This article accounts, in a "as told by" format, a series of interviews with Abel Rodríguez, a respected sage and artist of the Nonuya people from the Amazon rainforest. Rodríguez discusses how his deep knowledge of the forest's flora and fauna—spiritual, material, and sentimental—is mediated through memory, word, and images.

Also known as the "plant namer", Rodríguez has extensive knowledge of plants, animals and their ecological relationships, which he translates onto his distinctive ink paintings on paper. His knowledge, gained from close observation of the mamo (shaman), is not biological but tied to the energy and stories that began the world.

When displacement brought him to Bogotá 30 years ago, Rodríguez began drawing plants for the Tropenbos organization, transforming memory into visual records. He notes that the process is one of remembering, naming, and translating the rainforest's forms and scents, recognizing that the drawing, like a child, will never perfectly replicate the living form; it must change.