The bastards can't stop a walking utopia
Why nurturing your spiritual life matters now more than ever
Hi!
I woke this morning full of the passion for living in touch with one’s own soul, so I sat up, grabbed my pen and wrote this for you, dear tenacious fellow-dweller in life:
Here’s why it matters that you nurture the life of your spirit, now more than ever: because more than ever there are people who profit from constant attempts to confuse and beguile you, and to dim your hope. Because you’re alive right now and it’s become extra clear that there are no guarantees about tomorrow, next month or next year. It matters that you are in touch with your soul because we desperately need to hear the real truth about what you love, and see how it lights you up. When you are present and soft and unfurling, real magic transpires. Nurturing your spirit matters because the world sees your bright, irreplacable honesty on display, and it changes.
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Here’s why you should plan that pilgrimage, sign up for that workshop, set aside time tomorrow to meditate with your sweet mind, walk with your living legs, and sing and pray with your good lips and willing lungs. Because the surface-level world is where the bastards work their grinding-down machines, where they run the game. The capitalist-blind-starving-ass-parasite governments, the power-mad banks (quelle différence?), f*cking meta — remember when facebook changed their name to meta? That’s Greek for “higher” or “beyond.” That’s like saying “We are the panopticon. You’re welcome.” Sure, they can be “meta,” if they like. The bastards can skim the surface, where all seems scarce and fleeting and very much like a game that almost everyone loses. They can live that game, if they want. It’s a path of spiritual poverty, even for the wealthiest among us. Everybody does lose that game, eventually, even if they seem to win it for a minute.
The thing about hoarding wealth is that it broadcasts to everybody else that you’re ignorant of the innate abundance of life, that you can’t hear the violin strains of true presence here and now. It tells the rest of us here that you’re motivated by the dullest thud of fear and ignorance, a song without resonance or joy. If they would only bring their drum closer to the fire they wouldn’t need to hammer so hard on it to make it sound. But they don’t care. We may as well leave them to it. Let them fight it out on the surface level with their saggy drums and their driving, ceaseless fear of death.
The rest of us, the waking ones, gather here in the great below. And let me tell you, this is where the party is at. The great below is where all of the openings into the otherworld are found. Holy wells. Caves. Fairy Mounds. Stone circles. Sacred meadows. Here below we are in the company of the super-real, living and dying and threaded through with infinite shining pasts and futures, seething with sensation and insight. What invisible knowing do you carry with you right now, unexcavated or momentarily hidden? I invite you to remember it with me today. I invite you to feed it to the trees and the birds and the days that tumble past, optimistic and forgetful as toddlers. Feed it to me. Feed it to your friends. Feed it to the elderly while they are still more silvery-haired than you are. While they are still your neighbours.
That’s what we are here for in this life — to make the invisible visible. To play the secret chord. To surprise others, and ourselves to boot, by transforming into what we always suspected we could become. We are here to expand into the unseen realms and let them expand into us. There’s an interpretation of Christian cosmology I find really refreshing that has been articulated by episcopalian mystic and writer Cynthia Bourgeault, among others. That’s the notion that the “kingdom of heaven” of the bible isn’t a place beyond this world — and certainly it’s no meta-realm — rather it’s the rich and innate potential for grace and beauty in this world. The kingdom of heaven is the active knowing that around every corner is a possible utopia, that the next person you encounter could choose to be loving instead of fearful, because they opted today to expand rather than contract their dear, precious heart towards the sun of your own face, towards life.
Top-down religions, presidents and techno-feudalists can paste their brand logos all over this place, but they can never own the one precious source of life and goodness and truth. That source is possibility. That source is the phenomenology of pure choice that each of us holds in our grasp, forever. It’s in the moment you draw your breath, unclench your jaw, soften your shoulders, lean back into Earth’s good gravity and say, “I choose spirit. I choose inspiration. I choose to follow the bright thread, the rolling luminous ball that illuminates the hidden path through the wood. I choose the great unsteady steps of love, the emerald pull of the sea. I choose to step into the riverboat of mystery with gentle, childlike willingness to discover the deep jungle into which that watery path leads.” What wild and romping life might we befriend in the dark and green glade if we soften enough to become a part of that glade, instead of fighting to remain a bastion against it?
