New Mexico

“I was flying through the air on LSD!”, my new friend said. I imagined the floating sensation that often accompanies psychedelic journeys and smiled peacefully until she added, “The water slide by the main stage is totally shaped like a ski slope!” I had to reframe my vision of her “journey” and I also desperately had to try it for myself.

We had come to New Mexico to attend a small festival called “Unison”, spread across the banks of the Animas river in a low arid canyon at the foothills of the San Juan Mountains. We had flown in to Albuquerque the day before, where our close friends and chosen family, Austin and Jordie, live in a stucco house surrounded by mature cacti and and angry feral cats. (I swear one of them gave me the finger when I stepped outside to see the sunrise)

Austin had picked us up at the airport and immediately handed us a grape popsicle. “Welcome to New Mexico, it’s not new and it’s not Mexico,” he said. Jordie was suffering through the indentured servitude that is medical residency and would meet us later for a sushi dinner. Eating grape flavored ice, flying in an air-conditioned jet plane, and desert sushi all in the same day; living in the age of miracles is bizarrely indulgent sometimes.

*stumbling home drunk could kill you here*

If not for festivals, I wouldn’t know Austin and Jordie at all. 17 years ago, due to a random series of events involving a moving truck covered in singing gay men, Austin and I ended up camped next to one another at burning man and quickly and shockingly realized that we had grown up down the street from one another, that my high school best friend had been his baby sitter and that the only girl he’d ever been on a date with was my high school girlfriend’s sister. It was as if, thanks to the mind bending oddness of burning man, two parallel lives had crossed, and the intersection of parallel lines is a truly unique space in any type of geometry. We have been close friends ever since although usually living in different parts of the country. This has resulted in most of our meetings being adventurous or memorable. Flying over volcanoes in tiny planes, hiking fog shrouded summits, and exploring the outer reaches of modified perception. We have also seen each other through changing relationships, new living arrangements, family illnesses, and even a wicked case of scabies that involved some creative shaving. We are close. Austin is a designated brother, and our respective families are bonded whether they enjoy all of our drunken cackling or not.

We got to further entangle our families at this festival with the arrival of Austin’s brother and sister in law, Tony and Kristen. I think Austin and Tony may be the only brothers that I have ever hung out with and, as an only child, it is fascinating and heart-warming to see such a warm sibling bond. Kristen was celebrating the one year anniversary of sleeping in a tent for the first time and her ability to try new things as a parent-aged adult was inspiring.

*they only sell the truffle flavor kettle chips west of the Mississippi*

It has been five years or so since I last attended burning man and a lot has changed since I began going in 2005. Cell service, celebrity attendance, social media, middle aged thoughts about sleep hygiene, and climate change have all conspired to dampen the fires of enthusiasm that I once held for the event. (That being said, If you have never gone, you should) But I do miss the energy of the event; the inspiring creativity, exciting new strangers, desert sunsets, and some reckless hedonism are all things that I could use a bit more of amidst the homeschooling, dishwashing, and cat petting here in the Appalachians.

So when the opportunity came to attend a smaller desert festival with old friends, I couldn’t pass it up. Neither could Tiff, but mainly because I bought tickets without telling her first. One of the perks of owning a nature based psychedelic practice is that nearly anything is a justifiable business expense, and hanging out in nature with people on drugs is pretty much the agenda for most of Tiff’s work week, anyway.

Even with my personal and professional history as someone fascinated by medicines and their effects, it is hard to keep up with all of the new psychedelics or even the new ways of using older drugs. “Butt Stuff” is apparently its own category of intoxicants and a much larger one than I’d realized according to some enthusiastic experts. Given what my butt does just with Indian food, I don’t know that I need to find out what it does with a ketamine enema.

