Emergence Part 1: Hitting the Eject Button

I’m grateful that, at a young age, I succumbed to the allure of madness

This essay is the first in a series of six, that I have tentatively named “Emergence”. I wrote these over the course of a week in a compulsive fever - these essays represent a transition in my own life. I released an album of folk songs a few years back called “Unbecoming”. This album helped me process the transition in life I had been experiencing throughout my 20s, unweaving myself from the ideas and culture that had led me down a path of deep depression and internal strife. Now, I find myself at a point where I feel I can live my life on my own terms, creating my own vision for what the future may hold for me and how I would like to carry myself through this life. These essays seem to have poured out of me, it did not feel like a choice to write them - when I was younger, I needed to hear that it was possible to live a spiritually fulfilling life, an emotionally healthy life, a life that I could be proud to live. So, it seems I have written something for that version of myself - something that might’ve helped ease the journey and lit the path before me. If you find yourself struggling with similar parts of this business of living, I hope these essays can keep you company. As I note at the end of this first essay: “I have written these essays to share what I have learned on my journey thus far - there is certainly more to learn, but I hope these words may keep you company when the road feels too lonely to bear.”

Hitting the Eject Button

It is hard to remember a time throughout my early life when I was not in pain, a spiritual pain that seemed to live inside me, humming like an old furnace in a haunted basement. I used to lie awake late into the night, thirteen, fourteen years old, with pain radiating from my chest with every beat of my heart.¹ It was inescapable and I let myself writhe in it, I let myself experience the depths of this anguish - while I would wish such feelings upon nobody, letting myself fully experience this suffering (i.e., my body telling me something was very, very wrong), I think, empowered me to develop a deeper relationship between my body and spirit. I do not think, though, that overt suffering is needed to develop a healthy spiritual life, but I do think that accepting the sufferings that arise in life and learning to navigate them is a requisite aspect of a resilient spirit and body.

The pain I experienced seemed invisible to those around me - as a child, I could not tell if the people around me simply were blissfully unaware of the spiritual pain I was in or if they simply ignored it for their own comfort. With hindsight, I sense that a lot of us (at least in this shared land of early 21st century globalism) are too wrapped up in our own invisible sufferings to be present for that of the people around us.

“How are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m fine - you?”

“Oh, you know, about the same.”

As a result, I think a lot of us live fractured lives, where our internal self is not connected with the external world around us. At work, we are told to leave it at the door. With our families, we are told to be polite, spoke when spoken to, and respect adult authority. Our spirits are too much for the world to handle, so we keep the bottle corked, and let our spirits fester without oxygen.

Fractured, we suffer. Our ability to be ourselves is severely crippled by the limited ways we are permitted to express our true selves in this society. That is why so many of us cling to permitted identities we sense we could flourish within - children dreaming of becoming athletes and astronauts, doctors and firefighters. We sense, even as young kids, the opportunities for our soul stuff to seep out into the outside world. Many of us have learned it is best to be alone, that way we can at least let our spirit spill out in our moments of solitude.

Some of us are better able to handle the fracturing of our internal and external worlds - some of us are unable to bear the pain of it at all. For much of my conscious life, I have manically chased permissible ways for my soul to manifest itself in the physical world - ranging from sport to art to science to business. In-between each episode, I would fall into a deep depression - lacking the strength to be myself through any avenue available before me. At one point, the one light bulb in my bedroom burnt out and I did not change it for three months.

I am deeply indebted to books - while reading no longer comes easily to me,² books provided the most direct evidence that people’s internal and external worlds do not need to be fractured. Books taught me that this fracturing is actually a wound - a broken bone, a cancer - and that our internal self can exist out in the open, that our soul is meant to illuminate our entire body. Vonnegut helped me see that the world I was living within was absurd, Foster Wallace that this absurdity can and will kill us, and hooks that we can undertake the radical act of healing and letting our true selves step forth and breathe deeply of the air around us. Hesse taught me that there is an immense and rich universe in the physical world immediately around me, a universe that is at once my teacher, my canvas, my garden, and my caretaker.

