Scholar of the Weird

 So, this trip started with 22.2 grams of wet PE7 mushrooms. I was aiming for a "light, recreational" level of dose. This is not what I got... however, my limited experience so far points to the mushrooms kind of choosing FOR me how things are going to go. 

I followed advice from Alan Rockefeller, a guru on all things mushroom and Psilocybe; I sliced them up, added butter and garlic (note for next time: I want seasoned salt, not crushed fresh garlic; it was a little too much) and roasted them in the air fryer for about ten minutes. 

The effect was entirely palatable, although it would have been more delicious if I'd had slightly more tender stems. These were a little tough. They tasted like yummy mushrooms, and I think that my friend MvV's suggestion of an omelet with spinach and cheese would be an excellent option. I'm still getting to know the mushrooms themselves; this is only my second moderately successful grow out of a bunch of weird "learning experience" failures. I had moderate success with agar, and I'm learning, but my transfers to grain were unsuccessful so far. Sterile technique is very unforgiving, and I'm using a Still Air Box technique... but I'll get it. It's so much like cultivating plants, and so different. 

I think I could still taste the slight funky bitter note of the psilocybin, although a couple of chunks of the garlic got a little over-roasted and crispy, and once you get a piece of slightly charred garlic stuck in your teeth, your taste buds are a little whacked, and you have to go floss, and brush, and get that out. But I can taste the taste of the smell that I smell in these mushrooms that is unlike other mushrooms, if that makes sense... I'm pretty sure I'm smelling and tasting the psilocybin. If you know the answer to this, please let me know. 

The trip report was actually typed live, as I was going through it, and it was EPIC. It took the form of comments on a Facebook post under my Psychedelica filter, so there will be some minor disjointed bits, but I'm going to leave it as much as possible intact. I'm anonymizing names, but keeping initials, so if you see yourself in here, hey, you! You probably have SERIOUS meaning in my life. And if you want me to change in any way or remove the commentary about you, please let me know, because it's all meant in a spirit of goodness and connection, and I don't want to upset anybody's peace over my extended therapy session. 

To set the scene: my parents and my brother's daughter and son had just departed from our house to drive on up to Missouri to see my Aunt, and they're going to stop in the city where Husband grew up, because Husband and I are very, VERY close to the same tiny region, on the side of each of our Moms. My mom grew up in Kansas, about sixty miles from where his mom grew up in Missouri. We make the same weird chicken and noodles, which almost certainly came to the American Heartland via the Vaterland, because egg noodles over mashed potatoes is mind-bendingly Germanic, and farm hands needed all the calories they could pack in.  I started out talking with MvV about food. 

Breakfast was one of those meals where it needed multiple cooking techniques and spaces, because it needs serious coordination to hit the table all at the same time... I wish I had thought to take pictures. Bacon in the oven. Sausage patties in the air fryer. Slow-scrambled eggs in the non-stick skillet. Hash browns in the big cast iron, both the one Mom and Dad got me years ago at a garage sale, and the one Husband and I rescued from rust after recognizing it in deep disguise at a second-hand store, because we don't normally cook for company, and we constantly marveled at how big families must manage. Sliced strawberries with a little sugar, because that's how Mom likes them. Chopped fresh Ataulfo mango. Chopped fresh Kent mango, so fragrant you can smell them at arm's length. Segments of satsuma. Diced pineapple, and that MFer was PERFECTLY ripe from edge to edge, just about to go off, but it was like at that point where you watch a ski-jumper hang in the air for a second before gravity realizes what's happening and he has to start the parabolic decline. I woke up at 4:45 in the morning and sliced fruit in the kitchen alone, thinking about how the light was special as dawn filtered through the trees across the creek out the kitchen window, and how it reminded me of being in the tiny kitchen in Coffeyville, with my mom and her sisters and my Grandma making breakfast before it was light and before everyone else was awake, and it was a special, quiet family time... it was all SO delicious, and we ate all but a tub full of pineapple and some strawberries, and I only had sliced them all up because it's easier to have those in tubs in the fridge. It was one of those meals where it was just all perfectly tasty, and all hit the table at the appointed time (in spite of my Dad making Husband feel a little rushed, and the crust on the hashbrown not coming out as perfectly as Husband had planned, because he's studied and his hash browns are ON POINT now, suddenly in his fifties, and you SQUEEZE THE WATER OUT) and everybody was pleasant, and everybody was in a good place in their mind, and it was Just Right. And I'm sitting here tripping moderate balls, with tears streaming down my face, because we had a delicious breakfast and I'm proud of my husband for being a damned fine cook, and he's part of this family so much that he doesn't hesitate to call my Mom and Dad, Mom and Dad... and there is zero sadness in these tears. Maybe a little, when I think of the family I can't see or the ones I don't talk to often enough... but I'm at peace, and happy, and crying in gently rocking waves, kind of like the ocean or like pulses in the way light goes in and out between clouds, which is also happening at the moment, and kind of counterpoints this nicely. Canticle. That's the right word. The shifting from side to side. Left and right. Anyway. WOW.

