To Start, a Bit of Prayer
Before.
We read promises of consistency and certainty aloud to each other. Repeated them like mantras, hymns, sacred texts. Came to see them as truth. “In the future, you’ll be safe. When avoiding risk and death has finally grown like a cancer in your lungs, then you can stop to breathe.” Time was a tithe we were willing to give. Productivity a ritual we knew how to enact. At the center of each sanctuary, an altar, engraved with a single word: Security. Bishops called us forward, leaned into our ear, asked for a single sacrifice: Aliveness. The bread and wine, then, kept in glass containers, sat always behind the altar, a promise of future nourishment. Today’s starving was always worth tomorrow’s supposed feast. A sign out front read, “All are welcome to the Church of Self-Abandonment. Service each day, from 9am to 5pm. Often starts early and runs long.”
After.
We asked questions. Alms were just the phrase “I don’t know.” We woke up each morning, kneeled in the soil, and asked the land how to be. Every day, we lit candles to our deepest desires and then got to work making the invisible visible. There was only one job title, and it sounded something like “Alchemist” if you listened intently enough. Bells chimed from steeples at varying cadences. Every once in a while, a clown would fling open the church doors, yell “Our erotic knowledge empowers us!” And we’d all shout back, in response, “This is our great responsibility!”, but never in unison. Our bodies took up space, were nourished. Everyone forgot what sacrifice for “self” even meant because we were too concerned with feeding strangers. Every chapel still had a sign out front, but they’d been graffitied over with the words, “Worship each other and your own holy lives.”
“May this new decade be remembered as the decade of the strange path, of the third way, of the broken binary…the gift of disorientation that opened up new places of power.”
Now, a Working Bio
The Gift of Disorientation
I was born around morning twilight in the late fall of 1981.
Not completely dark, but not yet sunrise.
After warmth had begun to fade, but before winter set in.
In mid-October, the cusp between Libra and Scorpio season.
At the transition point between Generation X and Millennials.
This being the case, you could say I’m a person born between worlds. Never quite fully one thing, but also not quite another.
It makes sense, then, that I’ve spent most of my life loving everything related to paradox: seeming contradictions that trouble our notions of black-and-white realities and refuse easy labels.
To a metaphor, this thing is often that thing?
To Spirit, the rich are poor and the poor are rich?
To a geologist, a mountain can breathe?
To an immigrant, home is both here and there?
To a biologist, mold can have more than one gender?
To a synesthete, sound can be color and touch has taste?
To a physicist, light is both a wave and a particle?
To a mystic, all matter is both inert and also alive?
God is a poet, no?
This love of paradox, though, has not always been an easy road. Existing in “middle spaces” has meant a lot of seeming isolation. From high school to college, and into my 20s and 30s, I struggled to find places of “belonging,” both socially and in my career.
I loved having friendships across a lot of different identity groups: atheists, religious folks, vegans, meat eaters, the marginalized and the privileged, and everything in between. Still, we struggled to know how to hold difference in a society hell-bent on separateness. We were taught to cut out anything and everything that didn’t believe or behave exactly as we did.
So, I lost a lot of people who saw my differences and cut me out, but I also cut out a lot of others I saw as different than me, too. Exiled from each other, I’d find a new place of relative belonging, only to later notice how it seemed to replicate “oppressive” ideals the same way my last group did (generally “Those people are ‘bad’ and we’re the ‘good’ ones”), just with updated language and an extra dose of self-righteousness. Asking questions about these belief systems often got me in trouble. Challenge the stable walls we’d built to keep ourselves safe and risk the whole structure falling down, right?
Then there was work. I once was a “Community Animator,” a strange way of saying my position existed to facilitate relationships between all of the seemingly different organizations in one building, as well as between our building and other institutions, like the city, local businesses, and non-profits. It was probably the closest a title has ever come to pinning down how I tend to function in the world.
Outside of that, though, I’ve spent a lot of life curious about millions of things, never quite content to settle for any single role or career direction. I changed jobs often and my family had no clue when I’d ever “figure myself out.” I couldn’t seem to name what I did, even if I knew I did it really, really well. I saw how my skills at working across domains served to facilitate connection, creativity, and communication between siloed containers. Here, too, though, society struggled to know how to “hold difference.” Employers didn’t know how or what to hire me for unless they had already seen me in action. People underpaid me because they didn’t see the value in someone who didn’t specialize.
It is disorienting to never fully “belong” in one particular “group” or one particular “role.”
Eventually, though, I began to view all this disorientation as a gift. My gift. What I was quite literally born to do, what I think many of us are born to do—
Weave connections between worlds. Connect the seemingly un-connectable. Hold space for those who seek to make a home in the “third way,” per Báyò’s quote on this page, which is really an embrace of no home at all.
Impermanence, uncertainty, and transition as a way of being.
In this spacious acceptance, I allowed myself the freedom to speak my truth. If others weren’t willing to listen, that was okay; belonging to each other and boundaries can co-exist. Magically, though, others who needed this freedom began to find and befriend me, too. “Un-belonging” became a life philosophy, a practice of seeing ourselves as processes, emerging phenomena in constant transition, never really solidified into “stable” matter.
I also allowed myself the freedom to explore all of my seemingly disparate interests. I fell headlong into the connections between science and art, body and soul, the mystical and the mundane. I began to write and speak about it. I celebrated the way my brain works and what truly brings me most alive: The erotic space between all things. The energy flowing between all matter. The alive-ness found in dying to control—truly colonial and capitalist ways of thinking—thanks to other guides along my path.
And, out of that, I created “This Plus That,” for myself and others to wander in the mystical middle spaces, celebrate the connections between seemingly un-connectable things, and a sacred act of breaking binaries, but also asking where binaries serve us, because life is paradox.
The good news is, we are not alone. We never have been.
We come from a long line of “troublesome” but necessary ancestors and peers from cultures spread across time—
Creatives, artists, mystics, poets.
Doulas, herbalists, writers.
Misfits, radicals, shape-shifters, jesters.
And we are always, forever, connected.