Rest in Peace, Jacques Olivier

Wow. I just met Jacques on July 3rd while in a meeting with radio station manager Allen Hartle at 102.3 FM KIXP in Eastsound. Jacques walked in out of the blue, sat down, and began telling us some of his jaw-dropping life experiences. He handed Allen a copy of his book, Nature Loves Courage, and I asked if I could flip through it. Not one sentence was dull. I took it home and devoured it – his accounts of psychedelics, psylocybin, 5-MeO-DMT (a psychedelic secreted by the glands of a toad species), and the loves of his life began with a whirlwind of a story of how Jacques died on stage and was revived at the Imagine Festival in Doe Bay in the middle of playing a song by the Talking Heads.

The other night while painting a chair, I listened to a segment on 60 Minutes in which Anderson Cooper traveled to Mexico to watch veterans with PTSD attend a psychedelic retreat in hopes that it will help them heal from incredible trauma.

Yesterday, I bought a ticket to go to the Imagine Festival in Doe Bay, September 5-7. I’ve never been, and I don’t do any substances, but I decided it’s time to be a fly on the wall and see what this 3-day experience is like.

While posting an article on FaceBook a few minutes ago, I read that Jacques passed the other day.

Thank you, Jacques, for sharing your life. The timing was fascinatingly poignant…