I’ve been thinking about spirtuality and personal growth. About the feeling of being connected to the universe, to the infinite ALL, the sense of awe of the numinous, and how that translates with being at my lowest lows. There are ways to connect to that sense of the interconnectedness of things, when you are in those dark places, but how does one get there when you’re hardly connected with yourself. The only way for it is for me to go into my emotional pain, and embrace the dark, and completeness of it, which is very hard to do, the depression coming out of the fear of all of me that hides down there in the dark. A lot of people think about getting that spiritual sense of awe and connectedness with the highest points, the blazing of the light, orgasms that send you to the stars and inside and outside of you and your partner(s), seeing the beauty of sunlight sparkling on water, the deep calm of meditation, feeling centered, feeling balanced. The truth is, we are still connected, still part of the movements of time, space, infinity, when we are at the lowest lows…

Partly, as I think what happens with the highs when you move into that place of feeling the profound, back to the mundane, or from the mundane to the profound, you enter in the depths, and then all of a sudden you can see beyond, back into the gloom, and then in that darkest of dark, fear stops, pain stops, depression floats away, and calm comes. Sometimes it isn’t a spiritual calm, it’s the calm of tuning out, instead of tuning in, numbing. But sometimes, just sometimes, it’s the ability to reach through the dark, and hold myself, and take in my place in the cosmos, and feel… secure and whole in where I am. The most common times those have happened have actually been when I’ve hit absolutely rock bottom, have become suicidal, and am really actually not really rational in an intellectual sense, but in a spiritual sense, I have the feeling of completeness, readiness, the fear is completely gone, the fear of death is gone, I’ve made peace with my pain, with the world, and am ready to move on. Then what becomes hard is not moving into the infinite oneness with the dark through the taking of ones life, but realizing, that if one is to live, one has to climb back up through the pain again, not knowing whether you can reach a point where you no longer feel like you’re drowning, but just the never ending struggle of treading water, a place I’ve been for a while now.

Not suicidal, not in great emotional pain, but treading water, treading water. The problem with that is one gets tired, and if you’re not actually going anywhere, eventually you start to sink again. Then the fear starts nipping at your heels, you don’t want to go through the drowning, the pulling down through the agony of your own despair, lead weights attached to your limbs, your mind screaming, while you feel completely ineffectual, the world a large and turbulent and incessant ocean around you, undeniable.

I’m a very spiritual person, but it’s a hard place to meditate in, and on, and around, but the thing I keep telling myself, which I truly do believe, is that divinity is there regardless. That beauty is there regardless. There is the divine and the sublime in life, roses in bloom, sunrises and kittens, as much as there is in decay, death, a moonless night and vermin. In fact, it is through destruction that creation comes.

If the comet hadn’t come and wiped out the dinosaurs that ruled the planet ages ago, it might be scaled and clawed finger tips working this keyboard, it’s the little mammals that survived that brought about our evolution. Inside of me, destructive forces are at work, inside all of us, and outside all of us, destructive forces are at work, horrors, death, wars, depression… the dark, chaos… but remember chaos, out of chaos comes life, change, birth, rebirth, it’s part of the cycle, a spiritual cycle. The great wheel change and chance.

Whether your nailed to a cross, buried in the earth, or giving birth, your part of the dance.

XO
Leila