it was a dark and stormy night

The rain came tumbling down and from where I was sitting I felt a gust of calm and cool air come steal across my skin. And maybe it was the weed or maybe it was the wine or maybe it was that I had barely ate but as the heavens opened up they did things to my brain.

And I’d like to say there were candles except there were none but the restaurant was dim and dark and there was a lull and perhaps we were the only ones left this late in the evening. We were talking about something or other. Nothing of consequence, well, not to me, until a light flickered in the candle of my brain. And I don’t know what lead me here, and I don’t know how I got back—ohh wait, yes I do, we were talking about spirits and ghosts.

I find it so terribly dull when people close themselves off to what is always coming through, but more than this I find it boring, as in despairing, when people say, You have a gift, because I am not the only one. We all have this gift, only some of us reject it no matter how many times it gets in our face or invades our dreams or whispers in our ear. And then they want to set me apart for accepting things I cannot explain, to label me as special or as demented, whatever suits their needs.

I pay their small mindedness no mind. When I chose to accept these energies into my life, I decided not to care what anyone thought about my experiences, which might just be the only thing I don’t give a fuhck about. They could roll their eyes to my face and still it would not phase me because the only thing I can feel is sadness that they deny themselves this opportunity to transform their lives.

Back to the conversation at hand, it went a little something like this. Spirits and ghosts, how do they communicate? How do they reach us? When and why? How is it that this is always happening and so much of life is designed to deny?

And as I sat there listening to this person negate that which is cherished in my heart, a truth revealed itself. So it is that all the universe operates simultaneously, that all the universe and its creations experience energy as a sensory phenomenon. Time is an illusion and meaning is a game for no other being bothers to manipulate reality into something it is not.

And then I thought about humans, about how we are the only creatures with two hemispheres to the brain, how evolution has produced this left hemisphere that goes against Nature itsel. Ahh, the left brain, home to sequential thinking and language and meaning. The left brain, the thing upon which all of civilization was founded. All thought, all interpretation, all rules, all punishment, all ways in which we structure our very lives are created by, umm, well, some freak mutation in evolution.

The left brain, the thing that allows us to conceptualize Armageddon, is the thing which makes it possible for us to live into the actualization of total annihilation. But annihilation of ourselves and our world and our dreams, for how else will Nature regulate the species that has climbed its way to the top of the food chain except to program it to finish itself off, because that is poetic justice for all we have wrought.

But that’s not my point. My point is this: all the universe is right brain, because everywhere else the left does not exist. Everywhere else, it is always happening in a dream, it is always coming to us in ways that we do not accept because without “proof”. I mean, how can the dead still exist? How can someone be in two places at the same time? How can I know the future? How can I see past lives?

You cannot explain simultaneity to a sequentialist; you have to release yourself from this mode of thinking and get with what the body knows. Because it is the body that communicates to all other beings in this world. All words and thoughts and meaning does is throw us off our game. Believe you me, I know how easy it is to be deluded by the power of thought, especially thoughts that appear logical, because logic is not an arbiter of truth but a means to a ends that is dangerous at best. Logic exists for the power of persuasion; logic exists to build a power base. But that don’t make it truth and that don’t make it real. That makes it manipulation of the mind for the purpose of social control.

Very left brain. Very deceptive. And here’s the point of this essay. Spirits and ghosts, psychic vibes, dreams, miracles, conversations with God, talking to animals, speaking to the dead, communing with the trees, all those things that are dismissed by the logicians and the rationalists and the powers that be, the people who deem their cold and unfeeling world the one that is “real”—yea, well, all of that is always happening because that is how the universe works. Every creature in existence is in tune with the right brain, every creature except us.

compassion ..

Last night I lay in bed, exhausted, unable to sleep. Thoughts always flow in and out of my mind, and usually I organize them into verse so that the rhythm of the words relaxes my nerves. But this time, I didn’t have the chance to compose my thoughts into prose poetry because before I knew what happened, I found myself swept away and deposited into another person’s body.

