OLD TRIP: Beltane (Observed)
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Yesterday was a trip day. I think of it as Beltane (observed).
I hadn't slept the night before; I was up literally all night, writing. I have been getting this lately, and I'm rejoicing so much to feel the creative energy flowing through my hands again after a decade of drought, that I'm suffering through it as long as I can get enough weekday sleep to manage at work. And I hadn't eaten. So, I was already a little weird - I didn't feel bad, but I felt a little floaty and disconnected. I needed breakfast and a long nap if I wanted to feel ordinary. If I wanted to feel NON-ordinary? I was in just the right place.
Then I walked the dogs. After I got back, the show began. With lemon, the come-up is fairly rapid; I went from "I feel a little funny" to "the fence has patterns of fur that remind me of the velvety inner hind-wing of a long-tailed iridescent Brazilian Skipper butterfly," and they were shifting back and forth from being random patterns, to being deer and young leaping women, in the way that knots in wood become faces, but a lot less precise.
And I started basically watching the Universe unfold itself to me. I just watched, as butterflies floated through the flowers, birds wheeled overhead, hummingbirds zipped and chirped through the trees arguing over the rights to the feeder. It was MAGICAL. It was easily the most visually beautiful trip I've experienced so far, and probably in the top five most beautiful things I've seen in my life.
I talk when I trip. Sometimes I can manage to quiet my mouth and just watch, and I did some of that, but for the most part I relate to the world with words, and I talked. I talked to Husband about how my Granddad gardened, keeping notes on his harvests and reporting to the A&M Experimental Gardens program about his crops, so that they could know what grew well in which counties in Texas. I talked about the various species of things that were floating and zooming and crawling through the yard, and how amazing it was to me that the little bits of cottonwood fluff floating through the air each contained a seed that would probably take a thousand to make a gram, and each seed was fully capable of becoming a sixty-foot tall tree weighing tons. I kind of wear Husband out when I do this, because I'm already pretty explain-y in normal life, and when I'm seeing ALL THIS AMAZING STUFF, it just doesn't stop. My mouth is a river of wonder, and I have to tell it.
I started talking to my phone, trying to record my impressions. I had a lot of frustration, because I kept filling up the memory - I have lots of photos and video of things on my phone, plus audiobooks, and I was up against the edge of what it could store, but I was having just enough visual distortion that I could manage to push the record button, but could not figure out how to find the file folders and delete old audiobooks.
I watched wheeling and dancing shapes and lines in the air, overlaid on the cloudless sky and crawling across the surface of every single thing my eyes fell on. It reminded me of my former partner DYK's portrait of JM, how she painted the lines around him that she saw when he was thinking math. I had never seen this before; I saw it.
And at one point, talking to the phone's camera, I said, "This is the mystery. This is God happening, and it feels AMAZING, and the world is literally vibrating into shape, second to second, and there's no way to teach it, there's no way to talk through it, there's no way to explain it. But it's happening in the garden. And the difference with the mushrooms, is the difference between 'God is in the garden; go and seek him there,' and 'God is in the garden RIGHT NOW, and it is happening TO YOU, and it strikes you like lightning through the ground, and you're in the middle of it. And Christian religion has no way to account for that."
And it went on like this for about another hour or so, and then Husband brought me grapes and some juice with ice, and I had him dial my phone because I couldn't focus on it enough to see the buttons because the sky was WHEELING with multicolored shapes, translucent but colored like a cross between pale beadwork and soap bubble pinks and blues, and it was fractal geometry, and it really did feel like I was seeing the sketch lines that underpin the basic forces of things like gravity and the motion of wind. Everything left trails. Butterflies would whirl through in brilliant bursts of color, golden and orange and iridescent blue-black. I can name all their species, and some of them I actually did, but I also had to ask Husband in a couple of cases if they were really there, and mostly they were. A huge spiny lizard came across the pavement, and didn't walk up my leg or anything, but got within a few feet of me, and regarded me with those bizarre dinosaur eyes, and I had to talk about how amazed I was when I first learned about their EYE BONES, that one time when I took super-close photos and had to spend hours studying to learn more about sclerotic rings. Husband dialed my friend ED, and we talked for probably... two hours? Maybe? I lost all track of time. Actually, now that I have all my brains back in my head, I can check my phone and see that it was an hour and forty seven minutes.
I talked with E about how her path is so like mine, and although we're different in some ways - her personal priesthood of craft was shaped by the hills and hollers of Appalachia, and mine by the rolling prairies of Kansas, but we have very similar ways of wanting to know and understand and make and do. I had a Grandma who made the best biscuits in an old gas stove that had marks instead of numbers on the dial; hers was a Granny who made soda biscuits that she has only recently managed to perfect herself and reclaim from memory to lay on the table. We both go into places of unknowing and try to bring back some weird beautiful thing and share it - a song, a way of making yarn, a tool for drawing, a weaving pattern - and we both have a gift of being able to share those things with others, to speak and to teach and to write. She put a spoon in my hands back in the mid to late nineties and taught me how to make soap. She taught me to gather pears from the tree there and make vinegar with the wild yeasts that bloomed on their skin. I taught her to make silk and to tablet weave.
