Metaphysical Mulch

This is a rapid fire writing under circumstantial pressure of my own choosing. This is writing from the inbetween moments where I collect my thoughts – without pen or paper – without the notepad on my phone – I pull them from memory. Small threads of coherence reaching for one another through the vast currents of chaos  surrounding us. Tying little knots in the small tapestry of sense making.

This is a word from under the shower, while the potatoes are burning on the stove, woken up from a dream at 4 AM, sitting behind my part-time deskjob in customer service, smiling at strangers. I am being paid as I write this. It’s a minimum wage type of engagement. Although I never apply minimum wage effort to anything I do. Meaning I am, you, we, us folks are systemically underpaid for our applied life-force.

I don’t live a minimum wage life, which means I have to get creative, living on the weird eclectic margins to make ends meet. Small tapestries from the thrift store. It’s funny to me to recall how soon I was aware of this fate. I think I knew at 4. Not much later. When I cried going to school every single bloody day. And that particular type of crying didn’t stop until I completely disentangled myself from anything resembling a 9-5 existence. I knew at 4, that things were not going to work for me like that.

I am on the frontiers of a maximalist experience outside of the margins of whatever’s deemed normal. And even still, every now and then, this confronts, confounds, and confuses me. Am I a conman? Or not enough of a conman?

This week I had to go to a serious desk in a serious office in a serious building, in the rain. I had to ask for permission to exists as a legal entity. I had to pay a fee. I got a number and a piece of paper to confirm my application. The man behind the desk asked me questions that made me feel like he didn’t really believe me, or in me. And just by the way he looked at me, from behind his desk, suited up in the paraments of professionalism, he made me lose all my words. I stumbled. Didn’t know quite know how to answer in a way that might appease him. I started mubling, stumbling over sentencs. Started doubting myself. Started feeling smaller than I felt when I came through that glass door. Undeserving. An anomaly.

Ha! I thought. That doesn’t happen to me very often anymore. That type of out-of-place-diminishing is mostly eradicated from my life. I have successfully subtracted myself from most of the demeaning desks, and most of the grey suits, and most of the professional men who ask cynical questions from behind a false wall of security.

I left that office and rang the doorbell at a stranger’s house. He showed me some art he made, the antique skull of a dolphin, he gave me some ideas. We talked and meandered towards a conversation about spirituality and consciousness, organically. A while later I rang the doorbell at my brother’s on a whim, because it happened to be around the corner, and I was looking for an anchor in my own reality. We talked about psychology and astrology and laughed as we had breakfast at luchtime. Crises averted. There are so many people these days who see me so warmly they allow me to be good with words. They believe me – in me; and in that simple gesture, they grant me my fluency. My language. I find dreams to share, have good ideas, am even sometimes funny. And suddenly I make sense to myself. I can take myself seriously and joke about it. I belong here with us all, and I have heaps of evidence for it behind many doors that open when I ring the bell.

These are matters of frequency. And frequency is palpable to kindergardeners. This should be taught in schools, but sadly school are not made to enlighten children into their own fluent brilliance or belonging. They are designed to teach most of them how to function on a flatline. How to fit the formalities of the machine. And that’s why so many people feel so maddeningly isolated. And so out of place. Because the human heart is a brilliant thing. But brilliance needs warm witnessing. Brilliance needs a mirror to become luminous.

I can’t be myself without being held in the warm light of someone else’s understanding. And someone can only see me exactly as I am once they have accepted themselves exactly as they are. The inverse of which is my most important work – (and this labor pays for itself by making the world feel like home) – the more I embrace and integrate every part of me, the more ease other people feel in my presence. This is how we become loving feedback loops for one another. More and more and more self-warmth, is more and more and more heartfelt kindness for and from others.

Why is this not the case everywhere? All the time? With everyone? There are theories… I have them. They are out there. But I don’t have time to get into it now because my shift is ending and I am underpaid, and I have to go to a concert, and the potatoes are burning on the stove, and the new moon is rising and that means I have a deadline I promised myself I would keep. Here’s to keeping it.

Find the others, as they say, it’s a frequency for real.