NDE

I can never sleep before I travel. Something about being propelled through the air feels mighty unnatural. Airports- I can deal with. Irrefutable proof of bots. The way people move at airports is the way I have learned to go about life. With a hurried urgency and stifled precision. The sneaking suspicion that one might be forgetting something. But planes are forever odd. 

I lugged my shit through the jungle, wondering how much foreign stimulus it would take to distract me from the resounding grief pumping through my chest. What new amalgamation of prayers it’ll take for me to stop seeing two sides of a timeline turned down.  My friends have been trying to dance the pain out of me like medic ballerinas. I figure if I get enough physical traction, land-width, space, I can shake my reality like an etch a sketch. Reconfigure and stop the synchronicities. 

The Mayans believed that Playa Del Carmen was an entrance to the Underworld. Not Heaven or Hell, but a womb. A meeting place for the dwellers of earth and the divine, somewhere we originated from. It's muddy hollows lead to underground cities of deep sinkholes, caves miles beneath the jungle of the River Maya. These caverns boast massive rooms of stalactite statues and high ceilings, chiming silver pools unsteadily shaded by limestone chandeliers. These underground waters, cenotes, were said to have healing properties. 

We stayed in a gated community. A guarded casita by the sea, beachfront. There were ruins in our backyard that no one could tell me about. 

 The sand, as fine as granulated sugar, sprinkled the streets in dust. The town is built around trees that seem to puzzle in and out of clay structures, loping through the horizon in an impossible green. Every few hours , a sporadic violent rain will pour out on the streets, commanding brief reprieve from the humidity. There were colorful avenues packed with vendors of ceramic animals, painted skulls and sweet milks. The people there have wide kind eyes, warm faces. The land, the land had a heart beat of it's own. With heavy unresolution.  I hear stories about cartels that use witches, about the suppression of ancient medicine. Time seems to warp and distort, twirling alongside the hungry vines that grove above and below me. These highways of vines wire out in front of us, stitching ancient maps. Their fat trunks bear witness to invisible atrocities. Their mangled fingers point downwards, gesturing towards it's caves.

I can’t tell if it's the memory of sacrifice. Perhaps it’s the general unsettled hum of ancient magic suppressed. But I cry when I get there. I cry because there are ruins in our backyard and no one can tell me what happened . I cry because I don’t feel numbed by electricity and my gut is like an empty cup. I am a vessel for something. I am grieving, but I am not certain what. There were ruins in our backyard.

 After the initial euphoria of landing in strange terrain disappeared, the air got sticky. Sickly sweet. I have fanned enough of myself out to blend into the trees. I am like a sensitive Victorian boy who hasn’t seen the light of day. I get stung by a bee, quickly learn I am allergic. My gut, only recently accustomed to battling American parasites, is rebelling. I get food poisoning. I logically get a tattoo. My sensitivity hardly annoys me. At this point, it's become an irrefutable skill that has led me to uncover many valuable mysteries- but here, in this alien landscape- I am overwhelmed. I am moving through gradients, different perceptions of reality. Simplified almost. Things feel psychedelically distilled, alive, and yet ambient. The energy is loud, and I keep hearing myself say:

“The land is yelling.”

“There is grief here.”

Like the weirdest bitch you ever invited on vacation.

I couldn’t tell you what triggered it, beside the obvious dehydration and hives, but I seized. I keeled over on the pavement. Eyes rolling back in my head. Left my body. Twice. 

I seemed ready to leave 3D reality. A little too eager. I have always felt was only half captured by my senses. I  greeted an amorphous realm, strange but familiar. My ancestors were there. It was not heaven. Some liminal space. I could only make out jaguars. Lights. I had a dialogue about it not being time, and felt myself reluctantly return to my body.

The hard part.

I project back to my own body, all damp and matted, and Jose is crying over me. I remember duality.  I have to remember who I am for an irritating second, a second that stretches out for eternity. I thought I might die that night. For hours I am shivering, vomiting.  I feel like I am dialoguing with God. 

I am explaining, in this infantile state, that this gift is ridiculous, impractical and overwhelming. I would like to be regular- now. Why put the psychic irritants of a character like Madam Blavaskty tucked away in the body of a Rock Stars Wife. I would like to be blissfully unaware now.