I do, however, enjoy events with thoughtful versions of perceptual alteration, whether it’s through twiddling the brain knobs with substances, dance, or meditation. Being in a crowd who is mostly out of their default mode of thinking is a divine escape from the lockstep mentality of productive daily life. Meaning and connection are found easily and enjoyably, and perspectives are shared with curiosity. Listening seems more common. Obviously, this depends on the types of intoxicants prevalent and the predilections of the crowd, but I enjoyably noticed an absence of alcohol and cell phones at this event. I saw a lot of yoga, swimming, and meditation going on. I saw groups of friends laughing and every kind of dancing. I saw some confused staring and some stumbling but no more than on a typical crowded city street, and it seemed like a safe enough place for being confused.

The festival site, a general event venue and RV camp, was called “Tico Time” and took up both sides of the river for little less than a mile. Here, the river gently twists back and forth near the eastern side of a low canyon, with views of the San Juan Mountains to the north. The water was knee to chest deep, green, and just cold enough to erase the desert heat quickly when submerged. Of all the ways that people were altering their perceptions, I am sure that there is no drug as reliable, useful, and harmless as a good river dunking, and there was every version of aquatic immersion I could imagine.

*I’m not going back to burning man til they add one of these things*

The water slide was steep and wedgie-inducing enough to qualify as “Butt Stuff” I would imagine. With a ski jump shaped ramp at the bottom of a steep 20 foot drop, the slide shot the average human about 10 feet into the air. Some managed backflips and tucks; most looked like epileptic salmon trying to spawn straight into space. After one under-rotated flip by Jordie, a passing 7 year old offered him space to recover on her paddle board, which was sweet, particularly the way she said, “You ok, bro?” Festival kids seem to have a unique tolerance for the misadventures of adults.

There was also a zip line, which was relatively gentle after the aquatic drop kick of the slide. The topless screaming zip-lining women looked like some kind of anti-patriarchy SWAT team. (New Mexico views all nipples as equal under the law) It also sparked a thought-provoking conversation with Tiff as we walked through the crowd of beautiful lightly dressed attendees. “What are the differences in your emotional response to the sight of a beautiful man versus a beautiful woman?”, I asked. Context is important here; married conversations have a lot of built in short-hand from years of talking deeply. By “man and woman”, I’m referring to masculine and feminine here, not specific chromosomes, and beauty, for us, generally refers to someone who appears healthy, energized, and easily capable of joy. A nice smile and a plump booty never hurts, but that’s more about me and Tiff’s tastes than generalized beauty standards. Her response to my question gave me something to think about for a couple of days. “When I see a beautiful man, I think it must be fun to be him. When I see a beautiful woman, I think about all she’s probably been through.”

Being a doctor, a former raft guide, and spending lots of time at festivals throughout my life, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable with naked people. Probably one of the reasons I was drawn to medicine was a strong curiosity about humans in general, their similarities, their differences. I always enjoy seeing all of the different ways that humans are shaped and the resulting differences in the way that they move. I find people fascinating and the more they share of their differences, the more my curiosity is engaged. I’ve accepted the fact that most Americans equate nudity with sex, but it’s been a long time since that made much sense to me. Years ago, Tiffany and I realized that people who love skinny dipping in rivers and oceans are likely to be friends.

As Tiffany and I continued to discuss the experience of beauty in others, we also noticed that in a festival environment, where everyone is celebrating themselves to a certain extent, the experience of beauty and attraction actually feels much less complicated. In day to day life, it often seems that intentionally showcasing your physical beauty or style runs afoul of our lingering ideas about beauty as a possession that can be taken or used. It feels much easier to navigate when the overall vibe is splashy and free from the fear of predatory behaviors. It really dispels a certain daily omnipresent anxiety to be in crowd where everyone has let their guard down a bit and is sharing a little more of themselves. It also makes me realize how dangerous it can be to do that in the default world where all aspects of self are increasingly commodified. It’s hard to flash a genuine smile at a world that wants to buy it for a targeted toothpaste ad on instagram.

