Ketamine or cedar tree, lab or forest — mycelium doesn’t care about your categories. It cares if you’ll grow. 🌱🍄
🌿 Daily Field Notes — August 15, 2025
Underground Conversations
On the mesas of New Mexico, there are cedar trees whose trunks are twisted like old stories. Some are lopped clean off, only to have sprouted again. Others split in two and kept growing in opposite directions. Some died nearly to the roots before sending up one last, stubborn shoot. (Thank you for the inspiration Josh Schrei!)
These trees are living maps of survival — every bend a record of drought, wind, or lightning.
But here’s the secret: what you see above ground is only part of the story. Beneath the soil, an invisible mycelial network connects cedar to cedar, cedar to pine, pine to wildflower. A tree that looks alone is, in truth, in constant, quiet conversation with the forest.
Lately, in our work with both spirit plant medicines and clinical ketamine therapy, I’ve been feeling into this image. So often we frame trauma healing as an individual journey — my story, my symptoms, my integration.
But just as a cedar’s resilience depends on more than its own roots, our healing depends on what lives in the underground: shared ritual, ancestral memory, and the subtle knowledge that passes between us when we sit in ceremony together.
Maybe ketamine, like the old plant rites, can help us remember that we’re part of something larger — a living web where nourishment and insight flow in all directions, and where personal healing feeds the collective.
When one of us receives, the network grows stronger.
The cedar and the mushroom already know this. We are simply remembering.