I grow many salvias in my garden—as many as I can get my hands on—both in beds and in pots. The tender ones are in pots on my porch but I also grow some in my flower beds as annuals. The plant known as meadow sage (salvia pratensis or s. nemorosa) is a very popular and reliable perennial in my zone 5 landscape. Its flowers can be white to shades of lavender, purple, and even hot pink. I have noticed that the hot pink variety does not usually survive our winters—my guess is that as a more recently developed cultivar it is perhaps less hardy.

You may recognize the salvias used in the landscaping approach my husband and I call “Amish Bank.” This unfortunate style combines the meticulousness of the usual Amish garden (easily achieved when you have 7 children to edge and weed-whack) with all the imaginative design of a drive-thru bank. These salvias are dwarf with bright red flowers that continue until frost. The plants do as they’re told and nary a stem dares to extend past the border of bark mulch. I avoid them completely, viewing them with contempt, but I do grow their ancestor salvia splendens species that I obtain from Select Seeds Antique Flowers. These salvias are rambling and tall, reaching up to attract hummingbirds that fight over access like little ninjas. I keep these in pots on my porch. Bolivian Sage is another interesting salvia that has fuzzy stems and flowers in cerise. It takes a really long time to get going in my climate, however. There are many blues in the salvia family as well, from deep indigo salvia guarantica to cerulean bog sage (salvia uliginosa).

As I mentioned above, a notable species is salvia divinorum. It is a shrubby plant found only in the Sierra Mazateca in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. Its leaves are chewed by the Mazatecs to induce visions; they call it Maria Pastora. It can also be smoked. Salvia divinorum is unique in several ways. Most plants that cause states of altered consciousness contain alkaloids—examples are nicotine, caffeine, and morphine. The active compound in salvia divinorum, salvinorin A, is not an alkaloid and is the most potent psychoactive substance discovered thus far. Most of the well-known psychoactive plants and fungi, such as psilocybin mushrooms and the preparation ayahausca or yagé, act on the serotonin receptors; salvinorin A is a kappa-opioid agonist. This suggests that the plant may be useful in addressing opioid addiction because it stops withdrawal symptoms immediately. It is very potent and around 2007 caused a panic after YouTubes posted by users showed dramatic reactions to smoking salvia. However, the dosage taken by these users was extremely high. Used in much lower doses the plant causes comparatively subtle responses that last only a few minutes. As always, uninformed reactions by government agencies have affected the legal status of salvia divinorum. While it is not federally banned, some states have made the sale illegal. One would think the government would have more important issues to address, but of course not.

Salvias are pollinator magnets. I love to watch the moths, butterflies, and hummingbirds visit them in my garden, as well as bees. They tend to bloom all season as well in a varied palette from pinks to purples to blues as well as shades of red and burgundy. I love to come upon them growing wild during my trips to Mexico. I encourage you to seek out different varieties of salvia in your landscape. Way more interesting and beneficial than grass!

Kanna, Mesembryanthemum tortuosum, is a succulent that grows in the Cape Provinces of South Africa. It was chewed by the indigenous Khoisan people and contains more than 25 alkaloids. Its effects are described as euphoric, but I would say that these effects are quite subtle. And unlike with many plant medicines, the body seems to adapt over time to the point where one becomes more rather than less attuned to the sensations generated by continued use. I agree with this based on my own experience.

I started using kanna a couple of months ago. I tried sublingual lozenges and capsules as well as a powder that can be insufflated. At first I felt nothing. But having read that it takes repeated attempts to feel much, I kept trying. Now I definitely sense something. I would describe this feeling as cheerful or optimistic (hey, we could all use more of that!) with a soupçon of connection with others. It’s the psychological equivalent of sharing a funny meme with a friend on a fine spring day. Kanna is a bit like a blossom opening to receive the sun. People say that they like to take it before social situations. I did feel that it made me more open to group workshopping during my recent memoir-writing retreat. But some of that was probably canceled out by the heaviness of the trauma discussed.

I haven’t noticed any comedown or physical discomfort associated with my feeling afterward. Once in a while I feel a vague nausea at first, which is mitigated by a little bit of food in the stomach. Combining kanna with caffeine might make you a bit jittery. Of course all this is highly subjective—you’ll have to see for yourself in you’re interested in trying it. It is legal at present but I would research potential sources carefully to make sure it’s sourced sustainably and tested for contaminants. Don’t buy stuff in gas stations!

If you do a search for podcasts on Kanna you will come up with a few. I prefer the more scientific podcasts to those that project human qualities onto plant medicines and wax all lyrical about them. If you’re looking for information, the woo-woo attitude can be a bit of a turn-off. For me, anyway. Sometimes the hosts know absolutely nothing and haven’t bothered to do any research beforehand. That is annoying. Look into Kanna if it intrigues you. Just beware of grift. In the wellness community there is a lot of that. In fact, grift seems to be everywhere. No wonder we’re all looking for a boost in mood.

I do have some habits I find helpful and wholesome (for me) and I was thinking about them as I waded through the sea of various “shoulds” you can find everywhere on the internet. Exercise every day, eat plant-based, get outside, get enough sleep, create human connection, hydrate, tidy your environment, wear sunscreen, don’t scroll too much, wear shoes in the house (seriously—I read that in The NY Times), etc. etc. It can make you feel exhausted just encountering all that advice. So what are a couple of things I do every day that make me feel a little more in control?

I do exercise faithfully—some might say obsessively, and I have done so for 40 years. It hasn’t always been positive because I had multiple stress fractures from running and I would get very irritable if something interfered with my routine. I am a bit more reasonable about it now and overall I have seen enormous benefit. I have always been fit. As you age life is much easier if you’re fit, and it can save your life if you encounter severe illness, as I did a year ago. My doctors told me that my survival may have been the result of prior fitness. I have seen Covid and other illnesses take out people my age and I have friends who I feel are gambling with their lives because they don’t exercise at all and eat shitty food. But I keep my mouth shut. These are intelligent people who already know these facts and I am not their mom.

I eat well too, but that was a major source of angst when I was much younger. I became very vigilant about avoiding any fat when that was a fad. I would feel crushing guilt when I ate something that I thought was “bad.” But I had an uncanny experience that changed my attitude. I was 28 years old in the summer of 1989, newly married and living in Madison, Wisconsin. I was almost finished with my Ph D so I wasn’t taking classes and writing comes easily and always has, so I had a lot of time to sit on the terrace at Memorial Union and look at the sailboats on Lake Mendota. The first time I saw that view several years before, I was stunned. Is this a university?? It seemed more like a resort. Students gathered with pitchers of beer and salty popcorn, listening to Marvin Gaye on the Jukebox (“Sexual Healing”), just steps from the glacial lake.

I was sitting there on that summer day when I saw a woman whose appearance shocked me. Madison had its share of down and out homeless or semi-homeless people, many of them fixtures in the city, but this woman was frighteningly thin, skeletal. I recall her deep tan and a face that, while still young, looked so drawn and lined that she seemed nearly elderly. She asked if she could sit. In those days I was frequently approached by marginal people who were perhaps mentally ill or homeless or likely both. It happened so often that even others noticed it. I gestured to the empty chair. She sat and lit a cigarette. Blowing the smoke out the side of her mouth she asked my name. When I told her, she said her name was Martha as well. She said she was living at the YWCA. It was painful to look at her. She reminded me of photos I’d seen of Holocaust victims. She said she was anorexic, which was obvious. She told me to take care of myself and left. At that time I weighed somewhere around 103 pounds. Something shifted that day and I realized that my fixation on weight and what I ate was neurotic.

I am a vegetarian and I eat only complex carbohydrates and watch my protein intake. It’s not really difficult for me because I don’t crave junk. I do love dark chocolate but a little goes a long way. Otherwise sugar is not that appealing. I don’t drink anymore, though I used to drink more than I probably should have. Possibly any alcohol is more than anyone should drink. Both Sridhar and I stopped drinking when we were living in Australia. He only ever had a beer or two and we didn’t intentionally change our habits. We just didn’t want it. My anxiety had diminished considerably. I used to drink to relax and unwind but what I discovered is that the rebound anxiety is worse. I realized that the pleasant effect of alcohol lasts about 15 minutes, followed by unpleasant effects that last much longer.

Plant medicines feel much more helpful for anxiety and mood. I microdose mushrooms and I also take kratom and kanna. Kratom has been demonized quite a bit in the media but as usual the people writing these alarmist stories know very little about the plant. Wade Davis, the well-known ethnobotanist, writes about the benefits of coca, which has been vilified through a genocidal colonial effort to control the lands of indigenous people in South America. Yes, coca contains the alkaloid that is refined to make cocaine, but there is a world of difference between chewing coca and snorting cocaine. Similarly, taking kratom leaf is nothing like ingesting kratom extract bought at a gas station. Government regulations are notorious for being based on complete ignorance. In any case I don’t use antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications, though I used to. They might benefit some people but I have found their effects unhelpful and they can be very difficult to discontinue.

Another daily habit is writing. I do it every single day and I have stacks and stacks of daily journals going back decades. Probably a lot of it is boring and repetitive but sometimes it is useful if I need to remember or recapture something. I just find it therapeutic as well. I can’t *not* do it at this point. Writing is so intertwined with my daily life.

Finally, nearly every day I do something creative, whether it’s beadwork, stitching, painting, or sculpting. Making something is more meditative than actually meditating. My hands are my friends. They seem to possess knowledge that comes from something outside my body. They know things that my mind doesn’t access. I feel as if I spin spirit with my hands. In fact, if I think too much about a particular skill I have, I can no longer do it. It’s almost as if there is a separate consciousness in my hands.

So these are my everyday practices. I’m sure you have them as well. So next time you read a list of “shoulds” and start to feel bad that you’re not meditating or doing yoga or drinking bone broth or whatever it might be, just focus on the things you are doing that help you to maintain your equilibrium in these times when it can seem extremely difficult. And please share those practices, if you like

.

But yesterday was warmer so I planted dahlias. I like the tall dahlias with flowers as wide as plates, showy as fractals. I dig the tubers after the first hard frost and store them in a box filled with sawdust in the basement; now they’ve expanded to two boxes. They do really well in the raised beds filled with mushroom compost. Those raised beds were supposed to be for vegetables but the wildlife only permits me a salsa garden, which gets planted a little later. No point in putting in tomatoes and peppers before June.

When I was in Tasmania last year I was impressed that folks could grow tomatoes and peppers because it didn’t feel warm enough for those. Mornings were almost always sweater-cool and tee-shirt afternoons weren’t all that common, even though that sun was extremely strong. Which explained the dozens of skin cancer clinics in Hobart. They could grow sweet corn too, though we didn’t discover that right away. Most of the farmers’ market vendors were Hmong so the vegetables were mainly Asian varieties.

In the past we’ve joined a CSA. The problem with those is the surfeit of whatever is in season. If it’s spinach that’s ok. If it’s celeriac or turnips, that’s less good. We finally decided to end our membership after pounds and pounds of green beans. I do go to the local farmers’ market here, but I have to drive and it’s very busy. I often buy vegetables from Amish roadside stands, which is fine as long as you help them figure out how much change you need. And of course you can’t use a card.

Yesterday I was very disappointed to find my favorite Amish greenhouse shuttered. The woman who ran it was also called Martha. For some reason in the valley there are several Marthas, both Amish and “English,” which is strange to me because up until I lived here I was always the only one. Amish greenhouse Martha used to grow some interesting flowers, different varieties of salvia and tall snapdragons that I couldn’t find elsewhere. I gave up starting seeds some years back. At that time I was taking care of lots more farm animals and something had to give. So it was tending seedlings.

I have potted up most of my collection of salvias and fuchsias that I order from Select Seeds Antique Flowers. They always arrive impeccably packed, though a bit early. These varieties are all tender so I don’t plant them in beds, for the most part. I have tried a couple of times to winter some of these plants indoors but they never do well. Last fall I tried with two fuchsias. Of course the cats chomped on the leaves and then threw them up. Eventually I put the plants under grow lights in the basement. They looked a little better but then scale or some disease got them. So I just replace them every year. The pollinators love salvias and fuchsias on the porch and I love to watch the ninja dives of the hummingbirds as they defend their territory. I also make sure to provide junk food for them as well.

