Let’s continue on this path of opening our hearts to make way for something new. Life isn’t always easy, but there are therapeutic actions we can take to make it more bearable. “Life is suffering” according to the Buddha, who may have been right about a thing or two. I mean, his hot dog order (“One with everything.”) is pretty spot on.
-G.V
P.S. Squeaky wheel here. As you know, the newsletter is free. But when you contribute, it makes my spirit sing. Writing this newsletter and hearing that folks are finding it helpful in navigating an uncertain world is super-meaningful. Your participation financially would help this project grow and reach more people who might like to hear its message. Thank you for being a part of this!
All Aboard the Kundalini Express
I didn’t quite know what was going on, but a girlfriend told me she had seen my aura turn silver and that I should read up on kundalini awakenings, considering I might be having one. I’d never been diagnosed as bipolar and usually found any manic episodes or subsequent depressed states to be the result of other self-induced chemical imbalances. These bursts of creativity and energetic highs and lows, with their accompanying convulsions and contortions of mind, body, and soul, were something completely different. They painted a picture of something epic yet to come.
The awakening began just before the June 2020 full moon and culminated on the first of August when the street light outside my bedroom window came crashing down in one fell swoop, a clean break right at the base — not hitting any parked cars or snagging any wires — basically just laying down on its side in total capitulation. In that moment, I began to understand the power we all hold and felt a responsibility to share this news and my experiences with the world.
Not too dissimilar from what I figured a nervous breakdown might feel and look like, perhaps a midlife crisis with a big trauma cherry on top, I went deep into memoir organizing and writing mode, producing work like I’d never produced. Not so much in fits and starts but one long glorious fit of rage, grief, joy, loneliness and bliss — profundity and purpose snaking their way through every fiber of my broken yet whole being. Websites, entire chapters of novel, art across many media, an online clothing and culture shop — these things came out of me so unapologetically and authentically that I ceased to recognize who I was. Someone different, a phoenix from the ashes, a true creative.
Then came Clubhouse, and people like Adah Parris, Marques Anderson, and MC Hammer (the legit MC Hammer) were there to take me to church. To witness, to preach, to hear the gospel of so many others who were sick and tired of the way things had been and sought new paths of discovery toward alternative forms of being and making — new ways of looking at the cycle of life, death, and re-birth. Every Sunday, Ism.Earth reaffirmed all the creative world-building I’d been pouring myself into the nine months leading up to Summer 2021.
Here were people all across the globe speaking a sort of universal language, validating much of the work I had been exploring on my own months prior. Yet the pandemic brought us together — all of our humanity, our hopes and dreams, and our futures converging as one. My buddy Justin W. John, an abstract artist based in Boise, Idaho, joined me for many of these Sundays, where we spoke about the kinds of ancestors we wanted to be and explored what a life of art and the act of making — founded upon adaptive, sustainable and new systems — might actually look like. We thought, “Just how joyous and wonderful would that be?!”
Perhaps this was born out of isolation, and the need to create and connect with others. Perhaps it was kundalini possessing me so that my inner demons could be exorcised. All of it represented a sort of ego death from which I will neither return nor ever want to.
Writing this week’s Dispatch had me questioning my sense of time, which is something I think a lot of us struggle with as we piece back together our lives in the wake of the pandemic. So I put out a note, asking my fellow writers and mind travelers what their biggest roadblocks have been in framing up a period so surreal and fraught with distortions of time, space, and distance.
This is what I heard: NOTHING. Only some feedback to simplify my question. And the realization that Substack Notes work best when you have a larger following or a more compelling request than mine, which should’ve read: “Hello, fellow writers. Do you think we’re unreliable narrators because of the pandemic’s many horrors? Does your sense of time feel fucked?” Looking at my note again, I think maybe the question mark was too intimidating. I’ll post another note to hear your thoughts. First reply gets a free lifetime membership to the Feral Ferret Brigade, which includes a snazzy DFFF enamel pin to put on the obscure literary organization tote of your choice.
“Thin Places & Liminal Spaces: The Beauty of In-Between” is a piece I’ve been working on for longer than I care to admit. How close are any of us to the Divine on any given day, and where do we feel this closeness the most? A place of worship? On the bus? In line at a chain restaurant we’re kind of ashamed to be eating at in the first place? I’ll admit that I’ve had spiritual moments in all three. I believe thin places are everywhere, but only if we’re open to the idea that the distance between Earth and some idea of Heaven is likely closer than we think.
Sometimes we get the eerie feeling that we’ve been somewhere before — like a glitch in the matrix or the staticky, stuttering noise from tuning a radio dial or clicking from TV channel to TV channel. Déjà vu tells us that something bizarre exists just beyond what we can perceive with the senses that humans currently possess. It’s all there — only extra-dimensionally.
Consider the word “passage”, which by definition lives in the in-between. To fully immerse oneself in the stream of consciousness and of life is to surrender to the present. The past is but a teacher, and the future never truly arrives. Our passage through this world is a barrage of these kinds of moments — fleeting, few and far between, and astonishing to comprehend as cradle-to-grave collections of our one-of-a-kind lived experiences.
A word that I recently learned flashes in my mind, along with the corresponding image I already knew somehow — a visual without a word to describe it until meeting a Lyft driver who connected the dots for me. “Holon” is the quality of something being whole in and of itself while being part of a larger whole. This kind of resembles having our feet firmly planted on the ground in reality, our bodies stretched skyward like taffy, and our heads floating in the clouds, dreaming of possibility and potential. In this way, the larger whole is everything that is yet to be — an infinite universe of all the choices we’ll make and not make over the course of our lifetimes. Whatever actually comes to pass becomes the past while the roads not taken keep us searching and ascending ever upward toward the Divine.
But eventually everything comes crashing back to Earth and you find yourself in line at an airport Whataburger with the following message beating you back into your humble human form.
Editor’s note: Get ready for a few weeks of The Mother since Mother’s Day is coming, and I’ve had lots of mothers. Let’s start with my actual mom, a woman with the nickname “Kitten” who’s been dead for 24 years now.
Kitten. Reba. Darlene. Mother. Mom. Sissy. Strawberry Sunshine in the Month of May. My mother went by many names. The baby of six siblings, one of whom was her only full-blooded sibling (my Aunt Amanda, about whom I wrote last week), one who died as an infant (Patricia), and only one brother (John), who died just two weeks ago. The other two siblings were both half-sisters to my mother, but we never really thought of them as such. Family is family, after all. One died in 2019 (Roo Roo), and the other (Francine) is alive and kicking in Oklahoma, not far from where she was born — on the Kiowa reservation. Let’s just say my grandmother got around.
To give you a sense of the wit and whimsy that has plagued my family from the beginning (my mother’s maiden name is Witt), my grandmother’s full name was Burdetta Rosetta, and she had a twin brother whose name was Bert. Uncle Bert had a wife named Vernie, who sported permed hair, the teeniest mustache, and a club foot. So you can imagine how confusing and hilarious it got around the holidays, with Bertie (Oma, as I called her), Bert, and Vernie entertaining the family as our very own Oklahoman-Texan Sesame Street characters. To top it all off, my Oma must’ve dug the rhymes because three of her five daughters were called Reba Darlene, Amanda Charlene, and Minnie Francine. But I’m beating a dead horse here, and this e-news is skewing long. More on my mother and her childhood, and how that informed the way she mothered me — next week.
My current mother is a cat named Sylvia Cath of Arcadia Terrace. We’ve known each other for seven years now, and she judges me as harshly as ever. As she should.