Adventures in Spirituality: The Champagne of Blogs

Well FRIENDS, what can I tell you…

…I did NOT drink on my 10-yr anniversary of sobriety. What do you think I am, crazy??? I understand how foolish it would be to reconnect w/ alcohol. Nothing short of going back to an abusive lover.

We had a lovely adventure in St Pete—stayed in a hotel downtown, explored & dined & shopped, visited friends, went to the Phantogram show—and the temptation to drink just wasn’t there. Which surprised me. I really thought I would be playing pong with the moral gatekeepers on my shoulders. Should i? Shouldn’t I? I’m too paralyzed with uncertainty to have a good time!

But that’s not how it went.  Considering how much I’ve dreamed of being able to taste the magic elixir again, I was surprised at how blase I felt about it. Barely a day has gone by in these 10 years that I didn’t yearn for a cold beer, or a shot of warm bourbon or a delightfully frothy boat drink. I’ve been plagued by a sense of deprivation this whole time…

…deprived daily of the Spirit of Alcohol…

…but now that I’ve been granted parole, the pressure is off, and the cravings are quiet. I still plan on having at least one drink before I leave this planet, but it may have to wait til I’m on my deathbed.

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I’ve already regaled you with tales of finding a spiritual path that didn’t clash with my over-analytical & highly skeptical sensibilities. From 14 - 21 I was on this feverish quest to discover why people matter, why life is an important journey, and why I could “see things” before they happened. At 21, I was initiated into Wicca, having decided that was the “religion” for me.

With that, I’d hit my “enlightenment plateau.” Life quickly became less about exploring the esoteric zones and more about the unpalatable survival pyramid. 

Believe it or not, there was a time when I had contempt for people (ie, the adults in my family) who used alcohol to cope. I was NOT going to be one of those people. I had done my share of underage drinking & knew alcohol was there for me if I needed it. I knew I liked it a whole lot, and could easily become hooked, so I was always careful not to rely too heavily on it. 

I could go on a long rant about how much harder it is for me to interact with people than it is for the average person, but I think you all know that about me by now : )) I watch you all, and I see how much easier it is for you to talk and laugh and mingle and socialize.

It was hard enough in school, but out in the real (phony) world of business/commerce/adulthood it was torture. Being around people, working with people, having relationships with people, connecting, conforming, placating people alllll day long was killing me.

I found out that having strong spiritual beliefs could not make me feel fine after a long day of facing the public onslaught. I needed something powerful & instantaneous to create a cushion between reality and me. I also needed a magic potion that could transform me into a people-person. 

And I knew I could find that magical potion on any street corner!

So yeah, around my 23rd bday I scrapped my rigid stance on booze and started drinking pretty much constantly for the next 15 years. I won’t bore you with alllll the details of being an alcoholic from 23 - 38, only some of them. 

Initially, of course, alcohol turned me into a super hero! I was one of those people who transformed drastically under the influence—I could talk & socialize like a pro; I made friends I never would’ve been able to meet; I was able to do things (like play guitar onstage) I never would’ve been able to do; I could drink & drink and still make it in to work (and I would often drink at work).

I was a successful & highly functioning alcoholic and life was great. (Not really, but my close relationship w/ alcohol made me feel like life was great.) As they say in AA, I was self-medicating. Without question, the magnificent spectacle that was my 20s never would’ve happened without alcohol. I don’t know if that’s amusing or pathetic…

I became a funeral director when I was 27, and let me just say…formaldehyde & alcohol do not mix well. It was around this time I began worrying that I may have a PROBLEM with alcohol. It was affecting my job performance. I tried many times to abstain or cut back, but I just could not do without it.  

I really loved the social benefits alcohol gave me, but I also knew deep down… that the person I was when I drank was not the REAL ME. All my life I’d been told “You’re too quiet. You’re so negative. Smile. Speak up. What’s wrong? I can’t hear you. Why are you so sad? You look tired. You look mad.”

Basically, You have a shitty personality.

No one ever complained that I had a shitty personality when I drank. I felt obligated to drink in order to be liked by people. I was truly afraid that if I quit drinking I would lose everything—friends, job, social skills, creative abilities.

