Into the Mystic

Get Back to Where You Once Belonged

The Maze, Block Island, RI, USA. Photo by author

“Where have you been the rock?” the rock said when I finally sat down, slightly out of breath from the climb up the ancient stairway winding along the cliff’s edge above the Pacific. I hadn’t been there in weeks, avoiding its call, saying to myself I was too tired to trek over the uneven lava, not a pleasant stroll after work when all I wanted to do was put my feet up and binge-watch something on my computer to forget the real world.

An essay by

Charlotte Du Cann

, author of The Red Tent here on Substack, broke my trance of laziness. In “The Uneasy Chair,” a treatise on the craft of metaphysical writing, she rightly states that this type of writing must look at the world through different viewpoints, and goes on to name some: Cliffedge, Shore, Bench, Bird’s Eye, Cader Idris and The Shack. (For those who are curious about the specifics, I highly recommend reading this delightful article here.)

As soon as I read her description of the first potential vantage point, Cliffedge, I knew why my days had of late seemed flat. I had been too focused on the second point, the Shore, lost in the murk of my emotional turmoil and the details of surviving in late-stage capitalism. Things weren’t dire. My life is and was not truly in danger, but the constant anxiety of supporting myself financially in an expensive place with a housing crisis had made me forget there even was a Cliffedge view. I was so deep in amnesia, I’d forgotten there was an actual cliff just a couple of miles away from my dwelling place! Something had to be done about this.

Instead of putting my feet up after work, I put on my sneakers (that lava is sure to trip you up in flip-flops), and drove down the hill to the Pu’uhonua, the ancient Place of Refuge that had hosted the ceremony I wrote about in my book, Piko: A Return to the Dreaming. The book was my primary occupation for two years, but since its publication last September, I’d forgotten the magical circumstances surrounding its creation, and the wonder as the natural world began to speak back to me as I sat by the little ponds and told stories I’d been so focused on promoting the book, I’d lost myself on the Shore. All I could see were the thousands of pebbles, not the undersea mountains they used to be.

I resisted the stone’s call from high on the cliff’s edge for a couple of days. Like I said, I had some lame the excuses—I needed to rest because my job was hard, didn’t want to get back in a car after commuting home—and I was also aware I could just be lazy. I was also scared of what the rock was going to say. I’d blown my life up several times after receiving messages from holy beings in the form of wind, waves, ferns, currents, deer, striped bass, and ancient trees. It was so much easier to just lie down on the daybed and watch the sunset through the mango tree. Couldn’t I be content for once?

But that’s not what oracles are here for, and while everything I say, especially what I write, sounds like it’s coming from me because I’m using 21st century English you can understand, it’s really coming from inner Earth Waters that remember the first beings that came here from distant stars. I also don’t know why I keep calling myself lazy. I get a lot done. I work hard as a massage therapist, caretake a property with Air BnBs, have published four books, write this weekly Substack, swim for miles in the ocean as much as I can, read books, and am constantly soul-searching, yet I still feel like I’m not doing enough. I think it’s those hours I spent watching bot seasons of Bridgerton twice, and all three seasons of Ted Lasso two times. The time I waste scrolling on Instagram, when I could be finally reading War and Peace or binging Kurosawa films. I’ve given my time to the entertainment machine more than I wish and I feel ashamed of that. Although I’m still creative, my attention span has shortened. My imagination feels colonized. But hey—at least I’m relatable.

I’m also aware that laziness is a form of resistance and was hoping that a Cliffedge view would help me see what I’ve been resisting, hence my hike though the park, where I pass, properly shod in sneakers, a herd of goats who stop to watch me from rock piles on either side of the path that look like hardened drip castles. Marveling at their hooves that can balance on the sharp, slippery lava rock, I ascend, walk past my usual sitting spot and continue down the path, even though my laziness is telling me to just sit down anywhere. No, I tell it. We’re not there yet. I don’t know who the “we” I’m speaking about is at first, but then I realize maybe it’s laziness. Maybe laziness is my friend, maybe we’re even a couple.

Hey, thanks for getting me out here, I tell my BFF.

You’re welcome, she replies.

