I am writing my first blog since 2016 from a condo I've rented for the week with my family in a place I used to call home, the South Carolina coast. This time, it's Isle of Palms, one of the beaches of Charleston, the lowcountry city where I lived throughout my 20's and early 30's. And this time, it's just the three of us (including my husband and only son), not the larger extended family I'm used to sharing beach houses with each summer. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S., I was early to shut down my spiritual center in North Carolina and sequester in my home for the coming months. As an Enneagram 4, who thrives on the comforts of home and solitude, I'd say I was eager. Also, my self-preservation instincts and intuition were high; I felt this was going to be a "a thing" of greater magnitude than some around me were able to or willing to see at first. A month in, I was also vigorously looking for Air B & B's across the Carolinas that could feed my seemingly genetic need for sun and water together and a change of scene. And so it is.
As the days started to begin and end with an uncertainty more visceral than the usual cosmic uncertainty, I felt some of the threads to the identity that I was gripping come more loose. These threads lead to my role as the steadfast keeper of Light House Spiritual Center, first-time employer, spiritual teacher, busy healing facilitator, and loyal servant to the weekly interfaith Sunday services in my little community of approximately 40/50 active, regular attendees out of a list of around 120.
I had bought out my former business partner in a painful break-up the Spring prior to Covid-year and had experienced some personal, life-shaking losses and traumas in the early winter and late summer of the same year. (More on those later.) Truthfully, I was finally getting my bearings in grief recovery. But as I've learned on this self-awareness journey over the last couple decades, the nature of the threads we hold onto is that they don't always resist abrasion and aren't designed to. Threads wear down as a service to our evolutionary soul growth, and we are strongly urged by a loving universe to make adjustments to the tension that shows up in our life as a message, a call from beyond about some other way that we're needed now or will be soon. The tension that showed up for all of us was "The Pandemic". The call from beyond for me is an old refrain from a creative writing class I used to teach in my 20's to disenfranchised, often abused, pregnant girls living in the Florence Crittenton Home in downtown Charleston: "Tell your true stories."
At first glance, it's infinitely safer for me to not to tell my true stories. I could hide under the proverbial spiritual habit forever, but that's not the kind of spirituality that I believe in. The kind I believe in isn't on Instagram; it's unfiltered, like that first stalwart cigarette I smoked while tripping on acid in the woods of Appalachia at age 19. It's more accountable than some of the top layers of the new age, where seekers are constantly deferring to retrogrades, moon phases, star people, and stones they've read about on Google, often without doing the actual, deeper soul-work that comes to get all of us eventually. The spiritualty I live is a dance of shadow and light, one which may make those who have negated the emotional underworld as an aspect of light, itself, uncomfortable. For those who only want to look upon that which is obviously light, my spiritualty, with all of its unpolished, shady true stories, can be massively threatening to the identity a person has carefully cultivated. On the other hand, it has the potential to break open the hearts of those who are ready to meet or have already met their spiritual center, that pilot light that holds our true essence through it all, but which also includes the whole of the person.
So, at second glance, it's infinitely safer for me (and you) if I tell my true stories. Years ago when I had become accustomed to protecting myself from some of the terror and dysfunction of my past by being quiet about it and "private" online, I read something that said, "You are safer the more that you're seen." This made spiritual sense to me and brought me out of hiding. It raised the question, "What am I actually hiding from?" A power greater in them than the one that lives within me? No, not possible. We are only ever hiding from aspects of ourselves that we're afraid to meet, anyway. Once we stop running from that, we experience our innate freedom and true power and only defer to others in a state of student-mind, graciousness, or diplomacy. We no longer defer outside of us out of a disconnection with what lives within us, as us. We each see more clearly and become more clearly seen, and this keeps us out of the troubles of some of our earlier, painful learning curves. Just as America's favorite Christian hymn declares, "I once was blind, but now I see", seeing is at least half the battle.
I was in my 30's when I learned from Wayne Dyer that "sin" is simply defined as "turning away from our Source" or turning away from the light. To talk about the light side of spirituality, to truly help ourselves and other people, I believe that we have to brave talking about the hard won lessons that we met and continue to meet in the darkness and how there are no definitive lines separating the shades of spiritual experience. This means we have to take our spiritualty down from its pedestal where humanness has been extracted from it, where maybe it speaks in overly soft, contrived tones only, where it's a shining, golden trophy example of the laws of attraction, pridefully perfected. We have to locate the absolute saving grace of ordinary, everyday spirituality with all its farts and hiccups. After all, this is where angels are the most busy. This is where us spiritual beings learn about being human so that we can be more evolved beings and kinder humans. It's about having your boots (flip flops) on the ground, even if you're fixated on the heavens. It's what I would call a living spirituality.
As a spiritual act, I have a compulsion to discover and tell truths, even if only in stages that feel manageable. Not truths for the sake of a tell-all, but truths that insight "me too" in others and help us all see that we're not alone and are inherently connected to the same light and that this life is liveable. In other words, even with all its downs, we can stop looking for the escape route up and enjoy the journey for what it is. This is how I stand in my Divine flip-flops and find grace on the ground. Sometimes I stumble over which of my truths to tell now, but the intent is to get to the truth in the end. So, it's not all for me or the parts of me that needed more truth-seekers and tellers at different ages of my life, to little avail. It's about sharing to help relieve the suffering of you and to help you with your clear seeing - your "in-sight". The practice is turning to the light again and again, but with the gifts of the darkness showing us the next best step along the spiral of returning to our true, God-selves. This writing is part of my practice now.
So I'm beginning in a place that is half-home to me. I'm not talking about earth, though I suppose that would be true; I'm talking about the South Carolina coast. This half of home is part respite from a stereotypical suburban life that feels ill-fitting to me at times, part something I know deep down in my veins more than I know anything else, and part haunted by the shadowy lessons I accumulated while growing up here. It has the potential to be the most honest place for me to write, and by write, I mean to confront myself and you with true (spiritual) stories. But it's also safe, because we are safe with something larger than ourselves when we are real. Real is spiritual and being spiritual is being all of it. It's from here that we begin.
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