Category: Creative Nonfiction

Unsolicited Spiritual Advice: God Crack

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“…the place of mind in nature and the relationship between brain and consciousness.” -Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception

I’ll tell you what: Right now my brain is starting a headache looking at this quote while my consciousness is in Aldous Huxley’s pants. Such a spiritual hottie. Great big juicy brain. Big glasses. All the vision. Sexy. Delicious.

A friend asked me if, spiritually, there was a “ghost in the machine” and I think there is some big philosophical principle there, but I took it as: Is there a ghost in this human flesh machine that’s running the show? And my answer is, of course! Who else would be running the show but a ghost? Dead humans are the geneses of ghosts, are we not, so surely we each have to be full up with at least one ghost to begin with. In there, pulling the levers. The consciousness operating on the brain.

There are psychiatrists out there who say they can reproduce the god feeling artificially with some sort of electronic doodad plugged into your brain. They take this to mean that the god feeling is a product of brain function and not at all inspired by something outside, like an actual god. But then, how do they think a god operates except by affecting the physical brain through the consciousness? The god-consciousness goes conscious and pulls on the god-conscious-feeling brain levers because it says, “Hey flesh machine! You have GOT to feel this!” So yes, nasty psychiatrists. The god feeling can be reproduced in the brain, but the gods do it by one little lift of a divine eyebrow where it takes you a room full of overpriced equipment and millions in grant money.

But let me not come out of my hair about it…

My hottie Aldous used peyote to try to get there. High, he got the god feeling by looking at a painting of a chair, looking at flowers in a vase, counting the pleats in has pants. (Him and those pleats, man. He goes on and on. But he was high at the time, so we forgive him, and his sheets of pleats.) He was a visionary, but on his trip, he didn’t see visions. He saw life pulsating in everything, which is to say the divine radiating out of everything, which is to say the omnipresent face of the divine. Can we say he saw gods everywhere? Each pleat having its own divine ghost the way each human has its own divine ghost?

I think we can. I think we can see it too.

Unsolicited Spiritual Advice:

If you have millions of dollars in grant money and a stash of peyote to get you to the god feeling, by all means use it (and invite me), but if you don’t, the door is not closed to you. Pray. Meditate. Commune. Dare I say, make a habit of it? The gods are vast, but the the vastness of their feeling can slip in through even the tiniest conscious crack.

-M. Ashley

The Wisdom of Lavish Desire (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“There is no calamity greater than lavish desires.”
-Lao-tzu

I get this out of a devotional book for a twelve step program. Well there you have it, I’m in a twelve step program. But the thing is that I disagree with the devotional quotes about half the time. All these old men, very rarely women, who thought they were so wise. This devotional is like an assemblage of ancient and medieval Twitter. Humans have been thinking, wrongly, they are so wise since the first human threw a bone in the air to impress the mysterious monolith. Or maybe that was a movie.

But now that I’ve complained about people who think they are so wise and we who desire so much to find people to be wise to us in our faces to give us direction when our wisdom fails us, let me tell you how much wiser than this guy I am.

Lavish desires is the IT! That’s the magic! It’s the juice, it’s the jazz, it’s the… I can’t think of another “j” word. It’s where it’s at. The gods tell me all the time to “ask ask ask.” There is no limit, not even the sky. The more we ask and surrender to the knowing our ask will be answered, the more they get to answer and the richer we all feel.

I’ve been trying to focus in my writing lately on concrete, physical details, because that’s the jazzy juice of writing. But how do I explain sensually what I mean about this lavish desire and bold asking that is the very opposite of calamity? What are some antonyms for calamity? Alexa says one of them is “blessing.” That’s exactly whatI’m talking about, I mean, right on the nose, but “blessing’ seems so benign. It’s more like BAM! BLESSING! Nothing banally benign about that.

But you don’t get the BAM BLESSING unless you ask ridiculously and desire lavishly.

Even the wording…

Every week in my white and gold planner that is the white and golden apple of my eye, in the section on the left side of the two page week spread—the section marked priorities that, frankly, I don’t actually know whatI’m supposed to write there—in that section, under priorities, the first thing I write every week is, “My gods love me lavishly at every single moment and in every tiny detail.” So you see this Lao-tzu guy stole my very word to say a very wrong thing.

