This is part of the Astroids series.
saddle your horse
and saddle your spirit
run to the mountain spirit
be free
Freedom
Loneliness
Slowly, step by step, I climbed up the hill to the campfire at the top. I could hear a river gushing by, gently. Looking up, I found the sky shrouded with stars, yet they didn’t shine on this land. The fire itself burned without any wood, without anything apparent to feed it. All around me, it was pitch dark. Neither the flame nor the stars could penetrate it.
Two wooden stumps sat by the fire, both empty. I made my way over and sat on one, hoping someone would take the second.
I sat there for a while, yet nothing happened. Then the Icaros began, and Aya reached deep beneath my subconscious. Underneath it all, life and concepts were distilled into simple words. The words were powerful, resonating with our personalities, our sense of self, our insecurities. There, I found Trust, Love and Freedom, my intentions. But it pulled up a different word: لا تتركوني. To me it carried two things at once: don’t forget me; don’t leave me behind.
I felt this loneliness rising, uncontrollably, until it overtook me. I cried, I wept, I sobbed. I didn’t wipe the tears. I allowed myself to feel it, to embrace it. I didn’t care.
Some time passed. It could have been an hour or five minutes. Then the memories came.
The Wounds
I grew up with four brothers, no sisters. I am the youngest. With five boys around, the place was always noisy, lively. I’d come back from school and there was always something going on. Banter, soccer games, errands to run, secret deals my parents didn’t know about. When I was 12, in the span of one year, all of my brothers left the house. Two went to the army, one moved to the US, one moved to a different city to study. The house became silent and died.
My parents grew distant from each other. Not knowing how to cope, my entire world folded itself into my room. I cried my eyes out, alone. Without a role model to help me navigate it, I came to the conclusion that life is easier if I don’t care. If my heart turned to stone and I cared for no one, the hurt would go away. So I slowly distanced myself from everyone. I stopped going to weddings and funerals. I talked myself out of every friendship. I stopped hanging out with the people I knew and convinced myself we all just want something from each other; that if someone approached me, it was because they wanted something material, مصلحة. It went on like this for a while. When my brothers came back, I never connected with them on the same level again.
Then the war broke out. At first things were peaceful. Then the first person I knew died. بشار شلهوب. He was a goofy person. We used to play video games and hang out. During a demonstration, a bullet hit him. He died on the spot. I didn’t cry for his death. Felt nothing.
Then the next person died, and the next, and the next. وسيم , علاء , and others. There were times I was fully convinced I was a psychopath. The numbness never left. I went through life unable to feel anything. I crossed paths with people who genuinely cared for me; some told me I was their best friend, how much they valued me, and I could never match their energy, never reflect their feelings back.
When the Syrian regime collapsed in the fall of 2024, the dams broke. I cried for days. Especially when the footage from the prisons came out. Thinking about how people I knew had their final moments in those dark places. What were their final thoughts? Did they think of anyone?
My parents were very strict Muslims. No music, no dancing, no singing. If a woman came on TV wearing a skirt, my dad would change the channel. I didn’t listen to music until I was 16, when I got an mp3 player and started with heavy metal, because it was satanic and I was curious. The religious texts I was taught weren’t spirituality. They were a manual for life, and they were vivid. I was taught that if you drank alcohol, God would make you drink from Tinat al-Khabal, the ooze and discharge and sweat of the people in Hell, the fluid that drains off their burning skin and flesh. That adulterers would be hung by their genitals and lashed with whips of fire and iron, while the angels of punishment mocked them.
I’m not a Muslim anymore. But teaching a young boy those scriptures that early scars his psyche, subconsciously, forever.
The fire in front of me burned without wood, without eating anything. It wasn’t there to hurt me. Every fire I’d been taught to imagine was the other kind; skin and iron and whips.
I never broke free.
Let Go!
I sat on the stump, staring at the flame for a long time, sobbing. I was holding all these memories, just hugging them to my heart, to my chest, to keep them warm, to keep me warm, to keep them alive. Then Aya told me to reach in and let them go.
