It was on the eve of my birthday last week when I read in the Taurus Season horoscope exactly what I had been thinking about that day: I am in the midst of shedding old skin and on the verge of transition into a new chapter in my life.
It was the day after my birthday, out for a run, when I heard in the We Can Do Hard Things podcast exactly what I had been thinking about the days prior: dance for me is life-giving, complete and total embodiment.
It was tonight, driving home with S, when I heard Rick Rubin talk with Krista Tippet in an episode of On Being about exactly what I’ve been experiencing in the creative process of writing: every project takes a lifetime of experience; things take the time they take; we have to embrace the inspiration we find when we find it.
And that’s what inspiration is, isn’t it? The word itself comes from the Latin for “breathe into.” These ideas, these creative projects – they don’t belong to us and we didn’t create them. Inspiration comes to us because we helped cultivate the right conditions for it to arrive and for us to catch it.
Rubin talked about how he doesn’t write what he knows, he writes what he notices. Tippet said she writes in order to know what she thinks. The act of sitting down, of taking time to notice; this meditation creates the conditions we need in order to be breathed into.
Rubin and Tippet went on to talk about how there are ideas that are just ready to take shape, and if the idea comes to you and you don’t act on it, you’ll see it out in the world somewhere else in six months, because that idea was ready to be caught. If you don’t catch it as it blows by, someone else will. And I’ve had this sense of collectivity lately that all these different but connected ideas that have been swirling around me are on purpose. On purpose in a way I don’t think I’ve felt before.
Wait, What’s God?
I used to be a big believer in Big G God. Big G God was an old man in the clouds. Big G God was acting and intervening in people’s lives and everything happened for a reason. Big G God was omniscient and omnipotent and omnipresent. Big G God knew what was best for us, even if we didn’t, and everything that happened was what was best; there was a blessing to be found in everything. Big G God created the whole world in seven days.
I don’t believe that anymore, but I do believe in God. Or god? Or goddess? I don’t know if I can call it god, but I think what I’m imagining is what many people call God or Allah or Yahweh (and they believe it with a whole heart and a good heart). Thinking about this Creator-God, I recently went down a mini rabbit hole from intelligent design to the theory of theistic evolution.
“Francis Collins describes theistic evolution as the position that ‘evolution is real, but that it was set in motion by God’, and characterizes it as accepting ‘that evolution occurred as biologists describe it, but under the direction of God.’”
That statement doesn’t resonate with me. God is evolution, in my view. In the same way that Glennon and the pod talked about how we are our bodies. Our bodies are us. We are not a mind with a body, we are a body experiencing the world. God doesn’t act within and through nature. God is nature. And that includes the evolutionary process. And us.
God is the beautiful connection between everything that exists. God is the chemistry between two people and that sense that you’ve known someone forever who you’ve only just met. God is the energy that connects you in the first place.
God is the chill that runs up your spine when you hear music that speaks deeply to your soul. God is music in general, I think.
God is the parts of us that are (mostly) uniquely human: stories, dance, music, writing, inspiration, orgasm.
God is the breathlessness of looking up from the bottom of the Yosemite Valley, or catching a blazing orange sunset in your backyard, or driving straight toward a super blood moon—the highway disappearing in the horizon directly underneath.
God is the pit in your stomach when you learn something that makes you feel humiliated or ashamed or heartbroken. God is the knowing what’s the next right thing in those moments.
God is the devastation you feel when you lose someone you love. I think it’s so beautiful that animals feel this, too. God is also in the animals.
God is the pull between and among the planets and us. God is the unseen connection between heavenly bodies and earthly bodies that we can’t prove but people have known and studied for thousands of years.
God is what we notice when we stop and take the time to notice.
Okay, But Who am I Though?
I am the blood pumping through my veins. I am the lungs breathing deeply, softly, heavily.
I am the touch of the old cat curled in the crook of my legs. I am the way that the feeling of his soft fur in my hands can bring calm to us both.
I am the warmth that rushes from the top of my head to the bottom of my toes when I eat the most perfect, buttery salmon sashimi of my life. And the same feeling that comes back when I think of it seven years later.
I am the body dancing. Moving on instinct and rhythm alone. Not performing, not choreographing, simply following beats and pulses.
I am the hands that hold and arms that hug and lips that kiss the people I love. I am the memories that live as much inside of those hands and arms and lips as they do in my brain.
I am the womb and hips and back that birthed the humans that grew inside of me. That built them and pushed them out when I was ready and when they were ready.
I am the orgasm.
There starts to be a point where I can’t tell the difference between the things I could categorize as me and the things I could categorize as god. And I think that’s beautiful. And I think that’s the point.