Plant Medicine

 I am going to a plant medicine ritual, I am with a friend. We meet the Shaman, he seems like a guy who runs the local phone shop, rather than a Shaman as I would imagine.

He starts to talk to us about the plant medicine, he makes a point about plant medicine being colonialist and extractivist. My friend who I am with does not understand what that means, so I explain.

As I am explaining, the man leading the ritual slips some medicine into a glass of Prosecco that I have in front of me. I feel a little uneasy about the surreptitious nature of this delivery. I drink it anyway.

As I am drinking it a woman explains something to me, I realise that I am maybe already hallucinating. She says that the plant medicine will open a veil, but only for some people. She says that some people may wait over 100 years, and the veil will still not open for them. As I am pondering if the veil will open for me, it opens. I am looking at a painting on a canvas - a zip appears which I undo - and I am suddenly in contact with all that it is.

I had bought a question about my life into this ritual. I realise that the being that I am encountering, cares nothing for my day-to-day life. This realisation is not bad or disturbing, it just is. The woman who had been talking to me laughs, not un kindly, maybe as you might laugh at the naivety of a child - at the thought that the being of the universe would care about my day-to-day life.

I continue in a strange fragmented reality - it is like being a very small part of a vast  painting - the painting is undulating, pulsating, colourful and abstract. The colours are perhaps a little like a Monet.

The scale of this painting (and my smallness within it) is incomprehensible.