I am lovingly assured that this is not an option. That the physical is just as sacred as the non physical. I go through some sort of life review while I am awake, driving my consciousness like a ship to certain questions and themes. I ultimately conclude that most transient things- thoughts, beliefs, ideas- are temporal. I need to stop moving like I am at the fucking airport. I need to be unwavering about my love and truth.

There are ruins in the backyard. It takes a few days, but we learn they were ports to Ixchel, the Mayan goddess of War and Fertility. Her animal is a Jaguar. Xaman-Há, whose name means “Northern Water,” was the ruin. The most important departure point for pilgrimages made to keep both the land and woman fertile. Ixchel was celebrated by rituals of dehydration and dance, an effortless lethargy I have already unknowingly practiced in her favor.

The ancients would evade sleep and swim in oceans, deliberate in their efforts to simulate a seizure as it was considered a visit from God.

I am careful not to underestimate the monstrosity of goddesses and ghosts when ages are misrepresented. The deception of false history makes them louder. Makes it harder to determine, harder to process. And what isn’t felt is always repeated . These thirsting Gods with ancient technology and primordial magic seem to clamor along with me. Their magic was stolen and called governance. 

A few days pass, and I am renewed, catapulting above the jungle, swimming through mud rivers and crossing chiming silver pools. Leaving my sorrows in hollows in the earth. I meet a Medicine Woman, with silver hair and the demeanor of a child. We sit beside a cenote, the water buzzing brilliantly and batting off the shapely vines. She tells me to “drink more water” She traces me with feathers and I feel myself come back. I bathe in volcanic rock. I let her know that I feel stifled by the psychic stuff. She laughs and says shes glad I brought it up. We breathe. She tells me I am not unlike her. Tells me, I am allowed to have fun. My medicine comes from the heart. I need to dance daily. That I am from a tribe of warriors.  

She asks me if I have questions and I don’t. I thought about asking about the soulmate stuff, but I didn’t- and she points to a blue dragonfly that had been sitting on my hand. I don’t need to tirelessly search for answers, because they seem to find me.

Encino House

I am cocooned by the coven in Encino. Sitting poolside in tiny string bikinis, under the gazebo, playing with grass. I am toying with my perception again. My naked chest beating out massive beads of sweat, like hot wax. I have been a million people this summer. I nestle my knuckles into the dirt and wonder if the earth is as angry as I am. The valley is a sulky teenage girl. I much prefer Louisiana, its heavy antiquation, it's feral feminine. A wet warrioress with poisonous creatures and rabid aliveness. An impressive reminder that sacred things should not be toyed with. 

I was born for the greatness of a singular love, and more anonymity than I have gotten. I was made for the richness of monogamy, of childbirth, born to learn the quirks and intricacies of one man and never several. To profess brave omissions in a terribly dishonest world, to study someones dimensions with the diligence and patience of a devotee. In moments of deep introspection, God speaks to me with crystalline clarity, in a non-language. A nudge. Tells me that I am meant to become an ouroboros of myself first. That I can only get what I give. 

It's not an ideal time for dating. Astrologically. The boys have become bitches. Distracted. I tell myself, don’t dim down your knowing, that prehistoric pain is rising up through the meridians of the earth, and the men will not be the first to process it. We can’t skip this process, this time. There is no jumping the gun, no overlooking this sacred mass as it unearths itself. You can’t just catapult headfirst into someone elses process- it will fester over, and become codependency. If you stay in that toxic love, it will sour and boil, brew into something bad. Swallow you and spit you back out.

I am nauseated by the sticky, codependency I used to fester in. 

If you are longing for someone elses timeline, you are not doing it right. I used to only measure time in the beats between breaths of old lovers, used to count moments by the gestation between romantic encounters. Wounds seeking wounds that grooved and fit into each other. I have new definitions for love. Refined. Boundaried.

There's a reshuffling transpiring. A recalibration. A pole shift. Stay finely attuned to the omissions your subconscious is making, call in God. Cast out that hungry ghost. Seal and protect. Everyones grief is poking out of them, like blue radiation.  An aurora borealis of irresolution. It hurts to look at, to see it in the hollows of their chests, the mournful shadows in their eyes.  It comes in these harsh waves, cycles. Some people try to coat it in noise, moving dully through surrounding tornadoes of cleverly disguised pain. I have to be better at retracting and stifling through what's mine and what isn't.  

