“We all start out knowing magic. We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us. We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand. But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls. We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out. We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible. Told to act our age. Told to grow up, for God’s sake. And you know why we were told that? Because the people doing the telling were afraid of our wildness and youth, and because the magic we knew made them ashamed and sad of what they’d allowed to wither in themselves.” — Robert McCammon, Boy’s Life

I am writing this from a thin place on a mountain.

Montserrat. Alone. An hour from Barcelona by train, a thousand years and a million miles from the world I was born into. The serrated peaks are outside my window. The tourists descended hours ago. The monks have sung vespers and disappeared into their ancient rhythms. The mountain belongs to me tonight — and to sixty-eight years of a life I am only now beginning to understand fully.

Today is May 1st. May Day. A mystical threshold all its own — the ancient celebration of fertility, of spring’s full arrival, of the earth doing what it does naturally when conditions finally allow it.

I am sixty-eight years old today. Alone for the first time in my life on my birthday. Alone by choice. And I want to tell you something, watching the Catalonian dawn break over these surreal rocks:

I don’t know if I have ever been happier in my life.

How did this man — from humble beginnings — arrive at today?

The answer, I’ve come to understand, is magic, mycelium magic.

Planted

I was born in a tiny three-room house in Tennessee, a child of two seventeen-year-olds (children themselves) in 1958. Appalachian poverty. Pentecostal fire. A boy with whirlwinds inside him and no idea what to do with them. The community I was born into handed me a pre-fabricated identity and called it salvation. I wore it because it was the only garment available, and because the boy who wore it was loved, and love — even conditional love — is a powerful thing when you’re young and hungry for it.

The magic was in me from the beginning. I felt it lying naked on my bed at twelve, a spring breeze moving across my skin, the windows wide open, my whole body alive and electric and unashamed. In the shower, at age fifteen, I experienced my first orgasm and thought I had died and gone to heaven. I felt it exploring the Appalachian woods, in the folk music that moved through me before I knew music would change my life, in the forbidden books I devoured because they were the only doors out of a world too small for what I carried inside.

Then the institutions got hold of me.

Church. School. Culture. Ministry at nineteen. Marriage at twenty-one. Three decades of performing a version of myself that fit the container while the real thing waited underground, patient as mycelium, building its network in the dark.

A note about mycelium: it doesn’t die during dormancy. It networks. Invisibly, intelligently, without central control, it builds connections between organisms that appear separate on the surface. A single cubic inch of forest soil contains miles of mycelial threads. The network is more complex than the human brain. It keeps even dead stumps alive by feeding them through the web.

Those thirty years in the pulpit weren’t wasted years. They were mycelial years. Every wounded creative I sat with. Every mentor relationship. Every book I read in secret that the institutions would have burned. Every suppressed longing that went underground rather than dying. My network was growing. Connecting. Preparing.

Fertilized

In 2006, the prescribed container collapsed. I voluntarily resigned from the ministry. The marriage ended. I lost everything in the divorce — one hour with a guard to collect one box of belongings and my Jeep Wrangler. My nuclear family cast me out. Friends ghosted me. The phone went silent. For fifteen years, almost entirely silent.

Fertilizer isn’t pretty. It’s decomposed matter. In Appalachian gardens, it is shit. But it’s exactly what a dormant seed needs to spring open.

Pollinated

Gina. The watercolors. The writing that finally told the truth. The psychotherapy that named what fifty years had done to my true being. The first real encounters with my shadow and the slow, stubborn discovery that what lived in the dark wasn’t something to fear. It was something to embrace, to integrate.

More revelations. My outer body is actively male. My inner life — emotional, spiritual, imaginative — is actively female. I view the world through both. I always have. It took me six decades to say that without apology.

In 2003, during the earliest stirrings of this integration, I painted a watercolor of a nude fairy perched among autumn leaves and on a little brown mushroom — wings spread, face turned away, simultaneously vulnerable and free. My daughter called it obscene. I put it away in shame. I found it this week, writing this post.

It wasn’t obscene. It was the first honest self-portrait I ever made.

Growing

Gina has always said her essential nature is a nurturer. She has a green thumb — she can make anything grow and flourish. She proved it with flora and fauna at Kalien, our fifty-four-acre wilderness property in the Appalachian mountains, where she worked beside me for five years while we built something beautiful from raw land and stubbornness. In Austin, in Lebanon, in Dunedin, through every up and down, and toward a new beginning.

She can make anything flourish.

Including me.

She is my anam cara — my soul friend. She champions my freedom even when it costs her much. She stands behind the camera. She holds the space. She is the master gardener of our second life, and she has made life extraordinary.

Blooming

Barcelona arrived in 2023 like a city of my wildest dreams.

Here, nudity is not illegal. Eroticism is not a pathology. Freedom is not a theological problem requiring management. Strangers kiss you on the cheek. The Mediterranean light falls on ancient stone in a way that has inspired art for millennia. The Gothic Quarter, the Olympic pool at dawn, the terrace with the DeLonghi and the view toward Tibidabo — all of it conspiring daily to remind a man from three rooms in Appalachia that he chose well and arrived burgeoning.

My novel — The Mysteries of Barcelona, the first I’ve ever written — is currently being reviewed by Planeta Editorial, one of the most significant publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Written in this city. About this city. In the sensuous language, this city speaks naturally.

I am in full bloom.

The Little Brown Mushroom

In 1970 — when I was twelve years old, naked and lying on that bed feeling the spring breeze on my skin — Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and made psilocybin mushrooms a federal crime.

The same year the church was tightening its grip and putting clothes on my body, America was criminalizing the medicine that could have freed it.

Both were afraid of the same thing: human beings with direct, unmediated access to mystery—who didn’t need an institution standing between them and the sacred. People who could grow their own medicine, tend their own inner life, and trust their own experience.

I grow my medicine now. Ecuadorian spores, on a Barcelona terrace, not illegal here, tended with the same care Gina gives her spring flowers. Tomorrow I descend this mountain and walk back into the arms of my anam cara. And soon — with her hands holding mine, her presence steady, her green thumb on the soil of my becoming — I will take a full-dose journey with the little brown mushrooms we grew ourselves.

This is not a recreational experience. This is a ceremony, a ritual, a celebration of life.

Shamans in Siberia used sacred mushrooms to free their souls for journeys to the spirit world. America outlawed mushrooms because freedom would rob her of soldiers to willingly die in Vietnam. The mushrooms went underground — like mycelium, like my own suppressed life — and waited for conditions to change.

The mycelium never dies. It networks in the dark.

And when the conditions are finally right, it fruits.

I believe in magic. 

I believed it as a boy in those three rooms in Appalachia, before authorities spanked it and churched it and combed it out of me. I believe it more ferociously now, at sixty-eight, on this ancient magic mountain, having survived everything the institutions threw at my wildness.

The magic didn’t die.

It went underground and built a network so vast and complex and alive that no single cutting could kill it. It waited for a Mediterranean city that didn’t require subservience. It waited for a woman with a green thumb. It waited for little brown mushrooms planted, fertilized, pollinated, and grown by their hands.

It waited for this Friday.

I am a magic mushroom.

I always was.

Please check out my annual birthday nude selfie gallery at: https://www.randyelrod.com/age-68-nude-birthday-selfie/ Password: 68