Among the many weird things about ayahuasca is the impossible fact that, as soon as you commit to the task of drinking it, the adventure begins. There’s a ceremony next weekend that, months ago, I decided not to attend, but when I recently changed my mind, I immediately started swirling around the drain.

For confidentiality reasons I can’t tell you where I’m going next weekend, but I’ve been there once before. Right now, part of the swirling, is thinking about all the places where ayahuasca turned me inside-out. One location in Michigan (three times), one location in California (two times), one location in New Mexico (two times), another location in New Mexico (one time), one location in Colorado (one time), and one location in Las Vegas (one time). There’s something about the places. When I call to mind the blue temple in Traverse City, tears.

These are obviously specific places in exact locales that achieve their being in a compilation of particulars. Of course they are. The tiny house on the ocean in Santa Barbara is not the same as the magnificent cabin in New Mexico’s mountains. But, as my experience accrues, what I’m beginning to discover is that, beneath their particularities, they all recline into similarity, into sameness. What’s really strange, though, is that as I attempt to describe the way these places give way, their particularities shine out all the more brightly. They’re special. I remember the driveways, the doorways, the entryways, the way it feels to walk their halls in the dark. These places are sacred, portals, gateways to I don’t know where, but in this ignorance, they cohere.

Look, the science of psychedelics indicates that, under their influence, the entrenched neural network that seems (we must remain staunchly provisional) to produce the phenomenon of substantial selfhood, the Default Mode Network (DMN), loosens up, falls away, gives way—opens out into a mass of other paths. But what are you when there’s no more you? What I’m hinting at here is that we die in place. You in place are.

Remember forever before you were born? The same as forever after you die, right? But what’s completely bonkers is that you can drink this medicinal tea and collapse right down into that forever awhile right now. Come right back into your life with gobs and gobs of nothing dripping from your hands. And the places, in time, where that happens, become these weird sacred sites that glow with possibility, which is merely the shadow of nothing. That’s where I’m headed next weekend. That’s the place already reaching out to me. That’s the place where I always already am. And you too; see you soon.