Bett Williams

Bett Williams is a literary writer and psychedelic explorer, and the author of The Wild Kindness; A Psilocybin Odyssey (Dottir Press Fall, 2020), a memoir about growing mushrooms in the high desert of New Mexico. Her other works include The Wrestling Party and Girl Walking Backwards (St. Martin’s Press), which was named as one of the Ten Best Young Adult Queer Novels by Vogue Magazine. She has written for several publications including DoubleBlind, OUT Magazine, Flaunt, Lucid News and Lenny Letter. 

QUOTES:

“The problem with science is that it’s not alchemical. It’s always like one thing acting upon another & yet in real life there’s always so many things concurrently influencing each other, so how do just isolate one thing? The fact that basic scientific method can’t take in to account some basic process of alchemy is why we’re at where we’re at”

“There are so many things constantly in play, that as we try too hard to explain everything we forget to just enjoy the magic of the moment. Like how we’re sitting on chairs–someone had to invent a chair!”

“We can never know all the things that are in play that make things happen. However, I can be grateful that this moment’s pretty good”

“You know who’s really vibrating psychedelically right now? Brittany Spears! I saw a video of her playing with kinetic sand. I don’t know if she’s really trapped or what’s going on, but it seems like a very psychedelic situation”

“Anytime someone’s fighting for cognitive liberty & the right to be strange & not be stigmatized & abused for it, that’s in the realm of mind-manifesting”

“In terms of Shamanism, what often makes someone a great healer isn’t necessarily their training, but their intuitive talents being brought forth through discipline”

“I had a friend who had a vision that he was a glass-blower now. He wanted me to buy this crappy little pipe & I was like ‘dude I’ll buy something from you in a few years AFTER you get good at your craft! The world is full of critical feedback. We can’t expect the world to just bow down to our visions if we don’t back them up by putting the work in”

“You can have tons of talent, but like Tom Lane said to me once about Maria Sabina, ‘the entheogen needs to CHOOSE you too.’ It’s not this one way street, ‘oh I have so much talent, passion, drive etc,’ the truth is that the medium needs to choose you too!

“You have to learn the skills & put the work in & once it’s been established that you are in service to your talent, that sense of ‘being chosen’, you’re automatically going to get back up when life knocks you down. You have no other choice. ”

“I’ve manufactured, through my imagination, a call & response dialogue with my higher self”

“I think that one reason I feel so lost [since Covid] is that the world has shifted so much…My mirroring relationship with this animated world is not what it was & I need to re-calibrate”

“We get stuck in these tropes about what psychedelia should look like. I think it’s time for some bodywork on the aesthetics of the psychedelic realm”

“OMG, the last time I took LSD, I fixated on this phrase that came to me which was ‘cat-carpaccio.’ I just kept seeing this cat sliced very thinly & I couldn’t shake it, it was pretty funny”