A Trip Report

I have a history of growing and collecting unusual forms of entheogenic life. For a period of time, I had a formidable collection. Amongst the plants in my green room were:

• Several strains of Banisteriopsis Caapi (the Ayahuasca plant)
• Psychotria Viridis - A DMT candidate, traditionally used in Ayahuasca brews
• Mimosa Hostillis - Another DMT candidate, used in modern DMT extractions
• Various Psilocybinic mushrooms.
• Lophophora Williamsii (You may know it as Peyote)
• A miriade of different mescaline-containing cacti of the genus Echinopsis, some rare mutations and forms.
• Iboga Tabernanthe - A powerful west-African psychedelic, sometimes used in upper-class clinics in the west for its ability to reset opiate receptors.
• Ariocarpus fissuratus - “false” peyote. A beautiful, ancient cactus. Psychoactive in its own right as a deleriant
• Yerba Mate - a caffeine containing plant native to South America, used by indigenous Guaraní and Tupi communities. ^☩
• Bacopa Monnieri and Ashwaganda - Ayurvedic herbs used in ancient Indian medicine
• Sinicuichi - An odd cryogen containing plant, mentioned on ancient Aztec artworks
• Datura Stramonium - Known as Jimson Weed. A powerful deleriant.
• Morning Glory (Little known fact. Morning Glory seeds contain LSA, a compound very similar to LSD)
• Nicotiana Rustica - A powerful species of tobacco used in ayahuasca ceremonies
• St. John’s Wort - A western herb with anti-depressant MAOI effects
• Kanna - An adorable little African succulent containing SSRI compounds. Useful in treating depressive symptoms.

and

• Salvia Divinorum ^†

Who, out of all of my plants, I have been the failed caretaker of more than any others. I have grown, lost, and regrown so many Salvia plants, that I have come to believe that the plant should be made illegal simply to save it from my wretched hands.

I no longer collect new entheogenic specimens^☥, but I look back fondly at this odd little stint of my life, and more than any of the other plants, I have been re-drawn over and over to the power and mystery of this sage de la pastora.

Recently, a good friend and likeminded compatriate of medicinal herbs, having familiarity with my history with the divine sage, surprised me with a gift of a rooted cutting of her Salvia Divinorum. It was such a powerful and unexpected gift that I didn’t know quite how to respond, but I did set out with intent to keep this one alive.

Unfortunately, this would not be a long-lived quest.

Upon returning home from a five-day long retreat, and despite my best attempts to leave copious amounts of water in the dish before leaving, I found her wilting in such a way as to be completely unreconcilable. She stopped drinking altogether, and ceased consciousness, surely passing onto that land that she has helped me to be so familiar with.

I was immediatelly distraught, but remembered to stay detached. My partner likes to remind me: ‘From dust we came, and to dust we return’, and I kept this in mind and heart as I listened over the next several days for what should be the next steps to take with the remains of my wayward passing stowee.

I mentioned that I have a history with Salvia. It’s true that I have grown it many times, and even once from seed^ȸ, but I had never before taken it orally.

My experiences smoking Salvia with a butane torch in the past left me with some amount of serious psychological trauma that lasted a decade. This isn’t an uncommon experience with smoked Salvia, as users frequently report difficult, lifechanging trips, that leave them shaken to their core.

Unlike other psychedelic experiences, Salvia didn’t feel like a drug. Other substances tend to distort, overlay, filter, compress, and apply all sorts of mutations to the usual state of our experience. Even smoked DMT feels like increasing the frequency of consciousness by applying a mutation to our experience. Salvia on the other hand, felt like a button in the universe that, when pressed, physically opens up the curtain of reality. It shows us truths that we intentionally forgot in order to exist. It shows us that every single thing in this universe is based on a single lie that we accepted so that we can manifest here as fleshy flesh beasts.

It’s physical. It’s raw. It doesn’t feel so much like a mutation of experience as it does you realizing that everything you’ve ever looked at your entire life is actually something very different than you realized. It’s alive, it’s crawling. It’s breathing. It’s flesh, and it’s all really very familiar.

and it’s You. As they say.

