Arcs: 21 April 2013

After my typical few minutes of calm and "Observation," as I described last week, and a few more minutes of - what to call it - prayer, specific meditation on the presence of God, invocation, the mindspace produced the image of a huge candle. I attended a concert at St. Andrew's Cathedral in downtown yesterday, and they, like most liturgical churches, had those caps on top of their candles, which seem to exaggerate the candles' (already large) size. The candle in mind today was like those candles, but about ten times their size. I'm not sure how I knew this, because in the mindspace, there's no relativity of perspective, but it was huge, and the flame was equally huge - probably larger than the candle itself. After a few minutes playing with the image of the candle, a tiny flame blower-type flame appeared and came closer to the main, gigantic flame. A phrase started looping as some kind of echo:

If a flame is lit within another, will it shine ever brighter?

The new image was of the little flame drifting inside the big flame. It didn't have a wick, but it was very sure, very intense, very small. Soon there was a ring of little flames like it, slowly turning in a circle around the circumference of the main flame. The imagery's pretty obvious - Spirit is the large flame, and we, our energies each separate from the Spirit's, are still within and subsumed and - well this is the question - strengthened by the flame we have in common. And though we each be separate, we're all made of the same substance, the same organic reaction. By dwelling in Spirit, we are made more aware of the flame in us; by joining in a circle of fellowship, not only are we in the presence of a greater light, but also contribute to a greater illumination of the light itself. The more of us are present in the light, the lighter our surroundings - and the cycle is perpetuated.

It was about here that our friend Jonathon arrived. It was his first time visiting, and he'd gotten lost. I rose to greet him, and sat back down with fresh concentration. Jonathon's making plans to visit me in Seattle this summer, and so I'm unsurprised that the next image to come to mind was that of a plane's trajectory over the North American continent.

At first, there was just one; then, there were many. They increased in distance and speed and momentum, almost, from the slow, realistic speed of an actual plane to an electrical zapping across continents almost instantly. And unlike in these pictures, they got thinner and thinner, more hairlike - they were no longer just planes, but energy, the Light, connecting people to one another internationally.

There was a man at meeting today, named Silas, who is the pastor of a church in the programmed tradition in Kenya. With Jonathon and his Mexican heritage plus the Seattle travel motif, his place next to Silas created an interesting energy for this image to feed on. The arcs had been a clear, colorless energy before, but they became increasingly golden, until they resembled the color of the flames from the beginning. It's really the same concept: the connection between all people, unity in an energy that's in all people and places.

Having made this connection, and sensing - imagining - the connection between everyone in the meeting room as similar hair-thin projection, the arcs morphed into the rim of the edge of the first, big flame. It was solid - perhaps metal. But it was glowing and hot, which made anything that got placed on the rim move very quickly, as though it were oiled, or as if it were a puck on the surface of a pingpong table. I was spinning by my hands like a gymnast on the round bar that was the rim of the flame - it was maybe 8cm in diameter - and went all the way up it, then down the other side. This image had been fully absorbed when it was interrupted by vocal ministry.

It was about the recent floods in Grand Rapids, and how the presence of water everywhere points out how crooked everything else is. How the water always finds an equilibrium, that it's always straight, always even, when it just calms down. I've never thought of water in this symbolic light - that of equality. And as I contemplated the image, I realized that no one water molecule is actually exactly on the same plane as another, because what's up and down, high and low, is subjective - water covers our whole planet. Even if we understand people in relation to one another and no one is exactly the same, the way water flows into equilibrium is a great illustration of the way we ought to relate to one another. Like our planet's surface is a mass of mostly water, the human race is a mass of mostly water - yet energy still holds it together. Even submersed in the water, as we are, there is the energy of the flame in every molecule: electrons zooming in and out of orbits, moving atoms past one another, particles moving at nearly unmeasurable speeds, even while in the deepest of calm.

Carnage: 16 April 2013

Today is Tuesday, and I normally never write here on Tuesdays. The prodding to write certainly does not come from meditation, today, but it does come from collision of my imagination with my faith life, and the experience at hand relates to some themes I've explored here in the past. Please take with a grain of salt that which I'm about to say - this is far from the first time things like this have happened, and I'm sure they will happen again. I have had years of experience handling the reactions and have learned to control them well.

On Tuesdays, I have my favorite class: Religion 121, which is Biblical Literature. It's just a survey of the Bible, but it's been so realistic, informative, and scientifically-credible that it has been one of the first faith-related classes I've been in that I've never encountered with any fear. There has always been the possibility that something go wrong in the past - judging that I approached it with a desire to pursue "dangerous faith" while also craving intellectual integrity - and this has historically made me struggle through everything in the Bible, "wrestling" with it, trying to come to terms with it, trying to synchronize texts.

How can God say this if he means that? How can these two totally - no, surely, only seemingly - contradictory ideas come from the same author? How could God possibly say something so ridiculous, so mean, so ... off? So little like God?

