MY MIND ON PLANTS

A few months back, when we were still getting ready for the June edition of Camp Wildling, Kelly sent out a request for tapestries and decorative blankets. She said “You know, the kinds of blankets you used to hang in your parents’ basement while smoking pot.” She was so surprised when she found out that I had never had such a teenage experience. First of all, no one in Oklahoma has a basement. You might have a basement, but it’s the kind of basement that is barely tall enough to stand up in. [Side rant: Yes, I understand that it makes zero sense for an area known as “Tornado Alley” to have homes without basements. There’s some sort of geological reasoning behind not digging a basement into the foundation. I just don’t really know the details of it.]

Secondly, I was raised by very devout Southern Baptists. There was zero alcohol in that house. I will still hesitate to order any kind of alcoholic beverage in front of my mother and have been known to decline just to avoid her judgmental stare. There was only one time my Dad ever brought home alcohol. I was a teenager and the last one left in the house with my parents. Dad came home with a six pack of beer and I was shocked. He told me that he found it in the parking lot at the grocery store and that he was going to make beer biscuits. I was forty five years old (yeah, this year) before it occurred to me that Dad had not ‘found’ that beer. He had purchased that beer. He had purchased that beer because he had wanted a cold brewsky, not a goddamn biscuit.

It’s not that I am completely naive when it comes to alcohol and marijuana. It’s just that I never really had that young ‘adult’ time of experimentation that many people got to have. My vision was tunneled in to school and a future career. I’m not upset by this. Not even remotely. It’s just that I am pretty much middlish aged and there are a few things that I realize that I would like to experience at least just once. I’m not talking about anything hard core. I’m not going to take up heroin or crack (are those the same thing? I don’t even know). I’m just a little interested in psilocybin and a few months ago I was gifted some in mushroom form. I did not take them the minute they were gifted to me because I wasn’t ready. I had research to do first and planning. It was all very scientific. I interviewed experienced people about how much to take and what to expect. Everyone I asked told me to be in nature for this experience. Really…that is all anyone could really say. “Take it on an empty stomach, maybe with orange juice and be in nature.” As for what to expect, I could not get a straight answer from anyone. This is probably because everyone’s experiences are different and when I did finally take my first dose, I took notes like I would for my scientific notebook.

The effects that I experienced where very subtle. It turns out that my first dose would be considered a microdose. I did sit for what felt like hours just writing down a story that is building inside my brain. That night when I went to bed, I slept so soundly that I did not hear the boisterous group of young men playing some sort of game in the their tent in the campsite next to us. I slept until after eight the next morning and only got up when I did because Josephine was standing on me, looking down into my face as if to say “it is time to get up now.” In the week that followed though, I felt a noticeable difference. It was is if a switch in my brain had been flipped from negative to positive. There was a day last week when I was interrupted while in the middle of my yoga practice. Not only was I okay with pulling my shoes on and fixing the problem, but I went back to my mat and finished my practice.

Michael Pollan, in This is Your Mind on Plants, has this to say about psilocybin:

Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.

It is no secret that I have been feeling creatively stuck for some time. I just keep cranking out photos and words out of habit, while hoping that at least one photo or written thing will be something I am proud to have created. I have been in a loop of rumination. Maybe I was hoping that taking mushrooms would get me out of that loop. Maybe I was hoping that I would have some profound vision or experience that would nudge me out of a lot of different grooves. I was talking to a friend about all of this recently and our conversation turned to ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is an intense hallucinogenic experience. It involves a Shaman to guide you through your visions and it is very popular among celebrities. People who have experienced it rave about the life changing visions they experienced, only barely mentioning the intense vomiting that comes with taking ayahuasca. There is a part of me that kind of wants to have this experience, but there is a bigger part of me that knows that I don’t need this kind of experience. I can only imagine having visions of letting go of things I am unwilling to release. Also, I avoid anything that involves mild vomiting. Forget intense vomiting. No thank you.

I have more scientific experiments to do, but for now this is my mind on plant.