ordinary extraordinary: on the everyday imprint of the divine
the spectrum of belief, part three
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Hi friends,
Somehow I had forgotten just how hectic this time of year tends to get, and just how quickly. Especially at work, it’s as if everything suddenly went on red alert: every deadline seems urgent, and though I remind myself it’s not actually, it’s Capitalism rearing its ever-monstrous head, that doesn’t stop me from feeling this way. More and more, I resent the feeling. More and more, I sense how unsustainable it really is.
That’s not to say I don’t love getting festive. I’ll take any excuse to celebrate with those who are near and dear to me, and I think we’ve all deserved a good celebration even more than usual in recent years. One of my cousins and I have a special tradition of whipping up our own batch of homemade (and spiked, natch) eggnog for the rest of the family, and I am so looking forward to that! I desperately need a break from to-do lists and responsibilities, and feeling so inescapably adult.
This is why I chose to make the subject of this newsletter my constant search for the divine in daily life. “Real life.” I think of the Anais Nin quote:
I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.
To throwing off our shackles, to escaping our walls! And to feeling the nudge of divinity in our everyday, whether a scintilla of it or more.
Artists concern themselves with light: the finding of it. The way it falls on the planes of the face, the human body, the grandeur posed by the scale of the looming mountain, or else in swaths of expansive sky and open field alike.
From the heart of November in California, where I penned these words, the morning light was rich, amber and syrupy. I thought then, as I do often, about how many writers, myself included, seek to find or create their own source of light. To use it to get at a certain kind of truth. If not to expose outright then slowly, as by one layer after another, reveal. To find and disclose that thing which is so irrevocably there that it will not let you alone.
What does it say about me, about the pit of my own truth, that I write to absolve an exquisite kind of pain? I wonder if truth is what’s at the center of light. But that feels too easy, like replacing the word truth here with justice. Wanting justice feels naive much of the time. Needing it, an apex of focus.
In thousands of different ways, my truth may never come close to being real for you. In others, I strive to find you. And whether or not I have succeeded at exposing any kind of truth here on a collective scale, I know where I exist on my own.
When I write, I divine.
When I create, I am a channel for something else to pass through me. I give myself up for something more. A conduit for story, for poetry, for the pieces of sky that got caught on my soul when I stared deep into the center of it and could not be quenched.
And yet I am more entirely, more intensely, more thoroughly myself than at any other time.
Holy. God. Universe. Spirit. Angels and guides. Source. Divine transcendence. How many words can we dream up to encompass this thing we cannot encompass?
Divine is the muse
One of my favorite poets,
, refers to the imprint of the divine in her own poetry as “god-work”: as in, that ordinary extraordinary of every passing day, the ordinary extraordinary we cannot miss for fear of missing our entire lives.Divine is god and goddess-work. Divine is meeting someone’s eyes across a room and feeling your heart thrum jagged in response. Divine are the birds that cross your path, crows and herons, the hawks that lived in the eucalyptus trees behind your old pale green house in the Presidio, and three times, an owl sounding its low hoot, the sweep of its wings like a pale shock of snow in the trees. Each one portending a different life change.
Divine is the muse: it insists, like poet Rainer Maria Rilke1, that every angel is terrifying. And yet we are enthralled by their beauty anyway.
It’s pretty girls sitting on the moon, parting their hair with stars. Giggling as they invite you to climb up there and join them.
And how many myriad multifaceted things can we use to connect to that effervescent, transcendent thing? Nirvana, spiritual enlightenment—so promotes every religious cult, anyway. Heaven? Live music, love, sex, myriad poems about the moon, ecstasy—whether it’s interwoven with the religious connotation, or merely the sensation, perhaps a buzzy swooping high posing more questions than it answers.
Or else giving you a single perfect and bizarre response, the way psychedelics do, as if pulled directly from on high in the form of a sign.
Artists concern themselves with light: the finding of it. And isn’t light divine, too? Not only in that way it’s got of scything through darkness, nor in the obvious way that without it, we’d have no basis of comparison. Everything would be shades of dark—from midnight to vicissitudes of grey. I’m referring, then, to its regular, unassuming nature. I mean in the way it isn’t questioned, but held and holding—loud, soft, weak and watery, or else pure, clean, and as unforgiving a presence as it is holy in desert terrain.
And so I concern myself with my revealing, though the truths shift at times, with the light. I let the words come to me, and each time I do, I cement myself within the spectrum of my own belief. And I can change my mind at any time, as is my right (as is anyone’s). In this way I continue to build a beautiful sense of trust, with myself and with that larger thing.
Trust that the answers will reveal themselves in time. Even when I am half-wild with impatience, frustration, and longing. For things to arrive—or for me to arrive at them more quickly. For inspiration to come sooner. For the words to pour out the way they want to when I am preoccupied with some other thing out in the world that does not include the sitting and careful tending to the page.
It’s then, more often than not, that the right words concern themselves with me. They tell me:
Trust that you will find your way forward, that the path will be exposed in some way or another, even when all around you looms the perilous dark. Especially then. Trust that we will come to you.
And you can trust that something—whatever we feel like calling it, whether it’s God // Goddess, the Universe, Spirit or Source—has you in its hold. Has a larger plan for you just waiting to unfold, just like we do.
I don’t want a rational explanation. What I want is to let this remain a mystery, in a world that must increasingly find ways to decipher everything. I want all that is magical and transcendent in the world and outside of it simply to be that. And I want more than anything else to continue to be guided by the shimmer of my intuition, my dreams, the blazing light of my own personal connection to the divine.
So that I can continue choosing, despite it all, to believe in just that, and so that it can remain true for me.
Next week I hit the 6-month mark of writing this newsletter!
What a beautiful thing. I’ll be putting together a fun little round-up dedicated to some of my favorite missives.
I’m also thinking through my publishing schedule, and what kinds of changes I want to make, since I can’t seem to hold to publishing on a set day (blame my Sagittarius moon, though if you read last week’s letter, you know I’ve been relying on my rituals-that-are-routines lately). TBD on that.
We’re overdue for another witchy writer friend check-in: White Lotus! I finally finished reading Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, and I fucking loved it!
On a more serious note, I’ll be sharing, too, my thoughts on the latest news to come from Iran (and the fact that the women of Iran were named Time’s Heroes of the Year). There’s a lot to discuss. Coming soon, I promise.
Thanks for being here.
xx
Kimia
More to come on Rilke.