“Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.” – Carl Jung

If you’ve ever tried to return to a life you haven’t lived for over a decade you’ll know what i mean when I say I was feeling a bit adrift in the Fall of 2021. When I came back to the United States after I had spent three years in South America and a decade in Western Europe more or less, I did make an effort to return. What was in question was my sense self. Movement, travel, internal and external change takes us from point a to point b and sometimes it’s hard to decipher the significance of the in-between until you test it out. So, being an American the obvious place for me to get some insight was in the United States. I was living in Lima on a rooftop in an apartment that smelled of cats and had a view for miles, probably if there hadn’t been so much fog. I got a plane to L.A. with a stop-off in Miami. It was my first flight after my trip home from Cusco had been cancelled during the quarantine. I was there 11,000 feet in the air and unable to leave. The Peruvian police were walking the ancient cobble streets and if you were caught out without a good reason for being outside, like a medical emergency or gathering food and supplies they had a tendency to put people in jail. I took them seriously. I could barely get around with the little Spanish I knew and ending up in one of their police stations was not a thing I wanted to experience. So, i stayed in my tiny cottage. I had a propane burner for cooking and I made kombucha every week. It was creative and utilitarian enough to kept me occupied. I made videos about the effort to keep the brew going and spread the SCOBY around town. The Peruvian women who came with her little boy and mother to clean the apartment loved the idea and began making Kombucha for she and her family. I felt useful and since my status as a citizen of South America was in question each and every week it helped me ground. Afteer a mass exodus of expats, thousands and thousands got on planes the government provided the option for Americans to leave South America at an unknown cost but would come out of the recipients tax refund. Odd. After an email exchange with the consolate about the testing status of passengers of those planes, the gist of the reply was that they most concerned with getting people out of the country and if testing to make sure they weren’t putting infected people on a plane with a hundred other people went by the wayside well, that was secondary. I found the consolate’s logic askew and opted not to get board the petri dish they were supplying. I could stay in Peru a little longer.

The months wore on. I was quarantined in Peru for a total of 19 months.As one of the only English speaking people left in the village previously buoyant with plant medicine seekers and Machu Picchu enthusiasts, I felt as if I were a planet unto myself, a planet scientifically recalibrated by an invisible threat to an ice ball like Pluto.

When I was growing up, my 1970s public school education featured nine celestial bodies highlighted by a ninth easy to remember planet because it was Goofy dog’s name. I was a small kid, the youngest in my class and so I related to the cute little planet’s demotion a few days before my birthday in 2006 with rancor. When all the tourists nearly stampeded the airports to get back to their countries of origin I was stunned and dismayed. I didn’t blend in with my native Quechua neighbors or the farmer’s wives farmers at the miércoles and sábado market days. A Western single white woman was suspect in the extremely religious, family oriented Catholic milieu.

After a scary incident with a sexual predator at the Airbnb* hostel where I, the only guest remaining in what, prepandemic had been a huge thriving tourist destination I made a concerted effort to plan for what might be a long stay. I tried to explain my state of transient to a new friend that hadn’t known me before the big disruption all those years back. We were at his house in a desert valley where the light pollution is so low that you feel like you can reach out and hug the moon. As we talked over bowls of miso at the only Japanese-ish restaurant for a hundred miles I leaned toward him and in between slurps of broth tried to create some sort of container for my very nomadic ways. I made an effort because usually when somebody asked about me, you know, wanted to know something deeper than surface information about me I would tell them, Read my writing. It was a flippant response, I admit it. I don’t have a good excuse. It was hubris. But it was honest. I didn’t see any reason to talk any more about things I’d processed and integrated into my sense of self to enact a bonding ritual. b and didn’t want to talk about I write about things I cannot say in person. This person was decidedly a very talented musician and writer so I thoguht he wuold understand. my nonlinear appraoch to life. HOwever While he was open minded , when i took a ddep breath and began relating an experiences I’d had in South America ithe Andes he was silent .I expected a question to come out of the pause. There was nothing. He changed the subject. The waiter calibrated the moemnt and darted in with the next course salmon sashimi. I stared down at the little platter with little or no recognition of its contents. I was gathering up my breath before i looked up into the void that now stood between us. No amount of saki was going to penetrate the mental bypass he’d made around my spiritual vulnerability. I was stunned into silence but when he picked up his bowl and slurped another mouthful the aural disruption was so earthly, so grounded, so human. I thankfully did a hairpin emotion turn out of the invisibility I’d sunk into when he skated over my tenuous ephemeral share and I managed to shift into curiosity, a creative state we had shared so often in past conversations in front of his fireplace.

