You Are (Most Likely) Not Crazy

I got more "hits" on my most recent post regarding the gods within a day than I have of anything else I've written over weeks.  This is cool, but I realize I've got a rather profound responsibility here, if I'm going to go off prattling about what I've learned.  I've begun to learn a little more even since I wrote that post, and have had multiple synchronous things cascade upon me in the space of just a couple of hours, so there's gonna be plenty more to tell.  Before I tell you about this, though, I need to tell you...

About Divine Trauma

Here's how it happened for me:

I started having dreams last year around specific events and at strange, profound times.  I'd wake from them shaking, write them down and then, a little while later, forget about them.  Sometimes when I'd close my eyes I'd see them again, mostly when I didn't want them or didn't expect them, but for the most part I could ignore them and they interrupted nothing.

But they increased, and I began to feel a strange tension in my life between what I was dreaming and beginning to suspect of the world and what my actual life looked like.  A relationship had already begun to wind down, a job had become increasingly untenable (low-level social work for violent alcoholics...most people don't last a year, by that time I'd been there for 3), and a very long living situation which held joy only inasmuch as I shoved enjoyment down it's throat.  All of these things, though, were not only tolerable but also completely sufficient until I started confronting some of the dreams.

Right before it all came utterly crashing down, I'd written a long entry in my journal regarding a strange, looming sense which ended, "...something is coming. That beckoning call, I..." and then nothing.

Two months later after what I've liked to call The Long Winter, I found myself muttering a prayer to a goddess I'd seen in one of my dreams.  It was Imbolc, it turns out, and that goddess was Brighid.  Neither of these meant much to me at the time, and then suddenly meant everything once I got a profound answer.

The next day I decide I'm gonna study to be a druid, and 7 months later I'm writing this right before I go try to find out what some of these dreams mean (oh...don't think for a second they've stopped).

That winter was the beginning of what I've been calling Divine Trauma; that is, strange events full of brilliant meaning which utterly shake up your life, yet, when resolved carefully, suddenly leave you better off than before the trauma began.  It is in this way that Divine Trauma is utterly different from normal trauma and worlds away from mental-illness (more on this later)--both of these leave you worse off, seeking healing or sanity, and your ability to live in society go down.  The schizophrenic finds themselves soon isolated from others because of their voices, the sufferer of PTSD cannot reconcile the trauma with its later echoes; Divine Trauma leaves you more at peace, more perceptive, more skilled, and more self aware.

But it also fucking sucks, at least while it's happening.  

In some of the monotheistic religions, a mystic or a devotee with visions may enter a cloister or a monastery where they can study and experience their insights away from the chaos and difficulties of daily life and be surrounded by others experiencing something similar  We've mostly abolished both the monasteries and the concept of their function in our modern and advanced society with the exception, maybe, of the university.  So when someone has shamanic or deific visions, sees their ancestors or faeries or land-spirits, they still have to find a way to pay their rent, hold down their job, take care of their children, and have pretty much only the internet, psychic phone-lines, or mental-health professionals to turn to.

The last will medicate or hospitalise you, penultimate will drain your money, and the internet?  It's utterly hit or miss.  Try doing a web search such as "Does Apollo exist?" and you get mostly moon-landing conspiracy sites.  Then again, similarly, do a search regarding the existence of "true love" or "art" and you'll get no better.

The lack of available human community for most people, the anti-authoritarian nature of most of "paganism" (we don't like priests anymore than altar boys do, it would seem), and the apparently complete discontinuity between the older worship of the gods and the current iterations of pagan worship can leave one completely bereft and thinking you're going mad.

Guess what? You most likely are not crazy.

I can't fully vouch for you, though.  I hope you've got some rather good friends (if you're not, make some...quickly) who will listen to you patiently and not judge.  I hope you already experienced some sort of life-altering transformation because you've probably already picked up some of the skills you need (if you're gay, trans, or otherwise a freak you're gonna have an easier time--if you're a suburban housewife who likes to watch television, you have my sincere apologies).  And seriously, if the voices tell you to hurt yourself or others, or if the car talks back when you yell at? Go see someone, and quick.

I don't want to make this all sound really scary.  It isn't.  Actually, experiencing the gods and magic is absolutely the BEST FUCKING THING EVER.  But it's really, really not easy.  You're gonna lose sleep.  You're gonna start noticing stuff around you that you learned to stop noticing when you were a kid, and it's gonna be distracting.  Your dreams might get really vivid and maybe sometimes your vision, or you'll start to get senses from things that you didn't know.  And you're probably gonna start setting money aside for stuff like candles and incense and wine, and maybe grow a garden so you've got easier access to something a goddess tells you she would like, and gardens take work.

Some advice

 I'm just some punk wanna-be poet who raised himself and made a decent life for himself before all of this started happening, and now I'm still a punk wanna-be poet who thinks it'd be a nice idea if most other people don't have to freak the fuck out when gods start appearing.  If this helps someone, awesome, and if not--whatever.  I like writing.

1. Be really, really nice to yourself.  Just like in a break-up, or after a death, or during anything else traumatic, being hard on yourself is really easy to do and also maybe the worst possible thing to do.  After I used my first "revealed" sigil, I made myself a cup of hot cocoa, and then another, and then maybe got drunk and passed out because the whole thing was crazy.  You maybe don't need to get drunk, I donno.

2.  Be open to new and timely friendships.  I started calling the dating site I'd occasionally troll OKDruid, because within an hour of deciding to do this druid thing I met an adorable furry punk druid in another state and we wrote each other reams of emails.  And then when he didn't have time to talk, I met another one, and then I met another and another until I was pretty certain there were no straight or ugly druids in the world (there have been no druid orgies, I must sadly admit).  Maybe I could have done this all without them, but no, fuck that.  I couldn't.

3.  Consider some sort of guided study.  Seriously.  I'm relentlessly glad I joined OBOD, primarily because the pace of the lessons is up to you, but they are lessons, and they are written out.  There are other groups like this, too, and though I can't vouch for them, others can and will.  You may really like some of the wildly independent, build-your-own tradition orders, but maybe consider doing this later? If you're new to this stuff, it's nice to have someone guiding you, especially if they admit up front that you can take what you want and leave the rest. (And as a warning--avoid creepy cults).

