Heroic Dose

5grams and 3 months in Baja.

Stories are rarely only funny or understood when we rewind them back in hindsight. Here I am living one, raw dog.

They say you’ve got to purge to merge.

As the final woes of food poisoning leave my body from bad ceviche that I ate while bleeding.

As I take 5 grams of salty lemony sweet mushroom syrup down my gullet from inside my cosmic egg in the middle of a desert shack at 8 am two weeks into arriving in Baja — chased down with Blue Lotus and Damiana.

I sit at the altar of my life with visions of screaming at my Father just a few nights back — “To just STOP!!!” after running over a Todos Santos highway median after one too many mezcal to ease the pain of my youngest brother being in a south Floridian Prison and a lifetime of disappointment in my parents and the family I was born in to.

They never listen to Laurie.

A brand new truck and passengers physically unscathed, except for Mark my youngest sibling — he was the product of it all. I can still feel his little hands in mine. Just like him I bare the bruises of their psyche, however he is their lost son and my forgotten brother.

Sometimes I think I am a miracle that I’ve made it this far.

Some people tell me I’m strong, others don’t know that to make of me…

A very large Teepee falls with me in it, pieces of bamboo nearly taking me out. Like the Wizard of Oz, my Mother is always looking out for me and not the one who birthed me.

There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.

As I exit the chaos of another’s circus the Teepee lifts up over me and falls on the Wicked Witch of the West.

2 months living on a construction site.

He said I was the first to ever get up and take the blind fold off and walk out.

I pride myself in my irreverence.

You known the back window to my leer cap shattered on the way to taking my Father diving in Cabo Pulmo for the weekend. As I picked up the shattered glass I saw a Scorpion.

He warned me it would do so…

Said he would help me fix it like Dad’s do. Then barated me when fate met his premonition. Nothing I’m not used to.

Somehow I always fuck up how they see it for me.

He envisioned that I do it his way, as I summoned for Georgia wrapped under piles of soiled blankets.

And in the voice of my own inner child, “Georgia, I don’t think I want to do it this way.”

As she removed the blind fold from my eyes, I finally saw what I needed to see.

It wasn’t my universe in there.

He told me I was escaping.

Running from myself and my subconscious.

He told me I was so irresponsible for coming to Mexico. How was I going to survive?

It’s like he had parroted my middle brother a few weeks prior, “Who moves to Mexico with no money? “You’re crazy, Laurie and you’re reckless. Why don’t you have a plan.”

Nothing like your own father and brother co-conspiring against you.

None of the men believed in me. Not even this so called Shaman.

Georgia holds the provisions from the Farmer’s Market exiting my Dad’s Airbnb while I cry in the car after a lunch gone sour.

However, the sandwich was really good and I even managed to take it home for later even though I had left my body.

Food has always been the thing that’s filled me.

“It’s been 10 years and she still hasn’t made it. I don’t think she ever will.” — my Dad remarks.

She comes back to the car.

I am in the backseat.

All I want is a great big hug.

I’m left to my own devices.

Georgia reminds me this is my trip, my journey and that’s the comfort I will take.

I want to be the with desert. I want to be with the earth. I want to be with my mommy.

He tells me I am avoiding myself to only see the beauty…

I smirk.

Sophia-Christos fills the walls of mud, straw, and cactus skeleton.

A welcome reprieve from the tiny cartoon construction land I’d been traversing for the last 15 minutes.

“I’m going to the arroyo”, I say. “I want to be with the desert. Trust me that I know what’s right for me more and better than you do.”

In that one sentence the pain of a lifetime is resolved. If only I was 14 again and those words fell off my tongue. Nonetheless, I took my power back. At the very least for that one single moment that tipples out across all time.

I grab her arm. Halfway to the dry river bed I look at her smiling, she’s a dragonfly. She just starts laughing. She just wants to have fun.

It holds more weight than that for me.

I think to myself this trip, this journey, was supposed to be for me to heal and now he’s dosed you too.

As we enter into the mouth and belly of the mother, a surreal scene — I let go of her arm  and I tell her you got me this far and I must go on my own now. And even though I don’t think she heard me in that moment. She would have kept walking with me if I didn’t release my death grip and I would have dragged her on. She’s always down to mutate.

As I positioned myself in the direction of the Sierra’s “I LOVE you Laurie” echos in the distance.

To be loved by someone even when you’re pulling and pushing away. Even when you’re kicking and screaming — is a rare find.

I keep walking and begin peaking…

I’m writing this to you at 2:22am on the toilet.

I thank God that he waited to give me food poisoning after 8 weeks of compost toilets, outhouses, and living a midst a never ending construction zone.

I recount the deceiving details of the last 2 months of my life whilst a parasite exits my body.

Is there more? I ask…

I brace myself and let go.

I step one foot in front of the other and head in the direction of the mountains.

I don’t know what else to do but move.

It’s not that I’m afraid to sit and face myself— it’s that if I stop I get nauseous. I get motion sickness from all the things that dance around me and distract me and I focus on them not me. Perhaps because it’s easier.

So I keep going…

And I see her. At my feet. Fertility Goddess, Sarasvati, Mary, my spiritual cosmic Mother…

I’ve spent a lifetime giving my power to other people.

They tell me what they think is right for me and I claw and fight my way to prove that it’s not only to fuck no one else but myself.

“You came all the way from Florida?” the gentle man asks.

“Yes, with my dog, my cat, and my best friend.”

He makes his hand into a fist and serves it my way.

