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Hello, search engine listeners.

Before we begin today, I just want to apologize for the quality of my voice.

I've gotten myself a bit sick, but I'm going to play you a conversation from the before times when I still had a functioning voice.

Okay, how's this working?

Hi.

Oh, it sounds so much better.

Oh, good.

Okay, let me also move this out of the way so it's not so in your view.

A few weeks ago, I hopped on the line with someone I've known for a long time, someone I really admire.

Hi, Anna.

Hi, PJ.

How are you doing?

I'm good.

Anna Sale.

She makes a podcast I love called Death, Sex, and Money.

It is absolutely the best titled podcast that exists.

It does not hurt that the podcast itself is also very good.

She interviews all sorts of people with unusual life experiences and asks them the kind of questions you typically reserve for the people you're closest to.

That's how I think of the show anyway.

How do you explain your show to people?

Like when you meet strangers' places?

Well, this is where taglines are helpful.

We say it's a show about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.

And it's an interview show where I talk to people who are well-known and people who aren't public figures about the stuff that all of us go through and are figuring out in some way.

And then when you say that to people, do they start saying to you the things that they

want address on a show like that?

Like when you say like, oh, we talk about the things that people think about a lot, but should talk about more.

Are people like, oh, that reminds me, I'm afraid to die?

It's not usually quite like that, but my favorite is when it's maybe an older woman who I feel a little bit sheepish about saying the name of the show to, and then they go, Oh,

interesting.

And then I know we're off to the races.

It's not that they give me story ideas, it's that we just dig in with each other.

Like the name of the show has unlocked a sort of permission barrier or something.

Well, the way I experience it is, you know, I was raised in West Virginia.

I am a polite person.

I am eager to please socially.

And so it feels like this moment where I kind of like flip around my cards and say like, I've got a little punk rock edge to me.

And so then that can be fun in social situations, especially where it's a little bit more buttoned up or stuffy.

When Anna and I first met, we were working at the same radio station.

I was a lowly temp worker.

She was a star there.

A political reporter, everyone seemed to be in awe of.

Young, talented, and accomplished, except, and this is pretty rare in media, all of those things and liked by everyone.

It sort of felt like she could do whatever she wanted to.

And then one day she announced she was not going to cover politics anymore.

She was going to make this new show, Death, Sex, and Money, where she asked people these private questions about their lives.

She's been running the show steadily for a decade.

They had a brief brush with podcasting mortality late last year, but I was very happy to see them cheat death.

I've been on this funny trip lately where I've been trying to figure out what podcasting is for, why I am doing it.

I'm still figuring it out.

But Anna is one of the people I've bounced these questions off of a little bit.

I feel like one of the ways we are sort of like artistic comrades is that we're curious about other people's lives, but also sometimes I can hear in your show a person who is figuring out their own life as well.

And like you have been asking questions about these three topics that are the kinds of things that people think about deeply and often, and sometimes in anguish.

How has what you've cared about changed since you started broadcasting the show a decade ago?

I mean, a lot has changed.

I would say that the origin story for me of wanting to make a show about the most important building blocks of our lives or the ones that we can't avoid is that I was desperately looking for

guides at the point where I started the show.

You know, know, I was 30, 33, 34.

I was divorced.

I was living in New York.

We were working in the same building together.

You know, it was a time where I was like, I don't really know what I'm doing here.

And I just want to have conversations with people where I don't feel so alone in not knowing what I'm doing here and to feel reassurance that it's something you figure out along the way.

And

then over the course of the last 10 years, I got married.

I became a parent.

I've got two kids.

I crossed the country.

I live in a house.

I have two dogs.

My life is characterized by stability right now.

Like I'm living out the consequences of some really big choices I made in my, you know, early adulthood.

And so now I think this is also a response to the political climate and what's shifted over the last 10 years.

I'm really interested in

ambiguity.

and

uncertainty and

having conversations that add complexity rather than certainty.

It serves each of us and it also is going to serve how we have to make decisions together.

I have this hope that someday soon talking about uncertainty and ambiguity as values will start to feel like buzzwords.

Like there will be enough of us aiming at that point on the horizon that when I hear someone saying they care about that stuff, I'll feel like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we all do.

But I don't feel that way, not yet.

Right now, those still feel like watchwords.

And I really do get those feelings from Anna's show of someone thinking and wrestling and trying to not too quickly make up their own mind.

