“Tell me a story.” She was wasted on my couch, I was killing myself trying to forget that she had a fiancé. And, apparently, despite my manifold attempts to pique her interest in some water, she was more concerned with stories. I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I grew to know Hallie, she would teach me the value of stories. Stories celebrate all of the weird shit that happens between birth and death; all the random, pseudo-important details that fill in the lines, so to speak, and end up anthologized in our minds so we can pass them around the Thanksgiving table like some aesthetico-spiritual turkey.
This is one of my favorite stories, and I think Hallie would agree. Mostly, it’s a story about beauty, but if that’s too simple for your tastes, I could call it something academic and obscurantist. Then again, if you’re the sort of person that does that to beauty, maybe you shouldn’t be reading my stories. In any event, it’s about beauty, but it starts with mushrooms. I’d experimented with psilocybin once before, and my experiences had led me to believe that I would be fine so long as I meditated beforehand. Having achieved that state, I found myself looking down at the bag of dry fungus on the floor before me. I put the drugs down like Pringles, devouring a full eighth in no time flat. If you’ve never had this experience, well, you should; but I’ll do my best to articulate it to you as the story progresses.
I left the sanctity of my dark, sparsely decorated room and rejoined the group proper, which consisted of Hallie and her friend Sara. Hallie was still struggling to get the drugs down, as many people are not hip to the taste of fungus. Still, she pulled through like a champion, and the story began.
I am fortunate that, in introducing our merry cast of characters, many adjectives can be used to describe both parties. “Tall,” “slim,” and “pale” can apply equally to Hallie or myself, and we both have hair of a particular wave and thickness that serves to impede manageability at every turn. I clock in at about one seventy, having lost fifteen pounds to a failed experiment with vegetarianism, and was wearing my usual summer uniform of torn jeans, ratty tennis shoes, and a USA longsleeve turned inside out – because I’m grateful to be an American, and very, very lucky, but seldom if ever proud.
To convey Hallie’s appearance in two words, I would go with “fashion sense.” Not the bland, yuppified fashion of consumerist brand-touting, but the simple yet inspired fashion that combines an earth tone skirt, hippie-ish jewelry, and knee-high combat boots into a workable and alluring aesthetic. Just the right amount of body mod rounds out the ensemble: piercings in the ears, nose, and eyebrow, with a smallish tattoo. The fact that it’s a dragonfly has no bearing on the story whatsoever, but I can’t very well mention a tattoo and leave it at that.
Oh – and long legs. That’s critical. Long legs, and long, beautiful black hair.
With the help of a sober Sara and a vehicle of questionable condition, we began our trek toward the Rock House, a cave of particular spiritual value to me located about forty minutes into the Athenian woods. That would be Athens, Ohio, which is to Bohemia what the other Athens is to democracy. The weather was sunny with a light chill, but Hallie opted to go barefoot anyway, expounding to me the virtues of embracing the earth on a tactile level. Though I would come to walk as many as eight miles barefoot in these woods, as a neophyte to hippie-dom I opted for my trusted if bedraggled footwear, and off we went. We left Sara at the forest’s edge, and as the post-mushroom nausea alleviated, we embraced the onset of one of the most amazing chemicals I’ve experimented with.
I will not spend a great length of time explaining the drug in-depth, but for the mushroom-inveterate I will offer the following. Everyday, we each feed ourselves a fair amount of bullshit, little lies that keep us going and believing when the truth is just not comfortable. We don’t realize, however, just how big some of these lies can get. Lies about life, about love, and even about God. What psilocybin does is tear down the mental walls we use separate ourselves from these lies, forcing the user to, in a sense, tear open their own psyche and stare unreservedly into the wound. You will not always like what you find; and this level of spirituality or psychedelia is not for everyone, but as a philosopher, I find it particularly compelling.
At this point, the drugs were starting to hit. The colors were just a bit brighter, physically and metaphorically, and I in my naïveté was convinced that I was about to blow Hallie’s world wide open. She had a hint of post-goth to her (we can always tell our own kind), and was possessed of a deep if sporadic melancholy. Despite her intensely frustrating monogamous obligations, I still cared deeply for her, and wanted to do something more helpful than smiling and singing her Beatles songs. Drawing on my experiences with paradigm work, I thought I could use this trip as an opportunity to tune her into the thisness of what is, and maybe help alleviate some of her pain. Unfortunately, I had forgotten the first rule of philosophy: “I am wise only insofar as I acknowledge my own ignorance.”
As the trip progressed, several landmarks stand out in my mind, various lakes, logs, and bridges where we stopped. Once, over a low creek, Hallie stopped and stretched her arms out, a simple motion to embrace the world flowing around and within her. “Feel the wind,” she told me, with the sort of sigh that conveyed to me the complete and total surrender of her thought to the moment. I tried to feel the sight before me, with limited success, and watched as language and preconception fell away.
The particular difficulty of this story is that, while a poignant and germane tale on the whole, many components are simply play. It may seem irrelevant to tell you that I was on psyched on drugs and climbing every boulder I could find, or that Hallie was dancing between two rocks because it made her feel like a tongue. To miss these moments, however, is to miss the whole mushroom experience. We stopped to dance, to climb, to play. Always to play.
By now, the drugs were giving my paradigm a thorough workout, and Hallie was doing everything she could to help. Her patient teaching and perpetual charm seemed born of some pagan goddess-magic, her words pulsing with arcane gypsy song. “Now we’re up,” she told me from a high boulder. Then, jumping, “And now we’re down.”