Late last summer we redid our garden pond that had become choked with cattails. With the help of our Amish neighbor’s two oldest boys Sridhar pulled out the liner. We replaced that and filled the pond and within days we had 17 frogs. We have no idea where they came from. But now there are no frogs, though our goldfish have survived. We hear a single frog calling but it sounds like a lone spring peeper. I planted bulbs around the pond in fall and the display was very cheerful with yellow mini daffodils and lavender grape hyacinths as well as some other small bulbs.

Every year I try to grow hollyhocks. A neighbor has yellow ones that come back reliably but I have a preference for red, or my favorite almost-black hollyhock. When we lived in Santa Fe 30 years ago I took seeds from black hollyhocks but I was never able to get them to germinate in Pennsylvania. I only had one year to garden in Santa Fe. As long as I could water everything did well. I had glorious roses—no black spot or powdery mildew there. Most of my roses here have developed a disease that causes witch’s broom growth—apparently this disease was introduced to kill multiflora rose, which is invasive. The multiflora we have here seems to be unaffected. You need a Kevlar suit to hack away at that.

Invasives are a problem everywhere. Here we have Russian olive that spreads in a thorny impenetrable tangle of shrubs. It’s blooming right now, which is I think is causing my blocked sinuses. It seems less pleasantly fragrant when you know it’s invasive. I looked into renting a flock of goats to graze it down but that was prohibitively expensive. Our neighbors have planted their entire property in meticulously laid out lines of shrubs and trees that you can see via satellite. Once the snow melts they are maintaining their property pretty constantly with the use of noisy machines. Sometimes they do pick up twigs by hand! Our other neighbors mow acres of grass that they treat with chemicals. That’s the only time they’re outside.

We don’t mow very often. Our yard and gardens are “messy.” I used to get overwhelmed thinking about the weeds but I gave up worrying about them last year. When I am outside pulling weeds I listen to the catbird who has a lot to say about everything in his or her joyfully chaotic way. I look up to see the dip and dive of a goldfinch’s flight. Swallows skim close the ground for insects. I miss our chickens, who would scratch around, hoping to snatch an earthworm I might unearth. Once a hen swallowed a toad before I could stop her. Another time one of my turkey hens plucked out my nose ring and ate it before I realized what was happening. The peacocks had a careful way of cocking their heads this way and that before deciding whether something was edible.

I don’t know how many more seasons I will tend this land. Someday it will be the last time. These moments are ordinary and precious and a day in the garden is never wasted

.

As often as weather permitted Meema swam in the chilly waters of the lake, played the old lady’s out-of-tune piano, and sketched vistas of black spruce and birch reflected in the water. Sometimes she would venture out in the rowboat (patched in a few places) but never very far. Rowboats are awkward, Meema thought, you have to keep looking back to see where you are going. The summer that had seemed to stretch out before her in June soon went by, echoing in the distance like the call of a loon. Later Meema looked back on that summer in the Adirondacks as if encased in amber, a past experience curled in upon itself with no place in the sequence of ordinary time.

Years later, after the children had gone, Meema felt a kind of silence settle upon her; her focus had been taken up with the often stale routine of music lessons and more pets and Outer Banks beach vacations. Those summer holidays began to lose their appeal: long sweaty days in a station wagon, the growing strife among the children, and Meema’s own lack of enthusiasm that became more obvious every year. Meema had never much liked the beach anyway--the punishing summer sun of the south and the rough water of the Atlantic made her draw inward as if to protect herself. She stood up to her ankles in the surf, knees bent as if she had stopped in the act of sitting down, and as a wave approached she said, “oh oh, oh oh” and backed up so that the wave only foamed over her toes.

Now in her late 50s, Meema often thought back to the clean, scented air of the Adirondacks, where it was quiet but for a woodpecker, a chittering red squirrel, and the water gently lapping at the wooden dock. She imagined wearing a sweater at dusk and scanning the dark stillness of the lake, looking for loons.

So in late middle-age they decided to go.

After Meema and Dill exited the Northway, the surroundings seemed to close in very suddenly from rounded mountains at the horizon to granite cliffs plunging into deep narrow lakes, with birches clinging to the side, down to the edges marked by black spruce. The road twisted past the Aubuchon River, tumbling over smooth boulders and divided around an especially large rock, a resting spot for wet teenagers shivering under towels, maybe a bit uncomfortable, but happily so.

They passed through Keene, a combination of slightly tacky cottages and upscale kayak rental businesses and a cafe where hikers ate huge stacks of organic blueberry pancakes before they hit the trailhead. Here were houses where people lived all year long, painted flower boxes with geraniums sharing the front yard with a long-dead lawn tractor. Fit bicyclists in spandex pedaled up and up; sometimes they had to stand, their sinewy calves bulging with effort.

Meema was content to observe and admire the young, vigorous vacationers; she knew that other people sat on porches reading, or canoed along the edge of a lake. She would do that.

Those first few years of the Adirondack vacations Meema and Dill were joined by some combination of their children and children’s friends, later on, the children’s spouses. Meema was especially close to her and Dill’s daughter, Esther, so even when most of the rest of the family had moved on, their own family vacations and commitments pulling them away from Meema and Dill, Esther always went with them to the Adirondacks. She was content to be with them on her own, reading or walking, or lying down in the rowboat, watching the sky. Sometimes Esther would go alone in the kayak, and Meema worried. When Esther swam, Meema would look down from the porch, a small shadowy figure behind the screen.

Esther always woke early, though never as early as Dill. She heard the whine of the coffee grinder, which almost always went on a little too long on that first morning of vacation. The sound was both comforting and annoying, like Dill’s cigarette cough deep in the night when Esther was a child.

When Esther got up she found Meema sitting at the table, straight as always, the collar of her bathrobe up beside her neck on one side, folded down on the other. The white tag of her nightgown poked against the delicate vertebrae of her neck. Esther tucked the tag into her flannel nightshirt. The kitchen smelled strongly of coffee. Dill was on his hands and knees, wiping up black liquid and grounds, which had erupted from the automatic coffee filter and flowed like sludge down the cabinet door and onto the floor. “I told you not to grind it too long” Esther said. “I know, “ Dill replied and groaned as he got up off the floor and dumped several sepia-colored paper towels in the trash.

Meanwhile Meema waited for her coffee, smiling at Esther, the neatly set cup and saucer in front of her, a china plate, a butter knife and spoon, and butter on a clean dish. Meema began to recount a dream to Esther, a long boring thing about being in a house with many rooms, and there was a cat, and Esther was there eating an orange, and Meema couldn’t find her pocket book.

After breakfast Meema and Dill went out with their matching binoculars, and if the weather looked a bit iffy or misty, their matching raincoats as well. They walked along the old railroad line stretching between bogs edged by fir and balsam. Frogs yelped and plopped into the bog and turtles, sunning on logs, slid into the tannin-stained water. Meema and Dill looked for kingfishers that might be perched on the bones of dead spruce that stuck up out of the marsh. They often heard the crystal call of the thrush.

Sometimes they saw great blue herons wading in the shallows; the birds looked like old men with their hunched backs and long skinny legs. As quiet as Meema and Dill tried to be, the herons sometimes got grumpy and flapped their ungainly bodies above the water until they were level with the tops of the trees. Then, with surprising grace, they flew out of sight, but surely not far away.

In the afternoon Meema and Dill paddled the canoe out into the lake, usually hugging the shore. Dill ordered Meema to paddle this side and then the other; he was certain that they weren’t going in the intended direction because Meema wasn’t paddling correctly. Often they would happen on a loon or perhaps a loon family of three, sometimes drifting close enough to see the bird’s red eye. “Loons are so much bigger than you imagine,” Meema always said.

The routine of the vacation didn’t vary much.

When it was time to leave, Esther felt a knot of sadness at summer’s end press between her ribs.

As the seasons went by, the trips became somewhat difficult to distinguish from one another. The routine remained pretty much the same--even Dill’s annual mishap with the coffee. But eventually the bird walks became shorter; Meema took longer to tie her shoes, and when Dill told her to look right to see a kingfisher, she would fumble with her binoculars and look to the left.

As they reached old age, they did less. Meema depended even more on Esther to wrap her into the safe holiday routine; Dill wasn’t enough.

Esther awoke to Dill’s footsteps, just before the coffee grinder pierced the misty stillness of early morning. She looked at herself in the bathroom mirror, thinking about how much she had disliked her face when it was younger and rounder. Age had pared away the flesh and let the strong bones appear. Ah, that’s what’s under there, Esther thought idly.

“How calm and glassy the lake is!” Meema always said. Esther put the palms of her hands to her eyes and pressed. Had Meema said that or not?

Dill waited impatiently by the toaster while Meema sat at the table, her fragile neck bent. She was in her thin nightgown; it was unusually hot. The sleeveless shift revealed the crepey skin of Meema’s bird-like arms but her shoulders retained their smoothness with a pale sprinkle of pinky-brown freckles.

“Morning Meema.” Meema looked up at Esther, her eyes large and watery. The whites were discolored with yellow blotches near the iris. “I’m scared,” Meema said in a faint voice. Her features were set in a kind of rigid blankness, but her eyes were raised to Esther in terror, her expression imploring. Esther laid a strong brown hand on Meema’s shoulder. “It ‘s ok Meema, we’re here. We’re all here. Nothing to be scared of.”

“What are you scared of, dear? Did you take your pills?” Dill asked. He sat down and watched Meema as she fumbled with the pill; at first she tried to drop it into her small glass of orange juice. “No dear,” Dill said.

That summer, unlike previous summers, Meema went in the water often--more than she’d ever done before. Dill stood in the water up to his waist, both his arms under Meema’s body, holding her in the water, her neck bent forward to keep her fluff of white hair above the surface. Esther looked at Meema and Dill in the lake, the backdrop of north woods framing the scene, the clouds towering and slatey-blue in the unusual summer heat. Meema and Dill won’t come again, Esther said to herself, but the thought vanished like a dragonfly on the deck, still, and then suddenly gone.

Had a year gone by? Or was it two? In her morning stupor, she did not remember.

She went out onto the porch, a blanket cocooned around her. Mist was rising off the lake, calm as glass. She saw three loons on the water, two together and the other some distance away. The distant one dove and disappeared. Esther waited for it to surface but she did not see it again. The loons didn’t call. Esther pinched the ridge of skin between her eyes and felt the burn of tears.

Two years since Dill had held Meema in the water. It was two years.

Meema lay in the cradle-like bed with its rail, the blue pads had been removed from the floor. Esther sat beside Meema, lightly stroking her forehead with its blue veins, visible under the translucent skin, which seemed strangely smooth. Dill sat in they rocking chair on the other side of the bed. Esther leaned down to Meema’s ear, too big and prominent now that the white fluff had thinned. Meema had never liked her ears. “We’re here Meema, we’re all here,” Esther said. Not so many days ago Esther had visited Meema at lunchtime. Her eyes were large and glassy, but the fear had gone. Meema seemed to be looking beyond Esther and Dill, at something more compelling, as if she were trying to puzzle it out. Meema’s body was folded up into the wheelchair; her head seemed unusually large. Sometimes Meema looked merely blank, and her thin arms reached up, moving with no more consciousness than that of a crab, waving in the murk at the bottom of the sea.

Meema lay with her eyes closed. From time to time an aide would come and swab her mouth to ease the discomfort as her saliva dried up. Meema’s lips closed around the sponge-tipped swab and she sucked the solution. As Esther sat she became aware of a rhythmic rasp and sigh. “What’s that?” She asked and looked around the room, “the air conditioner?” “What hun?” Dill asked. “That’s noise, don’t you hear it?” Esther turned back toward Meema and realized that the sound was Meema’s breath. Her mouth was open and her breathing was deliberate.

Esther recalled Meema’s joy, that last time at the lake, seeing three juvenile loons scoot and splash in play just above the water. For those moments Meema forgot about the twist of fear that wrapped around her ribs. When did Meema last exclaim to Esther, “You look so nice!” At those moments when Esther sat down at her bedside and Meema awoke, it was as if she suddenly emerged from the fog and tried to reach out. Esther wanted to cry out, “Where are you, Meema? What do you see?” But she was gone again, drawn under the the surface into the deepening pool beneath.

When was the last time Meema saw the moon? “The moon was shining right on me last night!” she would say. It was as if moon revealed itself only to Meema and it was reaching out to touch her. She beamed at the moon like a child.

The call came at about ten after one on a soft June night. Dill hadn’t been there. Meema died when they weren’t looking, her fragile life blending away quietly, leaving only a fragrant wisp of her presence behind, which curled away into the night.

