The Cyrenaian Hedonic church

Listeing to Flesh, Power, and the Long Night [Spotify Playlist]

The Season of Communion [Link] rests between Summer Solstice and the Autumnal Equinox.

Already, there has been a noticeable shift. Though school and classes have begun, summer isn’t yet over. But the tourist crowds are already thinning and the boats that have spent the summer scattered across the Waters are beginning to draw closer to shore. 

I cannot say the summer has been heavy, but there was certainly a weight to it this year, for many of us, I suspect. For me, certainly.

And I have been thinking about my Mind House, a vast Victorian mansion. It is the sort of place built that has more rooms than anyone could possibly need, and yet apparently I go and decide to build another floor anyway. There are rooms I know well, rooms I rarely enter, rooms I have forgotten the purpose of, and rooms I am not entirely convinced were there yesterday.

There are corridors. And secret passages. There are walls with things behind them. 

Sometimes the mind needs a corridor because the door is too much. Sometimes we need to move quietly around something before we can stand in the room with it. Sometimes the secret passage is how we survive the house at all.

I wrote this some time ago: Passages [Link]

And there are basements. And basements below basements. And way down deep, at the bottom of a rough-hewn spiral stone stair is a series of endless, heavy wooden doors [Link]. And behind those doors are vaults and strongboxes and rooms filled with safes of all make and combinations. That is where I store the jars of things I am not yet ready to open. 

Throughout the Seasons of Rupture, of Vigilance, and of Reckoning, I carry those little jars of traumas, anxieties, fears, grief, mistakes, shame, old patterns, things I wish I had done differently, down the stairs, unlock the doors, find a safe, and put each jar away.

Then I turn the lights out and lock the door behind me. 

No denial. Storage. Containment. It is sometimes the only responsible thing you can do when the contents of the jar are corrosive and you still have a life to live.

But each jar needs dealing with. Eventually. 

Because there are earthquakes that can shake the shelves. A door can fail. A safe can rust. One jar tips against another, glass breaks, acid spills, and suddenly something you carefully contained begins eating its way through the architecture.

So, come the Season of Communion, I leave the mansion, with as many jars as I can carry, and I live on a houseboat. It is a strange little vessel, really. A large raft with four walls and a roof on one corner, but no mansion behind those walls. No corridors. No secret rooms. No sub-basements. No safes. Just a raft floating on open Waters. 

And between delightful swims, dances in summer thunderstorms, and sheltering inside during hurricanes, I take each jar, one by one, and pour it into the Waters.

The Sea is alive. And it can hold the shape of everything that is You. It can absorb, metabolize, dilute, incorporate and integrate the contents of the jar into something much larger.

And I turn my face back toward the Sun. 

While I float above it, the Waters move. Caverns shift beneath me. Currents change. Things I thought I understood begin arranging themselves differently. Old experiences encounter new knowledge. Patterns become visible from a different depth.

The jar is gone, but the experience is not. It is just a part of a larger understanding. 

This is the Season of Communion. In this time of gathering, respite, long days and humid nights, we take the things that have arisen through rupture, held through vigilance, and faced in reckoning, and pour them into the wider waters of our lives, where they can be encountered, understood, and transformed. 

The Autumnal Equinox is a little over two weeks away. Summer is not yet over. Not quite. But the boats are coming in and the season has turned. We are packing up our few belongings and getting ready to return to the mansion, the ocean inside us the same, but also shifted. 

There will be new rooms to enter, old passages to navigate, and perhaps now we have the keys to open doors we have never opened. And the Season of Rupture will begin.