Timor mortis conturbat me

Dale Pendell has been, next to my wife, one of the most influential people in my life, for better and worse. I never met him.

He died of cancer back in January, after a long illness, but I was working with Katie on getting our business on firmer footing, and didn't find out until today, when a quote came up on my social media that I had posted back in 2013. It's from his book Pharmako/Dynamis:

"There is a spring. It comes out of the rocks on a high ridge dividing two great watersheds. The water is very cold and is pure beyond any other. It may be the only thing in the world that is not poison. It is surely the only thing in the world that can save your life. I'm not going to tell you where it is, but you know how to find it."

I quoted this because, at the time, I was just coming out of a period of severe depression that had been precipitated by what I believe to have been Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. You can read about that here. I spent most of 2012 depressed out of my mind, watching anime and MMA to get the periodic shots of dopamine I so desperately needed. For those who didn’t click, I used a plant called kratom pretty heavily from 2004-2009, by the end using it almost three times a week. 2013 was when I started getting my head back together with yoga and meditation.

My depression wasn’t Pendell’s fault, of course. He was a writer and an ethnobotanist. Ethnobotany is the study of how plants and people interact. Specifically, he was super into the plants that people used to alter their consciousness. He wrote a series of books, the Pharmko series, that were a combination epic poem, scientific journal, trip report, sociological treatise, meditation guide, and occult grimoire. There is nothing like them in literature, that I know of.

In 1999 or so I stole one of his books from the sister of a friend of mine (Hi Lark! Hi Chad! I know you’ll never read this - sorry about everything) because I had fallen in love with it and couldn’t stop reading when we had to go back to New York from New Hampshire. At the time I was very interested in the chapter on Salvia Divinorum, which is a plant with hallucinogenic properties that, while useful to the seeker after wisdom, are unpleasant enough to make the stuff unpalatable to the casual, recreational user. This kept it from being scheduled by the DEA, since they mostly legislate against pleasure. Wisdom, being altogether more difficult to quantify, and perennially unpopular with the masses, they mostly leave alone.

Finding Salvia in the early days of the internet wasn’t super easy, but it wasn’t hard, and once you found somebody who could get you that, they often had other things for sale. That’s how I found out about kratom, which is a plant with opiate-like properties that, at the time, people believed to be non-addictive. Turned out that wasn’t true, but we live and learn.

One of the things that set Pendell apart from a lot of ethnobotanists was that, like Terrance McKenna or Timothy Leary, he made no bones about having tried all of the substances he wrote about. He was an alchemist in the truest sense, in that he was both the experimenter and the experimented upon, all with an eye toward enhancing and opening up his experience of the world.

It should be no surprise, then, that the guy who tried any number of different plants to alter and enhance his consciousness would, at some point, get liver cancer. This may be my protestant upbringing speaking, of course. There’s no way of knowing how or why a person gets cancer, and there may be any number of contributing factors. The idea that a person deserves to die for having pleasure and joy in the world and in the body is a pernicious myth propagated by puritanical busybodies, and I hate it.

But still he got cancer. He was recovering from it right around the time I was dealing with cancer, too. Which made today particularly hard. I made it. He didn’t. We’re all on a march to the grave.

I’ll likely edit out most of this.

He wrote beautifully. He wrote with cleverness and wisdom, like Terrance McKenna meets Alan Watts, with a dash of Gary Snyder. Because of him, I altered my consciousness, both with and without plants. I probably would have done that anyway, though. I’m still doing it to this day (yoga, Wim Hof). I loved him and his writing, and I’m sad he’s dead. I wish that we all lived a lot longer, and without the suffering that comes with living in a fallen world.