Chapter 12
The plant and reconnection
What changed inside Bairo after his inner search: the silence, finding who he was before the falls, and the plant as a bridge, not a destination.
By Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez · Published
There is a kind of noise that does not come from the street.
It lives inside. It is made of overdue bills, of the names of partners who left, of sentences someone said years ago that keep playing like a badly tuned radio. Anyone who has lost everything knows that noise. It does not switch off at night. It does not switch off in the shower. It follows a person to the door of every new attempt and stays there, leaning on the frame, repeating that it won't work.
Bairo lived for years with that noise on.
On the outside, he kept going. He started over, set things up, reinvented. On the inside, the volume only rose. Every fall added a new station to the radio, and none of them played music.
The man before the falls
Before the documents he did not have in hand, before the salon, the partners, the fifty lives, there was another man. A boy, really. The one who swore he would live in Brazil with no road to get there. The one who learned the ginga before the language. The one who announced out loud things that did not yet exist and did not apologize for it.
That boy had not died. He had been buried.
Every fall left a layer on top of him. One of caution. Another of shame. Another of fatigue. One more of distrust, the one the partners left. None of these layers was a lie. All of them were defense. Whoever takes blows learns to protect himself, and protecting yourself is sensible.
The problem is that the defense grew so thick that Bairo could no longer hear the voice of who he had been.
That is what he means when he speaks of what was broken inside him. It was not the body. It was the connection. The thread between the man he was and the man he had become snapped somewhere along the road, and he could not say where. He only knew that, when he tried to dream, the image came without color. He was still able to work. He had lost the ability to desire.
The bridge
The chapter The God of the impossible told how, at rock bottom, he went looking for silence, not for treatment, and how in that personal search cannabis oil was a bridge into himself. That chapter told the crossing as seen from outside. This one tells what happened on the inside.
He describes it this way: the noise went down.
It did not disappear. It went down. The bills were still there, the names too, the old sentences too. But, for the first time in a long while, there was space between one thought and the next. An interval. And, in that interval, something appeared that he had not gone looking for.
It was not, yet, a vision of the future. It was a memory.
The boy from the capoeira circle.
Bairo says he remembered who he was before he was afraid. Not like someone looking at an old photograph, with longing and distance. Like someone who recognizes his own voice on a forgotten tape and thinks: that's me. It was always me.
A bridge, not a destination
There is a phrase he repeats when he talks about this period, and it is the most important one in this chapter: the plant was a bridge, not a destination.
A bridge is for crossing. Nobody lives on a bridge. Whoever stops in the middle of one is nowhere: neither on the bank they left nor on the bank they were heading for. For Bairo, the value of the crossing was on the other bank, and the other bank was not the plant. It was himself.
That is why he does not tell this part of his life as the discovery of a substance. He tells it as a reunion. What he brought back from the other side does not fit in a bottle. It fits in a simple sentence that took him years to be able to say: you can be in silence without being afraid of silence.
He makes a point of being clear that this was his own path, and not a prescription for anyone: whoever is thinking about medical use starts with a consultation with a doctor, and what science already knows about the plant is in The plant and the science.
What the silence gave back
Reconnection is a word that sounds soft. In his life, it had hard, concrete consequences.
The first was the time between the blow and the response. Before, every no arrived and left at once as a reaction: anger, haste, a decision made to silence the anguish. Afterward, between the no and the response, there came to be an interval. Capoeira calls that ginga. He learned to sway on the inside.
The second was the question. The buried man gave answers, because answers protect. The man who found himself again went back to asking. What do I really want? Who am I building for? What would I do if I weren't afraid of falling again?
The third was desire. The image that used to come without color came back in color. He went back to dreaming out loud, like the boy who announced Brazil, and this time without asking fear for permission.
The fourth was the hardest for someone who had been left hanging: he went back to accepting help. Not from just anyone, and not without care. But the door that betrayal had locked from the inside opened a crack. It was through that crack that, later on, three old acquaintances came in, as The seventh attempt tells.
The gold in the cracks
In Japan there is an ancient art called kintsugi. When a ceramic bowl breaks, the craftsman does not hide the cracks. He joins the pieces with lacquer mixed with gold powder. The piece is usable again, and the lines of the break stay visible, shining. It does not go back to how it was. It becomes more whole than before, because now it carries its own story in its body.
Bairo's new version did not erase the man of the falls. He still carries the caution, the memory of the partners, the weight of the fifty lives. Only now those marks are no longer layers that bury; they have become lines of gold that join. The boy from the circle and the man who fell many times came to share the same body, without a fight.
That is what he calls his new version. It is not another person. It is the same person, whole again, with the cracks in plain sight.
What did not change
It would be prettier to say that, after this, everything became easy. It did not.
The debts did not pay themselves. The market did not start saying yes. The banks kept refusing, as The frequency of silence told. What changed was not the world. It was the place from which he looked at the world.
Before, he faced every no from inside the noise. Afterward, he began to face it from inside the silence. The no still hurt. It just no longer gave the orders.
Perhaps that is the difference between recovering and finding yourself again. Recovering is getting back to functioning. Finding yourself again is getting back to being. Bairo had already recovered many times: he was an expert at getting up. What he did not know how to do was get up whole.
The other bank
On the other side of the bridge was a quiet man, with his head in order and a new question: and now, where to?
He reached that bank by his own path. But the direction he took from there did not come from any plant. It came from a faith he had found somewhere else, listening to the stories of ordinary people who had crossed through the impossible, a faith that never depended on anything but trust.
That faith has its own chapter. It does not mix with this crossing, and he makes a point of keeping it that way. It is about the voice he came to follow.