“Wow, good on you!” he says as he puts his hand to his heart and bows his head at me, his wife smiling too in the kindest and most proud admiration. “Never ever forget how brave you are for doing this. Not many people would or could.”

With a forgetful grin, I say “Thanks for the much needed reminder.”

I wish they were my parents.

Imagine me with the right parents? I’d rule the world by now. I’d be on my Queen game.

It’s getting hot and I’m in deep. I must have been walking for 45 minutes. I turn around.

I process a lifetime and realize I’m fine.

It’s not me. It never was. This is not my shit.

Everyone is on their own trip.

I press the proverbial eject button.

And I have got to be on mine.

Once and for fucking all. MINE.

How I spent all these years not trusting myself is a grief that slowly and willfully breaks me down, makes me weak and shatters my heart to 1,000 pieces that I have yet to stop and sit and puzzle back together.

There’s a part of me that’s embarrassed to let you know all this. That shits still not perfect for me. I know there’s a handful of people who may find satisfaction in knowing I’m still in the thick of it.

But what else is there than the thick of it?

Thick shit coming out my ass, thick mushrooms going down my throat, there’s no going back now. I can’t be half-hearted. I’ve got to pick up the pieces of my brokeness and mend myself back together.

So I turn back around to the ocean, head in a direction only God knows where.

Stories are rarely only funny in hindsight. Here I am living one.

I turn the corner and see him laying there. Like a Salvador Dali painting.

I laugh to myself and think this fucking fake ass shaman. He doesn’t even know I’m there.

It’s 9:30 am, I take a sip of water and try and stomach some watermelon.

Realize Georgia is still in the desert.

I grab my phone and a see a fuzzy disorienting text of a photo of Mary inside my cosmic egg.

“Blessing your trip.” the text reads.

My instincts kick in, do I have to go and save her? Is she lost? Is she thirsty? Does she have sunscreen?

I know she’s tough she can handle the mushrooms. However 2grams, ain’t 5 so I will stay here. This is my trip after all.

I pass by him again, wrapped under blankets with a fire burning beside a tree.

Once again, he doesn’t hear me. He doesn’t know I’m there.

I flip down the back of my truck and take a seat.

Sip a juice, think about my life. Think to myself that I am a mother, and maybe you just don’t see it. I am the dark matter that brings it all to life in the loudest silence in all the universe.

She rounds the corner.

“Oh good you’re alive I say.”

Let’s get out of here.

“It’s over now.” she says. He doesn’t believe in you and he never will and you need to be around those who do.

As I gather my things to leave the desert and get home to Sabina, he yells from his own internal critic with a Spanish accent…

“Don’t you think I want to be with my own children?!?! You’re trying to go to your comfort, you want to control life, you need to surrender.”

As I walk past his line of projected subconscious fury I look at him and with a quiet calm I voice myself and demand to be heard, “How do you know I’m not? What’s happened here is between me and God now.”

He shuts up. I walk on.

As I back the car out on to the dusty road, “Becareful in town, it’s much different then it is here. I trust you.”

I nod, I’ve got Georgia as my co-pilot, however I’m the one steering this wonky wounded ship to shore and to safety.

What meets us at home is nothing short of dualistic and divine intervention, where the realms of consciousness weave and alchemize.

You can envision pulling up to the sweet enduring Mexican workers building the house that never ends and like a hall of mirrors at the fair, “This is the house that never ends, it goes on and on my friend.” is playing in the background akin to subtle torture.

Imagine, here you are still tripping on your heroic dose.

“Hola, como estas?”

Looks like Sabina got into the compost toilet while we were gone. Shit and urine smear the floors and all I can see is sex on the walls.

The most beautiful love making I’ve ever witnessed between two people. All the shapes all, all the sizes, all the ways. A breeze passes through a sheer curtain and he grabs the side of my face. I see his long hair.

A fly wizzes by, then another and another. I’m glued to the floor watching a premonition of my own psychedelic pornography on a clay adobe wall — a vision of my future life. Or so I can only hope.

I know I need to get into the bathtub.

She tells me she will take care of the mess so I can take care of myself, she says she knows what I need now, she saw it in the desert. So, when I actually feel safe to allow myself to receive it — she’s met with resentful resistance to my self help and surrender and all she’s done and all I have not.

Sister wounds run deep.

What does reciprocity look like?

“You’re like the Princess in the tower.” She utters from the kitchen.

I ponder if there is any place in this material world where I can experience and fall into this dream of being held that’s happening on the other side for me, right here and right now. I have a visceral and somatic need to be held by a human.

A place where I don’t have to worry if I’m doing it right, or if I’m enough.

A place where little girls with loving mothers and grandmothers go. Take me to that fantasy land.

I laugh, I moan, and I crawl to the tub.

I get myself naked and get inside, it just so happens that I’m also bleeding, again.

I’m always bleeding it seems.

I see Sophia and Sarasvati on the plaster next to me and I smile.

I watch my own blood drip down the drain.

And just smile.

A tear falls from my eye.

And I smile.

And after I smile, I also realize…

No matter the mess that I find myself in, the excrement, the dirt, the mud, the blood, and, the screams, the shame, the rage, and the chaos. The piss and shit — I can still come full circle in this moment, after all this time, and see that I am facing all my deepest fears.

I am facing myself and no longer facing all of them.

You’ve got to purge to merge.

I’ve left them behind, maybe we will meet again.

“Bottoms up.” I say to Georgia as I salute her mushroom filled glass with mine.

Here’s to love and laughter and stories to tell no matter how they find you.

Somehow we managed to laugh together the whole time.

X Laurie.🌹🌵🪞