The spiritual being
I wrote this out about 3 years ago. And I'm still struggling with it. That's annoying. But, this encapsulates a lot of what I've been thinking about lately, so I'm going to post it.
As a child growing up in a very religious household, I was taught that the highest ideal was to strive to become the spiritual man. That the physical man was imperfect, and needed to be overcome. To dwell on physical things was to starve your spirituality and to open yourself up to the devil, who ruled the physical world. Dwelling on the higher things of things of life, such as God, his commandments, his story as told in the bible, and his one true religion, was the only way to become a spiritual creature worthy of his blessing. The beauty to be found in the world was considered worthy of consideration only in the sense that it uplifts our senses and causes us to praise the loving creator who provided it.
Writing it out, it sounds like a beautiful way of living. To keep our thoughts lofty, unblemished by the baser things of physical life, is a basic tenet of most philosophical and religious systems.
And it was a beautiful way to grow up. However, it affected me in very specific ways as a child. I grew up in a large family; 5 kids and lots of pets, in a 250 year old farmhouse with 26 haunted rooms, surrounded on three sides by scary old pine forest. I was an EXTREMELY sensitive, imaginative child, and my surroundings alone would have made for an unusual world view.
I spent most of my childhood outdoors by myself. Despite the fact that I had brothers and sisters close to me in age, and at one point 3 cousins living with us around my age, most of my memories are of being alone. I don’t know if that’s because I was mostly alone or because the moments that stand out in memory are of when I was alone. Either way, my relationship with nature was defined at a very young age. And it was a strange relationship.
In many ways, I was terrified of it. Every tree hid a monster, be it the stegosaurus old oak in the front yard that lifted its roots at dusk and stomped across the lawn towards my bedroom, or the evil stump hiding behind the undergrowth at the end of the driveway that glared at me with knotty eyes and plotted my death as I walked to the bus stop. Around every corner was SOMETHING that wanted to hurt me, and in every shape, no matter how familiar, lurked a malevolent "presence". And yet I wasn’t an overly fearful child. I didn’t run screaming from things that scared me. There is an old cemetery behind where I grew up, called Blood Cemetery. It's been deemed one of the creepiest places in New England, with very good reason. It's old (late 1700s old), it's shaded and cool in the midst of an old pine forest, and it's got a funky energy. I spent a lot of time there alone as a kid. It was the best reading spot in the world. The ground was cushioned by years of pine needles, the stone wall surrounding it was mossy and cool, and it was close enough to my house for me to hear if my mom yelled for me. I'd sit for hours and read, feeling pretty damn convinced the whole time that I was being watched and trying to ignore the feeling. Dusk was my shut off point though. I've always been scared of the dark, and being outside in it alone was NOT a good thing.
Even in my house I never felt "alone". I wouldn’t look outside the windows at night if I could help it, for fear of seeing something looking in. Every time I walked into a room, I'd pause and look around first, waiting for movement. Some of the most terrifying moments in my life happened in that house; watching wallpaper ripple in my bedroom, looking out the bathroom window in the middle of a cold winter night and seeing a lovely woman in a sleeveless dress walking into our barn, watching my oldest sister get "pushed" down our attic steps when there was nothing around her, flying home as fast as I could from the sandpit in the back of our house because I was convinced a hyena was chasing me. I don’t really care if any of these things were real or figments of my imagination. In my mind, they were perfectly real, and that was all that mattered.
See, I didn’t have a very good grasp on reality growing up. And the way I was raised, with so much focus on spirituality, had ALOT to do with that. Not everything, as my parents were both fey people anyways, with a rather serious lack of a grasp themselves. But religion took that tendency and gave it a reason to live. It made it a good thing. My lack of connection to reality allowed me to immerse myself completely in the spiritual realm. I don’t necessarily mean God. Even as a young kid, I wasn’t sure about the whole "god" thing. I was pretty damn sure about the devil, and that kind of made belief in God a default, but I was never able to fully immerse myself in that belief.