And that's a part of why I wanted to share an episode of it with you this week.

At Search Engine, we're trying to make the show we'd want to hear.

And we get a fair amount of emails from people who like what we do and ask, what else feels like this?

And Death, Sex, and Money for me feels like this.

So Anna and I are crossing over this month, sharing stories with each other's audiences.

We got to pick a Death, and Money episode to play for you.

The one I chose is about this man named Jim Harris, who lives in Colorado.

Jim fell into a deep depression a couple years ago after a spinal cord injury left him partially paralyzed.

Jim, trying to navigate the grief of that situation, ends up seeking out music and psychedelics, psilocybin, and then has a very crazy experience on mushrooms.

Not the kind you've had in college.

Jim's at a concert when some of the feeling in his body actually returns.

That story and that conversation begins now.

This is Death, Sex, and Money.

The show from Slate about the things we think about a lot

and need to talk about more.

I'm in a sail.

In 2014, Jim Harris was 32 years old and kite skiing on a South American ice cap.

The wind would catch the kite and pull him forward, but then the wind changed and dropped him hard.

And then as I went to like get up and like prop myself on my elbows, I realized that I couldn't feel or move anything from stirring him down.

Jim injured his spine.

And then about eight months into his rehabilitation, he found himself having another profound physical experience, again set against a beautiful outdoor backdrop, this time soundtracked by a live jam band.

A friend had invited Jim to an outdoor music festival, and by then he'd recovered the ability to walk with a walker, but standing and moving around a lot was still exhausting and physically awkward.

But he didn't want to miss out.

And then when he got there, someone offered him a chocolate bar.

a psilocybin mushroom chocolate bar, and Jim didn't want to miss out on that either.

I remember the sunset that night being just phenomenal.

It would have been a stunning sunset if I'd been totally sober.

But in this altered state, I remember the grass looking really, really vivid and kind of having this interesting pattern.

I remember the sky looking phenomenally colorful and like it was, had these sort of subtle patterns and clouds that seemed to have repeating shapes.

And what did you notice about how it felt in your body?

Like inside my body, I remember the feeling of

like having an increased awareness of my internal organs, like kind of like feeling my guts in a way

that I didn't usually notice them.

Then kind of in this altered state was like shifting my feet around and flexing, unflexing muscles.

In that state, all of a sudden, I realized there were muscles that had not worked since the time of my accident that all of a sudden I could voluntarily control.

Jim grew up in Ohio and often felt like an outsider.

He wasn't a sports guy.

He didn't like the competitive dynamic.

So he mostly adventured outside on his own or with just his family.

When he went to college in Montana, Jim finally found a community where it felt like he fit.

Doing things outdoors with other people felt like an opportunity to have camaraderie that could feel hard for me to find elsewhere in life.

There's an element of taking in some enjoyment and watching other people's capability, like watching somebody else who's good at the activity that you're doing, but also not really in a competitive setting, like most team-based sports matches or something.

More like, hey, let's try and hike to the top of this mountain together.

There's still a requirement for some self-sufficiency, but also there's this camaraderie of this shared experience that feels really potent.

And he made outdoor adventuring into his work too.

In his early 20s, Jim taught mountaineering courses and then was hired by places like National Geographic and Powder Magazine to document his wilderness travels all over the world, doing things like hiking, remote mountains, backcountry river rafting, and snow kiting.

It's a really exhilarating sensation to be pulled by this invisible force of this atmosphere

moving around you.

Like if you've ever flown a kite, it's maybe like a little mini version of that and you feel that tug of the kite string.

But this is a big enough tug that it can, on a slippery surface like on snow with skis it'll pull you across the snow and so there's this moment of acceleration when the wind first catches the kite and then there's an awful lot of interactivity where there's a handlebar that's used almost like you know marionette strings where the kite's very maneuverable where you can steer it side to side and so the skill set or part of the skill set is around this attention to where the wind is in relation to your body and in relation to the kite.

So on the one hand, I'm imagining it feels like you're sort of,

I don't know, like tapping into this force that's bigger than you.

Yeah, it absolutely is that.

But also that you're not in control, right?

Necessarily?

Like it's surrender too.

There's an element of surrender to it.

Like I do a lot of river paddling and river activities have a lot of that where you're like moving with the current.

