I remember one of the first times that I smoked cannabis. I was in high school and with my lifelong dearest friend. Seeking out nature, we wandered into a wooded area in our neighborhood, and walked along Stonybrook path, finding a stream, finally making our way out into a field. There we sat together for a very long time, or at least perhaps what felt like a long time.
I remember this experience so well, as if it were yesterday. I felt a wild and deep connection to the earth. Lighting up a cigarette, I smoked some tobacco. I remember feeling the smoke hit my lungs, the sensation of earth touching the inner space of the body - the sacredness of this actual act entirely lost upon our culture… I remember feeling the trees soaring upward to the sky, a deep communion of heaven and earth, our bodies resting in between on the soft plush ground.
We sat there for some time, breathing in the grasses, the stream, the trees; feeling the wind like a wave through my body, feeling the pulsing of my blood, sunlight bathing my skin.
I also remember having a revelation. Some may make fun of these revelations when we are young and under the influence of even the slightest of psychedelics. It is easy to belittle those expansions. But in my own unindoctrinated way, I felt this as a sacred experience. I was very open, innocent. And it felt very clear to me that we lived in a world which did not teach us how to feel this brilliant connection to body and earth and sky. And yet it was there, for all of us.
What is more than that, I had the distinct experience that there were powers in this world that simply did not want us to connect to the true magnificence of the natural world, which reflects and magnifies our own sacred being-ness and a powerful, spontaneous and intuitive sense of embodiment. For what are we as creatures if not sons and daughters of the earth, and the very powers that move through the cosmos?
It was a beautiful epiphany laced with this understanding of a sense of darkness, a feeling that there were forces in this world that simply did not want us to expand our minds, to free ourselves from societal bondage, to learn how to embrace true sovereignty and selfhood. I felt my own inner Jim Morrison.
This was perhaps one of the first times where I may have questioned -- where are our rituals? Where are our vision quests- the journeys that bring us into a profound and expansive sense of self that is intertwined with archetype, myth and the earth body? They do not exist for those of us in this culture. We must make our own, or not.
I share this memory with you as I was contemplating the epiphany, by my own inner compass, that the world is not what it seems, that we simply do not actually know what is transpiring, and certainly not in the dark corners and cavities of the government. Who truly knows what happens in those corridors of power? Who can truly speak to that darkness?
And now as I witness what to me is the experience of our culture, the world truly, on the brink of absolute medical tyranny, I remember that young woman sitting in a field feeling her freedom so entirely, just by breathing in the air. We are slowly, drip by drip, allowing our personal sovereignty to be swallowed by government. Can we not see? Do we not understand?
This personal epiphany is one which I have never forgotten. In some way it actually has guided certain aspects of my being and life - that I have sought out counterculture, that I have a voracious desire to feel truth in my body, and that I have the inner curiosity to question authority and the very foundation of this strange and sick society that we all contribute to.
Again, one might easily laugh at these experiences now, but I do not.
I pray for illumination. I pray for healing. I pray for unity.
The bondages that we are signing up for remind me of what I felt that day so long ago on that field; a force moving, dark and unchecked, wrapping itself around our necks.
May all beings know true and lasting freedom.