I met Moonchild when I was 28 and alcohol was a big part of our dating adventure, and continued to be a major part of our lives after we got married. He could tell drinking was problematic for me and we tried together to make alcohol less of a priority, but somehow it always returned to being front & center in our lives.

By my early 30s I was really trying to get a grip on it. I was losing my super hero ability to be a functional drunkard and wanted to feel “normal” (ie, not sick all the time). I was 31 and drinking pretty heavily when I started the “psychic safari”—writing the streams-of-consciousness that turned out to be foreshadows of 9/11. 

And as I told you, I was able to stop drinking—strangely, miraculously—on Sep 4, 2001. From Sep ’01 to Aug ’03 I had no alcohol but lots of spirits visiting me : )) Then in Aug ’03 I went to spend time with my family when my nephew was born, and under those auspices I fell off the proverbial wagon.

I kept the drinking minimal for about a year, but in 2005 I went back to my old habit of just drinking all the time. And unlike in my 20s, I couldn’t even pretend to be functional. Much of ’06/’07 was a rollercoaster of blackouts & withdrawals.

By 2007 I was sick & tired of being sick & tired (to use more AA speak), but I was also powerless to overcome my addiction. It was getting to the point where I needed to go to the hospital to get through the withdrawals. I started to feel like I was going to die from drinking.  But I also thought I might die from NOT drinking. 

******************

So…how did I end up getting sober and staying that way for 10 years?

I started to realize the toll my drinking was taking on Moonchild. He was just about done with it, and he told me so around Jun 2007. I’ve never felt like a worse human being than I did when I could see on his face how serious he was. I knew I HAD to quit drinking immediately. But the thought of that scared the shit out of me.

Also in Jun 2007, I got a phonecall from an old friend I hadn’t seen since high school. This was just before the social network floodgates opened and every friend you ever had was right there at your fingerprints. It was a totally random, unexpected call. My friend was in town visiting family & wanted to meet up after all these years.

She called on a Wednesday, and luckily wanted to meet at the beach that Sunday. I had 4 days to sober up. Because I could not have driven to the beach, or sat on the beach for 3 hours, or had any sort of coherent conversation w/ my friend if I didn’t. So basically as soon as I got off the phone I began the process of withdrawing. I was able to sober up and feel okay enough to make it to the beach.

That day I learned my friend was also an “alcohol addict” and had sobered up at 28 when her dad died. She had been sober for 10 years! And what I really wanted was to be able to say that too—I’ve been sober for 10 years.

My plan was to find a way to quit drinking as soon as possible. So I made an appointment with a doctor who was highly recommended by another friend. The appointment was for Jul 19; I had about a month left to drink before I got help from the medical community. (Notice I didn’t say the religious community)

So I had my last binge…from June to July of ’07. Then around Jul 15 I knew it was time to stop so i could make it to the appointment. I count Jul 17 as “the day I got sober” because on the 16th I got desperate & drank the drops at the bottom of all the bottles in my closet. (yes, judge me)

I made it to my doctor’s appointment and managed to convey to him how desperate I was to quit drinking, which was difficult—a lot of doctors will tune you out or profile you as a liability if you speak candidly about addiction. But this doctor seemed to take me seriously, and was willing to help.

I credit Moonchild, my beach friend, and the doctor for getting me across that threshold into a new life that did not include alcohol.     

I would say getting sober was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a lot of hard things. (har, har It’s a dick joke for ya!) I had to change everything about my life—the way I interacted with the world, the way I processed emotions, the way I celebrated, the way I recovered from painful situations. All the things we think of as difficult in this world are nothing compared to rewiring your whole nervous system.

****************

Well…enough about my adventures with the fine spirit of ethanol. Now how can I put a spiritual spin on this? 

I’ve read several stories/articles about alcohol’s unique property as a distilling agent. How alcohol can extract the essence from just about anything, including a human body. And when your spirit has been extracted, what then takes its place? Is it our personalities undergoing a chemical transformation or is it more like a surrogate parallel-soul fills the gap?

The word alcohol comes from the Arabic al-kuhl meaning (depending on the source) “the kohl,” “a distilled or rectified spirit,” “body-eating spirit,” or “ghoul” —all words that remind me of waking from a black out.

