Dark-light; naming things; Abhorrence

tensions in Secrets and Truths

i don’t know if i am ready to write but i am starting.

i have been ‘on a break’ that was intended to be for the full month of march, since the last singing over the bones (in mid-february). // everything, Already, is so different.

but i want to talk about Right Now.

the desert mothers have been with me— the ones who, in the fourth century when christianity became the official religion— went to the deserts to live out their faith In Their Own Way.

i am confused by what is happening, Here; how to hold all these disparate threads of Reality. i’ve felt i’ve gotten really Good at that, Actually. and then you walk straight into the antithesis of what makes you feel right, okay, sacred, and safe and there’s such a huge unravelling. all i did this morning was walk into a modern church in a regular-ass building in my neighborhood; i was welcomed enthusiastically at the door and given a mug with the church’s name printed on it; i asked questions; talked to the blue-eyed pastor’s wife; ate a dunkin’ donuts munchkin as i started feeling more ill. i asked about mary magdalene. i asked about the christian imagination and centering prayer. i asked about the non-canonical gospels. i went inside for all of five minutes; left my mug of tea on the welcome station, and promptly left. i had to walk through the gauntlet of welcomers. and i’ve walked all the way home saying, what the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck, Was That.

it’s not that i was not welcomed. in fact i was Overly welcomed. it’s not that these folks aren’t gathering community— clearly, they Are.

but my insides Reeling right now are feeling like i made a mistake— the inner child always made to feel that i should’ve known better because look how horrible this is; funny how deeply that inner programming is Woven— doesn’t even make sense but is so Visceral— that you somehow should’ve preemptively known that a situation/instance/experience/etc would not be good for you, without even exploring it.

i’ve been trying to comfort my child self, inner selves. i’m here feeling like a garishness has Hit me that i can’t quite shake. everything, everything about this felt So Wrong to me. and can i use that, instead, as showers-of-the-way of what I’m here to do and keep doing?

[…]

i’m def getting ahead of myself; but who fucking cares because i’m constantly edging the intertidal between Explainable and Sloshing-Unknown— and Here is where i find myself— in These days having been led Straight into the heart of reintegrating parts of myself that haven’t fully been able to exist in the light, Alongside each other.

Yet— when i was blasted with the garish light of the modern church, everything in me recoiled; abhorrent. what is this Dark-light, Then, that i am creating, Seeking? what is the necessity of the Vastness of silence, of desert, of Dark, of Space? what is the Light therein? what am i trying to bring Up From The Underground, to Expose— and what actually Does need to Stay There?

i’m talking around it; i’m talking around it; and that’s Okay. that’s the only way i can do this, Now.

i wrote a new substack bio for myself some days ago, claiming identities that have been more implicit or inside-the-words, instead of The Words themselves:

queer artist, writer, researcher, storyteller, prayer-maker, sacred space-holder. Explorer, All-ways. 1st gen. italian-american NYC native ~ animist mystical-wisdom-christian in devotion to the great mother / black madonna

and on instagram:

🐺 🌈 big feelings welcome ✨️
📍NYC queerdo 🇮🇹🦁🦂🎨✍️📚🚴‍♀️🌎
animist christian heeding mary’s gospel 🙏
👇 tending the edge-space(s) 🐲

it’s no New endeavor to try to reconcile queerness with christianity. but i’m finding my leaning more intentionally into my queerness— and Returning to a lean into christianity— have been happening in tandem. i have the queer god and the queer bible on my kitchen floor along with the nag hammadi scriptures, the gospel of thomas, and a book about the desert mothers. what the fuck is even Happening here?

in this ‘break’ from my story-work and 1-on-1’s, and while my singing over the bones community is in transition / being Yielded into a co-created monthly meeting we’re calling ‘the imaginal commons’ (no idea yet how this will go; first one is today) — i’m finding several/many things. a Longing for my work and its importance in my life. a fascination with community, relationality, and people. a chance to tend to parts of me i often swerve around or ignore. // i went to my first on-the-ground LGBTQ+ women, femmes, and thems meet-up at the LGBT center in my neighborhood, the other day— i knew i had to go because getting myself to be in that room felt 1,000 times harder than sharing with total strangers that i’ve had an abortion or been suicidal.

