The Spirit's Zone

I realized this morning that it is officially over a year since I created this blog. Came as a bit of a shock to me at first, because it doesn't feel like it's been all that long. This funny thing happens, where as I get older, time feels shorter. I'm sure none of you have experienced anything like that at all, though. So never mind me.

In reminiscence, I expanded all the files to the right, so that the past year of entries spilled out into the bar. I stared at them awhile, wondering at the amount I've managed to write. Forty posts, including this one. Not that it's unusual for me to write profusely. As I said in Narrow Gate, I've been doing it for years, and these posts have been far from what I'd call "profuse." But to have written as much as I have that I actually deem presentable? Yes, that is something I might find valuable. My tendency is in compliance with the all-too-embarrassing female stereotype: to write tons and tons of pure bull crap for no apparent reason, to talk for the sake of talking. I think there's something to be said for making words intentional. That's a piece of personal dogma I've had to learn to hold myself to.

I read back over the titles of all the posts and smiled at the places my thoughts have wandered over the past 365 days. My eye got caught near the beginning, where nearly everything was about my childhood and the development of my worldview. As my mind started to wander, I remembered a certain interaction between a youth leader and myself that highlighted my pre-conversion view on prayer. I was 12 years old and two months short of the life-changing summer camp experience I've discussed before. I suppose the 12-year-old Marié believed in a God. But he was much more abstract, and a lot bigger- or, more removed, depending on how you look at it- than the one I would come to believe in at camp later that year. He wasn't much of a "he," he more of an "it." Just a Spirit. It was a powerful, binding force in the Universe, without which everything would fall apart, without which the thought of "matter" would be ludicrous. It was the substance which held atoms together, the substance between a nucleus and its electrons. It was the essence of nothingness, yet also the essence of the greatest thing that might be fathomed. It was the founder of unity, but also the possibility for separation. It was the very substance of life, an Ultimate Reality of sorts. Sometimes I think the God I believe in now is a more like the pseudo-God I believed in before I was a Christian than the one I met in the mainstream Church. I did have some pretty funky ideas, though, about both this Spirit and about the Christian God. And since they never got relieved in any proper fashion, they sometimes spilled out onto innocent, unsuspecting victims. Like my youth pastor.

His name was Mitch. Mitch left our church before I started seventh grade. He never knew me as 'a believer.' It seems strange to me now that I might have attended the same youth group I do now for a year as such a different person. I wonder how many people in church aren't really Christians, sometimes.

One day in May, the youth group went on an excursion to Wild Waves. It was an event called Big Splash, where a bunch of Christian bands played and pale white kids walked around in their bathing suits, trying to make themselves believe it wasn't cold. Just after we entered the park, I realized we'd forgotten our water bottles in the car and I asked to go get them. We had responsible chaperones, so Mitch escorted me to the van. We talked a bit about the weather on the way.

It was cool, but also nice and sunny, which is very rare in Washington at any point from mid-September till June. Mitch said something about how we should pray for the good weather to hold. And I said something along the lines of, Well, it doesn't seem like we need to, there are no clouds or anything. He responded that we could never be in surplus of prayer, that it is always good to pray, that the prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. That sort of thing. After thinking a few seconds, I said, But we certainly don't need to pray about everything if it's already under control. Here there was a bit of an awkward pause, after which he began to explain that we never really have anything under control, that God has the control, and that we're simply presenting our wishes to him. I was quiet for a few more seconds. Then an idea occurred to me: Maybe we've already prayed for sun, I wondered aloud. Maybe, when time has ended and we're all with God, we'll ask him to change today's weather. And then it will always have been changed, because God could make it so that it happened that way in the first place. That's why it's sunny: because in the future, we'll already have asked for it to be. Mitch got a really strange expression on his face. To this day, I'm not entirely sure what he thought of me, I can't remember what he said in reply. I doubt he was expecting whatever I said from a 12-year-old in the context of a discussion about the weather, in any case. There was silence after that, and the thought was swept from my mind, to lay dormant for a few years. I am notoriously bad at small talk.

