The first time I ever visited New Mexico was June 4, 2021. I was staying with my buddy Bryan in Durango, Colorado, and I dipped into the Land of Enchantment from up north to attend an ayahuasca ceremony in tiny Cleveland, NM, an unincorporated community in Mora County on the east side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Outside the enormous picture windows of the ceremony space towered South Truchas Peak, 13,108 feet, the second tallest mountain in all of New Mexico, and, just over that mountain, straddling a high ridge on the west side of the Sangre de Cristos, was the village of Truchas and, in that village, lived a woman named Margaret, living a quiet life, and doing many Margaret things.

Those two weekend nights, June 4 and 5, with the brain chemistry that constitutes a sense of selfhood thoroughly dismantled, I, undone, mountains, rivers, no end, millions and millions of milky dripped stars, and my dead dad singing magic songs in shaking lilting trills.

My intentions with ayahuasca have always revolved solely around seeking relief from alcohol dependence. But what are ayahuasca’s intentions with me? I waver between the extremes of doubting that ayahuasca even has an intention and wondering if I’m merely a pawn in its expansive and unfathomable game. If you listen to the people who regularly attend ayahuasca ceremonies, it’s all frequencies and vibrations, past lives and aliens, and you generally want to punch them in the face and scream at them to get real jobs. I mean it’s seriously a goddamn glut of healers who speak in cosmic houses of cards, but, to be fair, they are each lovable in their own logically inconsistent ways.

The bottom line is that I don’t know what happens when I drink ayahuasca, but I can tell you this much for sure. After I leave an ayahuasca ceremony, I feel utterly cleansed of the rigid machinations that make compulsive drinking necessary. And, after this particular ayahuasca ceremony, I left enamored with the idea that I would soon move to either Peru or New Mexico. I met Margaret 77 days later and I moved to Truchas 120 days after that.