At the onset of a connection curiosity rules and power struggles are still relegated to the shadows. Because it is pretty easy to enter into a meaningful topic with this new person, together we exhibit the requisite seed of common interest for friendship. 

After all these years of experimenting with transparency, I have found respite from a self-enforced social alienation. Initiated by a family trauma I decided eleven years ago that I was pausing on long term relationships and familial connections. It felt radical. Shock, sousto, as the South American shamans call it, psychic overwhelm as western psychology call it pointed me toward a trial period of existential quietude, a feeling that being alone certainly was better than needing to be emotionally close to people. Need was the operative word.

As Jean-Paul Sartre said, 

“Hell is other people.”

Whether my new friend really wanted to understand some of my finer points about the dilemma I encounter when writing about spirituality and sexuality, I’m not sure, but I could tell he wanted to relate on some level. Cynical undercurrents remind me of past encounters that I thought had promise but were tethered to the other person’s sexual agenda, not that I’ve never had the same agenda, it’s just that aging has a way of bringing clarity to the fore. I began to understand the philosphy of limit-experience and to practice disrupting my predilection toward sex as antidote to emptiness and fear. First, I changed my priorities a bit. Intimacy with others was no longer the goal. My new focus would be to see my blocks to intimacy within myself.

As I said, this person in the desert valley sparked the self examination. Soon after I moved down to the city of Los Angeles. I met someone there, antoher moring person who showed up and sat mext to my table at 5:00am. At the beginning, naturally not much is known about the other beyond first names. One thing is certain.He no longer arrives with his dog in tow because the dog died. He read my blog. He liked my writing he told me. We have both been on the planet for a while. We both still have the quality of the beginner’s mind in common. He travels a lot too. Curiosity is the common denominator that brings us together. There isn’t an overwhelming sexual attraction although that is there in the periphery because we’re still mammals. There is the impression of two deer or bears or something more domesticated, two dogs, separate and yet open to the cues that spring up before them. That’s what I sense if I allow myself to acknowledge my animal nature when I am around this person. Him more than me probably. I felt my body’s interest receding as time went on.

Yet the sudden appearance of this person’s gaze from behind a coffee cup along my eye line as I look up from the intensity of a paragraph, is cinematic cliche. It repeats itself in the encounters with strangers ubiquitously. Read literature. Watch movies and there we are hunting down our next connection.

For instance I’ll come into the cafe where I met this person and sometimes he will also wander in. There is no planing. We haven’t exchanged digital information. We are linked on a social sight that I hardly ever visit so there’s no connection happening there. He lives nearby which keeps him coming to this cafe; there’s the affinity he has with the staff and the setting of this place. I think while being very private as he has labeled his social style, he’s also very much in need of variety and stimulation in between activities demanded by his workload. The person has a professional position that requires intense bouts of focus, hence taking a walk to the cafe incrementally breaks up the tedium of his tasks. That’s a pretty common reason for the existence of coffee houses, as common or even more common than my reason for setting up an impromptu office for my writing sessions.

Several times a week I’m here with a manuscript opened in Google Docs. At those moments I’m either working to fill the page or edit a massive amount of material, to date, 547 pages, and this morning like many mornings I have put on headphones to signal that I’m in deep focus mode.

Regardless of the level of ease of creating a social boundary, the cafe represents an intentionally anonymous environment for me to write. I’ve had this ritual of early morning writing for many years in many countries around the world but what is great in this particular instance is that the dance with the locals is coming into a trickier to juggle but more emotionally responsive and satisfying balance. With this particular person we’ve established boundaries over a period of months and my long absence has been punctuated by a shift in my demeanor. I consciously enact cues that hopefully signal a need for privacy. Since coming back to Los Angeles after a six month absence.

Having boundaries is not so rare, we all do it to more or less success all the time. From standing in line for our turn with the cashier to standing in the gym sauna mostly unclad elbow to elbow with strangers we’ve gotten very good at raising our invulnerability shields to handle our urban and rural, human, animal, and viral epidemics. 

Over the last decade my writing practice has by the necessities of travel through Europe and South America as well as using my car as a living space once back in the U.S. put me in close proximity to others indoors and out. Public space is unpredictable and we navigate it sometimes with aplomb and sometimes as fortunately witnessed less frequently with violent consequences. 

