This evening I happened to indulge in watching a little bit of some made-for-tv video docuhistordrama on the Mayan prophecies and alien/extraterrestial involvement on the roots of human species and knowledge. It makes enough sense that the Mayans were all about some snake forms and some heady gods among the stars. I think it’s awesome that they were so super-math smart that they figured out that there will be an alignment of the sun with the earth and some gigantic black hole in the center of the universe in, like, a week and a half. I wonder if the supposed 9 gods will come back or if people will finally figure out the the plain old sky and clouds are involved with how all those old forces showed themselves?
That’s what I think, anyway.
It’s nice to be able to think things, to have some thoughts. I’m genuinely curious as to what might come about on that Friday. Given that I have seen a lot in the sky on a fairly regular basis, I’m ready for anything. Maybe there will be good dragon clouds on that day? Maybe there will be real dragons? Maybe just balls of fire? Maybe everyone will just feel really, really good and the toilets will flush backwards in Australia.
Sweet.
Some say the battle between Good and Evil (Love and Fear) will be epic. I’d say it already is.
I’d like to think that Love wins, and so does Fear, when it becomes Love.
Speaking of winning and losing:
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10:00 PM (32 minutes ago)
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Is it bred into us, this pugilism? Or do we learn it? Why is conflict a part of our lives?
It has a lot, I think, to do with the way the mind constructs its relations of self/others/world/power. Something about bicameralism and the breakdown of.
Tonight I found myself saying, “No wonder there is war in the world, if a brother and sister fight about the bathroom.” (Now, there’s a complex for a parent to give a child, micro/macro guilt. I’ll have to watch that.)
Ah, resources…or perceived resources, power and the ability to intimidate being a resource in itself.
Zero sum, haves necessitate a have not. Either I can have it, or you?
There are a lot of people that have reason to be desperate, reason to compete.
It’s in us though, this drive. The sporting life, violent and graceful as it is. War.
…and it is endlesslyendlesslyendlessly reinforced…it becomes us. We become it. Soldiers, a team. A unit for a bloody cause.
Why is there pride?
These are some cloud+crow flock pictures from the past couple of days. It’s a nice “hobby.” I played with the contrast on a couple of them, because doing so allows me to gauge form and density with a little more insight. Cloud X-rays.
Sometimes I look at pictures, even seemingly unremarkable images, and my mind unspools a little at what I see. “Holy shit, there is writing in the sky. I know those are letters. I know those are birds. I know those are serpents. What does all this mean!? Oh, yeah…I know what it means…oh, that’s a pretty big fuckin’ deal and someone better talk to some folks about the fact that I’ve proved a bunch of people’s theories about spirit, mechanics, language, sense, and things like schizophrenia and saints…doh, what am I going to cook for dinner.”
I’ve been writing constantly for the past few days, thousands and thousands of words. It’s not sustainable under the current circumstances and that, my friends, is unfortunate. I feel, sometimes, like I have to write, like there are things I need to say (for myself) and that there are things I need to remember (for myself) and that…believe it or not, I take the integrity of my story fairly seriously. This is also an ongoing experiment in self/world relations in the the age of gestalt and ego. This is also a GIGANTIC…something or other…memebomb? (<- I just tossed that in ’cause it’s such a sweet sounding little word and also for the benefit of anyone who is or who may in the future be looking over this for the purpose of monitoring the communique of outspoken humans who actually might know what they’re talking about. I mean, really, a memebomb is not a violent weapon. In fact, it just means content or notion or trigger-link that undermines the viability of an idea to the extent that all the ideas surrounding that idea simply fall to pieces. Can ideas be a weapon? Well, all weapons started with ideas, so yeah…)
Realistically though, I am going to have to hard downshift back into my walking talking life roles. This whole issue of messianic shifts in consciousness and gestalt vision and aliens and geometry and blackholes and language and old gods and fundamentalists and the Catholic Church and daydreaming about how clever it would be to get in touch with…
Written out like that, it all sounds sort of “psychotic” or at the least “manic.” I’m not manic. Isn’t it funny how when you think a person is manic and they say that they’re not manic that makes you feel really really nervous, like maybe they might be?
Oh, fuck that.
