27. Oh my wild God!

As I was brushing my teeth on a recent Friday morning, I noticed a ladybug in the sink.
She was on her back,  her little leg kicking madly into the air in her effort to right herself. I felt a pang of love at the sight of her mighty struggle for survival. I grabbed a tissue, held it near her, and helped her flip onto it.
I found myself talking soothingly to her, letting her know that it must be terrifying to have some unknown force literally flip your body with the flick of an unseen finger.
Don’t worry, little one, I said quietly. I’m here to help. You’re not alone.
I transferred her to a sunny windowsill, wished her well, and went on with my day.
Later that day, I realized that my experience of the Great Mystery has been a lot like what this little ladybug must have experienced.
When I hit rock bottom again and again in those hard months and years, flipped onto my back and waving my arms and legs, desperately trying to right myself, an unseen presence kept flipping me off my back, guiding me onto exactly the right “tissue” at the right time, and then gently placing me on a sunny windowsill, all the while whispering gentle words of encouragement in my ear.
Encouragement that sounded a lot like “Don’t worry, little one. I’m here to help. You’re not alone.”

It’s not that I believe in God. It’s that I can no longer not believe in God.

Not that God is the right word.

As you know, dear one, I like to refer to the divine as the Great Mystery, or simply the GM. Or sometimes Bella. I don’t think they (or she) care one whit what name I use. So I choose ones that feel expansive, unburdened by millennia of shitty history.

Names aside, I’m ready to put words to—or at least try to put words to—what I’ve experienced. I shared with you in the last chapter that it might be a wild ride and that it’s downright scary for me to claim it, put it out into the world in all its wildness.

But I’m ready, so today’s the day.

But first, a little look back on where I started and how I got here.

I started my life as a full-blown skeptic. An atheist even. I was an academic, an intellectual and I had to see it, touch it, and analyze it (and preferably read about it) to believe it. I truly thought this was a material world and that what you see is what you get.

I didn’t see God. I didn’t see evidence for God. So I didn’t believe in God. Period.

Then, sometime in the hectic, exhausting days of small children and sleeplessness, I was desperate and couldn’t hold everything on my own. I turned to mysticism and became a spiritual seeker. I experienced my own inner expansiveness for the first time. I opened up to insight, guidance, and love that were much more than mine, much more than me.

I still didn’t believe in God in any traditional sense. What I believed in was more like a quantum field, an underlying cosmic soup, full of love, beauty, and intelligence that gives rise to everything. But there was nothing personal or relational about this cosmic soup. It was more like the underlying rules of the cosmos that science was only just beginning to reveal. But it certainly wasn’t something that cared about me personally or took any interest in my life.

It was a spiritual orientation that kept me safe from being too woo-woo or too unscientific. It let me keep my armor and defend my nascent spirituality as perfectly “reasonable,” all the while orienting me to a higher power that made my life a whole lot better.

I played it nice and safe. Good for me.

Starting on the morning of January 2, 2020, the GM decided enough was enough. She was having none of my safe, lazy, divine experience. So had her way with me. She knocked me down, took me to the depths, stripped me of all my defenses. And over the next six years, she offered me experience after experience that challenged everything I thought I knew.

So here I am, these many years and heaps of both agony and ecstasy later, ready to share what she showed me. It feels overwhelming to corral into words or into any kind of order, so I turned it into a numbered list. A little containment to keep me safe in wild territory. Which makes me laugh.

Laughter aside, and without further ado, here goes…

1. When both my body and my psyche were so broken that I was barely recognizable, I came face-to-face with a part of me that was whole, untouched by all the shit I was going through. Is that part my soul? Or my Self with a capital S, the essence of me that is the same essence in everyone? A little piece of God?

   I don’t know. I just know I experienced it, and I know it’s there, under all the muck of me. No matter what. Which means that it’s there under the muck of everything. And everyone. No matter what.