The past is no more, the future is a dream, only the present is real. So I reached in, touched my heart, and pulled each memory out, throwing them into the fire, one by one. With each memory burning, I felt lighter. Until I was holding the last one. The memory of Waseem.
He was the most energetic person I’ve met in my entire life. We met in university. He always had a smile on his face. I think my politically-incorrect sense of humour came from him. He was always helping people out; his friends as well as those he’d only just met. When I moved to Egypt, he was one of the few who kept checking on me. I never really conveyed my feelings and state of mind, but I think he knew I needed help. In our last exchange, I shared a band I’d just discovered, “Mono.”
He told me about a woman he’d met, his first girlfriend, describing how it felt to hold her hand. The next week, I heard he went to the university to pick up his diploma. He never returned home. Some time later, his family received a letter to pick up his corpse. He died in prison, on a fake charge.
I held his memory in my hand, unable to throw it into the flame. I couldn’t do it. Time passed. Then something inside pushed me, and I sent Waseem’s memory, and the guilt, to the fire. The tears stopped.
I looked up; I’d been staring at the flame so long. I saw a net. It had been there the whole time, surrounding me and the campsite. The spirits I’d just let go were caught in it, trapped. Not only could they not get out, but nothing else could get in. I thought to myself: I have to set them free. So I looked for something to cut the net. I realized I had a lighter in the basket on my right, in the real world. I grabbed it and set the net on fire. Slowly, it burned and disappeared. Then the spirits flew away.
Now I sat by myself, and still I felt alone in many ways. At least before, I held the memories close to my heart and they kept me company. But then I thought, I’m not alone. Aya is with me. And she won’t leave me, I won’t let her go. I started to feel the urge to vomit and I suppressed it, and then it occurred to me how dark and twisted what I was trying to do was. Out of my own insecurities, I was hurting someone, something, else. I started to think of Aya like a cat. If you hold her too tight, against her will, trapped, she will bite, she will scratch, and she will get out and away. The only way to get her to settle down and sit in your lap is to leave the door open. She can get out anytime she wants. For now, I will enjoy the company.
Introduction
By now, you might be wondering where I was, or what I was describing. This is an ayahuasca ceremony; one of three I attended in Peru. Coming in, I had three intentions I wanted to explore: Freedom, Trust, and Love. My other intention; one I’d only told my therapist about; was my desire for death; not physically, but metaphorically. I hated who I had become, and how my life had converged on a small set of experiences. I’d been stuck for over a decade. Somehow, each of the three ceremonies explored one of these intentions.
The ceremony is held in a small temple. We’re each assigned a mattress, where we sit upright. The attendees sit on one side, the facilitators across from us. It’s held late at night; it starts at 8:30pm and runs past midnight; and it’s guided by two shamans. They administer the medicine. When they feel the energy in the room, they sing Icaros in their language, songs that guide the ceremony and control the energy and intensity of the medicine.
It’s hard to describe, but Ayahuasca -Aya- induces this sleep-like state. You know the feeling you sometimes get falling asleep, when only one half of you goes under while the other half stays awake, aware, confused by the dreams? Until that half begins interacting with the dreams, interpreting them. I found that Aya works on what’s in our hearts. It pulls out the raw emotions we might ignore, deny, or struggle with, then forces us to acknowledge them and deal with them. In this ceremony, it exposed my loneliness.
This ceremony began at 8:30pm. A few minutes before the shamans entered, it started pouring rain. I could hear the raindrops tapping the ceiling of the temple. Beside each of us, a bucket for when we purge. A basket with a lighter, two mapacho cigarettes, and a spray of Agua de Florida.
The temple is dark but for a few candles. After everyone drinks the medicine, we each sit upright. Then the candles go out. We sit in the dark for a while, letting the medicine take over. Ayahuasca is a purgative medicine. Once people start purging, and when the energy in the temple feels right, the shamans begin to sing the Icaros.
