The Holy Stain

How do I explain the feeling? 

Have you ever strolled through a verdant field in Wales eating every adorable little magic mushroom you come across until you’re so unbelievably high you’re flying over the hills, defying gravity and chasing rainbows to the backing track of an angelic choir? Until suddenly you wonder what it would feel like to be a rock and you spend the next several hours draped over a boulder, merged so fully with the mineral kingdom that you’re unable to remember how to lift your limbs, or indeed that you even have limbs to be lifted? And you are so entirely merged with your surroundings you are no longer you, and incidentally, your husband is no longer him, but rather a 10 foot tall Druid standing on a stone wall holding a gnarled and mighty staff that might realistically only be a stick? You know that feeling? 

Or, have you ever sat around a fire tripping so hard that the flames become owls who one by one surround you with fiery wings and stare you down with ancient eyes until you succumb to the fiery, feathery embrace which smolders and smothers out any sense of your own identity? And you’re consumed by the flames and so begin to dance, feet licking the earth and arms reaching toward the heavens in supplication, but with zero self-consciousness because hey, everyone else is tripping their balls off too. Besides, how could you be self-conscious when your sense of self has expanded so thoroughly as to include all and everything - but most especially that mighty fire burning all around and within you. The fire which, incidentally, something in you still fundamentally knows to avoid literally merging with.

Or maybe l should put it this way. Have you ever spent 3 solid hours vomiting and shitting, followed by 6 hours dry heaving while your body tries to wring out every last drop of DMT-laden Amazonian vine that you imbibed, tobacco juice you poured into your nose, and cactus pulp you ate? And as your body purges these plant medicines (some might call them poisons) your brain unearths every shadow of your psyche, leaving no dark corner unexamined and no stone unturned? Then, after petitioning God for mercy and begging to be released from this hell-realm of your mind in this dark and endless night of the soul, you finally fall into a dreamless sleep and awake wrung out, but blessedly and profoundly at peace, and stunningly pain-free? You know that feeling? 

Maybe you know the feeling, or something similar. Maybe you’ve felt it in ceremony or meditation or Nature. Maybe in flow, or even in the most ordinary moments. It turns out such feeling can sneak up on you when you least expect it, and quite without the influence of drugs.

Here’s how it happened.

I’m kneeling in the dirt. Gravelly rocks dig into my knees, and twigs from the pokey bush behind me tap at my back, adorably eager for my attention. It reminds me of how my kid used to trick me into looking over one shoulder, then dart to the other side and giggle. Ok, bush, that’s funny, you’re cute, but I’m kinda busy here. The gravel jabbing my knees is distracting too, but only uncomfortable enough to notice, not enough to do anything about. I could easily get a cushion for my knees but something about the sensation makes me feel more present in my body… more alive. And with that thought, the anvil of awareness drops- thunk- slicing through the veil of my mind and announcing the fact that I am- unequivocally, miraculously- alive. And in a body. Present for the roll call of life. Remember Murray in Flight of the Conchords? Murray? Preesent. That’s how present I am.

Suddenly this reality is the most awesome thing imaginable. Not awesome like when I order Eggs Benedict and my server is like “Peeerfect, awesome, and would you like hash browns or home fries?” I’m sure we all agree diner breakfast is awesome, especially with hash browns, but this is awesome in the sense of me suddenly feeling truly, madly and deeply awed by the simple fact of being in a body. Of course, once you’ve identified the awesomeness of that, everything else in creation, including breakfast, unfolds as equally if not more awe-inspiring. To be embodied and sensate is wildly exhilarating. To be breathing the oxygen from my environment that keeps this body alive. To be exhaling the carbon dioxide that keeps the trees alive that keep this body alive that keeps the trees alive and so on and so forth. And that simple cycle is only one infinitesimal part of the infinite chemical, cyclical, mathematical, magical patterns, known and unknown, that make up our vast and barely charted universe. I mean! Come ON! Let’s GO! Creation is just so… extra. That’s what all the kids are saying now… extra. Mom, you’re being extra. And I am… I totally am. I’m being extra extra, because… look around at the genius of Creation. “Look around, look around, how lucky we are to be alive right now,” sang Eliza in Hamilton, and in this moment I feel that truer words were never sung. Under normal circumstances, I might be a bit annoyed at myself for emoting this much over nothing, but all my self-deprecation and snark has left the building. Because this is not nothing- it’s everything. 

