A cruel cosmic game
played by a vindictive
and careless god,
dangling joy in front of me 
only to rip it away
over, and over, and over
again.

I can't keep believing this.

I can't and
I don't want to.

Let it all die.
This is what I've learned.

I believe in things I can't see
but what about the things I can?

There is no separation.
None.

I just keep coming back 
to the natural world
and my place in
"the family of things".

Nature is violent
and it is profoundly
beautiful.

Detangling all the old stories.
Humility.

The more "lost" I get
the more I find myself,
and the more I find myself
the more I find there is no-self.
And when you come into direct contact
with your total lack of existence 
and how you are nothing but
existence itself
all that's left to do
is bow down.

Or kill yourself?
Or get zooted out of your mind?
Or get into 4 AM cold plunges or some shit?

I don't know.

I'm trying to meet life on it's terms.

Anything else is just a rat race,
or swimming upstream,
or staying asleep to reality.

I get so lost 
in the loudness of mind
and stay so numb 
and closed off to heart.

And I roll my eyes at it all.

And I keep showing up
to feel it.

I'm mixing my ganja
with herbs now,
I like to call it decaf weed.

Damiana, Tulsei, Mullein,
Marshmallow & Chamomile.

I can feel her touching me.

Soften.
Soften.
Soften.

Dip your toes.
Treading in the river of sorrow,
the water's at my chin.
I didn't know it was
safe to get out 
and get back in
again.

They made me memorize
James 2:10 (NIV) as a kid and
I believed it.

They told me to be 
afraid of my own thoughts.

I genuinely believed that thinking
the word "fuck"
and physically murdering or raping someone
made you an equally bad person.

I keep doing mushrooms,
or "communing with plant teachers",
if you live in Portland long enough.

I keep meeting that resistance
inside of me 
to life.

I guess I should be 
praying right now,
or repenting,
or slowly imploding.

Anything can be a prison.

I doubt this is what
the carpenter
wanted.
There are so many tables
to flip.

And I don't need him
to be the answer.

Give the poor guy a break,
he's already carrying
a third of the world.

What's the shortest verse 
in the English bible?

All that's left to do
is grieve.

Don't dodge it with a laugh,
or a debate,
or a platitude.

Soften.

Mother Gaia's embrace,
God bless the archetype.

The Zen master told me
to get so quiet
you can hear her cry.

I'm not sure how to live.

I feel you just
float downstream.

Trust the inside out,
the ever-changing stagnation.

Like the child Christ
in a dark-night vision
born into empire:
"The Kingdom of Heaven
is within you."

Puer Aeternus,
collective unconscious.

Surrender to the ache, 
of bittersweet knowing.

Invite the tears,
they'll join if they want to.

We didn't ask to be born,
and maybe we did.

This simple, complex,
unstable peace 
we indwell
as incarnation.

It's enough to kill a man,
which is exactly what happens
right before he is
born again.

***

And please ignore 
all of my Jungian bullshit
if it's not helping.

Just pay your bills,
try to nourish your body,
and spend some time 
with people you love.

And for God's sake,
please end that 
war with yourself.

You don't need permission
to burn it all down,
throw it all away,
and breathe.

Rest up.

It doesn't get any more spiritual
then that.

I feel like I’m doing everything I can to lean into reconnection. But it only works so well. I always end up back in this place of depression, and exhaustion, and a grief that I don’t know how to process because it’s too heavy and I don’t have faith in the reality I’ll find on the other side.

“I am not a problem to solve”. I wrote that over and over again in my journal recently until I’d believe it. Like Robin Williams telling Matt Damon, “It’s not your fault”. My parents would make me and my siblings write lines as a punishment when we were kids.

Something inside of me tells me this is all part of it. That life can get softer even if it never gets easier. Would you blame a wilting flower for being planted in shitty soil? If there’s nothing wrong with me, and everyone who’s hurt me was just running from all of their own hurt, than what should I do with all this blame inside of me? Forgiveness is one of those Christian words that meant something completely different, and much less real to me, in the past.

I’ve been finding the connection between forgiveness and rage, I don’t know that you can have one without the other. “Spiritual bypassing” is one of the most helpful terms I’ve ever learned to make sense of my upbringing. In my dreams I often find myself yelling and screaming in anger and frustration at loved ones and they are always completely unresponsive. They don’t get angry back, they don’t validate my emotion, they ignore me for voicing how I feel and I’m left feeling ashamed for ever having those feelings in the first place.