The heavens drop golden plums—plums not apples now—in my lap almost constantly. More and more and more and more, better and better and better, and why? Because I lavishly desire golden plums constantly and greedily ask for them and BAM the BLESSING and, sensually, golden plum juice is sweeter than your best French kiss, and wetter. And why? Because I dared to desire lavishly.

So here’s the wisdom—my wisdom—that in this one and only case may be actually wise. Desire lavishly. Ask greedily. Receive the juicy plum. Celebrate with jazzy gratitude.

It would have been a better finish if “gratitude” had started with a “j.” Hey gods, give me a “j” word for gratitude.

“Joy.”

Yes. Joy.

-M. Ashley

Learning to Be Alone (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Not the first time I was alone, but the time I learned to love being alone. Art school. Summer arts school between my junior and senior years of high school. I went for writing. I had two writer roommates. They put the writers together because they said we had a tendency to keep odd hours and they didn’t want us keeping the dancers or singers awake all night because they had to wake up early and actually work for their muse. Lazy cusses that we were, our first class wasn’t until nine and we only had two classes and one group activity a day. The rest of the time we were supposed to be typing away at our keyboards making Shakespeare or whatever. We were supposed to be getting inspired. We were supposed to be collaborating. We were supposed to be bouncing off the walls with creative energy.

Mostly I remember wandering through the halls exploring myself.

That sounds unnecessarily sexual. If I were to say exploring myself from the inside, that doesn’t make it any better. Feeling myself from the inside? No.

Understanding my own soul better. There we go. Expanding. Spreading my arms into the empty space.

The halls were white painted brick and white tile, fluorescent lights. Someone in my class, more brilliant than I in that moment, said the halls looked like Communism. I just about fell out of my tree laughing at that at the time. I’ve used that joke several times since. I’ve probably used it more than the person who cracked it in the first place. I wonder if they even remember. I wonder if their own humor followed them the way it did me.

The halls of the funky math and science building at Vanderbilt looked like Communism. The mental hospital I was in on a hold that one time—that looked like Communism too. Math and mental health and art school. There should be a connection there. Art led to math led to the nuthouse. Maybe the more talented writer who cracked the joke in the first place could do more with that than I can in this moment. Don’t expect much of me. I was great in art school, I did marginally at math, and I was not one of the popular kids at the nuthouse. It was hard to be alone there. I made myself lonely in math when I didn’t need to be and at art school I was alone, but damn I was never lonely. Damn I loved being with myself then.

There was a smell in those halls. It was the smell of freedom. I had been to summer camp before—lifetimes of summer camp—but here I had all this time to do with as I pleased, to be plying my art, and no one was up my butt to be cheery or play Red Rover. Our meal times were even flexible.

I was planning a good roam one afternoon and went to the cafeteria first to get a sandwich. I was in the middle of a bad attempt to wrap it in a yellow napkin that was too small for the job, when a handsome man who worked there, I’m sure one of the regular students, so maybe all of 20 years old, came over to me and offered to wrap it up for me. That was the kindest thing.

I thought I was being so sly. I wasn’t even sure we were allowed to take food out. I was being on the down low and he busted me—busted me, then helped me out and in such a sweet tone. I wonder if he was a writer too or if he had found his personal space there—had explored his own self from the inside wandering down those halls, so he understood the lure and understood the need to have portable sandwiches for the journey.

-M. Ashley

I Have a Book of Guy du Maupassant Stories (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

I have a book of Guy du Maupassant stories. On the cover is an impressionist painting of a woman coming out of the bath and drying her feet. I assume it’s by Degas because he’s the impressionist I did my high school French class report on and, as far as I’m concerned, all impressionist paintings that aren’t famously and obviously by some other painter, were painted by Degas.

Degas started going blind at the end of his career. Tragedy. Tragedy for him and for us. I am legally blind. The tragedy is merely personal. The world does not mourn a loss over the fact that reading, for me, is slow and difficult. I have to be choosy about what I read because it takes so much time and effort. In college, I chose to read that book of Maupassant stories. After college, I chose to read it three more times.

Those stories can be a little like Far Side cartoons. Sometimes you don’t get it on your first shot. Sometimes you need someone to explain the world and the ending to you.

