Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart (19 page)

It Will Be a Long Time

It will be a long time before humans lose their terror of me,
said the serpent.
Though this serpent shape, this slithery form, is buried deep in every cell of every person on earth. It is the fundamental shape that is common to all. It is the shape of your DNA.

In the dream, Kate had just sprayed poison on a toiling pile of ants that seemed to be living in one corner of her house. It had not seemed the right thing to do, yet the infestation unnerved her. As she looked, however, she saw each individual ant growing
larger.

How are we to deal with fear?
she asked.

How else?
said the snake, smiling benignly, like Mr. Clean from the Buddhist retreat she’d left an eternity ago.
Make friends with it.

That’s what the Buddha taught!
said Kate, shocked to hear the same instruction coming from a snake.

Yesssss,
said the snake.
He was in alignment.

It Was a Warm Sunny Day

It was a warm sunny day in autumn. In two days Kate and Yolo would join their friends beside the clear, beautiful river they’d found in the north. Everyone was coming; the women from Kate’s women’s council; the men from Yolo’s Sangha. Their friends from Hawaii and the Amazon. Avoa and Sue and Margery from the run of the Colorado. Anunu and Enoba. Even Rick had called and said he’d be coming. That he had experienced a breakthrough. He was so excited he kept repeating: I’ll be on American, Flight 911, even after Kate told him that no one would be there to meet him, that he’d have to arrange transportation himself.

Yolo cleaned up his studio and swept the yard, and Kate swept out and saged the house. When she finished she went into her altar room. Everything was just as she’d left it more than a year ago. Buddha was still under the purple cloth. Her parents’ pictures were turned to the wall. Che and the Virgen de Guadalupe were in a corner. The rolled-up poster of Quan Yin had a spider nesting inside. She uncovered Buddha. Very carefully she began to dust each photograph and to put it back, just where it was before. Soon her altar, with its pregnant, barefoot Third World woman, Bessie Smith and Lester Young, its candles and a pair of baby shoes, a red clay pipe and fresh flowers from her garden, looked just the same as always. She studied it carefully. What was missing?

Yolo came in and Kate handed him a box of matches. He began to light the candles until they illuminated the room. They sat on cushions facing the altar, enjoying the scent of sage and the candles’ golden glow. Feeling connected and at peace, they fell into meditation without signal or plan. When they came out of it, half an hour later, Yolo went into the kitchen and returned with a small bowl of water into which he’d poured salt. This he placed on the altar near the flowers. Kate went to the refrigerator and took out the half bottle of yagé Armando had given her, which, at the river, she would use to paint the faces of her friends. She placed it between Che and the pregnant woman. Next she went into the living room and dragged the tall potted ficus close enough for its branches to gracefully shelter them as they sat. Finally she went to her bedroom and got the anaconda clock. Giving the anaconda a kiss and not looking at the time, she placed it in Buddha’s lap.

Afterword

There is a magic intoxicant in northwesternmost South America which the Indians believe can free the soul from corporeal confinement, allowing it to wander free and return to the body at will. The soul, thus untrammeled, liberates its owner from the realities of everyday life and introduces him to wondrous realms of what he considers reality and permits him to communicate with his ancestors. The Kechua term for this inebriating drink—Ayahuasca (“vine of the soul”)—refers to this freeing of the spirit. The plants involved are truly plants of the gods, for their power is laid to supernatural forces residing in their tissues, and they were divine gifts to the earliest Indians on earth.

—
PLANTS OF THE GODS
:
Their Sacred, Healing and Hallucinogenic Powers,

Richard Evans Schultes, Albert Hofmann, and Christian Rätsch

Thanks

For their inspiring lives of curiosity and dedication I thank master
kumus
Margaret Machado and Glenna Wilde, of Hawaii; Don José, of Peru; and ethnobotanist and preserver of ancient medicine Mark Plotkin, of New Orleans. For their legacies, their books, their talks, and their generosity in sharing knowledge and experience, I thank Maria Sabina, Richard Evans Schultes, and Jeremy Narby, whose book
The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge
contributes important insights to our time. I also thank Michael Harner for his ongoing work in the study and interpretation of shamanism, and Terrence McKenna, whose
Food of the Gods
offers a radical and rather cheerful vision of human development, deeply influenced by our primordial use of entheogens.

Kuma = teacher (Hawaiian)

Entheogen = Goddess/God within

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A
LICE
W
ALKER
won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for her novel
The Color Purple,
which was preceded by
The Third Life of Grange Copeland
and
Meridian.
Her other bestselling novels include
By the Light of My Father’s Smile, Possessing the Secret of Joy,
and
The Temple of My Familiar.
She is also the author of three collections of short stories, three collections of essays, six volumes of poetry, and several children’s books. Her books have been translated into more than two dozen languages. Born in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker now lives in northern California.

Also by Alice Walker

FICTION

The Way Forward Is with a Broken Heart

By the Light of My Father’s Smile

Possessing the Secret of Joy

The Temple of My Familiar

The Color Purple

You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down

Meridian

In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women

The Third Life of Grange Copeland

NONFICTION

Sent by Earth: A Message from the Grandmother Spirit

Anything We Love Can Be Saved

The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult

Warrior Marks (with Pratibha Parmar)

Living by the Word

In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens

POEMS

A Poem Traveled Down My Arm

Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth

Her Blue Body Everything We Know

Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful

Good Night, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning

Revolutionary Petunias and Other Poems

Once

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Alice Walker

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

R
ANDOM
H
OUSE
and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walker, Alice.

Now is the time to open your heart : a novel / Alice Walker.

p. cm.

1. Self-actualization (Psychology)—Fiction. 2. Colorado River (Colo.-Mexico)—Fiction. 3. Separation (Psychology)—Fiction. 4. Amazon River Region—Fiction.
5. Shamanism—Fiction. 6. Travelers—Fiction. 7. Hawaii—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3573.A425N69 2004

813′.54—dc21 2003054766

The author is committed to preserving ancient forests and natural resources and wishes to acknowledge Random House for printing this book on paper that is 100 percent postconsumer recycled fibers and processed chlorine free. For more information about Green Press Initiative and the use of recycled paper in book publishing, visit
www.greenpressinitiative.org
.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-396-1

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