Esther sat beside her mother and touched her forehead. She recoiled from the coolness, the horror of dead matter. Meema’s mouth was open and so were her eyes, halfway, yellowish. She was turned away; Esther tried to lift the head and pull it toward her, but the neck and shoulders were already stiff. “Here, let’s trade places” Dill said, struggling to his feet. Esther tried to close Meema’s eyes. “They won’t close” said Dill.

Around 4 AM the men from the crematorium arrived, dressed in suits, and greeted Dill and Esther in the hushed tone reserved for the grieving. Dill and Esther left the room. The door closed behind them and they heard the zip of the body bag. The solemn men pushed the stretcher down the hall and into the parking lot, where they slid Meema into the van and turned to shake Dill and Esther’s hands. “Sorry for your loss.”

Later that summer Esther went to the Adirondacks.

Esther saw Meema sitting at the table, one sleeve rolled up and the other covering her hand. She heard Meema say, “I dreamed I was in a house with many rooms.” Meema held the deck railing with both hands, going down the steps sideways. Esther saw the expression of surprise and discomfort as Meema lowered herself into the cold water. “Oh oh.”

Did Meema say, “I’m scared,” barely above a whisper? Esther stood at the very end of the dock. It was cool and the mist rose off the water. She scanned the surface for loons and listened for their cries. But there were none. Esther thought of Meema at the lake, more than 60 years ago. She looked toward the edge of the lake where the spruce cast black shadows on the water. She saw an oarless rowboat at the edge, and there was Meema, her hand raised in a tentative wave. Then the oarless boat disappeared slowly from the horizon.

The morning following our hike we woke to more rain. As Bobbie and I walked to breakfast we saw several sad-looking horses tacked up and tied to the posts of a shed. Ah yes, the promised horseback ride. Bobbie had already said she wasn’t keen—she wasn’t a horsewoman and had experienced some rather challenging rides in the past. I was a horsewoman but I was dubious. I knew enough to be worried. It was extremely wet and I had been injured once when I horse I’d been riding fell and I knew that it could happen easily. As it turned out, somebody made a wise decision and the horses were returned unridden to their owner. Or maybe they were just released to graze in the rain. I wondered if these were actually anybody’s horses.

Instead of riding we gathered to do art therapy, guided by Alana, the young Australian woman. While the mess hall was cold and damp and the folding metal chairs hard, at least working on drawings with the art supplies was distracting and somewhat absorbing. I did very much feel the lack of physical activity that I was used to and I wished I could leave. The experience was taking on a cultish vibe.

Bobbie and I hadn’t been able to start and maintain a fire in our fireplace, despite multiple attempts. Most of the wood was soaking wet and there was little kindling. Jessica told us that she would send “fire keeper” Valeria to our cabin to help. Oh boy, can’t wait. A little while later Valeria knocked on the door. She brought dry-ish wood and started building the fire, talking all the while about the ancestral significance of fire and what it represented to the indigenous people of South America. To be clear, Valeria was not indigenous. So while she claimed ownership of indigenous knowledge and reminded us often of her vision quest in the Andes, she was as much a cultural appropriator as we were. She talked and talked while Bobbie and I sat, obligated to listen. We crammed our bodies as close to the hearth as we could. Finally, Valeria asked how we felt about the lessons she had imparted from her abuelos. “Thanks for building the fire” I said, “I’m really tired.” She looked at me coldly. Finally she left.

That evening we were supposed to have our third mushroom journey. We had all felt something from the second dose. In fact, Terry, the nurse from California, had been moved to jump up and wave her arms about in ecstasy. Some of us couldn’t resist giggling and Bobbie reached a hand to Terry’s shoulder. Carol, the African facilitator, spoke sharply, “don’t touch her!” Carol was allowed to touch Terry, however. I guess she had a particular magic that made it ok. The following day we were scolded and told never to touch anyone who was in the midst of a medicine journey. We did so many things wrong! I wondered what terrible consequences might result from a hand on an arm.

As evening approached the weather didn’t improve. Jessica and the others decided that we would have to journey in one of the cabins. So the facilitators laid out yoga mats head-to-toe and side-by-side. We were arranged like logs, or maybe refugees from a natural disaster. The facilitators were lined up on a bench in front of us, the performers. As rain pounded the metal roof, Magdalena, the facilitator from Finland, began to sing in her clear soprano.

My dose was 10 grams. This is a very high dose of mushrooms but in general I don’t respond to low doses. As the psilocybin began to take effect I felt a familiar warm hum in my body. I started to rock in time to the music; it was impossible to remain still. Eventually I lay down. I found myself wandering about in a labyrinthine structure. I heard a voice say, “you’re ok, you’re fine, all is well.” Intense love surrounded me. I saw my parents as young people, before I was born. I felt so much love and longing for Sridhar and I sensed my mother watching over me. Then I felt my consciousness split into infinite pieces and I knew that’s what it was to die. As always, the journey slithers far beyond the reach of words. At one point I sat up and opened my eyes. I saw Magdalena with many faces like an Indian goddess. All the facilitators had endless faces, so many pairs of eyes. I had a vision of the delicate bones on the back of my mother’s neck, so tender and vulnerable that I cried. I had no idea how much time had passed but then I became aware that Valeria was speaking to me.

“Sing, Martha” she said.

I just smiled and lay back down, curled on my mat. Not tonight, amiga.

This morning I read an article by a woman whose Instagram post generated lots of comments. I’m not linking it because I don’t think it deserves more attention. What happened was that the woman was traveling and a male flight attendant cut ahead of her in the TSA line and tried to soften it by calling the woman “honey.” To which she indignantly replied, “I’m not your honey.”

The article quoted the Instagram comments for and against her response. Because it’s the internet, people weren’t shy about expressing their opinions. The post generated lots of emotion.

My own feeling was deep weariness. I had just flown across the country 2 days prior so all the inevitable unpleasantness of travel was fresh in my mind. I didn’t encounter this exact experience but I was fairly sure I wouldn’t have responded the way this woman had. More likely from me would be a semi-audible sigh and eye roll.

I commented on the article saying that I had just traveled and from the moment I stepped into the Uber to the moment I hefted my bag from the carousel I had encountered many situations in which I had been ignored, disrespected, or treated like somebody else’s inconvenience. But I knew that if I had voiced the thoughts I was having they would serve only to amplify the experience and make it worse. And I figured that most of my fellow travels were not having a good time either. It would be nice if people behaved with a bit more civility but it’s not my job to police other people and I doubt whether it would serve any useful purpose if I tried.

I also thought about what it’s like to be flight attendant. It’s certainly not a job I would want and I have seen what they have to put up with on a daily basis. It has to be stressful. If they want to keep their jobs I don’t think they can say what they’re thinking when travelers disregard or disrespect them.

Air travel is unpleasant in so many ways but in this country driving or flying are the only semi-convenient and relatively affordable options. For me the best strategy for getting through it (besides benzodiazepines, which are problematic) is to imagine a sort of protective bubble around myself and to focus on the outcome. Being in the present moment is not appealing.

I also thought about my experiences traveling in other countries and how people from the US can seem demanding and entitled. The sanctity of the individual is something we expect. I remember when I first traveled to India and I discovered that personal space wasn’t really a thing. Demanding it just resulted in confusion and didn’t get you anywhere.

Is “I’m not your honey” going to teach a lesson or is it just going to get you called a bitch? Both? Or is it going to make your day just that much worse? What do you think?

Recently I lost a friendship over a movie. In a newsy update to a friend of some 10 years, I mentioned that I had seen Project Hail Mary and told her not to bother going—it’s a terrible movie. I didn’t know that my friend had seen this just-released film twice. That day I had forwarded her a YouTube of Randy Rainbow, whom she likes, and offered a free subscription I’d been given to a substacker I follow. Her responses were very testy. She was mad that the YouTube had an ad and suspicious that the Substack subscription was a scam. I was puzzled but figured she was just in a mood. “Sarah” has always been loud, outspoken, and opinionated. I had a habit of just shrugging it off because I liked her sense of humor. Several times she had been scornful of something I was interested in—plant medicine was one of those things she dismissed as ridiculous. I didn’t mind; I don’t need her blessing to be involved. It’s not everyone’s cup of mushroom tea.

In one email she asked me why I didn’t like the movie, had I read the book, what sort of movies *did* I like. I sent her the Substack review I had published. The film was going to be discussed in an upcoming book group I had joined so I thought it was worth getting my thoughts down. At the same time Sridhar was arguing with two of his college buddies on a zoom call. I say arguing but it’s always actually good natured ribbing. He subsequently wrote a review too.

Sarah responded “I guess you might frame me as one of those stupid gullible sappy people and would probably include in that my own brilliant, creative scientist husband who quite enjoyed the movie. Honestly, Martha, your editorial is truly venomous. I’ve read the book twice, and seen the movie twice (so far).” Later she said, “so we disagree.” I could tell she was upset and perhaps I shouldn’t have done it but I said I wanted to share Sridhar’s review as a climate scientist: his take was different from mine but he didn’t like the movie either.

His review sent her over the edge. She wrote two more emails to both of us, including one with the subject line “my very very very last thoughts” (thus dismissing any response; by that time I was definitely not going to say more). She swore, she insulted us, she accused us of being completely ignorant of the purpose of art. She challenged us to collaborate on writing our own science fiction, as if one is not allowed to critique a particular piece of art if one has not created it him or herself. Her arguments were clearly preposterous and born of extreme anger. The fury mystified me. I speculated that part of it related to Sridhar’s outing of Andy Weir’s anti-woke agenda. My friend is liberal and I am sure that the fact that she liked something MAGA or MAGA-adjacent really stung.

But that couldn’t be the entire story. I feel sure there is something else happening with Sarah. She’d moved to the Bay Area from a town further south a few years back. That move occurred in part because of a longstanding feud with her neighbors that I never fully understood. She shared that despite living in such a vibrant cultural area, she had not been able to find her people. She was lonely. She felt that as an aging person without children she was isolated. She remarked that others her age were heavily involved with family, particularly with grandchildren. I understood. I don’t have children either and I think about this a lot. How can I cultivate relationships with younger people?

No doubt many of us are under stress because of the current regime. My friend is well off so she is insulated from many of the effects other people are feeling. But of course she grew up thinking that many of the battles had been fought, gains won. It’s hard to feel like everything is going backwards. I don’t know all of the stresses my former friend is feeling. But I do know that somehow I became the focus of her anger. She mentioned being estranged from friends of many decades from her hometown but she didn’t say why that was. And now she’s burned a bridge with me.

I find myself wondering a lot about friendship in the wake of this and another unpleasant incident where a friend blocked me on all media because of what I thought would be a minor issue. It escalated and I tried, too late, to make amends. We were two very sensitive people trying to have a long distance friendship through text and voice message. It went off the rails and I do blame myself for that and take responsibility. Sometimes you can’t fix it.

I feel like I have had some seriously messed up friendships and I don’t really understand why. About 14 or so years ago I became close friends with a woman, Kate, really quickly. She was soon calling me her best friend, which made me uncomfortable. Long emails were exchanged on a daily basis, even if I was traveling. If I didn’t reply at length, she would ask me what was wrong. But the worst part was her pathological lying, which took me a while to discover. She confided that her mother had abused her horribly and that she had a lot of trauma. And yet, she still visited this woman regularly at her Palm Beach home. Eventually her stories were revealed as a tangled heap of lies. When my African Grey parrot died, Kate tried to make it about her by telling a mutual friend that “a dear friend had been found dead in her apartment” and she was having difficulty coping. Of course the mutual friend asked me about the dead friend. When I confronted Kate about this lie and asked her why she had made the story up, she had no answer. I discovered that her life story was mostly a pack of lies and I cut her out of my life. It was ugly. There have been other friends too with debilitating mental illnesses that caused problems, not quite as extreme but nevertheless resulting in my need to break away.

I have asked Sridhar many times why this happens. He just shrugs and tells me it’s because I listen. But listening is good, right? I have noticed his ability to cut people off when he wants the conversation to end. “Gotta go” he says after 2 minutes, while I am still standing in the street half an hour later. People interest me and I like to hear their stories. Till I don’t, I guess. I want to leave room for people to be how they are, to feel natural and accepted, but I also have to pay attention to signs that something is amiss. I guess a good analogy is paying attention to how one’s body feels. I don’t do that either until something really bad is happening. Then I suddenly realize, oh yeah, this isn’t normal, this is a big problem. Well, I am in therapy, which is good I guess. But sometimes talk therapy just feels so futile and ineffective. We can talk and talk but how do we actually make a change? I hope somehow that writing will help. What about you? Is friendship easy for you or does it turn into a dumpster fire more often than not?

