Black Smoke - A Woman's Journey of Healing, Wild Love, and Transformation in the Amazon

Book Review

Black Smoke

A Woman's Journey of Healing, Wild Love, and Transformation in the Amazon

Margaret De WysPublisher: Sterling
Published: January 2009

240 pages
ISBN: 1-4027-4883-3
ISBN13: 9781402748837
$19.95 US
$21.95 Canadian
Hardcover with Jacket

When composer and Bard College music professor Margaret De Wys learned she had breast cancer, the diagnosis shattered her comfortable life. Seized by fear, crushed by existential loneliness, she couldn’t respond when her loved ones reached out to her. To everyone’s concern, the illness propelled her away from her family and deep into the Amazon to work with Carlos, a charismatic Shuar master of medicina milenaria, an ancient mystical tradition with a highly sophisticated and precise technology of healing. In Black Smoke, De Wys writes of her amazing encounter with Carlos as he guided her into a world of potent visionary plants, harrowing initiations, and ritual purification. It was, as Carlos called it, “the path of the warrior.”

At once an adventure story, a romance, and a rich exploration of a little-known culture, Black Smoke is destined to become a classic. It captures one woman’s physical, emotional, and “holy voyage” through a world that differs vastly from our own in its perception of healing and wholeness. And what emerges is a revealing chronicle of spiritual insight and a trenchant exploration of the limits of idealism. Not only does De Wys offer a probing look at how our modern technological culture can learn and benefit from indigenous wisdom, but she also weaves a cautionary tale about how potentially dangerous it is—on both sides—to try to cross those frontiers.

Margaret De Wys is a professor at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, as well as a composer and sound installation artist.  Her pieces have been performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Pace Gallery, Kitchen, and The Knitting Factory.  A CD of her music, I Oh, was released in 2000.  

“Black Smoke is a wonderful, beautifully written story . . . a true adventure told in a style that rivals the best of novels. This first-person account by an extraordinary woman of her inner and outer journey through darkness into light is a must read for anyone interested in healing.”—John Perkins, The New York Times best-selling author of Shapeshifting, Spirit of the Shuar and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

“This book will thrill and support all readers traveling—or wishing to travel themselves—into the unknown and the mystery of the human spirit.”—Josie RavenWing, author of The Book of Miracles

Finally a book about ayahuasca experiences that truely stands out ! Touching, honest and straitght to the heart

Ati Dion, Ph. D.-.