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.