An old foot injury acted up and I ended up base camping at my fantastic camp site only a mile and a half in for the entire six days, after resting up the second day doing day hikes up the canyon and a side trail. I’ve never stayed this long at a single camp site and it was interesting in a way, really allowing me to get the feel of this place. On the fourth day I felt that my head was in about as good a place as my head can get. I call it the three day phenomenon. After three days in the wilderness I always seem to settle into a really good mental place, especially on a solo trip like this. I had brought with me 4.1 dried grams of Cambodian psilocybin mushroom and woke thinking about the mushrooms. I felt slightly nauseas. It seems like every time I’m going to take mushrooms I wake up feeling slightly nauseas - maybe it’s fear? While I have never really had a “bad trip” with the mushrooms, I always fear them. Not only is the ego death scary, in this case I had not done a large dose for almost a year and I had a deep and abiding feeling that they (I think of the mushrooms now as “The Elders”) were going to hammer me - for my own good, of course. I had a big cup of coffee while I waited for air temperatures to come up and then when the temperature got up in the fifties, I made a tea of the mushrooms. I had not done this before and ended up putting the cup in my cooking pot, making a kind of double boiler since you do not want to boil them, and reheating them several times because the broth looked so thin. When I was done, the ¾ cup of broth that I had left after straining off the solids was still fairly thin looking, slightly yellowish. I held my nose and knocked it back about 10:30. I had been mashing the mushrooms for about an hour trying to squeeze out all the psilocybin that I could and the remaining ground up pieces of soggy mushroom had a distinct blue hue to them in the morning sunlight. This made me wonder even more about the potency of my broth and I told myself that I would probably end up having to eat that mushroom mush before this was all over.
I really wanted to try a mushroom broth just because I had never consumed them that way before but to be honest I was having a hard time getting up my nerve to take another large dose and I knew that this method would not yield the highest dosage - in other words, I was dancing around them kind of chickenshit.
I usually go through a period of chills and so retired into my tent to wait and see what would happen. Usually, they kick in after about forty minutes when eaten and I suspected that with drinking they might kick in a little bit quicker. They did. Just as I was starting to think that perhaps this broth had been as weak as it appeared, somewhat reluctantly contemplating eating the remaining blue mushroom mush, about thirty minutes after drinking it, they began to kick in. I immediately sensed then that the broth “worked” after all - it was coming on pretty strong. I had to overcome a not uncommon impulse to make myself throw up in an effort to stave off the effects - yea, I’m not a brave psychonaut! I lay in the tent then trying to relax and feeling them come on stronger every second.
I began to hear a slight crackling sound. Here we go! I thought kind of wildly
I breathed deeply, drawing breathe into the bottom of lungs and bringing it up until they were full and then releasing it from the top of the lungs down until empty. I tried to concentrate on my breathe and to keep it even and smooth and to not think; to just not think at all. But of course I thought. The mushroom that I took was from a single mushroom that had been about 45 grams wet, my biggest one. So being an American after all, I had thought that well this must be “the one”. Bigger is better, right? As I lay there, I reminded myself that I knew this mushroom, that is was nothing to fear. I visualized it in my mind, this particular mushroom growing, pulling it gently from its casing, holding it in my hand, noticing again in my minds eye how it was bigger than my hand, how beautiful it was ….
That seemed to assuage my fear a little and while I continued to deep breath, concentrating as best I could upon each breathe, I began to give myself to the effects. I knew that at this point I really had no choice. My choice had been made thirty minutes earlier and now I was in hands of what I had found to be a great and mysterious and frightening power. I was glad that I didn’t feel the need to fight it any more. I felt a little nauseas and crawled feebly out of my tent swaying slightly on my hands and knees and feeling vulnerable outside the tent even a few feet, like some small animal might feel vulnerable outside their hole. I found then that I did not really have to throw up after all - it was just the restlessness kicking in, my mind beginning to squirm as though in a somewhat desperate effort to escape the confines of my own skull.
Let me out! My mind screams, wanting desperately to tear off across the dry wilderness or scream away into the sky.



