Antonio Pedro

Especially considering there are masters who haven’t been on TV or had their teachings printed in books: their words aren’t measured by the grammar of right and wrong, they simply know how to live, they just are. People whose life is explained through exertion, who are experts in survival: they say they’re on the outskirts of the world, but they just might be closer to everything that is truly central.

“As illiterate as one may be,

They must get to know the person

living in the forest”

Antonio Pedro

Antonio Pedro was born in the heart of the Amazon Forest, close to the town of Feijó: a place called the land of açaí, the tasty and earthy fruit that has given the world a taste of Northern Brazil. The current population adds up to about thirty thousand inhabitants. He lost his mother at birth and, like so many boys from that region, started working early. At ten years old, he was already in the rubber plantations where he would spend 42 of his years.

“God brings the cold according

to the clothes on your back”

Brazilian popular saying repeated by Antonio Pedro when explaining his life story

It was the time of the Amazon Rubber Boom: extracting latex from trees to produce and sell rubber was a profitable business. Many men and families were relocated into the forest in search of an opportunity to make a living. Many were born and raised in that region, like Antonio Pedro, and witnessed the activities’ negative impact on the land: environmental damage, temperature rise, violence against the local people.

“Today, we look at the forest

and watch it weep”

Antonio Pedro

It was in this daily dealing with the rubber plantations that this simple man came even closer to his essence: he learned from local indigenous people, “the first Brazilians”, how to tread through the bushes and identify animals and plants. From one of these people, a man called Pajé Inácio who lived for over 100 years, he learned the how each root and herb functions and discovered Ayahuasca.

He received the gift of verse from the tea, brewed from roots and leaves that he learned to prepare over profound yet simple rituals performed at his house, with his family. He already knew how to play musical instruments as a child, but only after the visions from the Ayahuasca works started coming to him, did he also receive lyrics from the forest spirits: singing the poetry from Amazon creatures was his true purpose. His first verse was completed at 14 years of age, but between his melodies and those he learned from his father – yet another man from the rubber plantations – there are dozens of choros, mazurkas, waltzes, dances, sambas, and other Acre state-rhythms that made Antonio Pedro a renowned popular artist in the region.

“There are two planets,

One belongs to the night,

the other belongs to the day.

On the way to the Sacred Light

Of Jesus and Mary”

Lyrics by Antonio Pedro

The way he sees it, everything that has any value is close and stays in the family. The forest is, much like the cosmogony of various Amerindian peoples, the great hand that teaches and feeds. People who are close and share their days together are the most celebrated ones. The principle lesson from the Science of the Forest was to share.

“The way I see it,

whatever is mine

is also everyone else’s”

Antonio Pedro

And one can’t talk about Antonio without talking about Carmem Almeida, too: they were married for over fifty years, had eleven children, and formed a musical partnership that only grew since their teenage years. She is the one who raises the volume on the healer’s verses with the indigenous notes that resemble delays and purposeful stretching of each musical phrase.

“The vine is the sacred cinema”

Antonio Pedro

Antonio Pedro’s art was as spontaneous as his days. He didn’t understand why faith required so many different names, separating those who could sing from those who could simply listen. He had the knowledge of curing solely that which lay in his path. And he regarded himself only as a passage through which he weaved and divided a screen to draw another way of living. With a soundtrack, and singing with love at the top of his lungs: he insisted he knew nothing else. So, leaving behind his enchanted singing as inheritance, this man joined the forest: gone. But others remain: Carmem stretches his teaching aside from his notes, and his eleven children grow his continuing roots. And, in each friend who ever sat beside him is the desire to broaden the senses of the world.