It was pretty recently that I was terrified of the Bible. This blog of mine that I wrote just this past September makes that fairly obvious: "I am scared of reading the Bible, but I read it occasionally anyways. I've read pretty much the whole New Testament and large chunks of the Old Testament, but I have no one ask questions, and huge chunks of it does little but remind me of ways people have used the words to justify their exclusion and moral superiority." The thing is, when I said I'd read the Old Testament, I had only done so without the context of the historical narrative of the Hebrew people. Though I had read, I had not understood, and it mostly seemed pretty irrelevant to me. The New Testament was the bread and butter of all the sermons, all the devotions, all the random posters and bookmarks, all the theology, all the random verses we had to memorize for various classes. I had a conflicted relationship with the text, because as much as I felt that my faith was grounded in some things it taught, there were so many ignorant or hurtful things I associated with certain parts of it - or perhaps things that the text itself actually communicates. And what didn't have a negative connotation, I had enough questions that I never had any idea what to think about it and it was always hit or miss whether I could appreciate the reading or not.

Today in Biblical Literature class, we did Paul.

I wasn't expecting this class to be any different from other classes I've had in this course. It was supposed to be another step along the way in reframing the roots of Christianity to me, redeeming religion, continuing this revolutionary reconstructive process. But the thing is, some combination of what I mentioned above and the fact that Christian culture treats Paul like he's the Biblical author of primary authority in speaking the Gospel to us Gentiles makes me feel much more uncomfortable being critical of the text than I normally would.

You must understand that I have struggled constantly for years to apply this text - mostly Galatians, but also Romans, 1/2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians  Colossians, and the rest of the epistles - to my faith. This is the Christianity I've had most contact with, and these are words I've heard incessantly in descriptions of God's direct, interventionary connection to humankind. These are the ideas I have been told are dogmatic truth, in the reflection of Paul's and other apocalyptic-era New Testament radicals' firm commitment to moral purification before the apocalyptic purging and judgement. I've put lots of thought into Pauline morality, I've invested so much in it. The unfortunate consequence is that with all this has also come a ton of negative attachment - these texts have been incredibly abused, and it is extremely difficult for me to read them, let alone to hear them talked about.

I've described before the way my history with self-injury factors into the processes of my imagination. But it deeply impacts the way I approach religion as a whole because of the intimacy between religious frustration and the origins of self-injury in my past. My first moments of intentional, masochistic self-injury were during the weekly Lord's Prayer, in Chapel, and in Bible class that year. The way prayer was being used as a legalistic duty or a self-beneficial supernatural vending machine by a bunch of gender-segregated, privileged, sheltered, naïve white girls bothered me incredibly even then, and the inescapability of the environment was incredibly oppressive to me. This frustration, fear, and disgust was released by my biting my thumb while they prayed, sometimes to keep myself from crying. It felt like a fitting expression of my anger, my depression, my claustrophobia.

Throughout the rest of high school, I continued to care about Bible classes - they became even more important to me as my faith grew and changed. I applied myself very deeply and very spiritually and very intelligently, seeking to have integrity in whatever I learned there. My desire to be fully engaged and attentive was almost compulsive at times - I would have my computer out, looking up different translations or etymology dictionaries or Wikipedia articles, just to make sure I was understanding everything with the greatest precision possible. I asked tons of questions and developed a somewhat negative reputation with some peers toward the end because I'd sidetrack the teacher entirely, asking too many questions, questions that others sometimes perceived as idealistic or annoying. I tried to teach myself only to ask questions that would be tactful and interesting to the rest of the class. Personal notes crowded the margins of my notes - countless prayers, occasionally occupying as much paper as my notes.

And when I was in church or youth group, I filled the margins of bulletins with questions and then tore open offering envelopes to continue writing, making sure that I recorded anything with which I took issue. I did the same thing here - I made sure to rephrase my questions as well as I could to keep from provoking long debates with kids in my youth group or agitating anyone with my controversies. I didn't want to create unnecessary distance from them when a functional discussion could yield productive learning on both sides. Regardless of the occasion, my learning was pretty thoroughly integrated into my life, and my life into learning. So with the kinds of existential claims made by traditional Christianity, and with my nearly tireless desire to consider seriously what I was told by teachers, of course I would come to care deeply about the texts behind it all.

Like I said, I didn't go into class today any differently than I've gone into any lecture this year. I had done the reading and was anticipating an interesting lecture. But within a few minutes of class, I began to feel uneasy: where the rest of the class had been so objective, suddenly, I felt as though inquiry had been restricted again. I'm not sure whether or not my professor was communicating differently, in a way that suggested to me that I was being taught lies. I do know that in my experience, Paul's message of salvation has always been applied very literally and out of context. I do know that reading Paul made me intensely uncomfortable, and that hearing that Paul preach the basic Christian message - the forgiveness of sins by the atoning sacrifice of God's Son Jesus Christ - was a trigger for me, and I ended up in a fairly terrible place.