to clarify... there is a little multi-prism lead-crystal ball thing in my office window, and as I'm typing all this, the sunlight streaming through the window is making literal rainbows dance around the room, and this is the House of Rainbows, because the sun comes in through the creek side in the mornings, and rainbows dance around and paint every thing in my office... and through the front door just before late summer sunsets, the golden gloaming spears in multi-colored shafts through the beveled glass front door, and we call it the Rainbow Hour, and it hits the dogs and makes them rainbow dogs. I'm fucking GAY, we get it... but I'm also a student of color, and that prism splits the world into colors that are very often like my trips, and as the little glittering prism rotates on its cord in the fan's breeze, the cord specially designed to allow it to do just that... you tie a KNOT, you don't make a LOOP... it causes literal rainbows to flow across my dog's face... and then one will hit the side of my reading glasses, casting my entire field of vision in literally shifting bands of prismatic colors, BEFORE the psilocybin gets hold of it... I live a very, very trippy life. I only discovered mushrooms, really, about a month ago. Maybe it's six weeks, at this point. The weirdness is ALL BAKED IN. 

And the night before, I made dinner - chicken and noodles what I now think of as "the hard way," where it starts with chicken feet for the stock, and it's not pale and light like Grandma made it, it's thick and dark almost like I used beef, but it's caramelization and Maillard reaction and three days of careful work - but damn, it's good, and I can stand a damned CHEF KNIFE in my stock when it's chilled, and it vibrates like something in a fantasy movie. I screwed up with the mashed potatoes, I forgot to turn the water on, they were the one missed moment on getting it perfectly timed, but Husband did them right, with the ricer and whole cream and the grass-fed butter and the kosher salt. My brother's children peeled and chopped them, and I showed them the right way to hold the chef knife, because we've taken a class on knife skills. Again, not the way Grandma did, but the way we've learned, based on the ways we were raised and also our own travels and all of Husband's Reality TV cooking shows that have made him laugh and taught him a lot of good technique.

I wasn't DONE, Facebook; I didn't mean to hit the enter.

