Blue rings of wonder and delight!

Entheogen:

An entheogen ("generating the divine within") is any chemical substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context that often induces psychological or physiological changes

Or, in this case, a kind of fungus that brings on an “oh, holy shit!” moment.

Been a long time since I’ve had a chance to chat with machine elves over a cup of cosmic tea. Easily since the fall of 1992. I was a new bookmobile man back then. Had a route that took me through Forest Park in Everett, Washington. Just finished visiting the kiddos at the local preschool. Enthralled them with a story time and a visit on the bus and was heading back to the branch when I looked out the side window as I got ready to make a turn onto the boulevard when I spied a patch of what I knew for certain to be psilocybe cyanescens, or wavy blue caps to the layman. It didn’t take but a moment to go back around the park, back the bus into a parking spot and take a gander at the flower bed on foot and close up.

One of the great things about that park in the late afternoon of October was the deep dark secret woodiness of it all. It was easy for a library staffer to disappear for a few moments into the underbrush. The park was ringed with rhododendron beds and towered over by all manner of evergreen trees. The flower beds were sodden underfoot but since it was still early fall not damp and uncomfortable to stroll around in. My investigation revealed that the flower beds were not just casually strewn with mushroom beds but absolutely redolent with them. I took off my hat and filled it up with a few handfuls of squeaky wonder, got back up into my ride and finished up my day checking in books and restocking my truck. I went home, did a spore reading and found out that I had in my hand a very potent hallucinogen, something that I had been seeking for quite a long time.

I was no stranger to psychedelic mushrooms but this was the first time I had found them in the field. It’s one thing to get them from a reliable dealer, all desiccated and ready for play, another thing entirely to find them out and about, field guide in hand, with the mysteries of the universe right there before you in a garden bed. Stumbling on those shrooms that day was something I never expected, let alone needed, to have happen. I was new in state, new to my job and a relatively new dad to boot, with all the glories of child rearing all still fairly fresh and new to me. Somehow it was meant to be, I suppose, but try telling that to a new mother with a babe at her breast. I am sure that no matter how excited I was to have discovered a cyanescen goldmine, it seemed pale in comparison to all the worries and concerns that were delivered to our door on a daily basis.

We were living in Seattle at that time.We were both going through divorces. home foreclosures and post partum blues. It was the height of the grunge era and the city was steeped in youth culture and a sort of electronic sound not experienced since the days of the Doors and the Beatles. I was still relatively new in the profession and very new to big city life. It was a novel experience, dressing up for work in flannels, Doc Martin shoes and bulky sweaters, listening to Soundgarden, Pearl Jam and Nirvana and cruising the city looking for rock band posters stapled onto telephone poles. The city was not overloaded with newbies at that time, rents were still reasonable and the tech industry was just starting to get off the ground. Seattle still felt funky back in those days. Artists still lived in the warehouses north of downtown, the Dome was still hosting ballgames and concerts and there wasn’t a Trader Joe's or a decent Mexican food restaurant to be found anywhere in the city limits.

Seeing those mushrooms changed my mission, no doubt, just as it was meant to be. How could I deny them? The flower beds were lush with loamy soil and the wavy caps were sitting there, sunny side up, smiling at me, prolific. I really had no idea what I was doing back then, had no mycological sense and sensibility. I just jumped in those beds like a crazy man, pulled them out by the stem, by the fistful, decimating the beds and all future hope of harvest. All I saw before me in the wispy, Northwest sunlight was endless doses of psychedelic splendor, all waiting for me to harvest and take home and dry. And so I did. I took them up to my study, rigged up a drying table with a ceramic heater and an old Coca Cola case box and, grocery bag after grocery bag, dried them out a tray’s worth at a time. My partner, babe in arms, was patient but flabbergasted. What the hell was I thinking bringing so much contraband into the house? I know that they came out of a city park but they were still illegal as hell to have around, especially in that sort of volume.

I don’t think I really cared too much at the moment, I was too caught up in the bounty before me. It wasn’t until I damn near lost it on my maiden voyage that the burgeoning bounty in the freezer section of my refrigerator seemed to be a liability. But before that pivotal moment all I could think about was the trading value of what I had in the house. I thought, yes, those SoCal pals of mine would be more than happy to trade me ounce for ounce, hongos for mota. Little did I know that they would be just as freaked out as my partner was when they received a box of fungi from me in the mail. What the hell was I thinking, indeed!

Like all good journeys this one had its first steps. For me I thought it was going to be a typical Friday night. Some brews, a bit of bud and a fistful of hongos to round out the action. Looking back,  I must admit that I was a rube. I had it in my head I was just the same party boy of old and that there wasn’t anything out there, psychedelic wise, that I couldn’t handle. Sheesh, was I in for a surprise!  Also, the reference librarian in me had been asleep at the switch on the planning part of that trip, too. Part of it had to do with the lack of available study materials. Outside of an old copy of The Psychedelics Encyclopedia and a careworn copy of the Petersen Field Guide to Mushrooms there was little to work with. The Stamets guides were long gone off my local library shelves. There was no Erowid site to guide me, no online forums of folks who had tripped on these things to help me define dose or reasonable expectations nor were there books to spell out warnings or give me any sensible and important cautionary tales. I was going to be a solo psychonaut blazing a trail to the stars and I was going to go up in that rickety ship of mine without a guidebook, a compass or a navigator. While I chewed up my first mouthful of mushroom I must have felt a bit like one of Roger’s Rangers when he was told that they were going out west to see the natives. That Ranger was not only scared shitless but he must have had a boat load of questions to ask. I know that I did but the answers were forthcoming. Almost immediately.

