Dispatch from the Crystal Cathedral
Last month, on a horse farm in rural Kentucky, my husband and I dropped acid. An ice storm had swept through the state on the morning of the day we arrived, leaving every tree branch, pebble, and blade of grass encapsulated in a translucent sheath of crystalline ice.
We spent two nights there, and the whole time, the ice never melted, never changed. It looked so fragile, but it was sturdier than it looked. A suspended frozen moment, inside which we rattled around, walking and eating and breathing and laughing.
This is something we do once a year: Carefully select a setting, set some intentions, hold hands, and leap from the cliff of normal cognition into a psychedelic sea. It always feels slightly scary. It always feels slightly sacred. It always gives me cause to notice how close those two words are: scared and sacred, sacred and scared.
We’ve been immersed in fear for a solid year now. Fear for ourselves and our loved ones, our communities, our industries, our waning stamina in navigating the unceasing uncertainty.
I feel afraid when I write these newsletters, and I feel really afraid when I send them. It feels like sending naked pictures of my brain and heart to hundreds of people.
I felt a different kind of afraid when I went grocery shopping for the first few times last March and April, bobbing and weaving through invisible currents of virus-soaked air, taking whichever avocado I picked up, no matter how over- or under-ripe I discovered it to be, to avoid leaving potentially virus-soaked avocados in my wake. Squeezing and leaving avocados was a luxury for less terrifying times.
I feel afraid when the local daily case count ticks up. With every report of a new, more transmissible variant. With every story of lingering Covid symptoms slowly destroying people’s lives. Not so much for myself anymore, but afraid for our society, afraid this angst will never end.
When reality is this scary, how much scarier can the psychedelic version be? (Still, I get scared every time we do it. But I think it was Eleanor Roosevelt who said, "Do one thing every day that scares you." So there we go. Eleanor Roosevelt wants me to do LSD. Who am I to argue?)
In fact, more and more research is supporting the use of psychedelics to help release people from fear. They can help treat depression and anxiety; they can help people with terminal illnesses make peace with their impending deaths. They can shake us out of patterns that feel intractable, revealing new vistas, unlocking visceral experiences of expansion, oneness, and awe.
They can help shatter the illusion of being a small and separate self in a big and menacing world.
There’s a scene I love in the movie Apocalypto, which is set in the Amazon jungle: A young man named Jaguar Paw is out hunting with his father and other members of their tribe when they encounter another tribe fleeing in fear from some kind of threat. Jaguar Paw is concerned.
When he and his father return to their village, Jaguar Paw’s father says, “What did you see on those people?”
“I don’t understand,” says Jaguar Paw.
“Fear,” says his father. “Deep, rotting fear. They were infected by it. Fear is a sickness. It will crawl into the soul of anyone who engages it. It has tainted your peace already. Strike it from your heart. Do not bring it into our village.”
I think about that scene a lot.
It's almost spring again, a year into this slow-burn catastrophe. I worry that fear has infected our village. That even as the objective risk of Covid diminishes with every vaccination, we won’t be able to extricate the fear that has burrowed into our spirits, and we will expect safety to be our primary guiding principle from now on, sacrificing other values on its altar.
Connection, joy, adventure, expansion, the right of each person to determine for themselves their personal balance of risk and reward — all taking a backseat to caution. Leaving us so tightly bound in bubble wrap that we can't breathe.
I realize, of course, that this is itself a fear.
My friend Craig reminded me recently that the most repeated phrase in the Bible is “Be not afraid.” I am trying.
At the peak of my trip on the horse farm, I sat on the floor of the house’s vaulted loft, eye-level with a giant window overlooking an ice-coated forest.
The trees were bare, their trunks glowing and pulsing blue-green with lichen. The branches criss-crossed in a network that looked for all the world like neurons, like synapses.
As I stared, I was no longer looking at it, but in it — surrounded by a neural web that was blue-green with life, icy with stillness, encompassing all energy at once, frozen and alive and complete. It was holding me up. And then I was dispersed within it, no longer a discrete being, but part of this network of energy and light.
Later, we gradually returned to earth. We ventured outside to take some pictures, reheated some chili, and watched some Netflix, laughing at the intensity of the day.
But this is what I retain, and what I offer: When you’re held in the web of life, as everything is, there is no way to fall.
Of course, LSD is far from the only path to this truth. I sense whispers of it often in meditation. Others access it through prayer or transcendent religious experiences. Regardless, there it is, all the time: the sacred, permeating everything, even when we're scared. Asking us to walk through fear, and find the vista behind the veil. Reminding us that there’s actually nothing to be afraid of at all.
Brain Food
I enjoyed this piece on the connection between risk and creativity. "Creativity is the act of making something from nothing. It requires making public those bets first placed by imagination. This is not a job for the timid. Time wasted, reputation tarnished, money not well spent—these are all by-products of creativity gone awry. This too is part of the process. Creatives fail and the really good ones fail often."
I'm mildly obsessed with a show on HBO called How To with John Wilson. The best way I can describe it is visual essays that are wry, insightful, and laugh-out-loud funny. Even if you don't have HBO, just watching the online trailer will give you a chuckle.
I recently discovered Chloé Valdary, who created an innovative framework for compassionate antiracism based in radical love and a rigorous exploration of the humanities. Her work feels inviting, expansive, and nourishing to me, and I'm grateful to have found her.
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Until next time, sending much love and courage,