As I write this, Litha is still a few days away, but the post is written as though it were a day or two in the past.-D.
"Why don't we do drugs here," asked Ash, one of the yearlings.
"I don't want to," answered Allen. "I can't speak for your half of 'we.'"
And Ash made a pff! sound because Allen had deliberately misinterpreted her, as he does.
We were all sitting in the Dining Hall, which was rather over-stuffed and noisy because it's Litha, and almost everybody has their family and friends visiting, so there were five or six hundred people on campus. AND it was raining--hard--so rather than picnicking outside, a lot of us were camped out in the Dining Hall. The event tent, the one we use for Mabon, was set up, too, and there had the pigs roasting there and some of the rest of the food, so some of the people were in the tent, and others were variously scattered all over campus, I'm not sure where.
The Sprouts had accreted to the Dining Hall, and were running around the margins of the room playing some kind of game that involved shrieking and shooting imaginary guns at imaginary enemies and sometimes each other, but then Charlie stood up on a chair and shouted "ATTENTION!!!"
The room went silent. We all looked at him.
"Attention, Sprouts!" he said, "You're not going to melt, you're not going to get hypothermia today, Go PLAY OUTSIDE!"
All the Sprouts filed out, most of them glancing rather sheepishly at Charlie as they went, and when they were gone everybody burst into applause.
"Except he did that for the Sprouts, not for us," I said, quietly, to Allen. He nodded.
"I expect he'll join them, shortly," he guessed.
"Should we?"
"And blow his cover?" Allen shook his head.
The conversation about drugs continued, somewhat without us, as various people discussed various mind-blowing experiences they'd had on various substances. Something like this comes up every year, and the conversation usually evolves into extreme positions, with one camp insisting that human consciousness evolved in partnership with entheogenic plants (that many of these "plants" are actually mushrooms is only one of the things that has come to irritate me about such assertions), and the other camp equally certain that the "vibrations" of mind-altering chemicals are too intense and that attachment to their use indicates "the left-handed path."
It's no good pointing out that they're both clinging to dogma that has no actual basis in anything, they'll just think you're being un-spiritual, if they hear you at all.
Allen winced, slightly. Discordant noise bothers him, and the conversations of two hundred people were bouncing off the walls.
Charlie approached us, gradually, talking briefly to several others on his crowded way and looking rather like a popular politician as a result, and he arrived just as Ash was describing an especially intense trip she'd had involving, I think, MDMA (also called Ecstasy). She saw him and cut herself off mid-sentence, apologizing and biting her lip.
"You don't need to stop on my account," Charlie commented. "It's not that my virgin ears can't handle it."
"But I thought you--" said Ash, and stopped. That Charlie is a recovering alcoholic is widely but not universally known, and so it is never discussed.
"You don't like talk about substances," finished another yearling, inexplicably called Beta.
"Why should I care what you talk about?" growled Charlie. "You want to be stupid, go ahead."
"Why do you think all drug use is stupid?" asked Ash. She seemed genuinely curious, and Charlie sat down to talk to her.
"You're putting words in my mouth," he said. "I don't think all drug use is stupid. You want to join some shamanic tradition, fine. There's a place for everything. And there's possible uses in therapy, and maybe some people can handle recreational use, I don't know. But most drug users are using drugs because they're being stupid, some way or other, including the psuedo-religious crap people around here get into."
"Psuedo-religious?"
"Yeah. You do it to see God, right?"
"Yes."
"Drugs, sex, dancing," interjected the second yearling, "all the things the Christians don't want us doing because they don't want us to cut out the middle-man and see God ourselves."
"Those things make you feel like you're seeing God," Charlie clarified, "but what good are your feelings? When the feeling goes away, has your life changed?"
In the background, somebody cheered and Allen winced again. In another corner of the room, a drum circle started up. The rain on the roof of the Dining Hall intensified. I wondered how we'd ever set the Man alight at sunset, but around here, something always seems to work out.
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