Quick update! At least I’m gonna try to make it quick. My personal life still exists, and I suppose it’s worth mentioning now and again.
In January (way back under the last administration – ya know, 17 years ago) I completed my second level of reiki training, and since then things in my life have been shifting and changing dramatically. Second degree reiki has a lot to do with emotions and psycho-spiritual health. The symbol learned in first degree, cho ku rei, deals primarily with physical healing, but those learned in second degree encompass so much more. Hence, the attunement process has longer lasting “side-effects,” and for someone like me the personal transformation is far more powerful and noteworthy. The symbols Sei he ki (relating to emotions and mental health), and hon sha ze sho nen (relating to time and space) have enabled me to not only heal others from a distance, but also heal myself in ways I never thought possible. Being able to travel back to moments of profound trauma and take the sting out, setting myself free by nothing short of magic, has given me a whole new lease on life.
Probably one of the most noteworthy responses I’ve had to all this is my renewed drive to write. Having been raised in an anti-creative environment, the struggles I’ve had with my creative impulses have been tantamount to those many religious fundamentalists have with their genitals. Turns out, being raised to see fiction writing as a perverse form of masturbation doesn’t help one brave the sea of criticism that invariably awaits creative people when they muster the courage to share their work. It’s pretty easy to throw your baby overboard when your peers tell you its ugly and your family believes it was never a baby at all – but rather a plague-carrying vial of toxins that could break and transform an innocent populace into a brain-eating zombie hoard.
Because that makes sense.
But anyway – my second degree reiki attunement has enabled me to see that my writing is neither toxic, nor even bad. I’m a perfectly capable writer (Farewell, Everything recently made it to the finals in a fiction contest), and I enjoy doing it. So why wouldn’t I follow my heart and do what I love?
Sounds simple enough, but nothing is simple to me. Not with my background. And probably not with my brain, in general. Nope. Nothing.
So the thoughts I intended to share in this blog have largely been diverted into my second book, tentatively called Shadow Anatomy. More or less a sequel to Farewell, Everything (though not quite), the book – so far – reads like a collection of interlocking short stories: a handful of people (mostly side characters from the first book), find their lives woven together by conflict, crisis, and a shared need to get a particular box out of a hard-to-reach attic. Like Farewell, it’s panning out to be the perfect receptacle for my magical fantasies, my spiritual musings, and every wildly panicked doomsday fuckshow thought that relentlessly plagues my mind.
I highly recommend writing as therapy, btw. Especially fiction. Terrified of life? Write that worst-case scenario OUT. Live it. Did you love it? No. But did you survive? . . . . . . . . . Probably.
Maybe?
Anyway. So much for this being a “quick” update.
The last thing I wanted to share involves books as well, but none written by me. My Reiki Part Deux: The Reikoning (get it?) attunement has inevitably led to spiritual seeking and questioning and questing and all of that – things I’ve honestly done all of my life, though not without considerable self-doubt and embarrassment. Having been raised in a hyper-materialist culture (and household) I’ve learned to avoid speaking about my spiritual proclivities and interests to avoid seeming “stupid.”
Real talk: I don’t share my beliefs and experiences ’cause then I’ll be called “dumb.” I is an adult. I is pushin’ 40. Maybe it doesn’t get better, kids. Sorry.
Still, the pressure to maintain my mask of reasoned, intellectual, fact-based superiority has actually benefited me in several ways: I don’t fall for cults, I don’t let others tell me how or what to think (anymore), I don’t push my personal ideologies on others like I’m gonna save them. But sharpened reason is a double-edged blade, and I am just as turned off by hard-science as I am by hard-religion. This leaves me in the awkward position of seeing them as two halves of the same brain, sadly divided and pretending to be whole on their own. Consequently, science demands the type of heart-centered allegiance from its “fans” that really should only be given to softer things, and as such its intent (logical reasoning) is undermined by fanaticism. Religion has turned to psycho-dogma – reading metaphors as literal, parables as fact – to replace the solid, worldly foundation that it once enjoyed through it’s ancient marriage to, ya know, visible reality.
In order to be sane, we need both spirit and reason – yet it’s increasingly blasphemous to say so in public. And frankly, that’s fucked.
That said, I’m gonna be brave and come out with it: I have a weird respect for certain aspects of organized religion. I was raised without religion. More to the point: I was raised without any spirituality at all. And if you didn’t guess: the atheism didn’t take. I’ve got a 12th house stellium; spirit is oxygen. So I buried my nose in ESP pamphlets as a child, and I spent my college years fixated on Islam, spent some time in the West Bank, and quite enjoyed the lullaby-like rhythms of life fostered by dropping everything to hit the ground and pray five times a day. But I never considered converting. I love God, but I fundamentally suck at following rules.
I spent the rest of my 20’s making pilgrimages to the Peruvian Amazon, vision-questing with Shipibo shamans.
And that’s the entirety of my “formal” religious background. I’ve been almost systematically turned off to Buddhism and yoga by life on the west coast (and highly disappointing therapy sessions), and neither of the major Millennial religions (Neil deGrasse Tysonism vs. Instagram witchcraft) really fill my cup. I’ve read countless books about ancient goddess worship, and while I love what I find there, it comes with a caveat: all those cultures are dead.
Enter: my oldest daughter. Born to a “spiritual but not religious” mother and a father mostly interested in quantum physics and time travel, she clearly spent her last life as a preacher and has carried as much of her thirst for Christ into this life as she could. The kid reads her children’s Bible and prays NIGHTLY.
So it’s on me, now, to educate myself. To meet my daughter in her private church and discuss theology like someone who actually grew up in this society and even knows a single thing about Christianity. Which means, fortunately for both of us, that I get to pick and choose all the best parts of religion and leave out the rest. And there are actually some really beautiful things there – especially if you’re a historically-informed academic theologian with a good heart and a mind like a surgeon’s scalpel.
I’m not gonna defend what organized religion has become in popular consciousness, nor am I gonna downplay the trauma that many of my friends have suffered at its hands – trauma I was only spared on account of having zero spiritual guidance whatsoever growing up (which brings its own damage) – but I am gonna say I’ve been thoroughly enjoying my foray into a couple of books that I recommend wholeheartedly to everyone, religious and non-religious alike:
Convictions: How I Learned What Matters Most, by Marcus J. Borg
– and –
Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path Of Mussar, by Alan Morinis
I’m not going to review these books here. I’m just gonna let you sit with the fact that I identify (softly) as a witch, read tarot, do reiki, and generally do whatever the F I (softly) want. But I accept these books. Nay, I (softly) adore them. I appreciate the guidance and wisdom of Everyday Holiness – it gives form to my life and helps clarify my personal ethics: how I wish to be in the world, how I hope to affect it (in my tiny way). And I value the love, logic, and historicity of Convictions, which help me know better what I’ve gained, lost, and could regain though my inheritance as someone of at-least-mostly-Christian European descent.
These books as great. Read ’em if you want. I recommend them. They’ve played a large role in reforming my mind, which did indeed get ever so slightly blown by the Reikoning.
Anyway, that’s all. That’s what I’ve been up to.
Back to the Tarot.