Wind, Stone, Metal: 17 March 2013

It's been two weeks since I've last attended Meeting, and I miss it dearly. This week, I am in California on tour with my choir. It has been fun, but very busy, and there are 36 other women, which makes for an interesting dynamic. We've been go go go, so I was looking forward to some time for silence (hahaha, right). I did find a moment this morning on the bus, but it was strange. I think I'm going to try again before I go to sleep tonight, if I get a moment's chance.

The candle seemed so old and tired and pointless to me this morning. Too warm and cozy. A ball of wind came into mind and swept away the candle. That seemed much calmer, strangely. It bothered me less and sat more comfortably. If you've ever watched Avatar, The Last Airbender, the ball looked kind of like the ball of wind Aang sometimes sits on. And it swept the candle out of the way I imagine that blast of air over there might have, before forming into a ball.

So there I was with an empty field of vision except for this ball of air, and I was able to concentrate on it for a few minutes. It was a refreshing feeling. The contrast between envisioning your internal unity as a ball of air and as a candle flame is substantial - even though both of them are full of randomness and energy, the wind feels much more reckless, somehow, and freer. The candle feels self-aware and wise, but the wind feels full of energy and insight and spontaneity. There was a unique connection I experienced in that moment - the tight cohesion, the power, the intensity of the stillness. It didn't feel quite at peace, though. There was too much energy, it was spinning so fast. Like finding the eye of a hurricane: there's something magic, something intense, something pure about that spot, the spot that holds everything else together.

The faster it spun the more solid it became, until it had turned into a solid ball of rock. It never quit spinning - it kept going, with all the speed and energy, but with a power and firmness unlike that which it had had before. It sunk into a place in my gut that felt more centering than lifting, as the wind had felt. But as it kept accelerating, it condensed into a ball of metal - almost a stationary bullet, its turning indistinguishable. I might liken it to the ball of metal from last week, but it was almost gravitational in its density. Not just a power, but a nonchalant assumption that you recognized it as well.

I'm interested by this continuum in matters that appear in my meditations: from nothingness and vacuum to ethereal substances like fire and wind and light to solid objects like hearts, hands, tongues, balls to matter of inconceivable somethingness and density. It's as though my mind is sorting out a spectrum upon which to place my experiences in order that I might properly understand the value of aesthetic association.

Squirminess: 10 March 2013

Today I couldn't come to meeting, so I had silence on my own in the Prayer Room for an hour. I actually started by playing some music on the piano in there. I miss having music at church. It was one of the only parts I liked. Granted, it was often also the part of the service that most deeply upset me, and many worship songs carry terrible connotations in my memory. But if you spend six years wholeheartedly trying to connect to a playlist of worship songs at least two or three times a week, some songs will end up speaking to you.

There were two songs that connected to me in particular:

Everyday, by Hillsong

and Blessed Be Your Name

We didn't even sing these very frequently at Youth Group, back home; for the most part, I perceived them as "cliche" in my teenage years. I remember on a couple occasions where each of those songs really clicked for me, though, where they became as direct streams of communication with God. They are relatively plain, simple songs - songs about the goodness of life - but they provided me with the renewal and a certain kind of energetic emotion that felt like catharsis that I needed today. They're bouncy and full. That was something I could shoot through my fingers, into the piano.

When I sat down to silence, it felt natural to begin to concentrate on a round ball - something like a ball of led. It turned and turned, and I tried to center myself, to clear my mind. After a few minutes, a very large, cavernous mouth appeared around the ball and spit it out. The ball subsequently bounced off of whatever hard suface seemed to be the floor of my brain, and I couldn't regain it. But just a second later, I was back in the mouth, and the ball was there, in the middle, maybe halfway between the teeth and the soft palate, suspended in midair maybe six inches from the tongue. (In total, the mouth might've been fifteen inches tall inside. I felt like Jonah in the whale, or maybe Pinnochio and Geppetto in theirs.) Then the ball got swirled around in strange patterns by the tongue and got spit out again. This happened several times, the ball gaining more energy and momentum with the swirling each time.

Then the tongue just started licking things - I'm not sure what. Flat surfaces on the edges of my mind. I was just weirded out by this point, because I didn't know how to concentrate on the image without thinking about it. I was having a very, very hard time focusing on anything this morning. Part of that was probably lacking the presence of a community; it felt a little disjointed. But I was also completely consumed by meta-thought, to the extent that I would keep wondering whether it was even worth it to write about the experience because so much of what I thought about was thinking about the fact that I was thinking about sitting in that room thinking about writing about the fact that I was thinking about my thinking. It was kind of ridiculous.

