BJ's SOLSL: My friend Hystery, on...a number of matters

Ahhhh, Hystery.  

Hystery and I have never met.  One day I was browsing blogs and following links from one blog to another the way you do.  I was following neo-pagan and Quaker links that day.  Wishing there was someone who was both, so that I would feel I wasn’t the only one.  (I have a nominal Quaker bit, from attending meetings for a few years – it’s the only place I ever felt comfortable, that was a sort of, more or less, organized religious setting.  But eventually I wandered off due to disagreements on ways of doing things, hypocrisy, conflict resolution, that sort of thing. The sort of issues that can arise anywhere, even in places and within idea frameworks you love.  But I still have a Big Soft Spot for Friends, Quakers.  So I read some Quaker blogs sometimes.)

So, one day, doing that, I found Hystery – Plainly Pagan, a bittish paganish, a definite bittish Quakerish.  All fey and odd and moody like me. I read and read, then I ‘followed’ so I could read more when she wrote more.  She seemed to be having a mood dip that was lasting a long while (goodness, like looking in a mirror)…about similar things to me: role in life, purpose of writing, how to Be a Good Person, How To Make a Difference, how to live with family, how to understand the world, how to cope with a job that could be so much but felt like so little.  She was having a problem with feelings of down-ness, cynicism, disillusionment with politics.  The more I read, the more I realized I was reading a kindred spirit from far away over the sea.  I admired her – she was really principled – way more than me.  She walked her talk, she lived her ideals.  Yet I felt encouraged by her troubles and her example, not undermined, the way I sometimes feel reading about people similar to me yet somehow managing better in worse circumstances.

When she is quite sad, she writes almost apologetically, for which I want to bonk her round the head with a frying pan, as there is nowt to apologize for when you write this well; when she’s less down, just discouraged, a force of personality shines through that I know could change the world, were she to be able to harness it, if she had the time.

Eventually I started to comment on her posts and found her one of those people who actually reply to comments and seem happy to have them.  On starting this season I bravely thought – ‘I’m going to ask Hystery!’  Now, there are 2 bloggers I regularly read that I really admire that I asked to contribute to this season.  One declined as I thought he would (I shall pretty please him again next time maybe), and one that said yes.  That’ll be Hystery.  I haven’t missed a post she’s done in over 2 years.  I’m always so happy when they pop up, because she speaks to my soul and my mind.  When she’s hopeful, I feel it; when she’s sad, I feel it.  When I read her – I don’t feel alone.  That’s good writing.  I have no idea why she's not published.  I suspect she thinks she's not good enough and may not have tried.  Foooofle!

Now.  I have switched the order for this entry.  It was supposed to be something neutral.  But I have been very stressed and very sad this week, and Hystery’s writing speaks to my soul more than normal.  She writes of visions, of religion, of sadness, of what ‘God’ might be.  Things I think about.  So I give you my soul’s Sister from America, far far away, to take you from here.  Her tone is my tone.  That heaviness she feels, mine.  But not alone.  With good writing, two minds are never alone…

***

Dear Sister,

Thank you for asking me to write.  I have been in the midst of a stubborn writer’s block for so long, that I thought I might never become unfrozen.  Your invitation set me down at my keyboard and this is the result.  It is too long and not well-organized.  I apologize for this.  I do not think that it is necessarily worth sharing on your blog, but I offer it to you as evidence that your confidence in me lifted some of the weight that was keeping me from work that I love.  My beacon stone, here in New York, also belongs to you.  Perhaps, now that I’ve begun, future efforts will have more merit.  In any case, I offer this with my thanks.

-Hystery

The Beacon Stone

It is the kind of rock that fits nicely in a human hand.  Oblong and smooth, it is about the size of a chicken’s egg.  There is a nice heft to it so that when my hand closes around it, I feel a satisfying sense of its weight against my palm.  The color is unremarkable.  It is the soft grayish-brown of lake-worn sedimentary rock.  I feel a little guilty taking it away from the shore upon which it has tumbled longer than human notions of time can reckon.  But then the sense of loss I feel at the thought of leaving it behind nags more loudly than my guilt, so I drop it in the pocket of my ratty sweatshirt jacket.

I turn away from the lake shore, away from the sailboats in the blue distance, away from the cobbles and pebbles and stones that were, a minute ago, the perpetual fellows of the stone in my pocket.  Past the blackberry bush and the driftwood, I climb back up onto the grassy yard surrounding the old stone lighthouse and make my way up into the gardens.  Late summer flowers are almost as brilliant as those of midsummer, but not quite.  Already, there is a hint of the end of the season.  The colors are just a little duller.  The edges of the green world are starting to show the wither and rust of fall.  The stone in my jacket pocket bumps against my hip, and I think to myself that the stone is my beacon stone.  It is light-filled and steady and the days are getting darker. 