You can learn to

you can learn to read it and use it and navigate through it but ultimately it's kind of this collaboration between

the person who's paddling the person in the water and um and then the river itself and

the river itself is this enormously powerful kinetic force that is fun to interact with and it's also really humbling in a way that there often feels like a spiritual element of like being interacting with

a force that's a large and powerful thing that

maybe I don't have awareness of in my normal day-to-day.

I've never like considered like a river current and the wind being you know cousins of forces that you can kind of appreciate and tap into.

I like that.

How old were you when you were injured?

I was 32 years old.

It was my last week of being 32.

Uh-huh.

The day that I had my spine was fused was my 33rd birthday.

So it was wintertime in the northern hemisphere, summer in the...

Yeah, exactly.

It was

like late springtime in the southern hemisphere.

Jim was with a small group of friends near the Chile-Argentina border.

They planned to ski the Patagonian ice cap with the help of snow kites.

The kites that we had were quite small, just so we didn't have to carry as much weight when we weren't using them, and because we weren't trying to do tricks or go 50 miles an hour.

But the allure of being able to use the wind to go eight miles an hour without having to shuffle my feet versus one mile an hour while hauling a sled full of gear was really tempting.

I see.

So it wasn't like a you're going out,

it was to cover ground.

It was like

a rope tile.

That's what we were using it.

That's what we intended to use them for.

Yeah.

And

what happened

on the run when you got injured?

So we were out in a large open pasture

and

a big wind gust came up.

The wind accelerated.

It was enough that it lifted me off the ground a few feet.

And I wasn't particularly panicked.

There's like a big red cord that you can pull that will release some of the lines to the kite, and it becomes almost just like a sheet in the wind instead of being something that's generating force and generating lift.

It just becomes a big flapping flag attached to strings.

But I didn't pull that cord, I wasn't panicked, I didn't, I thought it was going to be okay.

And then I don't know what happened next.

The friend that was with me didn't witness what happened.

I woke up, like regained consciousness, lying on the ground.

I realized right away that I was concussed, that I felt dazed and realized I had just lost consciousness and was regaining it and was lucid enough to realize immediately that I was paralyzed.

When you woke up, you were face up?

I was, yeah, I was on my back.

And

after you regained consciousness, how long were you alone?

Like the time scale is a little fuzzy,

but not long.

I think my friend came running.

Yeah.

Maybe he was right by my side when I came back, and then he left to go get help.

And I was there by myself for a bit, and maybe that's what I'm remembering.

Like, I feel like

the recall is a little blurry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My whole neurology got quite a shake up in that.

When you realized

you couldn't feel anything from below your sternum,

was it scary?

What do you remember feeling?

Was it like

mystifying, like confused?

I felt fairly calm and resolute in that moment.

One thing I've learned about myself is that I tend to have a fair amount of composure in really stressful moments.

And then in the aftermath, once the acute crisis has moved on, then all the flood of emotions come in.

But I remember being backboarded and carried for a distance.

I remember cracking jokes while being backboarded.

Oh, really?

What were you joking about?

One of the things I remember being a little like joking cynically about was

the people, friends would encourage me to make more art beforehand.

And I felt like I never made time or space for it in life and didn't prioritize it and

but it was something that like for years people would gently and kindly give me this encouragement to like you should do more of that

and I was like resistant to it and busy preoccupied elsewhere and so on this backboard I remember being like well well I guess I've got more time for art now

that was like that that makes me emotional like you're immediately thinking like how will I spend my time like you're casting forward on this backboard.

Like,

that's, that's.

I mean, there's probably some, like, uh, psychological coping there.

Yeah.

Um,

but yeah, I think that uh, it seems like that gallows humor is

comes up a lot for people in really sad and gory and traumatic times.

It took a few hours, but eventually Jim was transported to a hospital in a small Chilean city.

I don't think there was much night staff on duty.

I think I got left on the

on like the rigid backboard overnight and not moved to a hospital bed till the morning.

So you were in a foreign country in the southern hemisphere in a hospital.

Were you comfortable with Spanish?

The medical situation was so far above my level of Spanish competency.

I leaned leaned really heavily on Google Translate.

Jim had the use of his arms, but was paralyzed below his rib cage.

He had full lung function, but his abdominal muscles didn't work.

He stayed in Chile for another week and then was transported back to the U.S.

for surgery.

Coming up, Jim begins the slow and hard process of rehabilitation.

I think I had really out of naivete

made up my mind that I was going to have a recovery and use all the resources and all the willpower that I had at my disposal to like shift

the course of the outcome.

