Moon's Gift, Part 1
Serenity comes when you trade expectations for acceptance.
- Attributed by some to Gautama Buddha.
I am going a different direction with the newsletter for the next couple of editions. As I reviewed my backlog for what to write this week, the items and themes coalesced into an idea for a short story, of all things. Everything I wanted to say became clear and started pouring into what you will ready below. This is part one of what is a multipart part story. It is called, “Moon’s Gift.”
An amateur mycologist from a small town in the Oregon Cascades discovers a new species of mushroom in the rain forest near Mount Jefferson. After researching her new find, she determines that it contains psilocybin and other compounds. Now, Janey had been hunting and using mushrooms since her hippy days, when she first tried mushrooms as a student at the University of Oregon. She was an amateur in name only: she had been hunting and consuming mushrooms of all kinds for over 50 years and was famous locally for being the person to go for all things mushroom.
Janey was 77 years old, and she had her share of life’s travails. She had lost her eldest daughter Sunny to suicide. Her second daughter, June, was despondent and bitter and estranged, and blamed the loss of her sister on their unconventional life growing up. They hadn’t talked in years. Janey’s “old man” - they never married - was the father of the two girls, and he abandoned them in 1977 when he joined an obscure New Age cult in Sedona Arizona. In 1982, she married a like-minded mycologist named Moon, and they lived together in their cabin in the woods above the McKenzie river for three decades, hunting mushrooms and communing with their friends, until he died of heart failure in 2012. Janey was crushed by her loss. She and Moon were inseparable. But her friends rallied around her, and she stayed in the cabin and she hiked in the woods year-round, enjoying nature and harvesting mushrooms, and sharing with her friends.
She was surprised when she found this new mushroom, since in all her years roaming the forests or Oregon, she thought she saw everything. This mushroom was new. She noted carefully where she found it, and that it grew on decaying incense cedar. After determining it was relatively nontoxic, she tried a small dose, and had the most pleasantly intense experience of her life. The combination of the psilocybin with the other compounds gave her a clarity into her life and the lives of others that was transformational.
She experienced an overwhelming feeling of empathy and love. She never forgave her “old man” Stuart for leaving her, but she was able rekindle her love for him and let her anger go. She exteriorized from her own life and viewed the world with the eyes of her daughters, and was overwhelmed by Sunny’s deep depression, and of June’s unconsolable grief, and was able to truly understand why June was estranged from her and her love for both of them consumed her and she became serene in her life and the lives of her daughters and her lovers and her friends. She felt like she understood.
She called June and of course it went to voice mail. Janey just said, “I love you, daughter,” and hung up. A few days later, June called back, and they started the road to reconciliation with tears, flashes of anger, discussions, apologies, and love.
Janey called the new mushroom “Moon’s Gift.” She tried it a few more times over the next two months and her empathy just grew and she felt a oneness with everything. She had always heard about this feeling of, well, Nirvana, from her friends who were into TM or who had visited ashrams in India, or spent time at the Self-Realization Fellowship in California, but she never experienced it herself until now. Moon’s Gift had truly given her a gift.
She noticed that she felt more supple and that she could move better. Her balance improved. Her blood pressure stabilized. She was able to concentrate better and read faster, and her eyes improved. She slept better than she had slept in years. She didn’t connect this to Moon’s Gift initially, because why should she? But the improvements were such that she couldn’t deny them, and the changes were coincident with the discovery and use of the mushroom. She had no idea how this could be, but it was, and she was grateful for it.
The altitude and atmosphere of her land was almost exactly like the climate of where she found the mushroom, and on one of her visits, she took a decently sized rotting branch of cedar with her back to the cabin and found she was able to cultivate it.
She knew she was taking a risk when she tried the mushrooms without fully researching them, but she was a 77 year old widow, and she knew her mushrooms, and was completely comfortable with the risk. The risk was real, and so she didn't share her find with her friends for the first two months. After two months of using Moon’s Gift and documenting her experiences, dosages, and effects, she decided to share her findings with her three best friends and fellow amateurs, Maud, Jim, and Gertie.
