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4:22pm June 24, 2014
Anonymous asked: What are your religious/spiritual beliefs?

This is going to be possibly more information than you ever wanted.  And it’s kind of opening myself up (including to potential ridicule) and putting a lot out there that I don’t normally talk about.  I’m going to edit this answer from a post I made recently regarding my spiritual beliefs.  So this is heavily derived from a recent post.  I’m glad that I wrote it before, because I couldn’t have written it all now.  Please try to at least respect my beliefs, even if you don’t agree with them in the slightest.                               

The redwood forest that I lived in when I was young, and the redwood forest that I lived in when I first moved out on my own, and the region connecting them, these are places that are sacred to me.  When I say sacred, I don’t mean fluffy new-age tree-hugger.  I mean they go right down to the core of my existence.  They tell me who I am, what I am, where I come from, where I belong.  I have a connection to these places, at the core of my soul, that can never be broken.

Every last part of them is sacred to me, but the soil is perhaps the most sacred part.  That is where death, decay, and birth interplay with each other constantly, in a way that is so interconnected that you can’t have one without the other.

I don’t talk about my spiritual experiences much.  I consider such things private, and trying to put words to something that can never have words put around it, feels like sacrilege of the most extreme sort.  But I can say that they have sometimes involved a perception that I was the soil, and everything in it.  I could feel all the processes of life and death and decay and rebirth happening inside me — timelessly, wordlessly, constantly, for hours, with no thoughts in my head and nothing other than the experience.

If I could be said to have a religion, it is based in the redwoods.  Sometimes in very specific parts of the redwoods, a very specific segment of San Mateo County.  I worship the soil and the mist, and the Mother Tree, and the many kinds of fungus and moss and lichen and redwood sorrel, and nurse logs, and insects and slugs, and redwood cones and needles, and everything the way it all interacts together.  Every one of these things has a beingness of its own, that is extremely important to me.  I cannot emphasize enough that I don’t take this lightly.

I also didn’t choose this.  I didn’t say one day, “I’m going to worship a redwood forest.”  (I’m still not sure “worship” is the right word.  I don’t know the right words for any of this.  This is not something that I normally put into words, discuss with people, or attach words to in my head.)  This is something that has been growing inside me since I was born.  This is a connection that goes so deep I don’t think I could get rid of it even if I wanted to.  It goes so deep that I’m 3000 miles away and I can recall myself to that redwood forest, at any point in time, and worship there, and have it be just as real as if I was there.  You can take me out of the redwoods but you can’t take the redwoods out of me.

I’ve seen a lot of people sort of deciding that a “nature religion” sounds like a good thing, and then designing one of their own.  And I have no problem with that, I believe fully in religious freedom as long as you’re not doing something wrong in the process (like stealing from a culture whose religion is closed only to people from that culture).  If designing a religion works for you, then that’s great.

But for me, this is a bottom-up process, not a top-down one.  I didn’t impose my will on the redwood forest.  The redwood forest built me from the ground up.  The redwood forest put its tendrils into me.  And when i die, I want to be consumed, wholly, by the redwood forest.  Nothing could make me happier than my body, or compost, or ashes, going back into the soil and becoming life again.  The world, and this particular part of the world, has worked its way into my life on every possible level.

There are other religions that I draw inspiration from.  Some of the ancient pagan gods mesh well with the analytical parts of my brain, and I have relationships with them for that reason — which is totally separate from the redwood-religion, for me.  The Tao Te Ching has always been a source of spiritual insight for me, and so have some of the Catholic and Anglican saints — Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Saint John of the Cross.  Also some of the early Quakers.   And some modern Catholic and Quaker authors as well.  (I don’t know why it’s mostly Catholics and Quakers rather than other Christians, but it is.)  Also some Jewish beliefs, but that is mostly through Jewish friends rather than formal writings by Jewish thinkers, for whatever reason.

