I Took Magic Mushrooms and Walked Through the Forest Naked

I wasn’t planning on it, but the small dose of mushroom powder I took earlier had tapped me into nature and my body. Everything Naked Mushrooms was alive. The trees looked as they always look — beautiful and vibrant, but even more so. They seemed alive, not just in a yes-of-course-they’re-alive,-they’re-trees way, but in a they-are-expressing-life-in-its-very-essence! way.

 Light shimmered off the little green leaf-hands that were waving at the world.The trunks and branches darkened in places from the rain that had fallen earlier, were works of art no human hand could replicate.

 My partner Drake and I veered off the main bike path into the forest. We followed a gravel path that used to be a train track and still contained some of the iron that hadn’t been peeled away. It was a path surrounded by trees, some of their branches reaching across to touch other trees’ branches.

We crossed a bridge over the river that flowed through the area and I relished at the glittering, living water flowing over rocks. “Look at how beautiful!” I exclaimed.

Drake wandered to the other side of the bridge to see the water flowing in, as I watched it flow out and away.A dragonfly settled onto a wildflower growing from the gravel. Its pitch-black wings were two, when closed, and blossomed into four, when open.

Deer in the Mist — photo by author

We continued along the path until Drake stopped me, pointing ahead. A deer, standing still in the mist, facing the woods but waiting. What was it waiting for?A smaller path branched off and veered more deeply into the woods. We took it, and avoided scaring the deer.

I love being surrounded by the woods. I become part of it.Plant life is no longer separate from me, the path no longer man-made and filled with gravel but dirt — mud, in fact, from the rain — created by the deer and other animals.

Deeper into the woods, until we were surrounded only by the sound raindrops, which had pooled on the higher leaves, now shaken by the wind. The water dropped on my bare arms. I wanted more touch.

I turned to Drake and asked if I could touch him.

This is an ongoing journey with him, eight years and counting. How did I end up with a partner who doesn’t love touch the way I do?

Perhaps it’s because of this difference that we’ve remained together all these years. It doesn’t fully make sense, but it’s starting to… because of this separation, we can each live our lives as individuals, connected in some ways, but not so attached we prevent each other’s growth.

Trees that grow too close can block each other’s sunlight, but it’s not that simple.

As Krissy Howard explains in How Trees Talk to Each Other:

Not only do trees consider their fellow partner’s needs for sunshine, some have been known to die with their companions — usually after two sets of individual roots become so deeply interconnected that they eventually acted as one.

Trees’ social lives don’t stop there. Using a fungal network some have affectionately deemed “the Wood Wide Web,” trees can actually communicate with one another by sending electrical signals among themselves, along with precious resources such as sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus.