Suburbs of Wonderland

"Keep Asheville Weird" is both the totem and the rallying cry of this city I call home. Filled with gloriously Mad Hatters and winsome March Hares, many residents live deep inside the rabbit hole. They spin their days away brewing tea with the White Queen and smoking hookah with Absolem. Sampling both sides of the mushroom, they shapeshift with the Cheshire Cat and watch netflix with the Doormouse. In these neighborhoods of wonderland, tupiks line the sidewalks like lemonade stands, advertising life coaching prowess and their ability to divine the meaning of The Jabberwocky by playing chess with the stars. They can teach you how to defeat the Red Queen with cacao-coated quartz and with which essential oil to anoint your vorpal blade. Meanwhile, some grizzled locals completely eschew the ways of Alice and live coldly in the land of realism. A province with starkly different terrain, but an ironically similar law of delusion. The remainder of the population bids for homes in the suburbs of Wonderland. They enjoy commuting down the rabbit hole to eat cake with the caterpillar and ecastatic dance with Tweedle-dee. They will forage with the White Rabbit and have their tarot cards read by the Gryphon. But their roots are embedded deeply in the earth, budding rhizomes in reality. They don't chart their career paths based on the omens of Vedic astrology. They don't cancel the trip of a lifetime because their chi is not fully activated. They don't file divorce papers because the Sun is conspiring with Venus and Mars. These moderates have discovered paradise in a zip code somewhere between a wintry Manhattan and Shangri-La. With block parties celebrating East meeting West, the ethereal and corporeal, illusion and truth. No one visits this realm unchanged. A petulant girl becomes regicidal. A skeptic becomes a priestess. A stoned caterpillar becomes a sagacious butterfly.

This characteristic brand of magical mythology that pervades the community at the base of the blue ridge mountains is actually not that different from many other ancient religions. The Greeks were baffled by thunder so they created the powerful Zeus. The Hindus, tired of ritual sacrifice and the caste system, imagined nirvana and birthed Buddhism. And the Christians, struggling with persecution and yearning for Eden, blamed their fate on Eve. In a similar way, these ranks of life coaches have risen out of decades of confusion and a millennial desire to understand inflation, high divorce rates, hate crimes, and the death of skinny jeans. These lost souls, adrift in a sea of overwhelming student debt and dream debris, look for answers in the stars. And many believe they find resolution there. Those who find themselves destitute and broken-hearted, swept into the rushing waters of an early life crisis, cling to the buoyant promises of these mystic practices like they were life rafts. Self-affirming answers materialize out of a cloud of Amazonian Hapé....You are not clinically depressed, you just haven't been activated by ceremonial light codes. You are not a cuckhold, your partner just needed to do some shadow work with the neighbor. You are not a burned-out corporate employee, you just haven't yet stepped into your divine feminine power and started an MLM scheme. These explanations are intoxicating. Especially in their cryptic deliverance. Who wants to be told they need to "deal with their unresolved trauma", "stop using relationships to fill the void in our hearts", and "quit putting vodka on their cheerios" by a dull, albeit well-meaning licensed therapist with years of psychological training? Particularly when you can use Apple Pay from the comfort of your own home to pay a quirky 30 year old woman, who went to one yoga retreat in Costa Rica and is now a high priestess, to tell you that her tea leaves indicate you are already whole and healed. And advise you that you just need to micro-dose PCP, perform an Ua Neeb Kho ceremony, and enter into a tantric marriage with the girl you've known for 6 weeks. At the end of the day, no matter how varied and absurd the rituals seem, all religions are just a feeble attempt by humanity to explain the unexplained. To clarify the alien. To render transparent the unascertained. An acknowledgement that there is a power higher and more omnipotent then our mortal brains can comprehend. Whether it be incense, crystals, a microscope, or rosary beads, the tokens on your personal altar do not matter. If your faith brings you hope and healing, provides you a light in the darkness, then all belief systems are profound.