Unfortunately, we live in a society that is quite essentially dependent on our internal and external worlds being fractured. When we suffer from such a wound, it is far easier to sell us things we do not need - whether it be literal products or abstractions, ideas, and wars. That is because when we live with this kind of fracture, our bodies feel bad. We quite literally become ill. We are depressed and anxious, we have IBS, we most certainly have ADHD, we have constant migraines, we are allergic to something or everything, we have panic attacks on, at minimum, a weekly basis, our cholesterol is through the roof, our sweat smells toxic, and our backs really, really hurt. When we are ill, we are far more susceptible to fill our cabinets and our minds with snake oil - when we are ill for so long we become desperate for relief.

I, like many others, became cynical. I could speak intelligently and at-length about the ills of our modern world. I could speak to the sources of my suffering, but I could not ease it. I could name the evils that sought to keep my soul fractured from my body, yet I could not find a path to re-align the breaks. This is because, in part, living as a critic is still living subject to the world I was critiquing. We cannot build something beautiful when we are consumed by the lack of it around us. We must hit the eject button, we must let ourselves grow into the world around us naturally - the way that trees grow from the ground, extending their branches towards the sun. Trees do not live in critique of the darkness, they simply gravitate towards the light.

As I came closer to this realization that I must step outside of the societal cloud I grew up in, I struggled to feel like it was okay to prioritize healing the suffering I was experiencing when it felt like the world around me was in shambles. The world is burning, children are being shot, culture wars threaten to drown us - it can feel truly wrong to start with caring for and healing ourselves when the stakes, globally, feel and are so high. Yet, how can we hope to build a beautiful world for ourselves and for our children when are fractured and suffering? What solutions can we offer when our shelves are lined with snake oil and false promises? What will grow in our garden when we don’t even know how to cultivate healthy soil?

There is, in the end, nothing inevitable about the society we live in. We are the children of the Sun and the Earth - we live (as does all life around us) by the grace of the gifts that they, together, provide to us. We are made in the likeness of our parents. We have been imbued with their gifts of cultivating and fostering life, of making something far greater than ourselves simply by existing. When our souls are fractured from our bodies, our ability to express this gift becomes compromised. Our gardens wilt, our waters muddy and run dry, our air thickens.

The society we inhabit relies on the fracturing of our internal self from our external, or more simply, of our soul from our body. If we want to be part of cultivating a more beautiful world, then we must embark on the journey of setting these fractures so they may begin to heal. When we are ill, when we are fractured - our energy feeds a cancer about us. When our soul illuminates our body (i.e., when we live as self-actualizing beings), the garden before us flourishes with the gifts of our light. To embark on this journey, we must give ourselves permission to say goodbye to the worlds that ask us to fracture ourselves.

This does not mean cloistering ourselves like hermits, but it does mean walking a path that the people around us may not recognize - that can be a lonely road. It does mean cultivating the fire inside of us, stoking its flames, so that it may shine bright through our being - that can be a confrontational road, especially when the people around us are not ready to walk beside us.

We are, in a sense, the micro-organisms that give our culture life. That is why it is called a “culture”, after all. As consumers, we are fed “culture” as if it is a dish prepared for us, when, in reality, culture is birthed wherever the fire in our bellies shines brightly. In a consumer society, in an individualistic society, we have largely lost touch with how we are able to foster and care for and pass down tradition. Today’s world would be unrecognizable to most of our ancestors, not simply because of the advancements in technology, but because our knowledge and daily practice of living have become so disconnected from the Earth and the Sun.

Most traditions now exist as a shadow of their true selves. Religious rites and cultural rituals, passed down for generations, have either been commodified into consumer holidays or entirely lost and forgotten. Instead of being bound together as a village, dependent on one another for survival, purpose, and joy, we find ourselves in a global society that seeks to homogenize us - cartons upon cartons of perfectly uniform white eggs. This homogenization is unnatural and, to be a part of if, we are forced to sever the relationship between our body and our soul.

