Words, words, words... (...sigh...) Sometimes I wonder whether the exhaustion that we feel so much of the time can be explained by the effort required to be constantly ordering and re-ordering words, like the world depended upon it. And yet things must be named for them to be things at all and so it was that Carla and I found ourselves trying to put words to our new venture.

The venture was born of a feeling. That mixture of joy, excitement, reverence and responsibility that accompanies the mushroom experience. There is a moment when one is journeying with mushrooms when these feelings cannot be contained, they over-flow, mix and there is an overwhelming need to share. Perhaps that is what love is. Perhaps it is the ocean within that we cannot contain and that we know has to be shared. Perhaps it has to be shared because at that moment we know that we swim in the same ocean.

There is nothing new about this need to share. It is as old as the hills and the paths that lead to the places of sharing are well trodden. We share through song. We share through play. We share through ritual. We share through our gratitude. We share through being together and feeling the presence of the other and knowing that there is something priceless that we share, even if it will not be named.

This need, and the practices and rituals created to satisfy it, have always been with us, at all times and in all places.

Until, that is, very recently.

The short span of the human story that is human history, that is to say the last few thousand years, has involved a progressive forgetting of the ocean that connects us and the paths that can lead us to a remembering of that ocean, to experiencing that ocean. And so long as we cannot access that deepest, tenderest part of ourselves, so long as we can't drop all that is superficial about ourselves and, for a moment, resonate together only in what unites us, well... we will fight. We will fight and we will struggle and we will get depressed and we will be anxious and we will feel a terrible inconsolable isolation and we will try to feel connection by consuming and consuming and consuming. And this, it would seem, is the hole that we have dug for ourselves at this particularly dark moment in human history with wars raging in Ukraine and Palestine, with environmental degradation reaching a tipping point and with a cultural disconnection from the rest of nature, from the planet and each other.

And yet, just at this point in human history when our situation would seem to be irreversible, our culture has tentatively started to open itself to the gift of the entheogenic mushroom. This is the strong medicine that Maria Sabina, the indigenous woman living in the margins of the historical narrative, shared with Gordan Wasson, banker, mycophile and emissary of western culture. He introduced the sacred mushroom into western culture and only now, 60-odd years later is our culture starting to wake up to the true nature of the gift. And the gift is...

... that it offers a way back. Back to basics. Back to factory settings. Back to that place where it is enough just to be, but so much better if you can be with others, because however unsure we may be much of the time, we know that we belong together and that we care for one another. And here we delight in creating resonance, we delight in belonging to this earth and living alongside these plants and these animals and these people and among these mountains and rivers and we feel as we do after the rains have fallen, after the long drought has given way to torrential rain and the earth has drunk deeply and the next morning we step out and see the mist in the valley and feel the warmth of the sun as it rises over the hills and the air is fresh and clear and earthy and the world seems pregnant with possibility...

... and this is why we decided to name our venture, After the Rains.

We intend to create spaces of ritual and of resonance within which to share what the mushroom experience has given us. We want to share the intensities of the peak experience and the somatic release that accompanies it. We want to share the feeling of renewal that follows this release; the sense of the sacred, the feeling of connectedness, the gratitude and the reverence. And so it is that, with feelings of responsibility, excitement, humility and a touch of mischievousness, we present After the Rains to you today.

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