🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that got lost in the mail. If you’re reading this, we found a way. 😤

Klea McKenna is Terence McKenna's daughter. For 25 years, she lived her own life while the internet turned her dad into a fractal-wrapped meme. Now she's sifting through his journals, letters, and recordings herself… not to mythologize him, but to let the material speak for itself.

We asked Klea what finally pulled her into the archive, what has surprised her most in Terence's personal letters, and which of her father's ideas deserve a more critical look.

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I always knew I'd have to manage his legacy in some way. For 25 years, it has haunted me as this looming job I didn’t feel ready for. I already have a calling, which is to be an artist, not an archivist. So I focused on that. I got a master's degree, built my art career, and had two kids. Decades just slipped by.

Recently, a couple things shifted. One is a growing awareness of mortality and immortality. My dad died when I was 19, my mom is 77 now, and I have my own kids, so I’m thinking about what people leave behind and how you make it meaningful. I always knew legacy was important to Terence. He lived with this heightened, almost literary self-awareness—what young people now call “main character energy.” He made choices as though he were the hero in a book, writing the story as it happened. Little things in the archive reinforce that. He'd write captions on the back of snapshots about himself in the third person, or Xerox a letter before he sent it.

There's also a practical side. My dad’s intellectual work is an asset our family has never leveraged. It occurred to me that in such unstable times his work might help care for his family, even in his absence. So, it seemed like the right time to revive Lux Natura (a company my parents founded in 1976) while also honoring his legacy and updating it for a new era. And on a personal level, it took growing into a new level of confidence. Doing anything publicly with his work invites scrutiny from fans who are attached to their version of him. Fifteen years ago, that would have stopped me. It doesn't anymore.

The first thing was the depth of his relationship with his mother. She died when he was in his early 20s, so I never knew her, but the whole family held her up as this golden person. What surprised me was how close they were and how openly they communicated. He was remarkably honest with her about his lifestyle. She was a smart housewife in small-town Colorado, and he's in Berkeley, doing all these drugs, having these crazy ideas, and he doesn't conceal any of it. She really tries to keep up with who he is becoming. When he'd write about theories, she'd say, “I don't really understand, but I'll look up the book you mentioned”. And the next week she'd write back saying she'd found it at the library and read the whole thing. For who they each were, and how disparate their sub-cultures were, that's a pretty extraordinary level of intellectual engagement.

I'm also reaching out to key friends of his to see if they have his letters. Luis Eduardo Luna, who does a lot of research around ayahuasca, just sent me dozens Terence wrote to him. I had already found about 60 from Eduardo to Terence in the archive, ranging from 1972 to 1992. Usually if you find an intense exchange between two people, it's a two-year blip. This is a 20-year arc that affected the trajectory of both of their lives.

Some of this material carries real emotional weight. There are days I sit down to go through a box and I don't know how it's going to make me feel. I think of mourning as something that happens in the immediate aftermath of someone’s death, about accepting and letting go. But grieving feels like maybe it's never done. It's letting yourself feel the loss and, in this case, getting to know someone through the parts of their life you didn’t witness.

I wouldn't really put it as people getting things “wrong.” But people who were his fans in the '90s know a different version of him than people who've discovered him online in the last 25 years. Internet culture has fragmented his body of work into sound bites and repackaged them with a certain aesthetic. His original ideas are weird enough that you don't need trippy AI fractals layered over them. The ideas themselves are what can stretch your mind.

I see that outdated aesthetic as a barrier to entry. If I weren't his daughter and someone sent me one of his talks on YouTube, I'd think, this isn't for me. I'm hoping to offer a counterpoint to that way of presenting his work. I’d also like to highlight his ideas on themes beyond psychedelics, such as creativity, the role of the artist, history and time, and the human relationship to nature.

Some people see me as an outsider because I haven't participated in the psychedelic scene for 25 years. But I never stopped taking psychedelics, and I never stopped being close with my family. In anthropology, they call that a “participant observer.” When you have a foot in both worlds, you can see patterns that you might not if you're totally immersed in them.

Yes, there are flaws in his ideas worth being honest about. The Timewave Zero Theory is an obvious one. The philosophical principle it's built on—novelty as a driving force of history, a pattern that's repeating but expanding—still rings true to me. But he should have kept it as philosophy. He was out of his depth trying to make it into a mathematical prediction tool.

And with True Hallucinations, which I think is one of his best works, the lack of awareness of the Indigenous people’s subjectivity is bizarre to me. He refers to the Witoto and their plants and practices, but there's not one individual with any character development who is Witoto. That's a colonial lens he hadn't examined.

On a more personal level, growing up, we were taught that no matter what you do, just don't be normal. That's the only crime. Go out in a blaze of glory or be a genius, but God forbid you just get married and buy a house and be “a working stiff.” That isn’t a healthy pressure to put on your children. One would hope the primary desire you have for your kids is that they're happy or find meaning in their lives. I've had to unlearn that alienation in order to feel satisfied with my own life choices.

But I have a lot of compassion for my parent’s shortcomings now. Particularly for creative people with a rich inner life, there's a feeling that your real life is your interior world, and the mundane tasks of parenting are taking you away from it. Both my parents struggled with that. It took me becoming a parent and a working artist at the same time to understand how much tension there can be between your inner and outer lives.

Near-term, we have a podcast coming, where we’ll play tracks from the audio archive. Some will be familiar talks, and others will be lesser-known material like field recordings and intimate conversations with friends that haven't been made public. When we share the podcast via YouTube, that raises the question of what visuals to pair with it, and to me that's ripe for inviting artists to contribute. It’s a curatorial project that could elicit some new visual interpretations.

Mid-term, I want to publish a series of slim editions organized around the primary themes in Terence’s work, which would be transcribed and edited from his spoken talks. I think pulling out these threads retrospectively and presenting them as primers would benefit the work and offer an entry point to some of his lesser-known ideas.

The project I'm most excited about is a beautiful art book. I’m envisioning a visual biography illustrated with material from the archive. It would include old photos, letters, notes, and manuscripts, all presented in their original form. I'm a huge sucker for the way material ages—old letters that are folded, ink that's bled through, stains on the paper.

In a way, that's what this whole project is about: choosing which pieces are preserved and which stories get told. Our long-term goal is to find a forever home for this material in an institutional archive where it can be preserved and shared. As the role of psychedelics in our culture changes, these characters that were once on the fringe are becoming the history of a mainstream phenomena. Archives act as an official form of memory; they are how events and people are written into our collective history.

Follow along with her archiving process on Instagram, join the mailing list to learn about new releases, and donate to support the creation of the Terence McKenna Archive.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.