And I wonder if I would have had that same sort of drive and optimism if I had known right away or had knew what I know now about spinal cord injuries.

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This is Death Sex and Money from Slate.

I'm Anna Sale.

After Jim was transported to the U.S., he was confronted with the extent of his injuries.

He'd fractured nine vertebrae, and he had surgery to relieve the pressure on his spine and fuse five vertebrae.

That went well, restoring some nerve function and proper blood flow that had been cut off.

And a few days after the surgery, he was able to move his right big toe.

A few weeks later, he could lift his right leg a bit.

But Jim did not know how hopeful he ought to be.

My neurosurgeon was very circumspect in not giving me any definitive prognosis.

It was like, well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Like, this doesn't look great.

Like, these circumstances here are

really not ideal.

But I was never, I wasn't told that I wasn't going to walk again.

Jim transferred to a different hospital, Craig Hospital in Colorado, which specializes in treating brain and spinal cord injuries.

He spent five months there doing intense physical therapy.

Eventually, he made enough progress that he was able to become an outpatient.

It was a slow shift from wheelchair to walker.

And by about seven or eight months post-injury, I really could only walk a few steps with a walker at a time.

I was like living in an old folks home where my parents had been able to rent themselves an apartment and I was staying with them.

You were in a literal old folks home?

Yeah, I was the youngest person there by decades.

Would you compare walkers with your neighbors?

I like this idea of you're surrounded by people who are also walkers.

Oh, that was

like absolutely.

surreal and a little bit comedic.

People who have moved to this assisted living facility are all in these sort of a degenerative phase of life where they've moved to this facility to help soften that landing as they lose different degrees of independence bit by bit.

So I was like a minor celebrity there the first time I came down through the lobby, which was a real congregating area, came down through the lobby with a walker instead of a wheelchair.

I got a standing ovation.

Oh.

So people there were so sweet to me.

Were you in a relationship at the time of your injury?

I was in a seven-year relationship that ended about two weeks prior to my injury.

Okay,

that's a lot.

It was.

It was a really, it was a long and committed relationship that was really wonderful.

And eventually we got engaged and that engagement brought up all these questions of what married life would look for like for each of us.

And through that, we realized that we had some very diverging aspirations.

At the time, I was traveling a ton and was on this very adventury track of traveling the world.

My girlfriend at the time

really wanted me around home more and was really kind of shifting more into like

wanting more domesticity and safety and security that were really normal and sane things to want in her early 30s.

And I was not there yet.

And I didn't want to give up this life of travel and adventure and of being footloose.

We went to some couples counseling, and the nail on the coffin after a number of sessions was this therapist saying something like, you know, you two are both pretty articulate.

You're both fairly self-aware.

Like, I think you can talk through this specific instance of this disagreement, but ultimately, maybe there's some differences in values here that are going to keep coming up and keep causing conflict.

And this is going to be something that you two keep dealing with year after year.

And she's like, you You know,

a lot of times, in my experience, couples with these sort of differences, um, it doesn't, it doesn't work out for them long term.

And then she added, like, but maybe you guys get five more really good years out of it.

And that was those last words were just felt like gutting.

I remember we went to a coffee shop and

cried in each other's arms, like, so we're gonna just keep doing this until we like can't stand each other until we're really, really resentful and bitter.

So, in some ways, that separation,

I think there was some mutual compassion of like, maybe there's something better out there for you.

And then I left on this trip to Patagonia that we'd been planning for a year and a half.

And all of a sudden, that trip took on a different

sort of texture for me: of like, well, now I get to go grieve and self-reflect and do this out of the spotlight of social media or shared friend circles.

Like, I can go have a month of something

like, you know, near solitude and have really something else to focus my mind on and

not have to have a Facebook breakup or something.

Yeah.

And that didn't quite play out the way I expected.

Yeah.

I will say that's a bold couples counselor.

That was a

maybe she was just at the end of the rope with us.

I'm not sure.

You guys are not getting a hint here.

Given the proximity of that breakup to your accident, I wonder, are you all, are you still in touch with that ex?

Did you all stay in touch throughout your recovery?

We did.

We stayed close through that first year of my recovery, though we weren't dating any longer.

There was some real reassessment and introspection around whether we would be more compatible now that I was wheelchair bound.

That one of the conflicts had been how much time I was away and the sort of dangerous activities I was engaging with, these sort of dangerous mountaineering photo and video jobs I was being offered

now that I was, you know, kind of housebound.

