When it is over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride, married to amazement.
— Mary Oliver
Midway through my psychedelic experience, having said goodbye to Mom and Fiver, I find myself on a beach. It’s quiet, peaceful. There’s a gentle surf lapping on the shore, clear blue sky. There is a sense of eternity, removed from the horrors of the everyday world. It feels like Grey’s Anatomy during Meredith’s endless COVID season and… oh my gosh is this where it came from, did I steal my liminal space from Shonda Rhimes, why have I just now realized this?
Oh this is distressing.
Okay, carry on.
I am on this beach, this beautiful peaceful beach, but I am not looking for peace. I am looking for answers.
I am in search of how to navigate through this terrifying world.
So I say, firmly, to the universe, I know the future is not a peaceful beautiful beach. I know the future is terrifying. Show me the truth. Show me the monster.
A huge black cloud appears on the horizon. It looks exactly like the monster I have always imagined, like the Grim Reaper, like a Death Eater.
I am thrilled, like Meredith Grey getting her first solo appendectomy. I have been training for this! I am ready to face the monster.
I don’t feel even a little bit afraid, as I approach the darkness. Decades of research have shown that this is a safe space in which to confront one’s fears.
Show me the terrors yet to come, I command.
And it vanishes.
Immediately gone.
Well. Did I not pay for a better SFX budget on this trip? Also, this is lazy trite writing, and I am disappointed in the mushrooms. From a metaphorical perspective, “your problems are all in your mind” is really kindergarten level insight. And it is, frankly, insulting to try to make this case to me, a person alive in 2023.
The world around me stays peaceful. Refuses to get all worked up.
There is nothing out there scarier than what is inside you. All that evil you fear? It’s all just smoke.
“Climate change!” I shriek, enraged. “How can you tell me nothing scary is out there when the planet is literally melting? Have you not met our past President?”
And the air, the light behind me, the white light like the sun behind me, the warm white light behind me that is separate from me but also I am part of it, the light says,
It’s true. The planet is burning a little hot right now, the voice says. It’s an experience, like any other. We’ve been hot before. And we’ll be cool again.
I feel those words all the way inside me. It isn’t a denial of reality. It isn’t a reassurance that climate change won’t progress, or that democracy will be saved. It simply offers a truth that cannot be denied, this sense of an endless cycle where all things happen, and keep happening.
We’ve been hot before. And we’ll be cool again.
I feel this incredibly serene, peaceful, empathetic wave that came over me. Like the entire ocean is made of peace, the world is filled with light, and all I have to do is stand inside it.
To The Left
“So what is my responsibility in the world?” I ask. “If the world is burning hot, what am I supposed to do?”
And the answer comes, gentle, calm, like a teacher showing a student how to read. There is a sense that this is important, but it is not hard. It is not scary. It is simple.
If the world is too hot, then you can be cool.
If the world is too cruel, then you can be kind.
If the world has too much pain, then you can ease suffering.
I experience heat as a bright red force, as a planet that is bright red with anger, with heat, with dismay. And I feel inside me the possibility of being not red. Of being not hot.
I feel inside me the possibility of going the other way. The voice that is not a voice is firm. It offers me a clear direction.
Mom and Fiver are with you, I hear. They are on your right side. But your job now is to go to the left.
I stretch out my left hand.
I hear the sensation, the voice that is not a voice.
Look to the left.
What is to the left will save you.
I wonder, “How do I know any of this is real? What if this is just a story I’m trying to tell myself, to feel better? How do I really know I will be okay?”
And then the plot twist.
I Already Caught You
The medicine says to me, in words that are not words but just a truth that settles inside me.
Remember when you fell yesterday?
Yes, of course I do.
It was your left hand that caught you. That underused, neglected left hand. The one you don’t write with, or brush your hair with. The hand you never use. You were falling. Your right hand was no good. Your right hand was all bound up. You were heading for ceertain injury.
And your left hand, at the last moment, caught you.
The bruise radiates from the center of the palm. I twist my hand, I look at it. At what it did, what it already did.
The fall was part of the trip, the voice says. You were already tripping when you were falling.
