ACOA - http://www.adultchildren.org/

I think finally some real clarity forms for me out of the chaos that has been my life and the clarity definitely seems to come out of what could be called ACOA principles, I feel. The two latest things that really hit one came from listening to a empathic astrologer which may seem odd to some I'm sure but she drove a stake right through my heart and somehow hearing what I already knew really seemed to help me get completely clear on it. She mentioned this pattern I had been in and mentioned that it involved relationships and that I was fully aware of it and fully aware of what I had to do to change it but that I couldn't like an addict. She said I knew now that I had to break this pattern and that I could see how destructive it is and that I could see exactly where it is going.

Why did this help? I think it was like someone finally really knew me at a very deep level like was in my head and it gave me some confirmation from outside.

I was able after that to pull myself away from any advisory role in this dysfunctional situation I am in now that is so much like numerous others over the last five years that it honestly frightens me a little how it could be so when I consciously tried so hard to avoid exactly this situation? There can be no doubt that some hand is at play that is greater than my own conscious intention even if it be just my own unconscious but I suspect it is karma which I have always perceived not as a punitive force but a teaching force.

I've accepted now that this person does not care about my ... being. I was talking with a friend who is hurt by the rejection of a close friend after many years and I realized that for her this was far more painful than is my own feelings of being dismissed in a love relationship because I do not feel the person I am involved with knows who and what I am so their reaction to me lacks the kind of depth that can really hurt me as would the reaction of a very close friend who actually knows who and what I am - that would be devastating to me as I saw it was to my friend. I see that in this situation I am in it is not about me on any level and that is the problem. Literally, if I were to say anything regarding my own feelings, thoughts, needs, desires, dreams - anything, the response is "O with all I have going on I'm suppose to care about your stuff!" and I get it for this person how that is quite the reality. It is not about me at all.

I think I really get it now that it is okay for me to want "it" to be about me. I have always felt shame at being selfish it's a deep feeling in me and not without some warrant but I see that I am capable of being available to others and caring of others while deserving to have this desire to be relevant myself as well. It was a subtle thing my relationship with my single mom this emotional incestuousness and proximity abandonment like some soft, dreamlike dance we danced for those many years. I love you, mom. I understand it all now. You did love me best you could and you came back for me again and again and eventually you kept me and took care of me the very best you could.

I recall once visiting my mom not too long before she died when she told me sobbing - and she seldom cried was a strong woman, actually - "All I EVER wanted David was a good man to love me and a family. I didn't want anything special" she said looking up at me with such pain then breaking down and crying so that the last part came out broken, "but I never got that my whole life long". It broke my heart and I held her and I thought very distinctly how she had expressed perhaps my own deepest feeling. It was a terrible and haunting moment and I will never forget it.

My Impassioned Flowers

On! Sail on! My Impassioned Flowers 
Over the nights and the frightful hours 


But one glance back shall steal our powers
Leave us faceless, our hands devoured,
Dried pillars of salt under Draconian Towers

O never to falter for the dawn's not ours
On! Sail On! My Impassioned Flowers

Who Am I to Argue?

I find myself again with this nearly overwhelming sense of not being in the right place almost not sure of how I got here even though I can retrace my steps in my mind and I do know how I got here and I know also that every step was of my own volition no one forced me or drugged me and relocated me at any point along the way. It is this knowing, in fact, that seems to be the only thing keeping me from really unhinging this time. I have this sense of having pushed it too far, having risked too greatly and am now dealing with the consequences of multiple and catastrophic failures.

It is almost as if I am some amnesiac and I can't help but think of a line from ACOA on the false self - that one can live so long in the false self that they may forget what their own real self is altogether. Yes, there it is. It is a frightening thought and brings me up out of bed where I have been unsuccessfully trying to ground myself for some time. I tell myself look man you are right here right now but it is as if my self insists more willfully than ever - "no, I am not!"

Who am I to argue?

I wander around and wait for someone to recognize me and come up to me and say something like, "Well I'll be damned if it isn't old (fill in the blank?) come back home to (fill in the blank?) Why we were all wondering where you had gotten off to!" And when I ask, this someone will be able to tell me where my home is or at least where it used to be. This someone will be able to tell me if any of my relatives are still alive, maybe if they living there in (fill in the blank?)

But as much as I wander, and I have wandered a lot, no one as of yet has recognized me. I know this is not my house here and these are not my things, not my people, not my animals, not my landscape.  

