letting go the wheel

follows is a collection of my writings and drawings from my peyote ceremony, on eof the last ceremonies of the course. i had a lot of anxiety about what this experience would be like. although i had experienced hallucinogenic plants before, i had never experienced them within the context of ceremony or so far from home. i suddenly was very aware of just how much resistance i had to this structure. i could'nt relax with the idea of being bound to a structure in an otherwise structureless realm.

it seems this feeling was echoed throughout the group because a series of events unfolded the day before the ceremony that meant we could not continue as planned. Daniel and Arbolita's son was very sick which meant if we did it that night only one of them would be able to lead the group. also only about half the group returned from the days exercise -to pick our peyote- with any cacti and i returned hours after dark after getting hopelessly lost in some much spikier cacti.

(There is something very central to this project about getting lost and i am interested in how this came up for me in response to ritual. the juxtaposition between walking without direction and trying desperately to find one's bearings is a strange relationship that repeated itself in many guises during the course, physically, in journeying and in my writing and as i saw more and more parallels between them, these things became more and more indistinguishable.)

so, because of these factors, we postponed the ceremony until the following day. instead of taking the peyote around the fire in the evening and staying in ceremony all night, we meditated together in the morning, eat the peyote together under a tree near the camp and walk off into the desert alone. we then had the option if we wanted to return to the camp for sunset to hold ceremony around the fire, which actually the whole group did. this felt like a good marriage of chaos and order and definitely had huge impacted on all of our experience.




i spent a long period of time playing with dualities that day and in fact this was mirrored throughout the whole trip. the mayan's symbol for the centre of the universe; the hunab ku, came to me again and again in different forms, working as a sigil holding paradox within me.







this is something i drew whilst peyote was with me. i was trying to show the energies of different numbers as i experienced them and the colliding worlds of day/night inner/outer. the view i drew of the sunset was as i had seen it vertical hanging from the branches of a tree, the night engulfing my left side and sinking sun my right.