I talked with her about my friend IL, who has a Latino heritage that I will never fully understand, but I see him as another one of this same tribe of what I still need to find a right word for - we're not shamans, per se, we're not witches in any traditional sense, we're not purely scholars, and priests is the only word I can think of, but it implies so much hidebound thinking and a history of institutional violence... but if I think of priesthood in more of a drums-in-the-jungle sense and less of a citadel-in-the-castle sense, it is easier.
I have monarch butterflies in common with IL. When I was growing up in Kansas, there was one year that a butterfly somehow failed to migrate; I don't remember what was wrong with it, but I remember gathering thistles and other things for it to nectar on, and I remember it making little flitting flights around the house, but it couldn't really go enough to get airborne. They fly back and forth in a massive exhalation of the planet's breath every year, going from the plains of North America to the mountains of Mexico, and the butterflies that I remember climbing up a ladder to watch from inside the green branches of the poplar trees that formed a windbreak in our back yard, would later fly down to Mexico and become the Catrinas in a Dia de los Muertos dance. IL's priesthood is a thing of storytelling and tribe-building, and he throws the most amazing orgies. I have discovered a freedom and a depth of sexual connection at his events that I had never known, and it has become another part of my own dance, a thing I am drawn to understand, to engage, to share, to teach. We are so scared, so ashamed, so repressed about our sexuality, especially growing up gay in the USA, and being able to shed that fear and shame and explore the bright and the dark sides of sex has been a deep and meaningful gift. I am a creature of words, and so for me it not only comes out in wanting to HAVE the experience, but in wanting to analyze it and then explain it to other people, and with a lot of this stuff, very few people write about it and even fewer gay men. Barbara Carellas, Finn Deerhart, Dossie Easton and Janet Hardy have been some of my guiding lights. I just realized - I think I may need to make some emails.
And I talked about the mycelial nature of connection - how the hyphal filament extends along a path, seeking nourishment and other like hyphae. I see it sometimes like a thread, sometimes like a water hose or a cable, and sometimes like a living serpent. I can handle the serpent, and I can tame it in a way that I can place it safely into someone else's hands and show them how to know it. And one of the most beautiful things about this journey, has been that there have been moments when I have heard something from one person, and even though I've NEVER DONE the obscure thing they are attempting, I have a connection, I've heard of it, I know a person. My network of fibers goes there. I haven't ever made persimmon tannin or used it for printing, but I know an exquisite craftsman living in an old farm house on a hillside in rural Japan who does it, and I can send you his email. I hosted a Japanese silk expert from Florida to teach a silk farmer from Rwanda about sericulture, as part of a program with a US university to help lift women out of poverty by teaching them business skills. I can hold the serpent in the middle, and bridge the space between those two strangers.
I do old, strange, forgotten things that NOBODY DOES. I have literally done with my own hands, things that I am fairly certain have been done by no other human hands. I haven't written that article yet, but I have worked ribbons with silk brocading on the front, and brocading in my own long hair with DIFFERENT WRITING on the back. It feels sacred, and it feels beautiful, and it feels f@cking DEEP. And I have had privileges and gifts that most people would never understand or even see, but which have rocked me to my core - like when the librarian came to our "Flowering of the Middle Ages" course in the honors program at U of H, and told us that we couldn't handle the books of the 1800's because they were printed on acidic paper that was made with a sulfur-based process and they crumbled to dust too easily, but that the REALLY old stuff, we would be allowed to handle - with gloves, and only in the special room, and only because they knew we were in the program - but I literally walked into the rare books room on the sixth floor at the library, and said, "Can you bring me anything before 1600?" and they DID, on a cart, and I sat there and made notes with my pencil on my paper pad, and I looked at manuscript initials illuminated in real lapis and real gold, and I looked at beautiful upright black Gothic Textura Quadrata written in Latin in a tiny book, which had then been glossed in Old English which I could only guess at, and then RE-glossed in Middle English in a Bastard Gothic hand, and one of the lines had a little pointing-finger drawing that defined some term as "The sole of the foote." The monks whose actual hands wrote the books with feather quills were all long gone before the Tudors founded their massive dynasty. I have in my personal library crumbling old books about silk, like a Letter from the Secretary of the Treasury, written in 1828 to encourage farmers to raise silk, and I mailed it to Ralph Griswold at the University of Arizona before he passed away, and he digitized it and mailed it safely back to me, and now it's in the digital archive at Handwoven. I've laid that road, brick by brick.
And then we went to the egret rookery at UTSW and looked at birds for an hour or so, and then went and ate Indian food, and then bought cases of mangoes and took them to ED and her husband's back yard and petted their dogs and looked at their beautiful old roses and talked about everything a little at a time as the sun set.
I don't think I've had a more perfect day.
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