I’ve always told Steve that my love language is not words of affirmation. I don’t believe them. “It’s easy to tell me you love me!” I always say to him, with a tone that makes loving me probably a little more difficult. “Anyone can say anything! If you want me to believe your love, you have to show me!”
It occurs to me: did the mushrooms know that?
They knew I wouldn’t believe an affirmation that I would feel all wonderful things again, so they made me freezing in a hot room.
They knew I wouldn’t believe a promise I would be protected if I fell, so they protected me when I fell. The universe didn’t promise to catch me. The universe showed me: I already did.
It is a jolt of truth. It is something beyond a story, and I look to my left. The left.
What is to the left? I ask, and I keep asking, and I keep listening.
Time passes.
The guide, who has been chanting and dancing and waving branches in my face at various intervals through the day, is now singing in English, which I take as a sign, a conductor pulling the train into the station. I take a breath. I open my eyes.
The guide is sitting opposite me. The room is strewn with branches and instruments, and the candles are still burning.
When I closed my eyes four hours ago, before I started to shiver, I was sitting on the futon, a lamp shining on my right side. I know that lamp was the origin of the light I sensed when Mom and Fiver were cosplaying Lion King on the cliff.
Now, when I open my eyes at the end, I am sitting cross legged on the floor. The single lamp is still burning, but I have changed directions.
Now the light is on my left.
After
It has been just over two years since I took the medicine, since the medicine said go to the left, the left side will catch you. Two years since I started to explore what was to the left. It wasn’t a simple answer. It was a compass, like following a trail in a thick forest, a diamond blazed on a path, a cairn of stones. Two years I’ve been following the trails, and I think I’m getting a sense of where the medicine is asking me to go.
In a world that is filled with grief, in a world where we long to be “great again” because we fear we never will, this is a different story. It’s not a story about everything we’ve lost.
It’s a story about everything that’s left.
The medicine, I believe, was trying to signal something deeper. Something different than me.
I’m not the only one on this journey, either.
Last year, at a Board meeting for one of my favorite clients, I sidled up to one of the Board members. Florence Williams is an award-winning science writer whose book The Nature Fix is my favorite resource on all the wild ways in which nature changes us, the power of the nature story itself. Florence has written about her own experience with psilocybin. I approached her as a genuine fan, and also as someone else looking for signs in the forest.
I grasped around for how to summarize what I have figured out so far. It’s not six syllables, it’s not a story at all, but it is an idea. It’s a spark. It’s something.
It starts with one word. One word that, somehow, sparks an entirely different narrative. A single word, and from that word, an idea, a light, a path, towards everything that’s left. It’s one word, and the whole world.
It’s an arrow to a distant mountaintop that I am feeling called to travel upon, the direction I’m pointing my single beam of light.
I think this is the way to go, I said to Florence. I think this is what the mushrooms were trying to tell me.
Almost every ancient religion used psilocybin the same way that forests do: to show us things. To enlighten us. The experts suggest that perhaps mushrooms emerge in the culture at a time when we need to repent. It’s a common theme in scripture. The need to go the other way.
I told Florence what I think I’m hearing. What I think the medicine is trying to say to me.
“Yes,” she said, with the smile of a person who published her story and now hears other people’s stories all the time.
“That’s what they’re saying to everyone.”
.
This is one chapter in a year-long saga of love, grief, and the stories we tell to survive it all. To start from the beginning, go here. Or subscribe for free to get a new chapter (almost) every week.
How ironic that when I “fell” it was my left ( and dominant ) hand that I relied on and thus shattered. I now had to rely on my right which has always been pretty useless up to now. During this disaster we will also dealing with the sudden death of one of our best friends from pancreatic cancer. I felt totally useless and realized I can’t do it all and have changed the direction of my life to be grateful for all I have and as my beloved Gramma said,”We do the best!” I’m a work in progress for sure but heading in the “right” direction I hope. Thank you for the reassurance!❤️
I recently had a profound experience at a holy well in Ireland where I heard, as you describe, not words but knowings. During it there was this very strong pull to the left, and slightly backward, behind me.