This is where the part starts that's authentic to this blog. My imagination went wild after this trigger. The last thing I wrote of the official notes was that Pauline Christianity focuses on salvation through faith in Christ, and after that it was all lost. I was thinking like my old self - the neurotic near-literalist - rather than with nuanced understanding and historical perspective.

I wrote in the margin of my notes.

Paul's God is not my God.
Paul's God is not my God.
Paul's God is not my God.
Paul's God is not my God.

Although I've recently become quite enthusiastic about reading Samuel and Amos and Ezra and Job in a state of mind that allows me to recognize that people's understandings of God have changed, and that's okay, something about Galatians felt like it had to be objective truth, and that by identifying as Christian, it was mandatory to accept as perfect everything he said. It crept up in a stain - a mindspace visual stain, like one I might describe in my regular posts on this blog. It had a red-yellow tint, but was pale and see-through and I didn't have my eyes closed, as I normally do. This makes it difficult to describe; it wasn't overlaid on my vision, but it existed clearly, and I could feel it encroaching on my ability to see.

It occurred to me to ask, as I normally would, what Paul really meant. We understand so much of his writing through a totally modernistic lens, a culture he predates by seventeen centuries. Certainly he didn't write this way. What was "salvation" to an apocalyptic, early Christian, pre-Destruction of Jerusalem Jewish evangelist? It certainly wasn't the same spiritual salvation from the fiery afterlife pit of punishment and isolation from God Evangelicals sometimes speak of today, nor was it quite the moralistic salvation presence of the resurrected Christ in our everyday, as some more liberal Christians might say. But it wouldn't've been right for me to question the validity of the core Gospel message in front of that class, in front of a group of peers that were almost completely uninterested in any conversation that would come of my question and might even be offended by what I said. No, it's better that, for the first time ever in this class, I force myself to remain quiet.

judgment. silence. be quiet. no questions. NO PASTORS. YOU ARE FREE.

This is where the first sign came: the ache in my palms. I have this strange psychosomatic thing that's been going on for several years where if I feel like I'm violating someone else's space (or need to deny myself in order to keep myself from doing so), my palms begin to ache, and it spreads up my arms and neck and through the rest of my body, until I feel unable to quite move my limbs. I lose coordination and concentration - sometimes I lose the ability to look at anyone, because it hurts my eyes, and my face feels exposed and raw. The professor was just explaining the Gospel - we're saved through grace, sanctified through Christ's redeeming work in us, produce the Fruit of the Spirit. They are not things I completely disbelieve, and I've come to love these ideas through the lens of the Old Testament. But hearing them said in the context of a Christian class, by someone male in authority, to a class of dogmatic students, dragged me back into my old rut, and I lost control of my mind.

nopaulnopaulnopaulnopaulnopaulnopaul
nopaulnopaulstopstopstoepnopaulNOPAULSTOPSTOPNO

The aching spread through my head first this time, before it spread out my arms through my body, and was in the roots of my molars and canines, more on the left than the right. I felt lopsided and physically hypersensitive, and it just got worse with every minute.

paul is God
paul is God
God is dead God is dead
GOD IS DEAD

And then came the images.
It was a full limb - an arm and a leg at once, severed at the joint. It was not a clean cut - it was torn; the bone was shattered where it stuck out at the end of it and in several other places. It was spinning, as if it had been thrown in a place without gravity - falling and falling without end. Startled, I shook myself out of it and tried to remember, tried to recall the reformation of thought I've learned from the Exile.

God is low
God is meek
God is light
God is peace

It was as though I remembered the words but couldn't quite grasp their meaning - as though their definitions had escaped me for a moment. I listened for a moment - I remember flashes of it, snapshots, that are completely disconnected from the rest of the event. Pulling down the map - the story of Paul in jail - Paul's angry with people trying to get Gentiles to be Jews - a piece of chalk on the board, an underline - freedom from the law - it's all a bit of a blur. I couldn't hear him. The words didn't go in. And the shoots of aching pain through my limbs were... interesting.

I am not paul
I don't need to be paul
I am not like Paul,
I am not LIKE PAUL
no more. I am free. I am free from the law. I am free 
NO! NOT PAUL! NOT HIS FREEDOM! PAUL DOES NOT SET ME FREE

There was a body without most of the limbs - I'm hardly sure whether male or female. It was evidently fairly beaten up, bruised, bloody. After it had hung in the mindspace for a couple seconds, there was a sudden burst of energy from within it, tearing it into a pattern of ragged, but intricately-connected strips, so that no part was detached, but every part - inside and out - was exposed. Again, shocked, the mindspace zoomed shut on itself and the explosion reversed.

I shook my head, trying to clear my mind, and flipped my open Bible from Galatians to some random piece of the Old Testament, trying to recover the frame-shift understanding of Theology I've discovered of late.

There was a time when I flipped to random portions of the Bible to see if God would speak to me, if he would "reveal himself," but today the randomness had quite a different intention. These texts are unspoiled to me, and have no strange connotations. I have firmly established them as part of a narrative, and not as dogmatic theology, so hardly anything there can really bother me. It's part of a story. Something caught my eye and I started reading - eventually, I arrived at Ecclesiastes.

