Tricycle | Awake in the World

When my mother took LSD in 1975, under the amicable supervision of Stanislav Grof and Joan Halifax, she had no idea I was growing inside her. Throughout the trip, she commented on the movement in her belly, how it pulsed and distended. That was me. I was smaller than a grape seed, yet I was clearly huge. My mother and I achieved a psychic union that was more vast, more seamless than even our circumstance. Perhaps I remember expanding; beyond my cells, their race of microscopic bloom; beyond the amniotic womb—yet corded to the flesh creating me. My early introduction to psychedelics, two weeks after conception, is not remarkable. My parents, a Spanish teacher and a sculptor/businessman, were involved in Esalen during the early seventies and lived for a period in a San Francisco ashram. Twenty years later an open attitude about most things prevails within my family. Including drugs. This may not be the norm, but in some ways, it represents a conceptual ideal for my generation.