The tomatoes that Dad grew, some kind of heritage variety, so dark they almost look like raw beef heart bleeding on the plate - my niece had to cut them with a paring knife into chunks, because two flowers had fused into one fruit in each one, each one had two stems. I have no idea how THAT happens, but it did, and they were delicious. And I had her pass the mushrooms to her brother, because she was busy with the paring knife, and he chopped oyster and shiitake mushrooms and then tossed them with melted butter and Greek seasoning, and those went into a 450° oven. I'm glad we had two ovens, because the other one was full of pão de queijo, although it was actually pandebono, because I had a mix that was from Columbia via Fiesta Mart, but it looked like the Right Stuff. I got some kind of Salvadoran queso molido, because it seemed more right than trusting this to powdered Parmesan... and My GOD they were good, and we ate all but like two tiny balls. I think there were sixty? I'm fairly certain I polished off more than my ten, slathering each one with the Kerrygold butter. Between the six of us, we ate a stick of butter, WITH dinner. Like, not the sticks, plural, of butter that were IN the potatoes, the noodles, the bread itself... but there was a full stick of Irish table butter with a butter knife in it at the beginning of dinner, and I washed the butter dish after dinner. I had to test-bake a single one first, because I've only ever done the white-people-recipe version of the Brazilian kind, where it starts with tapioca starch, and those are GOOD, but these were VERY GOOD. Like, the next time I have need of a tapioca-based cheese puff bread in my life, I will be getting that same Columbian orange box, and cranking my oven up to FIVE HUNDRED DEGREES, and flash-baking those chewy little fuckers. The explanation of how to make the threads and rotate them into a circle were not really clear, so I just made balls, because that's the reason I picked that particular box, was because of the balls illustrated on the front, which looked like the Real Deal version you get at the Churrascaria steakhouses, where somebody's grandma has the hookup on the weird cheese. They were slightly different texture than the Brazilian ones, but they look just like the pictures I see of pandebono. I wish I had photographed the whole sheet pan full of them on parchment. I had my nephew pouring in the water by fractions as I hand-kneaded the dough as per instructions on the packet, and I could tell, even having never done this particular recipe before, when it was the right texture. It just kind of became dough, squishing through my fingers. Then I made it into little plugs the length of my hand, and rolled them into moderately smooth tubes, and then I chunked them off with the chef knife and passed them to my niece in a bowl as I worked, and she picked up the little chunks and rolled them into perfect spheres. We were a family machine, and I LOVED it. 

HOLY FUCK these mushrooms are awesome, and they're also letting me TYPE (which isn't always the case) - and there is beautiful morning sunlight coming through my windows and casting rainbows through the little faceted ball thing that reminds me of the one I got at the World's Fair when I went with my grandparents and my cousin G, in Tennessee, pulling the camper trailer all through the American southeast, and that pins it to 1982 like a butterfly on a cork board. I am watching as a thin layer of illustration goes in front of my screen, and I can still see to type through the tears and the visual hallucination, and there are rotating cogwheels of tiny figures, and the colors are mostly pale shell orange and rosy pink and light blue. Normally I'm lying down being quiet while this whole Son et lumière lightshow happens, but recounting making dinner makes it feel more magical and family and special and I know that you're watching this happen, and I'm looking forward to a visit either in Dallas or in Idaho, and that feels like a beautiful connection.

A little more explanation - MvV is the guy I was responding to, the one watching; he commented off and on during my posts as I was writing. He has become kind of a fellow traveler in my life, and we've talked through a lot. I have a total dad crush on him. He knows that he's a beautiful piece of manflesh but he's humble about it, and he's one of those straight-but-not-narrow lovely guys you very rarely find, the kind who's already done his own work and gone through lots of therapy and fixed his shit. He's been a real source of connection for my therapeutic work, and we've communicated a lot about mushrooms. He only occasionally takes a nibble, more of an organic microdosing, but we can talk and cry about how emotional that can get you, that open and honest and vulnerable feeling when you've got the mushroom in your mouth. Hey, MvV. How YOU doin? 

My Mom took photos with flash standing at the back of the kitchen, and we were so focused, it was startling and made us all laugh.

A thing that I realized is not at all clear from context here... all of this stuff has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE. These young adults, my niece who's 20 and planning her doctorate in pharmacology with specialization in neuroscience, and my nephew who is 18 and raising rabbits for meat and profit and blacksmithing in a forge he built himself, have never been to our house in Dallas. I've only seen them at my parents' house at holidays, and briefly at their own house on a couple of occasions, and one extended family cruise when my folks celebrated their fiftieth anniversary. Their parents have traveled with them, but they've never come up this way. Now that school's out, the niece just finishing her first year of college and the nephew graduating high school, my parents are taking them on a road trip. This whole experience where I get to share the special fragrant mangoes that we drive to the Indo-Pak grocery to buy by the case, the passing of the strange bread dough from hand to hand, the fireflies dancing in the garden while the night-hawks wheel overhead and we sit around our little fire - all of this is entirely novel. Because of the connections that Husband and I made in the mushroom, and because of the therapy and the time spent working on the house and the garden, we decided to go all out, and instead of hitting a local restaurant, we cooked these two big beautiful spreads of food and had a really peak experience of a weekend. 

