kimberlysteele | Entries tagged with spirit of place

They seem so certain they're worshipping Jesus here!

We have come dangerously close to losing the concept of sacred space in our era. There are few buildings more obviously Satanic than megachurches, yet just about every middle to large size town features at least one of these monstrosities hulking in a former cornfield. Church architecture in America has become thoughtless: it’s not about beauty, it’s about creating a mixture of awe and convenience. Overlarge, boxy churches engulf the parishioner and intimidate with their size, but hey, at least it’s easy to park!

The ugliness of the modern built environment wears upon the soul and the psyche. There is a feeling of black-pilled hopelessness that impregnates schools, strip malls, and medical/office buildings. This feeling has become so endemic that the people working inside the buildings have come to mirror their built environment: ruled by the lowest of passions, cowardly, and obedient to whatever the corporation or the screen says. Some remedies for hopelessness are blindly sought in lifestyle influencers. Long ago, these influencers had their equivalent in the pre-prison era of Martha Stewart.

If only we could care about our spaces! If only somebody would do something! As it turns out, the somebody who can do something is you, and the time is now.

The Oakland Buddha

Oakland, California is one of those deteriorating places where the uneven collapse of our civilization is laid bare for all eyes to see. Like the rest of southern California, the divisions between the rich and everybody else are stark. Cost of living increases have been matched by surges in Oakland’s homeless population in recent years. In Southern California, any person who can still afford to eat in a fancy restaurant has a good chance of occupying the same room as a celebrity while meanwhile, outside the window, a homeless person poops on the sidewalk.

A homeowner named Dan Stevenson in Oakland had problems with homeless people shooting up and selling drugs and various other criminal activities on a bare patch of median on the street side of his house. The median became littered with trash. He had appealed to the police many times to no avail.

One day, he decided to try a different approach to cleaning up the median. After removing the trash, he set a statue of Buddha in the center of the median. He chose Buddha because of the god’s neutrality -- he was unlikely to offend passers by. The Buddha had an uncanny effect on the median and the area around it: suddenly, people didn’t leave their trash or shoot up around the Buddha. A few months later, offerings started showing up in front of the Buddha. Over the years, the single Buddha statue grew into a shrine that drew crowds who gathered to sing, pray, and worship.

Think of the spaces you occupy as the Oakland Buddha’s median. By venerating your space, you communicate to all of the forces around you, human and otherwise, that you are changing the narrative. Set up a worship area in your home: a portion of a bookshelf is enough. By setting up a worship area, you communicate to the gods you are quite serious.

Every living space is worthy of investment, including rented apartments and dingy strip malls. Improving a space is never a waste of money or time. When you fix the leaky sink the landlord was supposed to take care of or when you spruce up your rental’s bedroom so it is more pleasing, it is a quiet way of showing gratitude for the area in which you’ve landed.

There are few acts more unintentionally holy than gardening. Working the soil makes for a better human being. Gardening connects us with the elements that make our lives possible. When we get our hands dirty, we start intimately understanding where our food comes from, whether or not we are planting vegetables. Most suburban weeds are edible. Ripping out the monoculture lawn or asphalt and planting a buffet for bugs and birds restores the holiness of a small patch of this blighted planet. The land is made sacred again.

Yet another reminder to clean your toilet!

One thing rich and poor living spaces have in common is floors and toilets. No matter how much disposable income you have or do not have, sweeping your own floor and cleaning your own toilet are daily ways of saying to the Divine that you are not too proud to handle your own messes. To sweep the floor and to clean the toilet are daily acts of devotion. Somewhere, a monk or a nun is likely doing the same thing. When you opt for diligence, responsibility, and deliberate simplicity instead of either hiring someone to tidy your mess or leaving a garbage heap, it is a direct statement to divine powers that you are willing to do spiritual work. Is it any wonder that the least spiritual people among us are often the messiest? When you leave a swath of clutter, hoarded material possessions, and literal filth in your wake, it reverberates through the planes. There is no better way to show how ungrateful you are for what you have than neglect. The classic animal hoarder situation is one where a person, usually a woman, takes far too many animals into her home and allows them to starve or dehydrate to death for lack of care. Right now, millions of elderly people are languishing in nursing homes, begging to go “home” to a place that no longer exists. Their adult children are not coming to save them because that is who put them there in the first place. So much for honoring thy father and thy mother.