Connection
Things calmed down; I was at the temple again, hearing the rain. Time passed; then I found myself back at the campfire, thinking about how I was still alone here. I’d released the memories, but no one knew I was here. No one would find me like this. Not in this quiet corner of mine.
I thought about the few options I had to announce myself. I could make noise; singing is one way to let others know where you are. Dancing too: you send vibrations through the ground that those nearby can pick up on. And if I listened well enough, I could even sense other people’s vibrations and noise. Finally, light; I could build a bigger fire so others could spot it in this dark, desolate place. When I turned around to face the fire, I saw it had become a raging flame. Then it dawned on me: I’d fed it all those memories. It made sense for it to be this bright and strong.
Still, no one came, so I decided to venture into the dark and look. As I stepped in, sometimes the leaves beneath my feet would light up, showing me the way; where to step next, and then the next, and the next. All I had to do was step into the dark and make a move. Sometimes I’d take a step and no light would come on, and I’d have to backtrack, until a route lit up.
The sound of the pouring rain pulled me back to reality. I was at the temple, the lights still out. I was breathing slowly, steadily. The shamans were still singing. From their direction, I noticed a pulsing ultraviolet light. I was seeing their music in colours. The colour represented the emotions of the song, its brightness and dimness shifting with the crescendos. Some of the songs were pitch black. They’d pull my consciousness away.
There was silence for a while. Then one of the facilitators started singing in a familiar language; a kind of break, to bring the souls back to their homes. Her song had a fiery red colour. It radiated calm and warmth. While the temple was still dark, I felt everyone’s presence huddling in for warmth. Not a minute after the song ended, I finally purged; the medicine came up out of me.
The break didn’t last long before the shamans picked up where they’d left off. Whenever I paid attention to their Icaros, they’d send me spiralling out of myself. I’d lose all sense of my body, my surroundings, and forget my own name.
This was when my consciousness shattered and I became fragments. Floating from one thought to the next, with no narrative to tie them together. Fading in and out. Memories blended, and there was no Before or After. The following are bits and pieces I wrote after the ceremony ended.
Home
For a brief moment, I felt myself coming back. As before, I felt Aya pull another word into my attention. This time, it was Home.
What is home? I asked myself. Having lived in four countries, surrounded by ever-changing faces, never settled, I struggled to say where home was for me. It wasn’t until recently that I started investing in my apartment to make it comfier. I’d always been hesitant to. What was the point of personalizing my space when I might leave again in a few years?
All of a sudden I pulled my collar to my nose and breathed in. A thought that wasn’t my own surfaced: this is home. It was referring to my body. Home is where the soul resides. Each time my soul and thoughts drifted, they always came back to the same place: home. Home is what we return to each time we wake. Our bodies are how home takes physical form, but home itself is something above the body. If my arms and legs were chopped off, I’d still have a home, and it would still be whole. It can’t be taken from me.
We look after our homes. We maintain them, keep them clean and tidy. Sometimes we invite people in, and they invite us into theirs. That is how I think about intimacy, physical or spiritual. Wherever I go, I carry my home with me; it can’t be taken away. There is so much Freedom in this. The worst betrayal is to find someone in your home, uninvited.
Death
What is life but to learn how to die? I should stop thinking of life and death as two separate things. They are one. Death is just a stage of life. The stars shine bright, then they die. Plants sprout, grow, glow, then decay and die. In order for something to die, it has to exist in the first place. Death itself isn’t scary. It is just a stage. Nothingness is scary; to never be born.
Yet to learn how to die, we must first learn how to live. To understand something, one must create it themselves. Children, farming, music, and art are all examples of creating life.
Inward
Directions have been important throughout the ceremony. The fire was in front of me. Once satisfied, I looked up and saw the spirits. Still, I felt there was more to do, so I looked down. That was dark, difficult, and scary. I felt there was something there.