The morning after the first ceremony we gathered in the unheated dining hall and after yoga on the cold cement floor we placed chairs in a circle to do our “integration.” It was clear from the murmurs as we got our coffee that no one had felt anything from the mushrooms. It had merely been a long, cold, boring night on the ground listening to endless prayers. Jessica had got wind of the fact that no one had responded to the medicine so she got busy on damage control and a way to spin the experience. She addressed the group, claiming that the mushrooms she’d gotten from the Mazatec woman were for “opening.” I guess it was just too subtle for the less spiritually evolved. Then the sharing started. I shifted in the hard chair and sighed. How long would this take? We had our first glimpse of sunshine and we’re supposed to go on a hike. I wanted to get going before the sky clouded over.

As we went around in the circle my mind was elsewhere, thinking about home in front of the fire or the warmth of a Pacific beach. When it was my turn to speak I talked about how uncomfortable I was physically and how I missed my exercise routine. I had no insights to offer. Some of the others spoke of how they preferred more quiet time during ceremony. I echoed that. The prayers didn’t need to be so long. I stole a glance at Valeria. She had already sternly lectured us on the importance of thanking the spirits of the land. Whatever. Could we please walk on the land? Soon?

I didn’t have any hiking boots with me and as we set out on the meadow towards the horses, my feet sank deeply into the spongy ground. I tried to avoid bigger pools of water but eventually just gave up. My feet were going to get soaked. A short indigenous man was leading us. He didn’t know any English and I suspected that his Spanish was minimal. He moved quickly, obviously used to this environment. As we entered the forest the trail led upwards. It was very muddy and a couple of times I slid on my ass towards a small stream we needed to cross. I was doing the best I could to follow the Mazatec man. The others were moving more slowly, stopping to look at various features of the terrain and the wildflowers along the trail. But I have a phobia of getting lost. I get easily disoriented and though I try to memorize points of interest so that I can retrace my steps, I get anxious.

I became aware that Bobbie, Rina, and Terry weren’t with us. There were a number of branching trails and it was clear that the indigenous man was not keeping track of the wandering gringas in his care. A couple of us shouted at him to stop—“parate por favor!” We began to call out for the missing women. Eventually we heard them calling back. As I am deaf in one ear I cannot tell the direction from which a sound comes. So that probably contributes to my fear of getting lost. We passed a stressful 20 minutes trying to locate the others. Finally they found us. I wasn’t sure if the others were as anxious as I was, but I was relieved that the missing women had turned up.

We continued on our hike, coming to a waterfall. Guadelupe reached down and picked a flower, tucking it behind her ear. As we emerged from the forest we could see the cabins of the camp and we spread out on the meadow, seeking the least wet footing and a space to get through a wire fence. Valeria shouted and gestured for us to follow her. The way back to the camp was clear so I ignored her. I could see our cabin and was eager to take off my soaking shoes and socks. I doubted that the shoes would dry by the time we were to depart. I’d probably just leave them behind.

After our hike we were summoned to join together again in the dining hall. We were upbeat, having enjoyed an outing and chatted about the adventure. As we pulled the chairs into a circle, Valeria was already sitting, looking unhappy. Quivering with anger, she began to lecture us about getting lost on the hike. Terry weakly mentioned that the Mazatec man had moved so fast we were having trouble keeping up. Valeria told us that we had disrespected the forest and stolen things from pachamama. There were mystified looks. No one seemed to know what she was talking about. Valeria continued to rant for considerable time. Whatever joy had sprung up from a hike in the sunshine dissipated. I looked around at glum faces. Later, Bobbie told me that Valeria was angry at me for not obeying her as we returned across the meadow. “What the fuck is Valeria’s problem?” I responded. I felt my spirits sink and as predicted, the sun disappeared. As I walked back to the cabin I passed the guardhouse where 3 indigenous men sat huddled around a fire, sharing a bottle of clear liquid. I wanted to join them.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (book and movie with Ryan Gosling and Sandra Huller) is a climate change story. The sun is dimming and the earth will cool, threatening the lives of billions. Of course, in the real world the opposite is happening. Industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gasses have warmed the planet, changed rainfall and storm patterns, raised sea level, warmed and acidified the ocean.

The movie ignores all that. Perhaps it was an artistic choice: there is limited time to tell a story and the focus was on the discovery of the sun’s dimming and the search for a solution. The link to human-caused climate change may not have fit well. As a climate scientist, that choice is disappointing. It would have been natural and easy to have a scene where the links could be made between sunlight, CO2, and the climate catastrophe unfolding around the moviegoers.

What is less forgivable is the treatment of human-caused climate change in the book. I am going to give a *brief* primer on earth’s climate and then talk about Weir’s treatment of it in the book. (1) the Sun puts out vast amounts of energy and some of that is in the visible spectrum (colors we see). (2) that energy gets through the Earth’s atmosphere and hits rocks and soil and warms them. (3) those warm rocks in turn radiate energy in a color we can’t see (infrared). That energy *can’t* get back out through the Earth’s atmosphere to space because of CO2; is trapped in the air; warms the air and makes the Earth habitable.

So, there are two main controls on the Earth’s overall temperature: the amount of energy we get from the Sun, and the amount of CO2 in the air. Project Hail Mary is all about the first control knob: the Sun’s energy. Here is my main complaint about the book. During the 1-2 decades that Ryan Gosling is off trying to find a solution to the Sun’s dimming, Sandra Huller could have been rallying folks on Earth to turn up the CO2 and methane in the atmosphere to counteract the Sun’s dimming. (As a climate scientist writing that sentence pains me deeply.)

Instead, Weir chooses an entirely nonsensical solution to keep the Earth temporarily warm while Gosling is off to Tau Ceti. He introduces a French glaciologist (I don’t remember any of the names from the book and don’t plan on going back to the library to find out) who comes up with a plan to – wait for it – set off nuclear bombs on an ice shelf in Antarctica. This would… do something… that keeps the Earth ticking over for another decade or two. The ice shed into the ocean after the bombs would… mumble mumble… and all is well.

Here is where I think Weir’s politics come into it. The whole book (and his previous book, The Martian) is all about beating the reader over the head with details on astrophysics and microbiology and chemistry. In this book, he studiously ignores the woke science of human-caused climate change even though that science is absolutely central to the plot. He is clearly capable of diving deep into arcane science and making it understandable. He explicitly chose not to here. The climate science is entirely missing. The glaciology and oceanography is laughably wrong. I can only guess but I think that is because he has contempt for climate science and doesn’t think humans have anything to do with climate change.

I get that bombing the shit out of Antarctica is way more dramatic than messing around with CO2 and methane, but there is something more distasteful at work here. Weir takes an almost sadistic pleasure in putting that poor French glaciologist in the position where the only option he has is to recommend bombing his beloved Antarctica. He has the man crying on the deck of an aircraft carrier as Sandra Huller stands next to him and orders the nukes to detonate. The affect in that whole sequence is that Gosling and Huller are hard-headed real scientists who are going to save the world while namby-pamby climate scientists stand around and wring their hands over trivialities.

This was a terrible movie, a bad book, and I want that six hours of my life back.

As Sridhar and I walked out after the ordeal that was Project Hail Mary, spitting our critiques to each other about how incredibly bad it was, he turned to me and said, “people are going to love it.” I wrinkled my nose. “Seriously?” “Oh yeah, “ he said, “remember Dances with Wolves?” Surely it’s been more than 30 years since we saw that film, near the top of our canon of Really Bad Movies That Everyone Else Liked. As we drove into the night in our EV, we talked about what we hated in the film we’d just seen.

First, it was blatantly, patently manipulative. Every cliché, every trope in the book is used to tug at the heart strings and trigger emotions. People like us have calluses on ours, it would seem. I don’t like when art bashes me over the head to get me to respond. Big nope.

If you don’t know, Ryan Gosling plays a hapless but brilliant middle/high school teacher who was drummed out of an academic career for his creative and unorthodox theories. Sridhar, an actual brilliant, creative scientist with a successful career in the academy, remarked that the portrayal of the situation is not how science works. As for me, I far prefer Walter White, the loser chemistry teacher who works part-time in a car wash and ends up cooking meth in a camper to make ends meet. Darkly funny and more accurate.

The alien that Gosling’s character meets on his suicide mission to save the planet is a cute crab-like entity that Grace (Gosling’s character) names Rocky. With the help of a laptop Grace quickly learns to translate Rocky’s grunts and squeaks into a charming English patois. Please. That’s not how language works. And it seems like a total failure of imagination. Sridhar read the book but I didn’t, so I can’t speak to whether that facile trick is the fault of the author or of Hollywood. In case you have trouble accessing the right emotion at the right time, the music was there to clue you in. I found it irritating.

Surprise, surprise, Loser Teacher Grace saves the day and the alien, sacrificing his own journey home to do both. He takes more than 2.5 hours to do what you figured would happen within the first three minutes of the movie. I could say more—there’s the white savior motif with an inferior Black sidekick— but frankly it’s really not worth it. I’m only writing this because so many people disagree with my opinion and have asked me about it. As Sridhar mentioned, it would have been so easy to slip some climate change data in there to encourage people to think a bit. But never mind, let’s spend $200 million on complete feel-good drivel. Just what we need right now.

The night before our first ceremony we had gathered for general sharing and explanation of how the retreat and the ceremonies would unfold. The individual introductions took a long time. Afterward, Valeria, the woman from Ecuador, was formally introduced as our fire keeper. She was small and agile-looking, intense and didactic. Jessica had met her in Ecuador at an ayahuasca retreat. Valeria began to recount her experiences on a vision quest in the Andes. She dominated the evening and when she was finally finished she announced that she would lead us in song. She sang a couple of songs in Spanish used for ceremony. Then she suggested that we each sing something. Dutifully, the guests began to sing. Somebody sang Yesterday by the Beatles; another person shyly offered something from Fleetwood Mac. Valeria looked at me. “Martha?” I demurred. A classic introvert who doesn’t sing well is not going to belt out a tune in a group. Certainly not while she’s sober. Valeria persisted. “No thanks, I’m good.” Her jaw tightened. My glance didn’t shift. Eventually she moved on to someone else. But there was definitely a tension; it felt like the opening skirmish in a battle of wills.

When we arrived at the retreat center we’d been given a schedule of events. As I’ve said before in other essays, when I’m shown a list of activities on a trip I regard many of them as optional. I show up for the pivotal, important moments, but otherwise my attitude is, I paid, I’m deciding. This was not a workplace retreat. I’ve been on those and I’ve done my duty. I was already feeling grumpy about the primitive accommodations. I recalled the retreat with Amanda in January and how luxurious it felt in contrast. By late 2019 I was already an experienced traveler in Mexico so I knew what things cost. This lumber camp had to have come cheap. If not, Jessica was being cheated. But I suspected that we were the objects of the grift. I also tallied up the number of facilitators and where they were from. One was from Australia and another from Finland. That was a lot in airfare. We had 6 facilitators plus Jessica for 8 guests. At the other retreat we had 4 facilitators for 14 people and did just fine. Additionally, 2 guests were from Mexico. Just like gringos who have to pay the foreigner ticket price at museums and monuments, I suspected we were underwriting the retreat for the two Mexican women. Paying extra at a museum was fine. This was not.

On the schedule was a singing workshop. Neither Bobbie nor I was interested in that, and after breakfast, yoga, and the interminable sharing circle, we went back to the cabin. Grumbling about how we could have been relaxing on a Pacific beach, instead we struggled to light a fire in the fireplace with wet wood. As it sputtered sadly, we nearly crawled inside the stone hearth, trying to get warm, rubbing our hands in the cold. We talked about the past, sharing stories of our youth, since we had only known each other a few years. I told her about my Mexican boyfriend of decades before and she talked about her adventures in her early 20s in Arizona and the birth of her son. A while later we heard a knock at the door. It was Jessica. She looked concerned. “Is everything ok?” Well, now that you mention it, I thought. I did share that I wasn’t happy about the lack of hot water, especially since I had asked particularly about that. I gestured at the cabin. It was not what we were led to expect. Jessica sighed and changed the subject. “You missed the singing workshop.” She said. Yup, we weren’t interested, I replied. She wrinkled her forehead in concern. “Do we need an intervention?” Bobbie and I looked at each other. I repeated that we didn’t feel like going—it was simple.