I do not like to speak of it and much less to write about it, but I’ve been having a difficult time lately.  My body hurts in my joints, and in my veins, and in my muscles.  It feels as though neither blood nor energy courses efficiently.  My sleep is restless, and I often awake in panic.   My body feels foreign and heavy as if does not truly belong to me, and I am often in pain.  My memory is also not very good.  The darkness of my moods is more difficult to ignore and more difficult to dismiss.  I am word-weary.  My sentences lie about in fragments, and I retreat into silence.   

It has been an anguish for me to feel my sense of mastery fading, but perhaps there is something ultimately good in it.  When I do not clutter my thoughts with knowing, I begin to settle quietly, albeit gloomily, into not-knowing.  It is in that state that I feel the strongest pull toward the Ineffable.  This pull, this tide, always strongest when I am least confident, terrifies me.  In my middle-age, an adolescent existential angst plagues me.  At least when I was a younger woman I had the confidence to frame my fears in grand theories and pretty words.  Back then, I secretly harbored a belief that I might best the gods.

Home again, I take the rock out of my pocket and set it on the bathroom counter.  I do not mean to keep it there, but I am always tired and this is where it rests for now.  Perhaps later I will set it amongst my other sacred things.  For now, I pick it up again where I set it next to the lotions and oils I use to fend off my years and almost without thought, I place its cool, smooth weight gently against my forehead.  My head does not hurt, not now anyhow, but my brain feels troubled.  I want to stop the misfiring, the funny sad thoughts and the tumbling emotion.  And then again, I don’t want to stop them because, though they scare me beyond measure, they also bring me joy beyond measure.  It is through our scars, through our worries, and sorrows that the Holy Ones speak.   This has always been the way.

I live in a Universe populated by souls.  I can feel them all around me in the wood and the stones and the clay.  I can feel them in the palm of my hand and the tips of my fingers.  I can sense them in the breeze and in the light.  I feel them moving in my heart and my brain.  Especially in my brain.  They have been with me all my life.  Mostly they brush softly against me.  Mostly they tickle my consciousness.  I do not hear or see them distinctly.  A vision is not a film in my head.  It is nothing like the silly dream sequences of science fiction or fantasy.  There is no booming voice above my head telling me to do or say remarkable things.  I am not a puppet or a cliché of insanity.  But still, I am not quite sane, I think.  How do I describe my messages, my visions, my dreams, and my callings?  Sometimes they are merely a sense of a sense or the memory of a memory.  I have strong feelings of déjà vu that draw me up short.  I have been here before.  I have felt this before.  I know what comes next if only I can remember…

But at other times the visions overtake me more profoundly.  They are so powerful that I have found myself on my knees in their presence.  As a young mother, I was overtaken by an image of divinity that I cannot explain except to say that the image moved both inward and outward in Infinity.  It was a vision of limitlessness and boundlessness and absolute, perfect Unity.  I had heard, and had espoused the idea of “Unity” all my life, but before that vision, I had spoken of Unity as a woman expecting her first child speaks of “motherhood.”  I tried, very hard, to describe it for others, but I have never been able to succeed.   I could only describe something that looked like a sphere with many branches all connected at the roots that could rush inward infinitely and outward infinitely at the same time. But that was not quite right.   It was really nothing like that.  Not really at all.  

There have been other times when I have experienced these kinds of visions (if “vision” is the right word).  I don’t often speak of them because they make people uncomfortable.  I understand.  I am not very comfortable with them either.  Long ago, the doctor told me that I have seizures that probably resulted from a high fever in my infancy.  Such seizures are associated with hyper-religiosity and emotionalism.  Maybe the scarred tissue of my temporal lobes has filled my head with spirits that are merely expressions of that injury.  I am a rational person.  It is tempting to dismiss all my experience as nothing more than the effects of neurological vulnerabilities. 

But maybe the scars are like a gateway to a reality that exists whether or not those with undamaged brains can see it.   William James challenged the notion that identifying religious revelation as a function of the brain diminished its significance.  If that were true, he said, “...none of our thoughts and feelings, not even our scientific doctrines, not even our dis-beliefs, could retain any value as revelations of the truth, for every one of them without exception flows from the state of the possessor’s body at the time…”  (Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902).