I taught them about the Shang Hai Bok Choi that Husband and I love, and how they have to be triple-washed with water in the salad spinner after quartering them, because they grow them in sandy soil. The flavor is mild but the texture is delightfully crunchy, but you can't enjoy them if you fear biting into grains of sand. I sliced a little chunk and popped it into Mom's mouth to taste after I got them buttered and steamed and drizzled with the lemon juice and salt. I like them quartered and steamed in the microwave, and it was another one of those where it had to be multiple cooking techniques partly because the kitchen was so FULL of food and people... but that's the way I like them best anyway, and Husband and I installed that microwave and we DIDN'T FIGHT over it, which has been a marvel of therapy and hard work, and I used an ancient brass-edged wooden spirit level, and I'm honestly not sure if it's one I got from my Granddad, or one I gave to him, but then I realize it's not THAT level. Now, after more consideration, and watching the tiny GYMNASTIC PYRAMID of swirling goblin figures in rose and silver and pale peach, shifting and vibrating lines of characters that are not quite legible, and I'm not sure if they're mushroom artefacts or the ORIGIN OF WRITING, like, maybe this is an echo of the visual experience that turned somebody on to writing Kufic, or Devanagari, because that's literally scrolling in lines on the part of the video display where I'm typing. It's happening in front of my screen as I'm typing, and yawning, and CRYING, and this whole thing is so beautiful and strange... Anyway, this particular spirit level, I have a strong feeling that I'll find a tiny carefully-painted white museum accession number on it, and PF who was Curator will known the story, or at least the rough strokes... about the massive deaccession of inadvisably-accessioned curatorial items, because they didn't have the right chain of custody, or they didn't paint an appropriate and HONEST curatorial line of inquiry, and sometimes it was just because deaccessioning shit and having it disappear to people's houses almost felt like a better solution than calling THE EPA, or having them ritually cremated or hauled away as junk. 

To be clear here... I'm not talking about anything illegal, or really uncommon - our curator pruned the collection and there had been a lot of "I found this at a garage sale" items that were awesome, accessioned early in the Museum's history when there was more enthusiasm than rigor, but hard to justify in the mature accredited collection because of the curatorial guidelines. Some of the weird but not entirely appropriate-for-the-collection stuff was stuff that we loved and cared for when it was damaged, and PF has a little backless chair with the Dragon arms, and I have the dragons' tails going up the monkey-eating-fruit chairback like a display art piece above the mantle, because the flood had not been kind and there was no saving the tiny throne, and it never belonged in the history that the museum studies. 

