English language arts.

In this brief space I shall attempt to summarize in some truncated detail the adventures and exploits that have been the all-consuming focus of my life for the past 30 years.

The first time I felt that destiny had a special calling for me must have been on my first expedition with the Shuara in the jungles of eastern Ecuador. I was still in the womb, continually jostled up and down and from side to side by my mother’s laborious traversing of various natural obstacles. The incessant jolts prevented me from entering my primitive, pre-natal, sleep-like state, and I was left instead to peruse the shifting patterns of light and dark continually playing across the semi-spherical walls of the womb, and to contemplate the order of the world and my place in it.

Thus continued, day after grueling day, my first contemplations. But it was not until the evening that my mother was given the chewing leaf by the Shuara holy man that the true ephiphanies began. I thought I saw the life-giving chord literally illuminate as the chemicals of enlightenment rushed down from my mother’s generous heart. The brilliant light shown all around me, and all thru my fetal translucence, and the warmth began in my navel, quickly penetrating to my spine, and immediately shot up and down through my nervous system and into my conscious brain.

Did I say conscious? Because there had been no true consciousness until that moment.

…

Years later I would find myself hallucinating through the torturous 16th hour at the bilge pump of the Spanish galleon Delicia, and flickering across the scarred substrate of ancient pitchy planks I thought I could almost see the pattern of light resolve itself into some sort of message. Finally relieved of duty, I would drag my wasted body up the ladder and throw my broken corpse to the deck for all the gods and stars to witness my misery, for the resolution of my visual memory was poor, and those pre-natal ministrations of love and light were gone forever. All dead. My mother, the Shuara, the leaf, the chord, the connection, and that moment of true comprehension all wasted.

To be continued…