Some people write your welcome instead of you’re, though spoken they sound the same. Notice the difference? The former implies that you specifically are welcome in a place—you with all your angst and restlessness and shame. The latter, that the welcome is for you, a possession, leaving out the possibility for collaboration. You’re welcome. Sitting on the rock above the sea, even with all my resistance, I feel the truth of this. I am welcome.

So what have I been resisting? The War in Gaza? Climate collapse? Ecocide? That I live in Hawai’i, an occupied territory? That my parents are 80 and I live on the other side of the planet? Yes to all of these, and a lot more.

When I’m on the Cliffedge, I can see all these things clearly. This generally happens when I’m in a pattern of actively writing. When I’m in the daily grind of earning money, lost in the details of schedules and commuting, I see only the Shore. I suffer for it. Interesting that I suffer because I’m not allowing the world’s pain into my field, but when I really think about it, I’m not surprised. As an alchemist, I require the poisons. Without them, there is nothing to transmute.

Here on the literal Cliffedge, watching the turquoise waves break on the black rocks and transform into white foam that turns back to turquoise as the next wave draws it back into itself, I can see there is no use in starving resistance. In this world where things are known by what they are not, we can either resist, causing the pendulum to swing so wide we fall into such deep amnesia we forget that contrast can be a feast, one with enough food at a table big enough to sit warring armies, political parties, fractured families, with a space for the guest, who, as the Sufis say, is always holy.

I look out and see a whale spout close to the horizon, hope for a breach or a tail slap, but the whale sinks back under the surface and I’m left feeling disappointed and grateful that I saw it in the first place.

The rock draws me horizontal, both of us craving more of each other’s surface. I lie down, expand toward the clouds that are motionless, the gaps between them like empty aquariums or two-way mirrors looking down on Earth. Maybe there are bright yellow tangs and parrotfish on the other side observing me, or the ghost of that first tautog I speared back when I needed to learn how to stalk to understand how an animal thinks.

The rock jabs my lumbar and cervical spine. The rest of my vertebrae float suspended like a stone arch in a Utah canyon, gradually being worn down by blood and cerebrospinal fluid; my breath like wind, moves in and out of my lungs. Oxygen moves through my bloodstream, is offered back as carbon dioxide. A fern growing out of the lava nearby is grateful. We are both miracles.

Close to reverie, my to-do list intrudes. I won’t bore you with the details. I’m sure you have one, too, and know how easy it is to become obsessed with all the things you need to do. The best thing is to just start doing them, but when you’re lying on a rock above the cliff trying to meditate, the next best thing is to unzip your knapsack and take out your pen and get something down on a page, see what’s at the source of the restlessness, my inability to be content with the day-to-day that seems enough for most of the people around me, although that’s changing. More and more of us are waking up, looking for a different way.

The answer comes in waves, not words. After years of living by the sea, I’m a good translator. This is what they say: Your lack of contentment is the result of too much time on the clock. Get back into the mystic.

I love the fact that the rock’s message takes the form of a hybrid Beatles and Van Morrison song, so right away I’m amenable to the message. I get it, However, I recognize you may not, so I’m going to unpack it a bit and satiate the linear with some definitions.

What is mythic time? There are a lot of answers to that, both scholarly and indigenous, but for me it means living in a web where it’s obvious every thread is connected to each other because you can actually see and hear them. It takes some effort. It’s not obvious until you allow yourself to be caught in the web, a scary proposition at first, but once you do you realize, the trade-off for knowing you are prey is worth it.

In the Taittiriya Upanishad we hear this is what happens when a soul attains Moksha:

I am food, I am food, I am food! I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food, I am the eater of food! I am the poet, I am the poet, I am the poet! I am the first-born of the Right. Before the Devas I was in the centre of all that is immortal. He who gives me away, he alone preserves me: him who eats food, I eat as food. I overcome the whole world, I, endowed with golden light."

Ecstasy occurs when we surrender to polarity, not push it away.

When I’m in mythic time, I’m aware that the deer in the field stops and meets my eyes because I walked out of the house at dawn and lay down in the place in the dunes from which the herd had just risen, that I noticed the fiddleheads were about to unfurl by the low stone wall at the bottom of the driveway, and that the goldfinches who drop yellow feathers in my path when I’m gardening are reminding me we are in this enchantment together.