I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

        What is crooked cannot be made straight, 
        and what is lacking cannot be counted. 

I said to myself, "I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge." And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.

        For in much wisdom is much vexation,
        and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

In this text, I did not find a description of my state of mind, though I have felt this way before. I did not hear the "voice of God." I did not hear truth, and I heard nothing false. But I heard an honest description of someone's mind, and they were fully human to me in that moment. In those words, I found solace; but when I lost concentration, I heard the words of evangelism.

Paul is dead
Paul is dead
Paul is dead
Paul is dead
The dead are not raised
they are not raised
He was crucified
he was killed 
he was DEAD
he is DEAD!

Alternating between attention to class and my strange little coping mechanism, I tried to understand Paul as human, as a voice like the author of Ecclesiastes, as a being just like me, like my professor, just another person. I wasn't able. As little as I believe Paul has special authority, and as much as I have loved and understood this class perfectly on every other occasion, I have been rendered incapable of reading Paul's words or hearing Christian jargon without feeling as though my very understanding of the faith is an insult to the Church.

Be quiet, Marié. Don't speak. Those aren't the right questions. Those are not questions. They are not rational. Faith is a different matter. Sola fide. Sola gratia. Sola scriptura. Sola scriptura. Solo Paulo. You believe what he says. (An arm - my arm, though not the one resting on my desk - is vertically sliced open by an expo knife, exposing tendons and both radius and ulna. My mindspace smiles, and I try to clear it away.) Believe what he says - have faith - and you will inherit the Kingdom of heaven. And you want to "inherit the Kingdom of heaven," because that's the only way between God and you. It's unfathomable to spend your energy on any other thought - be calm. Rest. Give up. (Blood flows like spilled milk in every direction.) Your questions can be answered. They're silly questions. (The exploding body comes back.) You only need clarification. Look around - no one else is confused like you are! - they're all doing fine. (A small flurry of flaking severed limbs.) Don't ask your questions. They don't need to hear your thoughts. You don't even need to hear these thoughts. Be quiet. Give up. Be at peace.

All the fucking irony!

Over and over I have told myself these words. For as much as I talk and as many questions as I really have asked, there have been almost an equal number of times I have forced myself not to, and the only way I was able to was by feeding myself lies about the things that are most important to me. I'm not sure whose fault it is that my mind has constructed these triggers and barriers. I don't think I can blame anyone, even myself, for my dazed clumsiness, dizziness, shortness of breath, and near limp as I walked out of class. (I would've cried, but it felt like I'd forgotten how.) I have done a lot of research and never quite understood why the most intense physical pain I ever feel results from completely mental processes - I've had to write this post in several sessions, and just having worked on it now, I feel it in my left forearm - my right ring finger and pinky - my left ankle - my right eyebrow - my left armpit. But hopefully this open dialogue and the reconstruction of my faith that I am writing for this class will grant me opportunity for sufficient free expression to begin to heal these internal wounds. What can I do but hope and pray? Perhaps one day I will be able to read Paul again.

Seams of Dreamland: 14 April 2013

My mind alternated between three states today:
1) Meditation - the state I'm usually in during meeting, where I'm focused on an image or in the Nothing-Everything Vacuum Space;
2) Observation - a state more conscious than this, where I'm observing the room or listening to ministry or thinking clear, self-directed thoughts;
3) Dream - a very trippy, uncontrolled, dreamlike state, a state less conscious than meditation. I wasn't actually falling asleep, is the funny bit - but it did reflect the unconscious state of my mind the same way dreams often do.

I started Silence in Observation for quite some time, just absorbing my place in the room and calming my spirit. There's something about just sitting still and not doing anything and not feeling like you're waiting for anything and not getting antsy at all, but just being able to sit in peace with a bunch of other people that are also sitting in peace, that gives me the greatest sense of calm and focus. It's almost necessary preparation, for me, if I'm to make true connection with the divine in this type of context.

The first image that came to me today when I entered Meditation was stitching - just a needle and off-white thread stitching seams in the fabric of my mindsurface. This certainly came up because I have been sewing everything this weekend, to the great bemusement of my friends (you better believe the gender jokes will abound if I'm doing something as domestic as repairing my friend's stuffed pony). It wasn't particularly going anywhere or even mending holes, so I just watched it for a long while.

I stepped back out into Observation after a bit with the ideas of seams and wholeness and repair and ensemble in my head. I was absent-mindedly massaging my left hand, and noticed that despite the creases, there were no seams. But I'm an ensemble, I thought. There's got to be seams. Of course! - membranes. And like the needle, they're always stitching and stitching and stitching, never ending, always in this mesmerizing cyclical pattern: the unraveling of DNA and the coding of protein and mitosis, it's all zipping and unzipping or piecing and unpiecing of two separate things held together by a thread - some bond, protein, intermolecular force. Such complex, intricate, well-networked seamwork - I mean, if an epithelial cell is, what, 30μm, that's 25,400 stitches an inch. Even in this state of serene calm, life requires that we always be buzzing and spinning around at the cellular level, as if our biology's trying to keep us from that state of separation and focus. But it's the same hunk of biology that's evolved metacognition and decided it wants to enter that state. Honestly. It boggles me every time.