See, I am one of the lucky people who actually figured out how to navigate madness and what it meant to me and what was possible in the world. I was inspired to imagine. I as put through the rigors of imagination, fulling feeling what it might be like to be watched, to be known, to be scorned. Actually, I was being watched and known and scorned, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. By sheer luck and observation, I learned that it was – and is – definitely possible to make the “imagined” life actually become real, because it was – and is – real.
The nice thing is that there is a papertrail a mile long and I can explain in reasonable terms precisely why it makes perfect sense to do something like, oh, contact Russell Brand or something. He’s really quite savvy in his spiritual and revolutionary orientations. We’re sort of similar in some archetypal features, though I don’t really know much about the fellow other than that he thinks the second coming may be in the form of a koala and that his interview with Westboro Baptist reminded me a lot of my brief correspondence with Sye from Proof that God Exists.
Anyway, I’ve been doing this for a long time, keeping this record. Nobody really takes it seriously, but that’s okay…it will just add to the surprise a little more. (For more about Surprise, scroll down…and down…and down…only to find out that I also don’t know what the surprise will be.)
12/7/2012
This is all Kingdom.
There is no King,
other than the Kingdom itself.
At first the trees were nothing special. They were golden in the sun, as trees often are.
The branches moved in a slow breeze. The road was gilt and dusted.
The mountain rose, really just a hill.
It was high summer, early evening.
Down below, the parking lots were filling with headlights.
A song played on the radio and I smelled like sweat.
Suddenly I noticed that the trees were full of animals. Bears leaning a paw out over the road, cats crouched low, the shapes of birds’ beaks and all sorts of wild tails and hooves…and eyes.
They had eyes, places where the leaves had grown thick or the light shot right through.
They all had eyes and they looked like eyes look, wise and dancing.
It was all in silhouette.
I thought to myself, “What would it be, to walk up this hill on a day such as today, when the world is so full of this well-ordered sense and this light, this light, this light.”
The hair on my arms stood up and I felt something begin to fly around in my chest.
“What would it be to walk on this road, my hand held and my friends silent and pointing, bowing and weeping and laughing at the simple miracle that God – which works through trees, and works through birds, works through the wind and the rain and is all of those and is all of us…had somehow held the leaves and branches in the perfect forms of foxes, lit bright and larger than life there rising, up over the road. What would it be like, to see the world spread out as it does down this hill, with the sky on fire and the mountains all purple and grey?”
The beauty of it all just rocked me.
I was, I knew, seeing a miracle. I was, I knew, the only one who saw it.
I only saw it because I had learned how to look.
I wanted to show people, because it made me believe.
One night in September, the moon hung like a golden ring low in the eastern sky, at the unlikely hour of 3:00 in the morning.
“Impossible!” I thought, “The moon should be over there. The moon is in the wrong place!”
“Is that even the moon?” I wondered. “How could it be?”
I shook. The ring – a fiery semicircle at the top of the hills – was hung in an East/North Line. “The Holy See,” I thought. The Vatican. “Why am I thinking this shit? Why do I feel so in awe…and so cliche’? Really, am I one of those people now. Fuck.”
I tried to take pictures, but it was too dark. “This is what they’ll get. This is what they’ll get for not helping me. There will be only blurs. Someone should be filming this.”
I called my mother, woke her up. “Can you go outside and look at the moon?” She did try. She got up. She looked out the window. “I can’t see it.”
I thought for a minute, “Can you drive out to the main road? It’s the weirdest moon I’ve ever seen. It’s in the wrong place.” She told me she was going back to bed.
I knew where the moon was supposed to be and it wasn’t there…it was across the sky entirely, and it looked like it was burning. It was not a “hallucination.” The pictures, useless blurs though they are, do tell of the brightness.
I don’t have pictures of the trees by the road, travelling west. I was driving. Though sometimes I stopped to photograph the sky, I didn’t stop to photograph the trees. I just drove past them, looking around, stunned and weeping.
My sadness was always that people did not see, would not see…how beautiful this place is and how incredibly artful and precise and serendipitous its workings are…they do not see that this was Eden…that this is Eden…or something like that.
I contacted the Catholics because they have power and claim to care about God.
