~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


PEYOTE FLASHBACK


One morning in early Spring, out in the predawn dimness, in the still dark distance at the far end of the garden there's a visual vibration, a multiple pink shimmering, an eye-tickling glow that grows brighter, grows more multiple even as I look, as though there were a flock of large unblinking really fireflies out there hovering in the black, unmoving in the deeper shadows of the tall kinmokusei; I rub my eyes, I am reminded of...is there such a thing as a peyote flashback I wonder; this is before even my morning tea, but who knows what awaits in the golden years of the hallucinatory explorer of earlier times? The sun breaks the horizon; I see now: it is the first-opened blossoms of our wild mountain azaleas, than which there is no more fiery, surprising, or hallucinatory pink. Peyote sleeps.