The rift
As with the ayahuasca meetup I attended in Asheville a few weeks ago, not to mention every WordPress meetup I’ve attended since 2013, Saturday’s PsyAtlanta psychedelic integration meetup near Little Five Points was part meetup and part trade show, a mix I’ve come to accept as one of the defining characteristics of meetup culture. This marketplace dynamic might be unavoidable, in fact, since meetups tend to attract three types of people: those who know a lot, those who know less, and those prepared to buy whatever the first type has to sell. If I were king of the forest, meetups would consist entirely of the first two types, or the second type led by a knowledgeable facilitator, the shared goal in both cases being to raise all ships. Buying, selling, and advertising would take place at another time or in another place.
Nevertheless, I don’t regret the five hours I spent driving round-trip to Atlanta or the three hours I spent sitting on a stackable chair inside the branch library meeting room at 980 Ponce De Leon Avenue. There were digressions, of course, as might be expected wherever a few dozen strangers gather in the name of expanded consciousness. One man, for example, wanted to share with us the good news of Christ, another the many benefits of nutritional supplements. A third man, a self-described stoner, suggested that a fourth who was having difficulty “breaking through” try a dose that sounded to me like suicide, but my overall impression of the group was very positive. A cross-cultural, intergenerational, even international sample of predominantly on-point, open-minded, mutually supportive seekers.
I was there seeking stories. Bias-confirming travel stories in particular, and there were plenty of those. There were plenty of backstories, too: battles with depression, with eating disorders, with job dissatisfaction, alcohol abuse, anxiety, and childhood trauma. And while I’d have preferred a higher percentage of “betterment of well” experiencers and aspirants, their expectations of the “plant teachers,” I realized, were cut from the same cloth as mine. All of us sensed or on some level knew we’d become separated from something fundamental, be it internal or external. All of us sensed or on some level knew the plants offer a means of return.
Across Ponce De Leon is La Fonda, a Mexican restaurant from whose Linwood-facing wall a big, blue owl stares with big, yellow eyes. He seemed a fitting gatekeeper to the vicinity of our meetup and he asks a fittingly oracular question: “Meowl?” The mural and the meetup came to mind yesterday during a special showing of Princess Mononoke that for me invoked the ever-deepening darkness of the Enlightenment, and later, reading a New York Times article about the pristine Japanese island of Yakushima, I thought about the rift we’ve created between ourselves and what we call “the natural world,” as if it didn’t include us. And between ourselves and what we call “the spirit world,” as if that didn’t include us, either.