For today, though, I found the auric field around my body in the Goldilocks range, not too tight and exclusive but not too loose allowing any old energy to rub up against my fragile creative flow. 

ut in this instance the boundary between myself and this person is more complex and fluid. It sometimes precludes acknowledging the other person’s presence in the cafe at all. If he’s with someone then I gladly allow that the bubble around him is his terrain. I don’t have any reason to interject and in fact it helps me protect my domain around the periphery of my table with lioness prowess. I don’t need to meet his companions, in fact I have no interest in meeting a lot of random people and would feel imposed upon if it were part of the dynamic of becoming more familiar with the acquaintance. I just want to remain on course myself as queen of my own headphone enhanced journey through my creative self’s offering for the day. I can sit and write for eight or ten hours at a sprint if uninterrupted. 

Because these writing opportunities don’t happen every day when they do I must open to them and this is in essence the main part of my job description. If I am poised with writing utensil at the ready in my creativity lair accentuated with binaural music then I am likely to meet myself on the page in such a profound way that I am changed. In this way writing serves as a limit-experience for me because I allow parts of myself to come into the veins of my self expression in a torrent of unmentionable and often intolerable truth that I can only confront on the page as expanding existence. 

Thus, if I’m sitting in my intense, don’t break into my flow  writing pose, visually interpreted quickly by most adults, children are a different animal, and I don’t acknowledge the him who is the object of my epiphany this morning, or more often than not don’t even notice he’s arrived until he’s out the door or passing toward it, I don’t have to do more than wave to create a meaningful punctuation in our encounter. 

The first time it happened to good effect I was so relieved a broad smile swept across my face as he exited. It’s such a freeing experience not to be tied down by someone who gets upset if I don’t drop everything to talk to them. It’s obvious this person has his own life, his own rhythm, his own interests and concerns and mine are clearly separate. I am truly amazed by this seemingly shared preference to be separate and yet able to connect when it feels right. Before my last relationship I don’t think I would have reacted the same way to this new detached yet affable opportunity. 

So surprised was I that the space I’d taken for my work and for myself was being honored and met with the same that I wanted to understand what made it happen. Beyond the benefit of a spacious connection I suddenly realized, wait, there are characteristics which make it possible . What are they? I must create them to memory! Here are some of them, probably not all if I kept analyzing:

1. Both people pay close attention to detail.
   1. To respect the qualities of a single moment that makes up the many points of entry that the chemistry of two humans ally with their meeting is to create the setting for intimacy. 

The way these components intersect of their own accord paradoxically driven by individual availability or the lack of it makes this morning’s fleeting event serendipitous when I look back at it. It might not ever have happened to me in such a natural and mutual way before now if I hadn’t been doing the alchemical practices that I’ve used throughout my days to make sense of the chaos I encounter. What seems like minutiae is really a springboard into the vast ocean of possibility, the quantum field of possibility. 

For instance, I didn’t even know this configuration of physical space and psychically relayed (a glance, a slight nod) respect was something I wanted consciously. The discovery of what amounts to a basic performative aspect of mutual respect points me to the fragility of my own happiness.How can it be made manifest if I don’t have its components in mind? It logically cannot have its foundation be solid. The gap between who I am and who I am becoming in relation to others is not a mechanizable terrain. It is built on a ferocious and unpredictable volcano.  It has the fluidity of lava, unknowable and ever forming new masses of existence, availing itself to the ever changing fodder of limit-experience. At its crux is the concept of change, the setting aside of being for what it means to become. 

2. Trust is another word that comes up, trust in the Self.
   1. I now know what I didn’t know before and the fragility of the emergence of this insight gives me pause because I do not push the lever on the production of trust. I shiver with the implausibility of its byproduct, joy. I sit back in my little wooden cafe chair and am amazed by the power of trust. 

How many other traits have I developed over the years whose source of emergence I didn’t even realize? I took things like my resonance with the natural world for granted. Doesn’t everyone have it? The answer to that and so many other gifts destroyed on me that drive my day to day unique perspective of the world unequivocally is no; the truth is that I haven’t appreciated them because I haven’t appreciated myself and when I look into the heart of someone who is listening with a place of thirst, with a fervor for connection I am led into the beauty of my own heart.  

When I delve deeper into the awareness of the word that comes to me is,

3.  discernment I rediscover myself as enough. I am able to discern this new quality of my identity because it made itself known. I realize I am discerning more carefully and consistently because of clearing out old habits and patterns of thought whose byproduct was,
4. Grounding. Consistently I chose to connect more deeply to the earth over and over and over over the past several months.  

Strangely I find intimacy happens more easily in general with strangers. With the uncommon pleasure of translating the concept of the unknown into a literal human manifestation I find it easy to speak of usually private avenues of interest. Like oil to water the parts seldom given voice rise to the top of my mind demanding to be skimmed off once in a while if I want to settle the senses that lurk at the bottom of this primordial wellspring of inspiration and creative juice.

