How Many Times am I Gonna Have to Remind Myself that I am God?
A seasonal re-reflection
To preface, this piece I snagged from a journal entry from the beginning of the year. I have been seeing, reading and hearing about the changing of the seasons (even though the lines have blurred in this current time), and I happened to stumble on this entry. I have been struggling to write here, and I have just given over to experience because it’s the season of experience and collection just as the hay runs wild then eventually is mowed and fed to the animals. So, I give you a mix of a journal entry and an additional reflection on God made specifically for a future. I am reading myself. The God.
I’m thinking about how some sort of fear is thawing in me. The turn of the year feels like the beginning of this thawing- like I feel the Winter slowly let a warm breath of air out. For the first time in a long time I was able to reflect on a past self in a forgiving and distant way.
I had this dream last night where something kept following me at this large, dark campus, and it kept changing its form as I hastily walked away from it, constantly turning my head back. At first I couldn’t see its head, some part of the campus’s intricate architecture would always conveniently obstruct its view. I kept a panicky pace, but I was not quite panicked. I kept looking back, and usually I have a fear when someone is following or running behind me, so I felt like my body was reacting to this, but I was just becoming more and more curious. I became more curious and courageous in an indifferent kind of way. So I stopped despite having this sort of worry in me that I have scared the non-existent people that felt like stood within and around me. But I also felt a guidance. A clear voice of my own. When I turned around, the thing that was following me was a small man with a malicious but also a kind of clueless smile. I tilted my head. He had stopped too, and he was some ways from me. We were in the middle of a parking lot. I walked towards him and placed my palm on his bulky forehead, and I pushed firmly. His head bent back and snapped into place- like an action figure. I was amused. He held the same expression on his face. A light relief overcame me, and I began moving the rest of his limbs like a doll.
As I meditated the next morning after this dream, I found myself thinking about myself a few years back, but this reflection was different then when I usually imagine it. Usually it’s a critical voice, and it feared that past self in a way. Fear: an un-understanding. I realized my fear was of my capability to make certain mistakes, and what are the chances that I make them again. What are the chances I end up in the same state of mind where I was completely right then completely wrong. If I was able to do it before, I can do it again.
But tonight I saw her as completely someone else who I understood from a distance and with curiosity. I was capable of a…sympathy? without a single victim. She is me because it happened to us, but she is something clear that sits on a blue lake that I can only empathize with and listen when needed. It happened. I happened. I think we only fear what’s closest to us. Let them be something else. But let them be. I think we are constantly turning our heads and collecting ourselves with a wholesome intent we can’t even name.
And now that’s an act of God. God is a cycle of removing yourself and climbing somewhere else to dare to look. And as I think about this I think about a passage I read in Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva a couple weeks back where she writes:
Even for unbelievers there’s the instant of despair that is divine: the absence of the God is an act of religion. At this very instant I’m asking the God to help me. I’m needing. Needing more than human strength. I am strong but also destructive. The God must come to me since I haven’t gone to Him. Let the God come: please. Though I don’t deserve it. Come. Or perhaps those who least deserve Him need Him most. I’m restless and harsh and hopeless. Though I have love inside myself. It’s just that I don’t know how to use love. Sometimes it scratches like barbs. If I received so much love inside me and nonetheless am restless it’s because I need the God to come. (Lispector)
Maybe God is something we need to walk up to more often and acknowledge that, both wonderfully and terrifyingly, that we are capable of God. Because everything is constantly doing what it needs to do and what it desires.
Touch myself
Like it’s the first
Time I touched
Anything
Spine cracks
against soft skin
Membrane
Inside-
Organs shuffle
Bounce up in
Cytoplasm
Like a goldfish
Dropped in its new tank
or I
jumping 30 feet for the first
time
Into
Public pools
∞ deep
Shudder
Beneath heavy feet
And light winds
☆ S from north of space