Language has always held a very special place in my mind and soul. For all of the loving relationships and special moments in my life, I have always had an intense desire to express those feelings articulately with language. Without articulate communication that adds depth and meaning to our most inner feelings and desires and the positive or negative affirmation that inevitably follows when two people in a relationship communicate at such a deep level, I feel that something very special is lost between our interactions in favor of casual conversion and easy 'I love you's.
The result of this desire has mostly
left me disappointed, however. This is because I have always also
felt that this desire is not shared by most, leaving it up to me to
get that soul to soul communication started. Most often, out of fear
of rejection or worse – agreeable fluff, I would never attempt to
say the things I wanted to say. Perhaps my desire is not at all lost
on most of my friends and family as I thought, but they too struggle
with the same fears and insecurities. Despite this I have still
always had outbreaks of deep emotional communication with some
people, which would mostly lead to awkward moments but occasionally bring the type of interaction that satisfies my desire for deep
communication - if only for a few moments in time.
I have no regrets over thing things I
have said, but plenty for all the things I have never said. For each
person I was able to break out of my inner shell and communicate with
on a deep level, there are so many more who are no longer part of my
life – and I just wish I could go back in time and tell them what a
great human they are or were, the profound and positive effect they
had on my life, and how special our time shared together was for me.
The first time I experienced a
psilocybin mushroom trip, this desire and the disappointment it has
brought to my life was weighing heavily on my soul. I realized how
much I wanted to not only spend as much time as possible with those
most dear to me, but to also use that time to articulate exactly what
I think of them and what their love feels like to me. I was sad to
also realize how many years I had wasted apart from them, chasing
material things and wasting time with more shallow acquaintances.
Lost time and opportunity with my girlfriend and family was on my
mind, but most of all it was my younger brother.
In the weeks that followed my first
trip, I focused on spending more time with my girlfriend and made efforts at
improving our communication but I did not act on this revelation
regarding my family as I should or could have. Fast forward to about
five weeks after my first trip, and I am eating some Golden Teachers
to embark on my second psychedelic voyage. It was not more than
fifteen minutes later, well before I was feeling any of the effects,
that my brother sent me a text to let me know that he was going to be
in town and to invite me to have breakfast at my parents house. The
timing was just so incredible, I felt as if god or the universe was
not only teaching me a lesson about myself – but blessing me by
giving me the exact opportunity to act on it at the exact time I
would have wanted and needed it the most. As the psychedelic
experience grew more and more intense I was flooded with the same
thoughts and desires as my first trip, only this time I had an
outlet for my new goals ready to go – it was perfect.
The next day I woke up and went with my
girlfriend to have breakfast with my family, it was one of the
happiest times in my life and by far the most enjoyable time spent
with my family since I had been a child. I felt so much love, we
didn't waste the time arguing about politics or anything else, and my
brother even asked me to be the best man in his upcoming wedding. I
can't express how perfect it was. Still, it did not satisfy my
desire for deep articulate connection entirely at that moment, but it most
certainly was a very positive step in the right direction for me. I
hope that I will be able to look back at that day as a turning point
changing the way I interact with my family for the rest of our lives,
it seems certain to me that it will be.
Would all of that have happened if I had not
been using fungus for the sake of some soul searching? If I had not
being using psilocybin would I have felt and reacted to it in the same way?
Was it all just a phenomenal coincidence given meaning only by my
personal desires and interpretations? There is no way to know, but
perhaps this quote from The Matrix describes it best:
“What happened happened and could not
have happened any other way”