Hy-Brasail, Breasal, Brazil, O’Brasil, The Enchanted Island and The Isle of the Blessed. An island visible only one day every seven years and concealed in fog for all the time in between.
Lately, I have been considering The Holy Bible. I think I know what’s going on, and I think it’s more beautiful than any of us imagined. I think back to my nights at Sequim Bay when the two tomes, Harper-Collins’ The Holy Bible and Harper-Collins’ The Other Bible, sat with me at little 1950’s diner table. Above and beyond them, the bay’s dark, and beyond that bay’s dark, the Strait of Juan de Fuca’s dark.
“What are you?” I’d ask these books. “All the churches and synagogues and Vaticans aside, what are you?”
My relationship to scripture was on par with Willy Wonka’s relationship with dentistry. I knew it existed. I knew people said it was necessary. I knew a lot of people hated it for the impact of its interpretations on life—life of Indigenous peoples, life of the planet, life of women, life of LGBTQIA friends, life of everything. One book, the book on my diner table, had really fucked up the world.
“But what are you, really?”
As a poet, loving books had been my thing. I loved the mystery of them, the worlds they opened in me, the chords they struck that could be so powerful I’d throw a book out a train window if it revealed so much to me I had to be as far from it as possible. Here was a book that people I loved and respected described as being “written by a bunch of men.” The coffee shop at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle had floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I’d sip coffee and peruse. These books weren’t the best-sellers of their own or anyone else’s time. These were the duds. Years of authors’ perspiration and perambulations in dimly lit studies, manuscripts guarded under ink blotters, handwritten drafts painstakingly letter-pressed and woven into these specimens of alien times, each bookshelf the height of a stone of Stone Henge, each book a monument to the mediocre, or worse, the unsung genius of the word—these surrounded me. They were written by men, yet, unlike their holy brethren on my diner table, no one had built entire buildings to worship them. The Bible had to be something else, and that something else had to in some way connect it to all the other sacred books and traditions in the world. God, if logic serves, has no outliers. So, if there is discrepancy, it’s got to be our fault, not the authors’.
This is the kind of stuff I think about when I’m alone. Hell, I even think about it when I’m not alone. Out there, though, in the dark, where the cedars leak their scent into fog so the eagles can find them, out there, in that depth of solitude, I wondered how it all went so wrong. This must be connected. Wouldn’t that make sense? Shouldn’t the world’s sacred texts and traditions form a ring? I would kneel and bow in the muddy sand each night and feel prayer arise simultaneously from me and from something else. It was never just me. I felt it was a circle, the gratitude and the want coming from this stereo dialectic of which I was and was not the speaker. It was telling me what to say while also making it the thing I wanted to say. I’d speak into the night until, as I had experienced when creeping out of my dorm window to write on the ballustrade in London, the night said I had done enough and could sleep now. When I’d receive this permission, I’d sit back on my muddy heels and look out over the low tide’s revelations of starfish and geoduck, of tree limb and tidepool.
“What are you?” I’d ask of this as well. “What is all of this? Heron, otter, seal, eagle, loon, deer, elk, and even starfish and geoduck—that book has to be about all of it.” No book would seek to turn against the earth. No book capable of lasting ages would encourage war.
“I know we’ve got it all wrong,” I’d say then rise and remember how cold I was.
Twenty-five years, a baby, and a brain injury later, I’ve arrived at something. The creation of scripture has been woven into a socio-political context. We speak in terms of the texts’ publication, even if such publication was handwritten and copied by hand again then sealed with wax and tar in jars of clay and concealed in caves above the shores of the Dead Sea. I got carried away there. That’s how we view them. We also assign parallels between text and human context—key players, major moves, the holy covenant with God being passed and lobbed among fathers, sons, and someone/something else whose face we never see but who sure likes to shout from the stands. We’ve turned religion into contact sport, the contact always causing blood.
A sacred text, though, would not ever cause a war with its words. That was my rule. It has to be about something else.
Out there in Sequim, I lived in a constant state of discipline and humility. The lessons I was being shown by this invisible, inaudible teacher (whose name I keep to myself) were so beautiful, I never wanted them to stop. I found that my humility was bound up in my receiving those one-a-day vitamins from the sea, clouds, creatures, and blackberries (the actual berries). If my ego got any higher than the tops of my feet, nothing came. To stay in that humble posture, I remained wide-eyed and sweet, like a child. Even as I wrote my pages for my Masters essay, the words bucked me off of thought like wild horses because language should not, it all seemed to be saying, ever be sure or certain or authoritative. Language wasn’t about knowing something. It was about discovery. The poems I was supposed to write about did not want to be unlocked by my intelligence. They wanted to be lived in with my heart. After months of trying, I just gave up. My intellect was all I had, and it had failed me.
“I need to withdraw,” I called and told the MFA director. “I am going to be a doctor because in Medicine there’s a name for everything. In Poetry I have to find them, and I can’t.”