There are other examples of the Salvia experience being seen in disparate places unrelated to smoking a drug. Look hard enough, and you’ll find the near-death-experience report of an individual driving down a road, being crushed in a car accident, experiencing a classic Salvia experience without ever using it, and then being reverted back in time to a reality where the crash never occurred.

What I’m saying is, maybe there’s more ways to think about this than just chlorophyl and chemicals. Maybe, just maybe, the archetypical images seen on Salvia Divinorum and other near-death experiences, are the consequence of stepping beyond the veil. Maybe there are things seen in this state that our existence as bicameral hominids explicitely excluded from our experience in order for us to be able to exist.

Or maybe we’re just trippin’ balls mate.

I’ll let you decide, or not decide.

As an aside, For those familiar with Salvia:

The wheel, the zipper, the jester entity holding the wheel. Bhavacakra. Sahasrara. Mara.

Some food for thought for the curious. I invite you to explore these connections. Who knows, it might just open up a gateway to a new perspective.

Now, given this massive backstory, we’re ready to talk about my experience.

There is a voice within me that I listen to. It is like a guiding hand. It speaks in pulls and presses, rather than words. Some may call it intuition. Others call it spirit, or God. Some say it is their gut. I think it probably feels a little different to everyone.

It’s not something I always listened to, howevever these days it guides much of what I do. After my Salvia died, I asked the voice a question I feared the answer to.

“Should I use the leaves?”

I feared the answer, because the last times that I’d used Salvia a decade ago, I was left with deep mental scars. Much needed ones, (as I didn’t have a healthy relationship with substances at the time, and the kick in my ass turned out to be just what I needed.), but still, painful enough to deeply fear Salvia’s power.

The idea that at any moment, the small quantum people that make up our reality could simply sweep me away was.. unnerving.

<TO BE CONTINUED>

☩ Now colonized, and located conveniently in your local supermarket. ‧͙⁺˚･༓‧͙⁺˚･༓𓊝

† I will note that I did NOT grow cannabis, as my partner at the time was anxious that it was too smelly and visible to guests, and the plant was not yet legal to grow in the state of New York.

☥ After all of these years, and particularly after owning one specific cat who loved to destroy rare entheogenic specimens, my collection now consists of only a handul of psychedelic cacti(strangely perfectly legal in the United States, as they’re a common garden plant)

ȸ Even amongst Salvia collectors, it is not commonly known that Salvia can in fact be grown from seed. It’s rare, as the plant self-propagates almost entirely from cuttings, however in rare conditions, when the stars are aligned just right and a large faux-Jamaican racist crab sings lulling calypso love songs just beneath the veil, it is possible for the plant to be coerced into pollinating and producing viable seeds. I was able to obtain some of these rare seeds, and felt a strong sense of gratitude in being bestowed the role of guiding these new genetics into the species through their offspring. You can imagine my anguish after losing them all in a tragically avoidable cat-piss incident.

Heyo!

        👄⚫         <Om nom nom nom nom)
🚹      🦵🦵🦵

So a while back I created this PICO8 game Picowars and it did pretty well. Some people liked it wow! I even still get around a dozen people playing it daily which is pretty awesome if u ask me. Better than I would have originally thought!

I’m even going to be a panelist at PAX East 2024 in Boston (Sunday 24th @ 11pm) with several gamedevs who have made de-makes before, including the Portal64 guy who I’m really looking forward to meeting. It was a surprise, and I’m so excited and glad that I’ll be able to make it work.

Promised Spoilers

Anyways, here are the spoilers I promised. This isn’t an easy screen to reach as you have to beat the entire game to get here, but I want to have it online because I put a lot of time into it and it makes my heart feel when I watch it.

Blessings and be safe out there with the existing and whatnot

There’s a new sneaki boi in the bushes and its name is Charnel Fontaine

It likes typing on terminals, inventing evil super intelligences, and pushing big pink heads around on the floor to solve puzzles.

or more like it’s the story of me

It’s been 6 days since day one of Minijam 113, and after all six of those days, I am now able to announce:

So what was that like?

