Psychedelics Always Take me Somewhere I Never Anticipated

Back in 2016, not so long after I had first moved to Minneapolis, I attended the Hippie
Modernism exhibit at the Walker Art Museum. I felt deeply moved by the collection, which had
been organized around Timothy Leary’s infamous mantra- “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” As a
painter, I love visiting galleries, but something about seeing this particular collection behind so
much plexiglass, carefully curated between the white walls made me feel alienated from the
original life and intention of the work. I resolved to return on LSD. I had a couple tabs I had
saved from back home for something special. I was still feeling a little isolated and hadn’t found
my footing yet in a new city so I decided this was the opportunity I had been waiting for.
The dose set in heavily by the time I made it the exhibit, and beyond the anxiety of tripping in
the presence of the General Public (something I would typically avoid at all costs) it was one of
my favorite memories of living here. I felt the closest I’ll ever get to traveling through time. I was
able to experience relics of 1960s and early 1970s counterculture as I felt they had been
intended, however cornball that may sound. It was the first time I was able to understand
psychedelics as a collective experience rather than solely an individual one. Here in front of me
was the work and thoughts and art and love and fears and politics and lives people were living
over forty, even fifty years between where I stood, and by taking the same conscious expanding
substances that brought these pieces to fruition, I felt as though I had picked up right where they
left off. Suddenly I felt so close to these thinkers and makers. I stopped historicizing their
existence, stopped thinking of them as separate from me. I saw that psychedelics had the
power to take anyone on a journey to the same place, a place where all of these creations and
the questions they asked made perfect sense. While each trip is as unique as a fingerprint, the
feelings that drive us are so universal. I soaked in so many words, ideas, and images that I was
sure nothing had changed in half a century, and that the owners of the names on these walls
knew just as much what it felt like to be me in that moment as I did.
Psychedelics always take me somewhere I never anticipated. After the exhibit, I wandered into
the Jack Whitten retrospective: Five Decades of Painting. I was sure I had never seen it before
and if I had, I must have walked right past. But ultimately, this was the work that washed over
me with a flood of awe that knocked me off my feet- I had to sit with each piece to soak them in.
Museum benches are so uncomfortable, and I remember being alone except for the person I
came with and the young security guards who flirted with each other, completely unaware of my
folly, whose voices carried obnoxiously and seemed to reverberate off the walls but it didn’t
even matter. I was able to look at these paintings and feel like I could look into them, as they
expanded endlessly, shifting and rearranging themselves for what felt like lifetimes. It forever
changed how I look at paintings. I see them no longer as an object, but as a place. Jack
Whitten’s art took center stage that afternoon. Each abstraction carried me somewhere I never
wanted to leave. All it took was a shifted perspective.
A trip is somewhere you can go without going anywhere. It’s a place in your mind’s eye, that you
can feel in your heart. It’s a fragile space that needs to be handled delicately and loved deeply.
But if you nurture it, it can nurture you in return.