“Okay,” he said as I looked out over the inscrutable surface of the bay. He was so nonchalant I wondered if every MFA students had called and told him the same thing. “Let’s say give it a few days. If you still feel like leaving the program, we’ll have that conversation.”
Then: click. (Isn’t one of the great losses of the technological revolution is that of the click when conversations ended?)
I was at the end of my brain. Nothing existed past that last thought. I was at the edge of the world and at the edge of intellect. Invisible worlds have long been a motif in human imagination, though—Avalon, Shangri-la, Brasil. There are geographies beyond the senses and beyond the brain. I understand this now much better than I did back then, out there. The brain injury helped. In so many ways, the brain injury that jettisoned me out of my life, brought me deeper inside it. I needed to return to the darkness I had known, in order to unknow it, in order to discover my unseen world and my unseen self that dwells in it. The one thing, aside from my completed Masters essay, which ended up being about paradoxes and suppressed and revealed orders of reality, I left Sequim with was a name I had been given by the clouds over the Olympic Peninsula, a name that formed a word in my heart that I would then use to at call out and to present myself when I prayed. I had gone full earth girl, and no it was not easy. It took everything I had and all I never wanted back.
The darkness of the brain injury was even more challenging than being encouraged by an unseen being to plant my forehead in the muck of Sequim Bay night after night, full moon and fog. I now see it as a timeless, spaceless, lightless somersault marathon through nothingness. I couldn’t think. The part of my brain that thought was sloth slow. Other aspects of who I am observed it as someone who doesn’t know how to change a flat tire observes a flat tire, able to name, unable to fix. Having at all times except on Sequim Bay, after heartbreak, and after trauma been able to think my way through problems, I could not even think enough to know I had a problem—I had “You have a brain injury” written on the whiteboard on my fridge, a letter to the self that would wake up each day to darkness with no idea what was going on or who it was. A headache with a body attached. I lost these fundamental things that give meaning to our days and selves and could not, at times, know anything at all. That’s the best way to go through this. Six months of seldom broken nothing. In this space, I said the name that had been given to me by the clouds. Face it, things were already far out from any known shore. Why the hell not invite things to get a little bit wilder? Let’s do this.
As I’ve shared in earlier “chapters” of this brain-healing, reality-questioning, self-reseeding (thank you, Jules!) adventure, this was my third trip in, and you know what they say. The name had worked when I called it out a decade ago recovering from rape. Wouldn’t it make sense to use it again now that I’m back, now that I am in the intractable darkness once again? I had, again, nothing to lose.
An unlocked door that is forever open goes one of the descriptions of the mystical realm signified by Avalon, Shangri-la, Brasil. Maybe that is what Einstein when asked what he would like to come back as offers “a locksmith.” Secret worlds hold secret keyholes people devote their lives to finding. Might I suggest to these folks a life more prone to losing total control and a shit ton of trauma? One thing of many I learned in Sequim, the old stuff is still in action. Jacob’s wheel a rollin’. Incendiary only to you plants. Whirlwinds and the voices that emerge from them. It’s only when we temporalize the Holy Bible that we lose our access to its wisdom. Sacred texts aren’t stories as we think of them. They are grafts, skin grafts for the soul. Pay attention, they say. Lose yourself to find us. Myths aren’t code to be cracked with the divine light of reason. If they were, we would be wise by now. They are lessons that inhabit us so we can experience sparks of recognition between our lives and the ways of Nature, big nature, the universe and its whole wholeness to which myth attunes.
To enter it? Do we sing like Orpheus? Climb mountains and rush down to the sea like Jesus? Cruise the underworld searching for pomegranates like Persephone? Win a poetry-off like Sundiata? Enter the scary mountain like Gilgamesh? If none of these, how else can we enter without being arrested, exhausted, or harmed? Arrest is avoidable. The other two, these are required. We know this because —and here’s my thinking— our most ancient ancestors left keys the same way the clouds left me a key. We know it. We We all know it. They left us a whole lot of keys, actually, in the junk drawer of our psyches. Sadly, we have been jaded to them by the whole theatrical presentation built up around them every generation. Churches are the absolute worst publicity campaign for the Holy Bible imaginable. Thankfully, though, scripture survives the shouting, killing, and the weird emotions. The authors knew we would lose our minds. They knew it so well that they jotted a plan to help us unlose our minds.
Our timeline for the creation of scripture is misleading. We think or are told that paper is the original medium for this sacred reset key from the ancestors. That’s wrong though, right? Very little originates as text, aside from NaNoWriMo manuscripts. Stories survive for ages. Even if no one tells them, they live on in memory because stories are memory into which we tune it when we are healing. For the buddhists, all the world is sound. For Judeo-Christian-Muslim children of Abraham, all the world is sung story resonating us back into our humanity. As long as we can hear and read with our hearts. Such perceptual signal flipping is our birthright if only churches hadn’t duct-taped them in off position. But even if they did, we have somehow always known.