I'm still really conflicted about a pound jar of medicinal mercury, surprisingly small, from a properly acquired source and everything... it wobbled its way out of an EPA hazard call to collect the dangerous mercury medicines, but it's been sitting in my little herb cabinet, because I know what the REAL COLOR vermillion looks like and I dreamed of actually cooking up a little sulfated mercury out of Il Libro Dell'Arte, where I learned to burn my own charcoal and grind and levigate West Texas ochre to make paint... but I never did get around to finding a lab tech place that would let me do it, and I'm not going to sit and boil mercury in the back yard while watching the smoke shift from gray to the color of straw to the color of a ladybug's back. I know what it looks like when I've had it in my OWN HANDS on vellum inscribed by a real medieval monk, and VO earned her Laurel because she has the kind of research mind that not only catalogued safety pins in a Freedman's cemetery, but I remember her making vellum from road kill, showing the pieces in proper curatorial fashion, but at the same time showing her research, and it was GROSS, but it was SO RIGHT... and if she's not on this list, I will put her on it once I'm more upright, because I'm not great at computering and getting the online connection stuff right while I'm tripping, and I keep being both frustrated by all the red lines where the computer doesn't think I'm making clear English... and also I know I'm CORRECT, because that's the kind of mind I have, and I'm METICULOUS, and the correctness of terminology matters to me, and at the same time, it's kind of a point of pride at having a technical understanding that AUTOCORRECT has no valid opinion regarding, because I have held the vellum in my hands, and it came from GOD, or at least that's what the monks believed, and they did all this beautiful scribal work, and I wrote a paper in a college forum that professor Carl Lindahl taught, but the whole seminar was like fifteen people and he taught us that writing an essay was like building a CHAIR, because it needed good craftsmanship and the legs had to support the weight of the argument, and we were scholars, and he was so earnest and real, and I still have the CHAIR. Like metaphorically, but also he had actually studied furniture crafting, because it MATTERED, and he did good and careful work where you have to sharpen your own chisels, and he had to BLACKSMITH them because you have to go to First Principles. And that's where mushrooms take me...

My heart friend AR saw the mushroom pictures, and said, "A whole different kind of Sunday Brunch," which prompted more thoughts... 

AR, OMG, I asked my dad to say his Christian grace over the food we made, on the wooden table that I got with the tiny inheritance of money I got from my Grandma, the one whose family name we share, and you KNOW. She saved money taking in sewing, and I own that SEWING MACHINE that she bought in 1936, manufactured by Singer in Elizabethport, New Jersey... and I have the handwritten receipt book. And that's just as deep and meaningful as all the art I did that she didn't understand, the decoupaged paper box with the pressed passionflower, and my pencil drawing of MYSELF with long hair, that I gave to her, and she thought it was Jesus, and she kept it in the nursing home and it came back to me after her death.

And I REBUILT that thing, cleaning all the gummed up parts in special solvents, and I thought about getting the decals replaced, because OF COURSE I know how to find people who can do it properly with the real gold that they used... but I know that her careful meticulous hands wore those spots thin, and that means more to me than a perfect machine. It went from Grandma to Momma to ME. I have threaded that machine with silk I raised myself, twisted in a triple strand so that it threads the needle without jogging, like how Corticelli said to do. And that little ingenious bobbin mechanism that Elias Howe figured out from a dream, and Singer manufactured as an elucidation of the American Dream... I have UNDERSTAINDING of. And her handwritten notes, and I have her RESEARCH on those damned booties that kept our whole family warm, and she MADE NOTES in tiny sketches of yarn, and some of it can't even be understood in careful writing, but I have the work of her hands in my care.

And you, AR, and VO, and PF... we are scholars of this shit, and it is deep and weird and a sacred trust, and I feel like I'm only now, in my fifties, with a whole LIFETIME of my history laid out behind me and twenty-two wet grams of hardcore psychedelic mushrooms vibrating through my entire system, able to write this out like a gospel, seeing the delicate tracery, and my friends, ED and MvV who was MV before, and you all get it. I played the little bird automaton that ED got fixed for my family, telling them about the tiny paper bellows, and her story is woven together with mine on a very deep family level, even without blood.

Thank you to my husband, who knows that I need to HOLD MY DOG more, even though that's not easy for me sometimes.

I am literally unable at the moment to discern what's happening on her beautiful little weird doggo face, with its EXTRA EYES that only come out when I'm in the mushroom - I can't tell how much is rainbow opalescence from the mushrooms I grew myself on popcorn, and I learned the pressure canning that sterilizes the grain from my Grandmothers on both sides, and my mom was a CHAMPION, and it still keeps our family in good groceries... and how much is actual light dancing in the office as I write.

