Please understand me

A braided essay about braided essays, love, the desire to be loved, and a non-drug drug experience.

Love is the state of seeing deeply. It is a soul seen clearly, a person seen entirely. Self love is self knowledge. Your own soul bared to your own eyes. There is no such thing as total love. We are ever changing, ever oblique beings, unknown and unknowable, but there is between every person the possibility of partial love.

Love.

I want to be loved.

---

At every meal my family holds hands, and for the space of three long breaths we sit in silence. Those three began to take on meaning for me. In the first breath I would ask an inner character - my daemon, to draw love from the earth, in the second breath I asked my celestial to draw love from the sky. In the third breath I would draw love from my heart and send them all together through the circle of hands.

Three people together make a heart if you look at it right.

One time, I asked in my head - what would happen if you pulled from love together?
“That would connect you to the Source. You don’t want to try that here.” both male and female voice said in unison.

Later, alone in my sacred space - I tried. I looked down and my vision shifted, I looked up and the world had changed. It was one of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life.

But the feeling I got coming away from it was that I wasn’t ready.

“That’s why teenage sex is such a bad idea.” My mother told me when I shared it later.
“What?”
“What you experienced, coniunctio, the union of opposites. That feeling of not being ready was absolutely true.”

Clever woman. I didn’t lose my virginity till I was eighteen.

---

There is an old Japanese saying, that a person is made of three masks. The first is what you want people to see. The second is what you are ashamed to have seen. The third is made of gold.

When I speak of the soul, I mean this third mask. What is at your center? What are you willing to live for, willing to die for? If you were a pattern, with sunlight streaming through, what shadow would silhouette against the wall. Who are you?

Yet to get to this third mask you must pass through the first two. On the road to self love comes self hate. Delve deeper than the surface and you’ll find everything you’ve pushed down. Intimacies that don’t serve you in the outside world, intricacies too complex for the surface realm,  with its biases and cliches.

Others are afraid to be fallen in love with, for fear of revealing that second mask.

I embrace it as a necessary evil. Look at me. My sin is hunger - gluttony, greed, and lust. I have stolen, I have lied, I am selfish, and like only to play my own games. I have done things I am not proud of, with no intent to harm, yet harmful all the same. I am dark, but no darker than most, many more sins coming from light. I am judgemental. I seek to fix where there is no need. I make rules. I am a zealot. Righteousness and pride will be my unravelling. Look at me.

Now look past all that. Love me.

---

On the way back we talked about drugs - it was mostly me talking about drugs really. She was driving, I was thinking outloud.

Judgement was getting in my way. This was Evergreen, half of my friends regularly partake of them, but I found it difficult to relate, not shut down in the face of something I didn’t approve.

After thinking about it I realized I don’t disapprove. I just think drug users are stuck.

In a shamanic society (and this of course mattering on the drug) you would often take the drug in the beginning to break your mind out of its normal state, shake up your knowledge of reality, put you in tune with the divine. Then you’d stop and turn to other means.

How clever. Perfect. Let the plants act as guides, motivate the shaman’s apprentice into their training.

What bugs me, is consistent habitual use of drugs. The effect that initially broke up consciousness, becomes a gatekeeper, the only known way into that space. Every drug does what it does because we have the receptors inside our brains for that effect. Every drug can be self created, but most people don’t know that.

What if, I decided, my role was not to be judgemental, but to act as a teacher?

I know how to get to strange places. I’ve done it with various aids - fasting, dancing, meditation  - and without any at all. What if, when I’m in a circle around a bonfire and the joint is being passed, I get high, match them where they are, and model what is possible.

It’s a good idea in theory. I’m still testing it out.

---

I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve turned to fiction as a safe outlet for my mind, but sometimes it pours out of me, and hours later I look at a crafted thing - art made of memories, ideas and images braided together, a useless crafted thing. They are not just my memories, not my images. They are not mine to share.

“Fictionalize” my mother advises me, “translate the feeling but change the images.” It’s good advice, and I wonder as I walk away why I can’t take it.

