The Shadow is not necessarily always an opponent…like any human being with whom one has to get along, sometimes by giving in, sometimes by resisting, sometimes by giving love.      Marie-Louis von Franz

Still in the bathroom, one moment I was yelling with the voice of my father, or yelling back at him, or speaking like my mother, or a sibling, sometimes with the voice of a crow or making sounds from another living being. Or I was multigenerational trauma personified. Shape shifting. For moments I was the little boy in a familiar room forced to look at ridiculous wallpaper with cowboys and horses and covered wagons. I had forgotten about that wallpaper, recognizing it in this mushroom moment as a representation of the testosterone generated fantasy my father projected. Restrained in thick canvas, drenched in sweat, this 5 year old boy had nowhere to go, and nothing much to look at but walls decorated in his father’s unresolved stupid shit.

Sometimes I was with God, or near to God. This gave me a break from the action, and I could step back into this quieter space when I needed to.. But the message here wasn’t gentle either. What I understood was something like “Don’t blame me. I’ve provided you Beauty enough, this astonishing sacred creation, and all these wonderful companion beasts, and I endowed you with the capacity to discern between reality (Truth) and religious and political and cultural nonsense. I keep trying to save your ass. And you (meaning human beings—it wasn’t just me but me too) keep finding brand new ways to inflict more pain and destruction.

As a species, we cry out with blame and resentments, and brutality and do not go gently into our latest vindictiveness. Not all of us, of course, are brutish. Many are doing the work we need to do in order to live in a more compassionate heart, but I won’t deny the gist of what seemed like the wisdom of the magic mushroom.

It wasn’t the day I was planning for, but maybe, in retrospect, I got some useful therapy. Profoundly sad, but strangely more connected to Nature and alive. Exhausted. But at least able to look out a window of this bedroom where I had gotten stuck, even if it would take a lot more therapy for my body to finally find the door.