I Flew to Breda to Meet a Garden Gnome. He Never Showed.
People fly to Peru for ayahuasca. They sit in a maloca in the Amazon, vomit into a bucket held by a shaman who has done this four thousand times, and come out the other side reborn.
I flew to Breda.
I was already headed to Rotterdam for a cruise, so the logic wrote itself: fly in a few days early, do some legal mushrooms, sail away with new software installed. I looked at retreats first — a week with strangers in a converted farmhouse somewhere, everyone processing in a circle. The timing was wrong, and if I’m honest, so was the vibe. Tripping alongside people I’d just met felt less like a risk and more like a mixer I hadn’t RSVP’d to. I’m an introvert. Six strangers and a shared bathroom was never going to get me anywhere near enlightenment.
So I booked a private guide instead, and picked Breda — small enough to walk end to end, big enough to have a decent flat white. I’d been to Amsterdam once and nearly lost my mind in the crowds. Breda felt like the Netherlands I’d been picturing the whole time, the one that exists mostly in the part of my brain that still thinks the windmills are out there actually grinding flour.
I stayed at the Hotel Nassau, a converted church turned hotel, all clean lines and quiet staff who were friendly in the specific Dutch way — polite, but not remotely interested in your feelings. My first room had a large photograph over the bed of a woman dressed as a rather severe nun. I requested a room change without explaining why. Some things a man just knows he doesn’t need staring down at him while he’s about to eat a significant quantity of mushrooms alone in a hotel room.
The guide was a licensed therapist. We’d done a pre-screening call — blood pressure, medication, prior psychedelic experience, what I was hoping to get out of six hours in a room with a stranger and a pot of tea. All very clinical. Very reasonable.
None of that stopped me from feeling, the moment she knocked on the door, like I was doing something vaguely illegal. Magic truffles are legal here in a way regular mushrooms aren’t, some loophole in the law I still don’t fully understand, and some part of my nervous system hadn’t gotten the memo. I kept half-expecting her to produce a badge instead of a scale.
There was also the simpler discomfort of being a middle-aged man, happily partnered, letting an unfamiliar woman into a hotel room for six hours. Not because I thought she was after anything — mostly everything I own is from Costco, and half of what I’d packed was already dirty. Or that I’d wake up in the bathtub with a drainage tube taped to my side and a Post-it note telling me to call a doctor, one kidney lighter. I do have two working kidneys, for what that’s worth, if anyone out there was hoping to make a night of it.
She set up the room with the practiced efficiency of someone who does this for a living. Stones. Oversized rattles that were not, she clarified, actual baby rattles. Her lunch, packed and waiting, which told me everything I needed to know about how long this was going to take. Then she lit incense and waved a bundle of feathers around the room, and I spent a genuinely uncomfortable ninety seconds hoping she wasn’t about to set off the smoke detector in a former church.
Then came the tea. She weighed the truffles on a small scale with the seriousness of someone doing actual math, factoring in my blood pressure medication, my general tolerance, whatever she could read off me in the room, and landed on a dose calculated down to the decimal. And yet for all the math, the final number felt less like science and more like a very confident guess — not exactly winging it, not exactly rigorous either. She cut a lemon, put water on to boil, and handed me a hand-crank grinder.
Using an electric grinder, she told me, felt disrespectful to the medicine. I wasn’t sure if that was a genuine belief or a polite way of buying herself fifteen minutes to finish smudging, but I ground away anyway — slowly, by hand, because apparently that’s the only way it’s allowed to be done. She mentioned, almost in passing, that possessing truffles is legal here but processing them isn’t. Which meant that for about ten minutes, I was technically the one committing the crime.
She squeezed fresh lemon juice into a cup, set a strainer over the top, and poured hot water slowly through the paste and into the cup below. Handed me the truffle tea. I drank most of it in one go and waited for something to happen.
Here is what I thought was going to happen: a small crew of garden gnomes was going to show up somewhere behind my eyes, quietly swap out thirty years of faulty wiring in my head for something newer, hand me a printed manual, and let me get on with the rest of my life. I know that isn’t how this works. I wanted it to work that way anyway.
What actually happened was six hours of something called Internal Family Systems, a legitimate, well-regarded therapy methodology I would have known more about if I’d spent ten minutes researching it instead of fantasizing about garden gnomes in tiny hard hats. At one point she pulled out a deck of cards that I was fully prepared to call tarot. They were not tarot. They were an IFS card tool, which somehow felt like an even more specific way to be handed the wrong instrument for the job. The idea is that you’re not one self but several — different parts, each with a job, each owed some curiosity and respect. She kept asking which part of me was talking. Try asking it how it feels. Try asking it what it needs.
I did not want to have a conversation with my parts. I wanted them fired. Frog-marched out of the building, badges confiscated, so an entirely new team could move in and start fresh. Six hours of gentle, patient negotiation with the inner committee was about the least satisfying thing I could have signed up for, given what I’d actually shown up hoping to get.
I am, for context, the kind of person who gets restless two hours into a Netflix binge. By the two-hour mark I was ready for her to leave. By hour four I was dropping hints about it. Six hours of unhurried inner-committee negotiation was never going to end with me feeling especially zen about it.
None of this was on her. I’m a scanner, not a detail person, often to a fault — I book first and read the fine print never, and it genuinely had not occurred to me, going in, that “parts work” would be the actual process. I wasn’t trying to be difficult about it. I just didn’t have the first idea who was supposed to be answering these questions, or how to go introduce myself to my own mental neighborhood.
Which is a nicer way of saying: under ordinary circumstances, I’m the reason the feelings wheel had to be invented — ask me what I’m feeling and you’ll get a shrug and possibly a weather report. Ask me six hours into a truffle ceremony, though, and what you get instead is that guy at the end of the bar — not stumbling, not crying into his glass, still fairly convinced he could drive home if he had to. Just buzzed enough that the filter’s gone and the mouth won’t stop, talking at a stranger for twenty minutes without saying anything that actually matters. That guy. The one I’d go out of my way to avoid, mostly by not being in the bar in the first place.
I’d come to Breda carrying a year I won’t fully get into here — a family stretched thin by a health crisis, some things coming out that had been sitting quietly under the floorboards for a long time. Some part of me thought the mushrooms might reach down and rearrange all of it in one long afternoon. Six hours later, I had no vision, no download, no gnome. Just a slightly headachy, over-talked-out version of myself, sitting in a hotel room in a former church, still entirely intact.
Here’s what I keep circling back to.
I wanted a shortcut. I wanted the electric-grinder version of change — fast, effortless, somebody else doing the work while I stood there holding a teacup. What I got instead was the hand-crank version: slow, a little tedious, entirely mine to do, with nobody arriving at the end to tell me I was finished.
Maybe that’s the real loophole. Not the legal one — the other one. The one where you go looking for an instant reset and instead get handed the crank and told, gently, that this part doesn’t get outsourced.
I flew home with the same wiring I flew in with. No new operating system. No manual. Just a lemon rind drying out on the nightstand, a strainer still full of spent paste, and the faint suspicion that whatever I’m looking for isn’t going to arrive in a single afternoon, no matter how much truffle tea is in the cup.
Sean, from Slow Crossings: written in Breda, several truffles and zero garden gnomes later.