I'm just feeling kind of sick and broken too badly to do anything but languish right now. I feel as though I am most of the way through a convoluted and annoying story for which I can imagine no good ending. I'd honestly like to just throw the book away but I can't, dammit.

God thinking about creation

So where to start, you know, when there's no time or sequence … no syncopation ? That didn't take much thought, I simply created time for them within their own minds to give some cadence to their expressions. It's an artificial construct depending upon ones point of view but really what is artificial in this game? Time just makes it easier for them to play along. One concept often bantered about is, “Reality” with serious, even grave, inquiry and debate given to whether or not this or that is “real” or not. It amuses me to no end and I get caught up in it myself sometimes makes me laugh and laugh as if anything that IS could be not real!?

So I put into play as many independent operators as I can with numbers approaching let's just say the infinite here, for sake of discussion. Then I sit back, as it were, and watch the show. Sentient beings with free will put on one hell of a good show. Believe it! The things they come up with I tell you it's mind boggling. There is earth, a small planet with only seven billion of them, as a prime example. I heard one say the other day that, “if you put a million monkeys in a million rooms with a million separate typewriters after a million years one of them will write out an entire Shakespearean play by pure, random chance” and I thought yes there you go! That's the spirit of it right there!

And to the point, language is one of the things they came up with that really wows me. Reading and writing. There's nothing more touching than a great poem. And music this is quite a gift O my goodness yes absolutely worth the whole experiment itself just for this music alone. While some of the things they come up with are fascinating in the macabre like Satanic, live sacrifice - I mean seriously who would have ever thought of such a thing!? - to hear them sing love songs accompanied by this music they created expressing their heart felt love for each other now there is something that brings a smile to my face and puts a bounce in my step every single time! It would be most insincere of me if I said that I were not a bit proud of my grand experiment in creation. I literally never know what they are going to come up with next – it makes me giggle like a little child happily surprised! It's wonderful!

CALL JOHN ABOUT DOG”

Short-Short Story by David Sky

Just got in from mothers, put my purse down on the kitchen isle and I cry a little for the first time, just a little? I guess this is that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross stuff? I keep hearing in my head that he's dead and each time it is impossible to believe. A goddamn cliché. I had never heard this house to be so utterly silent before and suddenly I miss that, old energy inefficient and noisy refrigerator we had. I look back at the door and I can see myself looking back at me standing here … if that makes any sense … somehow seeing myself here looking so … lost .. my eyes with this desperation. I want to flee, you know, but I don't flee because I understand that what I really want to do is run so goddamn fast that I run clear out of my own skin.
But I am not crazy, I think. Not really. I know that I cannot actually run completely out of my own skin like that.

Can I? 

Ever since I found out I wanted to go into our bedroom and I don't know why maybe somehow I think that he will be there, after all. Like all this is a dream or something. Now I want to go into the bedroom and yet I don't really want to go into the bedroom because the bedroom is frightening me more than I have ever been frightened in my life like out of my own skin frightened and I realize that the truth of it is that I MUST go into that bedroom, after all. I must and I will. I make a few steps in that direction then turn back around thinking that I have forgotten something? I pick up my purse which I usually leave on the table by the door and I take it with me now, clutching it tight against my stomach.

Maybe, I wonder, oddly, I wonder, is this purse Elizabeth and I am holding her hand because she is coming now – thank god – and I feel like I should wait for Lizzie so she can actually take my hand and walk with me into the bedroom … but I cannot wait. No not at all. 

It would only be a couple more hours by the time Lizzie lands and gets here.

But instead of waiting to hold Lizzie's hand, I go on upstairs because I cannot help myself now alone with my purse and finally standing at the threshold looking into the bedroom thinking that this is far enough perhaps and feeling frozen and unable to cross through the threshold. of he door from the hallway into our bedroom. Some part of me says, “okay so just looking and this is as far as I go until Lizzie gets in.

She is probably close to landing, I think. She won't be much longer. 

Then I see one of his notes on David's side of the bed on the top of his pillow where he always puts his notes that he always is leaving for himself because the better part of his mind is off helping someone else, helping those others – 'all the broken ones”, he calls them. For the first time I think about his office, his patients. It's too much ...

I do not cry but I see myself inside my own mind collapsed on the floor, my purse fallen and everything is scattered across the bedroom floor, some things under the bed, some under the dresser and it is very real to me and I am crying now not really but in this vision of myself, having fallen through the threshold and onto the bedroom floor in this vision, sobbing and lost and out of my own skin with this … this irrevocable horror.

