Seeing Green
Though I have now had five encounters with the forest spirit, it was only after the fifth encounter in November 2023 that I became aware of it as spirit. I say spirit because I don’t know what else to call it. In each of these five occasions I was peaking on psilocybin, I was in the forest and it was sundown. It is likely that I have encountered this spirit without mushrooms—the spirit is the forest itself—and yet it has only been through the mushroom that the spirit becomes obvious. Of course, I remain heavily biased. I grew up in the boreal forest reading The Lord of the Rings (forest-core fantasy), I have spent many nights under the trees, I revere the forest and the mushroom; even my name is Forest, for pete’s sake. The forest obviates the need for God, space-exploration, the afterlife, transcendence; the sky-cults etc. The forest bower is the original church and cathedral; site of the Dionysian mysteries, if not witchcraft itself; the heavy-metal forest; a dark sanctuary knitted in root and bough; our great green mother.
In short, the forest is a destiny.
While recent psychedelic research may find it incredulous that the mushroom influences us in any particular direction, I see no such difficulty—deep as I am in my bias—in accepting the mushroom point of view; the mushroom allows us to see green, as it were. The mushroom initiates us into the mysteries of the forest while priming our ability for mushroom thinking; that is, thinking like a mushroom. A variety of recent anthropological work is only now beginning to confirm this weird thesis; what appears to be no less than a cultural transmission from fungi to human. No surprise then that both the set and setting of my mushroom journeys is nearly always the forest. The set—my motive—is to open myself to the forest; the setting—the frame of reference—is the forest. The epiphany of mycelium teleology has done its work. I have successfully indoctrinated myself into the forest mysteries; I believe in the forest.
But so anyways, my partner and I are both just absolutely ripped on mushrooms, (a shared 7 grams blended into a cacao smoothie) sitting beneath the trees and wrapped up in a duvet as the temperature is just above freezing, while the sun sets, shredding a blaze-orange horizon through the little forest above the lake. The trees are bare, no leaf stirs, but there is a kind of mist hanging in the trees. This is no mist of vapor, or smoke—it is non-photographable, believe me, I’ve tried—it’s like the air is thick and viscous in the trees; or the air is thick with an ambient spirit—the visible spirit common to these five encounters—that and the entire forest is vibrant and vibrating with a terrific and uncanny life. The color pools out of the sunset: neon green, sea green, teal, orange and coral reds. The mood is huge: this huge calm forest mood that we are inside of, strange and dark (Dante’s selva oscura) made of that same dark serenity promised by Tibetan Buddhism—little wonder the Buddha gained enlightenment by sitting under a fig tree for 49 days: he was channeling this giant arboreal equanimity (to gain wisdom from a tree is a virtue western-man has long denied).
The forest is filled with the earthly peace of shantih, shantih, shantih, a superterrestrial peace that passeth understanding, visibly emanating from this forest entity, clearly aware of us, sitting there in it, gaping. Time had broken down out of all its gears; the sun hung above the further treeline, burning red-hot through the etched black lattice of the canopy for what seemed like hours. Wrapped in our duvet, we were dumbstruck in a state of shock and rapt incredulity—“Are you seeing this?” “Oh my god.”—while the forest was doing its wah-wah thing, making us and everything, vibrate in sylvan affirmation of everything green.
Hiro Isono
