Lineage

An introduction to my newsletter

I’ve long flummoxed the PR departments of my publishers, starting with my first, Houghton Mifflin in 2004. The book I did for them, At Mesa’s Edge, is a hybrid book containing both text and recipes. The first 100 pages are about trying to fix up a raggedy ranch in rural Colorado. There are essays on being bullied by a sassy domineering skunk, finding porcini mushroom patches, collecting hundreds of squash blossoms from a mesa-top farm, glowing orange, and buzzing with bees, and doing my hunter safety class with a bunch of nose-picking 10-year-old boys. The second 100 pages consists of recipes derived from experimenting with the local foodstuffs—dishes like fried squash blossoms stuffed with wild smoked trout pate, elk cannelloni, and porcini mac and cheese. But hybrid books are a problem. Retailers need to know what shelf they go on in the bookstore. And since I’ve tended to alternate “reading books” as my agent calls them, with cookbooks, I’ve become a hybrid brand, which definitely has its downside. To wit, recently my frequent editor, Pam Krauss, told me she met a woman who admired my writing.

“You mean her recipes?” asked Pam.

“She writes cookbooks?” responded the woman.

That pretty much sums me up. I don’t belong on just one shelf. What links all my writing, I think, is that I like to peer into the workings of whatever I’m obsessed with: mushrooms, recipes, bacteria, drugs. What turns me on is the fact that no matter the subject, if you look deep enough, everything is ultimately comprised of a host of interdependencies both abiotic and biotic. When I get to that point with a subject, it’s like seeing God.

So, this newsletter will contain stories about nature, particularly mycology and microbiology, with a special interest in how microscopic life influences macroscopic life; and food, with a special interest in preserving recipes, wild foods, and preparing recipes whose waste stream or leftovers carry on to other dishes. In October I’ve got a new book coming out, Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience. I’ll share some stories about altered states, too.

I thought I’d start out this newsletter by pulling the thread on the idea of lineage. Most of you are probably familiar with the practice of land acknowledgement. At the beginning of public events, organizers or speakers will acknowledge the original indigenous people of the land upon which the event is taking place. Land acknowledgement is a traditional Native custom, a reflection of reverence and recognition for those who came before. The modern practice is growing in the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all English-speaking countries with a fairly recent history of indigenous genocide.

If you go to a psychedelic conference, the chances are very good you will hear a land acknowledgment. You may also hear speakers credit the indigenous people who first discovered and used magic mushrooms. I’ve heard various representatives of companies that make (or hope to make) psychedelic mushroom products, acknowledge the native people who originated their use. But that seems like lip service to me. Restitution could be made, and new practices could be installed to enfold indigenous people into the psychedelic economy (see the paper “Ethical principles of traditional Indigenous medicine to guide western psychedelic research and practice,” published in the Lancet in 2023). But I’m guessing reciprocity costs money, whereas acknowledgement is cheap. Journey Colab is a non-traditional pharmaceutical company that includes indigenous health advocates and scientists on their team and administers a reciprocity program. Theirs is an example of what some companies could do. I remember watching a presentation by the CEO, Jeeshan Chowdhury at the Horizon’s Perspective Conference in New York City in 2022. He pleaded with the corporate representatives in the audience to join him in inclusion and reciprocity programs. What I mainly heard was a lot of fumbling around with phones and uncomfortable shifting.

It's also common for speakers, especially if they present themselves as shamans or trip guides, to acknowledge their debt to the indigenous healers who came before them. They often describe their context, what brought them to “the work” of psychedelic therapy. Or they might describe their lineage, who they studied under. In indigenous settings, lineages are pretty specific. Shamans generally emerge from and serve their community. Not everyone can be a shaman; the position is earned through knowledge, ability, or shamanic lineage. REFERENCE Nonindigenous practitioners of shamanic arts are known as Neoshamans, though they tend to advertise as shamans, I imagine because “neo” can sound pejorative. Neoshamans tend to be self-appointed, after having worked on themselves for some time, and are in search of a community. In practice, they often (but not always) use psychedelic drugs in combination with New Age spirituality. The goal is to access the spiritual realm known to indigenous shamans but lost to modernity. REFERENCE Neoshamans may have little to no expertise in therapy or social work, “and instead, use anecdotes and self-transformational narratives to demonstrate the power within the self to help the self, despite the obvious contradiction,” wrote the authors of “Manifest your desires: Psychedelics and the self-help industry.” REFERENCE

It seems to me the current psychedelic scene is looking at a kind of nomenclature drift. What constitutes lineage is no longer limited to traditional shamanic forbears; a lineage might be one’s academic education. A person of white European ancestry might advertise their Druidic lineage, based mainly on ethnicity, though there are active Druid societies in Europe practicing various forms of nature-based spirituality. Lineages can be defined by mentors, New Age healers from the Boomer generation, even the mushroom itself. I listened to an EntheoNation podcast interview of a self-described magic mushroom healer and shamanic therapist. That’s a healer, shaman, and therapist all rolled up into one. Twelve times she took mushrooms. “My teachers,” she said, “are the mushroom spirits.” REFERENCE I have to admit, that put my bogus meter into the red.

But when I started thinking about it, scientific papers employ a kind of lineage too. When you read a scientific paper, it often builds on the work of other scientists, whose observations are noted in the paper. Theories are based on scientific lineage, a legacy of proofs, all the work that came before. The acknowledgements page of a book is not dissimilar. I list all those that helped me and upon whose work I depended on and learned from. Lineage reporting then, when it’s not opportunistic, is ultimately the practice of respect and gratitude—and it probably exists in every discipline and every culture. I find that encouraging.

I wanted to give a nod to the practices of the psychedelic culture, too. I’m not in the community, but I hear their values. So, I decided not to dedicate Have a Good Trip to my husband, who was actually really supportive during the 18 months I was working on the book, or my incredible editor or my steadfast agent or my wonderful kids. I decided to dedicate to my teachers, two fellows who taught me so much about mycology, and who were models of how I might live and work in this world.

Both are dead, both remain beloved, in Memoriam, Tom Volk and Gary Lincoff.