Then I tell myself that I must see what is on that note that he probably wrote only this morning – O my God only this morning! I choke a single sob off knowing that it is something that will take me down if I let it so I just choke it back now with everything I have because I must see what he wrote to himself this morning before leaving . It was only really a few hours ago, I wonder? In pen? His handwriting?

I focus on the note and shut out the rest of this bedroom O my god because it is too much but only I want to see what David has written as a reminder – what does he remind himself about here? Suddenly it is like this one little note laying neatly on his pillow expands to occupy all the space in this world and it reads:

“CALL JOHN ABOUT DOG”

Call John About Dog!?

I am looking at the note feeling maybe if I look at it hard enough by some ridiculous magic David will look back at me but he doesn't and I look at it trembling now so badly that I cannot hold it and let it drop my mind racing, “A dog, but David doesn't even LIKE dogs!?” racing around inside my own skull like some wild banshee, “And who the hell is JOHN!?”

The banshee my mind has become works itself up into a frenzy but I still cannot find this “John” among our cadre of friends … so who? … so some acquaintance? … wracking my mind and sitting on his side of the bed not even crying but when I try to pick up the note again I cannot because my hand is trembling too badly and just as the banshee tears off on her own out of the room, I am left in mystery and all that matters in life is WHAT dog and WHO the hell is John!?”

Psilocybin Trip Report – physical healing attempt

Trip Report – physical healing attempt
Psilocybin Cubensis May 2007

Background: 

This one completely different than any other for me. My now ex wife had been deathly ill after a rare complication from a surgery and finally we had found the cause to be the fact that in this surgery they had cut the main trunk of the vagal nerve near her stomach and she had a very bad reaction to it. This has left her with severe nausea vomiting every ten minutes for almost two months straight and she had begun to speak of suicide. Add to this that pic line for nourishment had become infected and almost gone to her heart only stopped by first line intravenous antibiotics. This woman was the strongest human being who I had ever met so for her to speak of suicide both alarmed me and made me realize just had bad was her suffering by that point. We had finally discovered at this two month point that the sedative Lorazepam (Ativan) that relieved the nausea for up to two hours allowing her some respite and some much needed rest. In my own work with the mushrooms, it had been suggested that they could help in the healing with this reaction to the vagal nerve being severed but this would require her to take them, something she was not prepared to do even in a well state. I found some information on enema dosing but she was not game. I should say that I never suggest them to anyone only in this circumstance was the exception. Finally I determined to do them myself in a healing attempt but had little faith in it or in myself as a healer but was desperate and my thought was that it could not hurt. I really felt that if she herself would do it, it would help but it appears this would be the closest I could get to that happening. 
Dosage: 

I had been saving aborts for a while had in mind for some special occasion and I can't quite say why other than I felt they may have a certain … flare? I measured out six dried grams of mixed cubensis from five different strains and looked at the gnarly pile in the palm of my hand with satisfaction thinking well this application qualifies as a special occasion, I suppose.

Set and Setting: 

Mindset in this case kind of dovetailed with setting, I feel. My wife and two dogs are in a motel having sold our house right after she had this surgery that was suppose to be a rather simple affair, mind you. Now I am trying to get her in with a specialist at John Hopkins since the surgeon apparently hands off the 1% of the patients who have a negative outcome to lawyers so as not to slow down the assembly line work of his medical business. We were suppose to be heading out west for a summer of car camping having sold everything and then driving through Mexico to Belize where we were going to move and buy a jungle lodge to run.

Now we are staying in a motel near the hospital that is not in the best neighborhood. My routine for tripping is in the morning on an empty stomach with two of my most trusted plant allies, coffee and cannabis. For coffee I had to walk about a 150 yards to a 7-11 going through a small, urban forest strewn with a varied and disturbing array of litter including panties and condoms. I am glad to see my wife is still sleeping when I return. I sit and write up intentions reading them over emphasis upon this being a healing attempt for my wife so I am determined to not get carried off in any other directions in this trip something so far never attempted and for which I have little confidence in pulling off, really. I had always gone in with only the best intentions and the very thought of trying to direct the experience felt like something of an anathema to me so this trip now felt daunting and challenging to say the least. I should say that for me this was never about something happening within my own mind but about an interaction with a separate entity or at least with a symbiotic entity created by the Psilocybin interacting with my own nervous system. So now I speak to (this entity) prayerfully asking and asserting at once what I need from this experience. I had only recently recalled that years earlier I had been given my power animal in a dream and that it is the Great Blue Whale. Large part of my preparation is looking at pictures of Blue Whales then closing my eyes and visualizing them in my minds eye. This I continue doing even while eating from the anomalous little pile of aborts on the desk before me. Their smell and taste are especially strong. The only real faith I can muster this morning, try as I may, is not in myself but in this Blue Whale power animal. For whatever reason, I do have a lot of faith in the Blue Whale Power Animal.

