The Wild Kindness featured in Lenny Letter
Since the release of Pollan’s book, a few people have sought me out, asking if I know of a therapist who can guide them on a psilocybin mushroom journey. Pollan preaches evangelically, with a Mr. Rogers-like wholesomeness, of the miraculous benefits gleaned by those who’ve done it in this way. But if it wasn’t for Pollan’s book, these people would never have gone anywhere near the stuff.
“I do know of a therapist,” I have said. “They’re called mushrooms. Eat them and ask them for help.”
It’s much too simple a prescription for most. To arrive to the mushrooms on their own terms, without the burden of expectations or the concepts put upon them by others, has been, for me, an act of decolonization. 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. What, after all, is the psychedelic but a private drama that, for all its profundity, only has meaning and significance to others when framed in a specific cultural context?