The switch flipped.
We’re up, we’re down, the Tao rises and falls, and at the end of the day, we’re all just monkeys. All at once I felt myself inundated with the sheer, unadulterated freedom that comes of knowing that you simply don’t have to matter. Sure, I can write, I can meditate, I can pursue my degree. I can also die in a car crash on my way to score beer for the weekend. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.
I looked up at Hallie with the eyes of a student. “Are you trying to get me to kill myself?” She seemed taken aback, which I found odder than I felt I should. “I don’t have to matter,” I kept repeating. “I can die, and I don’t have to miss me.”
In retrospect, this may not seem like the best time to have called me out, but I might argue that point. In any event, that’s exactly what Hallie did.
“All right, Mr. Philosopher, Mr. Heavy Metal Counterculture, what’s going on with all this? Because it’s not you. You’re a good guy, and you’re not that angry. So what’s up?” They were fair questions, but nonetheless, I felt like the earth had dropped out from underneath me. In the absence of ontological terra firma, I opened myself completely to my new teacher. Taking a second to articulate, which was futile, I dropped down and felt the words flowing out of me, the fruit of the universe growing and ripening into a bitter but ultimately curative crop.
“I feel like…I feel that God hates me. God is going to hate me.” Hallie pressed further, showing the patience and kindness of a true friend, .
“Why would God hate you?”
“Because the Catholics…they lied to me. They told me I have to believe, and I don’t. I can’t believe it anymore, I don’t want it.”
I should explain, at this point, that our language was getting pretty reductionist. When you’re shrooming, you’re not all about verbosity. When you’re straining your mind to the limits of your lexical prowess, you don’t have time for the moment. You don’t have time to play. It was not that I couldn’t explain at length how I had been led astray, psychologically taken advantage of from youth, couldn’t explain how my situation had been compounded by obsessive compulsive disorder, or couldn’t explain the limits to which I had pushed my young psyche in struggling with these insidious mistruths. It simply wasn’t necessary. The word was the feeling. Language was achieved.
I let it all out. In my simple, minimalist mushroom-speak, I told Hallie a story about religious deception. I told her a story about the warping of a mind, the shattering of trust, and the painful road to healing that I was still trudging through the darker stretches of, no matter how well I faked normality. I told her how the fear, the perpetual sense of less-than that is Catholicism continued to grip me, even though I knew rationally that my guilt was unjustifiable. I told how I was terrified to let it go, to move on, because my family was still trapped. I couldn’t leave the people I loved back in Catholic territory. By this point, tears were flowing faster than words, and I felt what I think, in my inexperience, the yogis might mean by “spiritual bliss,” akin to having a “cure serious wounds” spell cast on one’s psyche. That’s what Hallie called it – “spiritual healing.” She’d seen this sort of thing before, and was right there to walk me through it.
When the pain subsided, when I felt the tears dry and the shaking stop, I looked at Hallie with eyes that could finally see the depth of this incredible friend that I had made, and I remembered with some irony that I had come out here to save her.
“All right, I’m back,” I told her, “but you’ve got your own darkness, too. And we’re done. We’re good people, and we’re not going to live like this anymore. You’re going to take my hand, and when we come down, we’re not going to be afraid anymore.”
A genuine surprise took her face as she looked back at me, colored with shades of confusion and of fear. “Okay.”
I made her shake my hand, and told her that it was going to be all right. I’m not sure if she completely believed me, but then again, drugged-up philosophers are used to not being taken seriously. Hallie wanted to go, because it was getting dark and we were just starting to come down. We called Sara for a ride, and, covered in dirt and sticks and revelation, walked toward the forest’s edge. I looked at Hallie again, and stammered, in my stilted mushroom-speak: “They, there, and we, here; your friends, do they…do they play?”
Hallie smiled, knowing full well that my inquiry regarded the level of her cohorts’ attunement to the spirit we had captured that day. “Yes, they play.”
We went home, and as with all trips, we came down. Sara told us a story from her favorite mushroom book, and we watched a movie together, falling into the moment as it was and letting the drugs wear off. Hallie had to go and do something which escapes me, and I went to tend to a very good friend who had overindulged on liquor and pain pills, agreeing that we would meet later to compare trip notes.
At about two am, I was getting ready to call it for the evening, but that little part of us that keeps hoping the phone will ring, no matter how late it is or how far out of our league they are, won out. Hallie did call, but our conversation was particularly strange for me. She had wanted to crash on my couch, the same one she had laid on and asked me to hold her, though I knew she was not my own. The couch she had laid on while I told her, for the third time, that even though she had blacked out my two previous attempts to convey this, I was watching, and waiting, and ready to be a part of her life if her engagement didn’t work out. It was on this couch that I had fallen for her, the first night she came home with my roommate and I, neglecting purposefully to mention her lack of availability while we flirted incorrigibly. Another day in the life, I thought. But I found it odd that she would seek this particular couch out, despite all its denim-laden comfort, when her fiancé was two blocks away.
When she arrived, I asked about this, and she directed my attention to our conversation that afternoon. “I wasn’t afraid anymore,” she told me. “I broke up with him.” I held her like a lover for the first of many times, finding warmth in eyes I had feared might never look at me.
This is a story about beauty, about friendship, about two good people who have, over the past months, grown to love and understand each other in ways that I had not expected or even been so presumptuous as to hope for. Yes, we’re monkeys, and we can die. Or we can live, embracing the moments as they come – pain and grief, love and pleasure. We’re up. We’re down.
And the universe keeps grooving.