No, my sense of spirituality was more a sense of the workings behind the physical realm. Reality felt like a play, with everything that mattered actually happening backstage. So, when I focused on becoming a spiritual being, I focused on finding out what was actually happening behind the scenes. This distanced me almost completely from the here and now. There was no "moment" that existed into and of itself. Everything had to be analyzed and dissected to find its "real" meaning and its connection to everything else.
As one can imagine, this overcomplicated life greatly. I might have gotten a lot more nuance out of any given thing than most, but I also completely missed the bigger picture while looking for it with a microscope. And this focus on finding out what was really going on made people almost impossible to relate to or get along with. Trying to dissect and understand everyone’s hidden motives and realities does not lend itself to an easy camaraderie with humans, especially when you're a teenager.
And, when you turn that microscope on yourself, it doesn’t make it easy to have a healthy relationship with your own body. As a really young kid, I can remember being very grounded in my own body. Physical sensation fascinated me, to the point where I would pursue pleasant ones at all cost, much to my parents chagrin. My earliest memories are of physical sensations. The touch and taste of rain falling on my face while looking at a rainbow, the wonderful feeling of lolling around on a cool wooden table while naked, the first time I ever felt velvet, the taste and texture of specific foods.
But as I got older, and spirituality became the only acceptable focus, I lost touch with that connection. To a certain extent, I pushed it away deliberately because of the shame associated with such base things. Very quickly after that the physical world became something to be afraid of. My body became something to be ashamed of. I'm still not real clear as to why exactly a growing sense of "spirituality" lead to such shame and fear of non-spiritual things. I don’t think my religion was that stringent and judgmental. I don’t think they encouraged EVERYONE to disconnect so completely from reality, and most of the people I grew up around found a beautiful balance between the physical and spiritual worlds. I was so envious of those people. They were rooted in something that I didn’t understand but that I wanted very badly.
In order to make up for this lack of connection in real life, I read. ALOT. From the age of 4 onwards, I always had a book in my hand. I read at home while washing the dishes, at school while eating lunch, walking home, waiting in the car while my older siblings shopped. My reading supply was limited by what my parents deemed appropriate when I was younger, which excluded most anything interesting, but as I got older I read anything I could get my hands on. I remember being all alone in the library in first grade because the rest of the school was celebrating something I couldn’t, and sneaking into the 5th grade section to find some interesting books. I found a huge old book on Greek Mythology, and devoured most of it in one sitting. That book affected me deeply, to the point where I'm still absolutely fascinated by the mythologies of all cultures.
As I grew older ideas, through books, began to become my spirituality. I defined myself and everything else through ideas, and that included my religion and my sense of God. I don’t know that I’m expressing that right, in that everyone defines life through ideas, right? But there was nothing else for me. There was no balance between the reality of the moment and my idea of that moment. Does that make sense? I was, literally, one step removed from the process of life. God was a story that had very little to do with me, but then so were my friends. It made it hard to relate to anything, but it actually made it easy to excel at many things. I seemed like a model kid within my religion, because I knew so much. I knew the bible, I knew all the answers, and I knew how to sound smart but humble. I became popular as I got older because I analyzed social interactions and forced myself to apply what I learned.
However, the insincerity of this very quickly got to me. I was always being told that I was such an admirably sweet and peaceful person. That word, peaceful, was how everyone who knew me chose to describe me, especially my family. I can’t even begin to tell you how depressing that became. I was anything but peaceful. Inside I was a seething mass of conflicting ideas. I desperately craved things I thought I would never have, and considered myself to be an absolute freak of nature. I thrived on and loved learning new things, but my religion, and therefore everything else in my life, highly discouraged learning that didn’t directly relate to and encourage faith in God. This ruled out most of the ideas and authors I was interested in. My dad bought me the book “Chaos” by James Gleick when I was 17, but wouldn’t talk about it with me because it became too uncomfortable for him. I felt completely stifled and lost inside a role that I had created for myself.
