What I Learned from Talking Crows

 

Drugs are a window but not a door. Ram Dass

I assume you know psychedelics have been used in trauma research recently, which might seem a radical idea but in fact it’s a really old idea, the stuff of shamans. As a therapist, being allowed to bill clients for such work as a regular part of our Medical Insurance Industrial Complex, now that would be truly radical. I admit I had a lot of experience with psychedelics during my rebellious years, starting when I was thirteen, I used LSD, very frequently one summer, visiting Forest Park in Springfield, Massachusetts where it seemed you could get anything in those years, and, though, at the time I thought this was just recreational use, i.e. fun, and they were novel, these experiences also opened me up beyond the restraints of my childhood—restraints aren’t just a metaphor here, of course. You might consider me playing the familiar role of Rebel, except there was no one noticing my rebellion.

To warn you, I am going to describe one macro dose of mushrooms. I promise not to bore you about the predictable geometric patterns and electric colors, “the death by astonishment” as Terrance McKenna has described DMT (though this was much less than DMT). I do agree that anyone who describes their trips always seems self-indulgent, even foolish. Feel free to skip it.

Psilocybin was not available often in the nature park that served as my pharmacy. So, after I procured some, I was anticipating an exciting journey one Saturday; that was my only deliberate intention for the day, bringing a good set and in a good setting as Timothy Leary suggested, but, an hour in, I was bent over with unbearable pain, radiating from my gut through my limbs, my fingers claw-like. I couldn’t hold still, pacing around, then finding myself dancing about like an ancient warrior preparing for a hunt; I distinctly remember that this was the thought at the time, though you might question what I, a suburban teenager, would know about ancient warriors. Which would be a good question.

My parents were gone for the entire weekend, leaving me alone in the house, integral to the good setting. So, I was free to dance myself out onto the porch, hoping that a dose of Nature would be a distraction from the pain, but then immediately a crow stopped by to tell me to “get over it.”

“You know nothing about pain. You don’t know the trouble I’ve seen.” Something like that, though the message was conveyed without words, with some Caw, Caw, but I got the point. There was even a contemptuous tone, like I was not worthy of pity. It was very pointed, and then a bunch of other crows gathered to reinforce the message. The flock spoke in unison, “Buckle up Get ready! Forget your fun…Get serious. These are serious times. And this is traumatic pain.”

It was strange medicine. Normally you might not expect it to be helpful. I would never say to a client doubled over in somatic wounds, “This is not the half of it. We live in a traumatized world. Get ready to feel even more like crap!”  Of course, anything would sound different coming from birds, but their message helped me in some way that is hard to put into language. The pain suddenly took on a different texture, a different color or a different geometric shape. It was less personal. Existential. Maybe the understanding was a thousand years old. Maybe more. And I thanked them, oddly enough.

That was the start of approximately 2 hours when I left the porch and spent much of the time in my parent’s master bathroom having a conversation with God. Or to be more precise, I was the one talking, incessantly, acting out, shouting sometimes, shifting between different parts of a very old Heart-drama.  I sounded crazy. I knew I sounded deranged.

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-Louise von Franz

In the bathroom, peering into a huge mirror over the double sink and counter, 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 softly with the voice of a crow or making sounds from other beings. Or I was multigenerational trauma personified. Shape shifting. I felt tiny in an infinite space. Then, for moments I was the little boy in a familiar room forced to look at ridiculous wallpaper with cowboys and horses and covered wagons. We lived in a different house by that point. We moved continually in fact, “geographical cures,” and I had forgotten about that ugly wallpaper, recognizing it in this mushroom moment as a representation of the testosterone generated fantasy my father projected. He probably picked it out and carefully pasted it on to the wall in my bedroom. When restrained in thick canvas, drenched in sweat, I was a 5-year-old boy with nowhere to go, and nothing much to look at but the walls decorated with his father’s unresolved stupid shit.

Sometimes I was with a mushroom deity, or near to some lesser but powerful entity. This gave me a break from the action, and I could step back into a quieter space. 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) from religious and political and cultural nonsense. I keep trying to save your ass. And you (meaning human beings—it wasn’t personal to me but included me too) keep finding brand new ways to inflict more pain and destruction.”