Last night, I met a dear friend of mine at the mall and we had dinner and chatted for several hours. We know each other very well and I have a great fondness for him. We had a number of good conversations about personality types and relationships and people we know and religion and stuff going on in our lives. When we were walking back to campus, he told me about a recent socio-emotional development he's made in which he's realized that romantic attractions and the emotional bonds between close friends aren't nearly as distinct as society seems to like them to be; that his initial attractions to many people he knows have been a large and very authentic part of the reason he's loved them in such a way as to end up impacting their lives profoundly. I was able to share a long and wonderful hug with him at the end of this conversation; it was moving and comforting and very warm.

There is a type of energy that I get after long hugs that's similar to exercising or masturbating or taking a good nap - the kind of energy that makes your lungs feel bigger and healthier than normal. I still had a lot of that energy and warmth when I woke up this morning, and when I sat down to meditate, it was buzzing around in me like a disoriented insect, as though it had collided with some of the anti-climax of not going to Meeting and with my bodily hunger and lack of structure. It felt like potential energy converted suddenly into heat energy or static electricity. General fuzziness. I think this is where the random licking came from. Although the licking wasn't really very sexual - honestly, it was much too strange for that, it seemed more as though the tongue was trying to clean whatever surface it was licking in lieu of a dishrag - that visceral incarnation, that desire for sensation and a strange closeness of sorts and an exchange of energy was certainly present.

I tried to clear my mind for awhile, after that. Normally, the way I do that is by imagining a tear in the fabric of my thoughtspace, the plane in which all these images appear. Beyond the thoughtspace there is nothing - no boundaries, no lack of boundary, no object, no calm, no energy, no gravity, no vacuum. I wanted to describe it as purity, or even nothingness, but by sheer lack of definition, I cannot say whether it is impure or full of things or not, I only know that I see and feel and think nothing. If I break out of this space for even a moment, the boundaries of reality come fizzing back in. It's like a spark landing on a piece of paper and burning a hole, except backward, and lacking in heat or color. So I expend a great deal of effort in trying to keep the walls from closing in, because the goal is to stay on the other side of the reality divide. I might add that it's extremely shocking when any external stimulus enters my vicinity while I'm in this space, because the speed with which the edges of this boundary close creates this type of sucking motion that's like a whirlwind.

It didn't even take noise or distraction today. The rapidfire in and out of the boundary was like elastic. I couldn't get it to stay. I had a momentary image of me, once, sitting in the curve of the hole, trying to pry it open with my legs and arms, trying to get it to stay, and it wouldn't. I'd just pop out on this side of reality. Well, so much for that. Guess the serenity thing's not happenin' today.

Eventually what this image decided to turn itself into was a strange type of electrical lazer show, different extremely brightly-colored fiery, electrical circles of energy (like the burning ring above) would buzz around my field of vision, first only in two dimensions, and then in three, and then in another dimension I'm not quite sure what to call. What I know is that it went from the hole between realities to a really bright overimage of this hole to a whole ton of overlapping overimages to crazy colorful three-dimensional spastic electrical movements to something slightly more complex than that, like it had found a way within the line itself to move more, to be fuller. Likewise, the colors were not always visibile colors; I remember there being an extremely bright royal blue, once, and once there was a speckled type of orange, and once a neon fuchsia-purple, and once a blinding yellow sphere. But other than that, the color, no matter how hard I concentrated on it, was something other than a describable color entirely, though I know that it was very bright, whatever the color was. In fact, there were two or three distinguishable colors like this, that have no visual counterpart - all distinct, all blindingly bright. I want to say they were something like an oil spill, but that merely captures my inability to pinpoint visual single colors.

Anyways, the sheer amount of energy in these strings and blobs of light and energy and color was just incredible. Even when it was only a gentle, pulsing type of glow, it still seemed extremely strong and uncontainable. (Appropriately enough, these images you see to the left took forever to organize themselves into any kind of appropriate order in my blog.) It's very hard to describe. But even this was constantly interrupted by internal dialogue - attempts to describe what I was experiencing, and anticipations of how I'd end up describing it, thoughts about how I shouldn't be thinking about how I'm thinking about my thinking. It really did not feel productive or peace-making at all. I felt relatively aimless. I remember thinking in the last couple minutes that I had finally come up to a moment of rest in an interesting thought that I could write about, but now I don't have any recollection of what it was. Go figure. Honestly, I'm glad I don't remember. I hate how contrived it all felt.

At this point, I was just hungry and wanted to go to lunch. I was restless. My brain was not cooperating, and it felt like trying to hold down a toddler to try to put my thoughts at "peace." I probably just need to exercise more or do homework, but meditation just didn't work this morning. I do find it interesting that similar themes were in this week's entry to last week's, though. Despite the almost antithetical difference between my emotional responses to the two experiences, there are still 1) human organs dismembered from their bodies, 2) light-energy symbolism, 3) distressing, uncontrolled movement. Gotta say, they're strange motifs. Let's see where they take me next week.

