I Drank Ayahuasca and Now See the World as a Symphony of Gold and Grey
Plus musings on pumpkins, a biopsy, and an accident
The day before I nearly died, I visited a pumpkin patch. My mother’s mind had yet to be claimed by schizophrenia, and my marriage had yet to be claimed by divorce. For the weekend, my husband and I had custody of his eldest son, and our own two children were in good spirits.
There was a carnival going on, and my mother loved riding the Ferriss wheel. We looked out over the rail town where my kids attended school and smiled.
I knew that everything around me was fleeting, and not in the kind of way that everything is naturally impermanent.
More specifically, I realized that my mother’s grip on sanity was slipping, that my children’s school would be closing, and that my day of marital bliss was temporary, itself partly the result of the long hiatus my husband and I had just experienced— a period of time in which he had his second known affair and impregnated a young woman who’d be driving down to Georgia from West Virginia in two days’ time.
For some reason though, the carnival and pumpkin patch made all this feel better.
Both the rides and pumpkins were seasonal happenings, temporary sparks of beauty in a…