I was like, oh, maybe we're more compatible now than we were before.

And then I think after some reflection, we both came to the conclusion that our initial decision to separate was was probably still for the best.

By the summer of 2015, months into his recovery, Jim was ready for a change of scenery.

A nonprofit that supports injured adventure athletes called the High Fives Foundation offered him free physical therapy in Northern California.

Jim flew there and stayed in a buddy's rec room for the summer.

In July, he joined a crew of people at a big music festival near Tahoe.

String cheese incident was playing.

It was the kind of concert where people are dancing and laying around on blankets?

Yeah, I would sit on the ground, but then getting back up off the ground was a little bit of a struggle.

It wasn't until after spinal cord injury that I was like, I have no idea how I used to stand up off the ground.

This is something I'd never really paid attention to.

But the way I had learned to stand up was sort of like

being on all fours and pushing my butt up towards the sky and getting in kind of a downward dog position and then slowly walking my hands back one at a time towards my feet until I was sort of bent over, and then grabbing onto walker or a person and standing the rest of the way upright.

Jim was avoiding alcohol during his rehab, but most everyone around him was drinking.

Then someone gave him a large psilocybin chocolate bar, one with magic mushrooms, and he ate it.

This was not a micro-dose.

Psychedelics, including psilocybin, have been reported to cause muscle spasms in people with spinal cord injuries, causing the muscles to flex involuntarily.

And it's hard for your brain to tell them to stop.

Scientists don't know why.

And for Jim, right as his psychedelic experience began to peak, his right quad muscles and knee began to vibrate and kept wanting to lock.

I remember trying to like...

have this dialogue with my body, which was something that I had become really familiar with in that spinal cord state of kind of like

negotiating with appendages and muscles that felt like they were part of me, but also that I didn't really have full agency.

And there was like a like, hey, leg, can you do this thing?

Can you help me?

Can you,

let's all do this together now?

And movement through spinal cord injury began feeling like a lot more of a team effort versus like

whatever the center of my consciousness is extending out to like my fingertips and toes.

And so I remember being like, okay, okay, muscles, like, can we,

let's take a deep breath and can we unlock?

Can we stop doing that?

And as a part of that, I was kind of trying to like shuffle my feet and

being able to like shift body weight and flex and unflex muscles voluntarily was a way to stop these spasms from happening to kind of stop this sort of like muscle vibration sort of pattern.

And in that process, all of a sudden I realized there were muscles that had not worked since the time of my accident that all of a sudden I could voluntarily control.

When you start noticing that, Jim, are you like telling people around you, like, I'm noticing something in my leg?

Yeah.

Like, and what was the response?

Like, like, like, were people, was there an awareness that

among the people you were with that psilocybin could could have that kind of physical manifestation, or were people sort of like

wowed, and

was it mysterious?

Um,

it was mysterious, and it wasn't really even the center of the attention at the time because there was like this amazing sunset happening.

There was a headlining act playing like

crescendo

people are swaying, there's like thousands of people around.

Um, like there was, there's like a lot of stimulus overload happening, right?

Yeah, um, but I do remember having conversations about it, like, hey, guys, look what I can do.

And, you you know, my physical therapist who'd been assigned to my case was there and had seen my progress for months.

And all of a sudden, I'm like,

look what I can do.

And she was like, oh,

did that just start happening in the last couple of weeks?

And I was like, no, it just started happening

right now.

When that day was over,

and you started noticing the trip was ending,

were you afraid it was going to go away?

It did seem like it got weaker as that psychedelic experience kind of came to a conclusion, like that ability to control that muscle was not as strong as it had been a few hours earlier.

So, I wasn't sure if that meant that it was from the psilocybin itself or just from fatigue.

But it really wasn't until like maybe the next day where

it seemed like there might have been a a cause and effect between the psilocybin dose and these muscles that still were working the next day.

I was like, also still a possibility that it's all a wild coincidence.

And that was just happened to be the exact moment that some nerve pathway that had been healing for eight or nine months finally made the connection.

You're saying it could have just been that?

You're not sure?

I think if we, yeah, I think if we're exactly if we're being from being really scrupulously analytical about it, like that would be a reasonable thing to say, right?

Like, I feel like I have a feeling, an inner sense, an emotional feeling or a suspicion

that it was related to this psilocybin experience.