Cleanliness is not next to godliness. If anything, it is somewhere far below it, within the jurisdiction and able to be qualified as a potential side effect. Tidiness can also be imbalanced, such as in the case of compulsive neat freak perfectionists. There is a golden mean of tidiness as in anything else. The idea behind balanced, wabi-sabi tidiness is a love for what is instead of a dread of what could be or sadness over what once was. The most hidden knowledge of all is the knowledge of how to live in the moment. Those who recognize the beauty of mundane domestic tasks and who whistle while they work are the most blessed of all.

I am writing this shortly before an election, so I can imagine that everyone and his aunt have been bombarded by an unrelenting deluge of propaganda for the last several months. Whenever I receive a political panhandling text (usually about 5-10 messages per day) I respond by saying my polytheist adaptation of the Pledge of Allegiance before deleting it and reporting it as spam.

As I frequently make mention, humans are biologically wired to fixate upon the negative and there are good evolutionary reasons why this is so. I spent a great deal of my first half-century on this planet focusing on negativity because it was easier and it seemed like the most logical thing to do. Negativity feels like survival because it is survival. We all need some negativity to survive: not only would a Unicorn Farts and Rainbows outlook not suit me personally, it would be a dishonest and disastrous way of navigating the world.

So please allow me to take this moment to briefly recognize some of America’s many negatives, for they are legion.

America is a corrupt nation in a rogue’s gallery of corrupt nations. Our overblown, megalomaniacal government is vampiric, our culture is in a state of acute sepsis, and much of our infrastructure is falling to the ground. Ineptitude, neglect, and straight up bad design ensure that most of these problems will stay with us until America is no more. Our societal order is a fragile house of cards. It is one or two cancelled supply chains away from utter chaos. Yakkity yak, blah de blah blah blah. You’ve likely heard this all before and in much greater detail and with greater erudition. I now offer my contrary, unpopular opinion about why I love America. The following constitutes a handful of the reasons I will probably never leave the Midwestern prairieland where I was born until the day I am but ashes and other people’s memories.

The Spirit of the Land

A few of my good friends.

To be born in a place is to be made of its elements. In 1973, my sansei birthmother traveled to Chicago in exile from her East Coast home. She hid in shame after falling pregnant in college and disgracing her family. She allegedly refused to look at me the day I was born. I have always felt the psychic weight of her blame. I was given up for adoption at seven days after being born, and the only reason it was delayed that long was because I was jaundiced and needed treatment. I was adopted by two Chicagoans, both white and from the South Side. I won the life lottery. I got the best parents anybody could have after being born to a 22 year old girl who saw me as a horror who ruined her life. I did not try to contact her or even find out her name until my 30s. When I finally did make the mistake of reaching out via a state appointed Confidential Intermediary, my birthmother had already given up on America and her family here for the greener pastures of southeast Asia with her third or fourth husband. I could understand the sentiment. As a young person who did not like driving a car, I often felt the intense desire to move to another country, specifically one that was more likely to have a walkable city such as Amsterdam. Unlike my only known living genetic forbear, I stayed and I am glad I did.

The spirit of the American land lives through me and I through it. “You can hear it in my accent when I talk” croons Sting in his tune Englishman in New York. This is true. My voice tends to combine nasal Chicago drawl, 1980s slang, and various intonations from midcentury musical theater films that both my parents and I grew up with. I know the trees here, I am familiar with the seasonal patterns, and I know perennials from annuals. I know what can only be started from root division and what can be sown from seed. When I go on my long, solitary walks through the local forest and prairie preserves of which we have a great wealth here due to a good Park District, it is always a communion with old and dear friends. When you live in a place long enough, assimilation is far deeper than simple physical uptake of local resources into bodily matter. The land is no longer separate from me as I perceived it growing up, back when I considered moving far away. I cannot run away because I am the prairie. I am also whatever the prairie has had to suffer: highways, strip malls, subdivisions, McMansions, and displacement. We shoulder these burdens together, the prairie and I. We know that like any given set of circumstances or bodies, they are only temporary.

