My first peyote meeting
"By ingesting the heart of the creator, the peyote, they learn through prayer how to interact with the world around them."
Have we sat for a dozen songs yet, or have I been sleeping, eyes wide and distracted by the constant movement of the fire and the crushed-red of the tipi walls around midnight water? My back is cold where my shirt lifts, sitting against the cool airflow of nighttime the wind picks up and hands to us through the slit under the tipi walls. The rest of me is warm, even a little hot with my own faint nausea and the urge to pee. I'm inexperienced, so my focus labors between growing physical discomfort and the intensity of the songs and customs as they move around my body like the bellowing hands of a giant clock. I realize now that my measure of medicine determined how much attention I paid to exhaustion, and each time the plant came around I took less and less, fearing I would lose control of my nausea.
I am told by elders that it is not unusual to feel this way at first. The pace the night's events take is geared in such a way as to make you feel you are watching the slow transgression of the constellations--- not seeing how far you've come until you notice that the sky has completely shifted. And to be sick, also, was said to be "the medicine working on you. Poisons sting twice, love, once on the way in and once on the way out."
Have we sat for a dozen songs yet, or have I been sleeping, eyes wide and distracted by the constant movement of the fire and the crushed-red of the tipi walls around midnight water? My back is cold where my shirt lifts, sitting against the cool airflow of nighttime the wind picks up and hands to us through the slit under the tipi walls. The rest of me is warm, even a little hot with my own faint nausea and the urge to pee. I'm inexperienced, so my focus labors between growing physical discomfort and the intensity of the songs and customs as they move around my body like the bellowing hands of a giant clock. I realize now that my measure of medicine determined how much attention I paid to exhaustion, and each time the plant came around I took less and less, fearing I would lose control of my nausea.
I am told by elders that it is not unusual to feel this way at first. The pace the night's events take is geared in such a way as to make you feel you are watching the slow transgression of the constellations--- not seeing how far you've come until you notice that the sky has completely shifted. And to be sick, also, was said to be "the medicine working on you. Poisons sting twice, love, once on the way in and once on the way out."