4.  Don't be an ass.  You're probably wrong.  So am I.  I'm wrong all the time, and mostly I've only started to be right on the "maybe I'm wrong" thing.  Also, avoid people who are asses.  If you're wrong and they are right, they'll have a pretty good sense of how to guide you out of being wrong.  Wise elders are never asses, I've noticed.

5.  Ask.  There are some wicked nice people who are not asses at all, or at least not when you ask them for help.  A lot of them have websites and write about this stuff all the time, and maybe they've met the same god or goddess or spirit or what have you already and can give you advice on what worked for them.  Some of them maybe won't email you back, so email someone else.  Some of 'em are linked on this blog, and--know what? Go ahead and ask me. I probably have no clue, but maybe I know someone else who might.

6.  Consider starting from how other people do it first.  If you're american and anti-authoritarian and all that, it's kind of your nature to try to build a religion or practice from scratch.  Sure. You could do that, but this is a little related to #4, because you may find yourself getting so isolated from other people, being so sure that you're right, that you start getting into insane arguments with people on the internet which is probably your only access to people who understand.  You can totally find your own gods later if you need/want to.  This isn't monotheism, where rejecting one god means you've rejected the whole thing.

7.  Learn Tarot, or runes, or some other divination method.  This has all kinds of benefits, particularly in that most of them will tell you more about yourself at the beginning than they will about the divine, and this is a very good thing.  See #8.

8.  Learn about yourself.  Every religious tradition I've seen which leads to some sort of peace for the adherent starts with the same precept: you cannot hear the divine if you don't know what your own voice(s) sound like.  The schizophrenic makes the mistake of believing every uncomfortable voice to be outside themselves.  The "mundane" makes the mistake of believing that every thought is their own. Neither are correct, and the only way to tell the difference is by learning to follow that twisted, contorted, complicated wanderings of your own beautiful self.  Do you know why you get angry at certain times, or feel lonely at others, or feel afraid of certain things? If not, how will you be able to tell what that strange voice meant when it told you to light candles in a certain order, or to add damiana to the wine you were offering, or don't evoke certain powers before chanting a certain prayer?

A final thing about Divine Trauma.  I think it's probably brutally necessary.  When stuff gets wicked difficult to understand, when you suddenly find yourself about to enter another walking myth or learn the name of a deity whom you've felt watching you from the shadows, something seems to break inside of you.  Thing is, what's breaking isn't you, it's what's been keeping you from entering into communication with these vast outer and inner worlds that most people get by without ever bothering to experience.  If all you care about is money and television or MMORPG's, you can get by without ever even noticing, and live a perfectly happy life.

But if you've gotten this far, you've probably either already heard that same beckoning call I did, or are about to.  And if it hasn't gotten fucking crazy, it's probably about to.

Congratulations, and, oh dear--good luck.

What I've learned of the gods.

I haven't tried to write anything of this whole druid thing out in plain language yet, as, really, not much of it is given to plain language.  Really, how do you begin to put dreams into the concrete?  And why put anything into the concrete? Concrete is gross.

There's a reason most mystical truth is hidden in poetry, and why most poets are out of their minds.  Emily Dickenson hinted at this in one of my more favorite poems (and speaking of being mad, she was a shut-in):

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind. 

Part of the problem, I think, is how words just don't quite do.  There's a reason words are not our only form of communication; beyond pictorial representations of ourselves and the world (and a great photographer is not quite the one who shows the subject as it is; rather, we are shown how the photographer saw it), beyond the indescribable of music (ever try to detail to someone else what a song "means" to you? Try it again and you'll see the problem), beyond the strange evocations of scent (I cannot smell nicotiana flowers wafting into my house in a cooling evening without losing myself in intoxication), there's all the configurations of touch and movement.  

On that matter, I learned something recently, and I learned it both from one of my gods and a man who for all I can tell was a devout priest of him, certainly without knowing.  I watched him (the man, not the god, but I'm not sure I could tell the difference--this is a matter for poetry, not for prose) dance upon a stage and cried, learning for the first time why words cannot suffice to capture something that can only be told in movement.  And, of course, there's also all the touch, all the hugging and hitting, all the kissing and fucking and punching we do to communicate with another when nothing else will do.  We tell angry boys to use their words, but there's a wisdom they understand that we forget--words are for the ears, not the body.  

Ah, words.  What did Eliot say?
 
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.

They don't do enough, they don't work sometimes.  And I sometimes forget, because I am all words, that I am not just words.

Still, I'm trying to tell you what I've learned, and I keep retreating to poetry.  Bad habit, like smoking, like getting grumpy and shutting someone out when they seem to reject you because your body is not attractive as your face or somesuch.

This is what I've learned so far: that when people say that the gods are just stories, I should agree and, smiling, add, "and so are we."

Some people think the gods are fictions, or figments.  There are those who say they're mere archetypes springing forth from human consciousness, or great teaching tools, or an endless resource of psychological self-improvement.  There are those who believe in one God and think the other ones are demons.  And, more complicated, there's one emanation of divinitiy of which the gods are mere interfaces, mere masks for a unitary One. 

I believe something a little less complicated.  They're real, and they do stuff, and sometimes go by different names to different people.  They show up in my dreams and sometimes not in my dreams, somewhere between actual sight and imagination, usually in the middle of ritual but sometimes not (and in those cases, rather surprising).  I've had a god show up on the face of another person, and that was...weird.  I'm glad he did, though. 

(It occurs to me that a few people probably think I'm not sane.  It's true.  I've never once claimed otherwise.  Poetry demands nothing less). 

If you're still reading, I'll tell you about them.  If you're concerned about my mental health, I'll show you how to write an "involuntary treatment" detention declaration...I just wrote one for a client the other day.  She hadn't showered in months and babbled about how the bearded men finger her with knives and left trails of strange liquid everywhere. Madness is relative.

