Laughing the Sacred

Since 1995, when Jamie told me about his father’s experience sitting with a friend on Marine Drive in the early ‘70s “watching the Golden Gate Bridge dance all night,” I knew peyote would be in my life. His father, Jamie also revealed, mentioned that while most drugs expand your mind, peyote is your mind.

In 1999 I had my first opportunity to taste the sacred button, revered by Native American and Mexican cultures for centuries, and one of the few “illegal” substances considered sacrament available for legal possession and consumption in this country. Dax and I were in Amsterdam and the golf ball-sized bluish and orange discs sat within inches of my curious fingers. Given we were in a country we had never been to, and not in the presence of a Peyotero to help guide the experience, we opted for the more familiar psilocybin-producing “magic” mushrooms.

Needless to say, when I was informed of an opportunity to partake in this ceremony under certified guidance in New Paltz, I knew the time had arrived. The entire weekend was to include numerous rituals, including a pipe ceremony and sweat lodge, culminating in the consumption of peyote. The weekend was to be powerful for me in numerous ways, most immediately the burning of a certain object in the fire we would sweat with, one holding many memories I needed to rid myself of. Nostalgia, as Albert Einstein ingeniously noted, is fine unless we have the chance of returning to it. Like many of us, pieces of my past haunt the possibilities of future, and I allow this nostalgic bravado to govern my choices instead of stepping fearlessly ahead. This sweat, and my ingestion of sacrament, was to be one courageous footfall forward.

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