Faith is something else that doesn’t mean anything I thought it meant. Faith is the fact that I’m still breathing after all the times I’ve wanted to stop. Faith is getting too tired of clinging on to a cliff, completely letting go, and trusting that something will hold you down there and you won’t just splat on the ground. Faith is the panic and grace of free fall. It’s nothing like the God of my childhood and it’s everything that that child needed. That he still needs. I could write forever about what I think about “God”, and thinking seems to be one of the least important parts of it.

Can I trust the grief?

I never learned how to tread water,
but I did it yesterday in the Washougal.

I took a puff of the plant,
laid shirtless on a rock,
and didn't think about my body.

I thought about how this was being human
before all the window panes and tech necks.

With eyes closed,
the barriers softened and
I was in relation
with sunlight, breeze, and water.

This is the first religion,
before we thought up things
like money and separation.

My therapist told me he doesn't know
how much longer humanity has left.
He compared us to a cancer cell,
and we kept healing anyway.

My church taught me that climate change
was a hoax.
They taught me not to care about 
that which moth and rust destroy.

They told me God could move mountains,
but my teenage suicidality wouldn't budge.

I collect pieces of my first language,
How forgiveness flows over
the sediment of spite.

Taste and see.

It's quite the leap,
thinking to feeling.

It's cold out here,
ashamed of my blankets.

What is faith,
without chokehold dogma?

I choose to believe,
something will hold me.

Nature is slow,
I keep forgetting.

None of this would’ve happened if I hadn’t quit my specialty coffee production job I had been in for two years. I actively resented the company I was working for and the decisions they had made during my time there. I went back and forth on quitting for months, and then one day I made it through a shift and said to myself, “I don’t ever want to do that again,” and I haven’t. It was not strategic to quit my job without a backup plan and with an empty bank account, but what’s a life without some stories to tell? And miraculously, that choice has paid off so well, and I’ve been given opportunities I couldn’t have dreamt up. I’m so grateful for this.

A couple of weeks ago, I went into a room where a woman hypnotized me and had me recall moments and details from supposed past incarnations I’ve lived. I was, and am, very skeptical of this, but I decided to put my skepticism on a shelf for an hour or two before picking it back up again. Again, I want stories. I want to be an active participant in my life. It was surprisingly vivid and visceral, and I recalled four different lives with great detail. Who’s to say whether they were something my subconscious created or something more metaphysical?

The overarching theme across these lives was the struggle for contentment, making peace with the life I was living. That feeling definitely exists in this life too. I hope this gets easier as I age. I have a hard time knowing when my discontent is a message from within that I need to make a change, and when it is the echo of my ego and its inability to believe I am safe and loved just as I am. It’s an uphill battle against the self-loathing-filled religious programming I was given throughout my formative years. But we soldier on.

I just completed a two-week intensive Peer Wellness Specialist training. This is for people with lived experience of recovery from mental health challenges and/or addiction who want to use their background as a way to connect with and support people in need in their community. I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with school, but this was a really rewarding and impactful experience. I got to meet some really cool people and learn a lot.

It’s been such a relief to spend my time doing things that are in such deep alignment with my desires and intuition. It sure beats bagging coffee beans for eight hours a day. I just wanted to write this update. There are many areas in my life where I want to continue to grow, but I have come to believe that change and acceptance don’t need to be enemies.

I’m not sure how I’m going to keep making rent. I’m not sure when I’ll find a sustainable, healthy relationship with cannabis. I don’t know when I’ll find a medication for my ADHD that doesn’t make me feel like shit when it wears off. I have a nervous system that is primed for danger, and it’s been an uphill battle to start learning how to self-soothe and regulate, not just run away from my feelings as fast as I can. I’m just going to keep showing up, keep participating in therapy, and keep working to repair the broken relationship I have with myself. It’s all part of it.

I've been arguing with my mind again
and he's starting to believe 
that if you can learn to open yourself 
to the full emotional spectrum
of human experience 
you will feel so much fucking pain.

And,
you might just get to
feel something else too.

Shame is a shit-ass motor.
And since when did you forget?
You are not a machine.

I reject "spirit"
that can be sold,
or co-opted for control,
or that can't include 
all of it.

All of it.

Now I pray for nothing
but knowing,
which is the opposite 
of knowledge.

"Do you want me?",
I pleaded with the ocean.

All it said back
was wind 
and waves.

