The rain has finally come to the Pacific Northwest and the m..
Added 2020-11-22 12:52:07 +0000 UTCThe rain has finally come to the Pacific Northwest and the mushrooms are going bananas! Unless I’m an idiot and this is actually their second fruiting of the year? Sometimes I’m the last one to the party. 😅 These are Amanita Muscaria, or the American yellow fly agaric! These amazing mushrooms are found “in conifer and deciduous woodlands throughout the temperate and boreal regions of the Northern Hemisphere”. It’s commonly known that they are poisonous, though that’s not exactly accurate. They contain ibotenic acid, which in large doses can make you sick and have diarrhea. But they have been used for thousands of years, their earliest recorded use being around 4000 BCE by “almost all of the Uralic-speaking peoples of western Siberia and the Paleosoberian-speaking peoples of the Russian Far East.” First I pick them, then dry them, then make them into tea. So far this season, I’m just on step one and two. 😜🍄❤️🍄❤️🍄 When it comes time for step 3, the resulting brew will not make me trip. You don’t hallucinate, and even when it has been used during meditation practices and dream rituals, it’s more of a calm, relaxing state than a trip. The ibotenic acid gets converted to mucimol, which is one of “the principal psychoactive constituents of Amanita muscaria and related species of mushroom. Mucimol is a potent, selective agonist for the GABAA receptors and displays sedative-hypnotic, depressant and hallucinogenic psycho activity.” Some of its health benefits have been listed as: beneficial for sore throats, arthritis, joint pain, and swollen lymph nodes, memory, anxiety, withdrawal from benzodiazepines, and many others!!! I’ll post more on that in the next post! 🍄❤️🍄❤️ Must sleep for mushie hunting in the morning. 😍
