I’ll go down. I know this because I’ve gone down every single time so far. I’ll go down and I’ll go down hard with a dull thud and the abrasive drag of sand across my face and chest. The disorienting bliss of being overwhelmed underwater. It’s 1980, I’m eight-years-old, and I’m fighting waves in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to stand, trying to win, losing. It’s the game I play for hours. Watching intently as a wave comes in, vividly present to challenge and danger, screaming defiantly as it makes whooshing contact, going down again, fizz. I get back up. The sun is getting low. My grandmother calls. One more try. The wave comes crashing in, roaring like a stepdad.

*

The ayahuasca experience is uniquely unsayable. It resists the confines of absolutizing. As soon as you begin talking about how 89% of respondents reported relief from mood fluctuations and depressive symptoms, ayahuasca is gone. It won’t be reduced to, or consumed by, data and statistics. Scientific facts present themselves as the one and only way to measure and understand the world, but they never tell a living story. Rather, by their very exclusion of other modes of seeing and being, they suffocate what ayahuasca seeks to open up and reveal. The same goes for the accepted narratives you hear within ayahuasca circles. As soon as you hear about past lives, aliens, and frequencies or vibrations, remember: these are stories. Accept them at the expense of your own original relation to the fundamental mystery.

*

Though they are many and varied, this is not about visions or ideas. It’s about a feeling, a feeling that seemed to last the whole night. The ayahuasca, dark and licorice bitter, took up residence in my belly, warm like a piece of slow burning coal, radiating heat up through my lungs and around my neck. There was something about me that was relentlessly clenched. My body, yes, but also in a weird way, me—Jon, was being wrung out like a wet towel. Imagine the way the flu escalates. There’s feeling sick and nauseous, sweat on your forehead, knowing for sure that you’re soon to vomit, but not yet. Then there’s that rapid panic where you must find a toilet or a bucket. There. Imagine being there for 3 or 4 hours. Needing to purge. Not purging. Gripped in the clench of a dark and grimy heat that wants to bury you with dirty leaves.

*

The experience of ayahuasca should be approached the way you approach a work of art, with questions. Is the Girl with a Pearl Earring turning toward you or away from you? Is she frightened? Intrigued? In love? There will be many stories and many interpretations that open up and out into many further stories and interpretations, and so on, but you mustn’t let them harden into reality and truth, the story. Hold fast to the place where anything can be anything and everything else. Maintaining an ambiguous approach to understanding ayahuasca will allow for myriad artful understandings until you yourself become something like an art project. You can change.

*

I used to refer to myself as someone suffering with an addiction, as an alcoholic. In the final days of my compulsive drinking, 2019 and 2020, I would wake in the morning, stand up, look in the mirror and swear off drinking for good. Inevitably, after work, the gravitational pull of alcohol would drive my car to the bar. Ideation about not drinking and my willpower were both just a helpless foam atop the undertow of forces pulling me toward “one drink.” As the warmth from the first drink spread from my belly to the rest of my body, I would find myself submerged in the idea that another drink would be even better than this one. Overwhelmed, there was no pivot down here, no “or” to append to the idea of having another one. There was only another one, and another, and another until I would wake in the morning, stand up, look in the mirror and swear off drinking for good.

*

There will never be a comprehensive description of the ayahuasca experience. In the time between drinking ayahuasca and coming back to earth, you will see 10,000 things, think 10,000 thoughts, and feel 10,000 feelings. Do not seek to hold it all. Rather, let a vision, thought, or feeling rise to prominence. Let it tell you things, connect to other things, and then forget it. Another memory will emerge; sparks will fly. One day, maybe you will want to tell a story like this one about one tiny corner of your revealed infinity.

*

Another night, same feeling. The ayahuasca, dark and licorice bitter, took up residence in my belly, warm like a piece of slow burning coal, radiating heat up through my lungs and around my neck. Clenched, wrung out like a wet towel, sick, that dark and grimy heat. The sensations were largely the same sensations as the previous night, sensations one can expect from ingesting a psychedelic purgative. However, as opposed to relating to the sensations from an angle of misery, from resistance and the perspective of not wanting them and wishing they would stop, tonight I merely thought “Oh, here’s this again,” and watched. There was tension and heat, dark, grimy, burying me in dirty leaves, and then the weird and exquisite pleasure of flowers erupting from that heat, blooming from my chest: red, yellow, and the kind of deep purple that turns bruises into healing rain.

*

What if, rather than being held hostage to the absolutes of a static identity, ayahuasca taught us how to be and say “or”? Today, when I drink, I feel the warmth spread from my belly to the rest of my body. There arises the sensation of possibly being submerged or overwhelmed and I think “Oh, here’s this again.” I can have another drink. Or I can pay my tab and go home. Or I can drink to excess on vacation in the Dominican Republic. Or I can have a glass of water. Or a Coke. Or too many beers at the Lions game in Phoenix. Or. It’s always there, this or, this pivot, this otherwise. Is she frightened? Intrigued? In love?

*

It’s 1980, I’m eight-years-old, and I’m fighting waves in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to stand, trying to win, losing. Even though my stepdad drank himself to death, he is dead, it will take him 40 more years to die. In 40 years I will scream defiantly into a wave and stand triumphantly through its violent crashing. I will lift that eight-year-old up and we will not go down. We never went down.