I've always enjoyed the idea of timelessness, ever since Pocahontianism. I always thought of the Spirit as timeless, but I had never considered that God could be that way until it occurred to me at Big Splash in 2006. I had always heard that time wasn't entirely the same for God, and that he could do anything, but frankly, I never thought of him as part of the spiritual realm. I never explicitly connected what I knew about God and the church and religion to the idea of the Spirit. The closest I ever got to doing so was that day in Wild Waves. I almost wish someone would have entertained that idea with me as a child. I think it's safe to say that it it would have blown my mind to hear someone suggest that God and the Spirit are the same thing. God was so vague and removed. He was something like an imaginary friend that wasn't really a friend. Like the Tooth Fairy, or Santa. Something I wholeheartedly believed in, but only because my parents told me he existed. You could communicate with him, sort of, through prayer, or the Bible, or songs- you know, all the ways we're told to "worship" him. But all that was even less accurate than sending letters to Santa or the Tooth Fairy, because he never wrote back like they did. God wasn't very interesting. He was for church and prayer time and things like that. Just like there was a time for the Tooth Fairy and Santa, there was a time for him, too. The God I knew of was boxy. He was an event. He was very small and very human-like. He was monarchical. He wasn't much like God, I don't think. (But then, can I really ensure that I now have a better perspective?)

Now the Spirit, on the other hand, it was different. It was in everything, in everytime. Perfect omnipresence. Well, at least in nature. Walls muffled it. (Sort of like sand muffles Toph's vision, if you've watched Avatar.) I believed that people had become very arrogant and had started compromising nature- in and through which the Spirit existed- for their own selfish gains. Selfish gains like big buildings. Maybe this is where my complex about large rooms comes from. (For the record, I dislike big rooms. Cathedrals and performance halls are probably the only exceptions. Maybe because I believed the Spirit lived in and through music, the way it did through nature.) I believed that people were equal to all the rest of living nature and that mankind had thrown everything off-balance because they thought they were so awesome. I believed the Spirit had given mankind strong hints that the natural order was offset: global warming, horrible poverty, widespread despair, conflict, and destruction- but no one was in tune enough with the Spirit to hear. Sort of like Karma, or some prevailing Natural Law, I believed the Universe was set up to give its inhabitants pain when it had reason to feel it. I was very into the whole Go-Green World Peace Let's-All-Be-Nice-To-Each-Other deal. It was my genuine plan from the age of nine on to buy a few acres of forest and live in a treehouse I'd build there, powered by the wind and the sun, with no more than a bed, armchair, microwave, mini-fridge, paraffin stove, green carpet, books, and a laptop inside. Bare essentials, of course. I didn't want to have too much stuff to detract or distract from the Spirit, which was synonymous with harmony and peace. Also, I plain hated rich people.

The Spirit had many manifestations, since it was everywhere. There was a certain place one could enter that was a sort of spiritual abyss, that I called The Zone. I actually gleaned this idea from a friend of mine- her name is Louisa Richards- who I believed at the time had reached some type of enlightenment. She did seem to have an unnaturally creepy, close connection to nature. She could literally call the animals to her in the forest, could walk through a house or the woods without making a sound, and had a whole book full of four-leaf clovers. I was with her when she found her twenty-third one. There was some type of magical aura around her when she was in "The Zone," I could tell when she was. It's likely I was just extremely naïve or abnormally willing to believe she was an elf or pixie of sorts, but she genuinely did seem to have a deep connection with the Spirit. Sometimes I feel like I simply had a very exaggerated, imaginative, youthful perception, but then I remember the way she'd sit next to my bird's cage and whistle at it when she was over. She managed to tame it enough to stick her hand in the cage and stroke it, something that would have drawn copious amounts of blood from anyone else. In any case, I admired her for her connection with whatever allowed her to have such unity with the energy rippling through the fibers of the Universe. When she told me about "The Zone" around the middle of fourth grade, I decided to try going there, for the heck of it. For awhile there was this phase where a bunch of us wandered around the playground with our eyes closed, walking around in "The Zone," feeling the energy of the Universe guide us around the monkey bars and trees. Anyways, that's what I was doing, I have no idea what the girl originally told me or what my friends thought they were doing. Come to think of it, this activity is remarkably similar to what I did in first grade, when I was "listening with my heart" for the tug of the Spirit in the wind.

