my night in the desert with shrooms and ants

down the rabbit hole: 4.30.25

A few summers ago, I was in the middle of the desert on mushrooms with a close friend. We were lying in the dirt under a cluster of Joshua trees and stars, eating ice-cold slices of watermelon, sweat drying on our skin, dust in our hair. The air temperature matched our bodies so perfectly it felt like we weren’t outside at all—but floating in some liminal in-between, like a movie set with no crew. The moon was the fullest moon I think I’ve ever seen. It hung so low and heavy it felt like I could just reach up and touch it. Coyotes called out from the distance. Nighthawks swept quietly overhead. Everything around us felt alive in the exact right proportion.

At one point, I felt something crawling on me and when we used the phone flashlight to see what it was, I realized I was literally covered in ants.

But because I was on shrooms, I didn’t panic. I just laid my head back down in the dirt and tuned in. I’d just read about their collective consciousness—how they use pheromones to create maps of purpose, how they operate like one mind spread across thousands of bodies. So I half-joked to my friend, "I’ll leave them alone, I must let them work." (Not-on-shrooms-Stepfanie was very impressed by this lol)

With my head in the dirt and my body on the ground, that’s exactly what it felt like. Like I was being folded into their system. I could feel their legs on my arms and neck, not as individual tickles or threats but as one continuous signal. A kind of tingling intelligence that moved across me in rhythm. It didn’t feel gross. It felt—honestly?—cosmic.

It turns out, we’ve always looked at ants as more than insects. In many Indigenous cosmologies, ants are seen as keepers of time, models of patience and precision. Some African myths say they taught humans how to work. In Proverbs, it’s: “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise.” Maybe lying in the dirt, I was just rejoining an old, old conversation.

I think about that night often. The ants, the moon, the way the silence didn’t feel empty but interconnected. Like the whole desert was humming. Not metaphorically—truly. I could feel the ground beneath me vibrating with some kind of secret pulse. Like the Earth was humming as it moved through space.

Lately I’ve been circling the idea of collective consciousness again—wondering how it shows up in humans, in crowds, in code, in dreams. And naturally, that led me back to E.O. Wilson. I’ve known of him, vaguely. The ant guy. The Harvard guy. But today I wanted to actually understand why he gave his whole life to these creatures. So, down the hole I went…