When I say that, though… I’m not doing that thing some people do.  Where they take the “easy”, interesting parts of each religion they come across, dabble in that, and go on to the next thing once they run into something actually difficult.  The fact that I can draw inspiration from many religions does not mean that I’m doing that — in fact the parts of the religions that I draw inspiration from are usually those exact hard parts that so many people are willing to skip over.  The things that are demanding intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, that require serious effort and transformation, that basically end up putting you through hell and back in the process.  Spirituality isn’t a fluffy escape route for me, it’s the deepest and most demanding parts of reality.  Not that it isn’t also absolute beauty, absolute love, and absolute absolute.  But absolute beauty and absolute love have the capacity to be extremely difficult for a human ego to bear — so they often come with their fair share of struggle and suffering, for anyone serious about their religion, whatever their religion may be.  I’m not exempt just because I don’t know anyone who exactly shares my “religion”.

So when I am looking at pictures of redwoods, and redwood forests, and the plants and animals and fungi that live and die in redwood forests, I am looking at things that are, for lack of any better word, a deep part of my religious practice.  And the forest floor most of all.  I know that things like this can sound ‘out there’, or like something made up by hippies, but this is not something I made up, it’s something that made me, and all I had to do was pay attention.  It also runs far deeper — down to my bones, down to my soul — than anything I’ve seen from people who are making up something superficial because it sounds cool to engage in “nature worship”.

I sometimes say I’m sort-of-pagan, because I don’t know what else to call it.  But mostly I don’t talk about it much.  I sometimes recognize similar experiences in other people — I’m certain that my connection to the redwoods comes from just about exactly the same place as soilrockslove’s connection to the desert.  But I’ve never heard a word for what this is, to have a spirituality that’s tied to a specific place, that does not come from any culture you’ve ever heard of, that seems to come from the place itself and the connections you have formed with it, and is there whether you acknowledge it or not.  “Nature-worship” doesn’t cover it, although that’s how most people would certainly understand what I’m saying.

All I know is that this is right, this is what makes me whole, this is what guides me on every level throughout my life… and most importantly:  This is something that has happened to me.  This is not something that I have decided “And here’s what I think of this, and here’s what I think of that.”  This is something where the meaning has been given to me directly through the way I experience these things, rather than something where I have deliberately sought out to create or find meaning.  And it’s not like a one-time feeling of vague expansiveness in the presence of ‘nature’, it’s closer to having ties to a particular place that go as deep as your soul and create an ongoing, intense, demanding relationship with that place, that is as challenging and potentially terrifying as it is beautiful, as with all real spirituality regardless of the religion involved.

I know there must be lots of other people like me out there, both those who acknowledge these things have happened to them and those who are trying to ignore it.  I assume some of them have managed to blend in with pagan communities, while others just don’t call it anything, don’t talk about it.  I have never liked the pagan community that much.  And I don’t normally talk about it — not directly.  But I’m sure things like this have happened to others.

And those ties that have been created to that specific set of places… they seem to be no weaker for being far away from there in either space or time. Any time I want to, I can call on those connections.  Sometimes I curl up in bed and the Mother Tree is with me, and I’m curled up at the base of it — and I don’t even know if, right this moment in time, the Mother Tree is alive or dead, but it doesn’t matter, because at some point in time it was alive, and that’s all it takes for the connection to exist.  I can be here, and also be there, because the ties run deep and aren’t lessened by distance.  Which is fortunate, because even though I would love to live right at the center of the place that is sacred to me, that will probably never happen again in my lifetime.

I do want my ashes to be taken there, though.  And if I could, I wish I could die lying on the floor of the same forest I lived in when I was born.  Of all the dreams I had about my impending death (back before the adrenal insufficiency was treated, when I stood a really good chance of dying, so I dreamed about death a lot), the best of them was one where I was still living there and asked my parents to carry me out and lay me on the forest floor so I could be there as I died.  I would love to go out of the world so close to where I came into the world, in that place where every level of my mind, heart, and soul is bound to.

I hope this is a sufficient response, and again, I hope you respect my beliefs even if you don’t agree with them.  I guess, at a stretch, you could call them a form of paganism, but I didn’t really come at them through the pagan community, and I have no real ties to the pagan community, and mostly this is a very solitary thing that involves personal ties to a place, rather than a system of beliefs.  In fact the system of beliefs part is markedly absent here.  So it’s very hard to explain what it’s about.  Oh well, I tried my best.

Notes:
  1. withasmoothroundstone posted this