The sound of silence
Today is 7 Kej, the nahual of the stag, the guardian of the forest. I asked to receive, to channel, and drew my card for guidance from Kit, the nahuales, the ancestors, the spirits of the plants and all those voices that need amplifying.
I drew The Ancestor, because you can’t make this stuff up.
The day started with me feeling like the door had closed; after the ecstatic, frenetic energies of the past few days, everything today was… quiet.
still. silent.
It frightened me. I was afraid that yesterday, when I asked everything to slow down, that maybe I had closed a door I couldn’t open again. But in opening, emptying myself and truly asking to listen, I heard exactly what I needed to. I grasp the gnosis of nahuales today; I feel in my being what it truly means today that each day has its own unique energy signature. I am learning to hear, identify, channel the distinct voice of each day; I realize what our conception of time is. It’s a collection of vibrations, brought together for a moment; like matter, each day, trecena, year, is like a crystalline structure, a snowflake, a star; individual vibrations uniting for a moment in time to assemble something that is beautiful and perfect for a fleeting moment, before it dissolves again.
The Ancestor card represents the archetypes of nature, and I got goosebumps all over my body when I asked to empty myself, to truly get the I out of the way and channel and receive the energies, archetypes, and spirits beyond bodies that were present, and this was what came up. It’s working. I started reading Kit’s book last night, and it’s already a portal; xe had truly found a door to receiving this wisdom. But I see and feel today that I already have, as well; I’ve already been doing it. I just have been using a fragmented amalgamation of frameworks, cobbling together my own unique practice from the melodies and rhythms of resonance I’ve gathered along my own winding path.
This practice, praxis, thesis, PhD research, path of awakening, artist’s way, spiritual initiation, all different words for the same thing—this is how I am creating a new pathway to help others find the same thing. My role, I feel, I hear, is to help lead the queers and weirdos, the trans and divergent, into the forest, by helping them each find their own resonant frequency; their own way in.
Something is moving, something has shifted. I hear the voice of the deer today, and it’s giving me chills all over my body.
Kit is here; I feel them. I also see the collaboration with Anne-Sophie taking form: to convey something of that great awareness, the stillness of nature, the comfort in the vast and silent holding, enfolding you in its infinite embrace, seeing you as beautiful and unique and yet enveloping you, fermenting you, easing you slowly and gently back into the returning to the earth; the composting that unites us in death and rebirth.
The voice of Kej, the forest, sounds like James Earl Jones, slow and calm, strong and measured. Grounded, of course, because it’s Earth.
The energy of when we were all trees, and our fingers were roots that spread deep into the ground, absorbing nutrients from what surrounds and sending it out, mycelial connections, silent symbiosis, telepathic transmission. The womb space, where all needs are provided for without even asking, where there is no scarcity, but enoughness, and all are safe, even in death.
Listen. It says: here. If you leave you can come back again. And you’ll realize you were never really gone to begin with.
The sound of loving awareness is the silence, which is never totally quiet. It’s things coming closer and then retreating, ending and beginning. It’s the sound of cicadas in the moments after the icaros end, when we are slowly arriving, particles reassembling one by one to create the world of objects; to temporarily resume form. It’s the deafening silence of the mountains in the sacred valley.
It’s the whisper the branches of the cedar tree made above me on that muggy morning, Independence Day weekend, when I realized I didn’t want to die in my backyard in Texas.
That’s what I want to convey. That’s what I want to help people discover. That great, loving presence; that silent holding; that stillness of infinite awareness that simply comes as a feeling, without saying anything, that makes you not just hear or see but know, gnow, feel in your bones that you’re not alone; that makes you want to choose to stay alive a little bit longer, so you can help others survive and feel these moments.
So I ask for guidance, how do I convey this? Help me share this message with others who are suffering in ways that they can understand. Help me reach people through different mediums and messages. Help me transmit this love in ways that all different people can grasp.
Above all, help me connect with those others who have felt as alone as I did, who felt so separate they didn’t want to be alive anymore; help me show them that there are so many different ways into the oneness, help me convey what I’ve experienced: when you find the methods for connection that enliven your spirit, the Universe will throw so much love your way that it’ll make your head spin, until you’re overwhelmed with gratitude, and you feel the relief of realizing that you have always been worthy just because you exist; that you belong, already, without you having to prove you deserve it.
You deserve it.
* * *
As powerful as the music is, interestingly, as so many of my projects lately are about the sound—the answer today came in the quiet. The power of silence and the contrast between that and the beats.
Before you can be nobody, you have to realize you exist, and choose to be here; the paradox of Earthly existence is that the path to oneness comes through separateness. You have to believe you deserve to live, and say yes to it; you have to know your boundaries, and affirm them without infringing on those of others.
The fallacy is anyone trying to tell anybody else there’s only one way in. You have to directly experience it in the way that resonates for your unique frequency and transmit that back in your own unique method. You deserve to feel this loving awareness and choose and share the ways in which you access it, but the key is to do this with reciprocity and respect. Making offerings, being of service, giving back—and once you have been nurtured enough that your cup is full enough to pour from, you can do that.
Most of us don’t have frameworks for this anymore in the Anglosphere and Europe, so we cobble things together from other cultures. That’s okay; that’s good, even; that’s normal. It’s syncretism. It’s how human culture is and has always been formed. People have been trading ideas and experiences through traveling to other lands, interacting with other peoples, trading practices and material culture for as long as there have been people. It’s part of our nomadic heritage. But there were always frameworks, containers, apprenticeships, guidance, initiations, and these are what we have lost in many Anglocentric contexts. So we must learn from those who keep the traditions that survive. Make your own way, but cite your sources; try to give as much as you take; give more to those who have less; always show respect.
The most powerful part of the ceremony, to me, isn’t the ecstatic frenetic energy, as incredible as that can be. It isn’t even necessarily the deconstruction or the revelation. It’s the space between it ending and things rearranging. Those moments of quiet arrival when our particles are slowly reassembling, and we feel our belonging, and the understanding ripples through everything, people across cultures and trees and plants, and the ridiculousness of our predicament passes between us without speaking a word, and we laugh.
This is what the title of my play, thesis, projects really means, and I hope to embody and convey this message in all I create:
We go alone together. Singing, dancing, laughing as we walk each other home.
* * *
And then I went downstairs, and fed the cats, and fed myself, and had a moment almost as nondual as what I had felt sitting with the spirit of tobacco in the dark, nourishing my body with leftover coconut rice, not even warmed up, straight out of the pan with sliced-up avocado and plantain, and had a good giggle with Kit about how simple it can be.
Reading/Watching/Listening this week:
“Scattered Minds,” Gabor Maté
“Performing With the Dead,” Kit Danowski
Various lectures and podcast appearances on YouTube by Rupert Sheldrake
Soma meditation, Ram Dass
“Portrait of the Artist,” James Joyce
Also working on/recently published:
Cacao zine project for Bean to Barstool
Newsletter for syndication with Double Blind on the FDA MDMA legalization decision
A million newsletters that I’ve started and become overwhelmed by; meeting with Claire Bullen, former editor at Good Beer Hunting, to discuss hiring her as my Substack editor
Ideating/potentially reaching out to Alicia Kennedy about creating a federated Substack/virtual magazine for food and drinks writers
Creating a collaboration group for former Good Beer Hunting writers
Today's altar.
Jerry, my catsitting charge, apparently trying to have a sacred ritual with a stick of my copal he swiped.
Hapê pipe with medicine from the festival maloca.
The rice, which I eventually put in a bowl with a dollop of peanut butter and some plantain.
