Dough and Metal: 30 September 2013

It was a conveyor belt of some sort.

Rolling along it were globs of dough, squirted down onto the belt by some kind of mechanic operation hanging down from above.

They were in a vacuum, the regular dark of the mindspace cushioning them in silence.

Then came the leaves and the trees - once again, I was in a forest. But color never faded into the scene, apart from what existed in the dough. Everything was an intense, metallic pewter. Solid, sharp, and heavy. The forest floor was carpeted by a mossy sheet of small, dark, matt little balls of steel. It moved like a sheet of chain mail, and was so dense that none of the little balls ever came out of place. The trees were sparse and formed a low canopy maybe 20 feet at most off the ground - their bark was made of sheets of metal like everything else, and their leaves were bladelike in the way they hung down from their branches.
The one conveyor belt I'd seen initially was not the only one. This forest only existed for the sake of the conveyor belts, it seemed, or at least nothing lived here apart from it. It just kept spitting out these blobs of dough and they kept moving away to god knows where - it was assumed that something more would happen to them than just this.

It was at this point that it became clear to me that I was the product of this dough; I was dough, every part of me. My body was the same one I described in my last entry, and the same one present in my meditation from last week, which I didn't write about - a very plain, very androgynous body with mid-back-length wavy blonde hair.

I walked forward, alongside the conveyor belt, and stopped by a tree to examine the leaves. I cut my index finger clean off in the process, but it only stung a little. I picked the finger back up and examined it - a white layer of clay, pink, red, and tan: all the different layers that would be in a finger, just made of dough. I stuck it back on again and reappeared in the tree. The branches must have been cold, but I didn't feel them.

As if in explanation, some kind of incredible power surged through my body and shot out through my fingertips, sending medusa-like projectiles from my arms to every conveyor belt dough spout within a 300 foot radius. Out of my body poured dough - or perhaps it was sucked, drawn out, leeched out, vacuumed - and upon having injected what was necessary into this system, my power was completely drained. But I refused to remain weak, and so I gathered more, somehow, feeding from the surroundings, from the cold, from the lifelessness.

Understand, this cold and lifelessness and monochrome comes in stark contrast to the past few months. I have been on beautiful adventures and seen beautiful things. But there was some kind of unstoppable dark power in the utter defiance of this ecosystem's self-perpetuating death... It was alive, but only seemed to exist to prove how unliving and hostile and mechanical it could be.

A kind of invisible, silent vibration rose from the earth and formed a sheath around my body, and I drew it into myself, harvesting this power to whirl myself up above the leaf canopy, completely unhindered by, perhaps simply invincible to, the seemingly-lethal edges on both sides of every leaf.

Not going to lie, it was something like being in the avatar state. That's pretty close to what it was. My hair was rippling with static potential and wind, my fingers were tingling with power, and with every moment in the air and every moment I was able to see this wretched, indifferent expanse, I became stronger and angrier until.... something in my gut erupted.

My eyes lit up with a kind of lightning, as though anyone that so much dared look at them, at me, would have their corneas burned out (probably along with the rest of their face). Lightning shot from my core through my fingers and down through my feet to the trees below - but nothing burned, though the impulse was conducted from one side to the opposite side of the entire planet within seconds, because it was all just cold, hard steel.

The universe I was in seemed to feed off of that self-frustration. It generated more electricity and produced more dough. Thriving off of the explosion occurring in the sky above them, the trees all just seemed to ask for more, which gave me more power even as it infuriated me (since they refused to burn). The same beams shot out through my limbs again - every finger, every hair on my body, every toe, simply pouring out immense bolts of lightning from a completely unknown source in my gut. Sustaining this hold, I raised my arms and my eyes up to the sky, projecting it all somewhere beyond, commanding it to fall, to humble itself. There was some kind of brittle, flat, slate sky far, far away that received the bolts and shook, cracked, and crumbled, and the pieces catapulted down as though being sucked in by a black hole.

I remained completely invincible to this catapulting of slate meteorites, unsatisfied with the results - because it only grew, the more I tried to destroy it, the more viciously it gobbled up my attacks. And so the more vicious I became - the more intensely my eyes burned and the more fiercely my hair sizzled and the more pointed my teeth became and the more utterly neutral my expression seemed and the more fiercely my limbs swung lasers around as though it were some kind of apocalyptic light show... But this would not, could not, end. That Ola Gjeilo piece, Tundra, that I linked from my last entry? It had been transposed to some other, more ominous minor key, and to full orchestra, but half of that orchestra was playing on the wrong side of their bridges, and half the choir was shrieking.