We are many, and no two of us alike. How many different pockets of paradise can open before this whole planet is dancing with them? The greater the degree to which we unlock the otherworld in our hearts, the utopia we sense just beyond the eye’s ray, the more of heaven there is to go around, and the more those glimmering lands begin to bump up against one another, fashioning beautiful doors and passageways between, until the fairy mound opens wide and the hidden realms coincide with this one.
Artist Katie Benn made the most perfect piece, like a one-sentence poem that I think of often, with the text “Don’t you love people that are like a weird little secret door?” It matters that you nurture your spiritual life so that you can be like a weird little secret door that opens into an enclosure that’s bigger on the inside than it appears on the outside. So you can open life for everyone around you when they can’t do it for themselves. Even when they can, isn’t it just brilliant that you do it differently? I think so.
Remember the 1911 children’s book The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett? I was given this book by my Grandma when I was little (thank you, Grandma Mary), and I read it and I hardly recall the plot at all now. What I do remember is that after I read it, the book sat for a decade on the shelf, a luminous talisman flashing a message to my inner eye, because its title is already a whole story, already a mystical transmission. THE SECRET GARDEN. YES! The Secret Garden says that the goodness in life is a growing, flowering, soft and nourishing thing. You might not know it’s there, and then there is is. There may be a war, there may be brick walls and there are surely brambles and then, surprise, there’s A WHOLE (frilly, Victorian, magical, healing) GARDEN somewhere nearby, only misplaced for a time.
Little girls and boys know there’s a secret garden. That’s why they are always digging around looking for keys. That’s why they introduce themselves to everyone they encounter because hey, you never know what secret door the next kid might have the goods on. The secret-garden-as-metaphysics says that resistance doesn’t always have to be resistant, it says that sometimes resistance is dwelling in peace and wonder and unnecessary beauty. Maybe it doesn’t even go that far. Maybe the secret garden says resistance is simply a willingness to believe in the possibility of dwelling in peace and wonder and unnecessary beauty. Resistance is losing track of time on a walk, or while playing an instrument. Resistance is picnics on the grass and surprising friendships and glorying in the fleeting, fragrant, tenderest spring flowers.
The secret of the secret garden is that it is never far away. You can find it by listening carefully to your own intuition, or inquiring sincerely into somebody else’s. Your wonder makes you a walking utopia. You carry the key and the garden both. And the bastards will never find where you hid them because they can’t begin to imagine looking in the direction of hope. May you remember the secret garden today, and many times over in the days to come. Amen.
Some things that have been interesting me lately:
Incredibly, wonderfully, the well-loved teacher/intuitive/herbalist
has started a podcast called Remember Why You Are Here. In the second episode, which is an intuitive reading about the year ahead, she mentions a meditation wherein you picture the abyss and see what appears in it. I’ve been experimenting with this as a means of accessing intuition lately and it has been fascinating!The Druid Craft Tarot: My partner has this tarot deck, and I have been using it since I arrived here in the UK, to inspiring effect. I love Gorman’s positive approach to traditionally negatively-associated cards, and the illustrations are very engaging. I especially appreciate that not all of the people pictured are extremely thin or young, as they often are in new age tarot decks.
Listening When Parts Speak — this book has been my first instroduction to the therapeutic approach called Internal Family Systems or “parts work,” and with a focus on ancestral connection, it’s suitably woo for me. Since I started listening to the audio book I have had several flashes of insight and a greater sense of agency in how I relate to my own inner workings. I haven’t finished reading it but I recommend it just the same.
Thank you for being here! A reminder that Wonder Club, my devotional course on Saints for the Christian-ambivalent etc, begins in a week, on March 17th. I would love it if you joined me there! This course will be a beautiful way to anchor your spiritual practice in reclaimed wildness and wonder the coming months, if it calls to you. Those who join will receive eight sets of audio and video recordings in their inbox between mid-March and June (and the opportunity to join calls live, if you wish). You can listen in the car on the way to work, walking in the woods, or while doing the dishes on a Tuesday night. This is the kind of course I love to take myself, a mystical yet supportive container that asks nothing of you but interest. Needless to say, I am very excited for Wonder Club!
Love,
Danica
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