Like a siren calling from the deep seas, I felt something pulling me deep, deep down. To that place where primal fears live. Bit by bit, I slipped. I wasn’t ready. Something begged me to pull myself out of that place. Then I became aware of the Icaros again. Like a rescue line, I held onto it, and it pulled me back. The same Voice that had been with me throughout the ceremony said, “We will go down there, just not today.”
Outward
The Icaros died out. I could hear the sound of the rain again; each drop hitting the ceiling, vibrating through the temple, through my being, pulling me back, piece by piece. I opened my eyes and focused my attention. There was movement in the temple. The shamans were asking if anyone was still deep in the medicine. A few moments later, they concluded that night’s ceremony, and a few candles came on.
Reflections
While I’ve tried my best to describe the experience, there is a depth of emotion I can’t convey with words. I can’t, and don’t want to, rationalize my visions.
Weeks after the ceremony, I find myself revisiting that campsite. The darkness is really the universe around us. Everything outside of us is dark and colourless. Light is just wavelengths; it carries no colour-like attributes. The colours we experience are our interpretation of these waves. In a way, we paint the universe with colour… our universe.
There is no sound outside. The universe is silent. Sound is just vibrations in the air. Yet we perceive words, songs, poems. We compose the silence into music.
If a rock fell on a planet far, far away; who gives a shit? But if a human was there to witness it, wrote a story about it, and maybe named that rock, suddenly we perceive this mass of matter differently, and it has meaning.
We birth meaning unto the universe. The meaning is always there, present, inside. We share these Meanings with others, as others share their Meanings with us, and all the while, this dark forest that surrounded us becomes brighter.
That fire in my vision, I think, is my soul, my spirit, my life. Sometimes it’s a dying ember, and other times, a raging flame. My heart is where my identity lives, where Mehdi is. When I dragged the memories out of my heart and tossed them into the fire, I stopped identifying with them. These memories are still there, in my soul. My friends are never gone. There are bits of their habits, words, thoughts, Meaning, that I carry with me, in my soul. But I’m no longer a victim of the past. The past has led to the present, but it doesn’t control the future… I am free.
The net that surrounded me is all the habits and lies I’ve told myself for protection. These lies have kept me safe. But the net doesn’t let anything out, and it doesn’t let anything in either.
When the leaves and the ground lit up, I don’t think the ground was necessarily what gave the light. The light is always with us. We make our own path, as much as we forge our own Meaning. The important thing is to venture out into the dark, to explore, to take risks, to make the first move when all is unknown, to yolo.
The Voice I mentioned throughout was not a voice I heard with my ears, but thoughts that appeared. But these thoughts weren’t my own. As quickly as they came, they left. And before they left me, towards the end of the ceremony, they said: “The rain never stopped. You just couldn’t hear it for most of the ceremony. You were lost inside. Open your eyes; look into the sun. Never forget what is outside. There are worlds and universes outside, but unless you open your eyes and look up, you won’t see them.”
Trust
The second ceremony was back to back with the first. The following day, I felt lost. I came back from the journey, but not fully. Throughout the day, I felt I was missing something; a piece of me. Even though I’d dressed well and it wasn’t cold, I was shivering and shaking. I was tense, anxious… afraid.
I found some time to paint that day, and I had this vision of a tree:
The tree represents the possibilities in life. The leaves are every possible experience there is. The branches are the paths that lead to these experiences, the decisions we must make, the skills we must learn. Some branches are broken at birth, forever locked to us. I am not 6’7”. I will never be an NBA player. Traumas can break branches too, keeping us from the life we could have had. Unless those broken branches grow back, those experiences stay locked to us forever.
Fear
Just as with the first ceremony, I sat meditating in the dark after drinking the medicine. I focused on my breathing, trying to relax, to shake off the shiver and unease I hadn’t been able to loosen since the day before.