The next image that came to mind was, again, a ball, but it wasn't a ball of metal, or air, or rock. Get this - it was a ball of magnetic repulsion, that feeling of density you feel when you bring two magnets of same charge close to one another. But it wasn't a magnet - just a sphere of almost impenetrably dense not-matter, about two centimeters in diameter. I was equally outside of the sphere, on top of the sphere, around the sphere, and the sphere itself, so I was able to see and feel and hear everything that happened to it simultaneously. (Perhaps it's of note that the ball had no smell or taste, though it was sensitive enough that the sense of touch seemed to replace them both.) The ball fell into a body of water - the ocean, I soon discovered, and I floated down to the bottom very slowly. It was deeper than you might imagine; it took a long time to sink that far, and I'm interested that it wasn't at all accompanied by a feeling of panic or suffocation. I did not need air - just to make sure, I breathed, and it worked, but it wasn't quite a breath, because I had no lungs. I felt the water around me, and I felt that there was energy there, and it coursed through me. I felt the lightness contributed by the tiny bubbles in the water; I felt the dim warmth of the light coming from probably 200 feet above. My senses were not normal senses - they were incredibly enhanced, incredibly sensitive. Time also also gradually became more dreamlike than normal - enormous amounts of time passed - maybe three weeks? maybe two years? - but I was aware that I had experienced it within only a few minutes.

The softness of the impact when I - or, the sphere - hit the sand was so gentle. The feeling is almost magical. The sand was so powdery and light that it would've already been soft if it were dry, but that it was wet and that I was a ball of zero-mass, zero-energy not-matter made it such a graceful landing. I'll try to describe it again, because it was so peculiar. This sphere has no clear boundaries. It is invisible except for the fact that no matter is where it is, so it's a tensionless gasless bubble of sorts in the water; it is not conscious in and of itself, but only in my ability to perceive it; it is hypersensitive; it is itself and in itself and on itself and above itself and away from itself simultaneously. So landing on the sand meant that I could feel the little rush of the sand as it moved out from under me, the few grains that floated up onto the ball and slid off of it back to the sea floor, I could feel the tiny current the ball had made as it had moved down from the surface, I could feel the softness of the texture of the sand as though it were becoming part of me - contact without any barrier at all, touch without any nerves or skin.

This is where Dream mode kicked in fully. I followed this ball for, as I mentioned, anywhere from two weeks to a couple years as it got slowly rolled out of the ocean (except that it didn't roll - it perceived the rolling without ever changing perspective) and then was present on an island where it was taken up by wind or a bird, I think, and thrown out of the air, and experienced being as if part of the air. It's more difficult for me to remember this part because it was simultaneously so quick and so very, very long. The part I remember most is definitely the rolling back to shore. When I got close, the sand turned closer to dirt, and I was in a location more like the Pacific Northwest than California. There were water bugs above me, and I - or, the ball - could feel the vibrations, the indentations, they made on the water. The most subtle ripples, but the very same energy. Feeling the little twigs, the softness of the water-logged wood, decaying there in the mud; there was a small school of fish once, and a frog several meters upstream. (It seems the ocean had turned into a stream. I hadn't noticed.) Anyways, eventually this all was interrupted by a break back into Observation.

Again, after coming from that type of state, there is this weird depth of serenity and calm and timelessness I can't quite imagine finding elsewhere. I should mention that this is not an isolated activity, that the energy I'm perceiving and the state of mind in which this is all occurring is a hyper-awareness of everything, not just of the mindworld. Although my real senses are not nearly as enhanced as the mind senses, I'm very attentive and notice the sounds of the birds, of shifting people, of the buzzing heater or water or whatever it was. So, to build on that, I'm certainly not doing this without an acute awareness of the people in the room. I feel a sort of connection. It's simply different doing this type of activity in community than otherwise. And, on top of that, I'm certainly doing this all very much in the presence of God. I feel the need to emphasize these things to make it clear that this is not an introspective process for me; I don't feel like I'm delving into myself any more than I would be if I were actually stitching bagillions of yards of black non-fabric or exploring random tropical islands or floating in endless miles of water. It feels as though I am exploring something distinctly other than myself, and that I simply get to come along. Sometimes it barely seems that I'm actually exploring anything at all, but that something else is exploring and I have access to its experience. As much as it is clearly my imagination, it is very much revelation, a state of prayer and community with God, to me.

My mind was clear and still. I just sat for a long while, and reviewed what had just happened in order to maintain the internal cohesion I felt.

