The Mushroom Walk

Part 3 of a sequel by Martin J. Goodman

The threat of the storms has been captured by the mountains, just the occasional bulk of white cloud adrift in the blue sky over our heads.

I decide to let the mushroom take me for a walk.

It's a lesson I learned on ayahuasca, one I often ask my body to do on its own. I accept there is a physical consciousness as well as a mental one, so I still my mind to let the physical have precedence for a while.

I am hesitant at first, checking that my normal mode of decision making is not in over-ride. I walk slowly. Perhaps fear is playing a part for my body has turned to the right and I seem to be skirting the field entirely. But eventually I veer left, pass near a high steel rod to enter the lightning field, and keep on a course that takes me toward its core.

This route is dry, avoiding bogs so that the ground stays solid underfoot. I am glad to have been brought out this way. Two slender mushrooms grow to my left, rooted in a cow pat so fairly likely to be hallucinogenic. I bend over and touch them, wondering if this is the purpose of my walk, this opportunity to bend in reverence to the living form of the mushrooms that are active in my own chemistry. But my body urges me to rise and come with it, to walk on.

My fingers curl inwards a little, my chest presses forward. My posture reflects Castaneda's walk through France the previous summer. I worry that I am aping him, then let the worry go. My mind is meant to be on hold. I have given my body freedom to do as it wishes, and so relax back into that decision.

I am confident that the ground will stay firm now. Shrubs are so small and so scarce there is barely ever need to diverge from a straight path across the grass. I look some distance ahead of my feet as they set up a regular rhythm, and start to breathe in time with my steps.

The breathing asks to be given voice. I try some sound, showing a song the way if it wants to follow, and soon the open-throated song of my body is loud all around me. It keeps pace with my march, the song and the walk and the breathing all sharing one rhythm. The walk has arrived at its destination, for it is walking within itself. Still the walk is not aimless and I look out to see what is attracting it. The bearings focus on a mountain, the most distinctively shaped of the mountains that ring the area. Directly west, it rises toward a flat peak, its name Mount Allegre.

I am pleased to be in the centre of a march that is directed at a mountain, and my song sings still louder. It started as open-mouthed calls, its notes swooping and plummeting, but my tongue is working now and forming words. I am singing in a language I almost recognize but don't understand. A language of my body. My song is so full it surprises me to hear another voice. The voice is a gentle command from within myself which says that I should stop. Like taking the foot off the accelerator rather than applying the brakes, the command sets itself against my momentum. My footsteps slow. I pause, and grow silent.

I listen now. I have been hogging the party, the centre of my own attention, but it's clear to me that other forces are present. I wonder how they will show themselves.

"Sing," my body tells me. "You are here. There is no need to march. But sing."

My song resumes, sure of itself, vocal with its lyrics in the language I don't know. I sing to the mountain, then raise my head and sing to the sky. My feet resume their march, treading on one spot in time with the song, as my hands rise from my sides. My fingers straighten and spread, my hands begin to shake and the fingers to shiver, as they reach high above my head to where clouds lit white and rounded with shadow race across the sky.

I am singing to the sky, as my feet beat the rhythm of the song into the earth. I know the song now. It has verses, and a chorus, and a shape. It has a beginning, it passes through a middle, and in the natural way of things it comes to an end. I stare into the sky, leave my hands to hold the moment of silence, then bring them back down to my sides.

There is still no decision for me to take. I am following the promptings of my body, and so simply wait.

"Look," the body says. "See what you can see." And so I do. I don't look around but ahead, to where Mount Allegre stands. This is the view, and I wait for what I am to see to appear in front of it.

It comes in the air across to my right. The mental part of me notes disappointment in the plainness of the apparition, but I keep on watching. First one small violet-blue ball appears, the way I would imagine a molecule to be, then others follow it to form a small ring. It revolves at an angle, then glides down and to the left, turning to present me with the full circle of its shape rather than the sidelong oval.

It rests on the ground in front of my feet, still revolving, and as I watch it the circle expands. A broad avenue between the lightning rods leads between me and the mountain. The circle expands along it. It stretches to form an oval and twists after a while to form a figure eight, its violet-blue molecules always spinning in a flow of energy, so that even as the circle twists and flattens along the ground the tiny globes that form it still revolve around its perimeter.

Its pathway is complete. At one end of the pulsing, spiralling avenue it has formed is the mountain. At the other end is myself. This molecular stream is now the energy that flows between us. There is nothing for me to do now but to stand, and to appreciate. I thought, I hoped, that the walk would lead me to the mountain. This stream of violet light is happening outside of my hopes.

My walk has led me toward the mountain, but the mountain has also come to me.

***

As with the song this encounter with the mountain has a beginning, a middle, and a natural ending. The ending is for me to play out. With the stream of violet light still winding between us I acknowledge the mountain, thank it, and turn away. My body has accepted it is time to walk back.

I picked up a stone on the way out, a rough white one, and slipped it into my pocket. On my return I spot another stone, this one a blushing pink and in the shape of an ear. I bend toward it, and recognize it as a stone belonging to the journey. Laying the white one down in its place, I take the earstone in my hand and walk on.

The song returns. I drop the stone into my mouth and sing the song from beginning to end. It is something for the earstone to absorb. My route home takes me through the limits of the lightning field, beyond the outer rod with the log cabin ahead of me. I pause here and look to my right. A young rabbit stands at the edge of a patch of marshland, using its paws to wipe itself clean, bending forward its ears. A little further on I reach a broad stand of thistle, crowned with its purple flowers, and kneel beside it for a moment. I place my earstone on the ground above the thistle's roots and walk away.

I turn to Mount Allegre before entering the log cabin. The sun is dropping behind it, sheathing the sky to crimson.

***

I picked up that earstone the next morning. It is beside me on the desk as I write, listening to these words.

Carlos Castaneda stepped into my life and reclaimed his jungle. He's welcome to it. Perhaps we learn most from what has the power to kill us. Castaneda warned me against the power of mountains, yet in the Lightning Field they called me back to themselves and I am eager to listen. Each to his own poison.

Ayahuasca has given me my clearest experience of what has long been a mystical truth, a truth now being rationalized in science as M theory. All of existence is one being. In a microcosm of that my own body is one being, even though it has shed and grown so many cells that its physical structure shares little but DNA with my body as a youngster. My finger and my elbow are equal parts of that one body, but I don't pick my nose with my elbow. Every being is part of one whole, and can access any part of the experience of that whole, but still has a unique potential. We each have something we are called to.

If Castaneda comes back, I guess I have one final question for him. It's the question that takes us to astrology, or to the palm reader at the end of the pier. We want to know about the future and how we might succeed. "What will become of me?"

And of course that's a question we are left with. It's a question no-one can answer but ourselves.