In those days Friday night in my house generally meant movie night. Who was I to mess with routine? So, after snacking on my hongos I sat down in the comfy confines of my Victorian easy chair and popped in The Searchers. I don’t remember the room transforming but it did. It went from an upstairs room in an old Craftsman to the upper balcony of the Fox West Coast Theater I used to frequent as a kid. The curtains parted and before I knew it I was there in the opening scene, when John Ford opened the door to the ranch house to better tell his tale. All too quickly the film became too much to handle. I have no idea what happened to my partner and my kid as the house began its transformation into the wildest and most colorful carnival a home as ever been. It was a riot of color, patterns and auditory wonderment. Wave after wave of architectural designs, Mayan motifs, graphical overlays and otherworldly symbols not only splashed before my eyes but turned my home into some sort of land where giants, gnomes, fairies and elves cavorted and ancient spirits dwelled. It was as if all the folk tales, color palettes, classical tomes and mystical places all descended and overlaid themselves over every surface in that house.

After three or four hours of being pretty much out of my mind I went downstairs and settled into the bathroom, next to the toilet, thinking at the time I should just unload my gut. I was sitting next to the River Styx and was waiting for the Boatman to cross but he was off duty that night. My partner, gawd bless her good senses, decided at the last minute not to call the parameds that evenng. I can only imagine what kinds of horrors would have been visited upon me that night with a stomach pump as a sidekick!

The rest of the evening was like any other good tripping experience. The colors slowly faded, the sound effects quieted down, my mind settled into a beatific groove and the wild and otherworldly visions took a powder and left the building. I woke up the next day completely exhausted and confounded with the journey I had undertaken but like any good psychonaut couldn’t wait to do it all over again. Thanks to the bounty I harvested from that city park there were plenty of other trips to be had that fall, some solo, others with a good friend of my mine who had relocated to the city years before. But unlike my so many of less prosaic experiences with LSD those shroom trips had a pretty heavy spiritual overlay to them, one that said to me two things: first, those entheogens were special and were not to be taken in a lighthearted manner. Second, like any other lessons learned the hard way, I was content with the lessons I learned that fall and put them away after that.

Time flies. It has been over twenty-five years since I’ve visited the land of the machine elves. I went back to the Pacific Northwest a few years ago to visit my old haunts, to see what I could dig up. Before I left that old job of mine I was up to almost a dozen sites around the city where I was fortunate to find the blue ringers. Those days must have been pretty special indeed as not a one of my old mushroom beds had not even one hongo for me to take away and savor.

I am a older and wiser man these days, much more so than I was when I was happily tripping around in the rhodie beds of yore. I have learned a lot of hard, valuable lessons since then, ones that have given me insight not only into who I am but more on how the world works. I feel that those moments I spent quaffing hongos like party snacks are long behind me. I look forward to peering over my shoulder again someday and spying on another bed of sacred mushrooms, just so I can visit with machine elves again. I think, finally, that I am mindful enough, patient enough to appreciate the lessons that come from voyages with entheogens. I feel that I am a better man thanks to my past experiences with psychedelics, have a much richer and much more humbling respect for natural tripping agents and have learned to master the language of the machine elves in such a way that I value the listening much more than I do the speaking. At 58 I feel I am ready to experience that upcoming voyage like the leader and the spiritual guide that I now believe myself to be.

My ears are open. Hongos, call out my name again. I am here, patiently awaiting your return.

Salud!

Magic mushrooms: wild party toy or serious medicine?
http://www.thecannabist.co/2016/12/01/magic-mushrooms-psychedelic-ease-anxiety-depression/68533/

The Shroomery! Wild tales! Humbling stories!
https://www.shroomery.org/

Books by Paul Stamets:
http://www.fungi.com/shop/mushroom-books/books-by-paul-stamets.html

The Atlantic Magazine!
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/the-life-changing-magic-of-mushrooms/509246/

Terence McKenna and Machine Elves 101:
http://realitysandwich.com/55798/machine_elves_101/

Terence interview:
http://roychristopher.com/terence-mckenna-meets-the-machine-elves-of-hyperspace-struck-by-noetic-lightning

The Psychedelics Encyclopedia!
http://www.federaljack.com/ebooks/Psychedelics%20Encyclopedia%20-%20Peter%20Stafford%5Bpdf%5D%5Badeelamalik%5D%5B10-08-2008%5D/Psychedelics%20Encyclopedia%20-%20Peter%20Stafford.pdf