Dionysus

Speaking of madness, damn.  Except not.  Except yes and no.
You've heard of him, I'm sure.  Toga parties and drunkenness and I recently heard there was some tv show that had one of his "followers" on it, but there were werewolves in jeans I've heard, and this seems a little less what I'm talking about.
Want to know Desire? Ask him, and stock up on lube.  And then, when you're ready to actually learn something, ask him again and try to understand why you've rejected every single lover that wants to change you, even a little bit, since you first talked to him.
There's sex, yeah? And then there's something behind sex, and that's when stuff gets crazy.  I don't mean what we usually think is behind sex (lust and hormones and "connection" and love and all of that).  Maybe, better put, what's in-between sex? Where is that place you go when you orgasm, because you're sure the fuck not here when it happens. And remind yourself that old people who don't have sex have a profound wisdom that us young sluts need to have lots of sex to...avoid.
And then go walk by a christian church and ask why the blood of Christ is wine (or grape juice if it's evangelical).
And then go sit under a pine tree for a very long time and stare at the stars with him and see what he sees.
He likes wine, but you'll have to drink some with him.  Beer works if you really have no other option, but don't be lazy with him, really. Aphrodisiacs mixed in aren't the worst idea.

Arianrhod

She's--what is she? "The Queen of the Witches," she told me in a place between sleeping and waking.  And I saw a blue-silver owl in another such vision, feathers dripping from it like the flames of a phoenix.
Go stare at a pool of water, and look at the reflection of the sky in it.  Now, shift your vision so you're looking at the surface of the water only, and see there's something...else.  Seriously. Go try it. Now.
 And then when you start losing really wonderful meaningful things to you, don't be surprised.  You'll lose everything eventually, so it's good practice.
And besides, everything you've been given isn't yours.  Better to be an orphan and make your own way then to have all you need and never find a path.  She threw a child back to the sea, and took everything away from the other.  Best mother ever, and I mean this.
Also, beware your love.  Did you know you can desire without losing yourself? She and Dionysus may have had "a thing," whatever that means.  What's it mean to you? It probably shouldn't.
She seems to like chamomile, or liked it when I gave it to her, or was gracious enough to pretend she did.

Ceridwen

Stare at the full moon and remember it's completely dark on the other side.
Stare into a cauldron and die and realize it's surprisingly not all that bad.  Kind of lonely until you remember that you're going to decompose and something's going to use your molecules to form itself. 
Hmm.  Still kind of lonely.
Not sure the way around this.  Death is damn lonely.  So is life.  Ever been surrounded by everyone you love and felt alone?  Yup. Just like that.
You die every day, and you need to.  You eat the dead, you breathe their dust.  The crust of the earth, that stuff you walk on? You know, dirt? How much life ended so you could put a seed into it and have a tomato?
Also--this is wisdom, you know.  Meet a beautiful person, fall in love, and tell yourself it will end at some indeterminate point, and tell yourself as it starts. And then throw yourself into it fully, because it's beautiful.
Fool yourself that it's gonna last forever and you'll never see what you've got.
I'm not clear what she likes, except saying hello to her when you see the moon reminds you she's there and you're gonna die and it's a good thing.

Bran

I don't ever really know what to say about him, because he's a little too close.  Like, I know him from somewhere, and I think I can't see him because his reflection is a little too close to mine.
But when you walk in front of a car because you are absent-minded and notice it barreling towards you and hear your own voice say with an odd timbre, "you are not my death," well, ugh.
I watched him stand, towering, on a storm-lit plain with dark hills on the horizon, wearing a fluttering black cloak which flew away into millions of crows or ravens, leaving him only as white bone around which a tower was built.
He gave me a branch of Alder, where the forest met a river.  Alder seems to be everything to me now.  Crows scream at me to pay attention and then I do and they stop screaming.  I don't know what this means, except I've never felt safer.
Corvid feathers.  Go help someone else, too, especially if it involves you taking on some crazy burden that won't break you but would them.

Brighid

I don't have favorites, but, since she was the first, I think she's--awesome.
I've had more dreams of her than of the other gods, each strange and somewhat trying.  She's always laughing at a hearth, and she's laughing because she knows something that I don't.  I'm not sure what this is, and I won't try to tell you.
But fall in love, and she's laughing.  Fall out of love, and she's laughing again, all the while building the fire she tends higher and hotter.  In some places, they "smother" or "smoor" a fire, keeping coals warm overnight so that it can be rebuilt the next morning.  I think this is part of it--the hearth never grows cold, if by hearth one means the warm place inside you from which all creation springs.
I've heard she likes milk, and spring water.  I usually light a small fire in a metal cup with rubbing alcohol, particularly whenever I've fallen in or out of love.  If Ceridwen is death and life, if Arianrhod is loss and gain, Brighid is melting and reforging. 

The Morrighan

I don't feel comfortable talking about her, as we've just met.  A three week courting, it seems, regarding what others are calling "sovereignty."
War is to sovereignty as sex is to desire, faces of something greater, messy attempts to get at the truth. 
I don't really know who she is, except, as a "triple goddess," she seems--well.  I'm tempted to say she's also the other goddesses I worship, or their messenger.  I don't know.  Did I say this yet? I don't know.
Even still, we've met, and she taught me to do something and I trembled in fear at the responsibility of it.


And beyond all of these, there's another one, I think, whom I just saw yesterday lingering outside the circle I cast.  I'll figure this out soon enough.  Younger than the others.  I had this silly idea when I started meeting gods that I'd get a nice manageable number and keep it at that.  That was a silly thing I didn't really mean anyway, I find. 

Eleutherios (Lughnasadh 2013)

Bale'corn will soon die.

Do not ask Them if you would not know.

Earlier under the willow, reading.  How it was once seen, how we once thought.  Replace the confused words of desire from one with the archaic searchers of desire from people gone into the dark.

Later, under a pine.  What the tree asks, I do. My book, my thoughts, back against trunk, leaning against something which knows desire in a different time.

Brigidh

Do not look there if you would not leave.

In a cold house I was the only hearth, and she at it laughing. Not smothered, only smouldered, and here again the candles, here again the flame.

At Imbolc, when I left the tower, the web, the loom, after the mirror cracked, I walked through the gate to the forests and saw there a satyr.