As a child growing up in a very religious household, I was taught that the highest ideal was to strive to become the spiritual man. That the physical man was imperfect, and needed to be overcome. To dwell on physical things was to starve your spirituality and to open yourself up to the devil, who ruled the physical world. Dwelling on the higher things of things of life, such as God, his commandments, his story as told in the bible, and his one true religion, was the only way to become a spiritual creature worthy of his blessing. The beauty to be found in the world was considered worthy of consideration only in the sense that it uplifts our senses and causes us to praise the loving creator who provided it.
Writing it out, it sounds like a beautiful way of living. To keep our thoughts lofty, unblemished by the baser things of physical life, is a basic tenet of most philosophical and religious systems.
And it was a beautiful way to grow up. However, it affected me in very specific ways as a child. I grew up in a large family; 5 kids and lots of pets, in a 250 year old farmhouse with 26 haunted rooms, surrounded on three sides by scary old pine forest. I was an EXTREMELY sensitive, imaginative child, and my surroundings alone would have made for an unusual world view.
I spent most of my childhood outdoors by myself. Despite the fact that I had brothers and sisters close to me in age, and at one point 3 cousins living with us around my age, most of my memories are of being alone. I don’t know if that’s because I was mostly alone or because the moments that stand out in memory are of when I was alone. Either way, my relationship with nature was defined at a very young age. And it was a strange relationship.
In many ways, I was terrified of it. Every tree hid a monster, be it the stegosaurus old oak in the front yard that lifted its roots at dusk and stomped across the lawn towards my bedroom, or the evil stump hiding behind the undergrowth at the end of the driveway that glared at me with knotty eyes and plotted my death as I walked to the bus stop. Around every corner was SOMETHING that wanted to hurt me, and in every shape, no matter how familiar, lurked a malevolent "presence". And yet I wasn’t an overly fearful child. I didn’t run screaming from things that scared me. There is an old cemetery behind where I grew up, called Blood Cemetery. It's been deemed one of the creepiest places in New England, with very good reason. It's old (late 1700s old), it's shaded and cool in the midst of an old pine forest, and it's got a funky energy. I spent a lot of time there alone as a kid. It was the best reading spot in the world. The ground was cushioned by years of pine needles, the stone wall surrounding it was mossy and cool, and it was close enough to my house for me to hear if my mom yelled for me. I'd sit for hours and read, feeling pretty damn convinced the whole time that I was being watched and trying to ignore the feeling. Dusk was my shut off point though. I've always been scared of the dark, and being outside in it alone was NOT a good thing.
Even in my house I never felt "alone". I wouldn’t look outside the windows at night if I could help it, for fear of seeing something looking in. Every time I walked into a room, I'd pause and look around first, waiting for movement. Some of the most terrifying moments in my life happened in that house; watching wallpaper ripple in my bedroom, looking out the bathroom window in the middle of a cold winter night and seeing a lovely woman in a sleeveless dress walking into our barn, watching my oldest sister get "pushed" down our attic steps when there was nothing around her, flying home as fast as I could from the sandpit in the back of our house because I was convinced a hyena was chasing me. I don’t really care if any of these things were real or figments of my imagination. In my mind, they were perfectly real, and that was all that mattered.
See, I didn’t have a very good grasp on reality growing up. And the way I was raised, with so much focus on spirituality, had ALOT to do with that. Not everything, as my parents were both fey people anyways, with a rather serious lack of a grasp themselves. But religion took that tendency and gave it a reason to live. It made it a good thing. My lack of connection to reality allowed me to immerse myself completely in the spiritual realm. I don’t necessarily mean God. Even as a young kid, I wasn’t sure about the whole "god" thing. I was pretty damn sure about the devil, and that kind of made belief in God a default, but I was never able to fully immerse myself in that belief.
