I just got back from the forest with a dear traveler. Her revelation, “I don’t know. I can’t know. And that is okay.”
By the time we get to be middle-aged, parents, or leaders in our fields, we are expected to know everything. We are expected to hold the weight. Take responsibility. This is exhausting, especially because it isn’t true. We are engaged in a duet with fate and a million elements we can’t predict or control. It is an improv.
When the mushrooms dissolved her usual construct, this is what this traveler was left with. I massive sigh of relief. There was a limit to what she could know, what she could control, and what she could take responsibility for. With her usual loop gone, she could see this. She could feel this. This seemed suddenly obvious.
I can fix it. I can make it beautiful. I can get it to work. I am empowered.
These statements all sound really good. And they are not always true.
One of the great gifts of psilocybin is it folds us into nature’s web once again and we can sense that we are part of this great fabric of time, space, and circumstance. We are part of the living biome. We are a thread in a much larger system at play. You can let down your egotistical fantasy for a while and feel what it would be like to know your own limits…the limits of your selfness and the limitlessness of nature.
She spent hours staring up into the redwood trees, feeling that the great mothers above her were laughing down at these silly apes, us, below. Our blip of life - they see us come and go. They stand tall and strong and weather fires. And they keep growing up towards the Sun’s love. Structurally hopeful.
“I am part of that.”