"This is a tree. This is oxalis," he said, and fed me from blue-blossomed vines a nectar.  "This stone calms," he said. "This stone heals.  This is my fur," he said, "this is my heart beneath it." At Eiler, the first turning of the path we parted with oaths. "I can hear you from there," he said.

Under the pine, my back against the only thing strong enough, he said "I can hear you from here," and I smiled and rubbed my neck against bark.

Bran

Do not play to Them if you would not be heard.

John Barleycorn should die.

Wooden shield, sustainer of armies.  I played for him on an island, dark-winged birds wheeling. I thought they were birch, until I knew they were Alder.

Elk-tooth through the forest, in my hand, moss from one Grandmother to another (around which fires now rage, and I fear for her safety). Stag, moss, Alder.

I open a bottle of wine and leave it out for him, whom I chided, but I hold close to the branch he gave me.

Arianrhod

Do not ask if you would not have Them give. 

 Do not ask if you would not have Them take.

At Beltaine I stared into her sky. The stars wheel, and there, her crown, her citadel, where I lost a name and took another.  He has been called inconstant, yet hanged her circle of light for us then to see.  She crossed over sea, away from him, over her father's threshold. There gave birth, there gave back to the sea, there took all away from the other to let him make himself.

I have been in her court, though I did not know her. I have been in her court, but I did not know myself.

An old woman under a willow breaks off a branch for her dog. A moment later, a young girl swings from a Birch, and I know it will break, too.  Fallen branch, wet into a pool of stars, water dripping like bells.

"I am the Queen of Witches," she says. Blue reflected in silver, her owl.  "You would know him?" she asks.  "Take this to protect from your own love, this to remember what you try to forget."

He loved her.  I did not understand this until I saw the stars through needled branches and felt his desire, pining.

Ceridwen

Do not offer your hand if you

 would not have it taken. 

 Do not seek life if you would not 

know the death which gives it shape.

Do not seek light if you would not

 know the darkness which gives it birth

Jean Saint Pépin serait mort.

I walked between houses which did not know me, under a scythe moon which would blood me.  Black-iron pot in my small rucksack, blackest of darknesses in my heart.

Her hideous son. Towers of glass, a recipe-book, a year of stirring.  The boy- he did not steal it, but you cannot know life if you will not know death.

There, his seed.  There the death.  There, then, the birth.

"You would know him?" She laughs.  "I will show you his death."

The Mothers

Don't.  Just don't, unless you mean it.  

I laid against him. Blood drawn from thorn of holly feeds pining roots.  "Quiet," he says, "they are greater than I."  

They demand, and I plead.  More blood, but I only have enough for myself.  More blood until flesh is drained.

It was only three drops, the boy had said, and yet this was enough, they had said.  But they spin and weave and cut, and so do I.

"You have my blood," I say.  Winged water-wisps pierce my skin. "Others feed on their blood," I say, "which is mine, for they have stolen it too.  'Three drops is enough,' you said, but my blood will now run forever in streams of flesh-eaten-flesh."

"True," they say, and laugh, and the threads are woven again.

Dionysos

Ask. 

By the pine where ale poured deep,

 just before the dance of desire-- 

ask about that dance. 

Ask about those howls to the stars in his forests.

  Ask as a friend and get an answer,

  as a child and get the truth.

Clad in green, with his hair around his eyes.

Pine.
I ask.

In the place where we first met his arms are suddenly around me. He's not there, but he is behind me anyway. I did not know he was so tall.

"Tell yourself what I tell you," he says.  "Remind yourself in the morning."

"And look," he says.  "That man there knows me. He tends my shrine, he dances my dance. Use your words, like you did with Them when I told you to shut up and listen."

I stumble, wheel around him like her stars, throw myself into the dark roiling abyss, and surprise myself with my words.  They're the same words I'd tell myself.  "You already know this," I say, "but you're fucking beautiful."

In the morning, I try to piece it back together.  Hours of words by the hearth, but weren't we in a forest of pine?  There was dancing, but we were both still.  Satyrs laughed and fucked and howled at her moon, at her crown, by her springs, but we were still. 

In the morning, I wake and look at the wand of alder, the mug of tea.  There was a dance, and there's proof, but it was from another time.  There's the chalice with silvered vines, the wine.

"The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist," he'd said, as if talking about him. And why would I dare say he wasn't?

"Eleutherios," I'd said. And thunderer, and the howls are still here.  A depiction of a dance.  Poetic musings to a man elsewhere, that I know how to wield winter ('don't write poetry when drunk,' I tell myself still).

John Balleycorn'll die, his seed consumed, and me with it.

I know this story.
I am this story.
Again and-

Our Sister

There is nothing so beautiful in the world as the rising of the moon over mountains, reflected upon a lake as you greet it, except knowing that it reflects the light at the same time upon all those you love, close by or very far from you.

I would be that light upon her face,
I would be the face that reflects such light,
I would be the myriad stars wheeling about her,
and the myriad dreamers under her gaze.

In-Between

Everything is fading in that pleasantly subtle violent way, death of summer obscured in bursts of colours which cannot be named.  Grey-blue mist rising from the lakes beside which no evil can dwell surrounds us with mystery beyond which only hides the world in which we dream.

In a false way I loom larger, lording over not as brutish but as giant the cup and spoon and pot.  Something shifts when I think I have noticed, moving out of place to remind me what I do not remember.  Only at such times am I again myself, no longer anything except that which cannot die by quiet.  --2002

This is not the first time I've left Seattle.  In 2002 I traveled east as my then-lover traveled south, he to university, I first to the basement of my father in a tiny, post-coal town in Ohio, then to Portland Maine for a short, very hard winter.  I've journal entries from the time just before I left, prose attempts to get at the strange in-between sense one has at the point after deciding to leave a place but before actually doing so. 

I returned, and for another 2 years lived in Seattle.  On the summer solstice of 2004, I flew to France for 3 months, and just before this time I gave up the place where I'd lived to couch-surf with a friend in order to save money.  Though I felt that same liminality even stronger this time, I wrote surprisingly little regarding it and instead wrote about the discovery of the will, something I've begun to understand happens near the saturn-return of most lives.

