Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis

by Greg Wrenn Narrated by Greg Wrenn

Overview

Professor Greg Wrenn likes to tell his nature-writing students, "The ecological is personal, and the personal is ecological." What he's never told them is how he's lived out those correspondences to heal from childhood abuse at the hands of his mother.



Weaving together memoir and cutting-edge science, Mothership is not just a queer coming-of-age story. It's a deeply researched account of how coral reefs and a psychedelic tea called ayahuasca helped Greg heal from complex PTSD-a disorder of trust, which makes the very act of bonding with someone else panic-inducing. From the tide pools in Florida where he grew up, to Indonesia's Raja Ampat archipelago and the Amazon rainforest, this is his search for wholeness when talk therapy and pharmaceuticals did little to help. Along the way, as his ecological conscience wakes up, he takes listeners underwater to the last pristine reefs on earth, and into the psyche.



Written with prophetic urgency, Mothership ultimately asks if doses of nature will be enough to save us before it's too late.

Editorial Reviews

author of The Nature Fix and Heartbreak: A Per Florence Williams

A deeply felt, clear-eyed memoir examining what it means to grieve nature’s losses and yet still manage to find healing and love in what remains.

Alanna Collins

Greg’s life story and spiritual journey are one of the greatest examples of the power that ayahuasca and plant medicines have to bring about personal transformation. The first time I met Greg, he had a crippling fear of life. Through a deep commitment to self-healing, he has transmuted this fear into a full embrace with life itself. A raw, real, and riveting personal story, Mothership brings the reader on a journey through the darkness of deep traumas, woundings, and addictions into the light of divine consciousness. Page by page, we witness a transformation from being broken to becoming whole once again.

Rachel Harris

Mothership is a story of personal and, hopefully, global healing. With rare insight, Wrenn captures a mystical reciprocity with the natural world that leads to a love affair with all life he encounters under the sea. At the same time, he is learning, painfully and little by little, to love himself and to be loved. The turning point in his memoir is his encounter with the spirit of ayahuasca, Madre Ayahuasca. Wrenn elegantly describes his own emotional journey as well as the psychological process of working with this powerful psychedelic medicine. Mothership, a story of how healing happens after a traumatic childhood, is an important contribution to the growing field of psychedelic study."

Rick Doblin

As humanity stands at the crossroads of catastrophe and consciousness, Wrenn’s wonder-filled, carefully researched memoir makes a strong case for not only the sacramental value and healing power of psychedelics but also for safe, legal access to psychedelic-assisted therapy for PTSD. Mothership is a deeply moving roadmap through the intertwined destinies of individual well-being and the urgent need to heal our planet.

Garrard Conley

A brave, beautiful testament to love both past and present, a meticulously researched account of our relationship to ourselves and the world.... Mothership does for coral what Richard Powers’s The Overstory does for trees. I can’t wait to assign this to my students.

Carine McCandless

A powerful testimonial and call to action to save the equal opportunity healer that is Mother Nature.

Kirkus Reviews

2024-01-12
Wrenn turns to the healing properties of nature in search of a cure for his complex PTSD.

The author, a professor of environmental literature and creative writing at James Madison University, opens with a scene of a lecture hall full of silent, disengaged undergraduates. Wrenn describes how he stood in front of the room in full scuba gear, yearning to bestow a sense of wonder for nature and the perils of climate change. The effort fell flat, but readers will appreciate the enthusiasm that pervades the text. The author dissects three periods of his life and journey of healing from the physical abuse he experienced as a child to the verbal abuse he continued to endure. During his travels, Wrenn investigated the healing properties that nature provides, and he recounts the many ayahuasca ceremonies in which “The Door” to his trauma was opened, fully exposing him to the pain but also the eventual forgiveness of those who had harmed him. Taking readers along on his fascinating journey, the author emphasizes the interconnectivity of the self and Mother Earth, drawing connections between his own C-PTSD and the complex being that humans are actively destroying with our “gimme-gimme, carbon-belching society.” He continues, “Whether we’re talking about abusers and victims—or people and the planet—it’s all part of what’s known as our extraction mindset: Pretend the interconnectedness of all beings is woke hogwash. That there will be no consequences for your crimes. Do what feels good, take what you want, and get out.” Wrenn paints a vivid image of a dying planet at the hands of humans—not as an issue of tomorrow, but as the current consequence of our daily actions and inactions, a form of trauma all its own.

A memorable book that capably interweaves the personal and the universal.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940191510507
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	04/30/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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