She was lying in bed, unable to sleep. Thoughts spun around in her head, making her sick. This is wrong! This is wrong! She kept saying that over and over again. What have I done? She felt guilt, shame, horror, remorse but she couldn’t bare it. It couldn’t be her fault, yet it was. But she had to share the blame. She turned her head to the man lying asleep next to her, thinking he felt nothing at all. She hated him, resented him. It was all because of him, it always was.

Only, now it wasn’t so simple. One plus one equals three. And she lay there sick with worry, sick with grief. Sick, making herself sick, pumping cortisol into her body. She filled her body with death, and death began to take its toll, first on the that which she had been given to protect. But she was hurting  so bad, she couldn’t make it stop. Her mind started spinning and her body started to throb. She started to unravel, so desperate for help, so vulnerable, so lost. She called out, and that is when He came.

I shot back into my own body, the most awful ache in the center of my being. This horrible, horrible thing I never wanted to know was suddenly something very real. All I could feel was her truth, and I don’t know why she wants me to know. I know I would like to create meaning, I would like to understand this in a way that makes some kind of sense. Because, for all the things I have seen and heard and felt, this was absolutely the worst.

Up until now, I took a kind of pleasure and humble reverence in these unlikely communions, because they didn’t hurt me. I could understand the essence, even if words failed to explain what the chills and goosebumps told me. But this time, I went to a place of deep and unending pain, a pain that lives to this day, a pain that has become a rage, a rage that lives unabated and acts out in distorted ways.

I have a thousand interpretations in my head, but none of them feel right. Because, I am beginning to understand that there are no interpretations, there is only the experience itself. To feel it without meaning, to accept it without condition, to allow it into my heart, to feel the pain without trying to control it. And to remember that this isn’t a curse, but a blessing. Because if I am to be feeling other people’s pain like this, I must be learning compassion.

extra close

She smiles in recollection of the dream that they shared, convinced that he was not a figment of her imagination, but an active participant in it. She has long since believed that dreams are an alternate reality. Though it seems the dreams happen only in our mind, she believes that dreams occurs in their own universe that is just as legit as the one we return to every morning. Doesn’t it seem like what happens while we are awake is only a subjective interpretation of events? And in that way, wouldn’t it stand to reason that the same goes for our dreams?

She holds faith in the possibility of parallel universes, different wavelengths of energy on to which we jump at will or fall into by accident. She thinks back to her dream, to the very beginning, to the moment where he touched her and gave her his love. Near he had been, coming so close she could still feel his fingers upon her breast, and with a shy smile she slides her hand along the trails he left. A wondrous warmth sweeps through her soul and at that moment she feels one with all the love in the world.

A breath escapes her lips, born of a kind of peace she rarely experiences. In this exhale she is released from the continuous cuts and abrasions that accrue from the jagged edges of her fragmented self. In this exhale, fusion comes and she is whole again, like a baby born into this world who does not know anything yet. In this state of primordial mystery, where the ego is empty and the soul is free, there is no Self, there is no Other, there is simply Oneness with all beings that are, that have been, that will ever be.

As her muscles relax and her mind empties, her eyes open but they are unseeing. Sound fades into the most subtle of silences, the kind you do not notice until noise violates this vast emptiness. Feeling is muted so that there are no impressions and she slips softly into a trancelike state.

Everything is dark but there is a sense of motion, like energy floating and flowing, trails of black on black are invisible but noted. In this blackness she feels warmth, love, comfort, peace, happiness, joy. She is completely at ease but she understands that she is a visitor and she has been brought here for a reason. And though she is an outsider she feels very much accepted, as though this energy surrounds her with waves she cannot feel.

She knows that she is not dead, that she is still in her home, lying on her bed. Her eyes begin to focus and she sees that the world is the same yet somehow everything has changed.

the path to love

Love is the way messengers
from mystery tell us things.
—Rumi