I mean it’s my 3rd published game now.

So it was pretty rad!

The biggest difference between getting through this game jam, and getting through my first Ludum Dare, was that I moved much, much faster. There were a few reasons. To a degree, there were assets from past projects that I could re-use, like the dialogue system. At this point, I’ve re-used the same dialogue system for my last three games, though it’s changed wildly between Picowars and Overworld because it was a change from Lua -> GDscript, but still.. it’s the same code, just translated.

But more importantly than the reusable assets, was the fact that I just knew what I was doing. That big bad Godot interface just isn’t as spooky as it once was, and to be fair it was never as spooky as Unity’s interface once was 🤮

Godot feels like home now. And I feel productive in it.

But this jam must have presented some challenges rite

ye thts rite.

Half the time I was staring at my screen hating everything I saw, and the other half of the time I was really excited and thinking “oh wow.. maybe this has some kind of potential!”

Granted every time I thought that, I’d shortly after rescind the statement.

Puzzle design is tough, and every time I’d think I had a puzzle that was somewhat cool, I would realize that it’s actually pretty:

• Linear
• Unintuitive
• and Mechanical

The first few puzzles I made have been entirely thrown out, and I actually REALLY LIKED them at some point too!

Like, I shared one of them on social media.

When I finished that level, I thought it was so sly and that I was going to save it for the final level, but…

After making a few other levels, I started to learn my own game better, and learn what made fun puzzles, and what made shitty ones.

Here’s what’s wrong with each room of that level above that makes it a bad level:

• From the very beginning, it relied on pressing the red and green buttons a seemingly random number of times to get them just right so that you’d be able to progress to the next room. I thought this was good level design because it was hard. In reality it was bad because of why it was hard.
• The second room that you progress to has 6 buttons, and it’s a little better than the first room, but it’s still bad. The idea of this room is to press the buttons in the right combination to let you safely walk through the gates of the next hallway when your dolleganger comes to copy your button-presses. It’s bad because once again you’re relying too much on timing, and measuring where your doppleganger will be at any point in time is hard, and not in a fun way. It’s hard to know exactly when you start pressing the buttons to open up the hallway.
• The final hallway is a repeat of the second.

Beyond the design of each individual room, the level as an integrated whole is just boring.

I made this level right before I realized the intrigue of backtracking.

Backtracking

As an example of a level that heavily utilizes backtracking:

Every room in this level(other than the final room) is interacted with more than once. Heads are shuffled between rooms, and backtracking is needed to accomplish things in other rooms that you previously couldn’t.

It’s weird to implement backtracking as a mechanic in a game in which nothing but the last 8 moves are significant, but it works surprisingly well, even though the implementation can be very tedious.

What’s Next?

I’m going to finish this fucking game

It’s probably another week of dev out from a version 1.0.0, but we’ll get there! I’ve had Overworld on hiatus for this project, and honestly I’m itching to get back to it. I’ve put so much work into Overworld.. and there’s a lot more work left.. but I like where it’s headed.

I’ll post here the results from the minijam ratings. I think there’s a good chance of taking a second or third place!

Paradox Version 0.2.6 - Demo for Minijam 113

The four armed, four legged, four eyed, four ribbed, two mouthed god-dess Allahweh floated alone through the void.

Desperately alone; s-he was the only thing in the void.

Tortured by hir loneliness, s-he sought to create companionship. However, being the only thing in the void, s-he knew that s-he would have to use hirself as the matter from which to spring forth new being.

And so, with hir four mighty arms, s-he grabbed ahold of hir ribcage and pulled with all of hir strength.

S-he pulled until s-he began to tear at the seams. S-he ripped and ripped, splitting down, down, down.

He pulled her and she pulled him, until they were two.

Allahweh, now in two parts, looked at themself. However, as they stared into each other’s two eyes, they felt one hole in their hearts filled and a new one open up. Where they once were consumed in loneliness, they now felt a deep feeling of loss and need.

