Coming out of my snake hole

For months I couldn’t bring myself to participate in any kind of public facing communication. After many days of quiet inner turmoil about this, I’m acknowledging my process of hiding and re-appearing as a reflection of the bigger stories of hide and seek in Reality.

I love hiding. Everywhere I go I have some backup plan for how to be less visible, less available. Going to a show? Sit in the back or on the edges in case I need to leave abruptly or be weird in my body. Going to a night time thing at a bar with friends? Bring post its and a pen in case I need to sit in a corner and do a made up art project by myself. This level of permission to exit social flows is highly pleasurable, and a secret form of benevolent performance art. The more creative options I give myself in social spaces, the more you get to have too, and vice versa.

Some of these hiding skills are natural consequences of having chronic pain and fatigue. Some of them are about living with a neurobiology that most spaces can’t or won’t accommodate, so I have to build my own bridges. My own ways to stay a little longer, to still be in the world.

But I have plenty of needs, stories, and life experiences that I haven’t learned how to bridge. Over the past year reaching out via newsletter or social media has felt like one of those bridgeless places, a chasm that I cannot find the motivation to figure out how to cross. Part of me resents having to remind people about my existence, about what I am here to offer. I sometimes have incandescent, ecstatic sob sessions about how I’m not living my life in a cave. About how I am not an uninterrupted jungle monk who mostly forgets how to talk and instead listens to cascades of cosmic tones pulsating through leaves.

I’ve decided that it was an act of love to allow myself to just stop trying to reach across that chasm. To share nothing, for a long time. It was a pillow to the brain, to stop traversing the same patterns I have with writing and language, thanks to too many years in the so-called education system.

That absence helped me get more honest about how troubled my relationship to writing has been. Not with poetry or fiction, but with whatever this is, which my body brain associates with researching and writing papers in undergrad and grad school. As a mixed race Southasian student I had some pretty hardcore “model minority” academic pressures boiling me alive when I was younger. I was willing to rebel in just about every other area, but when it came to grades I hopped right into line, absolutely terrified at the prospect of…dishonoring my family? Disappointing my ancestors? It felt that serious.

There are a lot of rants in me about how we crush the spirits of young people in modern education systems, and the slight headache forming tells me I can’t go there much more today. But you get the point. School made me a terrible learner.

There are many movements of hiding and reappearing in the world, on this planet. I am writing this on the other side of the spring equinox, when all of the energy in the plants are shooting upwards, blooming, expanding, showing tender bits that had been carefully tucked away in the colder months. Every day the sun rises and then dies on the horizon, orchestrating cascades of hormonal and neurochemical choreography that shows us how to live well, if we let it.

There are also the movements of ideas, of knowledge systems that come in and out of hiding according to the needs of the time. Or so I’ve heard. What has also been made clear to me, primarily through research into menstrual rites over the past several years, is that human beings need to take action to create the right conditions for holistic ways of knowing and practicing life to return, or to be born anew in an appropriate version for this modern moment.

I am, if nothing else, a stubborn devotee to paradigm shifts. My beloveds are all nondual wrathfuls, fiercely loving entities that burn you alive in the best way. Shapeshifting, dancing, playful forces that seamlessly move with the big picture, while delighting in the mire and mystery of every minute detail of creation. Sometimes I am beyond-words grateful for these relationships, for this worldview that feels like a series of luminous tributaries underneath my skin, inseparable from DNA.

Other times, I feel so out of place, so out of step with the human culture(s) I see around me that it hurts to be visible.

I don’t always know what to do with that pain. My best methods help me sidestep the trap of feeling like an outsider, however true that might be in a relative sense. If I start to coil around my narrative of not belonging, of being out of time or place, I get self-indulgent. I turn into a bitter gremlin, bundled in blankets sipping tea, always bringing the conversation back to how people can’t handle realness and how bored I am. Ha! From a holistic perspective this is a lot of fun, but only if I remember that I’m playing dress-up.

If we follow pain for long enough we find Love again. The pain I feel at not fitting into dominant cultures (or even subcultures) comes from hosting fields of potential that are looking for the right place to unfurl. To crack open and claim space. The discomfort keeps me moving, looking, accountable to action and right conditions. Where can this thing finally land? How do we know when we have found the right moment, place, or people to do this with?

Today’s voice of wisdom tells me it is utterly unknowable from a thinky place. Instead we strengthen our familiarity with chasms, with lingering in the unfilled space. We expand time so that we can already feel the moment when the potentials we harbor have found their landing place, and the ancestral eons at our back ease any notion of solitary heroism. We find more and more ways to stay, to participate, so we are poised to reveal what we carry when the opportunity finds us.

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