“Fly agaric is the red mushroom with white spots that we see in fairy tale illustrations, old Disney movies, and (if you’re old enough to remember) Super Mario Brothers video games and all the Smurfs cartoons. They are seriously toxic, but they become less lethal when dried out. Conveniently, they grow most commonly under pine trees (because their spores travel exclusively on pine seeds), so the shaman would often hang them on lower branches of the pine they were growing under to dry out before taking them back to the village. As an alternative, he would put them in a sock and hang them over his fire to dry. Is this starting to sound familiar?”

“Another way to remove the fatal toxins from the ‘shrooms was to feed them to reindeer, who would only get high from them — and then pee, with their digestive systems having filtered out most of the toxins, making their urine safe for humans to drink and get a safer high that way. Reindeer happen to love fly agarics and eat them whenever they can, so a good supply of magic pee was usually ready and waiting all winter. In fact, the reindeer like fly agarics so much that they would eat any snow where a human who had drank ‘shroom-laced urine had relieved himself, and thus the circle would continue.”

Star Trek has always been self-referential but this is juuuuust a bit goofy.

And in local news:

https://nypost.com/2021/12/25/canada-secretly-tracked-33-million-phones-during-lockdown/

Two things that puzzle:

• 38 million Canadians, 33 million phones. That seems like it would cover every Canadian with a device.

• They bought all the data from Telus? So Bell and Rogers are sharing/selling? Or Telus has the capacity to just track everybody?

“The ones that I know who are willing to pay this huge price are the people I want to stand with.”

Rural Community Pastor,
East-Central Alberta

This has been my mantra for the past year and a half. How do I hold myself, my feelings, my knowing while also connecting through the channels of my heart to those who would seemingly oppose me.

How do I #OwnMySelf?

Honor what is for me and not need anyone to approve, change, or validate my reality in exchange for the human compassion of this mysterious experience we all chose.

When you wobble, check in with your body. Feel that pole of light that travels from your root to your crown and the deep awareness that encases that space. Rest into it. And then melt into your open chest.

One of the great lies is that it costs us anything to truly listen and to allow another to be who they are. Only from that space can we make informed choices about where to invest our energy…❤️