I also contacted some other people. I was a mess though, totally overwhelmed and astounded and grieving and exalted and…confused. It was embarrassing. Then I realized that my writing those audacious letters was part of the story and so I wrote more, telling myself I didn’t care who found out or what they might say, telling myself that it was all too important to say nothing and that somewhere, somebody is paying attention.
EARLY WARNING SIGNS
Sigh. I just posted this big rant on my facebook page on how much I can’t stand WalMart. I spent the day emailing from the perspective of The Girl Who Proved God, which is one facet of my real-live-imagined self that I actively maintain.
No, thank you. It’s not like a Dissociative Identity issue, though if it were, that’d be totally understandable. It’s more like myriad consciousness and dynamic storytelling, a cultivation for the raw appreciation of story and far-flung, spot-on possibility within one’s life.
I have spent a long time driving and listening to the radio. Is it any wonder that I want to be a…
…postmodern antipop phenom?
I don’t know what that means, either. I do know that I want to dance and be witty.
I want to prove God with bombastic grace and befuddling nuance.
I think it’s hilarious that what I am a saying has all…been…said…before…
Then I remember. The pictures. The Y. The A. The broken O and the circle unbroken. The equilaterals. The golden ratio. The crown of thorns. The glowing chalice. The hands. The eyes. The light. The clouds.
I don’t know if anyone has ever attempted to prove God with clouds. Actually, I do know. That’s basically how EVERYONE PROVES GOD.
There is even scripture about it. I’m sure someone out there could name it, book and number…and God proves itself through clouds, among other bizarre and mystical acts that have BEEN GOING ON FOREVER.
Okay, point taken. I am longwinded, because HELLO. I PROVED GOD!
I also know how why and how…sort of…okay, maybe not so much.
(Note: I’m just having fun now. That is an early warning sign of mine. If I am having fun, I need to settle down and get right, tidy my priorities and reign in the world. I don’t like to think that this most delightful EMAIL TO MYSELF (in which I can say whatever I need to say in whatever way I’d like to say it, so long as it’s true) is somehow pathological or indicative of some dooming state.)
The stress, depression, depletion, renewal, crash-boom-bang-ta-da is, perhaps, at boom?
It will ebb back down. I haven’t gotten to bang in a while.
I have managed to learn, however to sometimes circumvent all the possible shenanigans and be-whinery, impulsive/indulgent irreverent sabotage and disastrous launch of new plans to the tune of much distraction, anxiety, and general overwhelming and then falling apart…and GET RIGHT TO THE TA-DA.
Efficacy is important to me.
I like that, in all things, I have an out. Nobody can judge me or pathologize me because they don’t know what it’s like to be me…unless, of course, they do and I know who my friends are.
We are the 2.6%!
Oh, whatever. Plus minus status quo. We’re all a bunch of…every single one of us…and we are beautiful and awesome and clumsy and brave and keen and tearful and full of the world…and so we are like everyone, we are like no one. We are the same. We are different.
Tonight I went to a discussion group held by my good ol’ psychiatrist, Dr. J. I am not his “client” anymore and he has transitioned his practice to medication minimalism and harm reduction in coming off and reducing psychiatric medication. He has discussion groups about topics of relevance to human beings with minds and hearts, like depression, gratitude, and the roles we play.
Someone said, “I like how people are different. It’s like art.”
Yeah, it’s like art.
Just tell yourself that.
THIS IS ART.
True stories are my medium.
I like to make them.
Oh, so, what exactly is this an Early Warning Sign of?
A mighty fine day tomorrow if I put in some work tonight…?
I need to copy/paste those letters into a document.
It is well known that I do such things. I am a self-documentarian, after all.
I had gotten to the point where I was able to be very quiet about the whole proving God thing. Okay, not so much. I’ve been talking about it more and more. It’s just so fascinating to me and it just seems so relevant. I mean, hey, I am involved in mad advocacy (madvocacy) and I am a mental health PROFESSIONAL that is interested in how people in spiritual crisis can cope with the distress it can cause and how people in states commonly called “psychotic” can navigate and understand their experiences on their own terms and with full faith in their own drawn conclusions, how they can resolve the conflicts that give risen to all sorts of troubling side effects of being human in an inhumane world.
Also, there is this program at the school I’m going to about Spiritually-Conscious Activism and, yeah, WORD ON THAT.