The Spirit of the People

I love the American people. I am proud to be an American. America is a big place: expansive, gregarious, and Jupiterian. Largeness becomes largesse. Americans have space in which to roll around and be themselves. This is a place where you can practice an obscure, fringe religion — in my case American Revival Druidry — and be left alone to mind your own business. This air of independence permeates America and every thing and person in it, bringing with it a strange brew of jollity and pragmatism. American people are hilarious, or at least I find them to be hilarious. When French pickpockets attempted to steal from American tourists at the Paris 2024 Olympics, they were met with an array of pranks and instant karma. Several pickpockets got owned by exploding dummy wallets; supposedly there were severe injuries that required hospitalization. One long, tall Texan yeeted a French pickpocket down a flight of stairs, again landing the would-be thief in the hospital. American are not passive victims who sit idly by while bad things happen to them. This is why I was glad the term “patriot” came into vogue during the proto-Communist Covid-19 scourge. At first, the term implied Americanness but soon came to represent proud nationalism displayed for any given country. Communism is an astral pyramid that regularly yields the opposite of what it promises. Instead of ensuring prosperity and necessary wealth for the common folk, it enriches and empowers a tiny handful of supreme leaders via unearned wealth. In brief, under communism, the common folk starve and/or are thrown in gulags.

America was not as prone to the communist astral pyramid of Covid-19 hysteria because there were too many people already infected by the spirit of independence. Those people saw the ruse for what it was and called BS. Covidiotarianism did not achieve its final form in the US because too many were willing to construct and utilize underground freedom networks to go around the oppressors. Too many of us promoted freedom-loving businesses, churches, grocery stores, doctors offices, schools, theaters, and restaurants on the down low. Too many owners of too many places were happy to ignore the threats of commie enforcers and snitches. Too many of us, myself included, were willing to die upon the hill of remaining free of so-called MRNA vaccines. The result of these small decisions was a significant number of “mind your own business” alliances that made it impossible for Big Brother Mao to get significant traction, especially outside of leftist cities.

The average American is friendly, and I would argue Americans are friendlier to strangers than the denizens of any other nation. They are more likely to help a stranger and do good solely for the sake of doing good. Perhaps this is why it cuts so deep when hordes of illegal immigrants are dumped in our cities and towns. Americans naturally want to help our brothers and sisters, but when a Venezuelan gang takes over an apartment building or when 3000 Mauritanians move to a tiny town of 2500 and then refuse to pay taxes to boot, it abuses and perverts the natural American instinct to extend a helping hand. Nevertheless, most Americans cannot help their own drive to help. We continue to hold out hope our government and elites will stop or at least slow down their efforts to hijack and murder our good graces.

American Creativity

The combination of a big, all-encompassing space and a tendency to promote a mind-your-own business attitude yields a predictable result: creativity. I am a strange, creative person. I have never done psychedelics and I stick to single glasses of wine all of once a week because the last thing I need is to be more creative. I have had to enforce boundaries upon my own creativity because my cup runneth over: I gave away all of my craft supplies because between writing, composing and arranging music, and teaching, I simply don’t have the time to make a pair of earrings or a plant hanger. I am grateful to have been born in America because my creativity is accepted and encouraged here. There are plenty of people I can talk to who also write independently, make and arrange music, and who own and operate self-made small businesses like I do. Creativity is normal here, and it is not the new normal. I suspect it has been like this since the time before Native Americans traversed the Alaskan land bridge.

