Wandering in Everyday Mystical Experience

At 3:20 am on Friday, November 14th, I woke up from a dream that my father had just died. More precisely, in my dream, my father was acting in a movie in which he died, and I was watching this movie being filmed. The intensity of the dream woke me up, and I laid in bed and cried, realizing that my Dad will indeed die in the near future. I texted my Dad to ask him to text me as soon as he woke up that morning, and I told him that I love him. The tears continued to come and I felt the depth of my sadness about how little I know my Dad and how distant he is from my children. From this distance, my Dad feels like a gentle and constant presence. I then went on to decide that over Thanksgiving, I want to commit to the adventure of driving down to Florida with my Dad and my two girls to see my Mom and my extended family, including my grandmother. Next thing I remember about these post-dream moments is that I was appreciating the velvety nature of mystery and the unknown, and realizing that I am so drawn to inquiring into the mysterious and the curious right now. This spirit of gentle, open curiosity shows up so often for me. Why does anything need to be certain or understood? Then I realized that the only time and place that mystery cannot be invoked is when fear is dominant. There is no mystery in fear. Fear is simple, known and limited. Fear turns the velvety, graceful, plush drape of mystery into hard, definite edges.

This isn't the first dream I have had about death since my rebirth party. On Tuesday November 4th, around 7 am, I had a dream that I had had a baby and that it drowned in a bathtub, while I had gone downstairs to check on a party that Charlotte and Veronica were having. I receive both of these dreams as gifts, as ways to understand what is happening in my body/soul/spirit as I wander, childlike, in this new life.

As I drove to work on Friday, I saw how strongly my soul and/or my spirit wants to follow this thread of wandering into the depth and mystery of my internal experience, away from fear and self-consciousness. This tendency isn't new for me; I have logged three decades of spiritual wandering. What is new is that I admitted to myself that I'd like to live the 2014 version of Ralph Waldo Emerson. I want to sink deeply into the intricate experience of each day and write about what unfolds for me, because every day is like a kaleidoscope of sensations and insights. I am drawn to this practice every morning when I wake up, which is why it often takes me hours to get out of the house. Meanwhile, I remain firmly rooted in this world, as a mother, home owner, business owner, friend, sister, daughter, neighbor and community member, and these roles all invite a kind of practical empathy and directing my attention to other people, and to things like cars, houses, toilets, cash registers and snow in the driveway. The pace of that practical life doesn't seem to jive well with the transcendental mindset. Furthermore, the people in my life provide the input, the stimuli for the insights, the colors, the shapes of my inner kaleidoscope, and I wish to tend to these relationships. Each morning, I could get up and write, like I am right now, or I can grocery shop, or go to to yoga, or answer emails. Every morning, I confront the multiplicity of options that are available to me, and I limp into something resembling a decision about how I will spend my time.

My first impulse, upon allowing myself to imagine a mystical life for myself, is to think of the mystical and the practical as mutually exclusive or conflicting. I'm ashamed of my "mystical" tendencies. Like today, it's a Saturday. I'll sit here and write this until the guilt becomes overwhelming and I decide to go exercise or run errands, or clean the house... attending to relationships and practical life. What about accepting the reality of living both ways, simultaneously? Practical mysticism? Just in writing this paragraph, I have removed the word "but" and "just" several times, because I am committed to accepting the totality of what is me. And I am no longer interested in perpetuating the internal conflict of the thought form that says I don't have enough time or resources or money or power to "be" all parts of myself. It's this scarcity that leads me to either/or thinking, and today, I am accepting the idea of being both, of being all of me that there is. I can sink into the magic of unlimited resources, money and power, I've practiced that, and it's juicy and fun. Now time as unlimited? It seems like learning to practice that consciousness while inhabiting the world with love, maybe that's this path of practical mysticism?

This past April, during a hilltop forest pilgrimage in New Lebanon NY,  I made a pledge to the Natural World, to the Unseen, that She could have me, all of me. I surrendered my preconceived notions of success, control and love. Life has been different since then. I had spent the better part of a decade denying my relationship with the divine, and that chapter of my life ended on that hilltop.

This past Tuesday, it was sunny and in the 60s. I went to the River and offered flowers and whiskey and prayers, and the warm breeze played with my hair. Then Wednesday was in the 40s and snowflakes appeared. By Friday, I was shoveling the driveway in boots and pajamas at sunrise, hearing the liquid peace that the earth breathes under a foot of soft snow. The feeling that has come with the colder temperatures reminds me of how I used to feel as a child, waking up on Christmas morning. There is this tangible sense that newness awaits, and all I have to do is unwrap it. Like life happens for me, not to me.

Yesterday, I listened to this conversation between Sera Beak and Tami Simon. Sera spoke about the difference between the spirit and the soul. And I am wondering if I am just now journeying into my soul. I have spent many years dancing in and around the spiritual. But this realm of the soul, according to what Sera describes, it's quite different. The soul seems to be more related to the body and its knowledge, where the spirit is more related to the heart and the mind. To use Gurdjieff's model of consciousness, maybe the spirit is the higher functioning of the emotional and/or intellectual center, while the soul is the higher function of the moving instinctive center. Last Sunday, I listened to a conversation between Lisa Shrader and Robyn Thoren Smith about shame, sex, tribe and healing. And when I heard Robyn's voice, and her story, something in my body shifted and maybe what happened is I felt like I had permission to inhabit my soul.

I have never written like this before. I don't know who my audience is. Usually when I write about my internal journey, it's an email to an intimate friend, in which I tell the story of an insight or epiphany that I had. But this writing, I'm not documenting an epiphany. I keep using the phrase "I am realizing", which is interesting, because that language implies an embodiment of what I am experiencing. I feel like the deeper I go into these interconnected thoughts, the more unhinged I become, but also the more grounded, in myself. The process of writing this is irresistibly delicious.

I'm inspired by this mantra: "Practice conscious pleasure as a gateway to God."