My junior year of college, I had a little time between this and that, who knows—I don’t remember the obligations, I only remember the time in between. There was an in between place on the Vanderbilt campus where four paths met in a sort of pedestrian roundabout. At the center of the circle was a planter overflowing with the campus’ signature Spring yellow tulips. At the center of the planter was a blossoming dogwood, shedding its white blossoms, covering the ground in floral snow. The circle was bordered by ancient shade trees and magnolias. There were antique style street lamps dotted around. At night, they cast pale blue efficiency light. There were glossy wooden benches.

I was alone in the circle, in the in between time, in the in between place, sitting on one of the glossy benches. I was reading Guy du Maupassant. It was a bliss time. A life is only blessed with so many, and this was a precious one of mine.

I read a story about a man who observes another man’s gaudy, worldly treasures and also his beautiful daughter and wife. That’s the whole of the story—the observations of the one man and the bragging of the other on all his gaudy, worldly possessions. It’s the kind of story that, when it ends, you flip the pages expecting another ending and find only the beginning of another story. Maybe the printer made a mistake.

I stood up from my glossy bench, chewing on it. I went to my other obligation. I went back to my dorm room overstuffed with the detritus of a busy college career. I called my mom.

I told my mom about the story and asked her what she thought it meant. She said it was quite obvious, wasn’t it? The treasure was the women. In all that house full of stuff, (I looked around my own room and was embarrassed), in that house full of stuff,, (I thought about how often I had walked through that in between place circle with its gold tulips and dogwood snow and ignored it on my way from stuff-to-do to other stuff-to-do and was embarrassed), in that house full of stuff, the women were the treasure. The family bond was the most precious thing,

I thought about how often I neglected to call home in favor of some seemingly more pressing or interesting stuff. I was embarrassed. My life was stuffed with such stuff.

I told my mom I got it now. I told my mom she was an epiphany. I asked her how her day had gone.

-M. Ashley

Hairy Larry (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Hairy Larry gave me the worst haircut I have ever had. I think he was drunk at the time. It was only 6:00pm and he was in the kitchen with the rest of us, all bar friends, but also all sober. He was drunk I think, but I let him cut my hair anyway. My hair was a mess and needed some kind of attention. He was drunk, I figured, but he was always drunk, so I also figured, at least drunk, his hands wouldn’t shake.

He, himself, had ALL the hair. Pompadour and chest hair that would make a pectoral toupee jealous. He had a beard, well kept, but still mountain man worthy. His eyebrows, also well kept, but awnings enough that he never had to worry about the sun in his eyes.

He was a hairdresser by trade, or so I was told. Doing me in the kitchen was a special kindness, a special concession for bar friends. Also, doing me in the kitchen meant he didn’t have to pay a kick to his salon owner. He needed that money for booze.

He asked me what I wanted. I never know the answer to that when hairdressers ask me that question. I usually go months and months between haircuts and I never have learned to speak the language. By the time I gave myself to Hairy Larry, it had been more than a year—longer than the time I had moved into that house.

I told him I didn’t know how to describe what I wanted. It went something like medium length and, you know, not poofy. The not poofy thing is the hard part as my hair is thick and naturally curly. When I was a teenager in the nineties, I would always leave the hairdresser looking like some kind of hybrid poodle/Dolly Parton creature as my hair is as naturally platinum as it is curly and the hairdressers could never resist exercising their mad engineering skills and making it reach the rafters.

I always went home after hair appointments and washed the height out. I didn’t mind if the hair on the top of my head had no volume and the curls throughout weren’t quite as curly as they could have been. I wanted to look something like me and not something like poodle/Parton/other.

So, for Hairy Larry, the not poofy part was the challenge. I was in my late twenties by this point and although I knew very little about what I wanted for my hair, for my life, for this very moment, I knew at least one thing I didn’t want. I knew at least several things I didn’t want. At that time, I think I defined what I did want almost exclusively by what I didn’t want. I didn’t want poofy hair. Anything but poofy hair. No matter how you get there, Hairy Larry, anything but poofy hair.

Anything but the life I had been leaving before I moved into this house with three housemates, four cats, and three dogs between us. Anything but that. Kitchen haircuts and all. Anything but going back. Anything but the poodle of my teens. Anything but the you-are-not-who-you-are poof of someone else’s engineering.

