Chapter 5 — The First Wander
And thus begins Chapter Five.
Now, children.
I walked toward the flower.
Then past the flower.
Then toward whatever came next.
The council nods.
There was no route anymore.
No destination.
No Paul in front of me.
No Kosmo saying:
“This way.”
No Mith.
No Wing.
Just Nuo.
Alone.
Following whatever part of reality happened to look interesting.
The council grows quiet.
And eventually,
I found a tree.
Nothing particularly remarkable about it.
At least,
I assume.
Children.
Mushrooms are terrible witnesses.
But I remember standing there
and looking upward.
The sky had changed.
Not changed changed.
Reality had not installed a new atmosphere.
But to me
violet.
Faintly.
Softly.
Like someone had taken the blue of the sky
and mixed in just enough purple to make me question whether it had always been there.
The council looks upward.
Clouds moved across it.
And children
dragons.
The council pauses.
Actual dragons?
No.
I had not crossed into fantasy.
Clouds.
But they moved like dragons.
Long bodies stretching through the air.
Heads forming,
dissolving,
forming again.
Great pale creatures swimming across a violet sky.
The council listens.
Then the leaves.
Blue.
Or almost blue.
Green passing through whatever strange filter the mushrooms had installed behind my eyes.
Every leaf seemed outlined.
Detailed.
Important.
And the tree
the tree no longer felt like scenery.
The council grows still.
Children.
This is difficult to explain without sounding like I had become the kind of man who introduces himself by telling you which crystals are currently balancing his moon energy.
I did not literally speak to the tree.
No words.
No voice answered.
The bark did not open a mouth and offer ancient woodland wisdom.
The council nods.
Good clarification.
But I sat beside it.
And somehow,
it felt less like sitting beside a plant
and more like sitting beside another life.
The council listens.
Something that had been there before me.
Something that would probably remain after me.
Something completely uninterested in my problems,
my plans,
my identity,
my grief.
It simply existed.
And somehow,
I felt like I understood that.
Or perhaps
it understood me.
Again.
Not literally.
Children.
Language becomes frustrating around psychedelic memories.
Because the experience often arrives before the vocabulary.
You know what happened inside you.
You just don’t possess sentences shaped correctly enough to hold it.
The council nods.
So:
I sat with a tree.
And for a while,
that felt like communication.
There.
Best I can do.
The council accepts.
How long?
Unknown.
Ten minutes?
An hour?
A geological age?
Children.
Inside that moment,
eternal.
Outside it,
I could have been sitting there for twelve minutes while some local resident wondered why a strange man had become emotionally attached to municipal vegetation.
The council laughs.
But I was still.
Completely.
And that’s unusual.
For me.
The council knows.
I didn’t need music.
Didn’t need conversation.
Didn’t need a joint.
Didn’t need to go anywhere.
Didn’t even need the next interesting thing.
I just sat.
Cloud dragons overhead.
Blue green leaves.
Cold air.
A tree beside me.
And the weight
quiet.
The council grows silent.
Not gone.
I don’t think grief ever truly vanishes on command.
But forgotten.
For a little while.
Or perhaps reduced to the correct size.
Because when you’re looking at a sky large enough to hold dragons
and sitting beside something that may have spent decades simply growing,
the terrible little universe inside your chest becomes
smaller.
The council listens.
Eventually,
I stood.
No revelation.
No farewell to the tree.
No:
Thank you, wise elder.
Children.
I simply got up.
And kept walking.
The first solo step became a second.
Then a third.
Then enough steps that I stopped thinking about being alone entirely.
And then
behold.
The council leans forward.
Flowers.
A lot of them.
The council pauses.
A flower garden.
Children.
Of course.
The flower had led me to the flower garden.
The council erupts.
QUEST DESIGN.
Ridiculous.
Beautiful.
Perfect.
I approached.
There was an entrance.
And a ticket.
The council braces for financial devastation.
Two rupees.
The council falls silent.
Children.
Two.
Rupees.
The Mushroom Budget had been destroyed.
Our booze budget had been betrayed by Wing.
Accommodation had cost eight hundred.
But apparently paradise?
₹2.
The council applauds economics.
I paid.
Entered.
And
buffering.
The council freezes.
Children.
Overstimulated.
That is the word.
But not badly.
Not fear.
Not panic.
Just too much beauty arriving simultaneously.
