Trees, Moss, Ferns, Sex and Mushrooms

by Faun
 

Although I've never been a fan of recreational drugs, and have witnessed over the course of my life an incredible swathe of destruction created by alcohol, cigarettes and various forms of cocaine, eventually I've come to appreciate the occasional use of hallucinogens in some kinds of spiritual work. 

This is not to say I think they're necessary — as one of my teachers always says, you can get to the same places without them through meditation and other techniques.  I can't say I'd even recommend them — one problem is how widely people's responses seem to vary.  What I can say is that my own experience has been very positive in contexts I will describe. 

I love the woods, I love their wild energy, what I think of as Pan energy (not the classical Greek Pan, but an older, shyer, wilder god).  I love the way sunlight filters down through the branches, how wind rustles the leaves, how rain drips through fir needles onto moss below.  I particularly love the ancient delicate beauty of the ferns. 

A few years ago, I took mushrooms, and having arrived at an altered state, wandered naked in the rain through the forest. 

I found my multitude of inner voices stilled and I felt myself surprisingly an animal, whole and quietly aware.  I felt the earth under my feet, the rain on my back and shoulders, the air.  I could tell how fast I needed to move to keep warm.  I felt as if I could relearn an animal life naked in the forest if I had to.  Life became simpler, and at the same time more present, more beautiful. 

The beauty I was used was immediate, as if I was noticing it for the first time.  Subtle and glorious colors, the intricate patterns at every scale, branches, patches of sky, clumps of moss, fern fronds, spider webs holding tiny droplets of water, the sensuous contours of the land. 

As I moved, I found myself filled with that energy I so love, the Pan energy, the wildness.  I felt drawn deeply into something ancient and young, vast and full of life. 

That's all there was to it.  I came back after a while, put my clothes back on, had a quiet afternoon and resumed my life.  But that trip left a residual thread that I can often follow back to the sense of deep connection with the wildness.  I'm grateful. 

I had a different experience just last year with a person I love.  We'd been friends for several years, then lovers for several more, but for various reasons didn't see becoming life partners.  All the same, we felt very close and trusted each other, and we were a bit frustrated that we never seemed to be able to connect quite as deeply as either of us wanted. 

So as something of an experiment, we found ourselves last spring out in the woods in a small cabin having taken mushrooms. 

We took off our clothes and took turns massaging each other, which is always nice.  As the mushrooms kicked in, the sensations became more intense.  After a while, we started being more directly sexual, and then we found ourselves lying side by side looking in each others' eyes and talking.  We talked about what we saw, which was not in either case what we feared to see.  We both felt as if our own filters were melting away along with our defenses, and we were naked to each other in a way I'd never known possible before. 

But as I looked in her eyes and we talked, I noticed that her face started changing.  One moment she looked about 12, the next she could have been in her eighties.  After a bit, I realized I'd lost track of the conversation we'd been having, and she was no longer the same person — she looked completely different. 

We must have talked like that for half an hour to an hour, and I don't have a clue what we said.  At one point, I remember, she was a young black woman who had some emphatic advice for me, or for whomever I was speaking for, and I remember wishing I could have known her. 

After a while, we both came back into ourselves, and I was a little surprised to discover that she too had had the same experience as I — my face too had been changing as we spoke, and she hadn't understood half of what we seemed to be talking about. 

"I got the feeling," she told me, "that some of those people were from a long time ago," and I realized that I'd gotten the same impression. 

Now as we looked in each others' eyes, there were no barriers between us.  The love we'd always felt for each other seemed utterly unimpeded and we felt really horny. 

We made love.  Because of the mushrooms, both of us hovered at the edge of orgasm for a long time, feeling amazingly, magickally intimate.  She ended up coming a couple of times, but I never did, although we kept going all afternoon. 

For both of us, it was a transformative and incredibly beautiful experience.  It didn't change our relationship in any dramatic way, except that since then, we've both felt a kind of deep, deep trust for each other that I don't think either one of us would ever want to betray.  I suspect that feeling will be with me as long as I live. 

I feel that the goddess and the god touched us both that afternoon, and gave us a gift I would never have known how to ask for. 

I am grateful! 

(originally published in 2004 in Widdershins volume 10, issue 1).