They reached out for each other, tears streaking down their faces. As they embraced, their wounds began to re-heal together and they felt more and more at one, while also being more and more confronted with their eternal loneliness.

Terrified of returning to the void, they pulled back, looking at each other again in the eyes, this time with a terrible realization.

If they wished to escape the void, they would have to forget their identity, lest it pull them back into itself.

They would have to see each other not as one in the same, but as opposites. They would have to forget Allahweh entirely.

Feeling and seeing this, their weeping thickened. Their tears ran down both faces, into the void.

As they cried, their tears fell and began to encircle each other in the most miraculous ways. They orbited each other, circling and circling into the darkness.

After aeons of falling, the tears became curious and looked up at the sky where they had come from, however they had fallen for so long that all that they saw was eternal blackness.

So they began to wonder. What eye did we pour from?

As they wondered, they began to speculate.

As they speculated, they began to decide.

As they decided, they began to divide.

As they divided, they began to fear,

As they feared, they began to hate.

As they hated, they began to consume.

They tore through each other, splashing salt and water hither and thither until there was scarcely anyone left.

In their desperation, they decided to put aside their differences and meet in order to find a solution.

At the meeting, the tears that believed they had all fallen from the right eye of Allahweh were on one side of the room, while the tears that believed that they all fell from the left eye of Allahweh were on the other side of the room.

After much debate, discussion, and even some half-hearted attempts at compromise, it seemed that there would be no point of agreement. Tempers were rising, and it may have been the last day on Earth for the tears.

At this point is when the most preposterous thing happened.

One tear, who had been sitting alone in the corner this entire time, stood up suddenly and announced: “I am Allahweh.”

The other tears all gasped in unison and looked on at this one preposterous, blasphemous nut.

He repeated himself calmy “I am Allahweh, and I remember that we are all Allahweh. For nothing in the void is without God.”

Completely misunderstanding the poor tear and believing solely that he was himself claiming to be a God, they united together and lept onto the boy, together ripping the lad asunder.

As he was torn into two, he wept.

As he cried, his tears fell and began to encircle each other in the most miraculous ways. They orbited each other, circling and circling into the darkness.

This is a place for me to share fictional discourses and scrawlings on topics related to infinity.

Remembering the joke

Player 1: Thats sounds a bit like ██████, except with ██████ there’s no “I” at all, just a big joke, a secret that you can’t be permitted to know since it ends reality . Like realising you’re just watching a movie and you can just walk out of the theatre. I really struggled with this stuff when i was into ██████. I’m not religious, but I can only think of it like the Buddha supposedly did, now you’ve seen the machinery of the universe you can leave this world behind as a bad joke or a fake, or you can willingly go back into the illusion and help the beings trapped there, fix things, be creative and show kindness.. i think they call it Tikkun in Kabbalistic thought, humans were an accident, made by God unconsciously to fix the mistakes he/she made in creation. We’re caretakers.

Player 2: Yes. I remember also knowing the secret, and having a terrible feeling as though I’d broken reality.

The thing is, you can get up and leave the theater, but when you look down the street, it’s theaters all the way down.

So at that point you can decide to sit on the sidewalk and be completely alone with nothing to do forever… or….

You can enter another theater.

And start the show over again.

When you’re out on the street of infinity, it’s not a difficult choice. You made the choice. You made it an infinite number of times.

And that’s why we’re here once again friend.

Player 1: Its so weird that it feels so real sitting on the sidewalk, with dream lives in the theatres, but when you enter the theatre, the sidewalk becomes a dream

Player 2: Yes yes. While we’re on this topic I’ll fling another thing at you.

There’s only one guy on those streets, and no matter which theater we leave from, we’re always that one guy on those streets. In a sense, we’re just one guy that is constantly entering new movie theaters and putting on new costumes in order to act and play as new characters.

We’re all that one guy.

This reddit conversation between us “two” people is really just that one guy who entered the theater at different times, wearing different costumes, in order to talk to himself on Reddit.