There’s a large cluster of mushrooms growing out of a fern nearby, and it moves me more than I can say. I mean… mushrooms, am I right? Talk about extra. They, too, are in a body, of a body; the tip of the iceberg of a body so much bigger than we can see or even imagine. They too are sensing and responding to their environment. I don’t presume to know what mycelium want in their heart of hearts, but I imagine that fundamentally we long for the same things: survive, thrive, multiply, evolve. As I marvel quietly at the kindredness of me and my new bosom buddy, the mushroom clump, I hear the rustle of leaves above me like melody, and the pulse of Earth below me like rhythm, and I feel exquisitely awake to it all. I burst into unexpected tears of astonishment for the life coursing through and all around me. 

Admittedly, this is not the first time I’ve been this deeply moved by creation, but it may be the first time it’s happened without psychotropic involvement. I haven’t munched a single mushroom today. I haven’t drunk a single drop of Ayauasca, nor had an ounce of shamanic snuff blown up my nose through an armadillo tusk… not today, anyway. In fact, today is just another day at work. I’m staining a fence outside a condo I’ve been hired to renovate. It’s the kind of bland commuter housing complex that you might dismiss breezily as you speed past on the freeway. If you deign to notice it at all, it’s just to remark, a little bit smugly, “Mmmm, glad we don’t live there… there’s just no character to those places.” And then you cruise onward to somewhere like San Francisco, somewhere with lots of character where you feel very pleased with yourself for being someone who eschews the suburban sprawls for the hipper hoods. I know when I’m cruising by life at 70, or realistically 85mph, I sometimes fail to remember that everywhere I look there’s heaps of character- trees dancing lyrically to wind-song and earth thrumming ecstatically with the evolutionary yearnings of its inhabitants: animal, vegetable and mineral. Turns out even in unassuming vanilla condos, euphoric handywomen are crouched in the dirt in the throes of existential raptures, following instructions not only from the Homeowner’s Association, but from God itself. Wherever there is Creation, there is Character. 

As I’ve been sitting here quivering in tandem with creation, a few drops of Minwax Sedona Redwood stain have dripped from my paintbrush and are spreading out like blood onto the rumpled white dropcloth. I’m telling you, there’s so much character happening here, it’s downright Shakespearean. The red splashed on white in the dappled sunlight shimmers with meaning. It tells a story of innocence lost. Knowledge gained. Laundry, soiled. Shall I compare thee to a virgin’s stain? Thou art more lovely and more difficult to remove- because I would need to soak thee in paint thinner, and probably follow up with a bleach rinse. Not that I would because it’s a dropcloth. But I must not chase the rapture away with thoughts of laundry. I come back to the present, to the beauty around and inside me, and it’s still there- a pleasure that verges on pain. The cherry of my awareness has been popped and it hurts so good. The ache is more than physical: it’s my desire to merge more fully with all life. It’s not like I’m about to start humping the ground or anything; but I am quite taken by this ecstasy of connection with my environment. I keep getting shivery rushes up and down my spine that are akin to orgasmic- but more like an orgasm’s second cousin. Then I get just a teeny bit distracted again, thinking about euphemisms for female masturbation. Taming the Shrew. Romancing the Stone. Language in and of itself is so pleasurable, I can hardly stand it. But my paintbrush caressing the wood is its own poetry, and it’s suddenly clear to me that I don’t need to create an artistic masterpiece or leave a legacy for my life to have meaning. This is enough. Being here staining this fence, and noticing the deliciousness of being here staining this fence, is reason enough to exist. To take up space on this beauteous, bounteous, sometimes hideous planet. At least the world is as awesome as it is hideous, though; at least it has character. 