Of course i am regretful (I won’t say ashamed) that I used so many years of my life solving the alcohol dilemma, and most of all that I put Moonchild through that. I’m surprised he is still with me. 

But here’s a deep & poignant ask—does addiction cause a spiritual collapse or does spiritual collapse cause addiction?  Can spirituaI beliefs cure addiction, AA style? 

My years with alcohol were pretty devoid of any spiritual practice. Ingesting alcohol was such an easy fix, requiring none of the patience or discipline needed to meditate or chant or pray or do any Wiccan spells.

I dealt with the alcohol without once querying the spirit world. And yet it seems fate lent its hand anyway—especially in the form of the phone call from the one friend I needed to hear from at that moment. 

I like to believe a guardian angel helped me because it’s heartwarming. No, because random coincidences are sketchy. Does it seem like more people are committing suicide than ever? Is this the Hammers & Eggs war?

I can understand why people do drugs, become addicts. I don’t judge, because I know how much I would love to just check out. I fight hard against being a drug addict and I hope you all appreciate that.

Having a body hurts. The inner workings of the body can hurt even more. Drugs are the fastest scariest solution, a belief in a bigger picture is the slow boring solution.  So…depends how much time you got…?

*******************

Okay that’s all I’m going to muse about booze. Is summer almost over yet? I guess we have a month yet or more in FL.

Moonchild & I went out to the Mystic Faire this weekend, because it’s been a long time since we’ve done anything like that, plus it was research for The Octopus Thesis. So I’ll write up something about that.

I also have stuff to say about: 

Spiritual Tactics Employed in the Sober Life

My Dad Was A Born Again Promisekeepin’ Amway Salesman  

The New Age Industrial Complex

Sometime. In the Octopus Diary.

Adventures in Spirituality: Top Shelf Speculation

Friends & Whippersnappers,

So there you have the story of two psychic safaris taken separately by Moonchild & me. I’ve written here about the psychic safari before, and those of you who’ve been with me for awhile are probably like Oh not that delusional nonsense again, so goddamn boring. And obviously a lie.

To which I respond Yes, that nonsense again & again & again. As many times as I want to talk about it here, I will. It was a big deal to me. And it’s hard to talk about in the casual itty bitty confines that pass for social interaction. So I write about it instead and you’re welcome to not read it if it bores you. Imagine how bored I get when you talk about all your concrete. 

Also, I call you whippersnappers because I’m trying to embrace my oncoming oldness. I tried to maintain my youthfulness for as long as possible, and I think I did a great job! But I feel I’ve outgrown youth and am ready to see what senescence is all about. So…Get off my lawn!!

Syringe mandala—first layer

*****************

Let’s see. I guess in the last post I promised to get into what I believed about death & the afterlife & what happens to our consciousness when it escapes its humanoid flask.

Which makes me kick myself for deciding to write about spirituality all summer. Couldn’t I have chosen an easier topic like ‘How To Create the Perfect Alt-Right Eyebrows’ or ‘What You Should Never Say About Trans People When They’re Listening.’

No, I always have to go for the uncomfortably deep & esoteric stuff. As if I’m some kind of expert. Some kind of monk cloistered away, pondering our mysterium tremendum. 

I think that’s an apt description of my life. My inner journey’s so much vaster than the external “goings on.” No wonder I seem boring. Anyway… 

…what do I believe happens when/after we die? Like I said, I had a lot of experience around dead bodies, and grieving families, and funeral services at many different churches (and some not at churches). Life + Church = Death.

The raw materials

But the funeral business (including the church services) had nothing to do with spirituality as far as I could tell. I always thought it was more spiritual that it was against the law to store Clorox in the embalming room, because Clorox + formaldehyde = KABOOM!!!!

I’ve seen the various stages of what happens to our bodies after we die too, and I think decomposition is also more spiritual than people singing the hymn about rising up on eagle’s wings as the well-preserved corpse poses stiffly in its expensive casket. [Every goddamn cookie-cutter assembly-line funeral includes the hymn about the eagle’s wings.]