There are people I am connected to like impenetrable arteries, impressing themselves down on the earth, curving cleverly through time and space. We are the same. Some people speak without words. Some people see more than others.

Lament of The Legendary

Everything is starkly obvious here, in LA. A demonic garden of fluorescent lights, haunted by beasts of the night, bitter women, broken boys. The injured earth rings with invisible songs, it's starry pavements sing laments of the legendary. Disguise your enthusiasm. Try and come up with a more digestible, finite definition of love. And you can survive. 

I say I am ready to leave LA, and I never do, it's sticky air and dust clouds shackle me to it’s grids, weave me in and out of it's dimensions. Leaving me to make sense of a sacred, unfinished map. A tapestry, a holy war. Unconsciousness fucking the conscious. Bottish bretherin and their plastic consorts. Mystics and their mundane counterparts. In the delirium of the heat, I am almost thoughtless. Pondering group chats and chastity, genetic engineering, fake boobs and faker weather. 

It's safer for everyone if women like me don't think. Our thoughts become things with a lethal quickness. Charged items--prone to infecting or blessing everything in our strange spheres. In the delirium of the heat, I am thoughtless. Just a feeling. Amorphous . Sending rhythms through the canyon. 

I follow orchards of hawks and get on a metal bird. Fly away, to a convent in New Orleans. Armed with found feathers and blistered feet, beating to the assertive hum of diabolical curiosity. I’ve been politer than I could have been. I pocketed my pain, tidied it away.  I went to five churches, four bars, three hoodoo apothecaries. Two parks. The banks of the Mississippii. Three airports. Everyone was looking for the same thing.

<3

I laid on my stomach in the forest. Paced backwards and forwards, barefoot on terra firma. Stagnated in hot springs, waiting for the salt to exfoliate my skin, til my spirit returns intact. Made promises to the ocean. Asked it to swallow my commitment fears. Make me more digestible, manageable. No more half spent dreams. No hurried, unfinished love affairs. No half-anythings. 

I am getting younger. I want less responsibility, instead, to be surrounded by comfort and attention.

I used to be able to psychically surpass life's fragility, to rely on my capacity for apocalyptic vengeance, a hatred- for men, for sterile complacency, for structure. These parts of myself are softening. I can’t carry them.

Tell me about the men in your lineage. Sprawl me out like a map of prehistoric dimensions, return to your muscle memory of paradise, of Eden, before rights and wrongs. Change me. Charge me up. Reassemble my contents, invade my continents, memorize my body. Stare at me til I am invisible. Marry me to foreign perceptions.

I laid on my stomach in the forest. Paced backwards and forwards, barefoot on terra firma. Stagnated in hot springs, waiting for the salt to exfoliate my skin, til my spirit returns intact. Made promises to the ocean. Asked it to swallow my commitment fears. Make me more digestible, manageable. No more half spent dreams. No hurried, unfinished love affairs. No half-anythings. 

I am getting younger. I want less responsibility, instead, to be surrounded by comfort and attention.

I used to be able to psychically surpass life's fragility, to rely on my capacity for apocalyptic vengeance, a hatred- for men, for sterile complacency, for structure. These parts of myself are softening. I can’t carry them.

Tell me about the men in your lineage. Sprawl me out like a map of prehistoric dimensions, return me to your muscle memory of paradise, of Eden. Before rights and wrongs, guilt and shame. Change me. Shape me. Charge me up. Reassemble my contents, invade my continents, memorize my body. Stare at me til I am invisible. Marry me to foreign perceptions.

To be beautiful, you have to be seen. To be seen means you are subject to a thousand wounded perceptions.

And to be seen is to be hunted.

If you are to be hunted, you need to remember to stay swift, fast, impenetrable. Impossible to fully learn and retain. You need to exist just enough to be on the verge of disappearing. Like all ephemeral, temporary beautiful things. Natural anomalies. A non replicable sky. The sea. Effervescent. Impossible to hold.  

Never too tangible and just beyond reach. 