Despite its copious faults, American pop culture experienced a golden age of creativity that lasted from 1930 - 2000 and spawned entire genres of art and fiction. American cinema was so powerful during that era, Hollywood has spent nearly 30 years rehashing and recycling every theme and story from those halcyon days. Hollywood lost its quintessential Americanness at the flip of the millennium, when it became excruciatingly clear that pleasing the ghoulish censors of communist China and making cheddar on brand names were far more important than originality or storytelling. In the vacuum left behind by Hollywood’s abdication of the story in favor of THE MESSAGE flooded a new wave of independent, small time creators. Now that Hollywood gatekeepers have finally begun to lose their stranglehold, who knows what art forms will emerge from the American lands and their spirits?

The Food

The reason why so many Americans are pudgy (present company included!) is because the food here is amazing. My own backyard is so fertile, I grow lettuce, peppers, and zucchini without remedying the soil. America is a large, fertile breadbasket. For now, even the Derp State/Blackrock interlopers have not been able to take that away. American food features astonishing variation as the innate result of many cultures landing in the same place. What is called a melting pot should actually be called a weird pantry. Nobody is forced to melt here. At this very moment, I can travel fewer than 30 miles in any direction and eat authentic cuisines from Burma, North India, South India, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, various regions of Mexico, and specific European countries such as Greece, Ireland, Lithuania, Poland, Germany, or Italy. Authentic world cuisines are just the beginning — if I don’t mind a little improvisational cooking, I can obtain a staggering variety of burgers, pizza, appetizers, snacks, soups, and desserts. I have choices that would have turned Roman emperors green with envy. I am in a fortunate, somewhat self-made position when it comes to food and avoiding obesity: I have been a for-the-animals vegan since 2010 and I am not a woman of means. Spending $50 on a single meal and drinks even once a week is not an option for me if I want to afford groceries, transportation, and housing. Even with my severe limits, I still eat extremely well because, well… America.

As we pitch headlong into what could be another dark and troubled political/economic era, I would like to remind everyone to stop and smell the roses, even if there are precious few of them. America is great and beautiful. It is also horrible and awful. The same things are true of other homelands. Spirits of place are complicated, much like the humans who inhabit them. May you gain the courage to recognize and appreciate the good in your own homeland, and may it return the favor by recognizing and appreciating the good within you.

If you want to be treated more fairly and to be loved and adored, you must be the change you want to become in the world. You must be fair and you must emanate love and adoration, not just for other people but for places and things. I’m talking about gratitude.

We all love the grateful. Grateful people are thankful no matter what their circumstances. They take nothing for granted. You may be a jerk (here I am, the pot, calling out the kettle) but they are grateful for you. They uplift everyone and everything in their presence. Gratitude is powerful.

Think of the most grateful person you know. If you don’t know of anyone who emanates gratitude, consider the example of Jesus Christ. No matter what happened, Jesus was grateful to his father, God, for the opportunity to experience life. While on Earth, Jesus performed miracles that came from a well of power whose source was the connection forged with ultimate gratitude. Jesus knew himself to be poor but he preached gratitude nonetheless, because he was able to appreciate his circumstances and the lessons they offered while he was on Earth. Jesus had no fear of death despite the fact he was tortured to death. His gratitude overcame his fear.

We All Have to Start Somewhere

I’m not rich and my lifestyle is fairly modest. Nevertheless, I am nowhere near as poor as Jesus and chances are neither are you. We can either wallow in guilt and consider ourselves sinners, or we can appreciate our surroundings at every moment.

To appreciate is to raise in value. Value is not strictly material. A wise entity once threw me a bone. It said that genuine gratitude from the heart sublimates everything it touches by the power of seven. I have parsed this to mean that an act of genuine gratitude blesses the giver and the receiver across seven planes of existence. When a little boy gave his small portion of fish and bread to Jesus, via the power of his selflessness and Jesus’s gratitude the fishes and loaves were transformed into a hearty meal for five thousand people. The loaves and fishes example is an extreme one meant to illustrate a point. If you give everything you have out of the goodness of your heart, God will bless you and keep you no matter how bad things get. If you are compulsively generous, you will be rewarded with a kind of generosity to which no form of material wealth can compare.