So, yeah, here I am staring all around me in wonder and astonishment, wildly in love with life, and being paid by the hour for the privilege. I know this feeling will be fleeting, because how could a person possibly sustain such an expansive feeling while going about the rest of her day? I’m pretty sure Friday traffic will quickly put a kibosh on the love-fest bursting forth from my chest cavity, and if not that, certainly being ignored when I repeatedly ask my kid to brush her teeth tonight before bed. But right now it’s like there’s not enough room in my body for all the love I’m feeling; my heart wants to climb out of my chest and snuggle up in my lap like a puppy. My brain feels pressurized by the fullness I’m feeling. Having gone so deep so quickly I can only hope I don’t get the bends when I come back up. Maybe this is the real reason Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into painting the fence for him. Maybe he wasn’t trying to shirk his work out of laziness, but rather he was so overcome by an expansion in his heart he had to parse it around or it would bury him. Thinking about that rascal Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence makes me weep even harder. 

Even within this vastness of everything, there’s really nothing left to do but something… anything. So I pick up my paintbrush, tears welling up and spilling forth in a liquid prayer of gratitude, and I resume staining the fence. The smooth horizontal planks absorb the deep red stain like they’re parched. Having been sanded smooth already, they’re primed for it. Whereas the vertical posts are unsanded and the raw wood seems to reject the stain. It requires heavy saturation and several hard swipes to soak in even a little. It’s just like that. I can so relate. Some parts of me are smooth and open and permeable, other parts rough and raw and resistant. It’s all getting stained eventually. Life is always changing us in ways that can either obscure our essence or enhance it. I guess it all depends on the stain. Leaning in to my newfound kinship with non-human life forms, I anthropomorphize the fence post and whisper, “I understand. Conformity is not for you. Just try to go with it, my friend. This admittedly toxic stain will protect and condition you, give you long life, and help you to fulfill your HOA approved Sedona Red deck destiny.” It occurs to me that these posts just haven’t been sanded down ie: jaded enough yet by life. They refuse to submit without a fight to the slings and arrows of their outrageous fortune, and can you blame them? Look at us. We’re born into these miraculous, fragile bodies, and although our biology and conditioning help us survive the DIY project of life, they are also the root of all our crises. I’m pretty sure we came here to experience it all- the pleasure and the pain, the separation and the connection, the realness and the rawness and the smoothness and the toxic stain of living. I’m sure I will continue to fight it as life sometimes obscures my essence, but I also hope to embrace life sanding me down and coloring me deeper, richer shades of myself, drawing out and enhancing my natural grain. 

You know, even grasping for this dubious metaphor is too much for me in my heightened state, so I finally just sit back on my heels in the dirt, weeping softly and holding my paintbrush aloft like I’m toasting the heavens. As mentioned, I’m sober right now and quite lucid, but it occurs to me that I could also be really fucking high on fumes. It could be the formaldehyde or sodium hydroxide or glycol ether making me raise a dripping paintbrush skyward, but it’s probably some other indefinable ether I’ve inhaled. I’ve fooled around with the miraculous often enough to be pretty sure we just went all the way. I kind of feel like I should recline back on my dropcloth and smoke a cigarette. Instead, I just kneel in the dirt for an inordinately long time, raising a rapturous toast to the universe for its hospitality. Rocks still jab at my knees and twigs still poke at my back, and I let myself stop for a while, to just sit there and feel it all. 

So I guess that’s what it feels like, in a very long and rambling nutshell. It feels like everything. It feels like an initiation, like I’m being given a sip from the chalice of my heart’s deepest longing, which is to shed my own identity and merge into oneness with all life- at least momentarily. And as it turns out, I didn’t even need to get high to get there. But it was, indeed, fleeting. As it always does, the veil drops, and I pack up my tools and hit commuter traffic on the way home. That’s real too though. All of us together, on a journey, on our way back home. I don’t know what awaits us at the end of our commute towards the Beyond, but I hope it’s kind of like slippers and a warm meal and a loving embrace, like melting gratefully into the arms of the Beloved as we cross the threshold.