Sleeping Beauties

Today was a day spent idly. Idle roaming, idle thoughts, lying in the grass. The sun shone overhead, brightly, kindly, as if granting permission for the hours to unfold in whatever way that best seemed fit. Tasked with the choice between chocolatey psychonautic adventures in Golden Gate Park, or a movie, I decided to take a trip to the chocolate factory. For the longest time there have been these chocolate-covered mushrooms - of unknown strength - hiding quietly in my freezer. Patiently, they've been sitting in stasis, awaiting a warm mouth, a kiss, to make them alive again. Sleeping beauties. So, kiss them I did. It was only a peck, though. Sensibly, the chocolate was divided in half and quickly consumed. Then I burned some sage, making sure to let the swirling smoke touch the palms of my feet before trapping the last of it under my floral snap-back cap, and then I paid tribute to the altar of Ganesha for good luck and providence. Ritualistically I sang two songs of love and mourning, and then I was out the door. Already the world seemed to me a different place. The muscles in my feet, pressing into the soles of my shoes - and in turn, the shoes pressing against hard cement - throbbed and tickled with new intensity. Enhanced sensitivity. Wind danced over my chest, ruffling the tail of my shirt, jumping off through the leaves of trees behind me, leaving the limbs pleasantly thrashing and swaying in space. The air around me had become much more aqueous. My gills were flapping. A silly grin spread across my face and everything else seemed to smile, too. Even gravity, a thing that can always be relied upon to remind you of a constant constraint, seemed to have lightened, lifted. Birds were chirping, a soft music played in the distance, and I followed the scent of the future aimlessly into the park.

In the park there were many things that happened. A particularly odd interaction was a moment I had with a squirrel, a sort of standoff in which I was able to convince him, telepathically, that I was friend - not foe. Uneasily he eyed me, especially at first, while I watched his entire body pulse with trepidation. The thing to know about squirrels, is that they do not know how to move slowly. They can only twitch and dart and make sudden, frantic movements. This, and a gratuitous love of nuts, is all they know. After a long while of still-standing and nonverbal soothe saying, I was able to express the concept of peace to my furry woodland friend. Instantly I noticed a softening of the eye, a slowing of his heart-rate, an unbending of the ears. It was strange, what happened next, and it requires a careful imagination. He slowly moved down the trunk of the tree, inching toward my foot, and arriving, prostrated himself, like a dog at its master's feet. I kid you not, this actually happened. The fact that I was on mushrooms did not help me conceal my surprise. At first I wondered if he was just unafraid of people, if he thought I had some food to give him, but then I saw how he had almost completely flattened himself out. He wasn't looking for food, he was relaxing. I'd somehow tamed a squirrel. We had established a truce, a special bond. Could I take it home? Would it follow me? If it did, would I need to get it a small leash? A muzzle? Behind me a child's laughter broke the spell of our armistice and the squirrel retreated back up its tree. It seemed to look at me longingly, as I walked away, and I felt at first sad, then happy, because I knew I would always remember his trust and tenderness.

Flowers were what caught my eye next, lots of them. They seemed incredibly textured and outlandishly colored, incomprehensibly distinct, to the point of appearing alien. Never before had I seen flowers like these. Intricate patterns rippled out in waves across the petals, like goosebumps, then spilled slowly down their spiny stems. When the breeze would hit them they would gently jostle and dance, strutting in small, staccato, funkadelic grooves. Following the breeze I found myself passing through paths I'd never taken before, all of which led me, by a circuitous, no, fortuitous chance, back to the same place. For a while I lied down in the grass and listened to the sounds of peacetime; children playing, the cracking of cans of beer, leisured conversation, laughter. Staring up at the sky, watching clouds lose their shape and stretch themselves slowly apart, I thought about the scary thinness between calm and crisis, and how all it takes is an instant for the veil of civility to unravel. How the sounds would change, then; sirens, gunshots, screams, explosions, crying, whimpering, and then, eventually, nothing but the occasional sound of skidding rubble. The heat was getting to me. It was time to get up and find some shade.

When I got up, a pair of musicians had launched into a performance under an acoustically lovely arch. The sound was perfect. Amplified and rounded in a way that only physical space can render it, both brightening and also deepening it, the sound washed out in all its sonic splendor over the grass to those within earshot. They were musicians I had seen before, years ago, with my brother. At the time we'd given them money and bought their CD's. They were good then, but were even better now. They played a music that is difficult to characterize, somewhere between gypsy opera and gregorian chanting. It transcended language, spoken in a tongue that was foreign, yet familiar. The man played a violin and wore bells on his feet. While he played he danced to create a percussive, jangling rhythm. From his lips erupted a series of low growls, followed by a few soul-shaking falsetto notes, and then some hopping fiddlework as he cut at the air with his song. The woman also wore bells, and a painted white face, and she sang a pitch-perfect angelic hymn that was the harmony of the man's. A crowd gathered as they played. They danced, volleying notes of raw and unmistakable beauty and pain, longing, love. It had been some time since I'd seen such an expression of human feeling. Their music made the air feel fuller, heavier. The whirlpool sound had a kind of gravity to it, always pulling my breath nearer. It was electrifying. The conclusion of the performance brought all the lawn-sitters to their feet and a thunderous applause smacked at the silence. I delivered a crisp $10 bill to the open violin case and kept walking.

I lazed around, got lost for a while in a rose garden, walked a small circle around Stow Lake and then sat staring at trees. Everything was brilliant and beautiful and existed only in the exact way that it could. The power of psychedelics is in their ability to miniaturize the self, to dissolve the ego and give rise to an awesome, overwhelming feeling of insignificance in the face of nature's immensity. They give the gift of certainty - everything that is, is, because if it weren't, it wouldn't be. Everything is complete, whole, perfect, brimming with being. All there is is the moment. Seconds stretch out like thinning clouds; wispy white strands replete with presence.

There is a unique beauty about a second. Seconds pass indiscriminately, invisibly, incessantly. Aggregates of them make up the totality of our lives. Adolescence seems now only a series of seconds. And although they're all equal in duration, some stand out more than others; a first kiss, a broken bone, a last kiss. The seconds are what rule us. We can only see them in minutes, hours, days, and years, often forgetting that the only thing separating life and death is a second.