Start where you are and thank the bed you slept in. If you have time or if there is not someone still sleeping, make the bed as you thank it. Making the bed is an act of appreciation and love. It restores the order of the bed and in effect “seals the deal” of the appreciation you express. A heartfelt thank you to the bed, whether or not you slept well, tells it that you don’t take it for granted that you have a soft, warm place to sleep at night. It vicariously thanks the place and time where you live for sheltering you, especially if bombs were not raining down or if natural disasters weren’t attempting to wipe your residence off the map.

The Dollar Tree Egg Roll

Another potent ritual is to thank the food you eat for its sustenance, even if it is a Dollar Tree egg roll that you cooked in the microwave for lack of a better alternative. Someone grew the cabbage, threw it into a dangerous machine for slicing, and oversaw the frying, cooling, and wrapping of the egg roll. To be grateful for the egg roll and all those who brought it to you is to accept both the benefits and drawbacks of our era. Convenience food is nice in some ways. Gratitude for it means amplifying the good aspects of the egg roll and shifting focus off the bad. Yes, the egg roll is not healthy. In an ideal world, I would be handcrafting my own egg rolls with cabbage, carrots, and onions grown in my garden. I do have the good fortune of owning a garden. I have yet to grow the vegetables and gather other ingredients to make egg rolls. Instead of focusing on the egg roll’s calorie count or its lack of nutrition, I consider how wonderful and tasty it is and how hard various forces worked to bring it to me. I could be yet another diet-obsessed drudge; those types are common enough. It’s easy to obsess about what I eat. I don’t. People love being obsessed with food because it spares them the hard work of confronting their real fears and drives in contemplation and discursive meditation. In a world teeming with toxic negativity and misery, gratitude serves to counterbalance certain forces that have gotten out of control. I cannot singlehandedly cure the collective astral plane of the nastiness it suffers right now; nobody can. There’s no way gratitude for a nuked Dollar Tree egg roll will save the world. I can, however, be grateful for small things and small acts of kindness and by that virtue ameliorate some of the black sludge of the modern collective consciousness. I can watch and observe as that gratitude bounces back at me through the planes by the power of seven or more.

Imagine being grateful to every object, person, or place that fills your life. Imagine being grateful to those you don’t like for teaching how not to be and what not to do. Imagine being grateful for your mistakes because they are a constant opportunity to learn, despite it often feeling like trial by fire. Gratitude is like a rose in the garden. If you tend to it and give it lots of care it will grow and flourish. If you are grateful to your bed every morning, you will sleep better at night. If you are grateful for the place you live, you won’t be consumed by the desire to fix every aspect of it or to run away. The consequence of gratitude is often more gratitude. If you are grateful to others, they stand a much better chance of changing into the kind of people who would earn that gratitude than if you took them for granted and got angry at them for their behavior. Gratitude builds the positive and to a degree ignores the negative.

Gratitude and the Spirit of Place

The first connection to the spirits of place happens via gratitude, not by “getting into the occult”, pulling out the Ouija board, or hosting a sleepover seance. Humans make a grave mistake when they presume that bad energy that flies in their direction is coming either from other human beings who happen to know magic or other human beings who happen to be dead. At any given moment, the subtle ecosystem around you is populated by a complex menagerie of unseen beings. Some of these beings are the spirits of the dead. Some are elementals, beings that make fire hot and whose energy is the reason snow becomes crystals. Some are the spirits of place, from huge land spirits that encompass entire provinces and give them their particular idiosyncrasies to a tiny spirit who occupies the stove in a rented apartment. Some are thought egregores you created yourself that develop lives of their own. Some are egregores created by groups of people, such as the spirit Carl Jung described and warned about in his prophetic essay Wotan. Some are larvae, the unseen equivalent of maggots. Larvae are found wherever there is sickness or death. Clairvoyants can actually see them; most of us can only sense them as an icky feeling. Some are angels and some are demons. There are some who are so beyond humans in their intelligence that they could destroy you and everything you know in a single thought, yet for some odd reason they don’t. Most of the subtle ecosystem cannot be explained at all, and it also doesn’t help that we humans cannot physically see it and that our scientists have forgotten what it is to try to understand it. Just know it is there and as humans, we are uniquely handicapped when it comes to perceiving it.