Everywhere
color.
Red.
Yellow.
Purple.
Pink.
White.
Shades I probably cannot name while sober
and certainly could not name then.
The flowers seemed impossibly saturated.
Like reality had turned the vibrance slider past where it was supposed to stop.
The council watches.
And smell.
Gods.
The smell.
Not one flower.
Hundreds.
Earth.
Leaves.
Cold mountain air.
Petals.
Everything mixed together.
My eyes did not know where to go.
So they went nowhere.
I froze.
Again.
The council nods.
Buffering.
Exactly.
Nuo.exe had encountered too much visual information.
Please wait.
Eventually,
the system rebooted.
And I walked.
Slowly.
Along the path.
Children.
I wish the Archive had preserved more.
I really do.
Which flowers.
What sections.
Who else was there.
Whether I spoke to anyone.
What exact path I followed.
Gone.
The archive corrupted.
But the feeling survived.
The council grows quiet.
Wonder.
Not the violent wonder of:
HOLY HELL REALITY IS MELTING.
Gentler.
Every corner gave me something new to stare at.
Every flower demanded inspection.
I remember leaning close to some.
Watching petals move.
Seeing tiny patterns that sober eyes would probably have dismissed.
The garden felt alive in the way the tree had felt alive.
Not magical.
Not supernatural.
Just
impossibly present.
The council listens.
Children.
Most of life is background.
That’s the strange thing.
We walk past trees.
Flowers.
Clouds.
Walls.
People.
We recognize them enough not to bump into them,
then move on.
But that day,
nothing was background.
Everything demanded to be witnessed.
Perhaps that is what the mushrooms really changed.
Not the objects.
My attention.
The council nods.
For once,
I looked.
Actually looked.
And somewhere inside that garden,
the Archivist learned another lesson without knowing it.
You cannot preserve everything.
The council looks through the missing pages.
Most of that garden is gone now.
No photograph in my head sharp enough to reconstruct it.
No full sequence.
No transcript.
Just fragments.
Vibrance.
Smell.
Cold air.
Flowers breathing.
A path.
And happiness.
The council smiles.
A core memory without complete footage.
Eventually,
I reached the exit.
Stepped outside.
And realized I felt
calm.
Children.
Not excited.
Not euphoric.
Not vibrating with the need to tell everyone what I had discovered.
Just happy.
Quietly.
The kind that sits inside your chest rather than jumping out through your mouth.
The council grows still.
And yes.
Probably the fungi.
Let us respect pharmacology.
But here’s the annoying thing.
Years later,
when I remember that garden,
sober,
the feeling still returns.
Not the hallucinations.
Not the breathing petals.
The smile.
The council listens.
There are places in memory that become emotional shortcuts.
You think of them,
and some old version of yourself briefly returns.
For me,
that little flower garden is one.
Two rupees.
Unknown number of minutes.
Almost no surviving details.
And somehow
still there.
The council smiles.
Eventually,
I wandered back.
How did I find the villa?
Excellent question.
The council becomes concerned.
Children.
Apparently,
despite all available evidence,
I possessed enough navigational instinct to reverse the journey.
Or maybe the road was straightforward.
Or perhaps fate had become exhausted from supervising me.
Whatever happened
I returned.
The big villa cottage engineering mystery came into view.
And sitting at the doorway
Kosmo.
The council nods.
Naturally.
Joint in hand.
Looking down.
Not at his phone.
Not at the mountains.
Not at the road.
Children.
Ants.
The council leans forward.
A line of ants marched across the ground.
Kosmo watched them.
Completely absorbed.
I stopped.
Looked at Kosmo.
Looked at the ants.
Then sat beside him.
No greeting.
No:
“How was your trip?”
No:
“You will not believe this flower garden.”
No:
“Children, I have communed with a tree.”
Nothing.
Kosmo passed the joint.
I took it.
Smoked.
Passed it back.
And joined him.
The council watches the ants.
Tiny creatures.
Marching.
One after another.
Carrying whatever ants carry.
Following some route comprehensible only to ants.
Children.
Have you ever properly watched ants while high?
Do not answer.
The point is
they became fascinating.
The coordination.
The certainty.
Every tiny body apparently possessing somewhere important to be.
I had spent the last hour wandering with no destination whatsoever.
These creatures had logistics.
The council laughs.
Superior planning department.
