Dancing flamenco



In a blog post four days ago, I mentioned that there are lots of fancy strains of Psilocybe cubensis mushrooms - breeders go for the beautiful and the weird, as well as the mind-bendingly strong or highly visual. I wrote, "there is a strain that looks like the swirling skirts of a flamenco dancer in shades of cinnamon and dark chocolate." For the record, the strain I was talking about was one called "Chocolate Gumby" bred by Dave Wombat. 

The Universe has been winking at me a LOT lately. I've had many people tell me that this is due to more mindfulness, of noticing little synchronicities - but I've also had a lot of experienced psychonauts look at me and smile and say, "Yeah, that happens with the mushrooms. They'll do that to you." 

And so, when I got home after work and looked at this tray full of Avery's Albino (from an isolated syringe from Inoculate the World) I laughed out loud. She said, "Hey, you wanted Flamenco... how do you like my skirt? Check out my Duende - que rico! Ayayay!" I work in the performing arts - there was a poster of a famous Flamenco dancer in the window of an office cubicle directly across from mine for the first several years I was in this office. The pose is a classic. 





For me, the big fluffy twisty mushrooms are often like what I call "picture clouds" - when the sky presents you with a huge range of random blobby shapes, and you can look at them and imagine things. Your eyes and the marvel of pareidolia can show you visions of rollicking bunnies, or elephants flapping their ears. But this one... she's RIGHT THERE. You can see her face, her hips, the mermaid splash of her ruffled dress, her flared sleeves. She has on the classic hair comb. The Universe was not being subtle. 


Like I have mentioned before, I live a pretty trippy and beauty-filled life, despite never having had any real experience of psychedelics before last October. This kind of thing happens to me. A lot. But it's happening in much more immediately clear and self-evident ways lately. One political candidate called to ask if he could drop off a yard sign, and in less than ten minutes the opposing candidate knocked on my door (we are NOT a small district) - to ask for my vote, and I explained to him politely why I had chosen his opponent. With my new brain (which is what my husband and I call it) I didn't get a fast heartbeat, or nervous sweat, or that sinking nauseated feeling... I just told him how I felt, how I respected his campaign but had bonded with the other guy over our shared love of this wooded district's parks and nature resources, and he thanked me for my honesty, shook my hand, and went on his way. THEN, not ten minutes later, the manager from the campaign I am supporting showed up, and we spent an hour watching the wonders of Nature unfold themselves to us in the garden. He took dozens of pictures and quite a bit of video, because he'd never been on the creek side of the properties, or seen the stalking whiptail lizards, or watched a bee-mimic moth nectaring in the skullcap blossoms. This kind of connection keeps happening, again and again. 

The albino strains are fascinating. Some of them are actually gray or pale blue, because there's so much psilocybin in them. Technically, the psilocybin is colorless - it becomes blue when it is bruised, due to oxidation. These are still brilliantly white at this stage; I'll add a photo later if they blue up. The mycelium is so white that it fluoresces, or nearly does, in some of the brighter versions of light. For the record, there's no black light in this; it's just really brilliantly colored bright light. I used two color-adjustable LED panels that are designed for photographic effects.  These are colors that I often see in my trip experiences. Lighting up the mushrooms with the complementary colors, they writhed and shifted slightly under my eyes even though I was completely upright, days since my last trip. 

Intellectually, I know that they'll be the same as other mushrooms, in terms of the trip experience. These are likely to be strong, because they've been selected for strength by a talented and reputable breeder. In the non-intellectual space, however, I know that they will be super-intense for me because I spent a busy hour arranging colored lights and watching them dance the Flamenco. I may have to get some castanets. 


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