My wife continues to sleep probably beyond exhaustion and I have to give thanks to the Ativan – and no cannabis didn't help at all, unfortunately. I am now not looking at the time as is my custom but at some point I feel like it is starting to come on seems like maybe a half hour or so has passed? One of my only three power items is a little brass bell it's handle shaped and imprinted with the shell of a tortoise and I close my eyes and ring it gently next to left ear to see if there are any closed eyed visuals but no so I decide to go into the bathroom and brush my teeth of the lingering funk of the aborts. The sound of the bell it's vibration is also intended to dispel any negative energy or spirits as well. 

By the time I am in the bathroom, I feel them coming on strong now so much so that I feel looking in the mirror may not be the best thing at this point since I do not want to get carried away into a heavy trip but to focus on the healing attempt and while not even sure this strategy is best, I go with it. But suddenly I find myself closing my eyes as my head tilts back still standing in front of the bathroom mirror as my head explodes with visions the likes I've which I had never known before. I am in a desert landscape and arising from the dust like a dust devil is a whirlwind vortex rotating counter clockwise as I stare at it in wonder it becomes a double helix of a DNA strand whirling formed of skull masks that look like Aztec Death Masks shaped like human skulls and there are .. millions of them? They are the grains of sand forming this rising vortex whirlwind and within the eye socket of each mask I see human eyes that are alive staring out and, as is not uncommon I had noticed even tripping on LSD, I seem to be able to see each individual mask, each set of human eyes, as well as the whole whirling DNA strand of masks rising up into the sky at once and as I actually tilt my head back, I feel myself falling and snap open my eyes holding fast onto the sink now and staring at myself there in the mirror, eyes lit up like car lights in the wet night.

Whoa. I smile, you little stinkers, I knew you would try to carry me away! I whisper to myself in the mirror.

Even eyes open just looking at myself there staring back, I feel myself again going now going away and I close my eyes and call upon the Great Blue Whale and visualize the Whale in my minds eye and to my astonishment, it works and dispels the Aztec Death Mask DNA strands obviously trying their best to take me away. Normally O my would that have worked a real attention getter! The healing I assert and open my eyes returning quickly to the bed fortunately only a few steps away in the hotel room. As I lay down next to my still unconscious bride, I feel a little better about my intention to not be carried off into this trip but rather to try to bare down on it with some control. This is such a counter intuitive thing for me to do. I lay on my side with my wife on her side behind me and she curls up next to me and puts her arm over my side and I pull it gentle over and place her hand upon my heart and hold it there with both my hands and I pray and breathe deeply and before I know it, I'm in this strange lucid dream state that I had once before on my first high dose experience. As before, it is very real and does not seem at all like a dream rather like I am in some alternative reality. My last thought I could recall was upon The Blue Whale visualizing it mainly, the vague thought of “help me”. I am aware that I am within a mushroom experience that is the strange thing and I am standing upon what seems like clouds but it is solid and standing next to me is The Blue Whale. I look over at it in wonder. It is enormous and it is as if it is standing upright next to me towering above me like a building.

A stern, demanding voice startles me away from the Blue Whale, “Why are you here!” It booms deeply.

I see then before me and just above two men who look like business men (maybe doctors?) only they are in white, flowing robes like perhaps priests might wear? The are standing behind a pure, white marble alter that comes up to about their waist and behind them is a single white column and from behind the column shines a blindingly white light but I stand with the whale just in the shadow of the column enabling me to see them but still they are cast in a halo glow. The one on my right had spoken but both of them are glaring down at me and I have the strong sense that I am not suppose to be here. They are obviously not happy about it! I cannot speak the deep, boom of his voice has rattle me to the core as my mind fumbles, “for the healing” but before I can translate it into words, the other one on my left says in the most disdainful tone speaking to the Blue Whale, “THIS is what you bring us, now?” And the way he says “THIS” is clearly referring to me and clearly implies that to these two I am evidently less welcome than dog shit on the bottom of your shoe.