Mythic time applies to the human world, too. In fact, in mythic time, there isn’t much of a separation between the two. When I’m in mythic time, I can walk into the bar and see beyond the modern masks the pirates and jesters and oracles have put on.

In mythic time, it’s important to note who crosses your path when you’re out walking the trails, standing in line at the post office, foraging for bladderwrack in remote tide pools you can only reach by hiking down a cliff and a mile of rocky beach. It’s knowing that the first person you recognize after months of being away from the island at the ferry terminal is very significant, that coincidence is a form of denial, and that everyone who crosses your path is a blessing, sometimes in disguise, but nevertheless, a gift from the web of life that is absolutely essential to your personal evolution and the world’s, and that the same goes for them. You are their essential blessing.

The island I’m talking about is called Block Island, Manisses to its indigenous inhabitants, and I miss the place so much it’s a constant ache in my bones, a hole in my heart that can’t be filled by any other place, even Hawai’i, which has had paradise projected onto it by so many it’s about to implode under the fury at not being truly seen.

I was lucky to live on Block Island the summer when I was five, back when time was something grownups kept track of, calling us in for dinner or telling us to load into the station wagon that carried us across the island to the beach. My days were a haze of wonder that burrowed into my cells and lay dormant, waiting for the day I would need it, which came a year after graduating from college in Washington, DC. In a black depression I couldn’t explain, but which I knew, despite outside pressure to say otherwise, was not simply chemical, I followed my Dad’s advice—why don’t you go work on Block Island for the summer? Left the city, scooped up my cat Bea, and moved into the attic of an old house turned BnB, plunging right into the mythic. I floated, no problem. I was in my element. The rest is history, my personal history at least, which I’ll be detailing in my next book, The Deer Dance.

In the meantime, I can tell you a little about Block Island, what’s relevant for this article here. Being an island thirteen miles out to sea, a sea that’s often storm-tossed, Block Island has managed to stay mystical. People from all walks of life feel it. The island has an inexplicable pull that enchants many. One of my friends called it the fairy realm with some derision. implying that it kept people from growing up or facing reality. She was right in some ways, but I would never have broken that place’s spell on me of my own will. I fell in love with every spring, wave, and stone, and I hope my body is returned there when it’s my time to die, if I don’t actually die on that ground hallowed by the joys and struggles of my time there.

My friend was righ to an extent, though I don’t think everyone needs to leave the fairy realm. We all have different roles on this journey of life. Many people I know who choose to stay in the fairy realm are holding an energy that would go extinct otherwise, and many more are so open-hearted they would die in the real world, where competition is valued more than kindness, logic more than incomprehensible oracular proclamations that keep a flame we need alive in a world gone mad with logic and order.

I was blessed to live there, that fog-shrouded island ringed by ever-changing beaches where clocks were not the dominant way of measuring time. In my experience, this stepping around the clock, was essential to remembering what it felt like to be embedded in a mythic matrix.

What did this look like?

I didn’t work very much, at least not on a regular schedule, and definitely not year- round. Block Island, whose main industry is summer tourism, provided me with that. I worked full-time spring, summer, and fall. Winter was more sporadic. Sometimes I didn’t work at all. How could you afford that? I hear you ask, a legitimate question, because, yes, even on Block Island, people paid rent and had to buy food, though if you were willing to eat a lot of clams and fish, have seaweed as your main vegetable, you wouldn’t starve.

Getting around wasn’t so hard. Every now and then I’d pick up an old Jeep Cherokee for $400 and drive it until it died. Once someone even gave me his old one when he upgraded to a fancier Jeep. Years without a car, I biked, which, if you took seriously the adage “there’s no bad weather, only the wrong clothes,” was fine. And what I would have missed if I hadn’t ridden a bike all those years—deer running alongside me in December during rutting season, the full moon rising out of the ocean as I pedaled down the Neck, friends yelling out the window, “Hi Jen!” as they drove past, sometimes slowing to my pace to have a chat out the car window.

My Mexican ride, photo by author

Just as it was hard to starve on Block Island because it was a real community where people took care of each other, there were also creative living situations that didn’t require money, or maybe a little cash as a token to make sure you respected the place. I lived in barns, sheds, boats, a schools, tents in friends’ backyards, basement and attic rooms in Bed & Breakfasts, and for ten luxurious years, in a condo on the beach where I was a caretaker for a family from NYC who had three island homes and actually called the one I lived in “your house.”