As I write about the event this morning hunger takes over. Putting words to privately felt nuance requires me to fire the synaptic connectors of language, not necessarily an apt bridgemaker for what is sometimes unsayable. I’m munching on my smelly contraband at my table and sipping hot mint tea in between the crunchy, lightly smoked mixture. The heat of the liquid along with the astringent quality of the tea leaves sends the unctuousness of the fish oil from my tongue down past the cool breeze of my lungs down into my belly which smiles with the largess I’ve provided. My brain reaches down and snorts the newly digested omegas like cocaine on the lip of a disco bathroom sink in the 80s.

9:04

As the morning settles into its bottom hours the new friend leaves, his initial configuration previous to my arrival of old school buddies left the hour before, and I am left with the sense of  synchronicity that grabs onto my focus: The bizarre angelic deification of Metatron, a spiritually complicated figure that either exists or doesn’t because that is the dilemma of all celestial deities and that has an unknown origin especially since there could be two of him or only one depending on which religious texts and disciplines you ascribe with devotion arises when I go onto YouTube to cue up music for my session. I stumbled on the mention of Metatron whose name I’ve heard in a meditation that an alchemy teacher guided during a zoom session while I was quarantined during the pandemic. 

I, like so many, took on unusual subjects as depth projects during the Covid lock down and this one in particular, the study of alchemy has remained valuable to my life because it helps me navigate my own consciousness. I would go so far as to say, no pun intended, that it’s an elemental part of my relationship to myself now. The practice of alchemy has set itself up in little ways. I’ll see if I can tease out a few of them.

1. Every hour or so during the day I’m aware of the way nature, both seen and unseen, is affecting my body and mind.
   1. I start with waking. This morning huge crows were outside my window and cawed so loudly that the smaller birds’ vocal incantations took a lot of patience to hear. But patient attention is the point. I could be listening to the whir of an air conditioner as Esther Hicks talks about doing when she wants to connect to the stillness inside. 

Some mornings the sounds around me may drown out actual bird chirps and the subtlety of a breeze whistling through tree leaves may have to be left to my imagination but then I’ve triggered the proprioceptors that ignite a writing session. Nothing is ever for nothing.

2. Yesterday I was even stunned to realize after so many years of wandering and musing ephemerally I’d begun to understand that slippery concept of my soul. For a minute there it was a non localized object, not a particle not a wave, yet with presence in the temporal configuration of who I sense that I am, my ephemeral identity so to speak. 

3. The inner taking place in the outer world.
   1. In my conversation with my new friend today I talked a little bit about my creative endeavor to reframe the apex of sexuality, spirituality and trauma. I got more specific that I have in our brief conversations in the past and mentioned that extreme conditions like PTSD fit into the discussion I was developing and that since I’d been butting up against my preference for privacy and my need professionally to be more transparent I felt frustrated. 

All this led to the daily, almost hourly, practice of anthropomorphizing the common relational experiences that we struggle to assimilate. Perspective shifts when we mix it up with other people so we repress uncomfortable unconscious material when it makes itself accessible. To bring it forward we need tools, guideposts, any damn thing that will help ease that scary feeling of emotional overwhelm. The tools we feel drawn to learn about come to us serendipitously with the useful agenda of recontextualizing the ineffable.

“Depression is like a woman in black. If she turns up, don’t shoo 

her away. Invite her in, offer her a seat, treat her like a guest and 

listen to what she says.” – Carl Jung

12:52pm

I’ve jumped over the lunch hump by customizing the oatmeal they serve here. When my brain gets drained of glycogen and I need to refuel so I can keep it useful, I return to the counter and order the only thing on their menu that’s not processed, gluten or dairy based. I ask them to add more hot water in the little paper bowl that holds the instant but whole grain oats. Then I go down to the parking lot and grab the bag of powders that make up my sacred fuel as an existential transient without a kitchen:

Organic chocolate stevia leaf sweetened chocolate protein powder that’s chock full of vegetarian sourced nutrients and minerals. 

Stevia is a natural sweetener that tricks the mind into thinking it has been treated to my brains favorite legal drug, sugar when really no insulin has been produced as with sugar. There’s only the opposite of bitterness and the mind is satisfied so that a sugar craving is reduced or in my case alleviated. Each day my body wants sugar so finding this herbal remedy is crucial to turning down the hormone wrecking effects of insulin produced by sugar’s digestion. 