I entered another strange dream state, where I was effectively Mary Poppins entering Bert's chalk world. The scene with the penguins always freaked me out to no end. The music was just very disagreeable to me. Anyways, I was all Mary Poppins-ish, petticoats and all, stepping into another world that was meant to be "lovely" and "perfect" like in the movie. I felt a bit out of place - uncomfortable - because of the frilliness. But then I sort of forgot who I was, and ended up feeding those chocolate-covered life-restoring balls from The Princess Bride to tame chipmunks, like some kind of deranged variation on Snow White. I soon snapped out of this because it felt strange and unproductive. I'm not honestly sure what chocolate miracle balls and chipmunks in particular have to say about my spiritual life, other than, once again, this type of strange, simple joy and fellowship with all living creatures, the magic/energy/goodness we share with one another. What I certainly recognize as a reflection of my subconscious is the part about gender discomfort - I have been re-evaluating what it means to be the gender I am, and recommitting to the idea that there are not two, but at least five common genders. That, however, is a topic for another post.

I came back out into another state of Observation, contemplating the various different things I had come upon earlier - the cohesion, the hypersense, the energy, the community, the all-life connection - until Merry gave vocal ministry. She sang a song: "Our life is love, and peace, and tenderness; and bearing one with another, and forgiving one another, and not laying accusations one against another; but praying one for another, and helping one another up with a tender hand, if there has been any slip or fall." She spoke for awhile about the fact that the author had said, "Our life" instead of "Our lives" or "My life" - that this was a testament to the power of community. That such a prayer would interrupt my own moment of thankfulness for this type of community - the weird energy, presence, connectedness I've been describing - put old words to my experience. I've certainly experienced these things at Meeting, even as recently as I've started attending. I admire the authenticity and goodness of these people. It seems as though (or perhaps reveals that) the faith is as present as light to them. Meeting really is just a meeting, and the life of the group transcends Sunday morning. The work they do isn't simply a set of projects they've got on the side. It's a love and peace and tenderness that seems to flow from them as a byproduct of the system. I just love that it can work this way. I think it's brilliant.

As a final note, I can't help but be so thankful that the meeting is so inclusive of LGBT people. That LGBT identity is simply accepted as another thing about you to be celebrated, that it's not an issue to be disputed or misunderstood. Even after 9 months away from home, it continues to be the most amazing reality to me. The fact that there were two adult gay people in that meeting today and both of them are living with partners like the rest of the married folk at that meeting gives me so much hope - this feeling of deep warmth, community, and belonging. It makes me feel like I fit. It is such a release to be able to share freely my fears for a friend of mine going through issues coming out without feeling as though I need to be vague enough that I not be confronted by someone afterward to talk about my ...questionable... acceptance of homosexuality. It's still new to me that such a prayer would not lead to a heated, hourlong conversation about the seven clobber passages. It's a release to look around the circle and actually be able to say that I want to be like the people I see when I grow up. I use that phrase with intentionality - Meeting allows me to remember how young I am, how much growth I still have in store for me. Life is returned some perspective. Because I actually seem to understand my faith the way Quakers do, I don't just admire these people or occasionally like things they say, as I have in relation to other older people in my life. There's something at the core of the life of this faith that makes me want to actively try to do what I see them doing, everyday.

Love. Peace. Humility. Honesty. Kindness. Thankfulness. Smiles. Generosity. Simplicity. Intelligence. Good humor. Warm welcome. Deep service. Stability. Vision. A desire for justice and change.

These are not new ideas. Just in writing this concluding section, Hebrews 11 and Jeremiah 29:11 and Galatians 5:22-23 (not to mention the countless sermons I've heard on them) immediately came to mind. But nothing I've seen in practice at Meeting really is new at all. I do think that's the point: they're fruit of the lessons of a teacher already present within.

Water, Donut Holes, and Memory: 7 April 2013

I was finally back to Meeting again this week after two weeks of Spring Break and one of Easter. It is frankly difficult to describe how much I missed it, because although there's some sentiment in my saying so, and I've genuinely missed speaking to and learning from the people there very much, much of it is that I have noticed my brain get buzzy. My life has accumulated far too much static, and having limited moments in which to re-center has worn away some of the grounding I feel gives my life cohesion and self-awareness and peace. It's historically abnormal for me to ever come to a place where I'm more extrospective than introspective, but I think it's because I'm healthier this year. Since flurries of depression are relatively few and far between, and since most of my life is either content mundane or a hell of a lot of fun, I have been less attracted to the idea of spending huge amounts of time alone in my room thinking about my day.

That means that for the first time in what feels like about six years, I genuinely have had trouble describing to people how I'm doing. When I sat down to silence this morning, I realized that I have spent almost no time this week remembering what I've done, and so I barely felt that I knew who I was, this week. Meditation started with a few images, and the reflections flowing from these images comprise most of my writing today. But in real time, they shifted away within a few moments. It's disorienting to have so many thoughts I could expand on for what seems like endless periods of time. When silence ended, I felt like I'd barely started letting go and entering the peace I normally sink into after a minute or two.

