The Door She Did Not Build the Lock For (Maria Sabina)

Lyrics

[Verse 1]
You were four when you ate the mushrooms for the first time
in the Sierra Mazateca
behind your grandfather's house
where the wet clay smelled like something unfinished
The saints arrived — not as pictures,
not as lessons from the priest,
but as presences that spoke
through the part of you
that hadn't learned to be ashamed of listening
You were a curandera before you were tall enough
to reach the altar
and the altar didn't mind

[Verse 2]
For decades you healed in the dark —
the velada held at night
because the mushrooms ask for darkness
the way a developing photograph
asks to be left in the chemical bath
You chanted for hours
calling the little saints by name
while the sick person lay still
and the sickness inside them
rearranged itself
into something the body could finally argue with
You lost two husbands and most of your children
and the mushrooms did not explain why
and you did not ask them to

[Chorus]
Then the American came —
Gordon Wasson, banker, amateur mycologist,
polite, curious, taking notes
in a language the velada had never been transcribed into
You let him sit in the ceremony
because he asked and you were generous
and generosity is the door
you did not build the lock for
He published it in Life magazine
and the door swung open
onto ten thousand strangers
who wanted the saints
without the suffering that earned them

[Verse 3]
The hippies arrived in Huautla de Jiménez
with their backpacks and their questions
and their assumption that the sacred
is a destination you can fly to
They wanted the vision without the village
the ceremony without the decades
of sitting in the dark with sick people
and singing until your throat bled
You said the mushrooms had lost their power
but you meant the strangers had spent it —
the way a river loses nothing
when someone upstream builds a dam
but the village below goes dry

[Bridge]
The Mexican police came too
because where the tourists go
the government follows
and where the government follows
someone's house gets burned
They burned yours
and you rebuilt it
with the patience of someone
who has been talking to saints
since before she could read
and knows that a house
is the least permanent thing you own

[Outro]
You died in your village at ninety-one
still healing, still chanting in the dark
still calling the little saints
who never stopped coming
just because the tourists did
The drawer where they keep your ceremony
was never yours to lock —
you knew that, you always knew that —
the mushrooms belong to the mountain
and the mountain does not read Life magazine