Ancient Mayans feared the age we are currently living through. It’s as if they knew how far the human race would fall from being in touch with its own spirituality. Though people of our era love to claim that humankind is at the most advanced state it has ever achieved and that the past was full of ignorant, god-bothering rubes, it is our time that is the true Dark Age. Like a person who gradually becomes blind over the span of several years, our entire race has gradually lost its connection to clear perception of the subtle worlds over many generations. The unseen world is in attack mode all the time now. I don't think it was always this way, but it is this way now. That is why it is unwise to counterhex people who you think or know are hexing you. In absence of a banishing ritual such as the Sphere of Protection or the etheric and astral shielding formed by sacred homemaking and a great prayer relationship with one or more gods, to counterhex is to paint a target on your own back. You end up calling out for the exact type of energy you are trying to repel, much like the dumb kid who took a couple of martial arts classes and makes the mistake of taking on the biggest bully in school.

The answer to the blindness of our age is to slowly re-sensitize ourselves via the appreciation of the good, and that means cultivating many gardens of gratitude.

I have always steered clear of Ouija boards out of instinctive horror. Though I have seen and conversed with full-body apparitions, had my share of astral travels gone wrong, and as the old fairy tale goes "lacked the ability to shudder", I have a loathing of Ouija boards that seems born of past life experiences. When I unpack the skeeviness of Ouija boards in discursive meditation, this is what I have come up with:

It's Not Just a Game

My first experience with a Ouija board was at age fifteen, when some friends and I gathered around at someone's house and had a go. Nothing happened. Nevertheless, though lumped in the same general BAD BAD BAD category as occult books and Tarot cards by Christian suburban Karen-moms, there was always something about Ouija that seemed far more off and and far less relative to the acquisition of knowledge. Ouija boards are often manufactured by Hasbro, the same outfit that puts out Nerf guns and My Little Pony. The idea of Hasbro making a tool that can easily devolve in allowing a demon to enter and potentially possess a random pre-teen is grotesque. I highly doubt anyone at Hasbro ever gave such a possibility a second thought, but that is what I believe Ouija boards do: they quickly devolve from party game to demonic portal in a way an occult book or deck of Tarot cards will never emulate.

The reason why this happens is a sort of Lowest Common Denominator effect that happens at parties. Hoping for the best -- usually romance, fun, or exhiliration -- brings out the worst, especially in teenagers who are already dramatic by nature. Once it is tacitly understood that the party is not going to be a positive revolution that changes her life for the better, the excitement of the party turns into a vicious ennui for some guests, and that's where the Ouija board comes in as a desperate attempt to "make something happen".

A similar phenomenon happens during seances, where a crowd lathers itself up in anticipation of a life-changing experience. Most people go to seances hoping for a connection with a dead loved one. This can happen either with or without the possession of a medium.

No banishing rituals are done before or after a Ouija session or a seance. Considering the popularity of Ouija and seances over the last 200 years, it is no wonder the collective astral is so grubby. A channelling of random spirits without a banishing ritual both before and after is like going into surgery after a week without washing your hands. Septic is a nice word for it. At this very moment, some doofuses are having a seance somewhere, opening a floodgate of demonic energy into our already demon-infested plane. Somewhere else, a bunch of would be edgelord teenagers are doing the same thing with a Ouija board.

Take Me to Church... JK, Actually, Please Don't

I have yet to walk out of a church, temple, or religious center feeling cleaner than I did before I entered. Before I could talk to spirits, I could not explain why I routinely felt this way, so hopefully now that I've had some quality conversations with non-corporeal beings, I can give it a better shot. Like Ouija sessions and seances, the magical work of channeling spirits (thought to be God) is only as good as its weakest link. From what I have noticed, there are plenty of good souls in the pew seats and at the folding tables at any given service, but what tends to happen is a sort of drag effect from both mentally disturbed people among the worshippers as well as massive problems caused by the hypocrisy of the chosen leader/leaders.

