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Musings on the root of personal beliefs

You are a thirteen-year-old girl. You don't believe in God, but you believe in music. You believe in it because it soothes your pain. Your little teenage heart was broken because you were abandoned, stranded in emotional exile by those who professed nothing but love for you.

**

How can I explain to you that all of the pain and beauty of existence begins and ends in every moment?

*

I am a woman and I am a man.
Divinity exists within me and could not exist without me.

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My own path to spiritual awakening

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I found my spirit in the blanketing glow of moonlight in my middle school bedroom
In the rustling of leaves in the trees at a state park
In the warm flickering of a single votive

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I am a solitary practitioner

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Crying to the moon.
Listening to the leaves.
Reading the streaks of shooting stars under the skies of Napa Valley
Dwarfed by the fairy tale fjords of Norway

*

When I think of my spirituality I think of tears and blood, moonlight and crashing waves, fjords and mountains and luminescent clouds in Norway, eating mushrooms and asking for rain to play in and getting it, synchronicity, dreams with foresight, shooting stars and the beating of bats wings, LSD on Long Island and the sky filling my mind, transcending space and time and life and death and worry, visions of a past life in the sediment of my cup of tea, chaos and freedom and purposeful puposelessness, no coincidences, understanding, compassion, silence, chemistry, wordless prayer.

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Lots and lots of tears have aroused the divine in me.

**

Nothing has to be perfect but sometimes it is.

Hollow

I was awoken tonight from a disturbing dream by a text message. I should have known better than to leave my ringer on before going to bed but if the alert on my phone hadn't done it, the dream very well might have. Like most of my upsetting dreams, it started out without any particularly disturbing images. I was revisiting old dwelling space, though there were new dwellers in my old space... inevitable and yet saddening. Somehow, I was transport from there to a remote village in Brazil. A woman was telling me how she and a lover had been caught together by a local renegade militia and he had been murdered. Apparently the group of sadistic soldiers had been terrorizing the countryside, murdering for the thrill and thriving off the terror of their victims. They had been growing in number, collecting a brutal army. Finally they attacked the village where I was, and chaos broke loose. No one would be spared if they were caught by the enemy. I did not know who I was, only that I was somehow embodied and was running for my life. I ran past a rape treatment center, and leprosy hospital, and other indications of the miserable lives of the villagers. Though I was an alien in my settings, I was no less at risk. It was like hell's minions were descending upon us all, indiscriminate and blood thirsty. I ran through the village, from one house to the next. Eventually I came upon a man armed with a sword. He appeared to be white, presumably American, and when I encountered him he said something that I took to be a quote from a kung-fu movie. Then he paused and said "All I can think is how hollow those words sound in the face of my own death." Then he told me to follow him and we ran out of the house, nearly running over another armed man, I think he had a semi-automatic rifle. The three of us crouched along the wall of a house across the way, and waited, for what I'm not sure. It might have been to fight our way out of the village alone, it might have been for other armed villagers to band together and challenge the militia. I can't say exactly, because it was just at that moment that my phone roused me from the dream.