To say that self is but an illusion is not to dismiss it; rather, it is to put it into the world where we can truly celebrate it for what it is, a dream no different from the others with which we colour our existence with the hues of story and song.
Thus, to know the self is to gain the self as a tool, to use it as a canvas or a masque, to present to the world an incarnate dream upon which others might build.  To take up a self is to take up an art, to delve and delight in glamour and beauty, to act for the world a part of one’s own choosing, a subtle magic and a glorious feat. 

And most fascinating, the celebration of life begins in forests of dream in which each together unveil ourselves to find we are but mirrors of the world, that we are all each other.  --2004

And then--again. Back in the same house in the same room overlooking the same mountains and lake, attempting to make sense of all I'd seen of the world (and the terrifying reality that it was as brutally fascinating as I'd suspected).  This wasn't easy. Seattle was in the midst of another harrowing, a strange, fanatical rush of people to buy houses elsewhere, the first recent wave of destruction of old buildings, and the same sudden embrace of new technology the rest of America endured in the middle of the first decade of this century.

When I'd returned, something had changed.  The liminality I'd experienced before I left seemed to remain upon my return, or, more so, a new state of in-between had opened within me, and I could never quite find myself fully...here.

Yet one more time, I left Seattle, to Vancouver BC.  Something felt relieving about this move, less dream-soaked, more practical.  My then-lover had gotten a full scholarship to a master's program at UBC, and I'd get health care for the first time in my adult life, get a new ACL torn in a work-accident.  That liminality was strange, because I'd left Seattle so often by then it seemed rather casual.  And a darkness had settled over my understanding of the world, years of struggle against societal change which left me alienated from everything but my memories of dreams.

More often than not, the pictures refuse to fade into the magic of memory.  The do fade from sight but, instead of the solemn trek to and into the sea, they linger awhile, hesitant to walk into the breaking waves.

By then my attention has turned elsewhere, but I cannot now look at this new thing: they have caught my eye and held it, by the corner, so that I cannot truly deny I’m going blind.  --2009

And back.  Nothing could ever quite pull me back into the world.  I felt forever in-between, trapped within the liminal without egress.  I often thought I was going a bit insane, feeling myself never at home, viewing the world from that same mist I wrote of in the excerpt with which I started this piece. 

In many pagan, magical, and indigenous traditions, liminality is an entry point to the Other.  The shore is a liminal space, just as the gloaming (the time between sunset and twilight) is liminal, and Beltaine and Samhain.  In the liminal, the interstices, the in-between, the world is both one thing and another, and we are caught within it.  Colors bleed to grey, the sea turns to land, the earth tilts from life to death.

All of life had become this moment for me.  Trapped between sleeping and waking, the place of the physical and the place of dreams.  Echoes of noises I did not quite hear, light from stars I could not see.

From what I've read of anthropologist's studies of "shamanic calls," and from the lives of mystics and unhappy poets, I think I recognize this phenomena.  I am no shaman nor saint nor mystic, nor is my poetry very good, but the similarity of experience is not easily mistaken in myself.  The longer one attempts to avert ones eyes from what one has seen, the more difficult it is not to focus on it in the mind's eye, and so one sets within oneself a cycle of frustration, a perpetual dissatisfaction, a suspended binary, an unresolved polarity: liminality. 

And here I am again, in another liminal space, another border.  Except--it's not quite the same.  In it, in the decisions I've made these last 6 months, some difference has resolved itself into a third option, a completed dialectic.  In the spaces in-between, one need not choose between here or There--one can stand in both and actually be in both while existing in a third space, that specific space in between.

On the shore, one need not be either on the sea or on land.  The shore is both and a third place.  In the darkening of the day, it is neither light nor dark, it is both, it is the gloaming.  And I'd extend this with a suggestion, one that may prove useful to anyone who experiences deja vu in a similar way.

Setting aside the scientific conjecture of the experience, a deja vu seems to be the future bending itself back into the past to be experienced in the present.  It is rarely for me the sense of having "seen it before;" rather, it is like having remembered a dream in the past from the future of the current moment: all-is-always-now. 

It takes practice, but I've found that I can look around in those moments, pull myself out of apparently looping script and see something else.  A deja vu, like the shoreline, like the time before you leave somewhere but find your mind already there, may be a liminality. 

Then again, it may not be.  Ambiguity is also liminal. 

Still. I am here. I am elsewhere. I am in-between.

And I am absurdly happy. 

The Use of Racism

 

First: My Own Racisms

On the fourteenth floor of a skyscraper, I breathed in the electric smell of metallic ink dust.  Tall tinted windows filtered in the rose and violet light of the sun's setting and I, searching past the rows of machines, tried to divine which of the people gathered in one corner of the office was my supervisor.
For 6 months, I worked as a document-specialist, a modern, low-level scribe.  I was to stand before a massive photocopier and replicate pages of "legal discovery," perhaps the closest I've ever come to actual factory work.  We were supposed to wear face-masks, as printer and toner ink produce particles which will cause something similar to black-lung, but, well, there were no face-masks and the pay was good enough that one didn't care so much about the long-term effects of the job.
My first evening shift, and I was supposed to find a man named William, who was the night foreman and would assign me a work-station.  No one was wearing name tags, and I didn't know anyone yet, so I stood, disoriented, attempting to figure out who he might be.
A voice saved me from looking too much like a fool, both then and for the rest of my life. "Are you new?"
Relief flooded me as I looked at the woman who'd spoken.  Young like me, less well-dressed than the others--eminently approachable.
"Uh, yeah.  I'm Rhyd.  I'm looking for William?"
She told me her name, smiling, and then answered, "he's the one with the blue dress shirt. He's a nice guy."
And in that moment, I realised I was a racist.

There were maybe 30 people in the office, about 20 of them male.  There was only one man with a blue dress shirt, yes, but it took me an extra few seconds to identify him.  Something had short-circuited in my mind, because while yes, he was the only one wearing said color, he was different from the others in a few other ways, one of which stood out first to me--he was black.