But I think kind of from a really hard, rationalist, science-y view,

there's an argument that this was like

those were two unconnected events that just happened to co-occur.

And did that functionality with your right hamstring from that day,

was that a milestone of recovery that

you've got functionality that stayed?

Yeah, yeah, it was a milestone.

A milestone, but not an end.

Alongside his physical rehab, Jim was also struggling with his mental health.

It hit a low point two years in.

Nerve recovery from a severe accident like mine is

thought to more or less wrap up after about 24 months.

And so by about two years out,

whatever disability someone has is probably what they're going to be left with for life.

And so that was a milestone that I had in my head.

And right as that two-year anniversary hit, I was laid off from my job and the 2016 election had just happened.

I broke up with someone that I'd been dating and a pet died.

And it just felt like

there was all this kind of like series of

tragedies that any one of would have been hard.

And then in aggregate was really destabilizing.

And part of that, I ended up in this depressive state where it felt like

compared to the life that I had led before my accident, pre-injury, that nothing was ever going to be that good again.

That That I had like hit some sort of a high watermark, and that things were never going to be that happy, that joyful, that connected, that successful ever again.

And that felt pretty despondent.

Like, wait, what is the

point of any of this if it's

just a downhill slide towards the grave from here?

And you're turning 35 that year?

It's 2017?

Yes, I think so.

So you're a young person and you're looking at a long downward slide.

And

how long did that sort of heavy dark period last?

It's hard to answer

what a definitive end point for that was, but it felt like a long, slow crawl back out of a hole.

In some ways, I still face some of those challenges, though I don't think I'm depressed right now.

But I think there was a real reckoning with some of my worldviews and values where some of the ways that I understood myself felt like I hit a dead end.

And

it's an uncomfortable shift to find

new ways to see the world, new ways to find oneself.

Did you have psychiatric help?

during that time?

Yeah, I did.

I started seeing a therapist.

I saw a psychiatrist and was prescribed antidepressants.

I was really only on them for a few months and then weaned off of them and had

begun building some self-care routines and structure into my life that seemed to support me better than those drugs did.

What for you did you not like about antidepressants?

It wasn't that I didn't like them.

It was just like it didn't feel like a solution.

It just felt like a band-aid of like, this is, this is helpful, this is absolutely helping, but this is like palliative.

This isn't something that's offering me a new way to move to the world that, and being on antidepressants for life didn't seem like something that I wanted.

But they do, I do think they really supported me in an awful lot of journaling and reflection and contemplation and starting a personal meditation practice.

I've attended meditation retreats and some spiritual retreats and

like engaged with the things that would have seemed very woo to me prior to my injury.

And then

since then have found ways to be like, this doesn't have to be the only lens that I view the world through, but maybe there's some real value in having a sense of spirituality, of having a place for mysticism, of seeing the world in a way that's a little bit more alive than a really rationalist viewpoint might describe it.

Coming up, Jim keeps looking for a solution and tries a new psychedelic.

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Two years after his spinal cord injury, Jim Harris was able to walk with a cane, but he tired easily, and he sometimes struggled with how much he missed his body pre-injury.

Life still felt difficult and adrift, kind of without the vibrancy or the sense of purpose and meaning that I felt like I had had previously.

So that's how I ended up signing up to go drink ayahuasca with a shamanic group with some gentlemen who had flown up from Peru.

And was your experience?

I don't know if it like feels this way, but like did you

did you feel something in your body in a way that felt familiar to what your experience had been

when your right hamstring recovered?

Like did you feel as if something after that experience, something in the way your brain was functioning was happening differently?

I feel like I sort of had a fitful start, like my body's reaction to that ayahuasca.

I didn't,

I didn't feel like I experienced a physical recovery from those ceremonies.

Like the first night I came in with an awful, like some jittery nerves and an awful lot of hopes and expectations and apprehensions, and like nothing happened for me.

And that felt frustrating and a bit alienating, where you can like be like, I had the same little Dixie cup of weird tea as everybody around me.

And other people around me are clearly experiencing something that I'm not, but I'm still feel very,

very sober, very grounded in like consensus reality.

Things have not shifted.

I don't feel different.

I feel impatient and a little let down and I've made

all this time and effort to be here and like it's not working.

I was hoping for some sort of salvation and it's not here.

And then on the second night of ceremony, I had experienced like like 90 minutes of transcendent bliss that didn't feel like it answered any of my big existential questions that I felt like I had walked into the space with.