I think there should be body farms—not just for scientists who study post-mortem forensics—but for us to return to the earth naturally. We have landfills for our garbage—we should have landfills for ourselves. That sounds gross & harsh, but it could be done in a respectful and sanitary manner, and we would not be so far removed from our own mortality that we are in denial about it. [read The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford]

But what about that pesky elusive consciousness—or soul—that seems to separate from its shell, whilst still retaining a seemingly human intelligence, a high frequency voice, an ability to inhabit space and even interact with objects here in the physical realm? What do we know about that?

Pretty much everyone who has died, then lived to tell about it, reports the tunnel, the beautiful light, the wispy forms of departed loved ones welcoming them home. Many scientists believe this phenomenon is what happens to the brain when it is shutting down, and that’s what I believe too. Just like how you go into shock when you’re badly injured so you don’t die from the pain alone, our final gift from the kind loving universe is this beautiful death sequence. 

The pituitary gland hangs like a tiny lightbulb from the ceiling of the brain, and it’s believed to be the gizmo that projects this universal art house film about the death-tunnel.

So what happens if we do make it all the way through the tunnel? Who knows—we haven’t heard back from the ones who made it that far. But I go back to the bottle of bleach (or formaldehyde). If you leave the lid off a container of a highly active chemical solution, it will lose its power as it separates & evaporates. When we die, and our net of nerves lets go, and our organ systems stop binding the soul to its earthly duties—it separates from its slushy human solution and evaporates away… 

…why then, have experts, beginning from the ancient Egyptians right up to today, not been able to capture this escaping afflatus on any of their spectrometers or barometers or manometers? We sure do give off lots of foul gases as we decompose—is the soul somehow a part of that? Possibly, but I think we’re thinking too big.

Next layer

I don’t think the soul is as big as a body. I think we look for something anthropoid when we wave our spectrometers around the recently departed. Some ghostly form of the person his/herself.

But I believe—and this is just me, no science to back me up here—that the thing that allows us to remain potential energy after death must be a tiny battery-like spark that “escapes”—however micro-particles escape a useless container—very shortly after brain activity (tunnel vision) ceases. This tiny charged micro-particle could be located in the pituitary or the heart—or could be a paired ion from both the dying brain and heart. It could be released through the final breath, or through the skin, or even as the body cools it could be pushed out of its comfort zone through any orifice or pore in the body. Whatever…

…it is this tiny bit of potential that leaves us and carries all our earthly data & experience (like an airplane’s black box) off into the ether—not necessarily up above us, but all around us. It can float dormant and serene, or it can be charged (via any magnetic field, including earth’s) into a full screen action shot of its former host. It retains voice and intelligence (much like a thumb drive of a personality). 

If we’re to detect the soul, I’m afraid we’re going to have to put away our telescopes (& spectrometers) and get out our microscopes again. The superpowerful nano-microscopes we all have lying around the house (funeral home. hospital. crash site).

Another view

So, yeah…I know you all thought I was crazy before, and now you’re laughing and throwing circus peanuts at me because Damn…. who do I think I am speculating on all this shit? Well this is what interests me, folks. If I were a real scientist, my area of research would be finding the link between our bodies and our souls.

I don’t want to get into it today, because I think what we’ve covered here is enough to process for now, but at some point I do want to explore the karmic aspects of the afterlife. WHY does part of us need to live on, like a data recorder? Why do we experience feelings of deja vu, and having lived before? What are we being sent back to earth over & over again to learn? Are “heaven & hell” both just aspects of this very planet? 

I’ve said it before and I’m saying it again—I feel like a time-traveler of the universe, and this planet is kind of a rest stop/university/penitentiary where we come to do what we need to evolve, then return to being divine microchips with all our story arcs & covenants stored within us. I think my chip is running out of memory and this may be the final run of the VT program. Then I will become a permanent time particle in the nowhere of space, never required to be human again…

…one can only hope!

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Friends, whippersnappers—today is my 10 YEAR ANNIVERSARY of sobriety from alcohol (my lord and tormentor).