By this point, I was already a leftist. I'd read much, I knew much, and I thought I understood much about how whites have utterly fucked-up most of the world and its people.  I had "black friends" (and I'll get to that bit of racism in a bit), didn't fear minorities, etc. etc.. But here, looking at the people in the office, I was confused.  Why hadn't she said, "William's the black guy?" Because all the other potential Williams (that is, the men) were all that special shade of white that only comes from living in Seattle or a cave, near translucent skin even in mid-summer.

Granted, William was also the tallest guy in the room, and when I thought about this later (that shift, and the next couple of weeks after), I tried to parse out why she had chosen shirt color to distinguish him from others rather than his height or his skin color.  A Truth had begun to take root in my mind, and it was horrifying. I looked at skin color as an "obvious" difference; she didn't.

A few years later, I became the chef at a popular dinner-theatre in Seattle, working for two uber-liberal, very progressive and eco-conscious people.  They'd bought a house in an historically black neighborhood in Seattle, renovating both it and the area where they built their theatre.  They publicly supported liberal causes, including the city council campaign of a black neighbor (hosting one of his fund-raising campaign dinners for free).  They were generally what one might consider paragons of post-racial Seattle, what we all should strive to be.

Except when the well-dressed, amiable, professional woman arrived one afternoon.  She pulled a resume from a very chic leather document case and, speaking to one of the owners, said, "I'm here to apply for a job?"

"Oh--talk to Rhyd," he answered.  "He does the hiring for the kitchen."

"Oh, I'm sorry.  I was hoping you were hiring for servers?"

"No, sorry," he lied.  "Not right now."

This is where I mention that this well-dressed, fabulous applicant was black. And I failed to confront my boss, because I wanted to keep my job.

A Brief History of Race

Hannah Arendt

The history of racism is sordid, but it can be parsed out and unwoven.  There's something you should know about it, though--race theory (that is, there are different "races," and the races are different from each other) is a new idea.  Hannah Arendt (a jewish philosopher, student of Heidegger before she had to leave Germany), most famous for her treatment of the political uses of Zionism against Jews (Eichmann in Jerusalem) wrote extensively about both the history and function of Racism.  In The Burden of Our Time, she traces the birth of "race-thinking" to the early 1800's liberal aristocrats in both Germany and France and notes how its spread did not occur until nation-states noted its usefulness as a justification for their colonial and imperialist policies, particularly in Africa.

Consider the implications of this, though.  There was slavery before the 1800's, and there was what we now call "racism" against non-whites before the 1800's as well.  But her argument is this: there was no widespread, universal ideology about racial difference and racial superiority before the development of racism (during the much celebrated "enlightenment.").   Before then, other justifications existed for slavery and for hierarchies of peoples, but they were varied and unrecognisable to most in america now.

One of the justifications for slavery and oppression of non-european peoples was levels of "civilisation" (and this still returns to our thinking when we bomb the fuck out of less-dark peoples, like Afghanis and Iraqis--consider all the talk of how backward, violent, and savage muslims were/are to their women and minorities, unlike our enlightened selves (because we'd never justify the killing of homosexuals or blacks, nor would we support the rape of women, right???).

Another justification was religious and pseudo-historical.  For those unfamiliar with the Bible, Noah is said to have had three sons named Ham, Shem, and Japheth.  Ham looked his father's nakedness, it appears, and so was cursed to be the servant of his two brothers.  Ham later went on to found the nations of Africa, supposedly (and Ham sometimes translates as "dark,"), so christian preachers in america and elsewhere used this story as justification for slavery (after all, the forefather of Africa looked at Noah's cock...).

And yet another was religious.  Anyone who's ever seen The Mission (and if you haven't, you should--Antonio Banderas and Jeremy Irons as bearded priests...) will be familiar with this theory--rules of decency, of charity, and of society only applied to other Christians, not to non-Christians.  This idea helped justify the European slaughter of Arabs and Jews during the crusades, as well as justify the plunder and slavery of Africa and Asia.

But all those ideas went a bit to the side when a new idea, a more useful ideology came about: there are Races of people, and some are better than others.  Springing from Nationalist and aristocratic thinking in the 1700's, along with the applications of materialistic science, came a new justification for the slaughter and oppression of people-not-like-us.

And now we live with this legacy.

Race and Privilege

I've read too many recent conversations on the internet regarding race and privilege lately (too many, because I've got a pilgrimage to sacred sites in France to plan, and also they've made me a bit ill) to be unable to address one thing which keeps coming up.

It's been expressed various ways, but the most common aspect of those expressions can be summarized as such: "Racism and Privilege are just ideas, and we're all one people, so stop throwing blame and guilt around."

Ideas don't kill, but people embracing Ideologies sure do (Nazis, anyone?)  The difference is both simple and profound--an idea is just a thought expressed within a person's mind; and ideology is a set of ideas which lead a person to beliefs about the world, and beliefs, when held, lead to action.  "Black men are untrustworthy" is a mere idea (and possibly racist), but "black men are untrustworthy" is an ideology when it is shared by many people who embrace it not just on the level of ideas, but of belief.  And the most powerful thing about ideologies is that they become invisible to those under its sway, except on the level of society.  And each person within a society holding to this belief reinforces the others, making the power of that belief that much more potent and that much more invisible.

Except, of course, to those who don't hold to the ideology, or those who are the target of a racist ideology.

One need not look at the individual beliefs of each person in a society to prove that Racism has power.  Rather, it makes more sense to look at the function of that belief within society, or look at the conditions of the targets of racism and discern whether or not non-whites have the same access to everything that whites do.

And, well, they don't.  And privilege is easy to explain--when someone has access to more things than another in society, not by their own virtue but by some sort of classification, than they are a privileged class.  Need examples?

When people talk about privilege, this is what they mean: whites are a privileged class in America: they have access to more rights, more security, more opportunity as a whole than non-whites.  Even if any particular white has less wealth and less opportunity than a non-white, in general whites have more.  It's a useful way of talking about the affects of Racism As Ideology as it functions in society, and people should really stop taking it so fucking personally.  That is, acknowledge that, in general, some people have more privilege than others, that Racism continues to exist as an Ideology even if you yourself don't feel privileged or racist, and that this Ideology and its functions are making the lives of millions of people really, really miserable.