This would not have been the lifestyle for anyone who’s goal in life was accumulating possessions: real estate to pass onto the children, a 4-wheel drive Land Rover for the island and a Subaru because it got great gas mileage as a mainland car, or even for those without access to that kind of income who just wanted to be able to afford year- round rent, one car, and health insurance before Obamacare. I recognize I was an anomaly, but it was so natural to me I didn’t actually see myself as an exception. I was living in tune with my own rhythm and I probably could have gone on doing so happily if not for the price.

Subservience.

In a world that considers money as the highest form of exchange, in my experience, there’s always a level of subservience expected of those who barter for shelter, even for the extremely modest accommodations I lived in. The person who owned the land or house was always the one in charge. I think most of us are so conditioned by capitalism and private property as an inalienable right we wouldn’t even question this. I certainly was. I wasn’t even aware how subservient I was, how I could literally make myself invisible, take up as little space as possible in the kitchen, pee outside, etc., so I’d be allowed to sleep under a roof.

Don’t get me wrong, this worked for me for a long time. I devoted myself completely to becoming a poet and enjoyed life in the relaxed, old-fashioned way so few Americans know these days. (Spending a whole day making bread, for example. Reading Victorian novels straight through without checking my cell phone because there weren’t any), and I was able to follow the thread of depression deep into the labyrinth each winter, excavating myself in the dark center, returning each spring with a little more to offer my community, who appreciated me for who I was, not what I did, and expressed that in many ways, sometimes even verbally. I can’t tell you how many people have stopped me over the years and told me how happy it made them feel to see me riding my bike.

But still—there were shackles. I began to want to make more of a contribution than holding the energy of wildness. I wanted to be more than one of Hafiz’s rowdy prisoners. The world wanted more from me—and I wanted to be free. I didn’t actually know what that looked like, but I did know that vacuuming under someone’s feet while they read the newspaper and ignored you wasn’t it, at least not for me.

I was one of Hafiz’s rowdy prisoners, but no one was tossing keys to open the jail cell to me. I was going to have to get out myself. Because my mind failed to come up with a plan, my body stepped in and took over.

Ulcerative colitis is an autoimmune disease in which the body literally attacks itself, resulting in debilitating intestinal inflammation. The first time it happened I was living in that school bus I mentioned, not a fun place to have a bloody, spasming large intestine. I did my best to pretend it wasn’t happening, cleaned houses all summer, swam around the island with Sea Squad, the Block Island Snorkeling Club, took some probiotics and had a healing session with a guy who said he twisted my intestine back into its proper place.

I don’t know what worked, but the colitis went away. If I’d gone to a doctor, I would have been diagnosed with a chronic disease, but since I didn’t, I figured I just had some bug and went to Peru for the winter, my first overseas journey in 22 years, and my first winter off-island in eleven. I came back to Block Island, worked another season, decided my winters on a tiny island might be over, went to a bigger island called the Big Island, swam with dolphins a lot and made a best friend who called me out on my codependent bullshit, and went back to Block Island. That year I moved into the Hygeia House, an inn owned by my friend who was hosting the Block Island Poetry Project, a yearly gathering where we islanders got to attend workshops from some of the most respected poets in America: Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, Naomi Shihab-Nye, Carolyn Forché, Li-Young Li, Billy Collins. We also were blessed with drummers, singers, and storytellers.

Martin Shaw

came for a few years at the beginning of his career, forever changing my life on an April afternoon with his drum and the story Ivan the Bear’s Son. The Hygeia, built by a doctor in the 19th century who named it for the Greek Goddess of healing, was truly a temple of healing, which I came to know in a more personal way than I wanted to when ulcerative colitis felled me after the famous poets had all gone home.

I could write a whole book on the mythic levels of having this disease, there were so many triggers from so many traumas—not just mine, at some point I knew my disease was transpersonal. I was a reflecting pool, the traumas of Earth herself rippled through my body.

For the next ten years, I devoted myself to healing both and haven’t stopped, though the focus has moved beyond my personal journey, although I do relate bits of it when I feel that will help others. I passed through Shore and Cliffedge, where I leaped off and got a Bird’s Eye view, another vantage described by Du Cann.