But it did feel like a real beacon that it was a search worth continuing, like a

inquiry that was just at the start.

You didn't get any answers, but you got some

sensation.

I feel like I went.

Yeah.

yeah but just had like the like a kind of extended feeling that was um

that was like orgasmic in some ways but not in any sexual way just just like a real feeling of joy and bliss in a like in my heart and in my tummy and in a way that is um

it feels vivid to think back to it and it's really hard to put into words.

Jim now lives in western Colorado, in a town surrounded by mountains and ski resorts.

He's able to do some physical activities like pack rafting and mountain biking with limitations, and he makes art like woodblock prints of nature scenes.

Jim also has become a vocal advocate for therapeutic psychedelic use, including during the successful 2022 voter ballot initiative in Colorado to legalize psilocybin therapy and decriminalize five psychedelics, including DMT, the active psychedelic in ayahuasca.

But Jim says he relies on other long-term supports to take care of his mental health, too.

One came unexpectedly.

There was a solar eclipse in 2017,

and a young man who I was friends with and who I looked up to went, drove to the path of totality.

And then that night after leaving wherever he'd viewed the eclipse from, was in a car accident and passed away.

and

I was um

pretty gutted by that

and one of the things that I looked up to him for was he was part of this men's group disclosed group um where he was I think the youngest person by a fair margin and I really wanted to be part of it but they weren't interested in taking new members.

They had this small collection of people that

and so then at his wake, somebody said something to me about like, oh, I always want to be part of that men's group.

And I was like, wait, you did?

And the two of us started chatting.

And somebody else nearby was like, oh, yeah, that men's group sounds awesome.

I wish I could be like, wait, wait, what's your phone number?

We can do this on our own.

Did it tend to be, was it like a, was it a younger men's group?

Yeah, we literally called it the young men's group.

Does it still meet?

Yeah, for a while there, it was pretty seasonal.

It turns out

living in a mountain town, people really prioritize outdoor activities, especially in the summertime when it's light till 9 p.m.

I see.

Um, so you're winter, maybe like six months a year, we'll meet like every other week on a Wednesday night and have some preset topic that's sort of the focus of thought and contemplation and sharing and reflection and feedback

and being together.

That's cool, yeah.

Can you describe for me

where you notice your

accident now in your body?

Like what doesn't work in the same way that it did before your accident?

I walk with a pretty significant limp.

I mean, I feel like I often move like a man-sized toddler.

And sometimes I feel really self-conscious about that or really envious of, you know, see people who are like dancing and and who are really good dancers and i've never been a good dancer but

that hasn't stopped me from feeling envious of the way their bodies move um

i have some different sensation from one side to the other where one side of one half of my abdomen and one leg has better balance and better muscle activation, but very little hot or cold sensation, very little pain sensation.

And the other side has much better pain sensation and much better hot and cold sensation, but the muscles don't work nearly as well.

My balance doesn't work nearly as well.

So there's some kind of like almost like a little bit of a yin-yang

opposites because of the way

because of the way neurology is routes information through a spinal cord, and because one side of my spinal cord was slightly more damaged than the other.

Are you dating these days?

Yeah.

Been in dating somebody.

We just had our seven-year anniversary.

Seven-year?

Mm-hmm.

That seems significant.

So you're, this is your, is this your officially now your longest relationship?

I think maybe

just about the longest relationship for either of us.

Uh-huh.

What's that like?

How's it going?

Oh, it's great.

Relationship life is so lovely.

Both of us have kind of had some

hard twists to our adult lives, and I think that's helped to shape both of us into people who are interested in self-reflection and kind of interested in who we are inside and what we value and what we can really take ownership of

and what we can let go of.

And so, some of that kind of introspective stuff has formed some of the foundation of the relationship.

And it continues to feel really good.

That was the Death, Sex, and Money episode titled The Night Magic Mushrooms and Jam Bands.

Help Me Walk Again.

You can see Jim Harris's art and a portfolio of his wilderness adventures at Perpetual Weekend.

Anna says that they first heard about Jim's story in a piece in Outside magazine.

The original episode was hosted by Anna Sale and produced by Andrew Dunn.

You can hear more episodes of Death Sex Money wherever you get your podcasts, and you can find psilocybin at just kidding.

We will be back with not one, but two new episodes of Search Engine next Friday.

Wow.

See you then.

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