The Great Blue Whale says simply, “He is with me” and just rewriting this years later now brings me to tears how it made me feel. I have never felt so comforted and validated in my whole life before or since. 
The two look at each other then and I sense that the Blue Whale clearly pulls some weight with them. A significant beat passes then the disdainful one on my left says prissily almost, “Well, alright then so it shall be!” and he then takes is right arm and winds it around in a full circle dramatically once, twice, thrice and with the third circle flings something invisible at me underhanded the way one might pitch a softball and I feel an electric shock in my heart and “wake up” there on the bed feeling my wife's hand blown off my chest just as I make a startled cry and fly out of the bed. My wife wakes and looks at me and I somehow manage to say, “it's nothing” and she rolls over to her other side and goes back to sleep while I try to catch my breath with some difficulty. I am trembling and very aware of what just happened in fact just being back in the room instead of there where I was is blowing my mind and I find myself looking around the motel room in wonder, “what the hell,” I mutter softly. Both my dogs are now at my feet and I manage to kneel and pet them and tell them everything is alright. They are obviously disturbed. I plop down in the straight back chair at the desk next to the bed and put my head in my hands, closing my eyes -

MISTAKE!

I open my eyes immediately just closing them and I'm gone again and I think about it now trying to reason with myself, grappling with what just happened – what DID just happen? I think back to it and replay it in my mind that electric jolt to my heart from that … that … what? Priest? Healer? How could a healer be such a fucking asshole? Did it actually blow her hand away or did I throw her hand away when I startled and jumped out of bed – yes, I think that must be it, I pushed her hand off me is all? I think well maybe the fact that her hand was on my heart was why he sent that charge into it? I take the joint I had rolled and step outside to burn one trying to get a handle on things. The dogs want to go out but just the thought of placing leashes on them and then holding onto the leashes – O that is far too much! It would be all I could do to light the joint. By the clock, it looks like I had been out maybe an hour, hour and a half? Very strange, I think, now outside smoking gratefully, usually so much happens and I feel like how does all that is in the trip get packed into so little real time back “here” but this time I find myself wondering what happened it seemed pretty fast “in the trip” just the Great Blue Whale and I standing before the two … asshole healers … then boom I'm out and back here and yet had to be over an hour's time passed?

I test closing my eyes and powerful closed eyed visuals explode each time and I think well OK the healing is over maybe so I can just relax and enjoy this? But somehow that feels wrong and I resist it and just want to come down. I am oddly down like I can walk and function pretty well, considering? I go back in and began writing it up and it is very hard looking at the computer screen the letters are very tiny and seem to be at the end of a long tube and as I write it up, I think that I should cut my finger and have my wife take some of the blood. No, that's crazy!

No, do it.

I get some yogurt out of the fridge and spend a long ten minutes having a surprisingly difficult time just pricking my finger but finally did so and bleed a single drop onto a small spoonful of yogurt and look at it bright red against the pale vanilla yogurt - “Inoculation” comes to mind strongly. The mushrooms are insistent, “Inoculation” they mean for me to inoculate her with some of them that is in my blood, however tiny an amount that it might be. They are adamant that I do so. I wake her as gentle as I can and to my surprise, she takes the teaspoon of yogurt smiling and then just goes right back to sleep.

I sit on the floor and cry then thinking, “OK this is over”. And it is. I considered it a failed healing attempt nothing dramatic happens in terms of my wife's healing. I spend the rest of the day it seems fully coming down.

Extremely Short Story, A Field Trip!

A drone from an alien race far, far away comes across earth and does it's job reconnoitering the third planet from this galaxy's sun finding it to be barren of any lifeforms whatsoever. In nearby galaxy where the aliens have a science station, one of their astro-archaeologists gets the transmission from the drone that includes among other information a photograph of Mount Rushmore.

She shares the photo of Mount Rushmore with her co worker and asks, “from that dead Galaxy XW42753, this the third planet from the sun, what do you think?”

After a moment, the co worker responds, “clearly wasn't always dead and if any of them were to have had life, likely would have been this one - vaguely humanoid. I say you and I go take a look, get the hell out of here," smiling broadly. "Wholly unnecessary but who doesn't love a field trip!”

“By the scale of what we have here, obviously going to be another case of a high tech self destruction pretty much the same developmental place as usual, guessing … but, I agree let's get the hell out of here!” She, also smiling broadly.

It was a true miracle that never ceased to astound her that their people had somehow made it past this extinction zone in sentient, planetary evolution. Anyway, she could only agree - who doesn't love a field trip.