i Loved the experience. it felt like the fucking Windows were all open. // then whatever it is inside me that is still afraid / (or the part inside me i am still trying to interface with) binged a whole box of crackers and nearly a whole bar of white chocolate on the way home, which has felt like sacrilege in recent time— i was walking for weeks and weeks with abdominal pain, doing ultrasound scans/potential cat scan, losing weight, pain, Pain. and there’s still that interesting behavior. there’s still that Hunger. there’s still All Of This Complexity.

i’m just throwing Pieces out, here— that’s what part of the Point of this is.

i went to the queer meetup. i’ve been trying to acknowledge My Hunger. i’ve been trying to Acknowledge my Hurt. i’ve been working Hella Hard with my mother wounding; with what i encounter in the deeps of me when i lean further into authentic expression. i want to name How Much listening to kae tempest, and to rav jericho vincent of temple of the stranger, have been Essential to me in these days. <3 allowing myself to buy books i can’t feel ashamed of, anymore— as this nearing-40 being living in her childhood home, with my Own space but with a Portal That is Porous— to find the audacity to leave out on the table the book about queer sex, the book about adult children of emotionally immature parents. // all the memories of everything that has gone into the dark— that had no privacy, sharing a room with a bunkbed with my brother with an accordion door, until i gradually disappeared from the family unit to half-move in with my 10-years-older boyfriend, down the street, when i was 25.

i remember having to masturbate in silence. to worry if i passed out without clothes on, secretly in the dark on the top bunk, in case my brother awoke to find me that way in the morning. still now, the guilt that lilts or comes over me when i lock the door. what the fuck were locked doors? we used the bathroom with the door ajar, we knocked and went in to go to the bathroom when someone else was taking a shower. everything was everyone else’s. where was the Space, to Explore? ..

i remember the Place the white light of the bathroom and the cold black and white tile floor, became— squirrelling away with my dad’s old playboys and hustler magazines hidden in the hamper, or the bottom of the washing machine compartment. but i was the straight girl, but i was the straight girl. waiting for the photos to load on the dial-up connection. no videos! just pictures. just my imagination.

how everything has changed. // and Not.

[…]

i think what is Slamming Into Me this morning is that there is part of me that Wants to expose everything. that wants to stand here and tell you about All The Things that have ever happened to me— including things you don’t know like a potential past occurrence of gifted-child medical experimentation emerging in an ‘entity extraction’ with a traditional healing community now 4 years ago; and all the things i Have shared— my abortion, my codependency, my suicidality and crises— things i am Learning how to share— my continually emergent queerness, my polyamorousness for the past 20 years, my fears of being stuck in elevators and trains. my being religious and not just vaguely spiritual.

And. i see— so much of my work and my very Being has been about Bringing Things Out, and Up, and Into. but what about what isn’t ready? what about when that light Is garish, and unsafe? how to bring Up and Out and Into while retaining the dark, the shadow, the underbelly, the Realness? none of which i encountered this morning in that church.

i didn’t want a fucking mug. i wanted to go squirrel away in some corner of the building and gaze at stained glass windows or statues or icons. i wanted to light candles. i wanted to be able to pray and cry without blaring contemporary music and projection screens. why is this like this? why do people Like this? why are so many people here, why is everyone so in-my-face? — And Yet, i must Challenge myself— how do i Hold this, how do i Hold that just as christ (and the great mother, and mary of magdala) are telling Me something— that christ and god are telling These people something? and telling the people who use religion as the gateway for hatred and violence and exclusion, something? i don’t know why i have never felt it so viscerally— we read these things in books, we conceptually Know them— but how can this all happen at the same time? what is Truth? what is Right? // cue existential crisis via less than half hour in the modern church i had been meaning to check out for awhile.