I let myself be handled just a moment too long, and it shattered me kaleidoscopically. Expanded me, wove me to you- to the point that your fabric is etched into every peripheral of my reality. I see you in myself sometimes and it hits me in the chest, with a sporadic celestial nausea. Like having a heart outside of my body.

I have velvet green bedding, and my heart expands the corners of this strange city. Through the imported palm trees, hibiscus, purple twilight bougainvillea. The lakes, deer and coyotes. I called back my light, swore to stay on my own timeline. Forgave. My body felt radiant again, like I had swallowed orange light.

The next time I saw you, you looked grey, half satiated. Beautiful as always, but foreign. When you walked away, hurting, I could feel it for three blocks.

Like having a heart outside of my body.

This absurd, non-linear timeline procured a stain on my soul. In the privacy of my bedroom I turn it out and inspect it, like a strange jewel, glimmering with unresolution.

Haze can be safer than the kaleidoscopic.

I write notes about you in my phone I will never publish. I read my grievances to the ether. I pray to the trees. I know I’m bad, ephemeral, changing, obscene. There was so much you never learned, so much you still don’t know. You made assumptions that hurt. I am trying to exist, cooly, with a foot in some private Otherworld. Trying to stay neutral and forgive myself for trying to reconcile the sacred and mundane.

Beltane

Everytime I go to type your name I get held back, like a prayer I have been conditioned to swallow.

Everytime I think your name the earth beneath me tilts, a silent resonance shuffling through layers of the earth. They say places hold memory.  I feel like if I think about you too often you’ll feel it, or sense it, or worse- hate it. I try and curtail my longing, an operate under the belief that you are just as aware as me. Fluent in etheric, invisible smoke signals. 

There is no room for intellect in this business. We are in the business of trusting resonance over logic, following psychic nudges to places that feel like home. Hunting truth. When did you give up?

I have learned how to take possession of my own timeline, by making myself big- I stretch my field far across the land. I make myself massive- in an opalic bubble that stretches- churns and crashes into the caves of Malibu, presses deep and thick into the mycelium networks all the way through the forests of Los Angeles Crest, encompassing everything. I make my timeline sensual, erotically innocent. I fill it with pretty things to disguise the void. I have eaten at all the beautiful restaurants. Charmed my way through every variation of “appropriate” man.

You can’t fake resonance. Resonance hits you hard in the heart and it procures stains on the soul that can never be eradictated. I’ve tried. Replace, Rinse, Repeat.

 and now I learn to hold that delicate void empty, sit with it, nurse it. Befriend it. Be soft spoken to it.

I don’t need you to offer me any more than what you have already, even on your worst day.

Ode to Scotland

Scotland was home before I arrived. The bones of my ancestors were sown into the skin of the soil, sang in octaves of wind, fanned through birch, alder and hawthorn.  I felt them strike me with a diligent rhythm, a primordial urgency. A call to be heeded in halos of golden light that skimmed aisles of plush soil pathways. 

Beckoning, insisting, 

These colossal cathedrals of trees. 

I listened. I listened. I listened.
Variants of green spraying through leaves in champagne prisms of shadow, delicately threaded through the morning ether. This land let me incubate like a womb, let me roll through mossy troths and moors freckled with dew and silver lichen. I held the secrets of hollow tree trunks and mushroom caves, sat by lochs and cried into creeks. Everything was animated, everything was alive. Singing. Vibrant in plush beds of sprouting emerald, dusted with wild flowers and yellow cacti that smelled like coconut.

It is the unsettling bridge between seasons, flickering boldly with the spark of probabilities. The singing wind carries an air of change. 

The summer sun begins to shorten, leaving a shading of uncertainty across the land. I am on the brink of immense change and my body has recognized it before it has arrived.

I am in Threshold Space, preparing to turn to Los Angeles,  tethered to a past that has lost is allure and glamor. 

I speculate all the things I could have done and said in my time here, and decide everything is as it should be.

I vow to leave parts of myself suspended in the Scottish highlands, safely tucked in these groves of green, right before dusk.

 In solitude but woven into everything.

With the land as my only witness,  

I vow to remain equal parts wild and pure, 

wild and pure and untarnished, 

just like the Scottish highlands.