A Micro-Dose
“I meditated with Deepak today", the woman was saying. “His voice is so calming, it took about twelve seconds, and I was in the zone. I’m still feeling it.”
“The man is amazing,” someone agreed. “And he reaches so many people all over the world, just via an app.”
“Yes, he’s a true transmitter,” said Woman One, glowing with the light Deepak had beamed into her.
A breeze ruffled the swimming pool and trembled the leaves. There was a platter of watermelon pieces on the table, and a bowl of popcorn. It was an impromptu gathering of six women, and the conversation was whimsical. Someone dreamed of living in a shack by a lake in Maine, another imagined a new life in Portugal. Someone else was recently back from the Maldives. There was talk of games and gardening, wells and wi-fi, the rocket launch that morning. Elderberry supplements were highly recommended to boost the immune system against Covid or whatever else is out there.
“I’d like to try micro-dosing,” Woman One mused. “But I don’t have a source for LSD.”
“I could find you a source for mushrooms, but not LSD,” said her friend nonchalantly. “I’ve never taken LSD, at least not that I know of.”
“Yeah, with the micro-dosing, the effect is so gentle, you might not even know you’d taken it. But it can be profound. It can really change your mind.”
My mind, it seems to me, is always changing. It’s a lumpy burlap sack filled with paper lanterns and potatoes, moonlight and memories, bumpy roads and broken bowls. There are boisterous beloved ghosts, amphorae of amorphous good intentions, flickers of ideas that fizzle out. Things are forever shifting and clamoring.
“I can’t hold onto my thoughts anymore,” announced another of the women. “A thought comes, followed by another, and then I can’t remember what the first one was. Everything flies away.”
This is not entirely true. I have noticed that the thoughts of this particular friend often find their way into artistic expression, and there they are, materialized into color and form. In any case, she is someone who strives to not-think, so perhaps she is attaining her goal. When consciousness is painful and problems insoluble, not-thinking is a reasonable strategy for buffering and coping.
Things are bad out there. It’s a perfect storm of environmental catastrophe, political nightmare, pandemic, and war. And I realize that these musings seem hollow and rhetorical when spun by someone sitting by a swimming pool discussing herbal supplements with other ladies of privilege and means.
Maybe for some of us, meditation with Deepak can open up a new infinity in which to sail, leaving the worries of the weary world behind us. Or maybe it refuels and strengthens effective citizenship in reality. Or maybe reality doesn’t even matter. Or nothing is real, and Strawberry Fields Forever.
What do I know? I know this: a micro-dose of anything like LSD would likely put me over an edge into an abyss into which I have peered and hope never to fall. Maybe I’m a “fraidy-cat” to use my mother’s phrase. I am an earth-dweller, a nails-bitten, ink-stained, threads-unraveling worrier from way back, an affable neurotic who has learned the waters of my own head, as murky as they sometimes seem to be.
I know this, too. After saying good-bye to the women, I walked back home along an empty road in the gold light of late afternoon. The trees were creatures, frozen in dance moves, branches stretched in embrace of the world, casting beautiful shadows on the ground. The hills shimmered, and the hem of my skirt swirled about my knees.
I passed a white windmill, an old wooden fence, a row of mailboxes—all seemed to have souls. I was listening to the Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 on my phone, and my heart soared, and there was no one else around and not a car in sight, so just for fun, I followed the yellow center line right down the middle of the road. I was stoned by it all, or micro-dosed, and I could ask for nothing more. Maybe walking is my meditation.
My poet-friend Dan wrote me this in an email just this very morning: “Yes, paying attention is the alpha and the omega, and it is holy. It is opening ourselves to life, experience, the universe with the filters removed, with the self let go, the idea of our separateness, the target we hold up for arrow that would not otherwise wound us.”
I have not solved any problems.
But I’ve dodged the arrow that would wound me.
And I still intend to try. I am hopelessly in love with this world, compulsively connected to its unruly reality and the belief that I must not do nothing.
In the meantime, I am thankful to be present and bear witness. Gratitude fills my heart with a force that lifts me upward. I’m flying high.