Giant City and the Emotions Attached to a Home BiomeHow a hike in a state park taught me what is west and what is not.

Wind itself can drive you crazy. Sometimes there is a hysteria to it, a shrill tirade that goes on for days, relentless, unappeasable. Sometimes it is angry, as though Zeus sucked in his breath to roar at us. Invisible and unpredictable, wind can stroke us with a lover’s tenderness in the morning and topple our home that afternoon.

Why is it only certain characters among my friends—the recovered addict who got rich off disaster services, the photographer who did federal time on a RICO conviction, the former scout and paratrooper with traumatic brain injury—tell me they love me? My polite friends, the “normal” ones, the ones with long, seemingly solid marriages and steady white-collar jobs and no priors, do not say such things, despite often having been in my life longer or more directly.

Reverence, serenity, and compassion, courtesy of a mushroom? Well, what would be wrong with that? Humans are a broken species. Negative emotions wired into us for survival have run amok in times we call civilized, and now we hunt, or at least hurt, one another. It would be lovely to think we could all meditate our way to wholeness. But why not speed the process?