The next slate sky, a world beyond the one I had broken, shattered and fell; and the next; and the next, and the world of chaos just kept growing and growing, seeming to bristle with the energy it was feeding itself. But it was never enough, it kept growing - though everything was still cold, my arms became flamethrowers as well, a kind of sun, a combustion engine, a bringer of defiant, unliving death. I was in these three states at once: the naïve, new, quiet piece of raw dough; the witchlike provider of dough, peer of the trees; and the godlike, wrathful beast, attempting to destroy the world by expanding it... or perhaps expand the world by destroying it.

It was fairly nightmarish and by 45 minutes in, I was very, very tired. Horrified. But it wasn't horrified because I didn't know why it was there or what it was telling me, teaching me. I was horrified because it was such a perfect depiction.

I've been very frustrated of late with a great number of things. It, like this world I entered into, has been a fairly quiet but extremely explosive presence. I am frustrated with myself for lacking the self-control to be as responsible as I need to be; for forgetting things I need to remember; for having chosen to be where I am (as per this post to Apostrophe); for caring about things I probably would do better not to care about; for the death of a past I could never have saved. Infuriation about the state of Christianity and of Calvin and of those things I was always promised would be freeing but discovered not to be. Anger that I believed for so long and kept trying to when I always knew in the back of my mind how good it would feel to throw it away. I hate to admit it, but this world is a fairly accurate depiction of my soul from this past week, and living it through Meeting was the most cathartic spiritual experience I could have had.

I wasn't going to write about this week because it was so dark and so frightening. But today I find myself in the same kind of spiritual self-destruction - an inability to soothe the beast raging on this pillar of fire. When I tried to do so on sunday, I sent in a calming mist (to no avail), and then a numbing cloud (also futile). Then... well, all that worked was to implode the universe into a ball and carry it into the mindspace, enter my beautiful sea - the one with the sailboat - and drop it far down into the ocean, for use as my anchor. And there I lay, buoyed up by the water, soothed, peaceful, calm.

But I have found myself numb. I think it's simply true, on a descriptive, existential level, that Spirit leaves us sometimes. Well, I don't mean that it's not there, but perhaps that we are absent from Spirit. I'm unsure at times how to solve anything in my life productively, how not to engage self-destruction when I get the urge. Perhaps writing about this will create some type of calm. I find it more realistic to believe that that's not how this story will end, because that would seem disingenuous. I hope for more beautiful days with calmer weather; for big swallows to ride through the arboretum, valleys with blossom patchworks, orcas and soft sails and warm fires and children and waterfalls. I'd prefer that. But until then, perhaps this is how Spirit's urging me to hold my own issues in the light.

My Sailboat's Electric Blanket: 15 September 2013

Grand Rapids has returned to my field of vision, and I find myself blessed to have such a warm community around me. The new season has brought interesting new things to learn: I met with a few people from the Meeting this week to talk about the history of GRFM and am glad to have candid conversation around the various points of drama and politics that have been around now and in the past. The Meeting seems very ashamed or irritated by these problems, and they are difficult, no doubt, but they're the same kinds of struggles faced by every church or religious group. Someone does something in a way that's not as thorough or as considerate as someone else wants it to be, doesn't spend money the way others want the money to be spent, and people get upset. I think that this type of knowledge sometimes drives people away from social or religious groups because they experience it to be disillusioning. I may be young and dreadfully naïve, but I've been tired enough of the general obnoxiousness, pettiness, and idiocy of churches for such a large percentage of my life that these conflicts - like one between spending money on spiritual training versus donating to charity/education/outreach groups - seem like the right conflicts to be having, if conflicts are to be had.

The image that presented itself today came to me immediately. It's one that came to me momentarily this morning when I got up and centered myself for a few seconds - it only took a few to appear. The image is of a beautiful sailboat on a vast grey sea, restless, but not angry. My boat is pristine, almost fantastic: its paneling on the inside, like sides of the top of the boat, were pearly and gold stripes - they may have been wood, but the most polished, the hardest, the glossiest. Most of the rest of the boat was mostly this dark, off-black wood. The same intense sheen, the same solidity, reliability. The mast was this color, and on top was this gorgeous finial - like this, but far more ornate, with the ridges made up in swirls that reflected the twilight bouncing off the water. And of course, a sail. It was large and heavy, but had fine, delicate fibers, so that it wasn't as rough as a typical piece of canvas. It looked like milk in the wind.

