Ise Does It - Day 5
09.11.24
20.7Km
What does it take to believe in magic?
Is it the sobs that started deep in my gut as Chicquitita started playing in a cafe in Kii-Nagashima, at first unexplained and then explicitly tied to my childhood joy at listening to ABBA on repeat in the living room of my parents’ farm?
Is it my heart breaking as I witness someone experience a heartbreak of their own, or the way life-long defences can crumble with, seemingly, nothing more than a gentle gaze?
Or is it, that time I was undergoing psychedelic therapy in the Netherlands, standing on some psychic precipice, wracked with fear and shame and then falling only to land — cradled lovingly, all-knowingly — in a giant web of stars?
What does it take to believe, therefore, in a god of some sort?
Religion is a vexed topic for me. I attended a school that with God’s go-ahead — or so we were lead to believe — taught us that two locks or two keys don’t go together. We were taught that a woman’s right to choose, if she took it, would result in a wailing foetus, something that was demonstrated to us in x-ray detail by way of a movie called The Scream. And should we ever profess to struggling with our sexuality — as I did — them we would be told that unless we found God and went straight we would burn in hell for eternity.
As I was.
At least the reverend had the good graces to devise a prayer programme for me.
Against that backdrop, it’s little wonder I turned my back on any kind of belief in anything beyond myself. If Capital G G. O. D. wanted me dead — because I sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to pray this level of gay away — I would have to find another way to live.
In isolation, the way the school treated my gay friends and I should be cause for prosecution. Alas, religious protection laws in Australia make that impossible. But to me, the real injustice lay in how that experience for so long took away the possibility of believing that there might be something bigger than myself into which I could lean for support.
So what does it take to find the way back, if not to God, or even a god, but that sense of safety that comes from feeling connected to… something?
It started with a hefty dose of acid taken on Christmas night in 2015. Home in Australia for the holidays with life falling apart in quietly spectacular fashion the UK, I was taken under the wing of some loving folk in the Victorian countryside. I’d always been vehemently against any kind of psychedelic, associating them both with smelly hippies and precisely the kind of drug-induced psychosis I was trying to avoid. But in the presence of this couple and their rainbow-coloured family, I felt safe enough to drop a tab and see where the evening took me.
All the usual stuff happened. Swirly colours. Outrageous laughter. And yes, a sky full of diamonds. But it was out there on my back on the lawn that I first saw the silken web connecting all those stars, and how one silken strand came down to earth and connected me, too.
In the afterglow, a friend who knew me well and who knew my struggles intimately, asked me what I was left with. Even today the paradox of what I felt still twists my brain a little: I felt completely obliterated, insignificant, a nothingness, and at the same time, an indivisible part of some universal whole. And I’d never felt more free. That experience, for all the woo it may seem to contain, gave me the strength to go on. It literally saved my life.
Subsequent experiences with psychedelics have offered variations on a theme, each adding depth and subtlety to the spirituality that started to break free that Christmas night. I experienced a dissolution of self that offered me a set of decisions about how I’d like to remake myself moving forward, and yes, I fell back in to that great big web of stars and lived to tell the tale. But the biggest shift has come from seeing how that spiritual sense starts to come to life in the everyday. Because it’s one thing to feel something at work when you’re off your ‘nana. It’s another entirely to watch it come to life while listening to ABBA in a cafe in Kii-Nagashima.
I’m resisting putting a name to this thing, not because it’s has a third eye or demands I prostrate myself or endure daily beatings, but because it seems so prosaic, so… mushy, but there it is laid out before me on my keyboard and coming from my gut: love.
This all may change, as all things have a habit of doing, but to find that something, to feel it with some kind of regularity, and to experience how surrendering to it opens me up the world rather than shutting me down is a pretty awesome place to land for now. And its effects on how I connect to those around me are pretty startling, too. There have been more laughs, tears, and insights shared in one day of this walk than I’ve achieved in months of therapy, and with a bit of intention — and a bit of practice — that can be there, all the time.
So aside from all… that, what did the day hold? A touching conversation with a 21 year-old who looks after the otters at a local zoo. It threw in to such sharp perspective what opportunity looks like when you’re young in a remote part of Japan. A chat about how to design experiences to allow folk to go deeper in to what they need. A reckoning with how the ripples of my divorce are not quite quieted and how I find myself hoping that my ex finds healing. Aaaaand the most epic climb up the Tzuzurato-toge pass. I mean, would you just look at that view!
Sleep tight, friends. I love you.