The bird’s eye view is holistic, no part can be removed without altering the whole. Before I took that leap and soared, there were several years of see-sawing between vibrant health where I never felt more in my body and coming close to death when the UC came back and I collapsed into the hospital where angels hooked me up to IVs and resuscitated me. I’m going to share some of my UC story here because it is relevant to where we’re going, which I’m hoping is a place where we can all get a bird’s eye view of how the events of our own particular lives are both shaped and themselves shape the wider culture that contains us. By that I mean life now on Planet Earth.

I know a lot of people believe that disease is purely physical, bad luck, environmental exposure to toxins, or genetics, but once you cross into the mythic perspective, you know there is no way of separating the physical from the spiritual. The danger is not to fall into dissociative delusion, denying the physical’s place. I did that, so I know. Not wanting to experience the pain of the physical, I retreated into the spiritual, which I could now see extended to not wanting to deal with the real world, by which I mean the capitalist system that requires us to produce money in order to sustain ourselves or have influence. What I couldn’t see, was that living so far outside the mainstream, was not the best contribution I could make. My body stepped in and told me until I listened, finally starting to realize I was going to have to surrender my Block Island life (which had delightfully evolved into six months on my beloved island and six months in Bacalar, Mexico where I was an aquatic bodyworker and could actually afford to rent a house), when the colitis flared and I ended up in a Mexican hospital.

Unbelievably, after being rescued by friends and family because I couldn’t afford the private hospital bills, I didn’t make the change right away. That’s how powerful the fairy realm is. By that I mean, the other world’s dark side, the one that keeps us in delusion, and can ultimately stop us from making our greatest contribution to life.

One more round of ulcerative colitis that had me making 40 trips a day to the bathroom and crying every time I went up and down stairs because the arthritis in my knees was so bad, and I accepted the medication that put me into remission for a few years (I did have a flare in 2023, but it was minor compared to previous hells). I finally saw that I was a rowdy prisoner and accepted the keys tossed to me. My parents, exhausted by the stress of worrying about me, generously offered to send me to massage school on Kauai so I had a practical skill to earn a decent living. I moved back to the Big Island, and except for two brief visits to Block Island, have been here since. Ulcerative colitis was not a curse, or bad luck, it was the way my soul chose to connect me to the world’s soul.

Because of Covid, I had an easy entrance into the real world. Not many people were getting massages when I graduated in the spring of 2020, so I took a job as a caretaker for a property owner who forced me to look at my subservience by taking advantage of me until I started standing up to him. I was astonished when this opened up room for negotiation and I started getting what I wanted. He even told me he was glad I was standing up for myself ! I was so scared I thought standing up for myself would lead to being thrown out the door and living in my car.

The property I was caretaking was an ancient Hawaiian site, a farm for the ali’i (priests and chiefs) who once lived down below in the Pu’uhonua ō Honauanu, which is now a U.S. National Park. In pre-colonial times, the land provided sweet potatoes and taro, now it was a coffee farm, but it was still a very peaceful place despite the switch from root vegetables to caffeine. I surrendered to its rhythms and swam day after day for miles in the sea, going out of my comfort zone slowly until I was no longer afraid when I saw sharks. Once again, without the pressure of having to earn money to pay rent, etc., I attuned to mythic time and began to feel like myself again—the one I was comfortable with— after the stress of massage school and the exams to get my license. This is the time I sat in ceremony for 21 days by the anchialine ponds in the Pu’uhonua, which means Place of Refuge, and wrote the first draft of Piko: A Return to the Dreaming in 30 days, when this land spoke to me the way Block Island did and I began to feel at home here. This was the time I first began to feel at home in my body, no matter where it was.

Ancient walls in the Pu’uhonua: photo by author

This came to an end with the pandemic. It was time to finally go to work, pay rent, be a functioning adult in American society, which I’ve been doing for the past couple of years, shuttling back and forth between the mythic time and clock time as much as I could because I really did not like the real world, which is a bit of understatement. A better way to say it is I never felt so isolated for the 14 months I lived in a suburb of Kailua-Kona, the big town in these parts, or that life had less meaning. Get up, drive to work, work, stop at grocery store, drive home, eat dinner, watch Netflix, go to bed and start it all over again. It’s not like I had money now either. Rent for a single person who doesn’t want to live in a group house is astronomical here, and that’s if you can find a place! While I did feel I had some rights because I was paying rent, I had no lease so I felt like I had to be subservient again to please my landlady so she didn’t throw me out and I could hardly ever do laundry. (Wah Wah.)