Jessica began to talk. She described her vision for the retreat, emphasizing connection and ceremony. She recounted her trip to a Mazatec village to obtain our mushrooms for the evening journey and how the indigenous healer had asked her to meditate on pictures of catholic saints surrounded by candles. We had the opportunity to partake in something very special. “I want to talk about doses.” She said. We discussed how many grams of mushrooms we would take that evening. Since I had more experience with the medicine and I knew that I generally needed a higher amount to feel the effects, my dose would be higher than Bobbie’s. Jessica repeated that no prescriptions or supplements were permitted. I hoped no one would search my belongings.

The day was chilly with intermittent showers. Apparently there was no rain plan for ceremony except appeal to the gods. As we gathered towards sunset, it wasn’t raining. But it was cold and damp. Sleeping bags on pads had been placed around the fire. We arranged ourselves side by side, bundled in our warmest clothes. Jessica led the opening of the ceremony. Facilitators Bev and Alana blessed us all with palo santo and Jessica lit tobacco, the traditional way to begin. She talked about how we were gathered together to journey with the niños santos, as the Mazatec call the spirits of the magic mushrooms. When the opening remarks finally concluded, we were passed cups of tea with our mushroom dose and a spoon to make sure we got all the good bits. Psilocybin mushrooms don’t taste too bad, but the bitterness of alkaloids was detectable.

The music began as we waited for the mushrooms to take effect. The Finnish woman sang in a crystal soprano. Other facilitators joined with primitive instruments and Valeria drummed. After about 40 minutes, I glanced at Bobbie. She shrugged. A while later I wondered if the problem was me. But Bobbie whispered that nothing was happening. Nobody else was showing any signs of the medicine’s influence. Moaning, writhing, crying, laughing are all common. All was silent. I was cold and stiff and sneaked a look at my watch. It had been an hour and a half. The music continued and time dragged on. My mind wandered and I thought of home, wishing I were there. For a short time there was silence. Then Valeria began to recite prayers. They were interminable: calling for the blessings of abuelos, for the abuelos of abuelos, abuelos of abuelos of abuelos. From the four directions. From all the rivers. From the insects and the 4-leggeds and the wingeds and the fishes of the sea. From the fire and from Pachamama. It felt endless. I was bored and tired and cold. Finally we were told that the ceremony was coming to a close. It was nearly midnight and we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. As we struggled to get up from the hard ground, I caught Rina’s eye. “Did you feel anything?” “Nothing,” she replied. Somewhere in the dark cloud forest, a Mazatec curandera was laughing to herself.

Shadows had lengthened by the time we piled back into the shuttle bus. My heart sank as the outskirts of Oaxaca city appeared. Apparently we had to go all the way back to the city before we could make our way to the mountain retreat. San Pablo Huitzo was north and slightly west of Oaxaca city, while our destination, San Juan Atepec, was north but slightly east. There was no other way to go except to drive back to town. By the time we finally negotiated the busy traffic around Centro it was close to sunset. We still had hours to go on mountain roads.

At first, fresh from the Temazcal, we chatted happily among ourselves, getting to know each other better and feeling relief that our ordeal was behind us. There was definitely a bond forming through the experience, which was no doubt part of the goal. Bev, whom I had met at a previous retreat and who was along as a facilitator, had been sitting directly across from me in the sweat lodge, remarked that when the door opened and she saw me I looked cool and comfortable in the suffocating heat. I groaned. I shared how I had been close to panic. Bev assured me she never would have known. I asked another woman, Diane from Hawaii, how she was feeling. She had mentioned her high blood pressure and I was concerned that sitting in 125 degree temperatures for an hour might not be great. She was cheerful and upbeat.

As the sky darkened, the road became rougher, a tangle of hairpin turns in the mountains. The talk subsided. Bobbie turned to me and mentioned she wasn’t feeling well. Before I left a friend had given me a couple of elastic wrist bands that were supposed to activate a pressure point that would relieve nausea. I gave Bobbie one of them. It didn’t help. When we got to the retreat center it was well after 8 PM. Bobbie and I had opted for the more expensive accommodation—a cabin we would share. It was an adobe structure with two bedrooms, a living room and a bathroom. It was very cold and inky dark as we hauled our luggage into the cabin. In the large fireplace a weak fire burned, throwing very little heat. The wood hissed with moisture. Bobbie wasn’t feeling any better so she went directly to bed. I left the cabin to meet the others at the common area for dinner, hurrying in the cold. I met the cook, Claudia, and an African or African-American woman who had brought her 2.5 year-old child. She was a facilitator. So far the ratio of facilitators to participants seemed unusually high. I wondered about it. I didn’t really feel like talking to anybody and ate my squash blossom soup and guacamole quickly. Back at the cabin, I emphasized to Bobbie how much colder it was at the retreat center than in Oaxaca. It was obviously higher. I piled as many blankets as there were on my bed and tried to sleep.

Before the retreat Jessica had sent information about the retreat center and what to expect. In her description she said that the area was like Colorado. She said that our ceremonies would be held outside. So I did try to pack some warm clothes. I emailed her to ask if there would be hot water in the shower. She replied, “of course.” We had the deluxe accommodations, after all. She said that hot beverages would be available 24/7 in the kitchen.

I didn’t sleep well that night. I wasn’t surprised as I have a history of insomnia. I was stiff and cold. I missed my exercise routine after two days of sitting a lot and my digestion was sluggish, as often happens when I travel. I was up very early and threw on some clothes so I could rush to the common area/kitchen and get some coffee. When I got there no coffee was available. Fortunately I usually had instant with me so found a kettle and a mug. It was chilly and dank in the building so I decided to take my coffee out and look around.

It had obviously rained recently. My attention was drawn to some heavy pieces of machinery and trucks that looked as if they had been parked for a very long time. From a small guard house smoke wafted from the chimney. Horses grazed in the middle distance, no fences in sight. I suspected that they were feral, as were the ubiquitous Mexican dogs. Or at least they didn’t belong to anybody but survived on the fringes of human habitation. In the distance wisps of mist hung on the mountains. I looked closely at the nearby conifers, cedars I guessed. They were coated with lichen and moss. This is a cloud forest, I said to myself. Colorado, it was not. I saw some plants I recognized as a kind of salvia.

I went back to the cabin and undressed hurriedly for a shower and turned on the water. It got hot, but by the time I stepped in, the water had cooled. My mood shriveled. I thought about how Bobbie and I could be at a beach resort instead of this primitive lumber camp. Our first ceremony was to take place that evening. The day before we had been exposed to nearly unbearable heat. Too bad my body didn’t store it to use later, I thought. The idea of stretching out on the hard cold ground as night fell was not appealing. We’d been given a paper to sign the day before. We’d agreed not to leave the retreat early. I wondered how that would even be possible if we wanted to.

Later that year I discovered that Amanda and Jessica were involved in separate ventures; Amanda would be hosting a retreat in a Mexican beach town on the Pacific while Jessica was organizing something in the mountains of Oaxaca state. Oaxaca was more interesting to me so I made plans to attend Jessica’s trip and persuaded a friend, Bobbie, to join me. In the planning process I had begun to suspect that the two retreats reflected a schism between Amanda and Jessica. But I shrugged it off.

Bobbie and I arrived in Oaxaca City after an ordeal at the Mexico City airport, that never fails to leave me confused and disoriented. Our driver met us and took us to the hotel in Jalalatco where we were to spend a couple of nights. When we arrived he asked for 300 pesos. I wasn’t pleased that our transfer wasn’t included in the retreat cost; moreover, the “hotel” was a basic place that felt like a hostel. We were sharing the bathroom with a bunch of other guests. Given the amount of money we were spending for the trip I was a little surprised and put off but did not complain. We didn’t want to be whiny gringas. But I made a mental note.

In the morning we met our fellow retreat participants, all women, at breakfast. After breakfast we gathered our stuff and crammed ourselves into a shuttle bus. It seemed to take a long time to get out of Oaxaca and we stopped to pick up a couple of Mexican women who were joining our party. Sometime after noon we arrived at a village called San Pablo Huitzo where we bumped over dirt roads until we came to an adobe compound where we got out. In the courtyard we could see the crudely built, low rounded building that looked like a pizza oven. This was the temazcal, a kind of Zapotec sweat lodge where we were to initiate our retreat.

The retreat was going to be a kind of hybrid new age/indigenous ritual where we ingested psilocybin mushrooms in ceremony. Elements from Zapotec, Mazatec, and indigenous traditions from Ecuador were combined with whatever seemed complementary from new age practices created in the global north. As a trained anthropologist I did an inner eye roll; this was cultural appropriation and I felt uncomfortable participating in it. But here I was anyway.

The temazcal was heated with wood and smoke wafted into the air. Rocks were being heated in a separate fire so they could be placed inside the structure. We drank some water with lime, honey, and salt, and then were told to remove all our jewelry and change into bathing suits. We were also advised that we should not wear contact lenses. Bobbie wore contacts and hadn’t been prepared and didn’t have access to the container or the solution to deal with them. I suspected that it probably would not have mattered but who wants contacts melted onto their eyeballs? So she figured it out.

Guadalupe was the Zapotec woman who was tending the temazcal and together with Valeria, a woman from Ecuador, blessed us with an incense holder filled with cedar, possibly, and gave us each a sprig of basil. Then we crawled one by one into the temazcal, which had a dirt floor, moving to the left and around the central fire to take our seats. So all of us were doing this at once. My diaphragm tightened with this realization. There was a bundle of herbs hanging from the low ceiling over the hot rocks. We crammed into the space and sat on woven mats. We were squished together and I was between Bobbie and Rina, a woman I met on a previous trip who had also come at my urging.

We were told that there were four cycles to the temazcal, representing the four directions. Four songs would be sung and the door would be opened four times. We would not be permitted to exit the temazcal until the entire cycle was finished. My anxiety ratcheted up. When the door was closed we were in absolute darkness. I reached for Rina’s hand and clutched it. I have had a lifelong struggle with claustrophobia was close to panic. The songs began in Zapotec and Spanish and Guadalupe paused to ladle herb-laced water onto the rocks. The steam was the hardest part. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Continuing to hold Rina’s hand, I tried to breathe slowly and deeply. It was a huge relief when the door opened the first time and cool air and light rushed in. We would have to endure 3 more cycles. I lay on the floor curled in the fetal position and silently repeated “you can do this” as one of the women translated the prayers and songs into English. After the second cycle, it was clear that Bobbie wasn’t doing well. I was worried. It was hard enough for me and I am famous for being a heat-seeking reptile. Bobbie was not as heat tolerant. Her hand had gone to sleep and cramped up. She moved closer to the door. The third cycle was the hardest; the scent of the jasmine water poured over the rocks was overpowering. At certain points Guadalupe and Valeria splashed us with cold water that was deeply shocking. My heart tightened each time more hot rocks were added to the center. When the door opened we were passed coconut shells of lime water to drink.

At last the fourth cycle was complete. We crawled out in the correct order and there were tubs of herbal water we used to rinse ourselves of the sweat and dirt from the earthen floor. We changed into our clothes and had some tamales and fruit. We had endured an hour in the temazcal and I felt relief, even buoyancy. There was a black and white kitten in the courtyard and I snapped some photos with my phone. The afternoon light glowed golden; I noted that there was no way we would arrive at the retreat center in the mountains by 4 PM as planned. While I felt good, I reflected on the experience and how unprepared I was for this ritual. But it was over. For now.

In 2022 I did a course on becoming a psilocybin facilitator. I was in the first cohort of this initiative, which culminated in a week-long retreat in Tepoztlán, Mexico, a magical area south of Mexico City. I had previously done retreats with the Buena Vida and Amanda Schendel, the woman CEO. I had met her in Jamaica and actually had been among the guests at her very first retreat in Playa del Carmen in 2019. She is a former standup comedienne, which is a wonderful thing in a group of people trying to heal their trauma and mental health challenges. Not everyone is supportive of her work; while I was in Tepoztlán one of the other facilitators, a labor and delivery nurse who became my friend, took very much against Amanda and afterward did a deep dive into her past that reflected what I thought was an unhealthy obsession. I found myself in the middle of it. Just recently I have seen this happen again in a writing retreat; once more I am the confidante of the disgruntled person. I don’t like it but I try to listen and remain relatively noncommittal.

