My parents met in NYC in the 60s. She was an artist whose second husband had recently died of cancer. He was a scientist working at Columbia having recently done the deepest dive in the Bathyscaphe Trieste before Don Walsh took the vessel to the Mariana Trench. They were living in neighboring lofts.
My father was a Brooklyn-born son of Russian Jewish immigrants and a mid-thirties bachelor. My mother was a midwestern gal who was first married at seventeen and divorced after deciding to go to art school to live in a sweatshirt and a pair of corduroys for the next two years - not even wearing shoes or underwear. An unlikely pair, they had one major thing in common. They both wanted to raise children in the woods.
My Uncle Sam and Dad had bought 85 acres of swamp land in Connecticut that no one seemed to want. They could have bought 500 and until this day, this is one of my father’s greatest regrets. He got a grant from the federal government to rent bulldozers and dig out ponds to drain the land. This was great fun for a city boy - a revelation really. I don’t think he has ever gotten over the joy of playing with Earth-moving machines and power tools.
They moved to the land with my oldest brother when he was a baby and lived in a homemade tent structure with no running water or electricity. This they both loved. I was born six children later.
Now my father is in his nineties. After founding and running a biotechnology company from the 60s through the 2000s, all he cares about now is the land. His greatest love in life was making stone walls, digging ditches, battling the beaver, and cutting down dead trees. All he wants to know is that we will come to the land regularly to toil. He never wanted us to come to the land to relax. We were to work.
In many ways, our father views labor not just as a necessity, but as a source of deep satisfaction and fulfillment. His relentless dedication, bordering on workaholism, is a trait that some of us have certainly internalized. If there is one thing our father would like us to take from him, it is this.
I can see now that all of my life’s work is connected to the land. I made a dance company that works with scientists to create highly visual, sculpturally integrated full-evening works about wild nature. I make sculptures that are inspired by nature - all the while knowing that no human can compete with nature for beauty, complexity, and profundity. And now I am a psychedelic guide, focusing primarily on the compound that helps people connect the most deeply to nature - psilocybin. Not only that, I design nature retreats.
I hadn’t noticed it before, but I guess Dad got what he wanted from me in the end. I did dedicate my life to the land. I toil for the land. Just not only his acres and not in the way he imagined. I don’t build stone walls, cut down dead trees, and clear the old logging road into the woods regularly. I scaled up. I dedicate my life to Earth’s wild nature.
As a servant of the mushroom, I follow its message to support human consciousness blooming. One person at a time, I reintroduce travelers to the fabric of nature so they can feel a part of it again. Ah, bliss.