Below the
Bottom
By Jo P and
Sally D
Monday: frantic, and the perfect day to cap off with a therapeutic Salvia smoke.
Ah, the joys of Salvia Divinorum! The exploration of subconscious and supra-conscious worlds—the thrill of lift-off, the brief fear of crashing, the wonder of Lady Salvia’s creative embrace. The awe at landing, and the hours of reflection and self-questioning that persist long after the five-minute journey. If man’s real purpose in life is to breathe in and marvel at the unfathomable mystery of being, then Salvia offers a turbo-charged tour of the ways by which he might fulfill his true destiny.
I’ve been sitting in the kitchen for the past thirty minutes, meditating, but mainly waiting for the loud dishwasher to turn off. Before me, on the round table, there’s my “launching pad”: filled with ice-cold water, a new water pipe, consisting of a very large soda bottle and two vinyl hoses. One of the hoses is five feet in length and serves as the mouthpiece, while the other connects to a tobacco pipe bowl packed with high-salvinorin “fuel” (one SBC plain leaf). My old water pipe was constructed similarly, but was much smaller, and as it turned out, much less effective in cooling the hot smoke.
It’s
I’ve probably burned most of the leaf, so there’s no need to re-ignite the lighter. The new giant pipe holds a lot of leftover smoke. I leave the lighter at a safe distance and take in the rest of the hit.
The water pipe appears completely still, with no bubbling in the water, as if it’s been frozen in a photograph.
I face west on one of the table’s four chairs, which by coincidence (?), are aligned in the four cardinal directions. The backrest of each chair consists of a wooden arch supported by short vertical poles.
Suddenly, the poles, the table, and I converge in a grand spiraling clockwise motion. “We” are sliced up and morph into what seem to be thin wooden planks. We float up and, still rotating around a central axis, turn until we’re parallel to the floor. It appears that we’ve formed some kind of barrel (or perhaps a “circular staircase”, if this makes any sense) which I’m seeing from below.
As we rotate, different planks occupy the top position. Here’s where Lady Salvia pokes fun at her loyal enthusiast. Each time a plank reaches the top, I feel that I’m that plank. The topmost plank, apparently expressing superiority, always seems to be moving away from the others. “That’s me,” I tell myself, “time to rise….” But then I realize I can’t move—I’m below all the other planks!
“There I go, that’s me at the top! I’ve got to stand….” It’s useless—I haven’t moved an inch from rock bottom. This disturbing joke goes on for a while.
“Waterfall Creek” by Dave Hubbard is playing on the stereo. This piece from a “Tranquility” CD is sounding more eerie than peaceful. Its rising and falling notes, intended to evoke gentle ripples in a stream, happen to simulate my little predicament rather unnervingly as well.
By now I’m very confused. Any plank eventually arrives at the top and at the bottom in a cycle. If I’m always at the bottom, then which of these damn planks am I? I endure the relentless periodic humiliation. Is this my ultimate fate, for my identity to be eternally shuffled like a deck of cards consisting of all Jokers?
Then when everything seems just about hopeless, the vision breaks. I see my body suddenly separate from the barrel—as if it’s teleported back to this plane of existence—and the table and poles do likewise. Fuck! What the hell was that?
Tonight, Lady Salvia sure kicked my ass, and for a good reason. During the day, I’d been moping a bit about my career. The dark mood was triggered by a rejected paper, breaking my “winning streak” of three consecutive research papers accepted for publication by professional journals. Basically, I felt that I wasn’t “on top of things” anymore.
HA!
Before going to bed, I have a good laugh to myself: “So that’s your foolish dependence on career and external circumstances for happiness—it’s nothing more than a clunky bunch of planks following a cycle where neither you, nor anyone who thinks like you, will ever be ‘up there’, where it really matters.”
I have a deep sleep, and enjoy some very rich dream images.
When the alarm rings at