If anybody wants a copy of the recipe book we made for Husband's Grandma, aged 100, State Fair prize winner, with the fancy recipes on the Husband side... I have the PDF. I wish I had been there to watch her pride as she handed out the cookbooks full of family; she and I GOT one another. She was another maker, figure-outer, creator, handworker, I-can-do-that person. Husband had to go to that party alone, though - dividing and conquering is a way that we work as a family; sometimes I hold the fort, hold space, hold things together, while Husband works on his family stuff, and he does the same for me. Husband's Dad's Family and Husband's Mom's Family and My Dad's Family and My Mom's Family... they're all this interwoven American story.

My friend MycelialDawn asked if I noticed a drop in potency, because she'd heard the air fryer could damage the active chemicals. 

Well, Alan Rockefeller told me about how to cook them and the way they taste, and he's THE SOURCE on all this mushroom shit... and I'm watching the geometry of Creation SHOWING OFF for my personal enjoyment, in WAVES OF DELIGHT... I have ZERO BAD NOTES.

It's water tables and light diffraction and geometrical beauty... and an agricultural understanding that I associate with my paternal Granddad TC, despite his being an ORNERY and DIFFICULT man who shouted at his wife too much. But he got a lot of this real, old craftsmanship stuff, in a way that fundamentally shaped me as a creative person. I've never had his through-line of making big things.

I have rattlesnake rattles in an old prairie desk where I store my own cut off braids. I think they're Mom's Dad's side, and if so, they'll have Mom's slightly childish but still IMMACULATE Palmer method penmanship, telling as much of the story as she remembers. She tucks these notes into any family thing she gives me, naming people in faded photographs or the hands that crafted a quilt, and I'm a little torn on how I feel about knowing that these things may never be distributed to someone who knew anyone in that family alive. She apologizes for too much, and I keep trying to point this out to her... to allow her space, to give her credit.

Her body is aging, and it fails her. And she's always been afraid of my Dad's temper, although they're an organism like me and Husband. But she DOES GOOD WORK. Her sterile technique was always flawless. She had been scared straight on that one in nursing school; a staph infection on a patient in the ward one time meant somebody had broken technique, but it WAS NOT HER. Her stitches have been meticulous, although like too many of us she has let time cover over pride and ATTENTION SHOULD BE PAID. 

Frankly, these are mediocre strawberries (I'm eating a bowl of the, left over from breakfast, that Husband has brought me, mangoes and strawberries together), but they have sugar like she has always liked them, and she asked for it at the table on Sunday, but I was able to tell her I had already sweetened them, layering in the sugar like you're supposed to, tossing the berries and letting them sit on the counter to macerate. And I'm literally WATCHING IN FRONT OF ME right now, dancing molecules, showing how the sugar pulls out the aromatic esters... it actually makes them taste better and SMELL better, and I don't know how much of this she ever studied, intellectually, and how much of it was just passed through understanding of how the world works. An understanding hand to hand, here taste this, see, it's better this way. 

Mom and Dad built a CHURCH with their own hands, and I helped with that rainbow hooked rug that still hangs in the building... because even though the synthetic yarn was a bitch to work, it lasts. It's got to be forty-something years old now, that rug. They have two big beautiful halls these days, sweet lighting, good music. When we are in Kingwood on the alternate Christmases, we go for Christmas Eve service, and so many people smile and say they knew me when, or I meet a new generation of people who were born since I moved away and baptized in the new building. 

I have a deep and troubled relationship with Christianity, and I have wrestled with demons a lot of people don't even know the the names of, because you don't find out until you've seen VO making parchment out of a road-kill SQUIRREL, and cutting my own quill pens and copying page after page of Winchester Mallory in photofacsimile, because I needed a passable and acceptable Gothic Bastard Secretary hand... "And so Sr. Gawain rideth yet xviiij dayes withouten any aventura," and I finally got those little round weird S's to look like a real letter. I've studied a lot of Christian theology. I disagree with much of it. 