   Which is the single greatest source of relief and hope I’ve ever felt.
   

2. I had an experience of being a co-creator of my life and was stunned to learn how much my thoughts and my prayers matter, how terrifyingly powerful they can be, especially when I express them as healthy, joyful wants rather than hopes for avoiding hard things.

   I also know I’m only a co-creator, and that the GM has plans for me and for the world that will happen whether I like it or not—and no matter how much I hope and pray. This world is as much about chaos and suffering as it is about peace, love, and wonder, so there’s no avoiding the mess.

   Shit’s going to happen. Period.

   Thus, the co-creation. It’s as if my experience of life is some kind of simulation where my choices matter and I have some agency, but I’m clearly not in charge of how it’s designed or of the big picture of what it’s all about or where it’s headed.
   

3. Surrendering to the Great Mystery with a wide-open heart opened me up to serendipities, miracles, guidance, and inspiration that make my life luminous even when it’s hard, messy, and inevitably full of suffering. And I don’t need to understand how any of it works to let the luminous find me and flow through me.

4. I have had extraordinary—and I mean that quite literally—experiences with my horses, with the forests, with my own art, with departed loved ones, and with animal communication that leave me speechless and absolutely certain that I have no idea how this world works and that it is far more wild and wondrous than I thought.

   Note #1: Dear one, it’s beyond the scope of this memoir to share the details of these experiences, but they will definitely be the focus of my ongoing shares here on Substack after I finish this memoir. I’m excited to share some of the wildness with you.
   

5. My experiences have meant that I’m open to all sorts of crazy goings-on that I would have once dismissed as ridiculous: telepathy, spirit guides, other dimensions, distance communication and distance healing; not to mention mysterious guidance from the divine communicated in whispers (or sometimes yells) that come through animals, through the world wide web and the wood wide web, through books (holy or otherwise), through Tarot cards, and communications from lost loved ones, human or not. Through anything at all, really.

   Note #2: Being open is not the same as believing. It’s simply being curious and knowing that I don’t know enough to dismiss anything out of hand. There’s a place for healthy skepticism, and there’s a place for curiosity and openness. They are not mutually exclusive, and I wish hard-core skeptics (i.e., scientists and academics, including me) might chill out, get off their high horses, and recognize how wild and unknowable this world really is. And I wish new-age spiritualists might foster a little healthy skepticism and remember just how important evidence, data, and science really are to this whole human project. There’s a healthy middle where science matters, evidence matters, AND the world is wacky and wondrous, and it makes a lot of sense to stay curious and open about what’s possible.
   

6. And now, dear one, on to the wildest part of what I want to share…

   When we talk about the divine, whether in religious or spiritual terms, we often talk about peace and unconditional love. We talk about contemplation, quiet, and meditation. We talk about all that is peaceful, good and joyful. Which makes perfect sense, because all that matters. It matters a lot.
   

   But there’s another side of the divine we don’t talk about enough: the wild, untamed, fierce side of the divine. Because my experience is also this: whenever I let myself go and truly allow the Great Mystery to flow through me, I feel that there’s a great wildness at play.
   

   
   It feels like my body is somehow more “turned on” to life. I feel it in my art, dancing, writing, and my relationship to the more-than-human world. It’s a fully embodied sensuality that invites great pleasure in ordinary, everyday things. Not pleasure as an idea, not pleasure in my head, but an actual physical pleasure. Sometimes that pleasure even peaks in what I call a wondergasm (see chapter 24), which is pretty darn awesome.

   But that’s not all. It’s not just sensuality. It’s also sexuality.
   

   It has meant a greater (dare I be bold and say far greater?) capacity for sexual pleasure. And sexual power. It’s a wild, untamed energy that grows stronger the more I let it in. It’s earthy, elemental, and raw in a way that leaves me with no doubt that it is as much a part of the divine undercurrent as peace and love.
   