The setting was dark, but there was ample light, creating a shimmer on the water. This is more or less what it looked like, except that the boat was much smaller:


And this is what it sounded like:

http://olagjeilo.com/sheet-music/choral-ssaa/tundra

This song was playing in my head the entire time I was in this place, and the scene was being built, as if by the brush of an artist, as if it were to the beat of the music. As this was happening, I was laying in the belly of the boat, under the deck. It was dark and warm, but I was simultaneously looking down at the boat from the sky, as in a dream. I swayed back and forth with the motion of the arpeggio as the clouds came into greater focus and the ship gained greater definition and detail.

I did not move normally during this vision. I was like a spirit, evaporating and spinning through various states and positions in the scene. In some ways, I think I was the scene, or at least partaking in the scene, similarly to the way I partake in God. It was a symbiosis with something larger than myself, with infinitely more energy and power than me, but which radiated from me and my ship nonetheless.

If you're following the music, at the sopranos' lyric line at 1:03 in the recording I linked, there appeared an orca by the side of the boat, and soon I dove into the water to join it. My back was arched and I lay on the back of the orca, held there by some kind of magnetic, majestic spiritual energy as it shot through the water. I wasn't wearing anything, but I had a very plain, androgynous body - almost childlike, except that it was fairly toned. The water and the orca and the ship and the clouds were connected in some way, and we knew each other.

Soon I was on top of the mast, clinging to the finial and feeling my hair  - slightly longer and slightly wavier than it is, but still fairly androgynous - whip in the breeze. The music was building and building and at the musical section in 1:31, something cracked: with a burst, a rainbow-colored web of electric shock burst from the ship across the entire expanse of water, the entire sea brimming with static energy. In some vague way, it felt as if I were exploding out of the ship in the form of this energy, hovering in and over the water in this net of ethereal matter, as I imagine God in the Genesis story, where God hovers over the waters before Creation. As songs do when they are stuck in your head, the next time it reached that point in the song, the same thing happened: as if it were a wave hitting the boat, the mast, upon which I was perched again, shot such a burst of energy up out of its top, lighting the clouds on fire and sending bursts of bright, intense shocks through the entire sky.

And then came the rain: after several waves of this shock reverberating through the sky and the water, the drops of rainbow came pouring down from the dark, grey clouds - like they simply could not contain themselves any longer, and had to go down to greet the water. So there I was, on top of the mast on a Peter-Pan-like ship of glowing golden and pearl and off-black wood, floating in and atop and above an endless body of water, perched on the top of a mast, feeling my hair wave along with this creamy, fluid sail... It was incredible. (Unbelievably enough, no mind-altering substances required.) As is typical of my trips into these various fantastic worlds during Meeting, it was one of the most gorgeous things I have seen.

Again, it comes down to a very basic, very powerful experience with imagination. Here I was, this timeless, androgynous, powerful version of myself, completely by myself in this contained, isolated little world, with absolutely no one or anything to speak of in my company. Except the orca. And the fish. And the lightning, and my boat. And, of course, the music, which was the fiber of the universe, holding it al together, inexplicably oozing out of every crack that didn't exist. Even so alone, without anyone with whom to speak or to interact, I was in community, because this place was community. It was an audio-visuo-spatial expression of a soul.

Much of the reason people seem to cling to trinity doctrine is because it guarantees that God is in community with itself. I love that idea. God's internal community resonates with our own self-awareness and consciousness that's inherited as part of the human psyche. I like the idea of God knowing that God loves Godself and continuing in that love, understanding, self-knowing, and wisdom because it simply knows it to be that way. Trinity isn't the only way to get there, but the impact of this theology is an element of my natal tradition I haven't completely relinquished.

The human soul is an expression of God. This world, however alone or however stormy or however electric, is one we can retreat into to find peace - peace between the fibers of chaos. Because God, the human soul's expression of God, has put it there. Or it can put it there, if it's not. These worlds are hidden between synapses in our brains. It's such a simple joy. All it needs is to be dug out.