Bett Williams - The Wild Kindness

The Wild Kindness

Published in 2020 by Dottir Press

33 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10003

Dottirpress.com

Copyright 2020 by Bett Williams

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any transformation retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from Dottir Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

FIRST EDITION

Cover illustration by Mike Perry

Illustration on by Elizabeth Daggar

Design and production by Drew Stevens

The Wild Kindness is set in Adobe Caslon, which was designed in 1990 by Carol Twombly, and Montserrat, which was designed in 2012 by Julieta Ulanovsky.

Trade distribution by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution, www.cbsd.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-1-9483-4031-1

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, JUNE 2020

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PSYCHEDELICS HAVE HIT the mainstream. Strangers seek me out regularly, asking if I know of a therapist who can guide them on a psilocybin mushroom journey. Self-proclaimed experts preach evangelically about the miraculous benefits gleaned by those whove done it in this way: in a clinical setting, with a trained professional.

I do know of a therapist, I respond. Theyre called a mushroom. Eat them and ask them for help.

Its much too simple a prescription for most. For me, it has been an act of decolonization to arrive to the mushrooms on their own terms, without the burden of expectations or the concepts put upon them by others. It is not in the nature of the Western psyche to give such power directly to a plant, let alone an unruly fungus. We want babysitters, esoteric prophets, shamans, and scientists to act as gatekeepers in the realm of the incomprehensible. Fair enough. After all, what is the psychedelic but a private drama that, for all its profundity, only holds meaning and significance to others when framed in a specific cultural context? Up until recently, the celebrated psychedelic culture makers were predominantly white men. I have my own opinions as to how this has affected our collective imagination, but I suggest you look into it yourself.

Three to five grams of dried psilocybin mushrooms should be sufficient to achieve clear-sightedness. Keep your wits and dont do anything stupid. When you land solidly back to earth, you will have had the only psychedelic experience that really mattersthe one that is your own.

Before Wasson, nobody used the children only to find God. They were always taken to cure the sick.

MARA SABINA

I WAS BORN in Santa Barbara, where bougainvillea grows like weeds, its delicate paper flowers in red and pink spill over walls and tangle in hedges along with night-blooming jasmine and toxic oleander bushes. Trees planted by settlers from the far corners of the earth bear strange flowers that smell of urine, burning campfires, and honey, all of which mingle with the holy scent of ocean mist.

Now my house where I live in New Mexico, is surrounded by juniper trees on all sides. They are always in my sightline. For decades I hadnt given them much thought, being that the pinion trees outside are much more famous. Theyre older and occasionally produce pine nuts, and the wood is better for burning. In the late nineties, a bark beetle scourge took out a massive percentage of the pinions in northern New Mexicothirteen trees on my land. The bark beetle carries a blue stain fungus in its mouth that lodges itself under the bark of a pinion tree and weakens the resin, its natural defense. The junipers were immune to this attack. There are a lot of things suffering in this world, myself included, but if theres one thing thats not suffering at all, its the juniper trees. They go on for miles.

Now that I think of it, juniper has been around since the very beginning. Juniper kind of tried to kill my mother. Her allergies left her bedridden throughout my childhood and adolescence.

Its the juniper, she would say, in a state of total collapse. Its killing me.

It was the junipernot depression, not my father, not the cigarettes. Still, she insisted on planting even more juniper bushes in our yard, unearthing the perfectly fine ground cover that came before. Juniper was sturdy and drought-tolerant and didnt require tending. She planted it everywhere, vast swaths arranged in graded tiers that formed a maze of underground tunnels beneath the scratchy, slightly psychoactive branches. Juniper was a bleak underworld labyrinth I crawled through on my hands and knees with my dog, as if on a personal dare. The juniper tunnels were where Charlie, my demure sheltie, chose to relieve himself. I navigated around the dried shit piles to where the juniper fields ended at the skylight window of the guesthouse. One of my brothers friends was renting the space and sometimes I would get lucky and catch him jerking off.

Juniper provided my mother with what she needed mosta thing she could blame her Victorian illnesses on. Her commitment to juniper couldve been a secret rebellion, a return to her Lubbock roots, where nothing grows from the desolate, sandy ground except the strongest, most determined of plants. Juniper was just like herfucking alive and fucking irritating.

It occurred to me that the junipers might be what herbal medicine people would call my ally plant. Psilocybin mushrooms have been my gateway drug to LSD and San Pedro cactus; theyve also been my gateway drug to yarrow, rose, mullein, and the juniper trees. The mushrooms roll their eyes at the fact that it took a substance as unsubtle and hardcore as a mushroom to wake me up to the rest of the natural world.

I ATE MUSHROOMS for the first time at age fifteen, in 1983, with a pale and haunted girl who wandered into my life for only this purpose before disappearing. We walked under the full moon through crumbling Greek architecture in Montecito, California, and kissed for a short while like Victorian ladies. It was everything one would want from a first-time experience. After having visions of insects and dirt, I went to sleep blissfully, tears streaming down my face in gratitude.

The next day I had plans to visit a juvenile detention center as part of a teen outreach program facilitated by a twenty-eight-year-old woman with whom I was having an intense and very secret sexual relationship. The volunteers gathered in the parking lot. While we were standing around, I told the facilitator what I had done the night before, that I had eaten mushrooms with a girl and it had been beautiful. She fired me on the spot. I waited in the car, sobbing hysterically, while the rest of the group was inside for nearly two hours. It was stupid of me to tell her. I loved the teen outreach program and I also loved the facilitator. She broke my little mushroom heart.

Its possible I associated that traumatic experience directly with the mushrooms without meaning to, because I avoided them after that. In the late 1990s, I moved up the road from a tiny coal town in rural New Mexico and began to frequent a shop that sold candles, antiques, blown glass, and handmade ironwork. The owner, Denise, had red hair and wore leather pants and seemed to really like me. We talked a lot on my frequent visits to the store. Once we got in full gossip mode, we couldnt shut up. When parting, it was always with the promise that we would eventually get together for a real hangout.