There was a span of nearly 20 years where, if you had broached the topic of spiritualism with me, I’d have checked out immediately. Not because my own personal belief system didn’t have room for it. But having been raised in a stifling and controlling religion, spirituality, my spirituality was a thing that was policed by others (as was my body, my sexuality, my speech). Emerging from half a lifetime of experience in an organization that sought to weigh women down with responsibility while simultaneously separating them from power, I took a hard pivot in the opposite direction and kept anything but science-driven fact at arm’s length. Clearly, I had healing to do. Trust had to be restored between me and anything I couldn’t see with my own eyes or touch with my own hands.
I needed to be free, I think.
The older I get, the more I’m inclined to shrug and say, “it’s possible!” to all kinds of hard-to-understand things. And I don’t mean virgin birth or angry old men in the sky whose existence centers around creating and then punishing. But in the sense that I don’t require proof of any kind to tell me that I am connected to you and you are connected to me by invisible forces that are not measurable. I don’t need science to tell me that the earth isn’t simply a collection of living things (trees, bears, bugs, moss), it is a living thing. It simply is, because the truth of it echos around inside of me.
Other truths simply are.
And where I used to find so much comfort (and paradoxically, anxiety) in absolutes, I now take a certain amount of joy in the unknown. It’s full of possibility! Where my faith used to be directed at a bearded figure in a robe, it’s now directed at the idea of things simply working out. So long as my heart is pointed in the right direction, so long as I exercise self-awareness and do the work of repair (I can be a bit fiery and impulsive, so mistakes are part of the territory, I’m afraid), I don’t have to know what happens next. It’s gonna be okay.
The idea of manifestation might have gotten a few eye rolls from me in the past. But the power of words has always been one of those truths that I just felt. It is a certainty lodged in there, anchored permanently somewhere in my ribcage. It’s why I write. My soul, I think, is made up of words, a vocabulary I’m still and always learning.
“What we say, we bring into being.”
I was reading a book by Lyanda Haupt recently and the truth of that statement made me feel… buoyed. She was talking about our relationship with nature, but it had other meanings for me at that moment.
There are only a handful of people who would get my honest, or even complete, answer to the question, “What do you want?” I wouldn’t trust that many people with seeing me in that way. But just yesterday, when I was battling internally over what kind of future I needed for myself, and whether it was even practical or doable (this is what makes me roll my eyes now. Doable. Ha! Nothing is doable until you do it, Hunter), I told a friend, “this is what I want.” I didn’t worry if it sounded selfish. Or silly. Or And I didn’t describe a tangible things. Though, immediately, in my mind’s eye I could clearly see those things. A room. The weight and dimension of my body. The light.
Did I speak it into being? Who knows. But now it doesn’t have to live inside my head, undefined and trapped. And that, in itself, is a sort of freedom.
Thanks for writing this.