I frequently find myself in these situations where people tell me all sorts of things, almost always in person or on the phone, and I just listen and try to support. What often happens is that eventually they ghost me. I’m not sure what is behind this dynamic. Do they sense that they’ve told me too much and feel exposed? One time I went on an art trip and one woman texted me daily afterward about her terrible marriage. Finally I suggested she leave. Shortly after, she just stopped contacting me. Another woman I met on a retreat in Jamaica latched onto me and was texting and calling me multiple times a day. One day she called and I was quite distracted and she was miffed by the way I answered the phone. She called me again later to tell me how hurt she felt and would not relent until I acknowledged what I’d done and apologized. She said that this was what her husband generally did and I should follow suit. Well, I certainly did not see our friendship as anything resembling a marriage and it was not pleasant to extricate myself from this mess. I was not happy at how things ended up because ultimately I got angry and told her to kindly fuck off—not in those words but essentially that.

I acknowledge that I am not good at boundaries until they are pushed so far and I end up losing my shit. I ought to figure this out. If I make a friend and it seems as if I can share my inner experience, I prefer to write, rather than to talk. I am just more comfortable with writing. But then I worry about overwhelming the person with my missives and it does happen. I’m often left with this sense that I am absorbing a person’s thoughts and feelings but that when I share my thoughts people don’t want to hear it. And it ends up being somewhat ironic because usually what I am sharing is not that important; it’s a proxy for stuff I prefer to process on my own. So the friends I do write to get tired of the stories I tell, which actually aren’t that important to me. I’ll keep most of the significant stuff to myself except to write about in essays like this, which allow me the safety of an impersonal reader. I have bumped up against the limits of friendship many, many times and it feels safer to pull inward.

The only person I share a more meaningful layer with is my therapist but I almost always feel awful when I do. The emotions that are unearthed are unpleasant and I struggle to communicate what exactly is most important to me. Usually a therapist homes in on something that, again, does not represent what I really care about. It’s such a struggle to make someone understand and in the end it feels pointless.

Yesterday I tried something different, a kind of somatic therapy with a different person, combined with plant medicine. That word “somatic” gets thrown around a lot everywhere these days. Somatic has a Greek origin—soma, meaning body. I was a classics major for a year or two as an undergraduate and I did take attic Greek so I knew this. Somatic therapy means simply means therapy through focusing on bodily sensations.

At the beginning of the session, Sol, the therapist, asked me how I was feeling, meaning specifically physically. I told him I was tired from less than 4 hours of sleep (hello, rumination!) but that I was also feeling a lot of strong energy in my chest. I call this warrior energy and it is a theme for me.

When I was in Tepoztlán, I ended up saving not just one, but two hummingbirds. One had flown into a window and was stunned. I picked him up and held him in my cupped hands until he flew off. He had a shimmery violet head. The second one was in the temple space—he’d gotten stuck in there and I was able to grab him and release him. Rescuing animals is a perhaps why I am here on the planet—it happens all the time and I will pick up almost anything, from snakes to opossums. Once I picked up a bat in the Zócalo of Oaxaca. After the incidents with the hummingbirds I looked up their significance in the indigenous folklore of Mexico. It so happens that Tepoztlán was an important area for the Méxica, better known as the Aztecs. There is an archaeological site in the mountains above the town that is considered the birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the winged serpent (fun fact—we once had a cat named Quetzalcoatl). Tepoztlán is supposed to be a vortex of spiritual power. Unfortunately when I was there I couldn’t hike to the site because of a forest fire. Hummingbirds are associated with the god of war, Huitzilopochtli. The birds are said to be the spirits of fallen warriors. Anyone who’s watched the ninja moves at a hummingbird feeder knows that this makes sense. They are feisty!

The warrior energy has come up for me a lot in my different plant medicine journeys. I’m also feisty. My mother’s reaction anytime she felt criticized or unappreciated or challenged was to behave like a collapsed soufflé. I don’t know whether my own response is somehow related to watching how she behaved, but let’s just say it’s very different. In its less evolved manifestation my stance is defensive and angry, but the more positive aspects are strongly protective and tenacious. And the I-don’t-need-any-help-I’ll-do-it-myself song and dance.

I told Sol that I was feeling fiery in my chest and as if I was trying to tamp down that energy of anger and defensiveness and the urge to act in some way to change things. Many, many of us are feeling angry and helpless right now, and as I shared in a note here on Substack, the intersection of the political and the personal is particularly difficult. My older brother has been diagnosed with a neurodegenerative disease, the same one my mother suffered from and died of, and I am determined to make up for the fact that I stood by helplessly watching her decline—I want to find a way to help him and make things easier for my sister-in-law, who is finding that she must do more and more to care for him in terms of daily tasks, and she is still working as well.

Sol understood this situation and told me that his father died of Parkinson’s, which my mother also had. Then he initiated the plant medicine part of the therapy, asking me to notice the bodily sensations as I went through the process. I was immediately aware of the strong beating of my heart, a massive pulsing through my chest. Within a few seconds I could actually hear it drumming rhythmically. After a few minutes I smoked my second bowl (not cannabis!) and a sort of warm, viscous oil began to spread through my chest. The beating heart sensation moved into my shoulders and I felt a pop in my left shoulder. For months now I have had a pain there that is particularly uncomfortable in the morning and I sleep generally on my left side. As we age I think we come to expect these smallish but annoying pains and mostly we ignore them. It’s only when they suddenly resolve that we become aware of just how much nagging we felt. A close family member shared with me a similar experience with ketamine for postpartum depression. After the treatment she realized the extent of the pain she’d been carrying in her body.

My session revealed that my warrior energy needs to be released and directed in a beneficial way. It’s what I’ve got to work with so I need to make the most of it. What does that mean? As it concerns the political, I really don’t know. At this point I think all we can do is make our voices heard, keep making art, show up for each other. In a more personal realm I will continue to research plant medicine treatment for my brother and work on convincing him to try it. He is reluctant, but his wife is a creative thinker who is keen on exploring what is available. Doing nothing is not an option.

I knew that “facilitated communication” was controversial and had been debunked by most experts working with people who lack the ability to communicate verbally. The most damning critique was exposed by the 2024 documentary Tell Them You Love Me, which tells the story of Anna Stubblefield, a white professor who worked with an African-American man named Derrick Johnson who had cerebral palsy. Derrick functioned at the level of a pre-verbal child according to doctors who evaluated him, but Stubblefield, who got to know Derrick through his brother, her student, believed that Derrick was capable of highly complicated verbal expression. With a keyboard, which she helped Derrick use by guiding his hands, Stubblefield uncovered that Derrick was highly intelligent, aware, and intellectually sophisticated.

Eventually, Stubblefield, who was married with children, fell in love with Derrick and insisted that the feeling was mutual. The film becomes more and more difficult to watch as Derrick’s family begins to doubt Stubblefield, who eventually abuses Derrick sexually in her office. She appears to be completely convinced that Derrick loves her and wants to be intimate with her. Ultimately, charges are brought against Stubblefield and she ends up going to prison. But throughout her interviews in the film she never voices any doubt about the relationship. For me, one of the most telling moments is when she is driving with Derrick and Daisy, Derrick’s mother, who is listening to gospel music on the radio. Stubblefield changes the station, claiming that Derrick prefers classical music. Many relationships involve projection, but this is so clearly about one person’s delusional thinking. This film is a disturbing muster point of race, disability, sexuality, and power.

So often we want desperately for things to be true. The Telepathy Tapes speak directly to that desire. I binge-listened to all the episodes during my winter workouts in the gym. It felt seedy, like watching true crime on Netflix instead of reading. There was one on communicating with plants. Energy healing on Petri dishes of cells. Another about telepathy with dementia patients. All of these claims seemed outrageous to me, but that glint of hope is irrepressible. My mother had dementia and my older brother has been diagnosed with it as well. The desperation to retain some conscious connection is something I understand completely.

If you search the internet for accusations of fraud regarding the Telepathy Tapes, most of what you find concerns the non-speaker episodes. Stuart Vyse of The Skeptical Inquirer investigated the Telepathy Tapes and paid the $10 required to get access to the video.* The screenshots he publishes show that the non-speaker’s assistant, a family member usually, is touching the autistic person or in some cases the blindfold while he or she spells out the answers to the questions. It’s a step up from an ouija board and probably just as reliable. If it’s possible for the non-speaker to use telepathy, why does the assistant have to be directly involved? Why can’t he or she be in a different room?

Ky Dickens responds to critics with accusations of ableism. But if something paranormal is actually happening, there is easy money to be had. The Center for Inquiry Investigations Group (CFIIG) is offering $500,000 to anyone who demonstrates any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power. They will work with applicants to establish what sort of tests might be done to verify these powers. So far Ky Dickens has not applied.

In January I decided to take an animal reiki course. I was curious and the idea of using “energy” to heal or otherwise help animals was appealing. I was influenced by the Petri dish experiment held at M.D. Anderson, a highly respected cancer treatment center in Houston. I have to admit that distance healing, where one uses reiki to affect an animal from afar, sounded improbable. But I wanted to know so I signed up for the 7 week course.

Meditation and specifically breathing from the abdomen (referred to as the hara, in this course) were already familiar to me from my years of Buddhist practice. The idea was to connect with reiki (as energy as known) and invite an animal to share the experience. The teacher emphasized that we were not beaming or directing reiki towards an animal. Among the precepts was the idea that the animal is perfect and whole as is; there should be no pity or worry connected with the practice. That’s hard to maintain. Animals may display a variety of different behaviors that indicate they are sharing reiki. Anything from yawning to sleeping to coming close to the practitioner. Or not. There were a few videos online of people meditating in a shelter with barking, pacing dogs. After a while the chaos eased and the dogs were quiet. But it’s impossible to prove reiki is having effect.

The reading for the course was vague and slippery. Lots of wisdom, compassion, spiritual grounding, mindfulness. After a while I was asking myself what those terms even meant. As I read I felt as if I were circling in a kind of mist, unable to grasp a real object behind a wall of platitudes. I know that describing emotional states and forms of consciousness is difficult. But the words seem to pass in front of my eyes and leave me with nothing.

I don’t doubt that a meditating human can feel like a calming presence to an animal. My cats often join me when I meditate, but they also join me when I am cursing at my sewing machine. I’m just not sure animals are being healed from respiratory viruses or colic. But it can’t hurt. And the teacher was careful to say that reiki should be used as an adjunct and not instead of medical care. I was bothered a bit by the repetition of the belief that animals are spiritual teachers. It smacks of anthropomorphism. Animals have an autonomous existence and as I have written elsewhere I don’t like to project human qualities upon them. Which reminds me of this passage from Aldous Huxley:

“You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.”

Those words speak to an essential problem with the Telepathy Tapes. Science has not yet given us reliable data on telepathy or extra sensory perception. That doesn’t mean that it won’t. We know all sorts of things that seemed absurd not that long ago. I mean, think about quantum entanglement! Before humans knew about bacteria and viruses we had all sorts of theories on the origin of disease. Some people still do. Mycelia connect trees in a kind of natural World Wide Web underground. Nature contains so many mind-bending truths. So while I admit to finding the Telepathy Tapes intriguing, I try to stick with my favorite slogan. Be opened-minded—just not so open-minded that your brain falls out.

* https://skepticalinquirer.org/exclusive/the-telepathy-tapes-a-dangerous-cornucopia-of-pseudoscience

/

Some of the Nepali families opened hostels for trekkers, hastily slapped-together shacks of timber from rapidly diminishing forests. Others hauled heavy loads of Coca Cola and ramen noodles on their backs for those tourists. The luckiest were guides for the mountaineers. But all those people were poor. Dirt and disease were endemic, no matter how breathtaking the jagged Himalayan vistas and despite the picturesque prayer wheels and the tinkle of bells on the single file yaks.

The reality of tourism has troubled me for decades. But not enough to make me stay home, it would appear. From childhood I have traveled internationally and I always felt drawn to other cultures and I ended up marrying someone from the other side of the Earth. I didn’t grow up in Kansas, but I always felt as if my world turned technicolor when I left my home. The first time I went to India I was 19 years old. I felt like I was visiting another planet. I remember descending the stairs of the Air India flight in

New Delhi and inhaling deeply. The smell was completely alien: the earthy smokiness of cow dung fires, the choking gag of diesel exhaust, and so many other odors of unidentifiable origin. The sounds too: squawking birds and blaring horns. And then in the airport, a sea of dark faces behind wire mesh, many topped with brightly colored turbans, searching for their people.