Finding a friend who fulfills the mind’s need for companionship without necessarily requiring a more intimate encounter is a new intimacy trick for me. I come from a place of extremes as my affinity for limit-experience illustrates and bypassing the psychological cost of engagement in sexual intimacy, while not nearly the same bang for your buck, I couldn’t resist the pun, is better than continuing to maintain a sexually anorectic attitude to life. 

When I was in my twenties and used to go out to clubs and all that wild all night behavior that went with the excess that sucked up the youth of the 80s, one of my favorite band’s paradoxical songs would inevitably be played by closing time. The Smiths crooned, 

“Sweetness, sweetness I was only joking when I said by rights 

You should be bludgeoned in your bed.”

Sweetness indulged by the mind as connectedness instead of a rollicking affair is something akin to taking a lick of a lollipop instead of eating a slab of chocolate blackout cake. I’m not saying it’s the same on any real level but for someone who has entertained erotic extremes the substitute helps put the fervor I feel toward romantic love and all that means sexually and relationally is enough for the present and that’s a chaos I don’t mind detouring. It turns out loneliness has many of its own upsides, a strong bout of melancholia induces me to write. It has placed me in front of an easel with a paintbrush in hand.  

Then the lyrics point back toward the singer.

“And I’ve got no right to take my place with the human race.” – The Smiths

“A measure of darkness”, while not easy to indulge proves again and again to be something I cannot outrun either. Just when I’m exhausted by the dance I escape the tides of insanity through the simplest thing but in my turmoil I so often forget it’s an option: surrender. 

Once I was in the middle of a mosh pit but something was different that night because when I’d been rammed by too many testosterone driven elbows hitting my forehead and chest, I learned that change wasn’t only inevitable it was required if I wanted to choose conditions less bruising. 

By the time my youth was over and I could no longer pass as an ingenue in my  Hollywood career hearing that song blast through what remained of the 80s was a strange combination of disaster and delight, an embrace of postmodernism’s existential conundrum, an end to the old and a ballad for the new sense of 1990s  alienation. I leaned into a nomadic life soon after seeking connection and the expansive view of loss being constantly on the move gave me. It was an initiation into an existence crisis intimated through a miraculous healing that helped me avoid surgery. 

While I was jubilant not to be at death’s doorstep I also knew I couldn’t go back to my old life focused on excess and that Smithian theme of sublimity at the expense of joy. As if to answer the void I’d shouted into with the abandon of the Saturn Return years, the shift that takes place in our identities roughly from 27 to 30,  I was initiated on tribal lands in the American Southwest to the concept of transience as a heroic journey. The quest for transcendence from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary leads the traveler who is not looking for somewhere physically locatable but psychically discernable.  I had no idea how to go about it and I used to drive around Los Angeles trying to tap into some sort of inner GPS. Before digital mapping systems were invented it was much easier to get lost. The possibility of genuine anonymity time passed with the ubiquity of smartphones and Chet Baker’s ‘Let’s Get Lost’ is lost on young music lovers today. The phrase no longer holds the double entendre as a livable space. It’s not possible to truly be lost physically any more but  that leads to the lostness that I felt this morning as I walked into the cafe as a valuable  proposition because I can be lost in loneliness. 

Oh, hell, yes, to wander into a room full of people when you’ve not felt true human connection and find it, the kind that inspires you to create beauty and to be kinder, and to suddenly taste your food as nectar, that astonishingly comes to the homo sapien through the connection with another of our kind even though delight and disaster are sure to follow. 

When I leave the coffee house, find a parking spot and shut my eyes tonight I will end the connection with the world and drift off to another realm. When I wake up in the morning I will be again confined to the reality of our third dimension with its social chaos. I can choose the risk of connection if I’m lucky enough to have the opportunity. 

All in all I think I learned a lot from my decade of self imposed alienation. For most of this year I’ve felt that I might not be able to join the world again but I find when days of connection do happen I’m ready to “take my place in the human race” the phase of the psychic wound appreciated and its lessons plucked from the limbs of horrible experiences.

Research Areas:

Social, intimacy, relationships, culture, loneliness, jean-paul sartre, shamanism, alchemy, Tantric Buddhism, meditation, love, sexuality, chemistry, Metatron, chaos, philosophy, psychology, time continuum, sublimity, 80s, The Smiths, Chet Baker, anonymity, loss, lost, 90s, grounding, fluidity, transformation, loneliness, hysteria, abuse, child, Los Angeles, Tennessee, urban, city, farm, rural, society, alterity, alienation, limit-experience, limit experience, Foucault, desire, middle age, ageism, trauma, P.T.S.D., plant medicine, Saturn Return, trust, vulnerability, psyche, wound, connection, sexuality, trauma,

*Airbnb responded quickly to help me leave the unsafe location.