grey sun 10/17/24 grey sun 10/17/24

the magical mundane

The second time I ever tripped on acid in my early twenties I was eventually been guided back to my bedroom window to climb through by a barefoot friend—I would say I was protected and guided by spirit as much as my barefoot friend, really—and I found myself watching a candle’s shadow dance on the wall with my cat companion, Willow. It was about four thirty in the morning. As we watched the shadow in its erratic dance, I came to realize for the first time that this state I was in where sensory input was less tethered to these fixed points of understanding—when my mind’s grip on an illusory sense of understanding of the world around me was softened and I could see beyond—was where my cat companion lived. She was always tripping in some regard, able to see the messages and subtle worlds interacting without the imprint of logic and disbelief in all that is so in the universe.

As we both sat huddled together, a bit frightened mutually at the shadow’s sudden movements, a question came to me as I looked around my room—a space I so spent so much time in, but was always departing from in spirit. How can I learn to want to float here, to really be here? To float through this realm here on earth at this time in history, rather than the current unmoored roaming I was familiar with at the time. You could call it dissociating or you could say my spirit stayed in a constant ungrounded state of wandering. Both would be accurate. At that time in my life, I was not yet good friends with my body, and spent as little time there as possible, quite similar to my relationship to any house I had lived in previous to where I sat at the time.

You see, I had just moved into a new home with a new friend. It was just the two of us and Willow there. Not only was it the first time in my life I was not living with Christians, but it was the first time I lived with another queer person, and I have only lived with predominantly queer people ever since. So this home was something different.

How can I teach myself to want to float here?

I remember sitting with the question through the early morning hours with the candle light and the house across the street who I often spoke to. The house was abandoned, and seemed to have been for a short amount of time as far as abandoned houses go. I often watched spirits through the windows of the upper rooms and I asked the house what had happened there for the living to have taken its leave so early in its life. I won’t share those answers here, because, well, that’s another story. But throughout those morning hours a realization came to me. How can I teach myself to want to be here in life, rather than checked the fuck out, you say? It was a simple answer that came, although thank the gods it struck me as deeply profound, and that’s all that really matters for a change to happen, I believe.

Build your world into somewhere you want to float.

When I woke in the morning I found a notebook opened to a page covered in scribbles that all said “build your world into somewhere you want to float.” And that gift of guidance put me on a journey that I am still on as we speak.

For that was the summer I gave myself permission to indulge in beauty and adornment, both of myself but mostly of my environments. For this recollection is an entrance into my connection to the mundane as the site of spiritual devotion, as a ritualistic way to tether myself to the here and now. This memory that has so often stuck out in my mind is a treasure that has guided me passage to the gifts of magic and wisdom that sail my life forward.

By the end of that summer my bedroom was filled with dried flowers and broken shards of glass upon the walls. Rocks and bones, shadows and lace all filled the surfaces of the room and candles danced everywhere. I reveled naked in candlelight, and listened to messages through windows and reflections.

It would take years for this simple guidance to make its way into my relationship with the food and the kitchen of my homes, but more quickly it spread to the many ways of caring for a home, my own body included. For if my home was to no longer be somewhere I sought to escape, to be in offward motion of, then I must train myself to love the very actions necessary to maintain it. And I will be honest with you here: long before I was utilizing hypnosis or trance to evoke shifts in our subconscious relationships to things, I had this sense and understanding of how to trick the brain into experiencing what I wished it to. My upbringing in religiously heavy dogmatic spaces taught me this form of manipulation. Thank the gods I have developed past manipulation as an only avenue to evoke change, but at that time I only had the framework of a trick. I could trick myself until it was true. If I had to take out the trash, clean the bathroom, wash the dishes, water the plants, clean the floors, and much, much more to have access to an environment I truly wanted to exist and float within, then I would trick myself. Then I would focus on the end, rather than the means, until I gleaned pleasure from the very actions that lead me there.

I suppose I am telling you a story of how I realized that if I had to wash dishes every day for the rest of my life, to brush my teeth and bathe, every day, or close to it, for the rest of my life, and I didn’t enjoy any of it… Then I had to learn to trick myself, because I wanted to be here. Because I wanted to be here! Because finally I wanted to be here.

And for a long time I didn’t like any of it. I went through cycles of forcing myself to do these things in unhealthy ways, to refusing to do any of it and watching my environments turn into spaces no part of me enjoyed, to making deals and compromises. And amidst all of it, I was in relationship with myself and my environment. Even in my fight with myself and the world, I wasn’t sitting and staring at a wall, frozen, out wandering, with little ability to bring my own energy into the world anymore, you see. Because my life started to transform outside of my homes when I began to show up for the sake of being there, rather than an attempt of not being somewhere else. The outside world ceased to be somewhere I escaped to, and became a place I showed up to, ready to listen and participate in. That also took some time to navigate and grow into what it has now, but everything does.

Last night I stood in a lamp lit kitchen above a cast iron with hot butter melting and traveling across the pan. I slowly pushed garlic chopped by my Love into that butter and watched as the butter and garlic transformed one another, evoking complex sugars and aroma who traveled around the room. Then I gently put Oyster mushrooms pulled into long strands by my Love’s hands into the pan and I too watched them transform, soaking up the garlic infused butter. I stood above the sink and washed the dirty dishes we had created throughout the day and let them rest to dry, all while swaying into this flow of daily devotion to our bodies, to our home, to the belly of the day we had partaken in.

It would take years for me to cook for and with another human without anxiety and shame about whether what I was doing was right or good enough. It would take years for the flows and processes of a home to feel like the rivers carrying me towards and through all the ways I am asked to live in the world, and I still speak to myself of how to build the world I and everyone who seeks right relationship wants to live within. How to build the world everyone I love and who could love wants and could live within? You see, the charge changes, gets edited a little bit all of the time, and these gifts from the Otherworld come to us a little bit all of the time. They edit themselves, and ask us to edit them, to be in relationship with it all, teasing and pulling and revealing the next moment one bit at a time.

Now it has been nine years since that shadow dance I observed with Willow. I still have to stop in the middle of a day sometimes when I am not quite sure what I am doing and sew some dried flowers together to adorn the wall to make sure I can remember. I still gather apples to make sure my friends and I remember why we are here. I still stare at walls before I sweep the floor that feels too big for just me. And I am devoted to it; To me; To us; To the worlds; To the days; To the relationality of things; To the spirit world who always pushes back out to us.