My mother used to water our back garden Wearing nothing but her Mormon underwear And she bought the sheer silky kind Not the thick cotton. What goes on in the temple Is not secret, it’s sacred say the Mormons and I Believe them. An apostate child for twenty years And I have never looked up the endowment Ceremony online. But I know all about the underwear From my mom’s summer gardening habits and From when I had to gather them up and put them In a plastic reusable grocery bag for her friend To dispose of in a sacred way after she died.
I saw her temple clothes too when I went with her Church ladies to dress her body before she Met the fire. The people who had retrieved her body From the board and care left her in her gown And half open diaper. When we opened the bag her Mouth was open like she was begging for my help. I tried to focus on her peeling bare feet Only on her feet but my eyes kept reaching for her In her face and my ears for the silent scream.
I had to leave the room and let her faith friends Finish. This was not their first body. Not by a long shot. All near my mom’s age themselves I wondered if They wondered who would be gowning them Or if their mortuary would collect them in a more Dignified way. For their sakes, I hoped so.
They are clever. I wondered how exactly you Get a floor length temple dress on a dead body. The trick Is you cut it up the back and down the seams Of the sleeves. You lay the dress on and tuck it around. Mormon beehive ingenuity and industriousness Is something I have always admired.
And the courage. Those women’s courage.
When they were finished they called me back Into the room, pulled the cover from her face And said, “Isn’t she pretty?” She was wearing Her veil, white dress, green apron. Blessedly They had closed her terrified mouth.
She was pretty.
Light in her hair Hose in her hand Watering the red hibiscus In her silky sacred garments Watching a hummingbird Wings nearly invisible Dart in and out of the spray.
“…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.
“From fantasy comes union” that feels like Ecstatic gratitude. Electricity comes to mind But seems trite although there was literal Lightning in my gratitude ecstasy. I danced With my windows open in a storm drunk On an almost full bottle of table wine
I couldn’t have fantasized it better this stormy union
It wasn’t what I expected. How silly to expect Union to feel like freedom when really It is the ultimate binding—the ultimate us Together. We Eternally.
I flopped down in my unmade bed Left the last of the wine in a red plastic cup Gathering rain and the reflection of lightning on The dusty windowsill—dust made mud by the Gods’ rain. I wanted IT so much. I was naked. I wanted IT so much but The Lover said I was just a little too Drunk to have IT much Just now.
Crack open my soul and tell me what’s in there, would you? I am thinking of a decadent Easter egg with filling too bright and sweet to look at or taste. A Cadbury egg gone berserk spilling out gooey gold light.
“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.
Legally drunk on The Strip I slide anonymous past the break-dancing boys who sell CDs and their phone numbers on the liminal bridge between The Lion and The City.
Blurred, a bronzy man walks in front of me gray skinny suit filled out to six feet, six inches at least almost big enough to be the ancient god’s skeleton found by archaeologists in an unmarked grave somewhere in the backwoods of Greece.
On this night, Caesar’s is the best he can do.
Its plastic emperors, audio-animatronic mythology, and the gray-water fountain Evel Knievel jumped wait to praise him
just north of the newest destructions— about ten blocks shy of the lonely Stratosphere.
M. N. Ashley 