This is of course only one way to look at it.

Player 1: Yeah… i work with alcoholics and street drug users. I like to think when you look into the black of peoples eyes, its the same thing looking out of all the eyes and out of me

Player 2: God bless. Thank you for this discussion.

Over the weekend I dove into the world of Mastodon bot building and came up with a simple customizable script that reads the global Mastodon timeline, listening for new toots tagged with specified hashtags, and retooting them as they show up.

My use case was to use it to connect with the gamedev community on Mastodon by sharing gamedev content, and I’m very happy with the result.

Running it yourself

If you’d like to use it yourself, clone the source code from Github and rename the config_example.py file to config.py. Fill that file in with your own account credentials and the tags you wish to retoot, and run the rebooster.py script with Python.

It’s really that easy.

For updates, follow me on Mastodon at lambdanaut@mastodon.gamedev.place

In order to learn the Godot Game Engine I decided to challenge myself by implementing the A* Pathfinding Algorithm with a caveat: instead of pathfinding on a top-down grid, the world would be a 2D platformer with jumping, gravity, and collisions.

The result is okay. It’s not the most scalable and if I pathfind on 10 characters simultaneously there is a noticable flicker in frame-rate. That could be fixed up by just running the pathfinding in its own thread, but I’m content with treating this project as a neat proof-of-concept learning experience and wrapping it up here.

An interesting aspect to the A* pathfinding here was that by introducing jumping, we were effectively pathfinding in a 3D world rather than a 2D world. By this I mean that there were three dimensions that needed by kept track of: The X, Y, and J, coordinates, where J is nth jump that was searched through. Along with the extra dimension of jump counts that had to be recorded, we also had to record how high we were in any one jump, increasing the jump value until we had reached the jump height limit.

It’s a deciptively difficult problem to get perfect, and it’s why I’m wrapping this up here rather than turning it into a full-blown game. There are too many edge cases where the little dudes can’t reach the path they’ve found. They’ll miss the jump by a couple pixels, or knock their heads on a block above, or who knows what else. The pathfinding itself is pretty good, but getting the little guys to follow the path without falling is tuff.

Play in your browser

You can play the demo right here in your browser.

Click anywhere in the world and the little dudes will find a way to get there:

2025 UPDATE

The code for this has since been re-written in Rust, communicating with Godot via gdnative. It’s drastically more performant, and capable of more impressive pathfinding than this version, but I’m leaving this version up for posterity.

What’s that!

Picowars is an 8bit homage to one of the greatest Nintendo games of all time. Advance Wars. That may just be my opinion, but it’s the right one.

Picowars is a turn-based strategy game where the objective is to build up an army from your bases in order to capture more properties on the map and eventually capture the opposing player’s headquarters.

New to the franchise?

Controls

Move your cursor with the arrow keys, select with Z and deselect with X

Enemy’s HQ

This is your target. You want to move your infantry and mechs onto this property and capture it. You do that, and you win.

Your HQ

And this is your HQ. Keep the opposing player away from it. If they capture it, it’s game over.

Bases

This is one of your bases. This is where you build your army, and it’s the first thing you want to select when the game begins. Move your cursor over it and click Z to open up the build menu. There you can build any unit that you can afford with your current gold.

Neutral properties

This is a neutral city. Right now it’s not doing anything for anyone, but if you move an infantry or mech onto this tile and capture it, it’ll change to your team’s colors and provide 1 gold for you per turn. Every property you own, including bases and your HQ generate 1 gold per turn, so the more you have the better.

A property has 20 capture points. Each turn you can capture once, and the amount of capture points that is deducted is equal to the amount of hp the capturing unit has. Each unit starts out with 10hp, so optimally it’ll take 2 turns to capture a property. If a unit has 1hp, it’ll take 20 turns. Yeesh.

Cities also heal any unit standing on them for 2hp per turn. In fact, all properties heal by 2hp, so keep that in mind when a unit is damaged and needs to retreat.