-M. Ashley

The Satanic Office (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

In my dream, Satan was a thin, black-haired man wearing a pinstripe suit with a white shirt and ecclesiastical purple tie. His eyes were so dark brown they were almost, but not quite, black. He sat cross-legged on the floor between his rumpled camel-colored couch and Ikea glass-topped coffee table. There were stacks of files and towering reams of paperwork everywhere.

He was insistent he was not Lucifer, nor Beelzebub, nor the Devil, nor anything like that. His singular identity as Satan, he said, was very important to him.

He was flustered in that space with the great peaks of paperwork surrounding him—all the boxes that needed to be checked, all the signatures that needed to be signed just-so by the little yellow tabs poking out diabolically here and there and everywhere.

So when I hear of someone, some ghost hunter or erstwhile exorcist, being touched by Satan and being shaken to their very core, I think of Satan this way and wonder if all he really wanted was an audit of the last twenty years which, let’s face it, would scare the hell out of anyone.

-M. Ashley

Lame Zebra (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

Something as mundane as I found out he was courting other women, and yet I went on, enmeshed, with him anyway.

Courting is a nice word for manipulating. Affairs of the imagination, choosing which flesh to realize.

I sat in the car with a friend after finding out. Devastated. She told me it isn’t the lame zebra’s fault for being lame. It’s the asshole lion’s fault for going after lame zebras. I didn’t mind her calling me lame. I was lamer than that. Lame was an understatement. I was more like hobbled. The asshole lion the kind of asshole that hobbles the naive zebra then chases after her. He made her an easy catch.

I told my friend I was done. We arrived at my house and, in the dark, in my driveway, before opening the car door to let myself out, I told her I was done with him. That was it and it was over and I was done.

She patted my head and said sympathetically, “No you’re not.” A sentence of death and destruction and many, many more months of eating my heart out.

It sounds stupid, but time was the only thing that healed it. Time and he got married to one of his other lame zebras. He said she made him feel like a teenager again. That’s likely because she was the worst hobbled amongst us and, compared to her, he could run like the wind.

He wrote to me, “Since I’ve been with her, I’ve been running. Can you imagine? Me? At my age? Running?”

I wonder how long that lasted before she gave up and he, at his age, convinced her life was easier sitting, limp and licking his chops as she puts on weight and wonders what happened to her legs that used to run so swiftly, kick so high.

I took up running myself a few years later and I’m faster now than I ever was. I have no hurt for him anymore. I hurt for her. I’m sure I won’t be seeing her at any local, smalltime races anytime soon. The LA Marathon is bound to miss her as well. She might have wanted to do that before she was forty only a little less than she was terrified she wouldn’t be married by then.

Better wed and walking then a spinster fleet of foot.

I feel you sister. I do.

-M. Ashley

Lemon Mystery (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

“How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream.”
-Khalil Gibran, “The Prophet”

In my dream, I walked with my god through his sacred orange grove. The trees all had white bark. That was important somehow, the white bark coming off like ash, but healthy healthy. The trees were all so healthy.

Today, walking my puppy, I came across two lemons on the sidewalk. It was around the side of someone’s house, not near any trash cans. No wind had been blowing so they hadn’t come on the wind. There was no lemon tree leaning over the fence or anywhere nearby. It was as if someone had been walking that way and dropped these two lemons for me to see and follow like breadcrumbs, but sour and more vividly colored.

I thought of my god’s white barked orange grove and could this have been my god walking this corner, dropping these citrus fruits for me? Do oranges in the dream orchard become lemons on the waking dirty street? Dreams communicate this way in the sleeping and waking dream. Color color, symbol symbol, the promise of a taste. A god that walked that way before you. Mystery.

-M. Ashley

Mom Bling (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

My dad, divorced from my mother for more than ten years at that point, told me that what she really loves is jewelry. She has the bling gene, as we call it. That’s not what he said. That’s a little too clever, a little too caring for my dad.

She loves costume jewelry, but has a grounding in the real. Always reality on her fingers. On her left hand, she always wears a blue topaz ring she had made. The topaz is set in a simple, modern swoop of solid gold. It’s meant to show off the stone, bold as a blue diamond. The way she wears it, you would swear it was a diamond.

On her right hand, she wears a ruby set in a cluster of diamonds. The ruby is her birthstone. It is pigeon blood red. It is the best you can get.

A little silver ring I gave her. A simple gold chain bracelet on her left wrist.

