The desert only knows longing

saturday, october 16
santa monica, ca

portal log
i ate the magic plant and fell down the rabbit hole. i said a prayer, mother of this medicine, make my heart pure. make my journey in the spirit world and the world life be in a good way. this is my prayer.

the room was dark and we all laid in the bed, a tangle of our limbs heavy with the honey of the majikal mushroom medicine. the skin like soft velvet delighting in touch for the sake of pleasure again. feeling the sensation like a drop of water on the thirsty skin of the desert. the desert only knows longing. it is how it attracts the rain. it's hot, immediate longing has forgotten all the pain of the past and cries out now in voice of timeless yearning to be caressed as if there was no tomorrow and no yesterday.

i drifted in and out of a space of darkness like deep waters of inky stillness, i was not afraid, it felt like returning home to beginningless time.
the oracle said through me: "play, but first you have to die...then all the light comes"
first you must die...
journey back to the womb, which is dark, to the underworld, which is dark
if you are afraid to die, how can you be reborn? isn't that what jesus taught? not to fear death because resurrection is coming?

all of this sensation, pleasure and love are always here, so much energy that it is terrifying.
we walk the earth lonely as if there was not enough, when in truth, there is so much it threatens to erase our known existence.

the first time i went to india, my teacher asked me why i had come. the ashram is in the southern jungles and very few white people come there. i told him my life story that brought me to his feet now. my sadness, pain and regret. my years of stumbling through dark and dangerous alleys looking for some personal truth of god. like the woman who fell to the ground and touched the hem of jesus' cloak, i had wandered years lost and longing for the touch of god's presence. i told him of drugs i had used to escape pain and feel ecstasy. after i poured my heart out, he asked, "when you did drugs, what did you see?"i marvelled at his question. i had felt ashamed of the drugs as a weakness.
i looked at him confused and said, "it doesn't matter what i saw on the drugs, because it doesn't last, right"
he shrugged and looked away. "none of it lasts", he said.

jesus said, "let she who seeks keep seeking until she finds. when she finds she will be amazed and astonished. then she will be terrified. then she will rule over all."
i didn't used to understand this mystikal saying, until later that day after my teacher asked me what the drugs had shown me.

i sat on a hilltop in india. in front of the jungle temple of the god shiva's lingam (male sex organ). and i was made so that i could not stand and had to crawl on my hands and knees on the steps to reach the top. all my strength was drained from my body and my mind had thoughts which moved very slow. i was told to sit down on the earth, which i did. then i was told to lay on my belly, which i did. i felt the earth soften to swallow me and i travelled to the center of the earth's belly. time disappeared, and i do not remember anything, just being suspended like in the fluid of a pregnant belly, like a floating unborn baby. after time had passed, i became aware again, and sat up. i felt thick, like an insect in the sap of a tree, suspended like a fossil in amber.

i sat up and looked at the jungle around me. the hills around were shaped like a woman's curves. mounds of breasts and hips were the body of the land. i looked around and a strange awareness filled me. i made all this. i made all the earth. and there was no time, no beginning and no end. i sat for awhile, i don't know how long. an old man with tanned wrinkles skin like stained tobacco came walking up the hill steps to the temple. he carried the ritual items to worship the statue of the lingam (male sex organ). flowers, milk, incense. i thought it was sad he was going to worship the statue, to call god's energy into the stone. he could just come sit with me. i am god. and then i thought he could not see that, so he felt separate and lonely and had to worship the statue. my mind thought, "how sad". but then my mind realized it was not sad, it was just a choice we all have in how we see things. and in the end, it was all the same.

after more time passed a part of my mind woke up. it said, psalm, you must remember to go back to america. but that felt so far away. the same part of my mind said, you are a wife and mother, you must go back. and suddenly i felt afraid that my love was spread everywhere and nowhere in particular. maybe i would stay on this mountain forever.
let she who seeks keep seeking until she finds. when she finds, she will me amazed and astonished. then she will be terrified.

my mind said i must go down from the mountain and back to america. i must go eat some food.

i ate and drank some spicy chai and felt i was psalm again. but my mind was filled with songs of praise and joy, a happy simplicity. i sat next to my teacher and sang the christian songs i learned as a girl in church.

my teacher said, "are you usually this still?"

i said, "no"