Wandering around the sunny desert festival generally meant walking until we were dry from the last aquatic misadventure. As we walked between the zipline along the river towards the main stage we passed the pond where someone had strung a slack line about 40 feet across the water and there was a young woman gracefully balanced in the middle of it, occasionally taking a step forward or backward or shifting her arms to maintain a graceful equipoise. By the time she succumbed to gravity, she had gathered a crowd of onlookers who all erupted in cheers when she popped back up out of the water. Seeing these kinds of moments celebrated by a group of strangers warms my heart. When people have the luxury of dropping out of to-do land and take time to focus on just enjoying the day it makes so much of day-to-day life seem unnecessarily stressful by comparison.

While milling about the pond getting in touch with our inner manatees, we were surrounded by a disorganized flotilla of inner tubes and paddle boards drifting aimlessly about. We watched as Tiff was nearly, but gently, plowed over by two beautiful people on a raft, meditating with their hands on one another’s heart, eyes closed, and making good speed across the water in the breeze. Somehow, they successfully manifested a little push in the other direction by a nearby swimmer and a catastrophe of intention was averted.

The festival was largely electronic music and DJs but with stage shows full of acrobats and fire dancers. The prevalent style of dance was one I think of as “the sultry noodle”. Sort of like the roadside inflatable waving tube people that you see at car dealerships, but with some yoga thrown in. I was able to adapt my Kentucky cornpone shuffle by adding a little middle school dance sway and waving an arm around now and again and felt fairly at home amidst the seductive pasta.

The prevalent intoxicants seemed to be psychedelics and empathogens with a sprinkling of ketamine. I ended up having a rich conversation with a sweet railroad engineer who had had a bit too much of the latter. I ended up sorta holding him upright on the sandy dance floor and moving his arms around to the music like a man-size puppet for a few minutes until he dropped out of the psychosphere and we had a chance to get to know each other. I do a lot of procedures to folks in the ER on ketamine, and just sorta dancing someone around was a real nice change of pace. Making friends in odd ways is also a favorite way to socialize for me. Shared experience is so much more efficient for connecting than chit chat.

With Tiff working at our psychedelic therapy practice I hear quite a bit about people’s journeys with psychedelics as therapeutic medicines and it was interesting to contrast it with the experiences I heard and witnessed in this recreational context. I was camped with 3 psychiatrists, a nurse, a social worker, a PT and a PM&R doctor, and had the opportunity to discuss recreational psychedelic use from a lot of different perspectives. A good question is whether or not these substances should be treated as medicines or just made legal for use. The more I talked to people with expertise and experience in both pharmacology and psychiatry, the less certain I became of my opinion. Regardless, psychedelic use is exponentially more prevalent and accepted than even 10 years ago and it will be interesting to see the effects on our culture and our priorities. I do hold hope for the fact that psychedelic use has repeatedly been shown to improve nature connection and I have no doubts about the benefit of more people connecting to nature regularly. I find it strange to even discuss being disconnected to something that we are inseparable from.

Tiffany and I spent an afternoon sitting in the river talking and figured out some ways we had been making married life unnecessarily difficult. With some promises sealed by a full submersion in the cold water, we learned again the value of stepping away from home and its routines as a way of finding new perspectives. Marriage is a strange land where opinions about life purpose carry the same emotional weight as opinions on how to load the dishwasher. It’s so easy to make it harder than it needs to be.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I learned at this festival was culinary. Austin and Jordie had premade both gourmet dinner and breakfast burritos and frozen them so that two meals a day were as easy as heating up foil wrapped goodness. These also kept the cooler cold. A startling advance in festival food technology. I can waver on my thoughts about drugs but setting my intentions on a burrito always manifests a contented belly rub.

On our last day at the festival, we hiked up the east rim of the canyon and, from atop a smooth red sandstone overlook, could look down on the event. For such a brief adventure is was amazingly full of natural beauty, creativity, connection, and silliness. Like any trip the constellation of company was the right set of stars to navigate with. Festivals give everyone a brief chance to experiment with their own ideal use of freedom. It’s an important experiment. Like any precious resource, freedom can be exhausted by misuse. Innovation may be the key to its preservation.

Fall Quarterly Meeting 2023

Space and Time