I hope for 
the sound of
pedal steel
and the taste of
my mom's cooking
on the other side 
of death.

I took a quarter of a CBD-heavy edible about an hour ago, and it’s just kicking in. It’s the kind of high where you have to search for the fact that you’re a little high. Something I’m trying to make more of a norm when I choose to use substances.

I was re-listening to Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes. I love that book. And despite my weird little personal rule that reading should be challenging and hard in some way for it to “count”, I decided I’m allowed to read something I love just because I love reading it.

I went for a run this morning and felt sore, but good. Anytime I start running again, I remember that it’s basically an on-demand antidepressant and meditation practice all wrapped into one. I joke that I try to do all the things that make a person feel good and healthy except exercise. Trying that one again. Sadly, and thankfully, it works. It’s like the trouble of going to a dispensary and buying weed from a sad guy in a beanie, except the inconveniences are tight calves and back sweat.

Sitting there, I was looking forward to making dinner for my girlfriend tonight and spending time with her. I wasn’t thinking much further into the future than that. A very rare phenomenon for my often anxiety riddled mind

And I really felt it: there was nothing wrong with me. Nothing. I could come up with heaps of problems if you asked me to, but none of them were happening in that moment, and none of them were my fault. My therapist recently told me that when you heal your self-image you don’t stop having problems, but the problems finally get to just be problems.

I’ve had moments of Satori before (a Buddhist word for a sudden, intuitive flash of understanding the true nature of reality). Many of those moments were kinetic and overwhelming. They were also tied to manic bipolar episodes that I’m happy to not have experienced in a long time. This wasn’t that. This was a still, soft, quiet knowing that I am perfect just the way I am.

Mister Rogers was right this whole time.

I felt emotion well up, but I didn’t quite cry. I just felt grateful. Friends. Family. My partner. My job. My apartment. School. My therapist. My psychedelic facilitator. My past. My future. The fact that I still haven’t killed myself despite the countless times I would’ve loved to.

All of it.

Maybe this is a softer Satori. No overwhelming spiritual insight fueled by a mood disorder spinning out of control. Just contentment. Maybe it really is okay.

Yesterday I did a grief meditation, tapping in and out of some of the loss I carry around from old pain and complex trauma. It helped a bit.

A couple nights ago, I sheepishly rolled down a hill in the park like I did when I was a kid. It was way muddier than I expected. The whole world kept flying by in circles for thirty seconds while I tried to stand up and kept falling back over. It was perfect.

A couple weeks ago I turned 24. I took mushrooms in a clinic and spiraled, searching for The Ultimate Problem in my life. The thing causing this insatiable pain and emptiness as I felt myself being hollowed out.

I couldn’t find it, no matter where I looked.

Then I realized I just really didn’t like the David Bowie album that was playing because I once heard he was a pedophile and didn’t want my soul merging with a pedophile. (Turns out I was mixing him up with another one of those drug music guys.)

Then I listened to an album by this band I like called Great Grandpa (thanks for the rec, Brooks), and I came home to the sound of pedal steel guitars.

“It’s out of mind
Those things that hurt me
It moves right through
Only light remains
It’s like there’s only sun
All the darkness here is gone
It’s the perfect kind of song
It’s the one you sing along”

Then I really wanted to not be on drugs anymore, but the drugs were not done with me. I tried to eat a Clif Bar. I almost threw up. So I gave back into the experience and stared at the blossoming, twirling lamp on the ceiling for about fifteen minutes. My facilitator told me that was actually more than two hours of appreciating a lamp.

This is living.

I asked a robed man in Brooklyn
if I should convert to Buddhism.

He told me to follow
whatever voice brought me there,
whether that’s back to the temple
or anywhere else.

I laugh at his loosey-goosey nonsense,
and I pout at his lack of concrete guidelines,
and I sigh, knowing that he’s right.

There are rooms for me.

I was handed the “answer”
and had to work backwards
for the questions.

How could I ever feel anything but isolation?
I’ve been stranded in an arid thought-scape,
shivering alone since I was little.

Touch is the only true wealth,
and nobody owes you a thing.

Whoever I become is exactly
who I’m meant to be,
so why focus on anywhere
except right here,
right now?

If life is a question then you are the answer.

Maybe this life is a flight.

You don’t know where you came from
 or where you’ll go.

You do know that you’re terrified,
and amazed, 
that any of this works.