If I'm to impose a hunk of meta-analysis on the experience several hours after the fact, that uncontrollability has some parallel nature to relationship, to love, the same stuff that seemed to instill this energy in me. This particular energy was not as warm or peaceful or still as friendly or affectionate love typically is, but perhaps it can be likened to the kind of passion you get for life when you hear the birds chirp for the first time in five months, or sexual energy, or the surge of adrenaline when you pick up your pen after the last stroke of a difficult test. Understanding other types of relationship and love we have with and for the things and people around us with some of that uncontrollable, frustrating, fiery energy might give us some fleeting insight into the unpredictability of life - or even the uncontainability of God.

Coronary Muscle, Warmth, and Gratitude: 3 March 2013

My weekend hadn't been particularly sunny. The week it followed had several existential weights that, although they weren't universally bad, served to mute some of the high-spirited momentum I'd had the rest of the month:

A good, but very difficult, nearly three-hour-long conversation with a Christian fundamentalist about the nature of God, Christ, epistemology, homosexuality, and postmodernism left me so drained - nothing like defending the worth of love to a skeptic at the end of a long week.

I ended up having to wear some random girl's dress (I hate dresses) at a concert I was almost late to, granting me a hefty dose of dysphoric self-consciousness to deal with for several days following.

A test I'd been calling the "Chem Test of Death" that had received nearly ten hours of my attention over the past week returned to me wearing a much poorer grade than I would've liked.

I felt dragged down by the extent to which my friends and peers seem to dismiss how lucky we are as LGBT people at Calvin, seeming to take equality for granted and wishing for more without really wanting to work for it, as I do. Because of these dynamics and a few other slightly off-kilter conversations with friends, I became embarrassed about my writing and speaking and the passion I put into them.

I had the opportunity to explain to my Psych prof the issues I had with certain childhood disciplinary procedures, allowing me a moment of intense appreciation for the person I was as a kid. I felt as though I was finally actualizing a lifelong dream: to serve as an ambassador for children to the adult world. This is how I first became interested in controversy. It was my first desire to build bridges between people with inherent worldview differences.

An absolutely incredible realization I came to about the personality type of the guy I dated last year moved me to tears, helping me to understand why he was the way he was, why we didn't work out as a couple, why I loved him, and why I still love the person he is despite whatever distance we have between each other now.

...So regardless of the particular emotions at hand, it was a pretty emotionally-heavy week, and I found myself a bit depressed and tired and burdened come Saturday. As is fairly regular for me in moments of low self-worth and frustration, I started craving self-injury (don't worry, I haven't acted upon this in years) and wasting huge amounts of time, even though I should've been sleeping. Needless to say, I walked into Meeting this morning in a very strange, disoriented state of mind.

As always, Ron Irvine provided his gentle listening ear and good-natured conversation in the car on the way over, and Mike Holladay approached me before silence to ask if I had received his email. The email he'd sent was one of appreciation for my blog - the one that I'd kept secret out of fear of chastisement until only two weeks ago - and an extremely warm extension of affection and acceptance that I'm not sure I knew what to do with. It had come at a strange place in my week, and all the things I mentioned up top and more seem to have blown over it, though it stayed at the back of my mind like a little lighter flame, a little encouragement. When he asked me whether I'd received it, I was embarrassed to hesitate for a moment and was shocked into remembrance. The simple, down-to-earth goodness of the people I have gotten to know and speak with at Meeting has been a very touching, transformative part of my life lately. I can tell stories, but otherwise, I'm kind of at a loss for words, which happens infrequently enough that I find it embarrassing. This has all come as a very strange, wonderful, unexpected surprise in my religious life.

My word of gratitude to Mike as we sat down in the meeting room was that I'm unused to receiving such positive feedback on my blogs, particularly the secret one, and especially approval that isn't based on philosophical judgment. Even Apostrophe was always mostly a forum for argument: it was where I wrote essays about my disagreements with people and the arguments I couldn't finish for myself in person. The culture in which I was intellectually reared created colleagues of my peers, and, by extension, intellectual rivals of my most intimate friends and romantic interests. As I explained this, I realized with a bit of shock that I had condensed of the some of the greatest (and quietest) struggles of my past few years into a couple sentences and was greeted with warm, lighthearted, understanding laughter - it shouldn't've been as strange to me as it was. Just to be truly heard, truly seen, touched me. It occurs to me now that the magnitude of my reaction is owed in large part to the fact that many of the people that have been warm toward me and truly respected me - dare I say, as an equal - at Meeting have been middle-aged men, and some part of me is still instinctively unused to that.