…sinking legs struggling deep down into the sandy earth
Ah …
Sitting, just sitting …
Sun driven winds blow me away across the dry land all in a rush
Flowing out of self in waves like the ripples from a pebble tossed into a pond
Dancing the one dance now, the immaculate rhythm of it all, possessed of all things and all things possessing me in motion
I, the earth, take one great breath and this is day
And with one great exhalation bring forth night,
Red cliffs with subtle purple shades smile above against an electric blue sky, smiling between the rich green spring growth along the Gila below, smiling like a brother would smile, a warm, brotherly love kind of smile. The Great Gaian mother of us all tells me that She was born of this earth, that She is of this earth as we are of our bodies, that She is not the earth itself but the spirit of the earth itself, as we are spirit and not this body itself. And yet of course She is the earth itself and She is us all and we are also our bodies ...
“I am the mother of your body,” she explains to me, “but I am not the mother of you, you who are eternity have no mother, no father".
I fall then forehead onto the sandy earth softly crying and wondering what lessons this place strives so violently to teach me - am so shallow? I should have seen, yes, of course She is not my mother. I wanted our Gaian Spirit to be my mother. It is a natural feeling. And then eternity smashes open everything with a blinding white light …

“Why are you back here,” The voice of the mushroom Elders addresses me sternly, almost annoyed - an unusual, impatient tone - and before I can think of what to say or even “look up” - I think I am still fallen face first into the earth - the Elders add emphatically, “You KNOW!”
When they say “KNOW” it is as if someone punches me in the stomach. My mind reels with it: Know what? I could not imagine. I look up and am on my knees before a great, bone white pillar backlit by a blinding white light and I somehow feel that the Elders voice has come from this pillar - there is nothing else, after all? “But I do not know!” I address myself to the enormous white pillar, “that is why I am back?”
And then the Elders sigh wordless exhalation, as if grown so very weary of me and the likes of me. I understand that it was their way of saying, “go ahead then”.
Suddenly I am weightless, beingless, at the place where we all come, the place beyond bone, beyond stone, the place where we have no staff to lean upon and no shield to hold up against the blows of fate - eternity. No womb, no birth, eternity. Eternity imploded and exploded at once and I feel as if I am gasping for air from the unfathomed ecstasy of eternity. I draw away at last in wonder … why am I such a child if I am eternity? No, I sense that eternity is beyond the scope of our physical universe, this physical universe and our 3 billion years of evolution are but a blinking of an eternal eye. Again the sheer magnitude of eternity hits me in the chest, even though I thought that I had pulled away, and again it takes my breath from me. I bear down into it then inwardly concentrating my being into a laser like beam - What is this eternity? How? Why? Locking onto this with all my being and bearing down into it all with a sharp, laser beam of pure, unadulterated question.
?
The thought occurs to me that death is not my father. I dismiss it like in meditation, watching it come and go, “death is not my father” the kind of thought that was capable of sucking one’s mind off into a dark and fruitless places. I knew then that I was here in this place to learn lessons of eternity, lessons helpful to negotiating eternity and I saw that this unique physical reality of ours, this earth where one sentient creature eats another sentient creature alive, where all who enter, enter through a woman’s womb, born of blood and pain into this often brutal and senseless reality of ours, this physicality teaches us lessons for negotiating the infinity of our own eternity, the endless halls of our higher selves - the self beyond this body, beyond even our souls. This world teaches us how to exist for an eternity, how to cope with what could become the hell of eternity by learning things that are so crucially human on this world like creativity, music, art - the power of imagination. Imagination like magic opens eternity up, billowing the sails of infinity with an endless source of creativity. Then I began to see how a God might create a universe and even RNA and then maybe God watches this for billions of years as we here on this earth might watch television for the evening.
Then a very sweet but confident female voice said softly, “David,” tapping her finger on a table at the same time, very gently, so that I had to listen, “David,” she urges gently, patiently, “Come back here, be here”.
Yes I see clearly what she is saying and open my eyes and thinking, “is that the voice of eternity now?” Laughing at myself. But It was not the voice of the Gaian mother? I become aware of myself physically again. Even though my hair had been tied back, I have to gather it up and tie it back again, all a mess. I look around for a second recalling where I am.