No, my sense of spirituality was more a sense of the workings behind the physical realm. Reality felt like a play, with everything that mattered actually happening backstage. So, when I focused on becoming a spiritual being, I focused on finding out what was actually happening behind the scenes. This distanced me almost completely from the here and now. There was no "moment" that existed into and of itself. Everything had to be analyzed and dissected to find its "real" meaning and its connection to everything else.
As one can imagine, this overcomplicated life greatly. I might have gotten a lot more nuance out of any given thing than most, but I also completely missed the bigger picture while looking for it with a microscope. And this focus on finding out what was really going on made people almost impossible to relate to or get along with. Trying to dissect and understand everyone’s hidden motives and realities does not lend itself to an easy camaraderie with humans, especially when you're a teenager.
And, when you turn that microscope on yourself, it doesn’t make it easy to have a healthy relationship with your own body. As a really young kid, I can remember being very grounded in my own body. Physical sensation fascinated me, to the point where I would pursue pleasant ones at all cost, much to my parents chagrin. My earliest memories are of physical sensations. The touch and taste of rain falling on my face while looking at a rainbow, the wonderful feeling of lolling around on a cool wooden table while naked, the first time I ever felt velvet, the taste and texture of specific foods.
But as I got older, and spirituality became the only acceptable focus, I lost touch with that connection. To a certain extent, I pushed it away deliberately because of the shame associated with such base things. Very quickly after that the physical world became something to be afraid of. My body became something to be ashamed of. I'm still not real clear as to why exactly a growing sense of "spirituality" lead to such shame and fear of non-spiritual things. I don’t think my religion was that stringent and judgmental. I don’t think they encouraged EVERYONE to disconnect so completely from reality, and most of the people I grew up around found a beautiful balance between the physical and spiritual worlds. I was so envious of those people. They were rooted in something that I didn’t understand but that I wanted very badly.
In order to make up for this lack of connection in real life, I read. ALOT. From the age of 4 onwards, I always had a book in my hand. I read at home while washing the dishes, at school while eating lunch, walking home, waiting in the car while my older siblings shopped. My reading supply was limited by what my parents deemed appropriate when I was younger, which excluded most anything interesting, but as I got older I read anything I could get my hands on. I remember being all alone in the library in first grade because the rest of the school was celebrating something I couldn’t, and sneaking into the 5th grade section to find some interesting books. I found a huge old book on Greek Mythology, and devoured most of it in one sitting. That book affected me deeply, to the point where I'm still absolutely fascinated by the mythologies of all cultures.
As I grew older ideas, through books, began to become my spirituality. I defined myself and everything else through ideas, and that included my religion and my sense of God. I don’t know that I’m expressing that right, in that everyone defines life through ideas, right? But there was nothing else for me. There was no balance between the reality of the moment and my idea of that moment. Does that make sense? I was, literally, one step removed from the process of life. God was a story that had very little to do with me, but then so were my friends. It made it hard to relate to anything, but it actually made it easy to excel at many things. I seemed like a model kid within my religion, because I knew so much. I knew the bible, I knew all the answers, and I knew how to sound smart but humble. I became popular as I got older because I analyzed social interactions and forced myself to apply what I learned.
However, the insincerity of this very quickly got to me. I was always being told that I was such an admirably sweet and peaceful person. That word, peaceful, was how everyone who knew me chose to describe me, especially my family. I can’t even begin to tell you how depressing that became. I was anything but peaceful. Inside I was a seething mass of conflicting ideas. I desperately craved things I thought I would never have, and considered myself to be an absolute freak of nature. I thrived on and loved learning new things, but my religion, and therefore everything else in my life, highly discouraged learning that didn’t directly relate to and encourage faith in God. This ruled out most of the ideas and authors I was interested in. My dad bought me the book “Chaos” by James Gleick when I was 17, but wouldn’t talk about it with me because it became too uncomfortable for him. I felt completely stifled and lost inside a role that I had created for myself.
Comments
Post a Comment