peyote

first, the fall...

“It’s early November and there are still bees in the garden. They’re probably sheltering beneath leaves to escape the downpour that you can hear in the background. The UK has been in a prolonged drought, like so many other places, though the forecast now is for high winds and heavy rain.

I was planning on reading a longer piece this week, though after repeated attempts have given up on that idea. I will still be reading a little from it, but it proved particularly difficult because it tells of a time nearly a decade ago when I suffered a head injury as a result of a cycling accident in California that left me in a state of disarray, and the coping mechanisms and personas that I’d created to steer me through a lifetimes worth of turmoil collapsed. And so, all of the past unexamined traumas and stresses and disturbances that I’d coped through came back to be felt anew, to join in the skirmish with the present trouble.

For some time after that I had difficulty functioning in the way that I’d become accustomed to, including not being able to read or be in social gatherings that involved more than two other people. I could no longer work in recording studios because I became claustrophobic, and I couldn’t be in concert settings because large groups of people and loud music and lights were unbearable, so my music industry career that had spanned three decades came to an end, and I lived with, I’ve lived with, actually, head pain ever since but I’ve normalised it. I’ve actually come to adjust to it in many ways—except, a few months ago, I experienced something that could best be described as a neurological seismic event that hospitalised me and I’ve been doing the usual, very familiar round of tests and MRI’s and one thing and another as I reorganise from that.

So, that’s why retelling of those experiences whilst re-experiencing some of them felt particularly charged and difficult, especially as reading large bodies of text is problematic at the moment. So I had about twenty goes at recording it over the last week and have decided to change tack. I will read a little bit from it now—one of the explorations that I tried at the time was plant medicine, particularly peyote as it had arrived as a curiosity in the form of a dream, and so I pursued it and found a traditional ceremony just over the Mexican border, so drove down there and attended that, and we’ll pick up the narrative from the depths of that ceremony.”

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Since the accident I had created a belief that I had not done life well, so I asked for some guidance on how to escape this particular torment, and the spirit of the medicine said, ‘Don’t brace, don’t brace, show your face to the sky, show the depth of your sorrow. The sky is infinite and can hold it, your body can not’. As the sadness rose I experienced it as total, I could not conjure a memory of joy, nor imagine a single source of laughter, and yet without distraction or diversion, I realised the grief was not as unbearable to feel as the painful tension that arises from trying to suppress it.

From here, the best option seemed to be to offer a prayer of gratitude for the passing of the person I once was, then to walk without plan or expectation towards something else, one act of generosity at a time. Starting with compassion for my own soul. The trick is not to try and return to any former glory or youthful, untainted hopefulness. There was no cure for the grief of the loss of my former self, but that didn’t rule out the possibility of healing. The distinction is this: a cure puts us back to where we were before the trauma having learned nothing from it, healing takes the teaching held within the trauma into account. We have lost something, but have gained something from the loss of it.

“The following is an encapsulation of this experience, it’s the wisdom I’ve been able to extract from it. I refer to it regularly as a reminder that the journey is not linear and there is no point of arrival.”

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I am still learning to let go, enduring a repetitive cycle of arrogance and humbling because I forget the debt of thanks I owe, because my consciousness is flawed and creates a loop of forgetting, conjuring problems to serve as distraction away from the shattering beauty. It’s an ongoing, circuitous journey of departure and arrival. Somewhere, in the momentary pause between inhale and exhale, rise and fall, there is a space within which I can sit in the presence of beauty without fear and without wanting to control, possess or consume it. It is possible to be open to learning, to being teachable, without feeling foolish. It is possible to be humbled without being emasculated. Perhaps relearning is more accurate. There was so much that was inherent to me as a boy that became lost as I grew, and in that process a fragmentation occurred which resulted in a homesickness of sorts, a separation from self which manifested in many and varied ways; mostly destructive. The key for me was to admit that I did not feel worthy to be in the presence of the radiant, of the mystery. And from there I began to understand that somewhere within my depths there was, after all, something shimmering—and when I could summon it, by its light, I could see more clearly.

Music by Yoav