Beowulf, for instance, was oral tradition aeons before monks heard them and wrote them down, adding their little touches like making Beowulf a Christian in places. All myth was spoken long before it got picked up by people with pens who then felt they could similarly editorialize or all out revise. I read the Peshitta version that bypasses the Greek, but even the King James version holds the wisdom of the words, these mucky, slimy, pungent, tangy vestiges of our primordial past. The words are failsafe as soon as we dip down low enough in ourselves to see beyond the narrative. Take out the people, for instance, and you have clouds, rivers, rocks, stones, oceans, fires, mountains, and, yes, whirwinds. You have the earth. What we call setting in English class is prima material in alchemy. View the world in its terms, and your brain changes perceptual lenses. See it in parts and episodes the rosetta stone of world-reading proclaims. Watch reasoning go from linear to circular. Change from square to circle in the perception of time.
How else might these texts be compilations of ancestral locksmithing? First, it’s helpful to consider what’s on the other side of the door and why did we need to leave ourselves stories for opening it up again. What lessons might we have left for ourselves—Theseus’ string in the labyrinth, Orpheus singing at the bazillion doors of Hades? Go back farther to a time when our brains were just beginning to noodle in abstract reason. Sure, we praise frontal cortexes all the time in a mass cognitive dissonance lasting centuries. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t do good things. It doesn't help us. It doesn’t serve any purpose at all, least of all to the earth. It’s a stupid feature on an otherwise decently functioning organism. Homo sapiens shouldn’t be the name of our softball team. Drop the sapiens or at least provide strict measures to keep a balance between being able to think abstractly and being able to feel compassion. Let these measure be staying in our story and remaining humble in the face of all things. Design a new t-shirt for this team and print homo historia, or let’s ditch the Latin altogether and call ourselves beings among beings aware of all beings. That takes care of the story part.
Humility is a touch more difficult. Put all the people back into the Bible, and you’ve got oh so many names to remember, deeds to extract meaning from, and folks to either be like or not be like because often it’s impossible to tell, and because it’s hard to find good people in these books. Reading it as narrative is silly because the ancestral mind that birthed them was not a narrative mind but a symbolic one. Our ADHD and Autism reflect this. Our contemporary predilection for reality shows and jumpscares reflects this. While we love a good story, stories are the containers of elements, symbols, and situations that have not changed since the start. The clothes have changed. We have cars. Condos instead of cave-dwellings, but we have pretty much just made a man-made version of mountains and river, unconsciously projecting as we do with everything. Even A.I. is a projection of the collective psyche. Again, the “intelligence” throws us off. Intellect isn’t the answer. Being able to dream together is.
The Ten Commandments (I know you did not see that coming.) are how we get back. I know the mention of them conjures images of Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea with a stick, beard and hair long as crests of waves. This is the problem. We don’t take it personally enough. Instead, we view these stories through the Hollywood lens rather than the lens of our own seeking. If a guy can part a sea with a stick, why can’t anybody else? Because things happen in stories that stir our symbolic imaginations and bring our primordial mind to the fore so we can remember our true nature. We are not saints and sinners. We are seekers, inquirers, and explorers of the way into and through this mysterious place under mysterious circumstances. Yes, we have been assured that science will solve everything, and it has. The solution it is giving is that we are in a mysterious place under even more mysterious circumstances than we expected. This is something abstract reasoning and pre-frontal cortex can’t handle. The symbolic mind, however, can work in synch with the abstract mind to complete the picture. To get to that synch, here are some rules. Follow them not because you’re afraid of Charlton Heston (and there are reasons to be) or God. Follow them because they come from the earth and were spoken in the psyches of our ancestors who were so sensitive, so in tune, so connected to the universal consciousness that it could understand them the way I somehow understood a bunch of clouds over the Olympic Peninsula and could use abstract reasoning to find precedent in books from Elliott Bay, just not the ones in the basement (although . . . .).
If we want to stay close to the earth, which we need to do, we have to be the kind of people who would be able to control rage, moderate craving, eschew jealousy, honor earth, and always tell the truth and never hedge. That’s a serious walk there. If we forbid ourselves from lying, we choose a very difficult path. Don’t do shit that fucks things up. That’s the ten commandments. Be a responsible person. Deal with your stuff instead of flinging it around the room. Serve earth. Do these things, and you can tune into the most beautiful music forever, and it will speak to you. It will sing to you. It will absorb your suffering and embrace you with its healing. Of course, if you insist on thinking humans are above it all (and we have planted some doozies for you to trick you into thinking this book is about you), you can wind up here where we are now with our megachurches and our wars, our saviour complexes and fifteen seconds of fame (downgraded). You can look around you and see how hard it is to be good.
And you can choose to be good anyway and suffer through the transformation of the primordial consciousnesses the ten commandments force us to work through, and achieve this thing we call enlightenment, this panoramic awareness that permits us to hear and speak with the earth through its many languages that live still in us. If we listen.
If we listen. If we listen. If we listen.
Then we see, the Red Sea is in us.
So is the stick.
We have it in us to walk through this ocean to another way of being.
Thank you ❤️