The denizens of Wonderland understood the dangers of living in a land of black and white. A land where serving the White queen could merit a beheading and where consorting with a Black Knave could leave you trapped in a croquet game for eternity. The truth always lies somewhere in that daunting grey area. This has never been more clear to me then in the world of medicine, where the boundaries between helping and hurting can be as thin as a blade of grass. In that eternal waiting room where loved ones of the ill and injured hold space, one can hear battle cries echoing down the hallways as the different schools of thought collide. East meets west. Ayurveda meets radiation oncology. Reiki energy healing meets cardiothoracic surgery. Instead of sharing wisdom across the round table, I've seen scholars so engrossed in their incessant conflict that they barely deign to glance up when Death steals another soul on their watch. One such beautiful soul slipped away in the early dawn hours of a spring morning. A 19-year-old dancer who should have been sashaying across a college campus, was instead being dragged out of this life by that merciless spectre, cancer. What started as a small lump among breast tissue that could have been cured with local resection and targeted radiation, grew insidiously into a monstrous, friable, callous mass that invaded her chest wall and wrapped its tentacles around her heart. While her parents fought for surgery, her boyfriend insisted on only essential oil therapy, extremes fasts, and healing crystals. The most devastating reality was that the cure had been in front of them all along, hidden by the superficial differences in their antithetical doctrines. She could have received chemotherapy, then dealt with the side effects using ginger, lavender oil, and ashwagandha. She could have prepared for a curative resection with meditation and breath work. Instead, her incandescent flame dwindled to a tiny smouldering ember as her loved ones fought. They pulled in lawyers, lobbied injunctions and restraining orders at each other, and ignored the tiny angel being consumed alive, alone in her hospital bed. At the end of the day, these warring factions succeeded only in binding themselves in red tape. As her breaths became ragged, I was the only attendant at her bedside. I held that translucent, wasted hand and sang as her spirit ultimately danced out of this life and into the next.

It is impossible to chase a pocket-watch down a rabbit hole, stay in the Mad Hatter's Airbnb, and discuss "British Bake-off" with the Duchess and return to this colder reality unchanged. Just as you cannot watch a sunrise, taste a sun-warmed peach, or listen to a child's first cry without admitting there is certainly magic in this world. However, the combination of mysticism with either narcissism or hypocrisy is a blend not even a soccer mom on a juice cleanse would order. Behind the aesthetically pleasing white-picket fences of the suburban witches sometimes lies a thicket of poison ivy and cultural appropriation. Privileged white women coopting an ancient spiritual practice for their own monetary gain. Crediting Ayurvedic diet for their "revenge bodies" and twisting their henna-adorned limbs into near pornographic poses, surely not recommended by the ancient Indian Rishis. Boasting of all the wonderful healing work they do by posting platitudes and blurry selfies on instagram, then insisting the only true path to sacred Bodhi is to Venmo them hundreds of dollars for a personalized neural audit. Preaching of how they connected with past lives and shed their earthly desires while on a spiritual ayahuasca journey in Tulum, when in reality, their apathy is born of a traumatic, protective disassociation with reality. Spouting motivational quotes like posters on a boardroom wall and condescending to their unenlightened friends as if they have unlocked every divine secret of the universe. Girl, I had to put an AirTag on you last weekend because you got so wasted at brunch that you tossed me your phone, shouted "Go fish!" And took off running down the street. You are about as centered and enlightened as that bag of live Koi you managed to find and steal from the vintage pop-up we found you hiding in.....

Asheville is a soft landing spot for these sublime weirdos. A wonderland not even Lewis Carroll could have imagined. A charming oasis where a cynic can share kombucha and astral project with a priestess. Where an skeptic can debate light languages and ego deaths with a shaman. Where a western physician can explore eastern tinctures with a goddess. And when their foray into the rabbit hole is complete, these intrepid agnostics can click their heels and be transported home, back to the land of 401k's and narrative therapy. To an astral plane of gorgeously unaligned chakras and a chaotic path toward healing. To a world where every face in the Looking Glass is both alluringly haggard and perfectly confused. So come, raise a glass with me among the lawless beauty that is my backyard of unkempt vines, un-manifested dreams, and audacious wildflowers. Let us cheers to a realm full of grounded souls and open hearts. To the Suburbs of Wonderland.