Healing in a Psychedelic Landscape While the Coronavirus Rages on and Deforestation Continues

Healing in a Psychedelic Landscape While the Coronavirus Rages On and Deforestation Continues

While I was hiking the trail to Walker’s Knob the other day, I was drawn to this scene.  At first the shadows seemed too harsh and an unwanted eyesore, but when I allowed myself to think and see differently they become a portal to the past as they framed this impressive rock with its layers of geological history. When I am out in nature, I am always stopped by rocks and interesting sections of the landscape. I had to mostly give up hiking with groups, because I get so drawn in and want to look deeper and deeper into the scene. What I discover always blows my mind.  Back home while I was looking through my images, I started thinking about how the landscape offers the same infinite opening of doors that more and more people are turning to drugs to experience.  When I changed the algorithms of light and color in this photograph, the landscape became truly psychedelic.  This prompted me to search for information on psychedelic landscapes.  I come across Double Bind Magazine and an article that suggested integrating the lessons of the pandemic with psychedelic poetry.  This was to be done by writing for 10 minutes with no judgment.  This is what I wrote while studying my image.

Plants, shadows, rock intrusions, tilted slabs fighting to remain vertical, boulders perched and ready to crash.  Negative space becomes positive and vice versa.  In the locked chamber of my home, my mind removes the bars and flies.  No one said you have to check your imagination at the door when you enter your bubble.  Staring so long at the same walls, my mountain ridge, and the ecosystems I know like the back of my hand, such a tired saying but now I really do know every mole vein, and wrinkle intimately, I want to scream.  Instead I shut my eyes so tightly the blood pounds in my temples and colors began to shift into a phantasmagorical wonderland of psychedelic reality. My brain has become exhausted from looking at so much sameness indoors.  Familiarity does indeed breed contempt.  But how could anyone tire of this rich mountain landscape.  The human mind could never construct such intricate details, which become apparent only after I discover how to pay better attention and not get blinded by traditional associations.  While I’m writing, words twist and drift off the page as my eyes dart in a multitude of directions following leading lines to dead ends that end in impossible leaps.  Organic forms become transfigured to the point of no longer being recognizable.  Maybe it’s better that way, until the trauma ends and some normalcy returns.  Perhaps then I can return to familiar ways of seeing, because what is there to perceive won’t be so terrifying, but for now this is my release–my door to freedom.

The landscape always offers me the gift of healing, but as I learned from my indigenous friends we must offer a gift back to nature. When I walk somewhere I wonder about the history and health of a place and try and find out if there is some way that I can raise awareness or do something to help nature in its own healing process.  Though the earth knows how to heal itself, we humans often get in the way and intrude so much that it is impossible for nature to return to its original state before our interference.  The only option nature has is to recalibrate and come into equilibrium in a new state.  Here is what I learned and my gift back to the area.  I will definitely continue to learn more about the issue of deforestation and spread the word, as climate change, water, and trees are all very important issues to me. 

This trail was named after the Walker Family, loggers who were one of the very first settlers in the area and the owners of the North Fork Lumber Company. This family is actually descended from TB Walker who started the Red River Lumber Company in Minnesota and was the creator of the legendary character Paul Bunyan.  Living in the mountains of Western North Carolina, I am often struck by how many trees are here, though I do notice how sick many of them are becoming, so I haven’t thought much about logging.  I started reading more on logging in North Carolina and came to this interesting and relevant article that was published in September in Forest Policy Pub, a blog administered by a forest geneticist and forest service retiree, a former chair of the Forest Policy Committee and Forest Science and Technology Board at the Society of American Foresters. Highlights include the following: logging releases 44 million tons of carbon dioxide making it the state’s third most carbon intensive sector, forest lands store 50% less carbon than native forests, 2.6 million acres (7.5% of the state) are carbon sequestration dead zones because of short rotation tree plantations, 500,000 truckloads of timber are removed from our forests every year and clearcutting releases the CO2 equivalent of 582,900 tanker trucks of oil each year.  If we were to focus on protection, and restoration in places like wetlands and forests along rivers, climate smart forestry could remove nearly 3 gigatons of CO2 .

Here is the link to the article: https://forestpolicypub.com/2019/09/10/new-report-logging-is-north-carolinas-third-largest-carbon-emitter/ which contains the full report.