#LSD

When my oldest was seven or so, Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma changed the way I think about food and the food industry that, inevitably, feeds the vast majority of the country. His newest book, How to Change Your Mind, about psychedelics, is a book I’m reading exactly at the right time in my life. While I’m unlikely to be looking to score a few tabs of acid — I am a single mother who intends to stay on one particular side of the law, for one thing — the book is primarily about reappraising your life — in the supposed midstream, after a few years — maybe decades, compounded by child raising — of living.

What was I looking for at 21? Same, but different….

The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway.

— Michael Pollan

Driving home from a soccer game in Barre — I must always be writing about driving, driving, as maybe that’s when my mind wanders most, maybe thinks the best — we’re tired, or I’m tired at least, and my daughter must be starved. It’s raining, and the way is wooded and green.

Stopping at my library, on the way home, it’s wood turtle day. The hard-backed creatures have laid their eggs and are edging their way back to the wetlands. I see a six almost immediately in the grass. Looking down at the kids’ soccer field, the turtles are on the move, their ancient dance alive on this hot and now rainy summer evening.

My daughter stands silently, rapt.

Some late night reading….

(Aldous Huxley after an LSD trip wrote he saw)… ‘the direct, total awareness, from the inside, so to say, of Love as the primary and fundamental cosmic fact.’ The force of this insight seemed almost to embarrass the writer in its baldness: ‘The words, of course, have a kind of indecency and must necessarily ring false, seem like twaddle. But the fact remains.’

Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

Stony Soil Vermont

Vermont Writing

Reappraisal

Turtle Emergence