Today I would concur wholeheartedly. As a species, we cry out with blame and resentment, and with 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 to live in a more compassionate heart, but I won’t deny the gist of what seemed like wisdom.

What I Learned in the Grandeur of Nature

If self-development and spiritual development are part of the same spectrum of consciousness and not simply antagonists then early damage to the former can cripple the emergence of the latter.  Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit

Not long out of college, I spent one lonely year in the capitalist mecca of San Diego, which left me heart-broken by the greediness and the untethered ambitions of my generation. With some renewed hope, I fled to Vermont where I had received my undergraduate degree, to immerse myself again in Thoreau and Emerson, Blake and Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Whitman and Theodore Roethke, and e.e. cummings. These were all writers that spoke to me. I recited lines of poetry like mantras and felt that these authors had something to say to my heart about beauty and meaning and what was real.

I took a job at the Brattleboro Retreat, an ancient psychiatric hospital, and bought a “renovated” cabin deep in the Vermont woods as my refuge. To spoil the end of this story, I soon discovered the woodsman’s life was unlike my romantic and idealized visions. Nature did not welcome me. In fact, I soon found resistant barriers to my transcendental urgings.

My learning began when, much like an archaeologist painstakingly digging back into the past, I removed layers of wood trim from the walls and ceiling of the cabin, discovering that the beams that would have supported this idyllic structure did not exist. They were an illusion, a figment of stability. By the time I finished my exploration with crowbar and hammer, I was surrounded by piles of pine boards. It was then that I fully grasped, with some astonishment, how little support was holding up the second floor and loft.

I had a similar experience as I began stocking my little farm. Layers of self-deception and magical thinking were pried loose, revealing a starker reality. Indeed, this could be the overarching metaphor of my young adult life, as I learned, for instance, that ducklings mature and, at some point, will be capable of flying out of the pen I built for them. All at once, in unison, together as one, just as I finished feeding them one morning, the flock rose out of the wire boundaries, rising skyward.

How had I not thought to put a top on it?

My two goats (mother and son) soon taught me that they had an intuitive knowledge of how to dismantle any fence I erected with wood, nails, and metal screws. Many days I found them standing on the deck, staring in the window at me, quite self-satisfied. Even the rabbits escaped their enclosures and found cozier accommodation under the small barn.

Fiona, my one sheep, was my nervous beautiful girl. She was a spherical creature, white mostly, but with a crochet pattern on the top of her head: white and brown and pink, with large gold eyes.

I found her one afternoon dead and stiff with rigor mortis, and I spent the next few hours with an axe on the icy dirt, trying to dig a grave deep enough for her. I was shivering and sweaty in my ragged leather coat. Distraught. I remember with clarity reciting an e.e. cummings poem over her. I was some mad Shakespearean character, filled with unbearable shame.

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer’s lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?

 

Later an old Vermont farmer told me that a ton of native vegetation was toxic to sheep and my land was surely filled with many plants that could have killed her.

Dangerous and unconscious

All this deconstruction of back-to-nature fantasies happened in near sub-zero temperatures and sometimes heavy snow and ice storms. In a startlingly beautiful landscape, I discovered how little I knew about the difficulties of existing in the real world outside of contemporary conveniences. My ignorance and preconceptions were removed like the rotting soggy insulation under the floorboards, until there it was—and the truth was bleak. I was ill-equipped to live like this, to even exist for long without electricity and running water on only a foundation built of found rock. I had to return to civilization, or at least what passes as that in our world. Maybe my experience of freedom lasted longer than Thoreau’s experiment at Walden Pond, but not by much.

Many years later, I acknowledged my youthful efforts to return to a state of nature as a kind of “spiritual bypass.” This phrase was coined by John Welwood in the 1980s to describe a way of using spiritual notions and preoccupations to avoid more difficult, more painful psychological challenges.

I left Vermont with a psyche stripped, de-romanticized, more aware that I could not take care of even a small handful of animals. The creatures were uninterested in my state of mind and heart. They were foreign beings with their own notions, temperaments, and survival needs. And my endless stream of spiritual grandiosity made me dangerous to them.