As human beings, we do not and have never existed in a vacuum. We are inextricably tied to the Sun and the Earth and all of their children. We rely on the air, on the bacteria, on the land, on the plants, and on the animals. Our bodies are truly amazing - equipped with all kinds of sensors and systems to help us regulate our relationship with the world around us.

This is why so many of us feel ill - disconnected from the Earth, Sun, land, air, flora, and fauna, disconnected from ancestral knowledge, disconnected from one another - our bodies’ alarm systems have been screeching at us our entire lives, telling us that there is something very wrong. But, with souls severed from our bodies, we fail to listen to and comprehend what our bodies are telling us. We fail to find meaningful routes to healing, meaningful routes to feeling well, meaningful routes to living well.

So, what does it look like to heal? What does it look like to reconnect, remerge our souls with our bodies? In the end, it will look different for each of us - the fire in our bellies don’t burn identically, but fires all need to be fed. At the start, we have to go through a journey of “unbecoming” - in that, we must shed the societal notions that sever our soul from our bodies, so that we may step forward as a single, unified being.³ As a single, unified being, we are able to fully step into our power to create - just like our ancestors and forebears. Our life becomes a celebration of the beauty and joy we are able to create around us, fueled by the fire within us.

“Unbecoming” is a daunting, lonely road to walk. Ideas of how the world works and who we are have been deposited into our minds from an early age, like coins into a piggy bank.⁴ It is far easier to hold onto these seemingly-precious coins, even when they oxidize and stain our fingers and minds when we hold them. So many of these ideas keep our souls from our bodies, and we must undertake the daunting task of shedding these ideas that make us ill.

As we shed such ideas, we do lose connection with the people and places that continue to hold onto them - this is, perhaps, one of the most painful parts of this process of “unbecoming”. It is a lonely road and, often, a confrontational one. Many of the ideas we must shed to heal are ideas that others clutch dearly to their chests - it can feel like a great threat to witness somebody simply release such an idea, like a leaf on the wind. It can feel strange, often beautiful and often terrifying, to interact with someone who lives their lives fully on their own terms.

And so, that is why I have written these essays. I do not think that I have arrived at some final destination, nor do I think that my own healing is over - likely far from it. But, I do know that the road will get less lonely as more people undertake the challenging healing journey of “unbecoming” and, subsequently, “becoming” again when the soul remarries the body.

Culture and society are birthed from the fires in our bellies. We live in a world that tries to feed us a way of life - to do so, the fire in us must be re-directed from our own dreams to the dreams of society. I have written these essays to share what I have learned on my journey thus far - there is certainly more to learn, but I hope these words may keep you company when the road feels too lonely to bear.

1. A bit of science and body awareness has revealed this feeling was likely cortisol pumping into my body, my natural stress response system fully activated while I lie still in my childhood bed.

2. Even a book, as analog and archaic as it may be compared to modern technology, still only evokes the shadow of the real world.

3. For those familiar, what I speak of is contained within the Three Metamorphoses described by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. First we are the camel, in that we take on all the burdens society places upon us, and we are proud to witness our strength, yet we suffer under the weight of it all. Second, we transform into the lion, in which we recognize societal norms as a monster, a great dragon, with which we must do battle with. Yet, even though the lion is powerful and may be able to overcome the dragon, it is still a life at war. The final transformation is becoming the child - a being who lives a serious life of play. As the child, life becomes a celebration of one’s own gifts, of one’s own power, of one’s own ability to bring beauty into the world. When I speak of unifying the soul and the body, it is analogous to becoming the child once more - Nietzsche’s rendering of the tale points out that this is, indeed, a confrontational and lonely journey, but that there is a great prize at the end of it.

4. Paolo Freire speaks powerfully of this “banking model” of education in Pedagogy of the Oppressed and how it disempowers us from being in control of our own lives. We are able to meaningfully alter the conditions of our lives only when we develop our own understanding of the world around us, which in turn empowers us to become actors capable of changing the world around us with intention.