FEMME OSAGE

I was reading an interesting essay in yesterday's new NYT Opinion section (replacing the Sunday Review. Why?) about the recent surge of interest in the use of hallucinogens as an aid in psychotherapy. It reminded me of my own (single) experience with LSD back in the 1960s. 

I have never been much interested in drugs of any kind. Back in those days, I did smoke a bit of weed like everyone else--but laughably little when compared to those around me. I even gave that up in the early 1970s after a frightening, seemingly never-ending attack of acute paranoia, and have not taken more than a very occasional toke since then. But I remain convinced that the effects of that one "acid trip" left a lasting and radical change in my consciousness. It literally changed my mind.

It was the summer of Sergeant Pepper and the Surrealistic Pillow, remembered forever as "the summer of love." At the invitation of a poet friend in Iowa City I drove down to visit other friends of his at a farm in the lush green countryside near Hannibal, Missouri. The night we arrived I stood at the window of my bedroom and watched in awe as one of those incredible Midwest thunderstorms rolled past with immense thunderclaps, a spectacular display of lightning against dark, luminous green skies that threatened tornados. 

The following morning I found my poet friend and our host in quiet debate by the refrigerator in the kitchen. They eyed me speculatively before evidently coming to a decision--and offered me a tablet of LSD. I accepted nervously, more to avoid being left out, I think, than of eagerness to give it a try. We each swallowed down our dose with a glass of cool, clear water.

We strolled down, the three of us, to the nearby Femme Osage Creek, and separated there, each for our own solitude... and it was then that the universe literally opened up. I was sitting in the shallows of the creek, watching the crawdads go about their business on the stony ground beneath the surface. All about me, leaves and grasses shone with a multitude of gleaming greens. A red-headed woodpecker knocked incessantly at a tree-trunk. Now and then, a cardinal would swoop by, a stunning streak of scarlet against the green. Above, the intensity of the blue sky left me amazed.

I find it impossible to describe that sense--that illusion--of the universe revealing itself to me in all its glory and, particularly, in its oneness. I had the sudden and inarguable perception of the living, essential interdependence of all things--of leaves, and grass, and crawdads, of stones at the bottom of the creek, of each individual tree--and of myself. It was all one. And this perception, this illusion, if you will, was accompanied by an incredible sense of joy, of the rightness of all things. 

Fanciful or not--you decide--I know that this experience left an indelible, if indefinable impression on the deepest level of my consciousness. I'm not a religious perspn, as you know, but this is perhaps the closest I have ever been to a "religious experience"--and it stays with me. Again, it is rarely near the surface, and I would find it impossible to convey just how it manifests in my thinking or my life. I just know it's there.

I'd certainly not recommend this kind of uncontrolled experiment to anyone. Indeed, all that lightness of being and all that joy ended up, by the end of the day, in a nightmare little short of terror. That was the downside. The universe came crashing in on me. I was lost, separated from my friends, wandering between hedges in back lanes trying desperately to orient myself, to find my way back home. 

I did get back to the farmhouse as the evening fell, and was happy to be reunited with my friends. Here I am, to relive the experience and tell the tale. I hope that you too might have enjoyed the trip. And please be careful with those mind-altering drugs.