You know how sometimes you want to punch Britney Spears in the face? Imagine yourself David, triumphant over Goliath... Hmm, it went biblical there, and that wasn't what I was going for. I am a proficient typist, no more, no less, though I find the process of using a keyboard foreign and unnatural. It lacks the sensual, the poetry. The force behind a more deliberate keystroke. I feel like using a typewriter, goddammit, to feel my words emblazon themselves across a page, and have them embed within the fibers a certain mystical importance. I want to photocopy and staple these pages, and hand them out on the street. I want to leave them in shops, and at gas station counters. I may throw some out the window of my car.
It's too goddamn hot, and I'm working on my process, thinking about what the hell went on with my last packet - I waited until the last minute to write the paper, and turned it in a week late mostly ranting about my dad's death, and my feelings around my brother, and Passover, and the whole 'I'm lame and I suck' thing. So I lost a week of doing this week's packet work, and now I'm head first into a very busy weekend playing catch-up from a whole lot of bullshit....
Remember the walls the enlightened ones are always telling us we can walk through? They are inside our Selves. Well, I do also believe that we can train ourselves to walk through what we think of as 'actual' walls, but that's a different discussion... I have these three silver spheres, that I allow to roll around my house where they may - I call them clockworks. Mostly they stay in my room, hovering around the same general area. Every now and then, one rolls off for a better view, and in days past, they would take long, independent journeys, meeting again after a vacuuming or Spring cleaning. I mention this, obviously, because one has broken off from the pack and come to rest next to my desk, staring it's reflection at me as I type. It tells me I need to live Joy.
When I became spiritually aware, my hair became more sacred to me, and I have used it ritually. I dyed it blue, and dreaded it when I lived out West. I cut off and buried one of the dreads with Delia, my long-time traveling buddy cat-familiar, when she died. I buzzed my waist length mane into a crew cut when I moved to Vermont and started at Goddard. I saved my son's first haircut hair - but I think a lot of moms do that. And now, I've been craving the George Clinton 'do. I think it's time. I think the ritual is integral to the actualizing process. I need to bust out the typewriter and get the gay hairdresser on the line, because my Being hears Jonathan Livingston Seagull calling from the other side of this Wall, and he's telling me to turn down the music!
One of the things distracting me from the book I'm supposed to be reading is the book I have been reading, The Great American Detox Diet by Alex Jamison (she's a vegan chef who's married to Morgan Spurlock of Supersize Me fame). I read it once before, but I lost interest and never finished it, but this last bought with illness in our house sent me back to look deeper. Eating and living healthy is something I strive for everyday, and most days I feel I come out ahead. On others, I fail beyond all reason. But as I'm reading I'm thinking, "but Alex, I eat mostly organic food, local where I can, use Seventh Generation cleaning products and limit my use of plastics in my home (4000 Legos and too many Bionicles and Bakugan notwithstanding). I don't clutter my place up with consumerism or advertising, keep the stress down, use biodegradable bath products and minimal make-up only on fancy occasions, why do I still get so sick too often? Why is my immunity down?"
I don't get off my ass, out of my house, and out into nature enough anymore. I internalize my anger, my house needs a good cleaning, and I don't get enough exercise, that's why. I mean, I used to live outdoors, for goodness sake! I would bike or walk miles in a day! Over the years, the shamanic practice of my ritualized spirituality has waned into non-existence with the moving into buildings and setting up house. I have mourned it, but I have not wound branches into my hair and marched out into the woods to find it. The idea of a crazy new 'do and the getting out of doors for exercise and ritual feel like the energy between the tines of a tuning fork harmonizing with an instrument singing of joy (I believe I mentioned the joy). Sweat out those toxins while you dance, sing and shout!
I was so 'home insecure' during a time when I would say most women would choose to be more 'home secure' than usual, I find myself singing the lines to a Robyn Hitchcock song in my head - 'everything you say you won't / is what you will eventually' - and I recognize how much I like to be home. It's right in line with becoming everything I took flight to escape from - family, security, order and predictability, to name a few. I say I do it for the boy, but with my practiced transience of a former life, the truth has been for some time now that I just want to go Home, and with all the spaces I've inhabited, it still manages to elude me. I still just don't feel settled. Perhaps I never will, or will feel so on my deathbed, or when my energy returns to the void. If I wind the Joy into the crazy snake dance of my sacred hair, will I remember how to be a child of the world? Will it carry me out into the wind and rain, away from the outer sanctuary to the one within? Will it bind my intentions like a spell? I remember a fragment of a Native American poet's words - something about how his Grandmother's magic was in her long, unbraided hair...
The task is to invent a mythology, like a promotional guide for pretend deities. What should I call it?
Selah