///////

my sensitive nervous system makes a lot of things Hard for me.

but it also makes a lot of things instantly Apparent.

i’m proud of myself that i said mary magdalene and non-canonical gospels and christian imagination in the space. i’m proud that i didn’t force myself to sit (or stand) through the service that encountering for barely five minutes made me feel ill. i’m proud of myself, also, that i felt the world-flinging-open feeling of being in that queer meetup. of signing up for the butoh intensive without thinking another fucking thought about it. And, there’s All The Rest. the sick-feelings, and the Shame, and the bingeing, and what we do in secret that needs to be secret and when does it not need to be secret anymore—?

there is some Nuance here, for me. about Conditions for sharing secrets. about softness and Realness and Otherness and Dark-light. about the tabernacle— about sacred space you create around you— of not needing a priest’s collar or a spiritual direction certificate or a masters degree. i’m not trying to shame any of you who Have these things— or who like going to modern churches or contemporary worship— i’m trying to Own my own experience; which has been the literal-goddamn-complete-opposite of living in a highly enmeshed family in which differentiation and exploration have not been met with openness and support. i have had to Learn this— little by excruciating little— learn how to not smile and laugh through it, learn how not to grit my teeth, learn how to say No, learn how to Leave. learn to honor this ragged-wild-‘unqualified by normal standards’ Primordial-Soup that i Am.

there is part of me that is Tired of the pain of this. of fighting lifelong patterns. of learning and unlearning how to Parent myself, guide myself. of the blown-apart-Starkness of experiencing something i chose to do that feels so goddamn completely Wrong.

i think this is about my north and south node, too— but i don’t know enough to speak on it extensively. i know my generative but sometimes Entirely-Pain-full tension is living in these spectrums of Truth and Belonging. Individualization and Community. being my Full Self while also being Other. Belonging while also being Other.

i think about the experiences i’ve had that are Also part of being in community. of what happens when you raise your voice and people don’t want to hear it. when people want things to Stay The Same. not be threatening or different. how it feels to be Projected Onto and Scapegoated. put on sick leave to be silenced without being sick. to be isolated and targeted. to be eating and drinking out of the same vessels, singing and embracing and crying, sleeping in the same rooms with the theatre company i was a part of, one month— and then be ousted from the same group when my vax status suddenly made me dangerous. to be the veritable poster-child— by my Very Existing, Apparently— for the Underbelly, for things People Don’t Want To Look At, Acknowledge, or Integrate.

there’s that lilt of Shame swirling on the edges— take back what you wrote— everyone goes through this— stop complaining— ‘poor you’— and i have to, i Have To, call bullshit.

if i hadn’t embraced my Difference— if i hadn’t committed to Telling My Own Truth— i’d be dead. point-blank. if i kept eating, gratefully, what i had been given— i’d be more poisoned than the poison i’m continually trying to Expel out of me, right now.

so what of christianity, and what of queerness, and what of community? what of the sacred, and ways of worshipping, and what is right and wrong?

what of These Questions that come Up and Up again, in my life, in varying guises—

who decides what is real? who decides what is ‘safe and effective’ and ‘scientific’? who decides what is psychotic and what is visionary? who decides what is Normal, what is Divergent? what is Natural, and what is an Abomination? who decides whose voices get to be silenced or removed from history, what texts are illegitimate, unorthodox, non-canonical? what makes Unity? what is Truth?

mary magdalene is asking me to Lean In, and Study; my apostle of the Imaginal; her and my wisdom-christ i have come to know. she is asking me to Ask. she is asking me to speak her name. // and mine, and mine, and Mine.

///

no pretty bow at the end of this, just an Angel-wrestle.

foto credits: the prayer of the crack during my return to st. bart’s; astoria graff; st. bart’s column with burning bush; words by kae tempest; words by judy grahn; so fucking curiously— something i found written on a slip of paper tucked into the beyond belief: the secret gospel of thomas book i took out from the library.