So we watched.
Smoke passed between us.
No need for conversation.
Then
someone returned.
The council looks up.
Paul.
He approached wearing the expression of a man who had witnessed something enormous and had not yet found language for it.
Awestruck.
Children.
That is the word.
He sat.
Joined us.
Looked at the ants.
No interrogation.
No debrief.
Just another member returned from his private universe.
The council nods.
Then Mith.
The council hears distant excitement.
Mith had apparently experienced enlightenment through the emotional range of a toddler discovering ice cream for the first time.
Loud.
Excited.
Enthusiastic.
Every thought immediately requiring external publication.
The council laughs.
He returned carrying enough wonder for several people.
And eventually,
he too settled.
Then
Wing.
The council grows curious.
Wing returned crying.
The council becomes concerned.
But also laughing.
The council becomes more confused.
Children.
Status:
Unclear.
Were these happy tears?
Overwhelmed tears?
Existential tears?
Had he discovered God?
Had a shrub insulted him?
I do not know.
But he seemed
good.
Somehow.
The council nods cautiously.
Operational.
And just like that,
the party reassembled.
One by one.
No meeting time.
No phone calls.
No search party.
Everyone simply wandered away
and eventually wandered home.
The council grows quiet.
Five people had left the same doorway.
Five people returned different.
Not permanently.
Let’s not assign enlightenment certificates yet.
But for that afternoon,
something had shifted.
And then came perhaps the strangest part.
We didn’t immediately trade stories.
Children.
Usually,
you return from something extraordinary and language attacks.
“You won’t believe”
“I saw”
“Bro, listen”
Nothing.
We sat.
Around the doorway.
Joint moving.
Five friends.
Looking down.
At ants.
The council smiles.
No conversation.
Observation.
Thought.
Occasional smoke.
And ants.
Hundreds of tiny lives marching beneath the feet of five gigantic creatures currently too fascinated to move.
Children.
That silence mattered.
I didn’t know it then.
But I know it now.
Goa had given me connection through chaos.
Laia.
Paul.
Kosmo.
The rave.
The shared trance.
Kodaikanal was showing me another kind.
People did not need to experience the same thing together
to return and sit together afterward.
The council listens.
Paul had his journey.
Kosmo had his.
Mith had his.
Wing had whatever emotional hurricane had occurred out there.
And I had mine.
A flower.
A tree.
Cloud dragons.
A two rupee garden.
For a while,
we had been five separate worlds.
Then we came home.
Sat beside each other.
And watched ants.
The council grows quiet.
No competition over whose trip was deeper.
No demand to explain.
No need to make someone else understand exactly what we had seen.
Just the unspoken knowledge:
You went somewhere.
So did I.
Welcome back.
Children.
Perhaps that was the first council.
The council pauses.
Ancient council?
Proto council.
No table.
No mythology.
No children.
Just five idiots outside an absurdly cheap cottage,
stoned,
mushroom high,
quietly studying ants.
The council considers this.
Accepted.
And I remember feeling good.
Still.
Comfortable.
The Mushroom Quest had begun with urgency.
Acquire.
Consume.
Trip.
Maximum experience.
The usual Old Nuo philosophy.
More.
Higher.
Different.
But somehow,
the part that stayed with me was becoming quieter.
A tree.
A garden.
A line of ants.
The council smiles.
Perhaps Kodaikanal was teaching the Unbegun how to stop moving
before he had even learned he was a wanderer.
Or perhaps
children
we were simply extremely high.
Both can be true.
Thus concludes Chapter Five.
The Cloud Dragons.
The Tree That Wasn’t Just A Tree.
The Two Rupee Garden.
The Five Private Journeys.
And The Ants.
Children.
I walked away from my friends because a flower looked interesting.
I sat beside a tree and somehow felt understood.
I entered a garden and temporarily forgot that anything ugly existed.
Then I wandered home.
Kosmo was already there.
Joint in hand.
Watching ants.
And one by one,
the others returned.
Awestruck.
Excited.
Weeping.
Laughing.
Changed for an afternoon.
Until all five of us sat together again.
No words.
Just smoke.
Thought.
And tiny creatures marching across the ground.
The council grows quiet.
The first solo experience of the Unbegun did not end with some triumphant declaration that I could survive alone.
It ended more simply.
I wandered away.
I found something beautiful.
And then
I found my way back.