But, most importantly—now I that I have rattled around inside the hollow core of the tired beast of late-stage capitalism, I know how most people live. In the past, I might have judged them. Now they were relatable, which made me relatable to them. Bridges were built, the good kind that joined warring villages on opposite sides of the river.

The hollow core spit me out pretty quick. (I got fired after my first storytelling gig.) And while I do still have bills, I’m back to caretaking for the property owner who helped cure me of my subservience, so the pressure of rent is off. I’m half-in, half-out of the system, which I’m finding is just right for me right now. I’m not too isolated to make a contribution that society values, helping people through bodywork and more and more through my writing, and I’m compensated financially enough to get by.

I don’t want you to think this is a diatribe against the real world governed by clock time and dollars. That’s not the kind of conclusion you come to from the Bird’s Eye view. This is me acknowledging my strength and resilience for being able to maintain a thread into the labyrinth, when so many forces in our society don’t even want us to know it exists. If we do stumble upon it, the powers that be want us to just get the hell out and get back to work. I know the thread I followed in and out is strong enough to keep me connected to the web of life even when I’m bound to the clock. I made it from my own body.

“Where have you been?” The rock asked. I didn’t get it at first. This rock knew me.

It’s easy to slip out of the mythic. So many trances abound, and not the good kind that have you dancing around a fire all night until you drop onto the ground—smartphones, Instagram, TikTok (I’m Gen X, never seen it, but I know it’s a thing!)

Even stressing about the future, from a Bird’s Eye view, can be seen as a trance that keeps us from realizing we are safe in the moment and searching for solutions to the many crises our world faces from a place where there are more options than competition and war.

What if all it took was making a connection with one rock, letting it feel you as much as you feel it under your sit bones?

Here’s a secret—shame once had its hooks so deep in me, I hated myself. I thought I was useless and that life wasn’t worth living. I thought humans were despicable and Earth would be better off without us. I contemplated taking myself out of the picture many times when all I needed was a different frame.

On an unloved, poisoned and desecrated planet, having an autoimmune disease made sense. Think about it—rats will chew off their own tails to escape a trap. Sometimes in order to survive, we have to attack. But who or what will be left if the violated eradicate their attackers? I’m glad I chose to stick around.

Down below the cliff the turquoise water breaks into white waves when they hit the black lava, only they aren’t hitting the rocks, they are moving around them.

If I had chosen to stay deep in the labyrinth, I might not be here. Same goes for if I chose to stay in the real world. And I’m glad I’m here, writing these words to you. Half-in, half-out is where I belong. I stand with the deer at the edge of fields and roads and watch people pass. Most can’t see me. But some do.

I hope you find something useful in these words, even more something beautiful, and even more than that, something true.

I hope the bits of my journey I shared, totally unplanned, haphazard, irresponsible, but wildly intuitive, helps you on your own.

Let’s show up and respond to what’s needed wherever we are, recognize the magic in the mundane, don’t allow the ticking of the clock to push us into exiting through delusional fantasy.

I know I’m one of the lucky ones to have made it this far. I had a lot of support and have been given so much love even when I couldn’t receive it. Now it’s my time to give. I can see in so many directions.

C’est moi

Gratitude to all my readers and for Charlotte Du Cann for inspiring this article. Substack is a wonderful web of writers around the world. Check her work out at The Red Tent.

Piko: A Return to the Dreaming is available through all online retailers worldwide, including Bookshop, which doesn’t have free shipping like Amazon, but does support local bookstores, where you can order the book if you want to buy it from your neighborhood store. The next series of posts beginning soon will work with the stories and folktales I told in the ceremony that became Piko. You may want to pick up a copy of the book before we begin. The stories are all included there.

As always, ratings or reviews on Goodreads and Amazon are deeply appreciated. They help get the word out to people beyond my circle.

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Kō aloha lā ea

Concentrate on love by way of the light