Fifteen minutes later, I puked. The night before, I hadn’t purged until very late in the ceremony. It confused me. Soon after, I started shivering even more; sweating and shaking at the same time. I felt Aya attacking me, pulling me apart piece by piece; the skin, the muscles, the bones, the nerves, until there was nothing left… but a scared child. The medicine tore down all the walls and showed me what I’d been hiding inside.
Slowly, I felt myself fading. It was pitch dark, but I’d get these flashes where I saw myself surrounded by a dome of otherworldly faces, staring at me, laughing. The entire dome was shifting and moving. Then the dome disappeared, and I saw three large figures, faces with no bodies, like those drawn on tribal African shields. They were emitting so much energy and light that I felt them pushing me outside my body, outside myself, out of the protection of the temple, into nothingness.
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t sit straight. My thoughts ceased to exist. Nothing I held or knew was relevant anymore. My intentions became meaningless. All my gratitudes, all my anchors, were gone. One of the facilitators came to check in on me. I told them I shouldn’t have done this. (I wasn’t sure if I was referring to the second ceremony, or to ayahuasca, or to coming to Peru, or to something else.) I started hitting my leg, the mattress; maybe the sting of pain would keep me inside my body. Everything was falling apart.
The facilitator asked if I’d like to go to the “timeout mattress.” It’s a mattress at the far end of the temple. When someone is having an overwhelming ceremony, the small walk and movement sometimes help. I took his offer. But I couldn’t stand on my own. My feet were wobbly and shaking. He carried most of my weight. What should have been a four-metre walk took me half a minute. After getting to my new spot, I sat down.
I sat in silence for a while. Stephen asked me to talk, to tell him what I was feeling. I tried to think… to feel…
It wasn’t fear of death. Not of falling, not of… anything. Just raw fear, as primal as it gets. No cause, no trigger. It just was. I thought to myself: why am I experiencing this? Why was this time different? Then a realization hit me. Every time I’d been afraid in my life, I gritted my teeth and conquered it alone. But here I am, experiencing the truest of fears; and I am not alone. (Trust.) Stephen is holding my hand. I am surrounded by people. I am not alone. I think this was the missing revelation from the day before. Around the campfire, I was always alone. Even after everything, I was still alone. Today, that shifted. As I said the thought out loud, I felt a tingling at the back of my head, and a heavy weight, as if it were a demon, jumped off my shoulders. Just like that, in ten seconds, I stopped sweating, I stopped shivering, I was breathing normally. I was back.
I stood up with a clear mind and walked back to my spot, unassisted. By then, the shamans had started their songs.
With Honey and Dew
I sat down, nerves settled, mind clear. Then Aya started to build me back up, putting me together piece by piece, with honey and dew. She asked me what kind of man I wanted to be. I found myself floating, swinging from one thought to another.
My attention focused on my identity. What is Mehdi? Who is Mehdi? There was no single answer. Just the intentions: Love, Trust, Freedom. She showed me visions of futures, possibilities, experiences; gay, sex, cocktails, gatherings. But she also showed me a charming person: warm, kind, caring… that was me. There’s such joy in connecting with others: mentally, physically, emotionally. I used to need to be drunk to get into this frame of mind. I don’t think I need to anymore.
There are so many lonely, single people. People rarely meet these days. I’ve had this conversation many times, and we always blame the place: Toronto is a lonely city, the Seattle Freeze. But if so many different places suffer the same crippling isolation, maybe we’re the problem. I tried to break my sexual identity down further, until a thought told me to change the question: “You’re doing it again. You’re overthinking.”
I thought of work: how many months, how many years of my life I’ve spent working. Work is what I do for a living. It is not my identity. Identity is my core, my soul. I existed before I started working, and will continue to exist after I retire. Memories aren’t part of my identity either, which is why I hate the mindless victim talk. It creates a feedback loop that feeds on itself, a spiral leading downward.
The tree came back. Aya showed me that the best place to view the tree from is the outside, and the best way to navigate it is to be a monkey; jumping branch to branch, connecting with whoever’s on each one to guide me. (Freedom.)