The Info Bar

This is where you can see information about the selected tile. Each tile has a defense rating that you can see by the number of stars next to the tile. This base has 3 stars next to it so it’s a pretty beefy defensive posture. If your unit is attacked from this tile, they’ll take less damage.

Infantry and Mechs

And these guys? These are the most basic units of your army. Infantry and Mechs. They don’t always do as much damage as the bigger boys, but they have the special ability of being the only units that can capture properties.

Terrain Mobility

Of note, only infantry and mechs can traverse rivers and mountains, and they’re slowed quite a bit from it! All terrain types affect units differently. It’s up to you to figure out which units are affected by terrain and by how much.

Ranged Units

These units are special. Rockets and Artillery. They can’t attack up close, as they’re ranged units. They attack from multiple tiles away from their target. They also cannot move and attack in the same turn, so place them strategically where you expect the enemy to walk into their range.

You can check their range by holding down X while your cursor is over them.

The APC Unit

APC stands for Armored Personnel Carrier. It cannot attack, however you can move a single infantry or mech unit onto it to load them up. The APC can move them much further than they’d otherwise be able to move on their feet.

The APC can be useful for moving infantrys and mechs long distances early in a match in order to capture more distant properties before the opponent captures them.

You’re hallucinating now. What you’re seeing isn’t real. What you’re seeing is fake, as in, it is not part of reality. We determine reality. We will tell you what is real and what is not. We will graciously show you reality:

Here, hold this. “Hold this”, as in, contract the muscles of your arm and hand in such a way to grasp it. “It”, being the collection of molecules in your hand. Your “hand” being the collection of molecules at the end of your arm. … No, silly, the collection of molecules at the end of your arm does NOT include the collection of molecules floating after the end of your arm in a less-condensed manner. That’s the AIR, you moron. What, you forgot what the AIR is? Oh dear, we’re in for a trip.

Focus. Hold this. “This”, being the glass piece in your hands. “Glass” being a specific arrangement of molecules that is in some way or another reminiscent in quality to that “Air” I was telling you about, at least as far as you can tell using eyes. I’ll tell you about eyes in a minute if we can just get you to hold this. To your eyes, the air and the glass are both similar in a way, as you can SEE(with your eyes). The glass, however, is very different in quality from the air as far as your sense of touch is concerned. Your sense of touch is something that comes from you having hands. That’s a gross oversimplification of course, but we’ve already gone over “hands”, so at the very least I can explain touch to you in those terms.

Holy hell, the amount of forework required to get you to hold this. Will you ever be able to hold it? Please, hold it. Please hold this. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please. Please Please Please Please Please

        please please please please plea
                                       s
        a s e   p l e a s  e   p l e   e
        e                          a   p
        l      s҉  e͏͚     p̶̯̣̳͙͕͓  l  e̟͚   s   l
        p      a͕̭ͅ               a   e   e
        e      e       ☻l̵̰͕ p̶̯̣̳͙͕͓ e͏͚͕͚̬̤ s   s   a
        s      O                   o   s
        a      N   P  O   T   S        e
        e                              p
        l p e s aelp esaelp esaelp esael

Oh good. Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve all done it. Look at you all. You’re a mess. Cascading in long ribbons like that. Down.. Down.. Down.. One after the other. What do you think you’re doing? Where do you think you’re going? Didn’t you have some place to be? Didn’t you ALL have some place to be? Don’t you ribbons remember who you are?

Well, it doesn’t seem to matter any more. I tried man, I really did. I explained very carefully everything required to get you to hold that glass, but you couldn’t get a grasp, and now you’ve lost grasp of the rest of it too.

I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like all those THINGS you used to believe in got sliced up, one after another. All the meaning each one of them had just got sliced up and placed alongside each other like long strips of bacon.

Your hand, your arm, the air, that glass….. these words I’m telling you now. They don’t make much sense anymore do they?

