A Million Tiny Cuts on Our Souls - Part Three

Melancholy is a cake baked of sweet sadness.

Dear Friends,

Welcome to the final part of ‘A Million Tiny Cuts on Our Souls.’

Part One

Part Two

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I’m back from my final weekend at ‘Stalking the Rebel Soul’ at The West Country School of Myth and I feel the pull of the next stage of the journey into the wilderness.

I’m swollen and sad, broken open with questions, if I had my way, I would drift off to conduct my wilderness vigil today. The world feels like it's about to burst open. I’m wary of this melancholy, when I feel like this, it's always good to ask: is this an indulgence? Am I making excuses? Is the paradigm I'm endorsing due to an inherited mindset, filled with many residual nightmares, handed down generation after generation from ancestors trapped in the wheelhouse of post industrial human society? Or have I spent too long out of public circulation and forgotten just how hard it is to be human at this point in the game?

This is not indulgence.

Revulsion is an important warning signal, a transmission from our hearts.

We have a choice when we suffer. We either deny how we feel or we take the padlock off our hearts and allow this uncomfortable truth to fill us to the brim, to reign in its authenticity. To drown us in the salt brine of tears we forgot to shed.

In regret and faith we learn, we grow in the darkness our discomfort provides, even when we struggle to breathe, down in the depths of our suffering. We must cultivate an upside-down love, that honours our authentic imperfect selves, we do this even when it hurts and we're losing or lost.

With that in mind, let’s take a dive into the depths and explore the shipwreck that is melancholy.

I’m writing this in a coffee shop and the shrill voices of two girls clambering to converse is hurting my body. Energetically, there’s little decorum left in the world. We’ve lost our table manners, the symptoms of a world at the brink. Our poor wounded hearts. What an experience it is to be human right now. We're clockwork toys, wound past the point where the key should stop, we’re whirring and turning. Broken and confused. Off the rails. Snapped apart.

I want to talk about those moments when we exist in a state of hypersensitivity. When our story requires solitude, let's drop our eyes to the orphaned emotions that collect around our feet, connected to our ankles, like rattling tin cans. The emotional heft of our lives, nipping and clipping our ankles as we walk. Tin cans filled with hungry ghosts. An insalubrious pick n mix of unspoken pain and unrealised dreams, we never know what we'll get when we peel back the lids.

Our desires are magnetic and they're frequently labelled incorrectly. Wishes are not designed to fit neatly on the supermarket shelf, under the watchful eye of the premeditated power structures that contain and restrain. We are brutalised and forced to comply, to fit within the systems of power. And this comes at a price. We fragment, in the experience of our suffering. This is compounded by the fact we’re forced to witness the pain of our brothers and sisters. Of our friends and family. The increasing likelihood is that we eventually suffer from some form of mental health issue due to the setting our story takes place within. Anxiety, depression and a myriad of other forms of illness. For me it was Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Eleven years of structured well ordered hell.

It’s easy to see why we come to believe that we are fundamentally broken. That we are the problem itself.

While I'm not suggesting that we are not to blame on occasion...maybe, just maybe we’re really fucking fed up with how we're treated by those who have accrued power. Our bodies and souls have had enough of the neglect and loudly proclaim FUCK OFF.

Of course you're sad, you're a constrained and trapped miracle. A discarded wish. A beautiful muffled song, forced to signal jam your soul. The majority of your magick is bound by the meagre and mundane modern supermarket that your story is shelved within.

The fact is this:

Humans who have lost access to their truth, quickly become fractured beings, we become discordant and disharmonious. Painful to be around.

We are all really fucking annoying and disappointing a great deal of the time due to the fact we are really fucking annoyed and disappointed a great deal of the time.

To state anything else is to turn our back on the truth and to celebrate our surrender and acceptance of the meagre choices the systems of power provide. The disingenuous and disregular paths that sublimate our senses and attempt to occlude the root cause of these bouts of melancholy. Is it any wonder that addiction is epidemic at this point in the story of humanity? We need to medicate ourselves into accepting a reality where the shock of wonder is no longer welcome. Detached from the spirits that surround us, we stumble on, confused, sad and lost to a melancholy longing for our real story.

Anyone who pretends they are somehow above this form of suffering, or proposes they’ve attained nirvana is a liar. If you position yourself as a Guru who has all the answers, let me tell you to go fuck yourself.

You’re obviously a charlatan. The further you travel, the less you can be sure about.

Following my path to the best of my abilities has taught me a lot of strange shit, but has it eased the suffering? No. The struggle is the story. In many ways it has accentuated and amplified how utterly sad and confusing it is, to exist at a point in history where we have retreated so far from the shores of common sense, that our leaders are no longer fit to lead. How are we expected to find a moment’s peace, when we know those who are in power are trying to suffocate reason itself?

What to do, when trapped in a story created by maniacs, as a confused animal, unsure if the moment has arrived to gnaw our leg off. To flee.

“The deeds of the heroes, in the sacred dream-time...the only time, according to the bushmen, that was real.”

― Philip K. Dick, VALIS

Melancholy is a cake baked from sweet sadness.

In the depths of Dreamtime, there is a node of your ancestral story, where your kin existed either too close to the tribe, or so far out at the edges, that your blood located formless wonder.

We don’t have space or time to adequately reflect and ponder. This is key to the pain that power delivers. We don't own our time. Someone or something else does. The good news is that we do have space-time.

Anyone who can sense the subtle energies at work will find it hard being around the fear and stress, the hormones of the frightened herd of human animals, we gulp down our neighbours’ cortisol and adrenaline in each desperate breath. A cacophony of shredded experience reaches a critical frequency.

STOP. BREATHE.

Perhaps the answer is to say no, proclaim no more, we won't permit another infraction. We don't get up and walk away enough. There would be far fewer arguments if we were able to acknowledge that our access to solitude is vital for our survival.

What happens when you can't be alone? When you can't walk away? When you can't escape?

The first action is to open your heart, stubbornly if necessary, in a deliberate ceremony to instigate connection with the love you hold. Acknowledge and accept that you know what your basic human needs are right now, in this moment.

Power tries to convince us that we’re selfish if we focus on health and sanity.

Once you've addressed these basic requirements the next action is to sit inside the fear and anxiety and stress. Allow it to wash over and through you. Experience this at its full force. Don’t panic, allow the process to take place. Aware that you are travelling through this forest of chaos. And learning.

At a certain point you will reach the other side.

All you need to do is survive these moments from this stance a number of times to see that your essence (soul) is a finely tuned instrument, it is a dream machine. An impossible object that will survive all manner of subtle disruptions, it is designed to make music out of the discordance. To create stories from sadness. Bake cakes from the chaos. To create art from bright, messy life.

You are resilient. You are strong. You will find a way to survive.

I take my empty coffee cup to the counter. The owner thanks me, I make my way outside and walk a couple of hundred yards to the bookstore. My safe and sacred space.

I open a book.

I hear their voices before I see them, the two girls from the coffee shop have arrived. The cosmic joke is always unfolding.

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I have exciting news to share: You can now read The Story in the new Substack app for iPhone.

With the app, you’ll have a dedicated Inbox for my Substack and any others you subscribe to. New posts will never get lost in your email filters, or stuck in spam. Longer posts will never cut-off by your email app. Comments and rich media will all work seamlessly. Overall, it’s a big upgrade to the reading experience.

The Substack app is currently available for iOS. If you don’t have an Apple device, you can join the Android waitlist here.