The India of that era, with bullocks pulling a mower in front of the Taj Mahal, is long gone. I was last there for a family wedding in 2023, and as I walked on the beach near Mahabalipuram, escaping from the shabby all-inclusive resort, I came across the carcass of a bloated cow. I kept walking until I got to the fishing boats and into the trash-strewn, monsoon-drenched streets of the town. I started to cry. I realized that I didn’t want to be there ever again.

I ended up leaving early and a month later boarded a flight to Oaxaca, Mexico. Sridhar was in Antarctica from the end of October until mid-January, as he often was. I couldn’t bear to be home for Christmas. My parents were long dead and I didn’t even get a pity invitation for the holiday. Where I live people tend to stick around even after they’re grown up and multiple generation holidays are a thing. I feel like an orphan and as I’ve written elsewhere I prefer spending Christmas in Mexico rather than wallowing in self-pity under the gray skies of central Pennsylvania.

Oaxaca is one of my favorite cities ever. I think I have been there 7 times—3 Christmases and 3 Día de Muertos and another time in February 2023, where I did Spanish immersion for 2 weeks, 5 hours a day. What I love most about it is probably the color. The city neighborhoods are filled with murals and fluttering papel picado above the streets. You will see giant puppets of papier mâché and catch a wedding procession next to Santo Domingo with whirling full-skirted dancers, baskets balanced on their heads.

But since I first traveled there, in 2012, things have changed. The movie Coco came out, resulting in the Disneyfication of Día de Muertos, and tourism has exploded. Covid happened and digital nomads became a thing, finding their way to Oaxaca’s old neighborhoods. Airbnb is everywhere in the old part of the city, resulting in gentrification and pushing locals out. In short, Oaxaca is a victim of the enshittification of tourism.

The last couple of times I visited I noted that anti-tourist graffiti has popped up among the murals. A big problem in Oaxaca, as in many other places, is the shortage of water. In the area of the city, the state was allowing the water to flow through pipes only once every 20 to 39 days. Locals try to use as little water as possible, and when they do have water, they try to reuse as much as they can. For example, they collect water used to wash dishes, strain it, and use it to flush the toilet. But most of the time they use a dry bucket as a toilet. They shower Indian-style with a bucket and a scoop, and sometimes they just use wet wipes. And yet, in the city’s major hotels, water flows freely 24/7. How? These hotels buy tanks of water pumped from aquifers outside the city. At the major hotels tourists are never asked to limit their water.*

People who work in those hotels make minimum wage and can no longer afford to live in the city. Rents have doubled in the city between 2020 and 2025; as you might imagine, much of the city has turned into short-term rentals. The same has happened in Mexico City. The popular iconic neighborhoods of Roma and Condesa have been taken over by digital nomads. Public protests draw attention to this problem.

Of course not all the effects of tourism are bad. The preservation of architecture, natural landscapes, and wildlife are driven by tourism. Recently I hiked into the cloud forest in Guatemala, led by a local Mayan man trained by Cornell University to guide birding tours in the country. My hike was the high point of my visit to Guatemala. Beginning at 5 AM, we rode in the back of a pickup truck to a trailhead and walked quickly in the dark to arrive at a site by sunrise. As the mist parted in the volcanic valley, we were rewarded by a view of Guatemala’s national bird, the quetzal, perched high above. While we hiked, Rolando pointed out places where the forest had been cut by locals. They are poor and are simply trying to feed their families. The Guatemalan government must balance the creation of tourist infrastructure and the economic benefit it can bring with the needs of the largely impoverished indigenous population.

Local people can benefit from tourism implemented thoughtfully. I have booked another trip to Oaxaca, admittedly with some self-reproach. This time I am traveling as part of a venture co-created by several women artists, including a local. We will travel to the embroidery workshops of indigenous artists and learn techniques from them. Based on my own knowledge as a textile artist, I have noted the two-tier system of fiber art found in Mexico and Guatemala. In the past, artists used traditional methods and natural dyes to create their work. But with the availability of cheap manufactured materials, methods, and chemical dyes, local people sell a lower quality of items in the city markets and tourist shops. Visitors buy this stuff and feel as if they are getting a deal. In artist cooperatives or the shops connected with textile museums, much finer work is available and it reflects the use of hand spun cotton, wool, and silk dyed with natural substances. If you have a little experience with evaluating textiles, you can easily tell the difference. And the price point is much higher. But local people are benefiting directly (or almost directly) and precious water is not being polluted by chemical dyes.

As much as I love Mexico, I know that when I visit I will notice piles of plastic trash on the roadside as I travel into the mountains. I will see hungry, limping dogs hanging around taco stands. I will see trucks belching black diesel smoke. I will see people whose teeth are mended with gold because they’ve decayed from years of drinking coca-cola instead of the contaminated water. And I won’t pretend I haven’t seen those signs of poverty and environmental degradation, just to make my experience seem more idyllic. And I will know that people in those places are poor because people like me are rich in comparison. Does knowing that help? Probably not.

*See Bianca Graulau, A story about the tourism industry in Oaxaca, Mexico, YouTube, August 4, 2024.

I’m something of a retreat/expedition/workshop junkie. Since 2012 I have been on more than a dozen of these trips, most of them out of the country. I have counted blue sheep in Ladakh, learned indigo dyeing in North Carolina, done immersion Spanish in Oaxaca, and most recently attended a writing workshop in Central America. The vast majority of these trips have been informative and fun. Only one of them, a plant medicine retreat in the mountains of southern Mexico, was a complete shit show. Unfortunately that time I had convinced a friend to come along and I will forever feel responsible for our lousy experience. But this essay is not about that trip. Maybe someday I’ll write about it.

I joined most of these trips because I was traveling alone and I felt more comfortable with a group of people organized by an expert who took care of all the logistics. I met people who have remained friends for years. I have the utmost respect for expedition leaders who create itineraries that succeed in pleasing most travelers and can wrangle a group of adults with different diets, levels of fitness, and experience with other cultures. It’s no mean feat to accommodate and organize a group of people and keep everyone on task. Inevitably there are problems: during an art trip to San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, fully half of the group, including the teacher, fell ill with a stomach bug. In Oaxaca, a vegan had nothing to eat at dinner. Several of the trips featured roommate conflicts that became public. In San Miguel de Allende, a shouting match at breakfast. People have grumbled about the choice of restaurant and the amount of time allotted to a particular museum.

One thing I always keep in mind, which has helped me enjoy trips and which I suggest to fellow travelers, is that I am paying, and therefore I am free to opt out of something I don’t want to do. Maybe I’ve been to a particular market before and I’d rather wander somewhere else on my own. Or perhaps I want to return to the botanical garden instead of doing a pottery demo. Usually the group leaders are fine with that.

My most recent experience was a memoir-writing retreat in Central America. In preparation for this trip we were sent reams of information, complete with selfies of the leader. I understand the impulse (the words part, not the selfies. I haven’t had any plastic surgery). I am definitely afflicted with hypergraphia myself. My syllabi for my university courses were not exercises in brevity. Nor are my instructions for pet sitters. But I have learned that people simply don’t read long documents. It’s important to bullet the crucial bits so that participants don’t have to shuffle through pages and pages to find the instructions for managing immigration at arrival.

Among the bits of advice we received was that we should not exchange currency or use ATMs at the airport, but wait until we arrived at the destination city. Once there, we were advised to take out a lot of money, but not spend any in that colonial city where we were staying the first night, because there would be plenty of time to shop at a women’s cooperative at one of the lakeside villages we would visit. While in that city I browsed in a very nice, large handicraft emporium with a stunning collection of textiles organized by region and even village. However, I dutifully avoided buying anything.

At dinner that first evening I sat by a woman who is now my friend and I feel certain we’ll keep in contact. Another woman talked and talked and I was touched with sadness. She felt lonely. But people are full of surprises. Such occasions are usually somewhat awkward as people decide what to say about themselves and what not to. That night I had observed the woman across the table as she slowly faded from the conversation and then slumped against her neighbor. She was immediately attended by two other women with medical training and after a while she revived. She insisted that she was fine. Perhaps she was dizzy from lack of food and the altitude. Whatever it was, the caretaking instincts of a group of women were suddenly in evidence.

The next day we boarded two shuttle buses to drive to the lakeside residence where we would begin the retreat. The host, a writer in her early seventies, greeted us by name as we stepped out of the lancha and onto the dock. We had included headshots among the files we sent for the retreat. Fran got most of the names right but mistook me for another woman. I wasn’t pleased as that woman was in her 80s. Fran did remark on my earrings, “you’ve been shopping!” She exclaimed. I hadn’t; I’d made the earrings myself. I’m not a big one for forced girlfriend hugs when I first meet someone. But ok.

We gathered at an outdoor table for drinks (alcoholic, for those who wanted them) and snacks before our tour of the property. Our luggage had been labeled with our room name (rooms were named after the writer’s books) and we were encouraged, nay ordered, actually—to leave behind all of our stuff as we were led up steep stone stairs to view all the rooms and casitas. I had actually forgotten the name of my room. We followed along for the tour.

As we settled in before dinner we were made aware of whiteboards with signups for an array of activities that made my head spin. It seemed very regimented. There appeared to be little unstructured time for actual writing; in fact, if you attended all the sessions you wouldn’t have any free time. I felt an instinctive resistance.

The next day I made use of the temazcal (a kind of indigenous sauna or sweatlodge). My previous experiences with a temazcal had not been terribly pleasant as a dozen of us had been crammed naked into a tiny, pitch-black space, huddled on the dirt floor. We’d been told we could not leave until the Zapotec songs had ended. I had to stifle my panic. Fran’s temazcal was way more pleasant—we didn’t have to crawl in and there were benches to sit on. And there were just 3 of us. Afterward a swim in the volcanic lake was refreshing. There was yoga, which I quickly bailed on, and then breakfast. We were to gather on the yoga platform at 9 AM.

It was then that the nature of the writers’ memoir retreat was revealed. We sat in a semicircle with Fran at the head, and for hours, we were encouraged—no, we were goaded—into revealing our deepest traumas. The recitation had begun to my right and I would be the last to speak. Over the course of almost 4 hours, I witnessed the disgorging of more emotion at one time than I had ever before experienced. Fran repeatedly interrupted, saying she didn’t want anyone’s CV. She pushed and prodded until the women tearfully expunged their deepest pain. I am not going to describe what I heard out of respect for these women’s stories. But I have been on half a dozen plant medicine retreats for people desperately seeking relief from persistent depression, anxiety, and a whole host of other forms of mental anguish, and I have never, ever heard anything remotely approaching the horror I took in that morning. I was stunned. What was the purpose of this narrative of suffering? Was it a competition? I knew I would lose, and for that I was grateful. And who is this person leading this retreat, with no mental health training, what on earth is she doing? No good would come from this, I thought.

If you look at Fran the writer’s Substack you will see photos of her workshops, carefully curated— photos of women crying, dabbing their faces with toilet paper, offering a hand to the shoulder of the woman in the next folding chair. I’ve never been to a 12 step meeting, but I imagine it might be like this. By the time I was up to spew my trauma, so many hours had passed that it was time for lunch and I was given a reprieve. But not for long.

I wondered—is this what memoir is about? I had read Fran’s memoirs so I knew she was brutally honest. I had thought I admired that, but now I wasn’t so sure. I quickly realized that my own story was not enough about me, based on what I’d heard that morning. I was probably more interested in other people; after all, I live inside my head every day. I don’t feel the need to plumb my own depths. What I have observed is that even if I want to talk about myself, most people will just wait until I stop so that they can say their piece. Or they might not even wait, but jump in anyway. That’s all right. I have accepted that. I would rather listen. My own truth never really emerges when I attempt to tell it.

