Magic Mushrooms A Brief History

"There is a world beyond ours, a world that is far away, nearby, and invisible. And there is where God lives, where the dead live, the spirits and the saints, a world where everything has already happened and everything is known. That world talks. It has a language of its own. I report what it says. The sacred mushroom takes me by the hand and brings me to the world where everything is known. It is they, the sacred mushrooms, that speak in a way I can understand. I ask them and they answer me. When I return from the trip that I have taken with them, I tell what they have told me and what they have shown me."

Maria Sabina (1888-1985)

Maria Sabina is the famous Mazatec shaman of southern Mexico. She notably influenced the counter cultural revolution in America and abroad during the 1960s with her magico religious ceremonies being the point of much scientific and popular interest. R. Gordon Wasson, American ethnobotanist, visited her in the late 1950s and coined the term "bemushroomed" for the ineffable experience of the psilocybe. "There are no apt words in it to characterize one's state when one is, shall we say, 'bemushroomed'. For hundreds, even thousands, of years, we have thought about these things in terms of alcohol, and we now have to break the bounds imposed on us by our alcoholic obsession. We are all, willy-nilly, confined within the prison walls of our everyday vocabulary...Now virtually all the words describing the state of drunkenness, from 'intoxicated' thought the scores of current vulgarisms, are contemptuous, belittling, pejorative...What we need is a vocabulary to describe all the modalities of a divine inebriant..." He later took spores for study and some of which were sent to Europe and cultivated where the famous chemist Albert Hoffman isolated the active constituents.

(Quotations taken from Plants of The Gods)

Spring has sprung

From the depths of a long cold winter here in the southeast spring has finally arrived. So many projects in the works and not enough hours in the day. We were rewarded by our biggest Moso bamboo shoots this year and they are towering above us. Our Indian Runner ducks (only two females) have given us so many eggs we were inspired to incubate them and eagerly await the hatch expected around May 3rd. Last year our plum trees bloomed through some freezing temps and days that never made it out of the low 40s, so no pollinators. But this year the bee's were out in force and have made copious amounts of fruit, although making it to ripeness is another story. The kiwi vines will begin blooming in a week or so, last years bloom yielded more fruit than we could deal with, a little unripe seeing as they didn't mature before frost was expected. The gardens are coming along with okra emerging, beans, squash, bitter melon, all kinds of peppers and fresh herbs.

We will be working on new designs for our etsy shop www.mocahete.etsy.com and preparing to open a new shop on etsy sometime later this month under the name lunalindastudio.

So, so much going on!

The bees have left

It may not be news to many, especially those who keep bees and those more in tune with their surrounding environment, but our bees are leaving. Where nobody knows. What is certain is that our pollinators are declining at a frightening rate. Just a few years back I can remember the low enveloping drone of bumble bees and honey bees in spring. This spring was quite disturbing, a paltry, feeble murmur of bumbles that seemed to have far less spring fervor than before and a small fraction in number compared to a couple of years ago. I witnessed maybe 5 honey bees this spring so far doing their best to gather pollen and nectar from the nodding tufts of yellow mustard flowers and the the plum trees that bloomed almost 2 months ahead of schedule. Pine trees were blooming responding to late spring like temperatures in January reaching near 80 degrees . Wild blueberries and pears following suit, countless species budding and blooming only to be confronted with temperatures that dove into the mid 20s. Needless to say, this winter along with the last and the one before were uncharacteristically turbulent with no seasonal consistency, spurring the native vegetation into seasonal transition usually to be met with frost and growth again, sucking the energy from the plants, bees, birds and the myriad of earth systems dependent upon a rhythm aeons old. This is not simply freakish weather but a sign of something much larger and more disturbing, what exactly is uncertain but we humans are most assuredly culpable. The kiwi vines are blooming now, so sweet in the air but a ghostly silence surrounds the vines--where have all the bees gone? I am sadly having to pollinate by hand to insure fruit production, never before have I had to do this. The irony is that the smallest and meekest of creatures disappear and we take little notice of their absence until their survices are no longer rendered. Humans cannot survive without pollinators and the most evolved plants, angiosperms which we rely upon for our survival cannot either. If the wildflower is not pollinated, the plum tree, the tomato, the olive, the almond, the bean, the loss is more than beauty or food, the loss is our humanity and our homeland planet Earth.

In The Face Of A Flower

What do you see when you get up close and personal in the face of a flower. A microcosm of the entire universe is present. The form and colors designed to elicit an attraction completely irresistible, perpetuating the species, perpetuating DNA. The veins through the petals mirroring the macrocosm, a fractal of universal proportions showing the kinship of all life. The flowers beauty, a product of our own consciousness, the eye, the mind, the light which radiates from our star, immediately forming our reality. An entire universe within, the quantum reality manifesting itself in the face of a flower. What do you see in a flower? As this Earth Day comes and goes, we should all meditate on the beauty and fragility of our Earthly space craft, journeying through the cosmos with we humans at the helm. Peace and love to all.

Finding Time

In our hectic lives as entrepreneurial artists it seems as if each day ends with so much left to do and blogging is no exception. This morning blogging is the priority, as so many days it has not taken precedence at all, but alas it will! Each day the routine begins with coffee, an hour of interlude--waking up, logging into the net, more coffee, taking care of our chickens and ducks and gardens and what ever else needs to be done. Our studio time is not as structured as it should be although what to do ! We can be right in the middle of soldering a piece and then the cacophony of way too many chickens alarmed by a hawk circling, a fox stealthily closing in, a coyote approaching or even a bobcat lurking and waiting for a fresh chicken or duck dinner causes us to run outside and scare the predator away. Then of course something else catches our eye, maybe new flowers on our never before bloomed Kiwi, or we notice our newly emerging prized bamboo shoots chewed and eaten by squirrels who have just discovered what a delicacy they are. Perhaps at this point we notice the greenhouse is in need of a dire watering. When one is trying to be as sustainable as possible the chores can be overwhelming. It is not unusual for an hour or more to pass before we are back in the studio again trying to catch up.

So for an example just now as I write this, two persistent chickens have just found a new way to access our newly planted squash, beans and corn which necessitated my son and business partner to run outside and try to catch them up (good luck on that one).

We now have three online venues, 1000 markets, etsy, and artfire to market, on top of finding time to clean, make meals, vehicle maintenance and the myriad other things. We have always had too many irons in the fire and the secret is to find a way to get them hot enough to strike!