"All one or none"

All-One

There's this...shampoo. Or soap. Or dishwashing liquid, or insecticide, or purportedly 30 other things, called Dr. Bronner's.  And I'm afraid people may accidentally be getting there politics and spirituality from the manic and incoherent prattle printed on the bottle.  Not the "Dilute! Dilute! Or Rinse Eyes Well!," but the repetitive claims that We Are All One.

Well, yes. But not at all.  Imagine sitting at a table where everyone is eating, and you are particularly hungry but by the time the food is passed to you, there's only a spoonful left and then the host proclaims, "I'm glad we all got enough food."  You didn't, and you're having trouble not staring at the person who got served first and took more than everyone else, but you don't want to speak up because, well, everyone did get some food, you just got barely anything.

This is akin to proclaiming that we are all the same.  We are not, because some of us are treated horribly, shot because we're a different color or not allowed to apply for a job because we're not white. We should all have equal rights, and we should all be treated equally, yes.  But this isn't the case, and until it is, there's no sense pretending that we're all equal.

This has too many implications to number, but one of the most obvious is the way that wealth is distributed.  And this is where one begins to see the implications of Race Theory, and specifically, why very little has ever been done about it except by disobedient people who end up in jail.  Minorities are--poor.  The richest people in America are some of the whitest, and whites are, on average, much better off economically than non-whites.

There've been a few attempts by some very horrible (white) men to justify this philosophically and scientifically by attempting to prove that some minorities have lower mental capacity by virtue of their genetics, or are unable to do certain kinds of work because of their cultural upbringing, or (in the less politic sense) because they are lazy.  These are all easily rejected, but two questions should present themselves immediately: 1. Why are they poor? and 2. Why are white men trying to justify non-white poverty?

Buffalo Slaughter

In Capitalism, wealth is generated by wealth.  If you don't start with wealth, and can't borrow wealth to invest, you have to accumulate it by selling your labor.  If your parents and grandparents weren't rich (and not many slaves from Africa came over with great wealth shackled along with them in the slave-ships), then you have to get a job. And if you aren't white, this is not an easy proposition (refer back to my story earlier).  The same goes for immigrants (who are often fleeing poverty, war, or oppression) and First Nations (who had most of their land stolen, most of their ancestors slaughtered, and their primary resource eradicated by government policy.

The Perpetuation of Racism

But to the second question.  Why do people continue to justify unequal distribution of wealth between whites and non-whites?  I'm not interested in individuals here, per se (though sometimes I want to shake a fool or five).  No--more interesting: what is the use of Racism, if it's wrong?

The roots of Race Theory answer this question.  Arendt's theory--that ideologies don't take hold until they become useful as justifications of certain policies--is illuminating.  Racism is very useful if you want to hold on to power and are white.  Dividing the poor into (superficial, skin-deep) divisions which make them distrust each other is a very adequate way of ensuring the poor will never unite to take back some of that wealth. 

That is, we are being used.  When we repeat the refrains of a baseless ideology, we strengthen the rich and powerful.  When we refuse to confront this Ideology, we play into their hands.  And when we refuse to confront our own privilege, we are doing their bidding.  And many of my readers think not just of political implications, but spiritual matters, so I must add--to liberate ourselves from the materialistic forms which enchain us, we must learn how we inadvertently help the powerful enchain others.

Under the Pavement, the Stars

Our life is no dream. However, it should--and perhaps one day will--be.
--Novalis

 For a few days, I left the bustling streets of the city throngs, the culture and learning of the urban, and stayed in the village of Oak Grove, not far from Ravenswood.  The hearth which sheltered me, ringed by old pines, was a short walk from a quiet but strong stream which salmon use every autumn to spawn. To get to this stream, not far from where it becomes a river emptying into an ancient lake and then into the sea, one needed only to walk along a worn, weathered fence, pass through a well-concealed gate, and pick a way through old orchard trees and alder to a place where the bank slopes enough to walk down.

(where I sat)

There, listening to water, sitting upon a small beach formed by worn, rounded pebbles, I quieted, allowing myself to be open to what the stream had to say to me. 
"Hey," called the voice of the man on the other bank.  "How's it going?"
My journal was already open, but I set my pen aside long enough to say greet him back.  There was a tension in his voice, a forceful, assertive-agressive hail, but I ignored it, suspected I'd mistaken his tone.
After a while, distracted by the way the water lapped occasionally over moss-covered stones, feeling again at peace, I took up my pen.
"Watch out for that strange guy by the river," I heard, before I'd written my first word.
I looked up, disappointed, perturbed.  I saw the man talking to a maiden I presumed to be his daughter by her response. "Where, dad?"
"Not so loud," he answered, and then they both went out of earshot, into their expensive, suburban home.

I didn't mention that part.  Oak Grove isn't a village, nor is Ravenswood.  They're "living communities," probably with a TM somewhere on their websites.  I was house-sitting for some friends for a few days, hiding away from the great noise and dance of responsibility that has become my life in the city in one of the many old logging towns that have been transformed into "bedroom communities" in recent years around the city of Seattle.

A Brief (Personal) History of the Car

Every city has its suburbs, and I have avoided them whenever possible for the entirety of my adult life.  When I moved here, I swore off such places as dull, bourgeois, and ultimately anti-civilization.  Besides the usual reason why a gay man in his early 20's would want to be in a city (culture, ease of finding work, ease of finding dates), I've lived a very adversarial life to one of the two things which compel and create the existence of the suburbs.

I spent most of my pre-pubescent years in rural ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachians.  The WIC truck delivered, as did the government food truck, and I was reminiscing with a co-worker the other night about how perfect (and toxic) government cheese was--it made the best grilled cheese sandwiches imaginable, but turned your feces a strange color.  Also, powdered milk? Miserable.  Don't bother.

Me and an outhouse.

I lived in a worn-down A-frame house with a leaking sewer (the plants grew gorgeously tall above the iridescent-black sheen seeping through the leech-bed), a van on cinder-blocks (it was our shed), two old washers and one old fridge on the porch, and a fenced-off forest behind us.  The only industry worth talking about in that area was the paper-mill, and trees needed to be protected so they could be sold at a premium when the buyers came calling, so I wasn't allowed to hop the barbed-wire fence (that motherfucker hurt).

