My Mysticism / A portal without a door
There must be some reason, right?, for our souls to be housed in vessels which can shatter.
The full moon shone there in the face of God and trailed etheric resplendence on the black sea and all along the shore in the dark we stood, awed, frozen in place and in worship.
In Valencia I’m much more myself than I have been before. I keep feeling energy well up behind my crooked nose and it makes me sniffle and sneeze. The feeling of congestion between my nose and my ears, unreachable but nagging — that is what awaits me in America. Something I have to change but cannot touch yet. In the meantime I’m fixing my posture and poising multicolored scarves over my head just like abuela always did. I’m starting to think in Spanish. Unexpectedly I’m eating better here and spending less. I’m satisfied just sitting on the sand and watching the waves dance and sparkle under the sun and even looking up to the angels behind the clouds. I know I’ll miss these days just as I know I’ll be devastated when we lose abuela. It’s already too late to change much more than yourself and even that is a difficult and hardy choice to make. But I will make it because I must, because no one else will make it for me. And I will make memories and you will too, vague dramatizations of the vague recollections I give to you as one gives their body, bravely, beautifully…
I am beginning to recognize myself without needing to glance in the mirror or the pool reflecting my soul. And so I draw my wings close around myself and turn my gaze away to look directly at you.
I see you and your beauty: the way your back is so straight when bent over it could be mistaken for a line. The effort you put in, week after week, to keep your nails filed, colored, sharpened to a vicious point. I see your irises half-hidden by your thick eyelashes, the veins peeking out from beneath the skin of your neck when passion is present in your blood, the lotus bud of your nose, the blush on your cheeks, the way the sun reddens you, the way your shapely legs never stumble to hold all your weight, how you hide your teeth when you laugh too much, the elegance of your knuckles and your wrists, the ease with which your hair flutters and falls over your forehead and the back of your ears… I see just how lionhearted you have to be to persist in this hard and heavy world. I see how the cruelties round down your shoulders and how your muscles protrude out in the doing anyway. I see it clearly. Your refusal to be like anyone else you know. I wish I could kiss your forehead when you bend your head down to hide your tears, so I could say I’m sorry, but I see the ugly parts of you, too. Your laziness, your crudeness, the ways you contradict yourself, the sweat you leave behind, your snoring, the little hairs in your nose, the frenzy with which you sate your cravings, the fury with which you strike back against those who you perceive as having wronged you. I’m sorry, I would say, because I don’t know any word to use besides ugly, but to me, these are some of the most beautiful things about you, and you would not be complete without them.
Just like that — the crystal night is gone.
In order to become myself I have to die. I have to end who I have been and what also ends is the version of me which you have known so far, which you are accustomed to, which you cling to. The ways I have learned and practiced will never lead me to where I want to be or to whom.
And I’m in ecstasy and agony at once, because to shed skin is a painful feat that leaves you lighter than ever after, and prepossessing. I’m beaming from ear to ear because there is so much now that I don’t give half a single fuck about! I’m nothing and no one and I am free!
I built this life and I can rip it apart and the moon will come again to pour itself over whatever is left. Without fail. The city will still be here too. Danger will pass by me like midnight does. Some will love my new self and others will prefer my younger version. So be it. I have to remember that there is no risk. I’ve already succeeded. The future is happening right now in the same way someone across the world is falling in love again at this very moment and someone else’s heart is being broken for the first time, and in that future I’ve already accomplished everything in it, I’ve already cemented myself in people’s memories and said everything I need to say. It is well with my soul.
I’m only teaching my clients what I’m testing and finding out for myself: namely, that you can change the inside of yourself at any time, to any extent. I can go outside right now and walk to the beach and stare at the moon over the soft water, I can close my eyes and kneel into the tide and let the perfect temperature of the Mediterranean convince me that I’ve returned to the womb. And so I did. There is sand in my room now I’ve brought back on accident and also on purpose.
As for you, gorgeous one: swim with me, cut through the waves with your long and sun-speckled arms. I am awaiting your arrival as well. I’ve adored you more than most and you haven’t known it and you never will know the true extent of it. It being the feeling I get from being around you, the resonating of the auras, the heat of your luster descending on command of Ashtar… We are always trying to communicate the inexpressible. And the closer to the truth we get the less others will be able to understand it.
Ways to pass time in this world while you wait for the return of love in your life: Fall in love again. Dedicate yourself to a cause. Devote yourself to knowledge. Distort yourself into a practitioner of rituals. Resist the authority of the framework which holds us cramped together. Make the mistake of being born on the margins. Get lost; become shadow; flirt with homelessness. Wander. Walk in the sun and record all the colors you see. Be as specific as possible. Take pictures of everything you see until your phone overheats. Then buy a disposable camera and use the entirety of it without capturing a single person. Study the histories. Explore the origin of your name(s). Make sure there is something on the horizon to look forward to. This, you must. There will come a day when you are dead and no one notices anymore.
In Valencia, there is a portal without a door. Made in 1400, it once separated the Christian city from the Moorish part of it. An abbot lived in the house above it, once. Once, if you looked through it at the right moment of dusk, like looking up at the halo of the light around the full moon, you could see right into the eyes of God. And it would either enlighten you or destroy your mind.
It is said that Father Juan Gilabert Jofré built the first mental asylum in Europe in 1410 after an abundance of madmen began to linger and be brutalized in the area. When I visit the portal I am thinking of those poor devoted departed, I am remembering my time working at Rikers Island and all the cruelties I witnessed there. There must be some reason, right?, for our souls to be housed in vessels which can shatter.
It was near THE DOOR that we first felt the urge to share our words. It is human nature to need to explain, compartir, when we see something which does not seem explicable. We do it since we are children. Now I am watching a young one bring a handful of dirt and shells to his parents and he is smiling wide waving his arms up and down as he stumbles up the hill of the sand. His parents wave him off after a second of a smile. He isn’t perturbed. He drops the bounty at their feet and waddles back to the sea and its seaforms. He will grow into a great and strong man that will never stop falling in love if he keeps this up.
As for me, I love metaphysical extravagance. Moonrise. Thresholds and transformations. Be invoked: I am remembering the feeling of meeting myself during the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction earlier this year. It started with looking in the mirror. Then the angle shifted and I saw myself from the side looking at my shadow with just a thin translucent plane between us. Then I realized that Eye am the shadow and my full self is not my body but all of my energy which can never be created or destroyed, only transmuted. In my entirety I resemble an indigo star, an oceanic mass of power too bright and potent to look at or approach, and in my lives I am just a fraction of this energy distilled into a vessel made of dust. And I communicated with myself. I asked so many questions, I wanted insight on so many things, only to be told again and again: That doesn’t matter. There is no reason for it. It simply is.
My purpose here is to create myself. And you and all the world are a reflection of myself. So when I improve and grow and challenge and love myself, I am also performing these actions onto the world. When you are transfixed by my eyes you are looking directly into the heart of a sublime star. Me regarder c’est te regarder.
And what is a portal without a door but a mirror?
There is a reason porta / puerta is used for door !