I finally feel like I have amassed enough evidence that this is a very natural human process that millions and millions of people go through, in their own way and for their own duration and with variable outcomes and resolutions. The world is full of people that have been touched by God. Just ask.
“Um, excuse me? Have you been touched by God?”
I wish that someone would help me to take a street poll on that one. I’d love to hear/see the reactions. A lot of people would just walk by, but there might be some good stories.
Oh, the cloud thing is very concerning though. I don’t know what to make of that still. Even if nobody else can see the shapes and figures and suggestions, I can and it’s not a hallucination. That is why I took pictures. I know A LETTER when I see one…or 5…or so-called 3, which is also like a lot of other figures in a lot of other alphabets.
If nothing else, I proved the sky is rad and that people ought to spend more time with it. Then they can prove God for themselves.
Yay!
Seriously (and that last bit was fairly serious) – I really don’t think that I’m heading anywhere but weller than well, as myself…who is sort of a beautiful mess, but who lets her daughter make snickerdoodles, with measuring cups, at 8:00 in the morning on a Sunday and who encourages her son’s love of both cacti and oceans.
They are both good readers.
They understand – in their child-mind way – that life is a story and that I am, in as honest and fantastically a fashion as I possibly can, trying to make ours better, grateful for what it is, but trying to make things better…or at least more fun, and more free, with better returns and much swimming.
I’m glad I have this whole graduate school thing lined up, in the event that something tragic happens with this fine, fine story that will for sure win some hearts and flip some wigs, if I can figure out how to piece it together, just so.
“Did it make you want to save the world?”
“If so, why?”
“If not, why not?”
“Why do you think there are relatively few people who want to save the world?”
“Do you want to save the world?”
You don’t have to do anything to join the League of Left Fields. You don’t have to do anything as a member…except BE TRUE AND LOOK AROUND, WATCH THE GAME AND DAYDREAM…and then LET THE GAME END and GO PLAY.
Really, that’s all.
That’s one way to save the world.
Space out. Wake up. Walk away. Run. Laugh.
Throw the gloves in the corner.
(Early Warning Sign #6: veiled boxing entendres. What is it with boxing? Further, what is that an Early Warning Sign of? AWESOMENESS.)
10:49 PM (13 hours ago)
to me
Oh, it just occurred to me how royally NOT COOL it is that, with certain diagnoses, you are NOT ALLOWED TO BE AWESOME.
You can be a little awesome, but not too awesome and you have to keep your awesome quiet, because it might “concern” people.
The criteria upon which you are judged in recovery can be just as banal and constraining and insulting as those that you were judged by when you were “not well.”
Oh, you can’t try to save the world when you’re psychotic.
You can’t try to save the world when you’re not psychotic.
When, pray tell, can you try to save the world?
Maybe you’re a bona fide hero. Maybe you know it. Maybe you don’t.
I don’t know. I do know that I’m awesome and nobody is going to deny me that.
I think the ticket to humility is to think in terms of everybody being awesome and your brand of awesome not being any more worthy or spectacular than anyone else’s and yet simultaneously honoring how vital it is that you be oneself within the world…because you’re awesome.
Keep in mind that I am trying to save the world through writing letters and being a brilliantly quirky strategist and dynamic gestalt thinker and intuit.
This is not the first time such a feat has been attempted.
You’ll never guess what’s in the works. It’s a surprise. A wonderful and weird, madly magical surprise.
I don’t know what it is, either, or when it will happen.
However, the world is full of surprises. All the time.
So chances are good that there will be a really swell one soon.
MAD LOVE.
Short is sweet
but incomplete
when every day
is a hundred years
and every hour
my life ends
and begins
again and again
I say that all the time
over and over
this is how stories
are woven
stitches
loops
slashes
bows
This is how I know what is linked to what…thought, feeling, theory, image, song, memory, dream.
I am sorting and filing, dusting and exclaiming, sending and receiving…messages to myself, to the world.
You’ll come to see that this is my way of getting to the point.
The End.
EARLY WARNING SIGNS
I have been thinking a lot about Early Warning Signs. Hyperprolific writing and audacity of vision and taking far-fetched (but well-reasoned) chances are Early Warning Signs.
Of what?
A heightened energy and attunement, a period of deeply conscious spirituality, an upswing in hope and inspiration.