10 YEARS!!!!!! I never thought I could do it. But here I am, celebrating on a Monday. In July of 2007, I was quite sick from heavy drinking, and I told myself if I could give it a break for 10 years, then I could renegotiate my relationship with alcohol. I didn’t buy into the AA “never again! Sober-for-life” propaganda. That would’ve been too much to ask of myself. I think I set the ten year goal because it was do-able. “Forever” was not do-able. 

So today I get to renegotiate the deal. We’re going on a little adventure for the next couple days, and I am free to drink if I want to. But Will I?????

Is it a mandala or a dainty snowflake?????????????????

???????????????????????????????????????????????????

Find out next time, in The Octopus Diary. 

[This reminds me I want to include the “spirit of alcohol” in my Internet Thesis on Spirituality. So yeah, still lots to talk about for the rest of the summer… Enjoy the syringe art.] 

Adventures In Spirituality: Large-print Edition

HELLOH FRIENDS,

I’m back with more of what I’m calling my Internet Thesis on the Holy Life. Can I get a hallelujah, and can I also say I take great offense at Donnie Trumpo Jr calling his juvenile beef with the media a “witch hunt.”

How dare he? 

I can’t even.

juvenile beef : ))) witch hunt : )) : 00 >: /

Well I don’t have much of a prologue for you, so I’ll just get back to the story at hand…

*****The Incredible Magickal Mystical Wizard-like Special Ops Psychic Safari********

I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, but there’s something about a psychic safari that’s a double-edge sword. Sure it’s amazing that you managed to channel a huge world event through your sloppy drunk stream-of-conscious ramblings, but it’s also a sad trombone moment when you realize—what does it matter? Who benefited from my unconscious insights? Why did I not call the CIA when I saw all this gibberish about airplanes & New York & flights & departures & skyscrapers & ruins & 911 calls & death in the skies?

From the summer of Y2K to the summer of 2001, I filled my notebook with this specialized gibberish. But I was a fiction writer back then. I used stream-of-consciousness to limber up my brain for writing stories. I remember in the Summer of ’01 I had a short story returned to me from the Missouri Review. A real paper manuscript mailed back in a SASE, with red marks and a full page of editorial feedback. [I’ll bet you whippersnappers don’t remember when “being a writer” meant sending stacks of paper through the US mails…]

Poetry/gibberish was just a hobby/guilty pleasure. It took a couple of days after 9/11 till it dawned on me —oh, that’s what all the gibberish was about. I showed the “poems” to Moonchild and he agreed it was pretty eerie and uncanny, but he didn’t say much about it, which was odd.

The last entry in the notebook was from Sep 4, 2001 after a particularly debauched Labor Day that left me hungover for 2 days and sober for the next 2 years (yes I was newly sober when 9/11 happened). 

I was both intrigued and frightened by the whole deal. But the scary, spiritual part of the psychic safari was just beginning. I did not write at all for a few weeks following 9/11. I was too absorbed in the reality of it, plus I was a little scared to put pen to paper. And, like I said, I was sober.

One night in late Oct, I woke around 3 a.m. and felt the need to write. As a lifelong insomniac, my usual method for dealing w/ sleeplessness was to lay there and worry and fret and seethe with anger and finally fall back to sleep 10 minutes before the alarm went off. But the urge to write was very strong so i got up, found my notebook, didn’t turn on any lights and just listened…

…I could hear voices that weren’t my own. Just the tiniest vibration of sound behind my ears, like someone whispering from far away. And I wrote down what they were saying. I couldn’t really see what I was writing—I just scribbled as fast as I could what all these voices were telling me. And yes, they were talking about 9/11 and what really happened. I won’t get into the details, because I would sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist and also I know there are Russians reading this.

I know “hearing voices” sounds crazy enough. And I know 89% of you are thinking “Oh VT’s not psychic he’s just insane.” But I can’t describe it any other way. The voices were coming faster than my own head could think, faster than my hand could write.

So, whether you believe it or not, I continued waking up just about every night from Oct — Dec 2001, and took dictation from the afterlife. I got used to it. It was scary at times, but mostly I felt they just wanted their stories heard. They needed to tell the truth. I began to hear from people who were not involved with 9/11, departed friends or relatives, telling me to just keep doing what I was doing. Stay on the path they said.