When I have been in Christian churches, there is often the feeling of a fledgling attempting to rise against a strong wind and being blown back to the ground by a gust of crass materialism that makes a mockery of any honest aspiration or spiritual work. Among Buddhists, I could feel the spirits of place desperately vying for my energy and attention, begging me to come back to try and see the beauty they had cultivated. Alas, the leaden virtue signaling and status obsession of the center's leaders was not a force to be overcome by me or anyone else, and I explained this to the gentle spirit who pleaded with me to give it a second chance. In Hindu temples, I was fatigued by the insistence on empty-mind meditation as a panacea when this is not and has never been the case, at least not for me personally.
What I see happening in all of these places is similar to the Ouija Board Syndrome: a septic floodgate is opened by the naive who always presume they are channeling exactly whom they think they are channeling, as if demons were not good liars.

I have always wondered just how much of this French stereotype is true!

Making the words and lives of other people into objects of obsession conveniently places self-realization upon a high, impossible shelf. The life of the revered person or people becomes a Wendigo — a monster that cannot be satisfied and that always cannibalizes its own tribe and eventually itself. Westerners have had a long time fad of fetishizing Eastern religions and (bastardized) Eastern meditation. Eastern religions often act as a Wendigo to someone born and raised in the West. Their practices, divorced from the land, become poisonous. Much of this is because of the conflict with the spirit of the land in which they are adopted.

Exotic fetishism is a syndrome that results from feeling embarrassed about one’s humble origins, feeling unmoored or uninspired by one’s traditions, and longing for someone else’s birthright. Exotic fetishism is a way of displacing the appreciation of the here and now for the cherished other, who always lives in another land, another time, another social class. For instance, a Westerner who throws himself into Buddhist transcendental meditation while holding down a salary class job and while living in the West is likely to piss off the land spirits without knowing it depending on how grateful or ungrateful he acts in his daily life. If he’s lucky, the beings of the unseen ecosystem around him will be forgiving or at least ambivalent. If he’s not so lucky, he will be beset with personal tragedies, unhappiness, and misfortune. Buddhism is a religion of ancestor worship and if he leaves that part out, he’s missing too huge of a chunk of that religion to be doing it right. If he’s a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), he isn’t likely to understand ancestor worship on a fundamental level because he will not have been raised that way. There are hard limits to where and how he was born and he did not accept them or work with them; instead he pretended they weren’t there and supplanted his potential with a mantle of faith that wasn’t appropriate to him or the land from whence he came. He rejected the spirits of the land as they were, refused to work with them, and never thought they could do the same to him.

A Little Thing Called Self-Worth

There's a woman I know who has always been tortured by exotic fetishism. Like many exotic fetishists, she has traveled the world. Though she has an interesting ethnic background and is not entirely white, she is ashamed. She is embarrassed by her family's wealth but also embarrassed that they are not filthy, Hollywood mogul rich. She loses all self-worth when she is around celebrities and is the sort who would camp out in dreadfully uncomfortable and potentially degrading circumstances for days if it meant she could spend five minutes chatting with a rock star or top-tier politician. She name-drops insufferably, always presuming that other people are just as impressed by famous people as she is. She has spent her life wondering why she is so miserable, yet it has been under her nose this entire time.

The Land Can Reject Us Too

The land reaches out to us all the time, but if we make fetishes of other times, lands, and cultures, the land spirits around us have no choice but to show us the same rejection we show them. By fetishizing the foreign, we become foreigners on our own soil: anchorless, nomadic, here today, gone tomorrow. We become unworthy of investment. When we refuse to communicate with the spirit of place where we are, the spirits don’t give us much in return: they ignore us and we ignore them.