Maud and Jim were 74 and 77 respectively, and were partners their whole lives and for as long as Janey had known them. Jim was a math professor, and when he retired, they bought a cabin on the river, just below Janey’s place. Maud was a fishing guide for years, taking people out on the McKenzie and to the many lakes, streams and rivers in the area. Now she was happy to fish the stretch of the McKenzie behind their cabin. Gertie, at 67, was the “kid” of the bunch. She lost her husband to an overdose back in the ‘80s, and escaped from Los Angeles soon after. She grew up in Santa Monica, and got the acting bug as a teenager. She took acting classes, invested in head shots, went to cattle calls for extras, managed to get some auditions, and waited on many, many tables. She met Rod, who was a New Wave musician playing in a garage in Encino, fell madly in love with him, got pregnant, got married, and miscarried soon after. She was unable to have children after that, and she and Rod partied between tables and gigs, and one day Rod pushed it too far. Back then, Gertie was rail thin with black make up and shiny black straight hair, and she had just turned 30 and her world was over. She had always heard about Oregon, and knew she couldn’t stay in Hollywood, and so she moved. And met Janey, and Jim, and Maud, who took her in as their little sister.
The three of them inspected the new mushroom. None of the three had ever come across it or anything like it, and they were enthralled. If anyone but Janey had introduced them to Moon’s Gift, they would have smiled politely, shook their hand, and told them to take it to the university for testing - or anywhere else but there. Janey told them about her experiences, the divine feelings of empathy and love, she showed them her records of her blood pressure and stats from her health app (she was living in a cabin in the mountains, but she was no luddite), and her friends were going back and forth with fascination, a bit of incredulity, a bit of “wow! really?”, puzzlement of trying to figure out how this particular species worked, why it was different, and then, how it would affect them. So they decided to try it.
Maud and Gertie tried first, with Jim and Janey standing watch, as it were. After about half an hour, Maud closed her eyes and began to hum. Her breathing slowed to a slow and steady cadence of deep breaths filling her lungs down to her stomach, and deep exhales that smoothly let the air escape into the world in front of and around her, enveloping her. She murmured “I feel beautiful,” and she felt herself rising above her body into the sky above and into a golden light. She perceived her friends below her and they were shiny, glowing, and transparent. The world was transparent, and her body was transparent, and there were no boundaries between anything - her body, her friends, the trees and air, the fish and streaming water of the river - the fish were the river and the river was the rocks in the stream and the bank, and the bank was the earth and she and Jim and Janey and Gertie were the earth and of the glowing and transparent earth, and she felt herself expanding and rising higher, and the earth and the moon and the sun and - she sensed the stars and galaxies - were all around her and of her, and she was everything and everything was her. And she felt a calm, deep serenity, and she felt love she had never felt before.
Gertie started to softly cry a few minutes after she tried the mushroom. Like Maud, she closed her eyes. She felt a darkness grow and surround her, a familiar darkness, a deep gray cloud that she spent half her life avoiding. It was there, now, and she felt a deep sadness and she started to sob. Her grief was growing, but she felt she could embrace her sadness, finally, and felt no need to push it off any longer. She felt, again, the rejections, the so many rejections, the pain of being passed over for roles she loved, and the feelings of futility as all the time and effort and energy to break into the business - to pursue her art - came to absolutely nothing. It was as if she were never there. Even her occasional stints as an extra reinforced the reality that she was just another face in the crowd, not unique in any way, yet another pretty waitress refilling coffees from stained brown carafes. She felt a deep schism that almost tore her in half - Rod. All the love she felt for him and all the grief she had for him and everything she ever felt for him came to her as a fireball and somehow the darkness and the fireball permeated her and enveloped her. Rod as he was when they met was there and Rod as he was when she found him - the horror of when she found him on the floor - was there. Her beautiful son who was never to be. Gertie felt the death - it was not just her son to be that died that day. Her love for Rod, her love for what was to come that didn’t, her love for the life she was to live, this love came to her as a pink mist as the fireball dissipated, and it supplanted the darkness, and her tears flowed. She opened her eyes, and Janey, and Jim, and Maud were there, and she felt the safest she had ever felt, and her love for her friends - her family - overflowed. She was alive.
Gertie and Maud stood up together. The world was clean and bright. The four of them embraced for many minutes.
Thank you for reading this edition of “Things to Realize.” I hope you enjoyed chapter one of this new take, this experiment in fiction. Chapter 2 is swirling in my head and will be out on or maybe before next week. If you will, please like, share, and subscribe, and please let me know what you think!
And what is happening next with Janey and Gertie and Maud and Jim? Stay tuned, my friends!