19. How to describe it?

Naming the vastness and debunking the myth.

Blog Overview: The Void / The Ruler / The Myth

Artist Spotlight: Garis Edelweiss

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It’s happened to me on a few occasions.

Well, it was probably normal when I was story-less, yet overrun by identities. Before symbols were engrained in my memory as the way to tell these stories. It was happening constantly when I was in the womb, held in a warm bath of nurturance. In the years when my mother let me suckle her teet and that was all I cared about. When my babbling entertained adults, times they treasured and knew were fleeting because my baby clothes no longer fit. It even happened in the days of catching fireflies. And when I ran on gravel with roller-blades watching a meteor shower as a friend searched for me in our game of hide and seek.

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But it happened less so when report cards became a greater priority than my hidden tears. Especially when I stopped visiting my unseen friends for whom I built homes in the creek’s bend at the edge of “our property line” where I grew up and learned to identify myself as Jessica Marie Liddle, an avatar whose age and “dream job” were more important than how she was feeling in that moment.

When was it that thoughts trumped this state of being? When did everything begin feeling so crowded? Was it a steady fading away from the Divine? Why did I forget? When did I forget?

Anyway, it happened again the other day.

Toward the end of a community song circle, a very full day sunk me into shavasana while the others seamlessly wrapped me in medicine songs in the Portuguese tongue. I fell receptive. Languid in my tire, content in a new space with unfamiliar faces, I sunk until sinking became my entirety. I wore the softest grin without flexing a single muscle in my face. Every minuscule adjustment was happening as needed, but I put no thought into my splayed body. I was at the heart of matter and could’ve easily given everything away in that moment. All possessions. Aghhh, all this human ownership of reality manifest and manifesting, gone! I handed it all over long enough to feel what the turtle must’ve experienced when racing the fox. Steady. Stable. Sure. But not actually willing my Self to be sure of anything necessarily. I was nothing and everything all at once. Eventually integrated in this nothingness, momentarily between two stages in the everlasting romance of life, but not teetering between either. Simply resting between both stages, not grasping or willing for anything.

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When this happened, I was consumed by the most beautiful shade of black, eyes closed, my Inner Eye void of dust and distraction. Every single atom in my body took up space. I felt immense, expressed, and welcomed. I literally felt as big as a skyscraper; that kind of immensity. I was total. All of my parts put together. The sum.

When it happened, I was more ape than human. Not in the survival sense, rather in the way of existing without “Mother Culture”, no agreed-upon myth tethering me to some agreed-upon reality with rules and some destination.

That’s Ishmael’s influence…

Do you know it? Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The novel rests on my nightstand and has been having a rippling effect on my subconscious. Here’s how it goes, more or less: a gorilla named Ishmael teaches a man “how to save the world.” Ishmael explains that we, Takers, claim that man is responsible for and entitled to controlling the world as would the gods. But the world crumbles in the Takers’ hands the more they exercise their dominion, always fucking things up even more than if they would simply stop pushing an agenda (aka agriculture leading to colonialism) and eliminating their competitors. So, yea, the zoo gorilla named Ishmael awakens man to Mother Culture’s myths.

Myths. Stories. Words strung together to create meaning.

How did this system come to be when we mighty Takers were once just slime, Ishmael pushes man to wonder? We’ve evolved into sentient storytellers. That’s all we’re doing here…assigning meaning and convincing the next generation to believe what our grandparents taught our parents, who taught us, to believe mankind is the ultimate manifestation of God.

But somehow, these stories have limited our capacity to simply rest like the gorilla does in the tropical forests of equatorial Africa, munching on bamboo shoots. The gorilla is part of the system. Part of the slime. Part of the story, not the tyrannical narrator who decides what’s worthy of preserving in the history books as the one-and-only creation story. Nor is the gorilla the judge, outlawing this and that, Decider of good and evil. The gorilla isn’t analyzing its place in the world.

Sure, gorillas have customs in their bands. Plenty of documentaries convey the intelligence of these creatures. But what I’m getting at is how Himakamaka man is to believe he is better than, supreme.

Man, superior to animals, plants, and the Earth in general. Man, the bipedal whose language and civilized ways removes them from primal nature and into their destined role as the Ultimate and Chosen rulers!

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Oh yes, humans are all-powerful! Man has learned to manipulate growth (hence prosperity because, duh, more more more = success! Right?).

How? - Man learns that if they change the natural order of things, they can exercise will. They can plant more seeds and grow tons of XYZ to feed their hungry bellies, but the animals that also eat this crop must get eliminated because they are competition and will devastate the fields.

Decider of good and bad. Right and wrong.

Is it landing yet? Ah, just read Ishmael…

Oh, I have told these stories of “right and wrong” many times. And I’ve believed them even more. But when they fade away, like they did at that song circle, ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh….

I feel like an ape.

You know how some people say that “it can’t be put to words”? The indescribable…

That’s was I’m doing my best to accomplish right now. I’m wanting to convey a very organic and huge stillness and silence without naming it with such vague terms like: peace, serenity, depth, void, unity, presence, gratitude, wholeness, bliss. These tried-and-true words are powerful symbols, but they are watered-down in our spiritual communities.

What’s my point? Well, we are storytellers, after all. So let me give it one more crack to see if I can describe “what happened.”

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“It happened” to me on another occasion sitting in a circle with 10 women before a Titty Art Workshop. I was straight channeling wisdom and in that dark, peaceful, gorilla mindlessness. I felt massive. My energetic body, vertically and horizontally, were in perfect, symmetrical expansion. My soul, the very center point. My spine, erect. I was pure consciousness. This time, more in my Alpha than in the Omega. I was serving these women, dishing out divinity codes without a script, nor knowing where I was heading. My voice sounded more like me. My confidence, unshaken. I didn’t want nor need anyone’s approval. Not even my own. I wasn’t even available to that framework. I was simply fulfilling my destiny.

When it happens, the feeling is always night-black and still, but not at all scary. Nor exciting necessarily. It just isn’t charged. It’s neutral and so lovely. I basked in this beingness. This emptiness. This nothingness.

I might even be longing for it right now.

But it’s not far away. That immensity is my true Self.

Perhaps you’ve felt this before. Well, I feel sure you have at some point, even if it’s a memory faded from time, because ultimately you too were born from the womb of your mother. Whether or not she be nurturing…whether or not she was gentle and loving…you, like me and all else, come from the womb of the Divine Mother. And whether or not it’s a memory, a feeling, a state you can access, we begin and end together from this dark, still nothingness.

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So, if we’ve crossed paths in this lifetime, please know I vow to do my very best to meet you with this remembrance. I forget but then I remember again.

And again, and again, and again.

The spiral is ceaseless.

Does the spiral where it begins and ends?

Riddle me that....

With love and wonder,

Riddle