Wood lover paralysis – have you heard of this? It’s a rare form of muscle weakness that can occur after eating certain species of magic mushroom grown on decomposing wood. Eugenia Bone, presenting new release Have a Good Trip: Exploring the Magic Mushroom Experience at this year’s Texas Book Festival, said it manifests as anything from a wobble in the legs to outright paralysis, comes on four to six hours after shroom ingestion, and resolves naturally the next day.
As Bone says, “It’s helpful to know this could happen so you don’t eat this species and then go swimming.”
Here’s another obscure topic Bone investigates: noccers. Bone says these are guerrilla cultivators in the Pacific Northwest who inoculate – get it, “noccers”? – piles of wood chips to create limitless shroomage. “They’re like hooligan farmers,” she says.
Bone loves shrooms of all varieties and teaches a class on the psychedelic kind at New York’s Botanical Garden. She stresses that Have a Good Trip is not a guide to taking mushrooms, but a resource on them, including what can go wrong if you indulge. “A sober look at tripping,” she calls it.
New York Times reporter Ernesto Londoño will join Bone at a Saturday panel to discuss his psychedelic-themed book Trippy: The Peril and Promise of Medicinal Psychedelics. Londoño compares the book to How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan’s 2018 bestseller written just as people were becoming aware of psychedelic retreats. Trippy, on the other hand, examines the retreats now that they’ve become wildly popular.
“This whole field is a Wild West.” – Ernesto Londoño
“This whole field is a Wild West,” Londoño says. “And while many people do walk away in better shape, it is by no means guaranteed. It’s a place with a lot of charlatans and a lot of predators, a lot of practices that are not wholesome.”
Londoño got interested in psychedelic retreats while on assignment in Brazil, where he became crushingly depressed. He took part in a nine-day retreat which transformed his life and spent the next 18 months visiting various psychedelic practitioners. He lived for a time with the Yawanawá, an indigenous Brazilian tribe, and journeyed to our town to learn about the All Tribes Medicine Assembly of Austin, run by Whitney Lasseter.
Londoño estimates that during his research he experienced between 50 and 75 ayahuasca ceremonies. He said the trips often retrieve repressed memories that are difficult to re-encounter but can ultimately help relieve anxiety and obsessive behaviors.
“One example, just in my experience, was that after my first retreat I never wanted to touch alcohol again,” Londoño says. “And that was really, really surprising, because I used to really like drinking, and it was hard to envision how one remains a journalist if one does not drink. But I found clearly that alcohol was doing a lot more harm than good for me, physically and emotionally. So once I had clarity on that and I saw it in black-and-white terms it was sort of effortless to stop drinking.”
Mind-Altering Medicine: Psychedelics, Science & the Search for Healing
Saturday, Nov. 16, 10:15am, BookTV on C-Span2 Tent
More Panels on Personal Transformation
Austin poet KB Brookins (Pretty) and Washington Post classical music critic Michael Andor Brodeur (SWOLE: The Making of Men & the Meaning of Muscle) discuss evolving ideas about gender. (Becoming Ourselves: Memoirs of Transformation, Saturday, Nov. 16, 3pm, Kirkus Tent)
Memoirist Glynnis MacNicol (the Paris-set I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself) and debut novelist Kimberly King Parsons (We Were the Universe) find common ground in stories of women throwing out the playbook. (Reinventing Mid-Life: Women Defying Societal Expectations, Sunday, Nov. 17, 11:15am, Capitol Extension Room E2.014)
This article appears in November 15 • 2024.