You can pester a flight attendant.
You can spend a fortune 
on those little medicine bottles
of whisky,
take a Xanax,
and drift away.

You can scream
and shake
and pry at the emergency exit
and try to leap.

And if all of that doesn’t help,
you could take a deep breath,
ask for a Coke,
and find a nice movie.

Your legs are just going to be
a little cramped.

Sit with the turbulence.
If you can, smile.

Thank God
nothing lasts forever.

Sitting together
in the Museum of Modern Art,
in a city I can’t afford to be in,
scared of how she
keeps loving me.

I’m choking up at
Hilma af Klint—
her flowers and symbols.

And, right on cue,
my fragmented eye-roll:

"Will some shapes and colors
really tip the scales
on any of this
being worth
all of this?"

And I recall
art appreciation class,
the carves in my forearms,
her passion for teaching
and
her kindness, 
and
how I just kept
waking up.

Prayer,
therapy,
mushrooms,
and time.
It’s maddening,
the slow churn.

I’ve seen life
after death,
after life,
after death.

So now,
I look at her work
and can’t help but think:

"I’ve touched something
she’s touched."

Entranced by the stories
they unloaded,
I raised them
as my own.

If I told my young-self
he could feel alright again,
he might soften for a second
before I told him
how long it'd take.

I look around at the pew-people
nodding along to the primordial myths
and collective bullshit.
I know they're insane,

but who isn't?
At least they've found
someone to sit next to.

I'm starting to think
that each one of our realities
is simply a dream.

—

What would you like
to do with that?

Months ago I took an edible,
put on my headphones,
and walked to a park bench.

An older man sat next to me
and started talking,
that’s when the weed hit,
and I knew I was stuck.

He barked at his dog
for barking at the other dogs
and he talked about his daughter’s partner
and how he didn't want to call them a "they".

I guess he was looking for a friend,
someone to validate him,
someone to say:
"It’s okay that you feel what you feel."

But who gave me the authority?
I’m just a young stranger in the park,
self-medicating after a breakup,
freaking out
because I wasn’t ready for this interaction.

So I didn’t tell him his opinions
were the right ones,
or that he didn’t need to change,
I just asked him about his dog,
and his life,
and the hours he used to work
as a truck driver,
and the toll it took.

We sat there for hours
before I found an excuse to escape.

I wonder
if I’ll be him someday.

I think of all the ways
I want approval
and arms around me
and need someone who's willing to
sit with me
and listen.

I hope it's not because they're high
and too scared to leave.

My chest pitter-patters
as you peek into my center, 
cracked open.
Warm spongy joy,
held by the yeast of suffering.

Call it faith, if you like.
I just know I'm tired 
of fighting.

There are all these tender places
I just know you’ll touch.

“OUCH! OUCH! OUCH!”

But let me rest in this moment-
every bubble of giddiness,
every scorch of dread.
Let me sink my hands
deep in this doughy psyche,
and roll away at 
the chaos until it's 
something beautiful.

What if love wants me too?

Brutal, silly, sacred—

The way I try to patch up the gaps,
wood glue dripping all over
the cracks in my spirit.

Work, worry, text, smoke, eat, numb, sleep, regret…

I'm crumbling.
I'll even pray
if it means my heart
will shut up
for a Goddamn minute.

Why don't I want me?

"Oh what, are you just a little baby?
Goo-goo-ga-ga?
You're just a little baby
who needs to be held?"

I couldn’t walk,
bathe,
feed myself,
clean myself—
I was so tiny.

It's embarrassing,
Freudian,
terrifying,
vulnerable,

humbling.

And still, my breath breathes,
and the blood circulates.

I'm drowning in the pain
but I have faith 
it will always recede
to a lower tide.

-Kendrick Lamar, Mother I Sober

When you read these words, do you hear them as beautiful? Do you roll your eyes at them? Do you think they’re actively dangerous?

I love these lyrics. I’ve been deeply influenced by the way Kendrick describes spirituality in his music. And I can feel all these alarm bells go off inside me whenever someone starts talking about worshiping nature. My adult self doesn’t agree with those alarm bells, but my nervous system has its own wisdom. It sends important signals that override the intellect: “This is not safe.”

Of course my body doesn’t think it’s safe. The tradition I grew up in derided environmentalists and perpetuated belief in a “Sky God”—an entity that exists above us, superior to our human trifles. I was steeped in this culture: one of biblical inerrancy, of fear and suspicion toward anything that didn’t conform to Christian fundamentalism. I went to Bible memorization club every week, where a crowd of children pledged allegiance to the Bible and to the American flag at every opening ceremony. I was told, over and over again: “These are the good people, the good practices—everything else is not safe.”