I could agree with those who would tell me that my visions and sensations are mere delusions and disorder, but I do not see the logic or righteousness in denying any human being the dignity and worth of her own experience.  I could agree with other folks who say that to locate the source of my revelations in brain tissue is to trivialize religious revelation.  But to me that confuses the vehicle with the Source.  If a candle sputters and fails, I do not stop believing in Light.   I choose instead to believe that we are all expressions of divinity even (and especially) in our flawed and failing human forms.  I choose to see my body and brain as vehicles of experience, as potential channels of Light.    And why not?  In this embodied life, how else is Light expressed through us than through the form we are given-- scars and all?   I like the idea that I am “touched” and that it is our weakness and not our strength that draws us closer to our Source. 

The Apostle Paul, they say, also struggled with an unruly brain.  From the midst of his pain, he too called out, and the answer Paul received gives me some comfort.  “And He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.’” (2 Corinthians 12:9)

If power is perfected in weakness, then I have a head start.  I am at times painfully shy and socially awkward.  I have learned to teach and perform in front of others with some grace, but many simple things are beyond me.  I am a collection of phobias and anxieties.  I startle and cry too easily.  A child or a waterfall or a beautiful insect fill me with so much wonder that I can barely stand it.  The countryside around me home makes me weak with joy.  Colors and textures and sounds can seem too marvelous to tolerate without tears.  And yet at other times, I am accused of being too reserved.  I grow rigid and hide my feelings.  It gets me through the public work that I do for a living, but the cost is high.  Away from my audience or my class, I relax into exhaustion and melancholia.  I suffer headaches and anxiety attacks. 

Sometimes, my weakness makes me selfish.  It makes me bitter and tired.  But sometimes, in spite of myself, my weakness makes me a better friend.  Perhaps because I am so weak, so flawed, and so tender, I can sense others’ pain as well as celebrate their beauty.  My weakness helps me magnify others.  It helps me care about them and rejoice in them.  Sometimes I can see someone’s pain before they disclose it to me.  In the midst of their laughter and bravado, I can sense their tenderness so I am never surprised when they pull me aside to tell me their story. They tell me, “I have never said this before…”  But they have said it before.  I heard it as soon as they walked in the room.   

It makes me tired to tell my stories and it makes me tired to hear the stories others have to share.  But I have to keep going “out there” because, whether I wanted it or not, I cannot recall a time when I have not believed that I was called to serve, though who has called me I just can’t say.  When I say “God”, I’m not quite sure what I mean except that it has something to do with gentleness and mercy.  It has to do with compassion.  It has a good deal to do with love.  But not just love.  Love is too small a word for what I mean.    Be that as it may.  I am called to serve rather than to define Divinity.  And the Great Commandment tells us that we cannot serve God without serving each other.  We are called to Love. We are called to be midwives of each other’s souls.  Each of us, in our own way, is an instrument of our brothers’ and sisters’ songs. 

I hold the rock, cool and smooth, in the cradle of my palm and lift it again to my forehead.  By the open window of my bedroom, I rest and pray wordlessly. Maybe the rock is just a rock.  Maybe.  Maybe the Universe does not sing to me.  But I think it does.  I think it does.  It sings of many things, you know, but mostly of love.  No, not love.  Something even more than love.  Love is too small a word and the song is too great a song to be heard with my ears.  Whatever it is, I hear it with my whole life.  It is there, all the time.  It is a pulse, an essence, and a wave.  It is an abundance, a loss and a longing.  It is the sorrow that catches joy by the tail.  It is more terrible than words can say. I feel as though I could simply hand the stone to another soul and without words passing between us, the revelation could be shared.

I wish very much that I could say it better.  I wish I could hand you the stone and make it all clear.  I guess this is the best I can do.    I offer all of this because it offered itself first to me.  Others may judge if my visions and fancies are earth-bound or spirit-driven.  I cannot know.  Maybe I am crazy.  But I’ll tell you what the spirits tell me and where the visions lead me.  I’ll tell you what I feel called to do.  I feel called to be tender enough to hold others’ pain gently. I am called to surrender to a writer’s daemon so that I cannot stop the words and then again to falter and mourn when no words will come.  I am led to court the stories of others with reverence and wonder and to take all feeling where the roots are quick and too close to the source.  I am called to struggle in fear and doubt but to tell my story anyway in hope that I might make others brave.  I am called to feel wholly inadequate, entirely without merit, and to know all the while as the Mystic of Norwich told us that scarred and imperfect, fearful and unknowing we can trust that, “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” 

Texts that visited me while I wrote this:

James, William.  Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

Julian of Norwich.  Revelations of Divine Love (1413).