These are bad things? Things I need to warn myself of? Things I need to batten down the hatches for?
I was sitting and focusing on the sky, thinking in a particular way I think when I am focusing on the sky, “Please show me what you need the world to know.”
I thought back on my absolute enrapturement of 2010 and reflected on how frustrated I’d become, feeling that I had to watch, that I was bound to miss something important if I did not watch. I recalled the feeling of trembling excitement at watching the filaments move together, great figures and landscapes unfolding and exhaling before me. I thought of all the layers of the sky, all the forces of light and wind and water…and dust and chemical and bacteria.
The sky is alive.
I thought about how I’d be sitting and writing, as I am now, emailing myself with my phone, and I’d be called to look up and there would be the most surprising things held up in the clouds.
By Fall, the shapes were sharp as if carved, undeniable. I was pretty sure that I was calling clouds.
That level of attunement and attention is not easy to sustain. I still watch the clouds and they still figure themselves, but I am not drawing with them anymore, because I can’t…because I – tragedy of tragedies – don’t have time.
The clouds were dense and lightly swirling today. However, I was answered with a sun dog and a flock of crows that came one by one to gather and fly, stirring circles over my head.
It’s all real.
***
The interesting thing about all of this is that I came into it and it came in to me all in a somewhat accidental fashion.
I wasn’t seeking. I didn’t believe.
***
Oh, going wildly off-topic is another Early Warning Sign.
Of what, my brain/mind/hearts stumbling capacity to keep all these true stories straight and to try to reconcile how they are all one story…
I am extraordinarily busy. I have a job. I volunteer. I have two children with whom I bake cookies and do homework and have silly arguments with about socks and whether the mayor is a member of the executive branch of the federal government, we make food and we clean rooms and we read books and wake up early in the morning.
I am an activist and an advocate. I will be a rubric-bound student again soon.
I am an artist who has no time to make art and so my life was made a story.
Letter to A Friend
This ended up not being brief at all, though I did speak more about experiential messianics and I did say thank you.
Please read this with a heart open to belief and possibility, as I wrote of what I am called to do. I need this to be read as one would read a real letter, long awaited. It’s not so serious and dramatic as all that, but it really does deserve some space of mind and heart…as that is where, I have found, the imagined can become real.
Please read this and picture me a real person with real potential, which I am.
I think I am asking you to believe in me.
Here is the letter:
…then I realized the great service you’d done and the door you’d opened with earnest, the wealth of knowledge and reference you offered.
When I was alone in the midst of my madness, I told myself, “There are people who know about this, there are people that could explain this, put all these ideas together.”
When I learned of your work and saw the The Spiritual Gift come up on facebook, I thought, “See, I was right!” and it was an affirmation and a reassurance, received as a sign.
I was nervous about the way you’d analyzed others experiences, because of my ethos re: the right to make one’s own meaning.
However, the meaning that I made was not just made by me. I mentioned that “I did not want to know what I was coming to understand as God.” The reason for this is that I didn’t want to have to be anything or do anything. I had been trying to live small, surviving life for years.
“Who am I to sit here and think that I should be so special as to know God?” To think that I was receiving some message, some task, some vision to live by and to live with. It was the anti-ego, the reflexive diminishing humility I’d learned.
I wrote, “I am a nobody.” and when I found myself thinking, “I am chosen. God knew me and I knew God…then I got hurt and I got scared and I couldn’t be myself anymore and I wanted to die…”
I balked at what I felt was being asked of me, offered to me, expected of me. “I am a nobody. I’m a fuck up and a failure.”
I am sitting here and writing this and realizing with great colliding clarity, glass and mirrors, geodesics…that everything I have ever loved, everything that has ever loved me, everything that has ever saved my life…that it was by the workings of that great and benevolent algorithmic economy of sense and lightning that is tied to our very own hearts and to the hearts of all…that it was by God that I noticed all those small things that kept me alive and lit up my eyes in the desert, in the morning. It was by God that birds flew to my window on the days that they did, by God that the old woman stopped, saying, “Child, you look like you are the saddest person in the world right now.”
Her face was smooth and brown like earth and her eyes were kind and I thanked her for seeing my sadness, told her that I was okay. I was 20, sitting outside of Cramer Hall, at Portland State University, with my hair bleached white and my nails polished black, smoking a cigarette, and not feeling cool at all.
