Little Mushroom Trips

Since 2017 I’ve been slowly working on a book series, and I haven’t really talked about it much, in fact I didn’t even have a name for it until a few weeks ago. The series is called Little Mushroom Trips, and it consists of a series of meditations on each song in every major song cycle that Franz Schubert ever wrote. I anticipate that this will be a four to six book series, and I just finished the second!

First of all, what is a "little mushroom trip?" I don’t even do mushrooms, but Little Mushroom was the nickname given to Schubert, probably by his friend Franz Schober, who was kind of an asshole to put it mildly. I also think that calling these meditations "mushroom trips" summarizes their character succinctly. These books are hard to describe, and they don’t fit cleanly into any genre that I know of. They’re spiritual books, but they don’t fit into any one ideology. They’re romances, but the romance is just the framework for the message. They’re philosophical dialogues, but sexy, colorful, and funny. They’re fairytales, but they don’t have a narrative. While they explore Schubert’s songs they are not a deep dive into the music or poetry. Rather, I use the music and/or poetry as a jumping off point for philosophical and spiritual conversation with "Schubert" via meditation.

If what I’m connecting with in meditation is really the spirit of Franz Schubert is beside the point, and I couldn’t tell you if I really know myself. What I do know is that I get amazing insights with this technique, and colorful romantic adventures as well. The nature of messages received through meditation is often extremely visual, at least if you’re a visual person, therefore these books display a wealth of curious settings and vibrant metaphors.

The first book, Winter From Above, was written while I was working on a shadow puppet show of Winterreise (Winter Journey.) I started doing the meditations to get ideas for the puppets because how the heck do you add an extra layer of insight and nuance onto what is already a double layer of such in these spare and devastating songs? The meditations were so incredibly helpful in creating the puppet show that I felt compelled to publish them as a book, not yet knowing that this would become a series.

Winter From Above details the spiritual underpinnings of the books to follow, and as such I consider it a sort of spiritual manifesto for my own witchy, alchemical, non-dual belief system. I don’t even remember how I came across the idea to treat Die Schöne Müllerin (The Pretty Miller Maid) as metaphors for the artistic process, but that is what happened. I’m very pleased with the results! I call this book Turning the Philosopher’s Stone because the artistic process is alchemical at its core, and very much related to the turning of millstones - a flour mill upon a brook being the setting for this song cycle.

Upon researching millstones I discovered they are frequently engraved with patterns that resemble the sun’s rays. The sun is an ancient alchemical symbol for gold, while the moon represents silver (or quicksilver). Taken together the sun and moon stand for the integration of masculine and feminine polarities within the soul, and it is that integration that forms the substance of the completed work, aka gold. This is why the cover of Turning the Philosopher’s Stone depicts a millstone as the sun emerging between two halves of the moon.

I had initially hoped this book would include more practical tips on how to succeed as an artist, and while there are such tips in it, that is not what the book is primarily about. The topics that came up in meditation covered a wide gamut, but the main themes were about inspiration, the unconscious, the role of art in society, and art as a vehicle for empathy and unification with Source.

In these uncertain times in the United States a lot of artists are struggling to feel like they matter, like their work matters. As fascism threatens to crush us all, making art can feel like nothing more than escapism until you remember to look at it from a different angle. I covered this before in another blog post, but Turning the Philosopher’s Stone really gets to the heart of the matter. If you’re an artist dealing with depression and flagging motivation under political oppression then I highly recommend reading it.

Here are my thoughts for the rest of the Little Mushroom Trips book series:

Book 3: meditations on two incomplete and theoretical song cycles – Abendröte and Auf den wilden Wegen

Book 4: meditations on the Lady of the Lake songs and Schwanengesang

Book 5 and 6: possibly meditations or poems about Schubert’s chamber music.

Do I have a clue what the integrating theme will be for each of these books yet? Not at all! I started pondering book three, and it’s far from clear. So far the theme between those two "cycles" seems to be one of mirrors: as above so below, as within so without, but I don’t know yet where that’s going to go. Luckily, my pace on these books has quickened considerably, so I don’t plan on dragging my feet for another seven years to get out the next one, look for it in early 2027!

As for Turning the Philosopher’s Stone, it will be released on my website on January 5, 2026. You can purchase Winter From Above here.