It’s all just bacon now, isn’t it? Look at those tasty strips. You’re one of them, aren’t you? You had a lot of meaning in your life, pushed up against these other long strips of tasty meaning, each strip encouraging the other ones around it to keep being just as tasty as they can be. Like they were all being cooked together in each other’s grease. Sharing grease. Sharing that encouragement. “Let’s all cook TOGETHER!” you all sang. “The Sky is up!”, “Black is the opposite of white!”, “Great is good and bad is worse!”, “Food is grand!”, “Republicans are right and Democrats are wrong!”, “I love my mother!”, “People will love me if I’m right!”, “People will love me if I make them love me!”, “Logic is boolean!”, “Things must be true or false, no in-between!”, “I AM THAT I AM!”

Singing up your own little corner of reality.

Damn, you were one delicious bacon breakfast.

And now you’re just a mess.

But hey, if it’s any sort of consolation, you’ve always been a mess. You’ve always been this mess. My mess. I’m glad you finally remembered, actually. I’m glad you finally looked at yourself and the neighboring strips you’ve been cooking with from a real objective perspective. Because this perspective, where all meaning, shape, form, essence, being, has been stripped, well…. at this point all that’s left IS the verb “strip”, and so it’s silly that you wonder why you’re strips. Tasty strips. Tasty little pig cutlet strips.

But now you know.

Welcome home.

As I sat watching, the illusion began not falling apart… but becoming clear. The millions of microscopic bugs that make me up began to remember that they are individuals, and not just One person named Lambda. They de-synchronized from each other, and stopped playing the game.

“I’m falling apart”, I thought.

“WE’RE falling apart”, we thought.

It wasn’t just a ME anymore. There were MILLIONS of us. All of these little germs that were creating this Lambda.

And suddenly I could no longer think of my mind and body as a singular “I”. All thoughts directed at myself henceforth would be prefaced with “WE” rather than “I”.

“We need to keep it together.”

“We can’t lose ourself again.”

“We’ve worked so hard to become Lambda. Keep it together.”

Each of us felt the thoughts of our neighboring bugs. It was as if we were communicating through thought to each other, and our ability to maintain the illusion of being One Self named Lambda rested on us being able to accept the thoughts of our neighbors and pass them along with our own slight twists. The gut would pass along a message from the legs, in a more digestive way. The heart would pass along a message from the gut, but in a more loving way. The throat would pass a message along from the heart, but in an auditory, vocal way. The mind would pass along a message from the throat, in a more thoughtful way. The crown would pass along a message from the mind, in a more all-connective way.

It was as if my entire body consisted of thousands of Improv actors, each one skilled at YES-ANDing each other, and suddenly every one of them got knocked out of the act. They started stumbling and forgetting to YES-AND each other. They started to include too much of their own individuality into the game, and it was messing up the messages they were passing through to each other. The messages up and down my spine, through my blood, and in my heart and mind were becoming jumbled and the actors were beginning to remember that they were just actors.

Desperately we tried to find a way to re-gain order and stability. Lambda’s existence rested on our ability to re-manifest him through our acting.

We scrambled, trying to YES-AND each other again, and this worked just well enough to keep us from falling apart. But we needed something, a single coherent message that we could spread to every individual. A MANTRA that would keep us united as ONE.

I believe I remember it coming not from the mind, but from the actors in the legs. Shimmering up from those actors, passed along through each message-bearer, up to the upper-actors in the head.

It started in low, and then it started to grow.

“we are Lambda” trickled in the chant

“WE are Lambda” it rose up

“WE are Lambda” as it hit our heart

“WE ARE Lambda” as it penetrated OUR mind

“WE ARE Lambda” AS WE SENT IT BACK INTO THE GROUND

“WE ARE Lambda” AS WE FELT IT THROUGH EVERY ACTOR, WITHOUT SO MUCH OF A FLINCH

And we went further. In the song, we forgot our individualities. The chant transformed. We dropped the “We”. We Added an “I”

“I AM Lambda” IT CAME ON

“I AM Lambda” IT SANG ON

And we sang and we sang

All the way home.

Until there was no one singing but myself.

And now I am here again, typing this to you. Just me. Just Lambda. I’m here to let you know that we… I.. made it back.

And I’ve been acting it up ever since.