I was lonely. I was in pain.
She reminded me of Home.
I feel a little stunned right now. Gestalt is like that. My skin feels cold. I am shivering. Moments ago, I was in Big Time – a state that I experience as a sharp intravisual clarity (clarityclarityclarity, I need a new word for clarity) – here, now, then that was now, now that was then, everything that had come before…all hung together.
the woman, her family, my history and theirs
…and my mind and heart were doing this dance between awe and gratitude for all the ways that God had saved my life and kept in touch with me…
…a message in the darkest hours from a friend I once called Beautiful…
…a song played on the long road home…
“This is for all the lonely people…”
…a sunrise and strangers on a bus, a friendly child, a quiet child.
“He likes you. He usually won’t talk to strangers.”
Oh, the little gifts of stories shared and life’s small lights…
This – this is what I wanted the world to have – this feeling, this knowing, this amazed gratitude for just how fucking clever and wondrous and raw and kind this thing that we call God is…that it should know our most secret hearts and hear the songs we sing to ourselves, and that it should be watching all the currents and the sparks, the glow, the long silent boom and tiny ah-has that happen when meaning is made and friends are found by chance and wonder is renewed, giving life.
It’s all electric and it’s all of us and it’s everything that is alive, anything that has electricity.
Thrumming, buzzing, high and low, tight and scattered, ribbons and bows and tangles and loops and dead static fields and wide swathes of the most perfect conduit rivers…
Because I think in pictures and like to experiment with perspective, and because I have always done so, I used to imagine my home from above, seeing the ocean and the big rivers, the places where they joined and then branched, getting smaller and smaller and smaller as they split, rejoined, hit marsh and bluff.
I grew up in a geodesic dome.
Now, I believe that the work my father did to build that home was, itself, an act of God. Where else would a man get the energy to put massive stilts in the ground and construct a plexiglass geodesic dome as an aloft living room?
He didn’t use crews. He didn’t hire labor. Only a few people helped, just a couple of friends on weekends or as they travelled through. It took him years to build the primary house of my childhood.
“It was insane,” my mother reflects. “He worked all the time. He had tunnel vision. He was a man driven. He wanted to do it all himself.”
My childhood home was built by madness – industrious, inspired, visionary madness. A geodesic dome! On stilts! In the woods! By the river, with woodstoves and a dirt road! The river! The river! The river! Home! Home! Home!
Growing up, I thought my father was a hero.
It was God that brought my family to those woods, and it was God that put justice and art and architecture into the heart of my favorite dead uncle.
God is Justice, God is Art. God is Architecture.
God is Archetype.
God is All.
God is Pattern. God is Signal.
God is Code.
“Go onward, Dammit.”
Speaking of going on, I seem to be. This was initially a letter about grateful scheming, but then it became an exercise in metaexperiential gratitude, description, and notes.
These notes are important.
They are part of the story.
Last night, I almost wrote you a direct response to questions re: what I am called to do. It’s a bit of a complicated scheme, but not so much.
How do you say that you want to save the world, without claiming a desire to singlehandedly save the world?
“I want the world to be saved?”
“I want to help save the world.”
“I am intended to help save the world.”
What will the world be when it is saved? What are the criteria by which you might deem the world well?
Nothing too shocking:
measurable peace, sustainability, stewardship, dignity of species, jubilation of our own design, harmony and laughter, that sort of thing.
There are plenty of writings on utopia.
However, I approach this notion of a New Old World in non-idealistic ways. It won’t all be gardens and singing, at least not for a long time.
We’ve fucked up, royally, for the past several hundred years, give or take a few thousand. It will take time to heal.
This is what I know about healing: most pain is caused by bad ideas, ill-logic and belief in terrible truths.
Heal the meanings and the world is healed, because – logically – if people can reconcile their fear and hate and assumptions with the reality that we’re all going to die if we don’t change our ways and our children will have a stinking, toxic, seeping, dying home that will lead them to inevitable pain and suffering…and that, hey, there’s nothing to say we have to live this way, in wars and gluttony and starvation and objectification and abuse and sadness and fear…
Whoever told people that “This is just the way the world is, how it’s always been. It’s complicated.” is a liar.