But we had a road, a paved one even (not many of those around), and sometimes my father would drive us "to town." My little sisters would brush their hair and put on a dress, I'd comb my hair and put on shoes, and, if the car started (half the time, maybe), my family would make the 45 minute drive to a town of 20,000 people, the center of life, excitement, and also groceries and, the most exciting element of all, K-Mart.  I cannot begin to describe the extreme disappointment I'd feel when we were strapped into our seat-belts, all primped for the big world, and the car didn't start. 

After a divorce, my mother moved my sisters and me to what seemed the opposite world.  I lived all my adolescence in a town in South Florida, near beaches and amusement and well-dressed people in gated communities (a few of which incorporated themselves into "cities").  Yet--I'm not sure I can honestly say much changed.  We didn't have a car, and though the 5 mile walk to the grocery store (in summer humidity, in south Florida temperatures) was possible, it was never fun.  The worst part? Crossing the 10 lane "streets" built to accomadate the inundation of cars sweeping into the southern lands to escape the balance of temperatures most people call "winter."

These "streets" have a peculiar adornment, more visible in the later months of the year.  White crosses covered in flowers, cards, images of the Virgin, always painted with a hispanic first and last name (yes, roadside-shrines are everywhere, but in Florida, they're majority Hispanic).  I was far from enlightened when I was fourteen, and I remember asking someone why "mexicans always seemed to die when crossing the street" and the answer jarred me brutally, pointing out my own idiocy and also my own poverty: "mexicans can't afford cars, stupid."

It was at this point I first learned both class consciousness and race consciousness, and I've never been the same since. 

Life without Cars

In a benevolent city, you do not need a car.  I try only to live in such cities, as I've never learned to drive and hope to live my life without needing to.  But such a decision requires a lot of loss--multiple jobs will never be available to me, and, as a particular quirk of American civil planning has it, I cannot get anywhere truly "wild" without being driven there by a friend. 

This is okay, though.  I hate cars. I hate the car's waste of resources, its brutal impact on the planet, and its brutal impact on society.  I don't like running to cross a street because someone isn't looking (and are instead looking at one of the other technologies I've grown to despise, their smartphone).  I dislike having pets squashed on the street, I loathe the searing heat coming from seas of parking lots, I get depressed when I compare European cities to ours, and I am disappointed that there are places I cannot go without one. 

Though my own choices and admittedly strong opinions regarding automobiles probably disqualifies me in the eyes of some to talk about how cars have damaged our world (both outer and inner), there's something I hope to convey here.

Return for a moment to my account of sitting by the river just outside "Oak Grove."  If I painted it correctly for you, perhaps you imagined what I was trying to imagine while I was there-- that is, the ideal beneath the forms, the "world below the pavement."  It should not be hard to imagine such a village, not only because we want such a thing (and thus the archaic names for housing developments), but because there have been such things in the world.  Not only that, but there are still, for there are (believe it or not) a few places in the world where the necessities of the car did not trump the already-existing societal structures where it was introduced.

I'd argue, with the slow decline of industrialised society that I think is occurring (peak oil, capitalism grinding down, etc.,) we will have to adopt such old forms again.  North America will likely have it harder than most other places because so much of what we do, what we've built, relies upon the existence of cars.  The rest of the world has been quite accustomed to villages and cities interacting without cars, or at least for most of the last several thousand years.

The suburbs in North America are not like the villages in Europe or elsewhere, unfortunately.  They sprung up primarily because of the car and what was called "white flight" in 70's and 80's; whereas in the rest of the world, villages were emptied by industrialisation, in North America villages were transformed by both racism and industrialisation, aided by the handy "chariot of freedom" known as the automobile. The suburbs as they exist now function both as overflow for cities (though, now, in many places, they are becoming a refuge for the poor and immigrants who cannot afford the "white return").  And though the suburb's legacy is one of racism, there are plenty of people who choose to liver there for other reasons, not just fear of difference (though, in the case of the man who warned his daughter to beware me, it probably was).  I've also begun to be aware of something else, a way that the city damages us.  

Telling an Other Story

I can't believe I'm saying this, actually, but there's this: cities, with their press of peoples and noise, the primacy of commerce and consumerism and the destruction of nature, create a massive wall between the part of us which can experience the Other and the part of us who experiences the material.  Though I'm far from being extremely perceptive of such things, the more I've opened myself up to such experiences, the harder living in a city has become.  I've heard that people who are very good at listening to the subtle senses are able to block out all the noise, but these are high priests and mages, not normal people like me trying to awaken the old gods and work a full-time social work job (I won't even begin to tell you what working with schizophrenics is like now...).  Downtown gets...difficult.

Still, I don't think we should destroy the city, though.  Nope--far from it, for anyone who's ever had a deviant thought in her or his life knows quite well that the suburbs and rural areas are not friendly places to deviants.  Nor do I think we should raze the suburbs, with their symbolic village life.  Instead, I suspect we need to change the stories we tell about both.  Draw out from the suburbs their faux-archaic names and hold them to it, draw out the cultural and civilising promise of cities and demand it. 

The world has become dis-enchanted.  It's hard to find the magic in things, the whispers in nature, the voices of the Gods, the ancient paths that lead to Other worlds.  There are a myriad of reasons for this, and I intend to write more on one of the biggest reasons later.  But the fact of this dis-enchantment should not be allowed to stand, nor should our ability to re-enchant the world be forsaken.  We can re-weave the world with our stories, and one of the places I think maybe we should start is with the cities and villages in which we live.

And while telling this Other story about the places we live, we can begin to transform those places.  The cities are noisy and crowded and full of strife, yes, but they can also be places of wonder, with markets full of exotics from far-off lands and towers full of learning.  The suburbs are often closed-minded and fearful of outsiders, yes,  but they can be villages full of wise folk closer to nature and the old ways.   Not only can they be, but they ought to be, and it'd probably be best for all of us if we got started, learning to re-enchant the world and each other so that, when the world we've created around the car starts to crumble, there's something more enduring to take its place.