Feasting Friday (Apr 8, 2023)
In two days I'm getting on a plane and traveling to south america where over the span of the next three weeks I'll be drinking Ayahuasca seven times. I'm nervous and excited. People often ask some form of "if it works so well, why do you keep going back?" The classic response I've given is "If you brush your teeth and it works, do you stop brushing your teeth?" There's something about the nature of the question that annoys me when I'm not present, and tickles the feeling of tragedy in me when I am present.
We as modern people are the bastard children of a culture that taught us to fear nature, our emotions, and the chaotic (read dynamic) nature of the unconscious mind. Look out at what we've gotten for our forgetting: the #1 cause of death for our generation currently is overdosing, we're living in the current historical record for number of people disabled from mental illness (over 300 million).
The way we relate to nature, our emotions, and our psyche is not working.
A piece of the bastardization is our amnesia about our relationship with psychedelics states of consciousness and the plants that brought these altered states. Pick your favorite culture, at some point in their historical unfolding, they had a mystery tradition that used psychedelic plants to initiate the human ego (Greeks, Egyptians, Hindu, Irish, Germanic, indigenous people in the Amazon, Andes, Colombia, African tribes like the Bwiti, and thanks to research from The Immortality Key, your very own Christianity, Judaism, Islam show evidence of spiked wine, some weed, and maybe even ergot, a natural analog to LSD.
We are the worse for it that we've forgotten how to rhythmically dip into psychedelic states.
To be blunt, I believe these plants are our brothers and sisters, that our true mother is Gaia, and most of us who live in and were raised by Western Culture don't remember that Dad left Mom a long time ago and left our plant brothers and sisters with her, then told us we never had a mother (there is no Goddess in any of the monotheistic religions).
The reason I go back every year, is because I relate to Ayahuasca like she is a dear and magnificent friend. She doesn't have a phone, email, or any social media. Whenever her and I talk, I find myself weeping, laughing, and in awed disbelief at the profundity of existence. But even more importantly, she calls my attention to my blindspots. She helps me feel things I've ignored feeling for months or years. She feels like one of my closest friends.
Imagine asking "If your friend really helps you, why do you keep hanging out with them?"
I'm grateful to not be stuck in the worldview that sees psychedelics at worse, as the fruit of Lucifer himself, or at best, a kind of modern 'pill' to take to 'fix' ourselves so we can go back to work. I happily live in a worldview where Ayahuasca is a kind of god-friend I have. I'm really fucking grateful she lets me hang out with her.
As I prepare for my visit, I've stepped away from emails, texts, and social media. As I begin to feel myself slow down, I started crying yesterday.
I don't know if there is a word for it, but I began to feel an emotion that felt like what it would feel like to watch a montage of all your closest friends living their lives, succeeding, growing, learning, celebrating, and feeling the indescribable love that would emanate from your heart as you watched their lives,
but you aren't there.
As the bliss of their happiness hits you, your gut begins to ache as you watch huge swaths of their beautiful glorious lives unfold without you there. You could have been there. They wanted you there. But you weren't there.
You were living your life, they've been living theirs, and time marches on, unflinchingly.
That's the feeling I'm feeling as I begin packing.
I'm so proud of my friends and family. So many people I love are doing magnificent and admirable and generative things with their lives. I am too, but I look at my phone and see the dozens of unanswered texts, I look at my calendar and see the large spans of time I will be out of the country. I feel in my bones the legion of close friends I've gathered around me during my life, and how I haven't spoken to most of them once in the past year.
The truth is, I have a story that I need to be 'great' in order to worthy. My story of greatness currently involves hours of reading and writing, and producing the kind of art that gets remembered for hundreds of years. And this drive for greatness is the single heaviest factor that keeps me from connecting with my fiancé more, or connecting with my friend legion.
If I may be honest by not being faux-humble, the question I'm sitting with is -- if one is capable of producing once-in-a-generation art, are they obligated too? Can one create that kind of art but be a present Father, Husband, and friend? What examples do we have of great artists who were good fathers, husbands, and friends?
The beautiful tension I'm in right now is; I haven't yet birthed what feels like 'my work' in the world but I sacrifice the time with friends and lovers and families as if I have.
My eyes water as I write these words - has the sacrifice been worth it? Do I know how to be a friend? Am I hiding from intimacy and the world in my striving to be great? Is the drive to be great a defense mechanism that protected me from my childhood? Is my belief in myself delusional? Would 'healing' the core wound that produced this drive for greatness actually steal my fuel to fulfill it?
What if this is exactly the kind of thing I'm meant to struggle with, because of the art that wants to come through me?
What would I do if I felt whole, aligned, and clear?
I'd probably make art, and help Caitlyn make a child.
All this I bring with me as I get ready to see my dear friend Ayahuasca.
I'll bring back her responses and my stories.
I love yall.
Song on Repeat This Week:
This is the song that got me in my feels yesterday.
Thang I'm Reading This Week:
Not In His Image - Recommended by my brother Christian Pitti, this is the best book I've ever read of Gnosticism. I've had a gripe with Gnosticism most of my adult life because I saw it used as a worldview to justify smart young men opting out of the game of life and concluding it's all fucked, it's all the demiurge baby, etc. This book cleared up my misunderstanding and BLEW ME AWAY with everything Gnosticism did understand. Wow. Very good.
Quote I’m Dancing With This Week:
"“The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.”
-Joseph Campbell
"The small boy is still around, and possesses a creative life I lack."
-Carl Jung
My Favorite Journal Prompt This Week:
Begin writing down the names of the first 5 friends of yours that come to mind. Now write a little blessing for each of them where you imagine them triumphing over something, or being transformed by something, or coming across the just right luck, and with your words, write a letter of congratulations to them as if the fantasy vision had come true.
Over you're finished, maybe give one of them a call or text.