The idea that we would be expected to sit through the workshopping of manuscripts from 9 AM until 5 PM, with breaks for meals, and then reconvene for evening readings after dinner (signups were on one of the whiteboards) provoked my caged animal response. I hate sitting for long periods of time and as I soon discovered, workshopping the memoirs was far from gentle. Most of the stories were ripped apart. In general I didn’t have a problem with that; after all, we were there for writing advice. I agreed with some, though not all of Fran’s critiques. She expunged many an adjective and adverb, and rejected what she called interpretative writing in favor of keen observation and detail. As a former university writing instructor, I agreed with a lot of her counsel. But I could also tell when a writer was resisting Fran’s take on what was significant in her story. I listened as one woman’s narrative was reduced to a metaphor around a musical instrument that quite simply did not resonate with the writer. Fran kept at it for probably 15-20 minutes while the writer sat, quiet and expressionless. I sensed a bitter whiff of rebellion.

Along with a few others, I had somehow missed that we were to have another piece of writing with us to read at the evening soirées around the fire. But it was not a problem because I had access to my Substack and I chose to read a couple of poems about my cats. From that moment I felt waved off as the poetic and arty cat lady. That was fine. My label was a protective amulet in that circle of gushing confession and contrived intimacy.

Fran had scheduled an excursion midweek, to a local village, where we would visit an apiary, an herbal medicine cooperative, and a women’s textile workshop, and afterward, lunch at an artisanal Italian restaurant, a strange choice for a small Mayan village, but whatever. This trip would be the opportunity to offload all the local currency we had been told to get. I was looking forward to this outing, partly as a chance to escape the emotional chaos of the casa and partly to simply walk around and soak up some local color.

From the moment we moored at the dock we were herded en masse like a bunch of high school girls on a field trip. “Girls, GIRLS!” Fran shouted, directing us to the fleet of tuktuks that would take us to our destination. At each place we were shown to a row of benches or chairs, whereupon a local gave a canned speech about whatever it was; at the apiary we listened to an explanation of beekeeping, complete with unfunny allusions to the roles of drone and queen. I caught sight of a calico cat dashing through the shrubbery and wandered away, trying to find her. We keep bees, so I didn’t need to listen to the spiel. Afterward there was time to shop in the store. Soap and honey and lotions.

We were ushered back to the tuktuks and on to the next stop, an herbal cooperative. We sat while the Mayan woman repeated “otra planta, se llama___” while Fran translated, though I think most of us got it anyway. Again, after the presentation we were released to shop in the little tienda. I bought a cream made of rue, which was supposed to combat the effects of “mala energia” (bad energy) and then I poked around in the little garden, finding some plants I knew and others I didn’t. I looked for cats; there were none in evidence.

Back to the tuktuks and to the women’s textile workshop, the much-hyped stop that we were most looking forward to. Alas, another lecture. Fran had said it would be 8 minutes, but it lasted much longer. I bailed after about 5 minutes. I had heard this talk on natural dyes and weaving techniques at least 4 or 5 times in Mexico. I probably could have given the talk myself. So I wandered through the store. I am a textile artist and a cultural anthropologist so if there’s one thing I know about, it’s indigenous fiber art. The stuff in this shop was tourist-grade souvenirs. Some of it was rayon from bamboo, definitely not traditional.

I felt bad for the other women who were buying inferior work when I knew there was much higher quality stuff to be had—I had seen it in the colonial city on the first day. I briefly considered buying beaded quetzal earrings as a gift, but I also know beads and was certain that the locals didn’t have access to the fine Japanese seed beads I use at home. I began to wonder about the relationship between Fran and the shops we had been to.

“Girls, GIRLS!” Again we were assembled, finally for lunch at the Italian restaurant. I didn’t have any wine. Maybe I would have been less grumpy if I had drunk alcohol; I just had Pellegrino, which I discovered later that I had to pay for. Well, it was a way to use up some currency. The flavored Pellegrino was $5 a pop and I paid for mine and that of 3 others, which further eroded my mood. It wasn’t the money. I liked my fellow writers and I’d have gladly bought them a drink, but I had soured on the outing generally.

Back we went in the lancha to return to the casa. The week continued with more workshopping and it became clear that some people were protégées while others were not. During my one-on-one with Fran, I’d felt pressure to confess my personal struggles. I kept trying to redirect. I mentioned how much I enjoyed a memoir I had read recently, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, which explores the relationship between a chronically ill woman and a snail she keeps in a terrarium beside her bed. Imagine, in this context, writing about a beloved snail! I could tell that Fran wasn’t moved. We talked briefly of my mother’s death and how I sought the company of my horses that June evening after she died. That was my story, Fran decided.

Maybe. That night I lay in bed, listening to crickets and frogs and the incessant barking of far-off dogs, as well as the crack of bombas, ubiquitous in Mexico and Central America. Then, I was at home. I noticed a bundle of clothes and baggage that did not belong to me. I gathered it up and flung it out the door. Relieved to get it out of my space I turned and noticed a small hatch, a kind of secret cupboard or entrance into a ship’s cabin. I realized I had failed to secure it and the door was bulging, splintering. Dread tightened my diaphragm and I shoved my shoulder against the plywood. The intruder would still get in.

I awoke to the shrill carrion-eater laugh that had become so familiar that week. Even through the brick walls of the temazcal, I could hear it.

On the last day the schedule was very tight and since my work hadn’t been discussed in the group I felt obligated to attend. Again it was an entire morning before we got to me. I read a piece from my Substack and most of the feedback was positive. But it felt halfhearted. I think Fran wasn’t very interested in me or my story. She had drawn a line through my name by this point. She had already made clear that we should all attend the workshopping of one writer who was obviously going places (and had been published). I didn’t have a dramatic narrative to contribute and I had drawn the curtain across any naked emotion; that was not on offer from me. So there was little to feed on.

That afternoon we gathered on the yoga platform again to welcome a shaman who would do a Mayan ceremony for us. It was 2 hours of offering this and that to the fire. I am not an expert in Mayan rituals so I can’t speak to its authenticity. I have seen plenty of indigenous or indigenous-adjacent practices employed in service to tourists or plant medicine retreat guests and I suspect most of these are performative for gringos, or in this case gringas. It’s an attempt to bind us in shared reality. At the end, there were hugs. I did not seek Fran out to hug, nor did she move towards me. After that we gathered round the table to praise the retreat. Fran had told us she wanted only testimonials and that we should email those as soon as possible to the woman who had coordinated the trip. The evening dragged as Fran recounted one prior retreat story after another. I would have to pack in the dim light of my room and I knew we would have to get up very early. So I slipped out into the darkness. At dawn, we said goodbye. There were hugs again, but Fran hung back from me. Perhaps it was the rue-infused balm.

When I got home I was exhausted and though it was a rare sunny, warm day in March, I stayed on the couch with my cats. My niece, who is my closest family member, called me. When I told her about my writing retreat, she said her stomach had started to hurt. She asked me, “Did you feel unsafe?”I hesitated. I said no. It sounds dangerous, actually, she said. Yes, probably for some people, it was.

Before I left for Central America, I did a tarot spread, mostly on a whim. The cards were negative. Usually I take a photo of my readings but this time I swept the cards aside, irritated. I didn’t have to believe the message. But I do remember the central card of the Celtic cross. It was the Queen of cups, reversed. The upright card is a positive sign. She symbolizes creativity, abundance, generosity. She sits at the water’s edge, holding the cup. But reversed? She is manipulative, lacking in boundaries, insecure, impulsive. Manic, she overshares strategically.

Whatever is in the cup spills out, oozing everywhere. It stains whatever it touches.

The guest was one of the founders of the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) in Santa Fe and Baja (perfect locations!). A fifty-something guy, a self-described “third culture kid,” he had a plummy accent and a carefully cultivated scruffy beard. During the interview he kept flipping back his greasy-looking gray hair with a gesture of studied nonchalance. I’m guessing it wasn’t really greasy—perhaps it was product, or even more likely, he’d just come in from the beach.

His points seemed valid to me. First, listen. Second, learn how to ask good questions, third, “go first,” and fourth, have a good mindset about friendship. Going first basically means not being afraid to make overtures to people who seem interesting. The mindset relates to how often there’s a gap between how you assume you’re being regarded and how people actually see you. In other words, people may like you more than you believe they will, so be confident. I think these approaches make a lot of sense.

The guest also talked about transactional vs. relational friendships. Transactional friends are the ones who disappear when you quit a job. Sometimes this can be pretty painful because you thought the friendship went beyond the lunchroom discussions of the weekend. I think we all know the difference and sometimes transactional friendships transform into something more meaningful.

Then the discussion wandered into epiphanies of midlife, and how those played out. The guest worked for a Swiss multimillionaire and traveled a lot. Then he settled in the Bay Area working in Dot Com and innovation. So, obviously, he was involved in lucrative pursuits, such that when he began to feel dissatisfied, he could pack up his family and drive down to Todos Santos to spend four months surfing. And he was able to find himself again. He offered several anecdotes about other people he knew in his situation who did something similar.

At this point I soured on the interview. In the ensuing conversation about the important discoveries around friendship and community (and the entrepreneurial development of MEA, where these ideas, among others, could be explored) no mention was made of the enormous privilege that allowed this to happen.

I have no problem with people taking a break and doing some soul-searching in a Mexican beach town for several months. By all means, do it. But to offer this as a paradigm without acknowledging that it’s out of reach for the majority of middle class people going through the angst of midlife is just so stunningly myopic. It made me wonder whether the two men in this discussion even realized how privileged they are. Most ordinary working people in their late forties to fifties are trying to negotiate the challenges of helping aging parents and raising children; perhaps they are locked into a bleak career that no longer satisfies them. These folks are lucky to get a week to take off and reassess their lives. What advice does the Midlife Chrysalis offer them?

I do lots of retreats and workshops and I have looked at the offerings at MEA and am intrigued. Recently there was a gathering at their Baja campus with Dacher Keltner, the author of a book called Awe: The new science of everyday wonder and how it can transform your life. Keltner’s work is very appealing to me and I wished I had signed up for that event instead of the art workshop I had planned. So I am not dismissive of the work being done at MEA. However, I know that I am very fortunate to be able to take advantage of opportunities like this. I have enormous privilege.

Both my husband and I are one generation removed from poverty on opposite sides of the planet. His parents came from peasant villages in pre-independence India. My mother was the daughter of a bankrupt farmer in upstate New York. My father was the child of a single mother trying to get by in a tough urban neighborhood of immigrants. Both sets of parents worked very hard, saved a lot, and provided a prosperous life for their children, with the major emphasis being education. My parents were the old-fashioned trade union leftists whose values were informed by the hardships of the working class and the struggles of brown and black people as they fought white supremacy and injustice. They never tired of mentioning their humble roots despite the eye-rolls they got in response. We were taught to think about people who didn’t have the access to resources and the advantages that we had. A complaint about food or a grubby motel room wouldn’t get us very far. I’m not trying to virtue-signal here. I’m talking about sensitivity and empathy.

The fact that an entire podcast was devoted to the difficulties of friendship and community in midlife without mentioning that most people can’t make use of the fixes suggested is problematic. And it’s emblematic of a culture and era in which wealth determines access to wellness. At least noticing that and noting it would be better than nothing. Otherwise the methods on offer are purely transactional and not relational at all.

I am currently taking a class in which a fundamental concept is that animals are our spiritual teachers. For a person who loves animals as much as I do, it’s a compelling idea. I am also working on a memoir about my experiences with horses. This is the Year of the Horse in the Chinese calendar, and horses are powerful symbols in many cultures: a horse galloping through the surf, mane and tail flying in the wind, is freedom. A horse carrying its rider is fidelity.

But what if we consider that they are not about us, that they are not here to do anything for us or teach us anything? What if we stopped projecting our human attributes and desires onto them? What then?

I share my household with 6 cats. Over the years I have also lived with dogs and parrots and my land has been home to different kinds of poultry, horses, and wild animals, as well as the myriad insect life I attract with plants. Plants are teachers too, don’t forget! Am I at the center of all this life? Having returned from a 10 day trip in January, and immediately being surrounded and sat on by all the cats, it would be easy to think so.

I rescue and care for cats because humans are responsible for their existence and their suffering. They would not be in their current situation but for us. I feel a moral imperative to tend them as best I can, which often seems like a broken and futile effort. I love them immeasurably. My grief when they die is eviscerating and ambushes me unpredictably at any moment. Same with the other animals. They might be here because of me in a general sense—inasmuch as I, a human being, have contributed to their predicament of living on a planet that we are rapidly destroying. But they are not here for me.

Animals are their own selves and are compelling to watch so we can see how different species live and die in the world and how we are all connected. But animals are not mirrors. If we choose to see them that way, we are as deluded as Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection

.