I didn’t mention any of this to Moonchild until mid Dec. First of all, I wasn’t sure what to call it. Or that it wasn’t some post traumatic backlash or psychotic lapse. Plus, Moonchild remained somewhat reluctant to talk about or read the original pre-cog poems. Something about it bothered him.

So it was with trepidation that I showed him my 2 notebooks full of late-night chicken scratch. I really wanted his input, and didn’t want to feel like I was keeping secrets anymore.

He gave the pages a cursory flip-through and said “Oh, you’ve been doing some automatic writing.”

I’d never heard it called that before. I explained about the voices and the urgency to capture everything they said. I asked if he could help, or if he wanted to try doing it with me. He vehemently refused—I had never seen him so upset, so unsupportive. Basically he said, NO I will not do this with you. In fact, I don’t think you should be doing it either, it could get out of hand!

We ended up fighting over it for hours, through the night and into the next day. And those of you who know us know we don’t really fight about anything. In the 20 years we’ve been together this was the only real contention we’ve had. I ended up ripping those notebooks to shreds and throwing them in the garbage, which I still regret.

WHY was Moonchild so vehemently opposed to my psychic safari?

Well…because he’d already been on his own psychic safari.

[Once upon a time in a small town in Indiana there lived a lady much like my early spiritual mentor, Tante Venice. Only her name was Bettie and she was Moonchild’s mom.

Bettie was the leader of a semi-clandestine Spiritualist group who practiced consciousness-raising through meditation, deep breathing and other means, such as automatic writing. I’m not sure if their group was called ‘The Psychic Safari’ or if that’s just what Moonchild called it.

When Moonchild was 12-13 he demonstrated a gift for channeling. That is, serving as a medium between the spirit world and 1970s Indiana. He became part of Bettie’s spiritualist group and mostly channeled a Chaldean astronomer named Omar, who advised the group on personal issues as well as the whole geopolitical situation.

No matter how innocently it started, young but oh-so-adult Moonchild was used mercilessly to channel Omar over the next several years. It was a lot of undue pressure for a teenage boy to manage, but the group really counted on him. It went on till the relationship between him & his mom deteriorated and he had to move away at 17.

Once Moonchild got some distance, he and Bettie were able to repair their bond, but it was never the same.

Bettie died in July 1999, one year before my own psychic adventure began. I have no doubt she had a hand in it.]

So yeah, that’s why Moonchild had concerns about my channeling getting out of hand and wanted no part of it. And though I wanted to respect his wish not to continue doing it, the spirit world wasn’t ready to leave me alone.

My psychic safari went on till the end of 2004. I never heard the voices quite as strongly as I did in those months following 9/11 but I did hear from many soldiers after we engaged in the business of war. Just wanting to tell their stories, the truth about what was going on. 

The last bit of channeling I did from that era of clairvoyance was an “automatic drawing” of a tidal wave looming & people running & a fish jumping out of the wave yelling ’Tsunami!’. A few weeks later was the big tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

From Oct '04 —not exactly as described, but you get the picture

In 2005 I started drinking heavily again, and the psychic safari was over. I had another brief fling with automatic writing from 2011–2013. And in 2014, I did two airplane drawings: one right before flight 370 disappeared, and another right before flight 17 was shot down over Ukraine. Other than that I seem to be of little interest to the spirit world : ))

(Oh, I still do have prophetic dreams sometimes.)

********YEPILOGUE**********

So, how did all this telepathic activity inform my spiritual beliefs? It of course created more questions than answers. It caused me to start thinking about it in terms of DEATH rather than CREATION.

I had pretty much satisfied my need to know how the world and its oceans and plants and animals were created by delving into the organic sciences. By looking into the microscope. All the building blocks & lightning strikes of creation were visible and accounted for. 

But what about these invisible voices, this consciousness that seemed to linger after our personal containers expired? Which instrument could I use to study that? I had become the microscope. Except I was more like a stethoscope.