I biked to Meeting this morning because rides didn't seem like they'd quite work out, which meant just under half an hour of physical activity each way. The bike I was borrowing has rusty gears and a slightly flat tire, so it was a bit of a chore, but it got the job done. Rather tired and staring into the glass of water I'd filled up for myself, I felt the last sip I'd taken moving down my throat and had a moment of strange connection to it. The water in my throat - was it quite a part of my body yet? When is it the water in the glass and when does it become part of my own being? The line is really so grey. We are only made up of that which we take from around us. It reminds me of what Kim Ranger said when I was talking to her after meeting today: that when we eat, we not only have communion with that of God which Christ reveals to us, but also everyone around us; and not just with the people present, but with everyone that helped prepare the food and everything that went into the food - all the animals, all the plants, all the things that fed these animals and plants. The water moving my throat had become me, and I had become the water. I'm not going to commit fully to this idea, but I think it's worthwhile to wonder whether the water still in my cup was part of me, as well.

When I took communion at church, I never did it without significant amounts of deep and unique reflection on the act. I prided myself on it. I never once took communion the same way I had at some other time in my past. It had a sacred quality to it, and not because anyone had told me it was so, but because it symbolized something I thought was important at the time: the breaking of a sacrificial offering for us in our miserable fallenness. One of my first blogs was about the topic. I loved how grotesque and graphic it was, because it mirrored the grotesque nature of sin. I didn't realize at the time how unhelpful this kind of understanding of human nature was - needless to say, I have since turned from this mode of thought. I'm saddened by the way self-injury and the doctrine of Total Depravity combined to turn this element of my teenage faith extremely sadomasochistic.

It's been months since I last took communion, so my understanding of it is considerably outdated. It was uncomfortable to talk to Kim about it afterward when we were having potluck, because my thinking has changed so much since I left that tradition (and thank God I have been able to change this way) that barely any of the things I used to think about it are authentic to me anymore. I definitely still value Jesus as a figure, but for completely different reasons. The act of chewing no longer symbolizes my own daily, horrific, sinful crushing of an innocent human body to me. Instead, I think communion would mean to me that the process of eating becomes a reminder of the cyclical community that is life. The Spirit of Jesus is present in every meal, every quotidian routine. He is the average, the normal, because if we open our eyes and see the God in the lowly, we are more deeply able to understand our own humanity (and our participation in God).

The second image started as a rounded droplet of water from the glass I was holding. It came into view the moment I closed my eyes. But within a couple seconds, it had become a donut hole - a hollow donut hole, with a little creature inside it, a little insect, a little man, a little ball of energy with legs and a mouth and a very large appetite, that was scrambling all over, eating it up from the inside out. Like James and the Giant Peach.

There was a recurring dream I had as a very young child that extended sporadically into my adolescence and adulthood where objects - ants, thimbles, wine glasses, picknick blankets, peaches, wooden dolls - would be distorted from intricate, complex, harsh, and
pointy to flaccid, smooth, fuzzy, and overwhelmingly soft. From piercing laughter, bright colors, and sharp-edged faces to endless, undefined, dark, dough-ish mires of silence and static. It would often bounce from one to the other unexpectedly, which had a very jarring effect on my poor 4-year-old mind. I still remember the first night I had it, and how difficult it was for me to process such a dream, one without any plot or dimensions or time or concrete measures of size or distance. There was a particular character that sometimes showed up - a little male wooden puppet-doll-thing, like Pinnochio's manic great uncle. He moved extremely quickly and he was unpleasant to look at because the edges would seem to cut your eyes. He wasn't an angry or unhappy character, though I never quite realized he was as happy as I suppose he was. It was simply frightening and intimidating to be in his presence. I think he was chattering about something he wanted to tell me, something that was important or funny or interesting, but his words were never distinguishable and his laughter felt like sandpaper, and he'd come closer and closer and ...

The little creature in the doughnut hole today was a very shrunken variant of this character, and he was stuck inside this strange incubator. Straight glucose - straight energy. (It goes with the same motif I described earlier - the smooth mire would've been lipids.) So the longer it "chattered" - the longer it violently scrambled, raced to chomp up tiny pieces of this giant hollow donut hole, the faster it went, and the more complex it became, so the more sugar it got, and the more vicious and crazy and sugar-hyped and happy and scary and more and more and more and - !!

That's when I realized that as happy, as content, as functional as I have finally figured out how to be, my spirit has had no rest. No internal-harmony type peace. No chance to just calm the fuck down. And that's not because I've had no opportunity for relaxation - my life hasn't been busy as much as it's been full. I just needed to breathe for a moment and debrief my life in the presence of God, the Light, he Spirit, where I could see properly, so I wouldn't just keep incubating my inner scary puppet man.

So, as boring as it might be to the rest of you, I figure I should grant this post a summary of my past week.

On Sunday, I had a long conversation with Hielkema about his recent engagement. I hadn't seen him for a few days since it was announced, and it was wonderful to see him - not only for that reason, but because we always end up talking about such fun things. The conversation had gone in a number of very different directions by the end, and I ended up getting to bed very late. It was worth it.

