Connection as Content
East Forest and Music for Mushrooms
I just lived through New York Psychedelic Climate Week, a collection of events curated by my new friend Marissa Feinberg, who is the first person in more than a decade who has managed to get me to train into New York City ten nights in a row. It was pretty remarkable to encounter such large groups of people not only openly committed to engaging with these plants, but also aware of the people and places impacted by their harvesting, dedicated to promoting life on earth, and the sanctity of nature.
Most people seemed interested in the process through which psychedelics tend to make many people aware of the interconnectedness of things, our dependence on the earth, and the planet’s limited capacity for extraction and abuse. Many people emerge from a psychedelic ceremony with newfound respect for nature, and a sense of urgency about responding to the climate. As Extinction Rebellion founder Gail Bradbrook likes to say, if you’ve done a psychedelic trip you have started on the path to climate activism.
I prefer to think of it more in terms of “set and setting.” Learning how to approach psychedelics may help us understand how to approach not just nature, but climate activism itself. Instead of using propaganda and marketing to “get people” to are about the climate, how can we engender the conditions…