I prayed to Sky God. I prayed a lot, because I knew 1 Thessalonians called us to “pray without ceasing.” I had a lot of trouble sleeping as a kid. I can’t count the nights I begged God to let me sleep—to let me see that He was real, so I could find comfort in Him. With only cold silence in return, I figured there must just be something I was doing wrong.

As I grew older, this rift only widened—this dissonance of trying to love a God who seemed largely disinterested in me. It became harder and harder to see God in the suicidal thoughts I was having throughout my teen years. I still feel this urge to pray, and I resent it. I still give in sometimes, because it calms my nervous system down. God the neglectful father—the only spiritual safety I was ever handed.

I’ve tried to become a Christian again. I really have. I’ve read Christian authors. I’ve tried to read the Gospels from my current worldview. I recently went to a Quaker meeting, because they’re the most radically accepting Christians I’ve been able to find. I really love Jesus—in whatever ways you can love a guy who died 2,000 years ago.

I know there are people who would be relieved if I told them I was a Christian again. They’d think I was finally safe. At least that’s what I was taught—that the person I am today has booked a one-way ticket to eternal torment and damnation unless he repents.

I want to feel safe. Isn’t that all any of us want? Some cocktail of love, safety, and belonging to take the edge off this life that can feel like a gift one day and a hellish nightmare the next? There are people who feel safe as Christians. Am I allowed to just not be one of them?

I’m sick of fighting—with myself, with others. I’m just sick of it. I’ve found so much truth and gentleness outside the rigid boxes of safety I was prescribed. I think my humanity is wondrous—not pathological. There’s so much beauty to be found in those blurrier, mystical places. And I don’t just mean “mystical” in some airy, woo-woo way—I mean it in the visceral reality of being a body, on this earth, in this universe. The human senses, psychology, civilization, art—it’s fucking crazy that any of this works.

So there’s the bad. What about the good? What rebuilding have I found in my years of tearing down? I’ve found so much. I hope to keep finding. I’m pretty sure everyone reading this knows me personally—if you care, ask me where I find it. There are books, songs, relationships, moments in my life, spiritual experiences—all the nooks and crannies where I see the divine, where I see an earthier God: The Word became flesh.

I’m not sure what you’re thinking if you’re a Christian reading this. Maybe you agree with me and don’t think I need to change. Maybe this message is exactly what Jesus was getting at. Maybe you disagree with some things but see me as a lost soul searching for something I’ll find. Maybe you see me as deeply misguided—or even dangerous. I can’t say, because you are a single person with a single worldview, just like I am.

I know there are Christians in my life who read my writing, and I often write with y’all in mind. I want you to know that I feel safer now than I ever did trying to be “one of you.” As I continue to write, I might do it less from a place of trying to appease anyone. I like writing that is honest—that’s all I promise to be.

I constantly come back to what Ram Dass always said: “We’re all just walking each other home.” It’s not the first time I’ve ended a post with those words, and it won’t be the last. It’s really that simple. The rest can be a mystery.

I texted my shaman about the rug
and the way Life taunts me,
tugging at its corners.

I've heard that birth was just a ledge,
so why grasp for rocks on the way down?
The Buddha would probably laugh
and call it "Anicca".

And here I go again,
grasping for rocks.

Maybe the wails will cease
once my tiny body understands
just how much I've read about 
Philosophy and Religion
and how that means 
we might finally be
safe.

Bodies don't understand.
Bodies know...
the panic of free fall
that claustrophobic open.

Just lean into it,
find someone
with skin on,

and 
melt.

Later, 
we watched the ceiling drip
and the carpet waltz.

I smiled and asked him,
"What if this is ok?"

I feel you as a specter 
dwelling beneath the murk
of morality.

I feel you as lightness,
atmospheric opening,
knowing, 
really knowing,
peace.

You giveth,
you taketh away.

I'm sick of loving you,
and hating you,
and searching outside
for a deep within.

The monks were right
when they called you water,
that salty sacred.

I resent the "Believers",
the fucking arrogance.
(I know we're the same.)

I'm too smart to believe in destiny,
but...

I've tasted and seen.
She told me it's called 
"Maitrī".

I have no idea
what's going on here-

so I bow.