SPIRITUAL SPACES ARE SO HARD. We need them to keep our shit together, we need that community for support in pursuit of the Divine and for connection with Divine in one another, but for some reason it gives everybody ego flares. Myself totally included. I sit there switching eyeblink quick between being smug because of how holy I am and then stricken about how smug I am and then sullen because I feel stricken and then total encompassing love and back up to smug.
It’s hard! And the people who seek it out are broad and difficult personalities to engage with. I remember this from my childhood and adolescence. I’ll scoop everyone into two large groups because we all love a reductionist organisation of humanity. There’s the wild ones. People who often don’t know how to fit into socially accepted parameters, either because they don’t read cues or because they’ve chosen to throw that off. They can make you very uncomfortable and they are where ecstasy is rooted. Then there are rule followers. Rule followers (me) can resent the wild ones because they’re having a good time and they’re fucking with the flow, plan, structure of the gathering. Sometimes that chaotic person is following a golden thread to where you should actually be and sometimes they’re just bringing chaos. They cause stress to the rule followers, who have internalised that if they’re good and do what they’re told, they will get the cookie of enlightenment (or what have you.)
My mom is a wild one. My dad is a rule follower. My brother is becoming more balanced as he ages. I would like to think I am too, but I ain’t. I love me some rules. I want to yank on the reins until everyone is doing what I say and we are all marching apace to God. I’ve tried to throw that off in a variety of unhealthy and extreme fashions, deprivation, immersion, isolation, to name a few. It led to me living in a motel with my cats and muttering to myself. It didn’t work. We must be balanced. If we can’t be balanced in ourselves, we must find it in our community. I need these staggerers, these holy fools, these wanderers into traffic. It’s my job to protect them. It’s my job to remind them. It’s my job to care for them and let them lead me down a weird and lighted road.
But it’s soooo hard. I can’t relax and feel holy. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe feeling like you’re a good person isn’t being a good person. Maybe feeling exquisite impatience and being kind through it is the training ground. I don’t have to like it. I often don’t like true lessons. But I’m here for it.
eatpienotwar 