When I meditate, I either conjure up a simple image - a flame, a ball, a magnet, a pill-shaped blob - or some image will present itself. For the images I conjure up consciously, usually the flame, I concentrate on it until I have come to an understanding of the wholeness of myself and the life around me, as though I have become the flame: steady, full of energy, controlled, bright, ethereal. Like a soul. But today, the first image presented itself, and almost immediately: a human heart, still beating, but isolated from any image of a human chest or body. After it had beaten for a few seconds, it was violently torn aside by the force of a cut that passed through it, product of an invisible blade. It shuddered slightly, but kept its ground, and kept beating. After a few seconds, another and another came, and I witnessed the ruthless laceration of the poor piece of meat by some kind of inscrutable, unstoppable power. The right ventricle and left atrium had both been punctured and the aorta had been ripped to shreds, but it continued beating normally, as though oblivious to the fact that it was under attack.

One cut for that time your entire circle of "peers" (more like colleagues) and your most respected mentor and teacher attacked your views in Philosophy of Religion. One cut for that time you were called a blasphemer between kisses in your lover's arms. One cut for every time you were told your writing was too embarrassingly pretentious to read. One cut for that time you were told you were incapable of giving an introductory presentation on your most passionate interest by your (tall, athletic, guy) friend that runs all the school's Bible studies because you're not a "weathered male." One cut for every time someone thought your orientation meant you were a slut. One cut for every time you were told that it's against God's will that women ever be spiritual leaders to men. One cut for every time you wondered whether you could ever become more than the middle-aged housewife you never wanted to be.

Given the cravings I was experiencing last night and this morning, you can probably imagine that it was more powerful than pure symbolism. Strangely enough, the cuts were not cuts of self-injury: they were the cuts of a victim, a victim without an attacker. My response was not one of grudge, and has never been a grudge. I have never really blamed my friends and teachers and loved ones for these various things they did that hurt me, because those things were symptoms of a broken culture, not the malice of their intention. And I rationalized all that happened, so I was certainly not aware at the time that I was being hurt as badly as I was. Don't get me wrong - I had a very, very positive high school experience, I am very privileged, and I am very thankful. But where there are people, there is hurt, and all the little scars still tear open from time to time.

The heart kept beating, kept pumping, and somehow, blood did not come pouring out. Eventually the adrenaline fades, though, and you're left with a bunch of swollen wounds that need healing.

It wasn't very long before the tears came. I had no desire to stop them; they felt like the blood that should've been gushing from the wounds. As the tears rolled down my cheeks, I saw a creamy jel begin to form in the space around this pathetic collection of mutilated tissues, filling in the cracks like a soothing salve. The object continued to smooth itself over until it was coated in a thin, mucous-like protective layer, beating in a dull throb instead of in a piercing pain. It occurred to me that I was not ashamed of crying, and that I felt no desire to leave the room as I would've in church at home.

Within fifteen or twenty minutes, this image had faded and that of a large fireplace came into view. It was such soft light and it felt so warm that the heart curled up by it, resting and thankful. The golden glow that fell over the soothed little organ, beating happily and steadily in its little clump by the fire, was so peaceful. Just seeing it at rest instead of being torn back and forth across my field of vision by some vicious mysterious enemy was adorable and beautiful in a way, as though I were connected to it by some kind of spiritual bond. I was drawn to the light; I couldn't distinguish the flames. I knew only that it was the source of warmth.

As is often the case in my meditations on fire and candles, I became aware that this warmth and energy was the warmth and energy of life, the mysterious energy contained like a present to discover within everything around me. The fire emulates the sun, our original source of light and energy; the sun gives its energy to the plants and the plants to us and other animals; that energy goes from starch and protein and whatever else and gets broken down into amino acids and glucose molecules; and from there it becomes energy again, the warmth that we feel under our skin. The same warmth we feel in the carbon combusting before our eyes. This is the energy that flows through the veins of every person we know and every thing that we eat and breathe, the energy that decided it would organize itself into life.

I have been thinking for several months now about the possibility that God might be the personification of the natural meta-law that determines that matter would defy entropy with gravity and evolution, somehow finding greater stability in the complexity of life than in random disorder. My life is so deeply governed by my connection to this natural meta-law, the same concept I have called "mother" and "father" and "God" and "teacher" and "friend." It is fairly unimportant to me what I call it, because I know Life well enough by now to know at least this: that that cohesive order is our ally. That the universe itself, through all the precedent time and space has established for us, seems to be urging us forward, into stability, simplicity, community, peace, and beauty. That sounds like the urge of a parent to me. It sounds like the will of a mighty and just king. It sounds like a construct to make us feel good. It sounds like a still small voice within my heart. It feels like the truth. And all at once. I feel no need to distinguish.

It was in this warmth that I found my place in the Light's peace and quiet energy, the same quiet energy I normally find when I have become the candle's flame. A steady pulse, a heartbeat, the contant warmth of a flickering fireplace. And my mind was mostly empty, at rest, for the rest of Meeting.