Don’t apologize for inconvenience. Apologize only when you’ve been selfish and hurt someone.
I’ve taken up many hobbies these past five years, all driven by a desire to connect with others. But so many of them steered me in the wrong direction. The piano is great, but it’s a solo instrument. I wouldn’t trade it and I don’t regret learning it, but I had the wrong intention going in.
Singing, on the other hand, is the oldest instrument. Everyone sings and dances. Always. Singing and dancing are some of the most intimate expressions of the self. Let others hear the noise, tune to the frequencies, join the campfire, and turn it into a party.
In my haze, I realized the shamans had stopped the Icaros. They were laughing. The night before, I’d thought of the shamans as gods. As my soul was torn to pieces and my mind was tossed and swallowed by the depths, they were present the entire time, unwavering. And here they were, laughing. It was only today that I saw how friendly they were, a side I hadn’t noticed before. It is hard to appreciate life when the mind is lost in seriousness. It is difficult to see others when I always look down.
I’ve been living stuck on one branch of life, sadness, depression. These feelings are true, but they aren’t my identity. And I built my entire universe, all my thoughts, around them. Just live. Be a monkey.
Love
Up ahead, a river: endless, eternal, gentle. I strip and step inside.
The ritual is all familiar by now. After drinking the medicine on the last night, I sat, anxious, waiting for something, for anything, to happen. Time passed. Unlike the first two ceremonies, I was still present: intact, whole. The shamans started the Icaros. More time went by. Still, nothing happened.
Gradually, then suddenly, I was on all fours, crawling through a very dark place. Before me stood a cloaked shape, veiled in a darkness darker than everything around it. I sensed no fear or malice from it. Strange as it was, it felt welcoming, inviting me to crawl inside its cloak. I gulped, and crawled in.
I was surrounded by warmth, kindness, peace, and an unconditional love. I had never felt this loved before. All my strength faded away. I tried to lift my arm, but couldn’t. I heard the Voice tell me: “You are safe here. You don’t need your strength.”
I sat there for a while, enjoying the peace. Just as water poured into a vase will eventually overflow, when a person is loved this much, the only thing they can do is share that love outward. I couldn’t see the bodies of the others around me, but I could feel them. For the first time, I saw the souls behind the smiles, the tears, the stories, and the traumas. I cried, not from sadness but from love.
We Contain Multitudes
I was at the campfire, but this time it was different. The darkness that had surrounded the site had lifted. I could clearly see there were others around me, and they could see me. The darkness was never there. It was always in my imagination. I was never unseen.
Emotions influence thoughts, and thoughts influence emotions. They feed on each other. They create negative feedback loops, spiralling out of control, downward into the abyss. We have to recognize when it’s happening, or let someone point it out to us. Just as with other people, we can’t control how they behave or think. We can only control how we respond. The same applies to emotions. We don’t control how our feelings arise; only how we react to them after we experience them.
At each ceremony, the ancient gods descended: the Goddess of Freedom, the God of Fear, the Goddess of Love. The raw feelings, the old ones, the ones that overwhelm us and command our thoughts and our bodies. Once I acknowledged them, each night, they surrendered their control. And I am free.
Inside all of us is unconditional love. It is the most raw and basic human emotion. We shroud it with memories, traumas, and ego attachment.
At last, I found forgiveness in my heart for those who wronged me. Trauma manifests in twisted ways. We often relive and reenact our traumas by inflicting them on others. In its own strange way, it is a cry for help. With that realization, I could only feel love, even for the cruel.
Life is vast, and so are we. No one is ever just one thing. Our dreams, our hopes, our feelings, our thoughts, our bodies, our inner worlds. We contain multitudes. I contain multitudes.
I will carry this warmth with me forever. When the nights are coldest and brightest, I will always feel that love inside. I didn’t throw up that night. And just as the shamans were about to close the ceremony, I felt the Voice bidding me farewell: “I will always be with you.”