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.