   It’s wild. It’s creative. It’s powerful.

   And it’s definitely feminine.

   Dear one. I finally get it. I finally get why the divine feminine was systematically oppressed with such vehemence for millennia, why it was scrubbed out of our story, scrubbed out of our collective consciousness in such a deliberate, violent way, especially in the Western world and by the Judeo-Christian religions.

   I finally get how it makes sense that women and women’s bodies were the target of that scrubbing out and why we have been burned, caged, stoned, and beaten into submission in a way that has long baffled me. I get why witches (i.e. intuitive women deeply connected to the natural world and to the embodied power of the divine feminine) were relentlessly hunted down and literally burned to bits.

   I’m not baffled anymore. I finally get it that it was always about fear.

   Because every time I get even the tiniest taste of that wildness, I’m floored by its power, but it’s uncontrollable creative wildness. It’s thrilling. But also overwhelming. Sometimes even scary.
   

   You can’t oppress and dominate people (men or women) in the flow of that energy, that wild power. Which is terribly inconvenient if your aim is power, oppression, and domination.
   

   What still stuns me is how successful the scrubbing out really was. How God was stripped of the power of the feminine—and the power of the healthy masculine, but that’s a story for another time—and corralled into a box, a shape, a narrative that keeps us small. How we were stripped of the power of the feminine and corralled into a box, a shape, a narrative that keeps us small.

   We’ve been kept in the dark about the power of our bodies to be a direct conduit to the divine, a direct conduit to our own extraordinary, embodied power. Which has kept us tame. Good. Controllable.

   I finally get it, and I’m stunned by it. Stunned, angered, and outraged. But also hopeful.

   Because we are so clearly reclaiming it. Ot at least starting to.

   I would say it’s about time.

   Note #3: Religion has failed spectacularly at many things. The one thing that still matters, the baby we might want to keep if we throw out the bathwater, is that we’re not meant to be islands in the storms of life. And we’re not meant to explore our spiritual nature and this mysterious world on our own. We’re wired for connection and community. We need support, mentorship and accountability. Religion has long provided these things and rightly so. So, to be clear, I’m not suggesting there’s no role of religion in the human experience. Not at all. That said, I have no idea if it’s possible to reclaim the wildness that is our birthright in the midst of the very institutions that beat it out of us. I have no idea how we reclaim the embodied wildness of the divine feminine while sitting in pews bathed in the words he, father, lord. I won’t even get into the word sin and the legacy of shame its (mistaken) interpretation has showered us with. I know there are folks out there who have better answers to these questions than I do, so I’ll look to our collective intelligence and collective wisdom to carry that conversation.

Dear one, that’s it! I’ve come to the end of my little list!
These are the experiences at the heart of my adventure, at the heart of my alchemy. The experiences that leave me speechless, stunned, amazed, and saying over and over again…

Oh my wild god!

Dancer, mover
shaker, creator
birther, lover
giver of life.
She, he, they.
Maybe s/he.
Beyond our myopic categories
and myopic pronouns
they continue
dancing, moving
shaking, creating
birthing, loving
and giving life.
They. The wild ones.
Waiting for us to wake up,
shed the shame
love our bodies
love this world.
Not with some of ourselves
not just with our hearts and our heads
but with muscle and sinew,
skin and bone.
With all of our selves.
With all of us.

If you’re new here, welcome!

However you made your way here, I’m grateful you found me and happy to have you pop into my little world, whether it’s for a brief visit or a longer hangout around my campfire.

Accidental Alchemy is a serial memoir, so if you’re curious and have the time, I recommend starting with the Prologue and reading chapters in order for the full experience. You can access all chapters on my Substack homepage.

For the best reading experience, I recommend reading in a browser and on a larger screen. It makes it easier to enjoy the art and navigate through the chapters with the buttons at the bottom of each post.

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PS.. All art and poetry included in this memoir are my own unless I specifically credit another author or artist.