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Hola amigos, A sliver of moon grinned a cheshire cat grin as the sun faded over the Pacific Ocean tonight. I’m squeezing in an eleven-day, too-good-to-be-true adventure with a rad human I really wanted to go on an adventure with, and write you tonight on the roof of a mansion in a Mexican beach town! Two nights ago, in another town perched high atop a mountain ridgeline where clouds breathe in and out of existence and magic mushrooms can be ordered as easy as pie at all the restaurants, I had a midnight moment with one of the wildest views of my life to date. After walking about these crazy clouds (pictured above) at sunset, we drank a cup of mushroom tea, headed back to our little steep hillside cabin with this incredible view from the porch, and traded tunes as it took effect. Up at 8,000ft in elevation, it was cold, but at the height of the experience, I finally managed to wrap myself in a thick weaved blanket, go out, and sit on the edge of the porch. Holy wow… Countless stars. Clouds (actually) condensing and evaporating repeatedly across the sky over and over hiding and revealing the stars. The top of a tropical green flowering tree rising up from the steep hillside below with big bell-shaped flowers within hand’s reach. Drinking in the view and pondering science’s big theories: a big bang, stars cooking matter into increasingly complex matter, life springing from that complex matter and evolving on Earth… this eternity leading up to everything in my experience, including me, a monkey with all these layers of the process of creation in a single view and what felt like on fast forward because the clouds were coming and going so fast it looked like a time-lapse and the mushrooms seemed to have really un-”repressed [my] vision of the primary miraculousness of creation” and in pondering the great wide all I thought and said: “I see where I’m from.” I felt like a creature born out of creation far far out beyond the comfort of my culture, gazing and gulping directly at the yawing mystery from which I’d sprung. It felt like Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, not in book, but in experiential form. I’m not sure what to make of it all. It was profound and visceral and I wanted to write about it while it’s still fresh. In spending the past five hours toying with these words, thinking, writing and re-writing, I was quite identified with my physical body, with that creaturely “self,” and have had a variety of other experiences hinting at a “Self” deeper and larger, so who knows? I send this not to declare truth, but as a raw note from way out there, a glimpse into a surreal moment of exploration and mystery. Perhaps for inspiration, perhaps for something interesting to chew on, perhaps to try and pin what it’s like to engage life’s biggest questions as a monkey on space rock. Sometimes I feel the adventure of living the questions is better than finding the answers? With love & stoke, Ethan
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