When I was a Funeral Director the main thing people asked besides whether I was a necrophiliac (no, gross)

was if I ever got any 6th senses from the dead, and I had to say no, I never detected anything resembling a soul hovering around the embalming room, or any part of the funeral home (except maybe the casket room). The death trade did nothing to enhance my already low opinion of the human race : ))

But my years of channeling through automatic writing really switched on my curiosity about the human condition. This is where my obsession with people began. What makes us who we are? Why are we so intent on turning ourselves into simple organisms when we are vast complex radiant galaxies? How do we paint ourselves into the corners of gender, race, age? Why don’t we take the time to know ourselves? Why have we created a society that goes against nature and why have we desecrated the planet that supplies us with our basic needs?

I got some answers to those questions through channeling but it’s all very complicated and this is long enough already, so perhaps I’ll stop here and see if I can formulate any intelligent thoughts about what happens after we die. I feel like I understand it pretty well but organizing it into concise language may not be my strong suit : )) 

I will try though. Next time. In The Octopus Diary. 

Adventures In Spirituality: Automatic Paws

Oh Hello Friends,

Let’s hear it for our contributors to the inaugural issue of The Octo Review!! I couldn’t be more thankful to those who allowed me to share their work on my humble slice of the internet. I’ll repost it throughout the summer for you to enjoy again & again.

************ THE PSYCHOANALYTICAL PROLOGUE******

Ughh…but now it’s time to get back to Adventures in Spirituality. What was I thinking, unravelling a big sloppy grenade-filled hairball of a topic like Spirituality-slash-Religiosity?? Sometimes I’m a bigger fool than I give myself credit for, but…I started it so I’m gonna see where I go with it, until I feel I’ve explored it to its frayed edges.

Again, my intention here is not to condescend or be the victim or the victor, and it’s definitely not to teach you how to be bitchy little witches in plaid mini-skirts putting cobalt hexes on the equally bitchy cheerleaders who are tormenting you w/ their popularity.

(If anything I’d like to *dispel* that movie-industry image of witchiness. The realm of magick does not belong only to misfit teen girls—it can and should be *appropriated* by everyone. Most witches i knew were fat middle-age women and big bald-headed dudes. And they all adhered strictly to the threefold karmic law and never deployed the elements with malignant intent.)

As I was saying, it was the study of Wicca that bridged the gap between science and spirituality for me. Now there is no gap between science & spirituality as far as I can tell. Unless you think of *God* as a big handsome white guy who sculpted the universe into being, end-of-story don’t-ask-questions. Then there continues to be a sizable gap.

Over my lifetime I’ve been the beneficiary of too many rarefied and somewhat miraculous experiences to not believe in some kind of higher power. But anytime I’d try to get a close-up of that power it would turn into the mocking smiley-face emoji stuck to the ceiling (as described w/ such chilling accuracy in Infinite Jest.)

[Yes I just finished my difficult-reading assignment for 2017, and I’ll be referencing it and quipping from it until it fades from my map.]

The thing about spirituality is…you can’t get too close to it without ruining it. Like the object that changes simply by being observed, spirituality will shapeshift under any lens you peep it through. Microscopic or telescopic. Perhaps that’s why so many choose not to peep it at all, but only to believe in it. Or not.

After studying the elements of nature in Wicca, and how they are the driving forces of life, as well as the basic structures of living things, I began to look at spirituality through a microscope. Cell structure, atomic bonds, electrical charges, flesh-eating microbes all took on aspects of *God* for me, much as fire/water/earth/air represented the aspects of divine creation to pre-Xtians.

As a young lady-person, I struggled with drastic hormone shifts that really undermined my quality of life. I also had some other chemical imbalances that caused my default settings to revert to depression, anxiety and rage whenever I wasn’t diligently & actively dialing in more desirable settings.

I have observed the world and its people, and most people do not struggle with the levels of anxiety & rage that I do. The ones who do are writers, alcoholics, drug addicts, inmates, or corpses.

My inner landscape is pretty bleak: bee-hivish, loud, screechy, lightning-prone, staticky, insects gnawing on dendrites, adrenals pumping sweat at mere forms of Hello. My urgent data-streams that cut through all the animal noise do not like to be interrupted. (Welcome!)

