I don't really believe in coincidences. I always feel that there's a purpose to happenstance, even if answers are not immediately produced. So when Matt brought San Pedro cactus juice from Peru to our adventure in San Pedro de Atacama (the village is named after the plant), I knew it was meant to be drunk on the spot. Also, it'd been a while since I've gotten fucked up on hallucinogens.

San Pedro is a specific cactus grown in South America, drunk for thousands and thousands of years by indigenous tribesmen to get closer to nature, find answers, brainwash you into different religions—the rituals vary. You can buy the cactus for about a buck, but turning it into that magic potion can take up to two days, involving skinning it, chopping it, blending it, boiling it, freezing it. Best to just buy it on the street (it's somewhat easy to find if you look in the right places). Oh, turns out it's illegal to drink in Chile, but we didn't know that until after our trip. Just sayin'.

The worst part about drinking San Pedro is drinking it. It's gnarly, and truly tastes wretched. There's no flavor, just a bitter, excrement-y quality that will test your gag reflex. Then, you must stomach it for about an hour. The whole point is not to vomit, though it truly is a glass of nasty. I was lucky enough to hold it down, and after an hour, I felt it completely consume my body.

The juice was a cross between mushrooms, two pills of Vicodin, maybe a shot of codeine thrown in, and pure Ecstasy. You reach a state of euphoria that only the Gods could experience. In the middle of the desert, Matt and I tripped our balls off and—believe it or not—not in a recreational sense. It truly made us connect with our setting. My senses were extraordinarily heightened. You can hear the different layers in the wind. You can see faces in the clouds of the indigenous tribe. Better yet, we saw them in the canyons. In fact, the entire history of the rocks told us their story. I know it sounds super far out, but the point is that I connected with the Earth, and became aware.

Strange things also happened, which, in the case of coincidences, came to me more as signs. A storm brewed and rolled through, raining and lightening and thundering. Was it a coincidence this happened the same day we connected to our area, a storm that locals have not seen in the desert for years? Or the mysterious cat that appeared out of nowhere, a cat none of the locals had ever seen, a cat that found comfort in us, perhaps trying to tell us something? Though we will not have answers, we will know it was all not simply circumstantial.

Jimmy Im, the high-strung journalist from the city, would have totally been over the trip after the 5th hour, but I embraced it into the night (it lasts a good ten hours) and remembered who I was. I was aware. The earth has been here longer than we can even remember. It wasn't until midnight, under a band of the night sky, that I truly connected, realizing the stars were no coincidence either. They are there for a reason. In fact, they represent the entire galaxy, and even the galaxies outside ours and, if you think about it, in the grand scheme of things, it proves we are essentially nothing. A millisecond in time. A dot in space. And so, if we are nothing, then why are we here? Because we are something to each other. And we can't forget that we're a human race put here to learn something from who we know and to love and create and remember who we are. And that also, to me, is no coincidence.

This was quite a trip—literally and figuratively—that brought that moment of clarity I believe every city dweller should at some point consider, if only to remember (Google and Blackberry and fashion week and celebrity restaurants aside) the pure awareness of being.