Poems for the Psychedelic Soul
A Few of my Favorites
Well, it was bound to happen. Life took hold of me and for the first time in 20 weeks, I published a day late.
But hear me out.
I’m fresh back from Mexico from leading a psilocybin retreat in 100 degree weather, where I hardly slept on account of the heat. Mexico City, where I spent four days to “recover,” was filled with anything but that.
Today, I started my third cohort teaching with Inner Trek, one of the leading legal psilocybin facilitator training program in the US, and certainly in Oregon. It’s always a bit of a mad dash, this year especially because a dear friend and colleague who was going to join our team was sent back by the good people at the US immigration to his home country of Mexico, all because of a misunderstanding around differences between a “scholarship” and a work trade. Ugh.
May we all live to see the day when such calamities cease to exist. May walls and borders and bureaucrats disintegrate into the ruble heaps which they are all ultimately destined to become. May those who pride themselves by keeping others out of whatever castle ramparts they peer down from know what feels like to be the others on the ground.
Anyway, this week I was inspired by my recent retreat time to share a bit about poetry: why I read it, what I read it for, and a few of my favorites. May these poems serve you, wherever you find yourself on this spiral road.
Anyone who has been in a group circle I’ve led, be it a men’s group or a psilocybin retreat, will tell you that I read a lot of poetry.
I do this for two reasons. First, to honor the mythopoetic tradition and many of the elders of that movement, most of whom were poets, troubadours, and feral storytellers. They played with and celebrated the oracular arts and the spoken word - the nearly extinct ability to get up in front of a room full of people and speak something beautiful and vibrant into the ears of those listening.
Martin Prechtel is one of these mythopoetic elders. While I’ve never studied with the man directly, I’ve heard it said that one of his foundational teachings is that the gods gave humanity tongues and thumbs in order that we create beauty, which in turn feeds the holy. To not use these divine gifts to speak or craft more beauty into the world is an affront to the sacred. The gods, and the earth itself, demands that beauty flows from us as a way to repay our debt. Seen in this light, beauty creates balance.
Robert Bly, who largely “discovered” Martin’s work, was a lion of a poet, and brought a well of poetic knowledge and spirit into the emerging conversations around myth and masculinity that he and others like Michael Meade, James Hillman, and Malidoma Somé were weaving. Listen to any of those talks from the late 1980’s all the way into the early 2000’s,, and they begin each gathering by reading piles of poetry.
The second reason I read poems when facilitating groups is because poetry takes us into the imaginal world, the world of the soul. When a group of people close their eyes and enter into that realm together, a sense of community takes root. There is a doorway that opens when a collection of humans all agree to enter into the realm of the soul together. A certain spirit, or perhaps a communal purpose, begins to weave itself around everyone present.
This is how this amorphous idea of “community” begins to take shape.
Malidoma Somé, a genius teacher from Burkina Faso who I had the pleasure of hearing lecture only once, said,
“Community is formed each time more than one person meets for a purpose ... What one acknowledges in the formation of the community is the possibility of doing together what is impossible to do alone. This acknowledgement is also an objection against the isolation of individuals and individualism by a society in service of the Machine.”
That last line is the kicker. I’ll say it another way: poetry can become a powerful force of resistance precisely due to its ability to bring people together. Poetry is dangerous. The Roman emperor Augustus decreed Ovid’s exile. Persian sultans imprisoned many famous Sufi poets over the centuries. And the fascist Chilean dictator Pinochet was so troubled by Neruda’s riotous and revolutionary spirit that he assassinated him.
Today, poets are still being killed, with Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer being the most recent example.
All of this and more, is why I use poetry as a foundation of my practice in group and ritual space.
The poet’s words come from somewhere beyond the poet themselves, and draw us towards that same place when we let them settle into the dark groundwater of our being. They point towards the ineffable, and are beautiful attempts at articulating something utterly vast and unknown.
So I wanted to offer you all a selection of some of my favorite poems that I reliably draw upon. I’ve heard many great poets say that the words are meant to be spoken aloud, so I invite you to do the same as you read through these.