Amusings

May 19, 2025

I – Background

The beginning of this story goes back twenty years… Let’s not start at the beginning… The beginning has too many tangents… 2021 would be a good place to start… 

Life was not awesome.

A very close friend of mine passed away from cancer…  

My mother was diagnosed with a rare blood disease and given one month to live… 

My shattered career left me completely isolated and working from home… 

I was knee deep in a marriage that left me feeling powerless and betrayed…

My daughter’s piercing scream robbed me of concentration and peeled the paint off the walls…

…And I began to wonder… On a daily basis… If life would be better off… Without me in it.

Let that sink in.   

When you’re in that situation… And you’re the type of person who usually looks for innovative solutions to problems… Your mind can wander into a lot of interesting places… And mine did.

For some reason, I was reminded of my earlier curiosity in ethnobotanical plants.  Twenty years previously, this interest had been more of a juvenile and recreational excursion.    Now, however, my attention was more of a medicinal and spiritual endeavor.

I began growing seeds from many of the different plants I had researched.  All of these plants had a long history of use by various cultures around the world… Many of them for centuries.  These plants had been used by shamans in spiritual ceremonies.  Their endurance throughout history as a treatment for mental and spiritual ills has been well documented.   

For me though… I needed something.  I needed to clear a space in my brain.  I had too many thoughts swirling around in my head… And I couldn’t concentrate on one of them long enough to try and solve it.  My consciousness was cluttered… And I saw these plants as a potential spring cleaning for the mind.

Many of the seeds I planted never sprouted… Some sprouted and then petered out… And some grew well for a while but eventually couldn’t adapt to their growing conditions…  Which were very different from the jungles and deserts in which they had originated.  The one group of plants that I could successfully grow were cacti.  

For the uninitiated, many species of cacti contain alkaloids… That when ingested by humans, have a hallucinogenic effect.  Yes… Some of those same plants that we were warned about in our grade school classrooms… And instructed to sternly respond [Just Say] “No!” when offered them. 

Even while I was doing it… I knew that growing these plants from seed was a flight of fancy.  Cacti grow slowly… And juicing them up with fertilizers would more likely kill them than speed up the growing process.

But watching these seeds sprout and grow gave me hope…  A small ray of grow-light sunshine in the dark basement of my existence.

Fast forward to 2024…  My marriage had devolved and been dissolved… The career that was formerly on life support had turned into a saving grace of regular income… My daughter was developing into a very precocious and intuitive young lady… And I felt like I was starting to see light at the end of a very dark and endless five year tunnel.

It had been a year since my divorce was finalized.  I had friends and acquaintances who were going through a divorce at the same time that I was experiencing it.  And I observed their choices… Not as a judgement… But more as a source of information gathering to make informed decisions about the path I wanted to take in this new landscape.

Some used the bar scene as a panacea and cure for their new found loneliness… Engaging in shallow relationships united by libations… And making reckless choices about how to get home afterward.

Others sought refuge in scantily-clad women and girlfriends thirty years younger than themselves… Who accompanied them on vacations to the Caribbean.    

I was the last of my friends to get married.  I was 41 at the time.  And this was on the heels of two full decades that included times of being single… Which would have allowed me to explore these avenues if I desired.  Post-divorce, I didn’t have the urge to make up for lost time… To try and recapture experiences that I missed during my youth.  Throughout the twists and turns of my 20’s and 30’s… I dodged the bullets that left many who married and had children early in their 20’s… Wondering what experiences they might have missed.

And while I observed my friends’ paths… I had no desire to follow in their footsteps.  I had just been through the bleakest emotional period in my life… And, in the aftermath… I had mentally reviewed ad nauseam each moment and choice that led me to that point.  I didn’t want to repeat it… I needed to learn from it.

During a conversation with a friend, I exclaimed that I hadn’t done anything remarkable since the divorce.  Here I was with all of this freedom… And I wasn’t using it.

And then I said,

There is something to be said… For getting on a plane… With nothing but a backpack… And going somewhere you’ve never been before… To do something you’ve never done before!

Then I informed her… That I already had a trip planned… And I wasn’t telling anyone where I was going.  She looked at me with wide-eyed concern.  And then I let her know that she would be the first person I told about the trip when I got back.