Why?

I run the things I write past the dear ones whose memories they share. “Too personal” “Too intimate” Too much of the second mask. I find myself oddly hurt by this, and confused by that hurt. Didn’t I ask knowing no might be an answer? Isn’t it their right to refuse? Who am I to spoil the image each holds up to the world? It’s reasonable to refuse and even I can see it.

So why?

I’ve lived by a motto for a few years now. “Speak the truth for yourself, lie without hesitation for others.” For a long time I thought that was it, that I felt unable to speak my own truths, felt a lie, in the lack of showing, but then it struck me that the second half of that applies, that a lie is justified if it’s not for me - and clearly it’s not.

Why then?

Simple. It comes from something a loved one told me once a long time ago. We had just become facebook friends, she was looking at my profile and discovered the notes. She began reading my writing.

Then, she told me, she got up and closed the door to her room - because one should fall in love alone.

---

Sometimes, when I sit quietly and listen, I am suddenly hit by the presence of the river that runs through all things. I feel as if I am about to be swept away by it, and I pull back, shut down, get away from that presence as fast as I possibly can.

I suspect I’ve drown in that river before.

Today is different though, after I’ve struggled away, I pause. I’ve made this claim, that I can reach a druglike state at will. Prove it.

I reach again for the river. Actively trying to get there - it’s just out of reach. I breath, center, draw a circle around myself, and experiment.

By the time I leave for dance, I am very, very high.

Everything has begun to have an afterimage. Every movement leaves tracers, and people are often streaks of color. I’ve opened my third eye and I can feel a presence on my forehead, a tightening of skin, a thrumming of blood. I’m aware of my body in a way I’m not normally, sensitive. The beat of my pulse and the temperature of the air. If anyone stays still I can see an aura around them, flickering between shimmer and vibrant color.

I dance and I am in joy. I am possessed of all-power, and there is nothing that I cannot do. It hits me then. Why don’t I connect to the Source? I wasn’t ready then, but surely I am ready now.

Even high, I remember to set my circles. I dance to the North, and South, and East, and West. I prepare myself, and then, having graduated from inner helpers years ago, I reach in by myself to stone and sky, and find the point where they meet.

Love.

My heart opens. I hadn’t realized my heart was closed. It opens to everything and everyone. I find myself suddenly in a room full of people, none of whom are my friends, with a heart that’s lost every single one of its shields.

I am making love to myself, I think, and I have never felt so alone, and vulnerable. I can’t do this alone. I consider sinking to the floor and sobbing. My eyes graduated from making tears years ago too, but I could bawl. The possibility that no one might help me keeps me from it. Some inhibitions are still in place.

I stand in the middle of the room, and shake with silent sobs without tears, and everyone keeps on dancing.

---

Love is the state of seeing deeply. There are many people I have loved but not liked. Few I have liked but not loved. None I have loved at first sight. I need time to see.

Yet perhaps it is not seeing that is love, perhaps it is the being together, the drawing together of some profound force. The Source. I’ve tried pulling it with others and it felt redundant.
“Sounds a lot like ecstasy.” my father tells me when I recount it later. “It’s a drug usually taken by couples, rarely done alone.” We talk about drugs and how they’re more than a crutch, they’re also a gatekeeper. With a drug you know the effect will end in time.

“Sounds like a premenstrual woman.” My mother says.
“Really?!”  I can’t imagine doing that every month. Maybe it’s a bit less than that, but maybe a bit more respect might be due.

My heart opens, life opens and asks me to explore what I can do alone. Love. You have dominated my life - not a moment since twelve without someone catching my eye. I cannot help but look for the soul that sings inside. I cannot help but fall in love.

Now it is time to trust. Trust that it’s okay to be alone. Trust that I’m strong. Trust that I am very very loved.

When I write I’ll sometimes get comments back - “This spoke to me.” “I’m going through the same thing.” “It’s so good to see I’m not the only one.”

Trust, that others understand me.