when the reader gets read

ft. V., novel writing, etc.

Source: Mudpots and Fumaroles: Lithographs of Yellowstone’s Thermal Springs (1883)

Welcome to Dream Interpretation for Dummies, where Dear Abby meets Native Americana. Come to the campfire, peer into the yawning grave, and take a dive into the collective subconscious… or maybe just explore some weird clown imagery. We’ll wait for you here.

Howdy Note: Long time no see, friends. Missed y’all.

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Before I was born, my mother, aunt, grandmother, grandfather, and my aunt’s four young children were all inside my grandparent’s trailer when a tornado came and swept them all up into the air for several extended moments. It was terrifying, of course. The trailer didn’t survive, of course. And yet, somehow, they all did. As a child, I was envious of this experience they had all had without me. Shouldn’t I, too, have a miracle if we were to be bound together? For my mother, aunt, grandmother, grandfather, and my aunt’s four children were the only family I truly had in the world. My mother and grandparents especially.

Naively, or rather hopefully, I thought it was this shared experience that made me, sometimes, feel as if I was an intangible and porous thing while they were flesh and bone. That I was (badly) acting out being a person and they were actually doing it — as if, whereas they had all been tied together for at least a lifetime, I had just stumbled in and been handed the script and asked to perform. To behave, as it were, if there was nothing afflicting me. Because that is how it felt — in my child’s mind, my child’s body, in my (child’s) spirit — like affliction.

Of course now I know, and so do you, that that was far from the reason why.

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V. and I met through A. who was one of the first people, in a public forum, who really wanted to talk to me about my own mysticism.

At that time in my life, there were only small references to spirituality in my work — in some ways, it populated everything, but as only a shadow, a tinge. I didn’t know how to articulate something that mattered so deeply to me that it in turn lent me an anti-air of credibility. I wanted a long and successful career in writing, someday — I was a freak, yes, I knew that, but a serious one. I knew I could not write, or talk, about mysticism in purely joking terms. It would eventually come out that I meant it. That I was incapable of not being weird about god. That I avoided talking about certain things on dates because I knew the people I was on them with wanted me to be fun and free. I knew on my best days I could be engaging — even charming, but free from responsibility? From the yoke?

Well, I didn’t think I had ever been that, not in this life at least. And, as I privately held, if past lives were indeed a thing, probably not in those either.

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Since I quit my day job with a small Native focused federal agency in mid-April I have wedded myself entirely to one task: that of finishing my (first) novel and then, once that is done, casting it out into the world. No small task, to be sure, but there is a crystal clarity of vision surrounding it for me, one I was sure I would never get back. That I was sure had fled for me forever. A gift, yes, but a slightly terrifying one.

I quit for an abundance of reasons, some I am sure you can guess — my own morals chief among them, but also DOGE, and return to office, and weeping at my desk for multiple months, and my politics, and and and. Still, it was a hard decision, and one that came with no small amount of pains. On the weekends, finally unshackled from my computer, I would open all the windows and lay on the floor of my office/guest bedroom on a yoga mat, too bone-tired even to light a candle, much less pray in a way that I knew would be pleasing instead of desperate. I knew if I tried what would come out was a prayer from my past I had never forgotten. That still, despite it all, brings me a hollow kind of comfort. Instead, I would just close my eyes. Barely meditation. Barely anything at all.

What I told V., however, remains true. There would come a point when I felt that the Universe, that God, that the Divine, hell, even the ghosts of the building when I would return on Monday, were looking me in the face. I felt They were saying — will you, indeed, quit? I felt They were saying — are you what We think you are?

I felt Them say — okay, then, prove it.

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Which is all to say, I’ve been thrillingly busy, but I also knew I needed a reading, even if only to confirm what I had been feeling myself, in order to proceed in the best way possible. Still, there are so few people on this earth that I allow to read for me, these days, though V., of course, is among that few. I had a few questions for her, but mostly I wanted to know if she, since the last time we had spoken, sensed anything different about me. Unsaid: with my spirit, with my energy.

For there was, indeed, something different about me. Something I had told no one, so miraculous it felt. Like closing a loop. When I was a child, I called it the Holy Ghost, then just the Ghost. The thing that lived inside of me, that I could feel under my ribcage, inside my hands, my retinas, my brain, my mouth. The thing that lived inside of me, yes, but also the thing that lived outside of me in terrifying ways, holding my eyes open, pulling me into a dream, telling me something I did not want to hear, much less speak aloud. Occasionally, if I allowed myself to really think of the Ghost at all, I knew it was not one singular being, but multi-faceted, multi-mouthed. Like in the Bible stories I grew up with — be not afraid, I am with you. Yet I was afraid. And I was such a lonely child.

Which is to say, the first question V. asked me was — Can you feel it in your body?

To which I said, feeling like I could weep — Yes, yes, exactly.

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Someone I am seeing casually asks — how did you figure out you had a knack for it?

To which I say — It predates me.

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Sending you your own closing loops.

See you on the Other Side,
Howdy

Send your dreams, nightmares, and mystical/symbolical queries to sadboyhowdy@gmail.com.