The Hidden Way is a a beautifully illustrated novel containing myths and legends culled from travels into the Amazon. 13 years in the making, Harrison Love’s book offers a rich understanding of indigenous cultures, and a deep dive into the purpose of making art, which in his own words, “preserves a sense of the divine.”
That spiritual journey is what infuses the book, through Illustrations as meaningful as words. It is in all ways a lovely and lovingly told journey. The illustrations were created using lineloeum and woodblock printing, with each print colored using techniques from watercolor to spray paint and stencils. There is a sense of myth making and creating in these images as well as woven throughout the text.
As poetic as it is compelling, the book not only follows a journey, it depicts and creates its own. “The stars returned to their daytime hiding places. Each day upon realizing that they were still alone in the wilderness, relying upon something so fleeting as a dream to guide them, the absurdity of their circumstances gave way to panic,” Love writes.
To some extent serving as Love’s doppelgange, the character of Khay traverses many places and mystical spaces. Toward the end of the book, she is told, “You were chosen because you are a good student of the old ways, and because you value the power of myth. You seek knowledge with a clear altruism…” This is appears to be what Love hopes for the reader as well.
Along with a spiritual quest, the book also serves as an environmental one, referencing more than once the destruction of the jungle. “We cannot feel the moments of time pass until we recognize the last of them, when we have little time left. We were told that every day our own people cut into the jungle and lay waste the soil that their ancestors had tended…”
In terrible concert with the loss of the natural world, another loss hovers over the book, equally as powerfully heartbreaking. “Without our stories, we too may have our way of life lost to the deserts of time.”
The Hidden Way seeks to illiuminate those stories, retelling them in an immersive, sometimes feverish unspooling. It reconstructs the mysths told among the tribes of the Peruvian Amazon and other Shamanic peoples. According to Love, some specific shamanistic myths were included from cultures outside Peru in order to reveal the loss of some of these traditional practices.
Shamanism itself is considered to be a study of the self, conjoined with a belief in the spiritual realm that is hidden from the human eye, but according to the author it can also be sought “in the depths of meditation or introspection,” or in the pages of this book.
The work itself unfolds as if through a meditative trance; it is a dance of words that follows a rhythm unusual in its variance between action and dream-like description. This is not to say that the book is difficult or histrionic; and while Love says it was written to pay tribute to the heritage of Shamanic teaching, a heritage too often disregarded, it is also not a history tome.
Rather, it serves as tribute and eulogy, connection and hope, revealing a culture and its stories in an immediate and absorbing fashion. Within these stories, there are spirits and quests, silence and energetic action, portents and promises. It is a kaleidoscopic story, filled with both an urgent immediacy and a profound respect for the mysterious wisdom and the practices it describes within the story.
A travel book like no other and a poem to past and future, inner being and the adventurous heart, The Hidden Way definitively takes readers on quite a journey.
Love is a painter, author, illustrator, and skilled muralist. The book he has created here is a mural of words, guiding the reader through a search for wisdom, power, and above all else, the redemption of a new beginning. Highly unique, the book can be favorably compared to the works of Carlos Castaneda. Those with a mystic heart and a taste for adventure, read on.
- Genie Davis; images and advance copy provided by the book’s author
