2011

Lately, I’ve been preoccupied with 2011. Specifically the latter part of the year–late summer, fall and early winter. I can feel it, smell it, taste it…like somehow, five years ago is right here with me today.

I was immersed in photography classes, selling fancy handbags at the mall. In love with a man who would never love me. Living in a cute little apartment in Houston, at the corner of Westheimer and the 610 Loop. (Side note: I met a woman several months later who I cared for deeply. For a brief time, she was a mentor and friend. She died suddenly on Christmas Day, 2012 and before she passed, we found out that years earlier, she had lived in that exact same apartment.)

2011 was also the year I discovered psychedelics, sitting with a close friend in my living room. No ceremony about it, just a couple of pills sourced from a neighbor. Two important things happened that night, under the spell of a mixture of MDMA and psilocybin:

1. I encountered, what I called (repeatedly, out loud) “The Holiest of Holies.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I remember feeling years of anxiety and PTSD melt away in one instant of awe and sacredness, ancient symbols dancing on the walls.

2. Somewhere deep into the journey, my friend quietly took my hands. Visions of vines began to ripple up from the floor and through his arms and body as he said, “The earth is your Mother, and she loves you.”

At some point, likely under that same spell or in the afterglow of another similar session, I wrote a poem which randomly crossed my path again today. Just a single verse, in badly translated Latin:

Hodie mundo vivit.

Oculi aperti sunt .

Universum canit audio cantus .

Interiora mea efferbuerunt absque liberis morior .

Moriatur anima mea fueris .

Mors terribilis , et decora facie.

Totum vocat . Antiquus redit .

Tempus est.

Today, the world is alive.

My eyes are open.

The universe sings, I hear its song.

My heart is free and I am dying.

Let my soul soar. Death is terrible, and beautiful.

The Whole calls. The Ancient returns.

It is time.

Reading this today transported me again, instantly: 2011. I likely keep going back because those months would be the last few before my world started to undergo more drastic, abrupt changes than I could count. Maybe there’s some part of me that’s craving that sweet, naive stability again…mushrooms and beer and “The Holiest of Holies” with friends on the weekends. A slightly boring, easy existence in my hometown. A feeling of mystery about the world, like there was so much I didn’t know, and so much I wanted to figure out.

I turned 30 that fall, brimming with curiosity about “The Meaning of Life”.  A year later, most of those questions (in their most simple sense) had been answered.

And here I am, at almost 35. Nostalgic, with the feeling that I’m reaching out for something again, like some of that curiosity has returned. There’s a question which comes up for me often these days, whether I’m looking up to the stars or the mountains, or within:

“What else is out there?”

The Space Between Stories

Self Portrait by Edward Honaker, via My Modern Met

Source unknown, via Antigone XXI

via blackyogis (Tumblr)

The first thing I read when I woke up today was this:

“This week, I experienced a trauma that collapsed my story of self, yet a new story has not yet emerged. Charles Eisenstein calls this ‘the space between stories.’ Many of us are in this space between stories right now, when you feel lost, ungrounded, dislocated, as if your roots have been pulled up and you’re not quite sure where to land. Everything you thought you knew—about yourself and the world—is now in question. Even our systems—the medical system, our political systems, the education system, the banking system—they’re in the space between stories too. We know the old way is falling apart, yet the new way has not yet been born.”

(Read the rest of Dr. Lissa Rankin’s powerful article here.)

After a weekend spent mostly in bed, eating mostly junk food, watching mostly cop shows (all things which are appropriate for me in reasonable doses….when they don’t take up an entire sad, isolated weekend) it’s clear that something is coming up for me to look at.  I felt a powerful resonance with the collapsing of systems Lissa describes, internal and external.

And somehow, I also feel hopeful…one of my favorite things is to feel “met” in the darkness, by whatever unseen forces walk with me along this path.  The synchronicity of this article being the first thing on my newsfeed after a foggy emergence from a restless night’s sleep felt like a hand reaching into the shadows to say,

“It’s ok.  We’re still right here with you.”

(P.S:

This quote, from the same article mentioned above:

“If you get overwhelmed, rest in the sanctuary of your blown open heart, where you will know that this stripping down is not a punishment; it is an answer to a silent prayer for freedom that you may not even remember praying.”)