As I’ve also noted, it has gotten so bad at times that I sought religious intervention. I’ve sought ‘help’ from ‘outside powers’ to quiet the ‘powers that were dictating from the inside.’ And what I found is—that those powers squirting from your pituitary and adrenal glands are as potent as the flow of the ocean, or the gusts of a hurricane, or the radiation of solar energy. Trying to put a stopper on them is …swimming against a rip current or trying to blow out a candle by batting your eyelashes. 

It’s possible, but it takes the kind of effort we usually refer to as mountain-moving.The phrase ‘mind over matter’ has physical properties we don’t often consider when we say the words.

Your endocrine system is like a tiny fascist regime, your nervous system a delicate power grid, your brain a magnet board, and your heart powered by a couple of tiny batteries. 

People who have the energy to smile and make conversation and rush about here & there, accomplishing things—who can go into crowded spaces, who can ask for assistance, who can make eye contact, who can sleep, who can keep calm & carry on, despite the stress in their lives—can do so because they have the right amounts of dopamine & serotonin flowing through their personal ductwork. 

Let’s call it ‘chemical privilege’ (smiley face)

Dealing with my chemical deficits has been a lifelong effort, one that I’ve sought to monitor through the spirit world—including the spirit that lives in the bottle, but that’s for another episode—to the point where I was always thinking sub-atomically, at the most anatomically, when it came to understanding the science of spirit. 

And then I had a psychic safari.

*******************THE ANECDOTAL PART**********

We look and look all around us for evidence of God(spirit; higher power). Most of us look through a telescope. I found comfort in looking through the microscope. But…

I never thought to LISTEN.

Friends, in the Spring of 1999 two kids shot up their school in a display of adolescent vengeance we’d never quite witnessed before. There’d been other school shootings of course but this one was bigger, it had diagrams & manifestos & multiple attack zones. We were all shocked and horrified. 

What surprised me about the whole thing was, though I felt awful for the people who were killed, and their grieving families, I also felt I could identify with the two perpetrators. I related to their misguided & tragic need to retaliate against what they perceived as injustice. Their perceptions, no matter how unfit for society, were valid, at least to each other, and I felt it would be wrong to ignore their side of the story.

So I became obsessed with trying to write a great dystopian novel about a future where we were all too afraid of each other to interact freely. A future borne out of an era of schoolyard violence so heinous it changed how even adult society operated. That ’99 summer I created a few characters & jotted some paragraphs, but had trouble really visualizing this super-introvert future or what monolithic event would steer us into it.

So I decided I would just keep jotting stuff, letting my mind wander, letting the story come together piecemeal and not try so hard to write that 1000 page novel in one linear streak. 

I was still a busy young person back then—working, socializing, and mostly recovering from all the alcohol required to do both of those things. I didn’t carve out a lot of writing time; I estimated my book would be done in about 50 years.

Then, around the summer of Y2K I suddenly lost all interest in being social and started going home right after work (late at night) and just drinking by myself and writing, writing, writing. Writing without much structure or intent. Without much editing or revision. What I’d heard the teachers call ’stream of consciousness.’

I always hoped I’d have some crystalline insights into my great dystopian novel. Each night I would sit in the absolute early a.m. quietude of my rural Indiana bedroom—and I would just listen to the air. And let my pen wander into it. 

It was very relaxing. It felt therapeutic, comforting, natural. It was almost like a drug in itself. And I always felt that I was scribbling very profound stuff in the moment, though I would get up the next day and find it was just a bunch of gibberish—

—no insights into the act of violence that would shatter our society from the high school campuses on up. In fact a lot of the writing was silly stuff about airplanes. Planes flying into buildings, flying into windows, planes falling on big cities and killing lots of people, people crying on the tops of skyscrapers, looking for their Gods in the clouds. What did that have to do with anything?

*************THE DISMISSIVE EPILOGUE**********

Well, I will leave it there. I’m sure you can see where this is headed. And I’ll tell you the rest NEXT TIME in the Octopus Diary.

Sorry I don’t have new art work. I am working on the syringe mandala, but it’s kind of a tedious project, more measured & precise than I’m used to in my creative endeavors. So that may not be done til Fall (autumn). I promise to take a break from it & do some messy splashy watercolors or neon ink sketches. Soon. Soon. Soon, people.