The Zone was a mystical spiritual overlap between the physical world and the spiritual world. It was where all spirits existed in unity, melded into a single, infinite web, as the one Spirit. It was a place where one could find the meaning to any of life's mysteries, because it was the origin of all mystery to life. I often went there to regain a connection with the Spirit, a connection to the Universal harmony. It was where I would go to calm down, to find peace. In it, the Spirit dwelled freely, like a mist of sorts. An oily, weightless matter that had no boundaries, and of which I was a part. The place was similar to my conception of the field where the BFG caught his dreams: no obstacles, no light, no darkness, just an aura of substance-less being. Every once in awhile, one might come into special contact with one individual spirit, making contact with a part of the Whole you'd fallen out of touch with. Making that link was necessary to improve the Spirit's internal harmony, like learning to touch your finger to your nose with your eyes closed: at no point are your nose and finger separate creatures, but they don't know each other as well as they might.

There was another way I would sometimes connect to the Spirit, a more visual way. I'm not sure if it'll work for any of you, but you can try it and see: find a small object and focus on it until nothing else in the room remains but that object. It takes several minutes, but eventually, a silvery mass begins to surround the object you have refused to shift your eyes from. Then, slowly shift your concentration, but not your eyes, from one corner of your vision to the next, stretching the boundaries of your reality in the silvery film. Concentrate on the film. That, I believed, was the spiritual energy from my soul leaving my eyes to sync with the spiritual energy contained within the object. It was like being Matilda, but without the ability to move the objects. Perhaps it was more like the candle meditation scene from The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, where John Cartwright is being explained how to see without eyes by the guru Imhrat Kahn. Recognizing this flow of energy with my eyes and reminding myself of the connection I had to the rest of the Universe gave me a cool calmness and purpose I lost sometimes when I became angry or frustrated. Simply the thought that I was one little droplet in the sea of Life, the thought that I was an inseparable One with that expanse of water... That thought could pull me though a math lesson.

The Spirit was personal in many forms, too, though. Like I've said, it had many manifestations. It existed inside the physical world just as much as in the pseudo-spiritual world I sometimes entered. Certain things, say, a special rock, or a special mountain, or a special spot in the woods, had their own place in the living fiber I've been talking about, and one could develop a special connection with them. That's what made the Tree so special: it was more than simply a place to pass time. I truly believed that the Tree and I had a deep spiritual connection, and that no matter where I was, I could gain a faint access to it connection by dwelling in the vibrations of Spirit that flowed through everything around me. The branches of that tree allowed me a focus and community unlike any other I experienced before the age of twelve: it was quite possibly the greatest intimacy and greatest spirituality I knew. Or at least I thought of it that way. And not because I believed the Tree was a god, but because it was one personality I could attach myself to in order to better know the Spirit. The Spirit, which was the connecting force that bound it together with me and with all things that ever were, ever are, ever will be, and never can. Somehow it always made more sense to me the way the Spirit moved and breathed through the Tree. I felt some deeper connection.

In sixth grade, we read Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan. In the first chapter, there is a scene between Esperanza as a little girl and her father. The father tells her to lie down on the earth and be still, simply listening. And then, she begins to feel the heartbeat. "Softly at first. A gentle thumping. A little stronger. A resounding thud, thud, thud against her body. She could hear it, too. The beat rushing in her ears. Shoomp, shoomp, shoomp. [...] She pressed her body closer to the ground, until her body was breathing with the earth's. And with Papa's. Three hearts beating together." I wholeheartedly believed that we were all connected with everything else around us. That there was a living, breathing, pulsating Being holding existence together. That was my God.

I lost all this to the wind when I became a Christian. I rather resent that, now.

I threw away years of thinking and understanding for a new worldview and a good deal of false hope because someone was able to convince me my immortal soul was in danger if I didn't change. I don't mean to say that being "converted" didn't ultimately impact me positively, because it did: my understanding of purpose and of morality and of humanity is something I'm glad ended up changing. Certainly not everything I believed before 2006 was true, but I know not everything I believe after 2006 is, either.

I'm glad my understanding of Christianity was able to develop in an amicable light. But I don't think my understanding of the Spirit was any less like God than my understanding of the Trinity post-conversion. That's my hunch. But I wouldn't be able to tell, would I? That's not for me to judge, nor for me to see. I'm on this side of eternity.