Clearcut: What Forests Teach Us About the Necessity of Community in a Time of Fracture 

By: Rosalind Watts, Ph.D.

John’s story points to something that the cultures that have stewarded these medicines for generations understood, and that modern Western culture has largely forgotten.

In 1955, an American banker persuaded María Sabina, a Mazatec healer from the mountains of southern Mexico, to let him sit in on a velada, the night-long ceremony in which she had worked with sacred mushrooms her whole life. He took photographs, and two years later, they appeared in Life magazine. The molecule was isolated in a Swiss laboratory, and what had been carried inside a living community of ceremony and song and land began a long journey into a culture that did not know how to hold it.

Near the end of her life, María Sabina said: ‘From the moment the foreigners arrived, the holy children lost their purity. They lost their force; the foreigners spoiled them. From now on they won’t be any good. There’s no remedy for it.’ (Álvaro Estrada, María Sabina: Her Life and Chants, 1981)

What she was describing was not a failure of chemistry, but a failure of the container. The medicine had been extracted from the circle that gave it meaning, and in that extraction, something essential was lost. The mushrooms, in Mazatec tradition, were not a drug that happened to grow inside a plant. They were a medicine held inside a cosmology, a community, a relationship to the land. We cannot extract one piece of a living system and expect it to do the work the whole system was doing.

The cultures that carried these medicines understood that the source intention of psychedelic healing is the relationship itself: with self, with community, with the living world. To extract the molecule without the circle is to lose the medicine’s deepest purpose.  This is the inheritance we are working with now, and it reaches far beyond the psychedelic field into every corner of a culture that has forgotten how to hold its people.

There is something that fascist and authoritarian movements have always understood: that the destruction of community is a political project. Isolated people are easier to control, frightened people reach for strongmen. Atomized people cannot organize, cannot imagine alternatives, cannot hold each other. The pyramid depends on us forgetting that the circle was ever an option.

You can watch this logic playing out right now, even inside the world of psychedelic medicine itself. This year, the US Department of Defense will begin giving active-duty soldiers MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. There is talk of dosing soldiers before they are ever traumatized, building the medicine into training like a kind of psychological armor. The ethnobotanist Dennis McKenna named the danger plainly: that we might use it to turn people into ‘more efficient killing machines.’

This is not simple, and I want to hold it carefully. A traumatized person deserves healing, whoever they are, whatever uniform they wear, and none of us stands cleanly outside the systems we are critiquing. But we come back to the same question I mentioned at the start, the question my mentor Sophy Banks reminds me to ask in moral dilemma situations of political complexity: what is the source intention of psychedelics? What is the medicine for? What would the plants themselves want to be used for?  

If these medicines are for healing and connection, then to heal a traumatized soldier and return them to combat is to deliver them back to the source of their own trauma, and to require them to inflict it, in turn, on countless others. The concept of healing is inverted, made to serve the thing it exists to undo. A medicine of connection enlisted to support campaigns of annihilation.

Refusing to be complicit in a system using medicines of connection to sustain the machinery of killing is more challenging than one might think. Resisting political violence cannot be carried alone: it requires community, courage, solidarity, and integrity. It requires a willingness to face the personal cost of standing up for what we value, but that cost is bearable when we are held by the village, held by the circle.

The slow work of rebuilding local connection, sitting with neighbors, tending to the frightened parts of ourselves, learning to stay present with discomfort rather than numb it, is not a retreat from politics; it is one of its most necessary forms. The conversations we have in our kitchens can ripple outward and contribute to real, systemic change.

We have lost so much of the connective tissue that once held communities together, the shared green spaces, the open doors, the informal gathering places where people simply existed alongside one another without agenda. Rebuilding that, stitch by stitch, in whatever modest form is available to us, is as urgent as any campaign or petition.

The forest regenerates through the deep connections of the mycelial web, through countless invisible exchanges of nutrients and signals between roots. And the quality of those connections matters: not just the tender and the vulnerable, but loud and warm and joyful too, full of laughter and cathartic singing and dancing that shakes something loose that words never could. The strength of the whole emerges from the quality of the connections between the parts, the trust that rises up in a circle of people who once were strangers.

What I have witnessed over six years of this work is that when people are genuinely held in community, something shifts that individual interventions rarely sustain. They come home to their bodies, and they find they can feel difficult things without being destroyed by them. Their roots deepen, their branches reach toward others. They learn, slowly, to stand in the circle. In a time of manufactured division, that is not a small thing.

In a culture built on separation, choosing to belong is a revolution at the roots.