This is not just the way the world is, this is not how it’s always been and it’s not complicated!”
It’s simple. We made this mess. We hurt the world. We have to fix it.
Some people have hurt the world more than others. They have to stop and they have to make it right.
This is where the global revolutions come in, also an act of God and a function of restorative cycles in the multiverse.
My calling is to contribute to the dismantling of the lousy ideas about what it is to be human and to also catalyze dialogue on the subject of God and what we’re really serving around here.
My calling is to help those who find themselves called in ways currently deemed unusual to make sense of the fire in their heart and to rise up true and wise. My calling is to help people to understand the workings of pain and hope, love and Fear, so that they may navigate to their best selves.
My calling is to support those who are doing the work of being and the work of trying and to share good ideas and help sense to be made of difficult realities.
The wonderful thing is that I am actually able to do the work I am called to do, in a number of ways.
I don’t know if you realize this, but I am very well-written. I laughed and laughed when I saw how it could all play out, how they would want to hate me, but how they would have to shake their heads, they would have to talk about it and they would have to feel something, to reckon with their own experience and beliefs.
There is some jubilant triumph in this character for me, the weirdo lovely mad Girl Who Proved God.
The best thing is that it’s not a joke at all.
It’s actually very serious and real.
When I talk about my lofty goals, I am not just blathering grandiose delusion. God wants me to laugh and to be charming and wise. I am charming and wise.
I am also a genius strategic thinker and a practitioner of active, transformative dialogue. This is not grandiose delusion.
I scored 2 points shy of a perfect score on the GREs Logic and Analysis exam, which nobody ever looked at.
The way I figure it is that this – this letter and these thoughts – they are all part of an actual series of events that are unfolding or that could unfold if handled correctly.
It only takes a few letters, a few talks, a shared chuckle and a vision.
I think that, with some creative and conscientious scheming, some networking and introductions, I might be able to curtsy and wink this idea onto the main stage…shocking, charming, tragic…absurd, blasphemous, genuine…surreal, lovely, amazing.
In the event that enigmatic and influential celebrity doesn’t work out, well…I have back up plans to get my work done…going to graduate school, organizing, being quiet in some circles, about my agenda re: liberation and human potential and a global spirit-driven insurrection for the recovery of human dignity and habitat sanctity.
Oh, I don’t want to have to be quiet, to pretend I didn’t prove God, which I did…actually, God proved itself, I just took notes and pictures. I got to be the…right hand…man…
(No, I don’t believe I’m Christ. We all have this thing called Christ in us.)
Oh, it’s so foolish to think that these archetypes, this Christ, that Isaiah, that Joan, that Mary…that they will look or be any particular way.
God is resourceful and clever. Absurdly (Sadly? Delightfully?) enough, a heavily tattooed oddball sweetheart genius from south Georgia might be just the ticket in the current economies of charm and marketing.
The nice thing is that I actually do have a lot of affiliation with a lot of different groups…there are outliers in every community and we’re all touched by madness.
It’s in our histories.
Love,
Faith 
p.s. #iamakoala hahahahaha!
(Clearly, I’m not. But I think I’ve seen one in the clouds once or twice. Might have been a cougar though, or an alien.)
UPDATE: 12/09/2012
@faithghost
@rustyrockets Hope your travels are well. As a courtesy, I’d like to welcome you to the story: http://proofofgodandothertragedies.net/2012/12/09/early-warning-signs-re-daily-life-and-messianic-consciousness-shift/ … #iamakoala XO
The clouds have been very lively today and I’ve been happy. I walked out to the porch, looked up and ran in to get my camera. Some things just look important, you know? …but only if you are paying attention.
There is a lot here, hearts, triangles, 90 degrees and Ss and ∞ and 3s.
I took over a hundred pictures today. Five minutes here, five minutes there, make lunch, play outside.
Send a message.
It’s a balmy day here in the mountains, very strange for December. The kids made up a new game, Gardthon. It involves hitting a kickball along the ground with an aluminum baseball bat. The names on the bats were Savage, Magnum, and Cyclone. Easton bats. It was nice to play outside.
We stood in a triangle formation and hit the balls back and forth, pinging and knocking and bouncing.
It was fun.
PROOF OF GOD! ...and other tragedies. 