A touch of reality around her neck too. A shy diamond set in another modern swoop of gold, smaller, more delicate—a stylized teardrop. It sits against a black backdrop, created shadow. The diamond is from her mother’s engagement ring—her mother’s first engagement to my mother’s father.

They took that necklace off my mom when she went into the hospital so it wouldn’t interfere with the MRI. They took her rings and bracelet too.

She had to be in the hospital alone because of the virus. She was there a week. I called her every day, at least once a day. She told me many times about how they had taken her jewelry. She told me many times she was sure she would get it back. She had faith they were good, honest people, and that she would get her jewelry back even though she couldn’t quite remember where they had put it in her room. It seemed she thought about that more than she thought about her infection, her surgery, the second attempt at her surgery, and what life would be like after.

She recovered enough to come home. Once home, it took her another two weeks to recover enough physically and mentally even to want to put her jewelry on again.

She fished it out of her purse. It was all jumbled up in a green, semicircular plastic holder that looked like something you would put false teeth in. All that reality. All her reality. All those precious gems.

She put the topaz on first. This was what she earned, her badass career—the woman she was before retirement who made male lawyers quiver and go limp. The woman who could afford a topaz like that and all that swoop of gold.

She put her ruby on next. This was the woman she was born. Badass in essence from the start. The little girl who chopped down an entire row of bird of paradise in front of her mother’s house because she didn’t like the way they looked at her when she got home from school. She planted snapdragons there instead. Their fierce little faces were sweeter.

The gold bracelet. She fastened that on herself. She bought it somewhere borderline seedy while on a Caribbean cruise—her first. First of many with a group of globetrotting women, badass as she was, exploring everything, planting their flags everywhere.

She needed help with the necklace with the engagement diamond. I tried for more than fifteen minutes and couldn’t get it. The clasp is so tiny, I wondered how she ever got it on in the first place as her well kept fingernails are long and lustrous and mine are bitten to the nubs. It should have been easier for me having my actual fingertips to work with, but it was impossible.

She sighed as I handed it back to her. She looked down. “I don’t like to be without it,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe how easily the nurse took it off.”

Finally, she slid the little silver ring with the created pink gemstones I gave her for her birthday on to her little finger. The ring had turned black. Something they injected her with had burned her inside, leaked out of the injection site, ran down her arm, and burned off whatever real silver there was on the ring. This was before the MRI. Before the box. Before she was bereft of everything. Before it was all protected.

That silver ring I gave her—the timid whisper that is my life’s contribution to hers, turned black in her illness—she wears it anyway, right alongside her gold and precious. She wears it anyway.

-M. Ashley

Happy Mothers’ Day everyone!

A Little Stuffy in Here (creative nonfiction)

~ M. Ashley ~ Leave a comment

The breakfast with Jeana at the botanical gardens in Nashville. You never saw so many nouveau riche people in one place at one time. Not one colored face among them.

They all sat on the lower level, next to the wide windows overlooking the butterfly garden, but they were mainly looking at each other, what was she wearing, who was she with, who should we say hello to, what hands should we shake, how many rungs can we climb this beautiful Sunday morning we are spending with our faces buried in our mimosas and our backs to the beautiful garden.

Or at least this was our impression as we sat on the upper level, close to the door we should probably have been grateful they let us through in our jeans and t-shirts. Clean jeans and t-shirts, mind you, but jeans and t-shirts nonetheless. Mine was burgundy and had a baseball style swoosh on it with the words, “Think dark thoughts.” One of my favorite t-shirts of all time, and we were. We were thinking dark thoughts about these people when these people we assumed didn’t want us there, were probably not thinking about us at all.

At the brunch buffet table, this lady in a white dress with heels way too high for a garden… we were in a freaking garden after all… elbowed me over the eggs. Elbowed in the boobs, over the chafing dish full of rubbery eggs. Strangest things. I suppose my low class ass wasn’t moving fast enough and she was at the eggs in a hurry because maybe she had some ass to kiss back at her table right then or the ass wouldn’t be ripe for kissing anymore.

Dark thoughts.

At our table on the higher level, the undesirable section, we were the only table up there after all, the waitress came over to fill our water glasses. Jeana, with her Jeana wit said to the waitress, “How are you today.” Fine, the waitress said. “A little stuffy in here, ain’t it?” The waitress smiled in a way she wasn’t supposed to and said, “Sometimes.”

-M, Ashley