Of the next day I remember very little except that I made the decision not to skip choir to spend more time at the Chemistry help session, and that choir stressed out my voice a lot that night. I remember feeling very unprepared for Chemistry.

Tuesday was the day I decorated a sugar cookie, had a short conversation with Monique, and Chem lab was cancelled, allowing me to study for my Chem midterm the following morning. After taking a four-hour-long nap that afternoon instead of going to Super Secret meeting (our LGBT discussion group), I studied Chem for probably four hours, after which I was much less overwhelmed, but extremely tired. After Chem Help had ended, I got a cup of coffee to calm my nerves and grant me a moment of peace. Because I'd lost my ID card, I hadn't eaten anything but a sugar cookie and tons of

dried blueberries and almonds that day. Not being on a meal plan even for a couple days granted me a different sense of freedom - a deeper understanding in my gut that food doesn't appear out of the cracks in the walls like I kind of feel sometimes in the dining halls. In the Fishouse (our coffee shop), there was an open-mic where people were telling stories. Just being given the opportunity to laugh for a couple minutes, sipping a latte (extra foam), made schoolwork seem tolerable again. I even managed to finish my Biology assignment on top of Chemistry.

On Wednesday, Jim Lucas came to SAGA and I had the wonderful opportunity to spend some time talking to him. I still hadn't found my ID, so I had three pieces of pizza at SAGA. A member of the current leadership suggested to me that I apply for leadership next year - which I already have - and it probably made my day, though I don't think I realized it at the time. To have someone recognize that I'm good at something and confirm my ambitions in this avenue in particular is still a miracle to me.

Most of Thursday morning, I had a SAGA booth shift, selling shirts with Jakob. The rest was hard studying for a Religion test I had later that day - I had gotten a few hours of studying in before then, but the material was so exciting that I just ended up reading Second Isaiah instead. I spent from 1:30 until 4:10 writing my test, even though class ended at 2:50. The prompts were basically tailor-fit to provoke in me the desire to write a couple long rants about all the ways I've redefined Christianity this semester. Then I had a conversation with a Annaka and Stensen and Hielkema on Common's Lawn - it was finally sunny again - and went to dinner at 5. I went grocery shopping with Sam and spent some time catching up with him, hearing his stories. He and I stopped by at the Smoke Pit to hang out with Arie, Foisy, Anders, Sam Camp, Jakob, Zach, and perhaps a couple others I've left out. Among our conversations was one where my gender was compared to Jakob's, who is MTF transgender. The opinion was that I'm less feminine than Jakob, and I realized with shock for just a moment that I'd interpreted such a statement as a compliment. I still have much internalized sexism to work through. My company was very surprised to hear about the way I used to understand femininity. The rest of my evening was occupied by Biology homework.

Friday was the day we all wore the SAGA T-shirts we'd been selling and took a big picture on Commons lawn. It was awesome to see how much bigger the group was than last year's. Psychology was a bit perturbing that day (especially to Jakob), and I had a couple meetings for conversation with Foisy and Grant, my RA. Then it was off to dinner, where I had a great conversation with someone with whom I've wished to rebuild connection with for some time. That was followed by Korea+, a concert-type event run by the Korean Students Association on campus. It was certainly more impressive than I was expecting, and I was glad to have attended. The women's choir I'm in sang a Korean folk song there - we were the only American performers. I went to Johnny's looking for company afterward and found Monique, and we were later joined by Lizz, blonde Mary, Jakob. The only other thing I did that night was to write a blog I hope might get published by the Transgender Education Collaboration, with which which I've been wanting to get involved.

On Saturday, I slept in until noon and then joined Jeff, Foisy, Sam, and Hielkema for a Dream Theater listening party. We went through two albums, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (which I know very well) and Scenes from a Memory (which I have been meaning to get to know for many years). Scenes from a Memory just about blew my mind - Jeff and Sam and I had some great conversation about it after the other couple had left.

Barely any of these things even have to do with all the stuff I'm learning in classes. There was a time when I would sit down routinely after every day and write about everything that had happened, everything I'd thought and learned, so that I would not become buzzy like I am now. But I cannot describe the release I have now, having simply put down a couple sentences to serve as place markers for every day - evidence that I did them, that they didn't go to waste. Perhaps now that crazy little demon puppet can be put to rest.

When I had finally wrapped my mind around the existence of the past week, I realized I haven't read back through the thoughts I'd finally managed to put on paper during my religion test on Thursday. It was a meaningful couple essays, and I couldn't remember exactly what I'd written. So I got out my phone - I'd had the foresight to take pictures of my essay booklet before I turned it in - and just barely finished reading as Meeting ended.

So there it was cut short, and I am about to start another week of blogs and science and latte foam and queer things and music. Deep breath. Here we go. Let's do this with a little less buzz this time, please.

(The scary puppet man - head tilted, legs crossed, eyes wide - grins and nods in agreement.)