(If nothing else, this is a story…)
Sigh. So, I thought about sending another letter to St. Paul’s Outside the Walls, and even wrote one to send, thought about sending it to St. Peter’s, too…but, then I sat down at my computer and my email was acting glitchy and I thought about…just how weird it is to be trying to get in touch with religious leaders of influence.
I think that, more than anything, confirms the strength of my conviction and my certainty of the need to reconcile truths at this particular point in the history of the future.
I’m actually frightened of religious leaders of influence. Many of them are hateful men. Part of my concern is that, hey, what if some lady in the mountains – or some child from the streets or some fisherman or some field worker – really did document some old expressions of the old God, the real God…and what if nobody listens…?
That makes me feel something big and sad and frustrated.
Here’s the letter I didn’t send, following up on the one’s I did:
Hello, my name is Faith and I am writing to you from the United States. I have tried to contact you before, during what I was experiencing as a troubling period of realization.
I do hope that someone read those messages and hoped, for a moment, that all would turn out well.
The reason I am writing you today is because I, like many people, have witnessed a series of events and spectacles in my life over the past few years that, to me, establish a fair amount of evidence regarding the existence and workings of what is commonly thought of as God.
I understand that the immediate reaction to this claim may be one of 1) disdain, 2) disbelief, 3) a feeling of offense. I am sorry for that.
I have sought counsel on these matters from a number of people, but many do not even reply or they tell me that what I see is not real.
That is not true. It is for this reason that I have taken so many pictures.
I began to recognize shapes and stories in the clouds several years ago. This may sound whimsical, worthy of dismissal, but I do hope you’ll continue reading.
I understand that there are particular forms and particular patterns, certain arrangements of line and space that are present in holy artworks and that the elements of all written language did arise from man’s effort to tell of nature and relationship.
I do not know what all the shapes and compositions I have been documenting mean. I’ve not yet found anybody to review them with a learned eye.
What I do know is that God has always communed with people through nature and that clouds play a mighty role in many scriptures, hymns, and stories.
I also know that there are many people who, through the ages, have found themselves pulled to notice, driven to tell.
In my story, this reckoning was deemed to be a “mental illness,” though my thoughts were and are well-reasoned and my heart’s intention is only to have truth be known, for things to be okay…
It is concerning to me that I have, as have others, made a sincere effort to show God as it has shown itself to me and nobody within the established bodies of belief will consider the possibility that this may be true, that this is real, and that it is happening right now.
Perhaps the language I use is incorrect. Perhaps my views do not align with the goals of the churches and the laws of men.
Perhaps I appear arrogant in that I profess to know the will of God. Many people claim to know what God wants or does not want within the world. As you know, many people are often wrong.
I have spent the past several years feeling and seeing, listening, discerning, proving and disproving, trying to make some sense of all this sense.
In the quiet space between sentences I find a great plea rises up in my chest, “Please! Somebody do something to help me with this! It is important! There are signs and I know they are signs, because I have seen the shapes, the compositions, before and when I see them…when I see them I know the truth. What am I supposed to do?! Who can I tell that will listen?”
It makes me sad to think that nobody will care. It makes me sad to think that God works through us in so many ways that are not honored by those who have assumed the authority to determine what is and what is not God.
God is God and the messengers of such come in many forms, with many stories.
Isn’t this how it has always been?
Please do consider whether there is something that could be done to help us reckon with the rebirth of word and golden heart.
For all, everywhere,
Faith
…maybe this is one of those tests of faith (no pun intended), in which I am tested in my belief, not in God, but in the goodness of people and their capacity to see truth and to honor it?
Oh! I get it!
I have to trust in people, through whom God works.
Seeing men as hateful allows them to be hateful, makes them hateful.
“Don’t make assumptions.”
I just heard a song by The Clash on the radio and it helped me to feel more brave and I remembered that I really am very brave already.
Doubt is fuckery.
I refuse to doubt that the best possible outcome will arise.
Trust.
I’ll send the letters tonight. Those are fair questions I am asking, perfectly reasonable, given the circumstances.
Trust in God>Trust in people>Trust in God
That’s such a tough one, because people don’t listen to their hearts. They get so trapped in their ideas and their realities that anyone or anything who…challenges them…is…a threat…
“Don’t make assumptions.”
Trust.