“A Mushroom Told Me To Do It”-How I Was Removed From A Psychedelic Garden
Fun Times In The Wattle Tea Garden Hangout
As 2018 eased into 2019, my interest in a particular type of plant medicine, the blessed acacia tree, led me and my compadre, Jose, into the world of plant knowledgeable online communities. With our discussion with others, we found The Wattle Tea Garden Hangout. This was a Facebook Group set up by someone active in this community as a facilitator of ayahuasca journeys and the like. He is someone well-known around this island nation that I inhabit.
Hey, look at the people
Sometimes we forget that we’re just people
And we’re falling head over heels
‘Cause all of us forget quite how to feel
Yes, and we live in the Garden of Eden, yeah
Don’t know why we wanna tear
The whole thing to the ground -John Dawson-Songwriter
This community garden had few rules and was a sweet place to share information about our psychedelic journeys, how-tos for cacti, acacia, shrooms, and more. Some people had been involved in this community for some time and there were new folks like me and Jose who had decades of lived experience but did not know these people at all.
Within this hangout, you could find self-appointed shaman, home chemists, wannabe gurus, plant medicine followers, cacti experts, legal advisors and a large number of candy-flipping psychonauts. There were fabulous stories of people ingesting many varieties of these substances either on their own or in some special mix to enable them to have visions of the godhead or experience ego death. Some of the tales were beautiful in intent and made you want to experience something similar. There were other tales where people just seemed to want to get as high as possible by creating a magic elixir from ingredients they decided to use.
There were times we shared concern about some comments and the mental health status of some participants. But who are you going to call? We took it upon ourselves to self-moderate and check in with people who seemed to be having trouble integrating back into daily life.
What made this Hangout a vital part of my Aussie Plant Medicine Travels was that it was safe and secure, and we all seemed to have each other’s backs. Everyone could ask questions, there was little judgment, and the peace and love quotient was at a high vibration when we first entered the Garden. Just about everyone was allowed in and we all respected each other with good humour and knowledge sharing.
Occasionally, someone would wander in and join the group and we were unsure if they were a Narc or just someone who thought we were there to talk about gardening. We tended to keep the conversation ‘safe’ so no one would be sucked into the legal system. There was no trading of substances within this online community. I asked the Hangout owner how he moderated who came into the group. He never got back to me.
As you can imagine, in a Hangout where people are talking about expanding their consciousness, there were always some slightly wide left and right-wing turns. Fortunately, politics did not taint the garden that much unless we were talking about legislation regarding these molecules. This was a fabulous forum to meet like-minded folks online, which eventually led to me meeting quite a number of them at plant medicine conferences, Bicycle Day gatherings in the park, Australian Psychedelic Society meet-ups, and more. The garden was well tended and fertilised and things were growing into a beautiful community.
As the pandemic became the focus of our lives in 2020, weeds became overgrown and people were losing their way on the pathways within the garden. Our little community of like-minded travellers was becoming divided, fragmented by the politics and the unknown behaviour of this virus. You could truly see where each person stood on the issue as some quoted scientific information and others took up positions that walked hand in hand with conspiracy theorist David Icke and his broadcasts on London Live and the like. If you don’t know Icke, check him out, he is also known for his grand statements that reptiles run the world and the royal family are lizards. He believes the pandemic was a hoax.
Y’all can discuss that amongst yourselves until the end of time.
This is not a story about the pandemic.
To be clear on where I stand, I was following the science. I had insight from relatives working in hospitals in America that things were very bad over there. News from New York was not pretty. I was concerned about my direct community’s health and my own. I am not in lockstep with politicians and governments, so I kept an open mind. As we became locked down in Melbourne, I was on a constant search for facts amongst all the sensationalism.
The Garden Hangout mirrored what was going on everywhere. Everyone had an opinion, a theory, a story. I was particularly annoyed one time with a fellow in Perth who was deep in conspiracy mode. He took to his bicycle and took pictures of empty Emergency Rooms in Perth. Western Australia locked down its borders and, by April 2020, had eliminated community transmission.
People who were sick were not going to Emergency Rooms and there were not many cases in WA because of the steps they took. I definitely had some disagreements with this chartacter because of his so called photographic proof.
Other people posted blatantly false information, and others and I fact-checked it and posted information from SNOPES or other sources. The entire group was lost in the jungle of Covid. Disagreements and the like took place frequently. This was common all over social media. The group’s moderator could have taken a stance to ban such conversations, but did not.
Starting up Facebook one day in May 2020, I found I could no longer laze around the Hangout. There was also a notification from the Hangout owner in my private messages. Here is that conversation:
If you know me, I was VERY CURIOUS.
This 3rd person, who was blocked, had said that the FB Group had become a ‘conspiracy circle jerk’. It certainly seemed that way as the three of us were not playing that tune. And then all of a sudden, as posted below, I am not right for this community.
People began messaging me privately and were wondering what in hallucination’s sake was going on. I told them what you read above and then in the not too distant future this (below) was posted on the Wattle Tea Garden Page.
So, a mushroom told him what to do regarding his Facebook Group. Ok, I guess anything can happen. But were my words that bad?
Jesus….’raped by words’.
Now that is a fairly strong stance to take. Mind you I could not comment on his post because I was tossed out into the desert, no garden for me. Other folks I knew were sending me these details.
There was another female facilitator who seemed to be kissing the ring of this plant man and she blocked us from her page. They also took part in a bit of slanderous conversation about us, which people brought to my attention. This woman called us “American Gangsters” and the owner of the page called us ‘newbies’. As I had an interest in these molecules before thegroup owner was born, I could only assume he meant a ‘newbie’ to his world.
They also said that Jose and I were “creepy Uncles hitting up females to drink with them”. Really? So because we were elders and Yanks and we disagreed with the bloody conspiracies broadcast by many on the page, we were thrown out of the garden. As far as being called a predator, we thought (jokingly) about legal action for this slanderous bullshit.
We did not lose any friends. No one else thought about us in that way. A very good person I knew from the page had this to say about the page owner.
Over time I have found other writings by this group owner, either on social media or in his emails, that denigrate America. Hey, I am no red, white and blue flag waving patriot. I left America over 40 years ago. I hold 2 passports. Maybe it was the tag team of the bi-coastal energy of New York Paul and LA Jose that irked him.
My thick skin was not bruised but there was a sour taste in my mouth. Things could have been addressed with conversation like any moderator of an online community would normally do. A simple announcement on the page to cease pandemic rumours and conspiracies and arguments would have gone a long way to fixing the problem.
But instead, the people who moved against the groove were exiled.
So it goes.
Postscript: The Wattle Tea Garden Hangout continued, and in 2022 I was reinstated in the group. The page’s owner had a MeToo moment on an ABC TV programme here in Australia. You can find that story for yourself with a bit of digging. I do not know the facts, I only saw the programme.
For whatever reason, at this same time, I was magically transported back to the Wattle Tea Garden Hangout along with the others who had been banned.
I never found out why I was suddenly allowed back into this plant community.
A mushroom must have let me back in.
Peace and Love.
And eventually, Meta shut down the FB Page.
You can ponder that the next time you have a shitake.