However, it must be said.... my own deep heart has always been with Textura Quadrata. Blackletter. Fraktur. My Dad has the documents that Jakob Weber used to transfer from Merishausen Switzerland to the plains of Coffeyville, Kansas, and they're in nearly undiscernible Gothic penmanship. I have DISCERNED it, although only just. My professor in German Translation had to literally make me a code sheet, to pull apart the HANDWRITING letter by letter, before I could start to even think about the WRITING, to wrestle with the thoughts. Those letters, that purple prose, the PAIN of being a world apart from your own dear beloved Schwester... and my professor had kept up her own Deutschealthandschrift, because she corresponded with an ancient Aunt, and she had learned the old letters before they Romanized the school system in Germany when she was in primary school. This stuff is completely illegible to almost all modern German speakers; they can't recognize the letters much better than what I can. 

To my never-ending delight, TEXTURA QUADRATA means "Squarely woven." I have woven so much of my meaning in life with the tiny tablet-weaving squares; the ones I punched out of Chili's coasters, the ones I made and sanded from Plastruct, the commercial thin ones from Lacis. I wish I owned a piece of Peter Collingwood's work; I cherish the correspondence I had with him, figuring shit out.

I have traveled, I have written, I have studied in old and weird company... and so much of the stuff that I love, is even UNDERSTOOD by only a tiny fraction of the handweaving world, which in itself is a vanishingly small fraction of the handcraft community... and the Internet has allowed us to connect, to support, to suggest paths for further study and trying new techniques. I feel moderately guilty for not being better at some of the stuff that I haven't taken time to focus on. I feel substantial guilt for not taking better care of some historical and craft-work artefacts in my care. I feel great pride in the work that I have done, sharing, connecting, making the difficult parts approachable for others. 

I am waking up, I am becoming aware again after a long sleep - and I'm trying to reconnect. I need to make some new front-and-back brocade, like what I did back when I used my own hair to brocade my SCA name on the back of a ribbon I made for PG... I have in my personal hands the knowing of a thing unknown to this craft, shuttles flying in front of the work and behind it using a tiny mirror, and I feel like it's important that I not let that knowing perish. It's difficult, and it's esoteric, and I know that it's a decorative elaboration of a craft that doesn't bear the life-and-death significance that good craftsmanship used to mean in weaving... but my interest has always been Scriptorium level interest. I want to talk to the WEIRD monk.

I think I want to make some that says something really clear, like FRONT and BACK... because my tendency is to make it say RECTO and VERSO, and I know that just takes it weirder. I am having a scholarly and hand-working conversation with a couple dozen living people and a handful of dead ones. Nancy Spies. Peter Collingwood. Klaus Laigtenberger, who sent me a peacock worked in silk that is so different from my own peacock, his is based on Middle Eastern yurt bands, I think - and a hand-translated letter that someone had written on his behalf because he needed to make sure I KNEW. I still have the peacock weaving, in a tiny enameled frame. It's one of my treasures.

Ironically, I don't know if I ever explained to Klaus that I have a genuine connection to understand him AUF DEUTSCH, and how much I appreciated having BOTH the letter in his neat clipped penmanship and the translator's version... but even my professor in Junior Translation wasn't technical enough for me to figure out some of the scholarly writing. She was an impressive scholar in her own right, and she made me translate Jakob and Ursula's letters with an ear for the Victorian nature of their prose... very hand-to-bosom, swoony emotion - and she had to talk me through words that don't even get used in modern German, like gönnen... I need to remind myself of the exact phrasing, but it was something about "Gönne Irh die Ruhe" - TO NOT BEGRUDGE. We need this word. Let people have things they enjoy. He was talking about how he didn't begrudge someone who was dead, the peace of death. It's so weirdly German, and it was so sweet, and so Victorian and purple. And so I had to write it in English prose like "Do not begrudge him the peace toward which we all yearn." It went right along with "Beloved Schwester - Would GOD that you were beside me, to whisper words of comfort to my troubled spirit."

Jakob had a rough time, emotionally, and even getting his letters translated in weird Courier type from photofacsimiles of the onion skin originals was difficult, but my Dad needed the data. I wanted to know the language; Dad needed to know the story and the dates. 

