Sometimes we fear a bad trip but some time periods of our life are that on the daily. When we cannot afford to be ourselves the only thing we are left to do is attempt to move against our own grain. That is painful and understandably protective! It is a feeling of spinning and spiraling with no concept of center. We are lost to ourselves. That’s really all of what most bad trips are…a loosing of oneself combined with an inability to surrender to Self. When I say Self I mean someone, nothing and everything that knows how to be you, me, and simultaneously everything else…an experience, a teardrop, a budding leaf, a birdsong, a murderer, a neighbor…this surrendering is that practice of differentiation and merging that we were gifted the moment we were born into family. We are mirrored in the polarities that we both Are and are not. Family is really just a place of opportunity for solace and for everyone to get to show up as they are to a large degree while connecting. Family is support of individual gifts and differences while maintaining contact and collective cohesion or discernment. Family structures are capitalist potential at actually living amongst one another instead of solely within transactional roles and settings while pretending or not knowing Self. Could family be safe haven for cultivation of new ways of relating? Can family live authentic amidst capitalism or is more nature relationship necessary to remember how to actually coexist in synch and simbiosis? The paradigm of everything as commodity separates us from the very earth we are (inter)dependen with—this separates us from one another and who we are. We are first part of this planet with needs related to our senses, instincts, and the elements. If we forever take for granted or do not acknowledge our place within the paradigm of belonging to earth then we fail to exist in humbled ways involving the Self that is not of artificial elevation from Life both nourishing and nourished. Really, when basic needs are met in ways that honor the beings such as air and water who provide them then we are actually in alignment and connection with family as the whole fuckin’ Earth. Ironically, with medicines sometimes by loosing self—an ego identity that is attached to worth based on commodification—ya might discover surrender into both that ego self as a gift, tool, and creative manifestation and Self as Universe, Spirit, or Infinite Picture and Connection. I am grateful to cannabis for continually showing me how to surrender. For reminding me of that option. For also showing me how to protect myself as needed. I wish for more collective surrender into our current state of detachment from our mutual mother and each other. I wish for more surrender into the impacts of violence toward one another and the more than human beings we exist with. In order to connect we can’t deny the disconnect and harm done to individuals, groups, races of people and cultures, homes, hopes, animals and land. It is no wonder plantlife such as cannabis speaks to us of listening, collaborating, and cohabitating—plants desire that we make ourselves responsible to their well-being and, naturally by extension, our own. Cannabis may not be a basic need but is a being able to remind us of Sacred ways of engaging with plant beings who feed us physically, spiritually, and emotionally and vice versa. I think to continue practicing surrender I will sing, breathe and/or whistle into and with the plant beings around me with intentional care and contact.
—Jai