“Where are you going?” the voice of eternity asks again, just as patiently, tapping her finger ever so gently upon that table. “Come back here, where is there to go?”, she insists, laughing playfully so that I laugh along with Her - yes, where is there to go?
Good one, eternity.
I find a couple sticks nearby the tent after discovering that I can move. I go into the sunny field under the long line of western cliffs maybe three hundred feet above. The sun feels wonderful, instantly taking the temperature up from about sixty in the shade to eighty. I clap my sticks together and cry out a song about the cliffs, about the river. It was a good thing at this point to be so far out in the wilderness. I feel that I am communicating with the ravens and turkey vultures circling high overhead. I feel the message of eternity flowing through me, “be here, be now,” the most important lesson for an eternal being, I see. I thought of shaman then and cry out happily, giddily, “O you shaman, you!”


I feel through this energy how profoundly much I do NOT inhabit my own body. I feel how all of my life I have rejected the fullest expression of my being. I did not really possess my self. I pictured myself then standing alone in long, white robes, a drooping white hood keeping my face in shadow. I was not living, I was observing. I was not the character, I was the writer. To have observed so very much and yet know so very little, I wondered a little shrilly. It was kind of frightening. I feel as though I could slip into insanity with this part of it. I was beginning to come down. I feel myself coming down through layers, the sensation of down, of returning back to this earth, returning slowly layer by layer of reality to my actual body collapsed now in the shade overlooking this bright field. The Gila turns a bend to my left under the cliffs and a ribbon of new green spring leaf follows it in the form of various blooming plants drawn intimately close to the precious water of the Gila. I hear the cascading of water.
What could I have done to have sentenced myself to death? I wondered. Why would I want to punish myself by blowing my own head off! There it was, right there. Somehow I did not feel that I have a right to live. Who am I to live? As I continued down, I wrestled with these personal questions, grappling with the reality of my own dispossession. Was I always like this? It seems not. I recalled being a careless child. Something in adolescence then - but what? Hormones? I do not recall any trauma. Sure I had the bad childhood but who doesn’t? But I felt how I could never give myself to anything my whole life long and I felt how this was because I never did possess myself to give. I was just watching this self. No wonder I felt no joy! You have to possess your own being to feel joy! As I continued down through the layers over a number of hours, I began to think of myself in the 3rd person - “we’re coming down now” as if to emphasize the disassociation.
I watch other people in wonder, “how do they have so much fun? Watching sports, dancing, whatever?” I thought back to third grade watching newsreels of Hitler rallies in Nazi Germany at how appalled I was - not by the fascism, I was too young to really understand that, but by that vision of crowds numbering in the thousands all performing together, as if all were just one super organism - I rejected it viscerally. It made me want to flee the classroom. All those thousands in perfect unity like that! It made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. It was daunting to discover how perpetual my condition was. I never was a joiner. I never felt the jingoism of country going to war, never felt really the team spirit of being part of a team, even though I played sports. I cannot begin to imagine actually feeling some connection to a commercial or collegiate sports team? I began to wonder if I had ever truly inhabited my own body? For hours I wrestled with this as the Spring winds added their constant sighing to the cascading of the river.
I grow morose. I know this is what I came for but am already sick of my self and weary to go back to thinking of nothing. Back to that place in my self where eternity is only a word. That is the place where I feel comfortable, the place that I am used to.
The only answer was to be here and be now. That feels a little to much like a bumper sticker to me: “Be Here, Be Now” and as soon as eternity stopped tapping Her finger and calling me back, I drift more and more out of the moment as I come down. I feel hollow and depressed. The come down is jagged and hard and painful, as if putting myself back into a broken jar or trying to slip through a broken window. I feel that fully inhabiting my own being is hopeless - actually, what I think is : “we’ll never inhabit our own being!” And even though it is a beautiful Spring afternoon, I sit gloomily in the shade feeling quite helpless and hopeless. I feel sorry for myself, for being so close to eternity and yet so far away. I was just there and it was so real, I insist o myself but almost not believing it already. How could I be eternity - hell, I am not even really here?