And I SEE YOU, JAKOB.

I sat in an office with three Professors of German, and I had a conversation in German about my feelings about a Kafka story they had given me to read and digest, and it was BEAUTIFUL, and I placed right out of two years of University German and into Junior Translation, because of the brilliant work of Frau Judith Hermann in High School German. They wanted to know when I had lived in Germany; they had real difficulty believing I had two years of high school German and that's IT. I got to tell that testing panel about how Frau Hermann had made German fun and accessible, while she was simultaneously working for her own PhD (if I'm remembering right) with those same colleagues at University of Houston. She took us to German club events, and we drank wine, and we were weirdos in a special place of privilege, because we had literally made German our secret code language and we talked to each other in it during lunches. 

and then I had more conversation with MycelialDawn. 

I feel like these Big Trips have a pacing that's almost like sex. It's NOT sex.... I feel almost zero sexual energy in these trips, like the sex part has been disconnected, and attached to the thinking flow; I don't have any desire for sexual pleasure, but the rhythm, the structure, reminds me of a good fuck. It's like some classical music. It's like a sonnet form, maybe? Something that I haven't musically studied enough to grasp. But they definitely have an inception, a reiteration and elaboration of themes, a passionate middle period full of Sturm und Drang, a LOT of back and forth with conclusions and Big Thoughts, and then a quiet period that needs a kind of gentle rocking energy before the demons settle back on Bald Mountain. Pictures of The Artist Troubled With The Muse are appropriate. If I could see an image of The Muse Fucking The Artist In The Brain, it's like that. The language of creation, the energy of making, has this fundamental structure that I think is hard-wired into us as mammals.

And I stink. There is a pheromonal funk that is very distinctly "I smell like a mushroom trip" to me. Some of it feels sexual, like if I smell my shirt later, it turns me on... but it's more like a compost energy. I'm muuuuusssssky. 

Smelling my husband when we're together in the mushroom state, it's not sexy... but I want to pull him inside of me. Like I crave an intimate connectedness. We wrap our arms with one another and press until we are like one body, breathing in time together. This is why we have so many OCTOPUS shirts and pictures and gifts... we are one beast with eight limbs.

It's also like a thunderstorm. Or, more specifically, like a weather front. I can see the rough outlines ahead, I can see the challenging cumulonimbus blossoming in the sky, the updrafts of violent air from the hot ground, the hints of circulation. This is why I love following JT's Facebook feed so much. I wish there was a way he could photograph the lightshow I get to watch while the psilocybin converts to psilocin and throbs through my mind. I know that he's had his own journey with the mushrooms, and I wonder if there's a way that this expresses itself in his work, that I haven't fully understood yet. Hey, JT!

Now, I'm in the clear part after a high-pressure system has moved through; the yard is soaked, my ears have popped, we've avoided the big hail yet again, although watching the pea-sized silver stones dancing in the grass is always magical. I need dappled sunlight; the mushrooms never feel like they want me to be in full sun, although I have observed so many in nature that thrive right out there... but there is a subtle dance of humidity and micro-micro-climate that I'm only beginning to sense.

The trip continued, with more chatting, writing, talking with my husband, and eventually curling up with him in bed and talking, and I know I talk too much right now which exhausts him, but then just holding each other and breathing. We really DO regulate one another - something I've read about in Attached - sometimes if he's breathing too fast, I'll just let him take all the breath, and I hold my lungs empty for half a minute, Wim-Hof style, and then HIS breath slows and it's easier to keep in time with him. Husband and I have sorted out some stuff "in the mushroom" that has significantly fixed some old issues, and then he supported me for a trip, and then I supported him for one, driving home to be with him because he got lost and couldn't see his phone screen, and then again today he supported me, although it was more "Can I get you anything?" and watching over me, because I was on a roll typing by myself for most of the day and I didn't need a guide so much as an occasional reminder to drink my water. But his love and support is a constant buoy for my spirit in this stuff for me, and thank you, CC.