Finding East Forest
This story takes place during the 2023 Psychedelic Science conference in Denver, Colorado, which drew a crowd of more than 12,000 psychedelic enthusiasts. The event both pulsed with excitement for the new frontiers of psychedelic legalization and also amplified tensions, with Native medicine carriers demanding voice and rightly critical of this “new frontier” eagerness.
One evening during the conference, I went with my mom and a small group of friends to see East Forest, a musician who creates immersive sonospheres conducive to mushroom journeys. It’s contempory classical music inspired by sounds in nature – peaceful music to absorb while lying down with eyes closed. Tickets to see East Forest had cost a pretty penny, and we were looking forward to the opportunity to experience a live performance.
The day of the concert, we are notified that there had been an unexpected change in venue; it would now be held at a downtown nightclub. The weather shifted, too - the summer night sky turned ominous, the temperature dropped precipitously, and marble-sized hail poured down. When the Lyft dropped us off, a few minutes after East Forest was to have started playing, we thought we would be able to dash inside before getting pummeled by the downpour. But no…we were greeted with a line of people a block long, winding out the door and around the buildings, huddled under any available overhang, waiting for the bouncer to let another person out of the storm and into the shelter of the club. It quickly became clear that the line, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t moving.
One member of our group had purchased the “VIP” ticket, and we thought maybe she, at least, would be allowed in. The rest of us were ready to cut our losses and leave before we were injured by the hail. We shielded our heads the best we could with our jackets and dashed to the door to inquire. Suddenly, in the dark and the chaos, we find ourselves at the very front of the line, getting our tickets scanned and being ushered inside. Surprise, delight, and relief. I take a small dose of mushrooms as we go inside to, I assume, settle in for the concert.
To our surprise, the venue is dark with flashing disco lights. There is blasting rave music, definitely not East Forest. A few dancers with light-up costumes and hula hoops perform around the room, but very few other people are to be seen. It is a bizarre caricature of a psychedelic party. My friend follows the signage to check out the “VIP lounge” and returns a few minutes later to report that it’s simply an empty balcony, no drinks or anything. Perhaps this is the opener and East Forest will be coming on soon? But where are the people (other than out in the hail)? The bartender doesn’t seem to have any information about what’s happening.
After about 20 minutes of confusion, a member of our group finds a discreetly-located, unmarked passageway leading to another room. The new room is brightly lit, almost painfully so. There are interactive psychedelic art installations on the walls. There is no music playing, but there are hundreds of people, and everyone is wearing headphones. Cheerful event organizers greet us at a table and help us set up our own headphones that allow each of us to “choose our own vibe.” The music is nice, but it’s not East Forest. No one mentions East Forest at all or volunteers any direction or orientation other than a demo of how to use the headphones. We explore the room and notice that among the clusters of people, there appears to be a sort of line coalescing. We ask, and no one near us in this “line” seems to know what we are waiting for either. But just a little ways in front of us we spot Robin Carhartt Harris, a highly-published superstar in the world of psychedelic research. Well, we thought, if Robin is here, we must be in the right place. So we chat, listen to our headphones, ogle Robin, and wait.
It must be at least an hour and a half in the realm of the headphones before we can see what’s going on. Very slowly, in groups of 2 or 3, people are being allowed to ascend a small staircase that extends upward from back of the room. We eventually reach this next mysterious passage and are directed up the steps.
Upon ascent, we enter yet another space. This time, we have arrived. People lie side by side on the blanket-covered floor vibing to a now live-and-in-person East Forest. The lights are perfectly dim and soothing, the sound finally both nourishing and communally shared. This is what we came for. We are directed to the few empty spots on the floor and lie down. We are there for a grand total of perhaps 15 minutes.
The show ends and we all file out, down the stairs, back through the bright headphone room and the dark rave room and then out into the night where thankfully the hail has stopped and the air is now pleasantly cool. The other ticket-holders who never even made it out of the hail, much less to the coveted upper room, have by this time dispersed.
Despite the deep oddness of this adventure and the fact that I did take about a gram of dried mushrooms, I feel completely sober. When I finally land back at the hotel, over three hours after ingesting the fungal friends, I’m ready to sleep. It soon becomes clear, in the quiet stillness, that sleep is still a long way off; the mushroom space unexpectedly begins to spin open. The mushrooms have been hanging out waiting for their opportunity to communicate, and they aren’t going to be ignored now. Despite my exhaustion, there’s nothing for it but to put some East Forest back on, this time through my earbuds, and continue the night’s journey.
The mushrooms take me right back to the club, to the shame of cutting in line and leaving others to be beaten down by the freezing hail. To the absurdity of a world that can turn East Forest into a scarce resource. There is a massive conference center just down the street with rooms that can hold thousands for heavens sake! It didn’t have to be this way. What happened was a peculiar yet familiar brand of human-made madness, leaving the masses huddled outside, with only the lucky or privileged few making it through the maze of sensory hell to arrive at the place of peace and holding that we were all seeking.
I’ll leave the story here, rather than wrapping it up with a bow. I almost titled this tale The Manufacture of Scarcity: Finding East Forest in the Fourth Circle. We traveled through four concentric worlds that night, and in Dante’s vision the fourth circle is the hell-realm created by the misappropriation of wealth, the misuse of our abundance. But that feels entirely too heavy-handed and moralistic. Really, after this experience, I’m left only with questions.
Is it possible to participate in the legal, regulated model of mushroom facilitation from a place of abundance, rather than a place of gatekeeping a scarce and expensive resource? What does abundance look like, for facilitators of various trainings and backgrounds, and for journeyers? What if abundance of healing opportunities in the modern western world directly conflicts with the sacred containers in which these medicines are held in their cultures of origin? What of it is mine to do? This East Forest adventure is one that continues to guide the questions, even if it does not provide the answers.