Obsession with technology is its own sort of exotic fetish. When I walk in the forest preserve, I often see joggers and bikers dressed to the nines in the latest style of designer spandex suits. Their bikes likely cost more than my 16 year old car is worth. They wear sunglasses, noise-cancelling headphones, Apple watches, helmets, and special designer shoes as if they were going to be photographed by paparazzi during or after their bouts of exercise. They don't go through the forest preserve slowly enough to connect with the spirits of the land. They huff and puff too much to notice details like hummingbird moths or wild roses and blackberries. Their headphones cancel the calls of rare sandhill cranes and the distinct song of red winged blackbirds. They wouldn't know a red sumac from a poison sumac until it was far too late and it doesn't occur to them to learn. At least they manage to get to the forest preserve though, because for every one of them there are five of their peers glued to a screen who rarely go outdoors at all.

The Ungratefulness of Exotic Fetishism

There's another irony in that we can make fetishes of our own culture and background and alienate the spirits around us that way. For instance, if I decide my German grandparents, now deceased, are the pinnacle of human transcendence, and I make a fetish out of their lives and become a snob about how great they were, once again I fail to listen to the spirit voices around me and the land that gently guides me every day. I ignore the love of my family who are alive now. I become uncaring about the Earth that generously offers me spaghetti to eat and black tea to drink because it does not exactly match the spaetzle and beer of the past that I imagine my grandparents had. I fail to love the Eastern red cedars and the maples because my grandparents had hawthorns and black pines. I spend my life studying German when I could easily learn Spanish, which is what half my neighborhood speaks.

If I put my head in the clouds of an imaginary land, I am also prone to make stupid mistakes. I could make a small mistake, such as wearing clothing that does not suit me, but I wear it because it is from a culture I admire. I could easily spend too much money, buying trinkets and doodads from the exotic land I am obsessed with, or I could spend thousands traveling. The worst outcome is if I make a major life choice based on my exotic fetishism: marrying someone not because they are right for me, but because they suit the fetish, or wallowing in the fetish as if it is an all-consuming addiction and becoming useless and dependent.

Like it or not, we are spirits in the material world tasked with learning the onerous burden of being human so we may one day free ourselves once again to rest in the arms of God. I can deny my burden and rail against it all I want, but my refusal to learn my lessons will not enable me to pass the class without the usual groundwork.

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For a former atheist, I spend a lot of time praying, probably because I am making up for lost time. One of the most amazing things that has happened since approximately six years ago when I began to believe in gods for the first time in this incarnation was the connection I felt with the spirits of place.

The Obviousness of Animism

Humans are animists by nature. Consider how reliably often we attribute human characteristics to objects and non-human animals, especially when we are dealing with children. When I was growing up, there was a deli/market on the corner that had an ugly, 1950s era sign of an anthropomorphic hotdog holding up a plate with a sliced sausage on it. My friend darkly and hilariously commented that the hot dog appeared to be serving up its own son. Anthropomorphism is just another form of animism. Animism has been right in front of our faces this entire time.

One of the primary reasons the Industrial Age is so marked by psychosis is the denial of animism. Romantic art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900) hated animism and coined the term “pathetic fallacy” in an attempt to discourage animism and the personification of objects and places. According to Ruskin, “objects ... derive their influence not from properties inherent in them ... but from such as are bestowed upon them by the minds of those who are conversant with or affected by these objects." Despite his own adoration of wild spaces, he was horrified by the idea of actually having a conversation with them. Ruskin was awed by wild spaces but also determined not to communicate with them, which smacks of the legacy of certain brands of Christianity. God is a distant, omnipotent judge, serenely uninvolved yet exceedingly jealous and wrathful. Recognition of any place, animal, or object as human-like is idolatry. This binary attitude of God = good vs. Spirit of place=bad was an easy, slippery slope to the barren pastures where we now find ourselves in the Industrial Age. Removing God from the everyday while engaging in the fallacy that He has blessed us with material prosperity because we deserve it was the first mistake. The second was the attempt to prevent the natural urge to talk to the spirits of place unless it was in the form of a children’s movie or within the similar cacomagic of advertising.

The goofy thing about the spirit of place is how darn obvious it is. The landscape tells us most of what we need to know just by looking at it. Mountains are huge and awe-inspiring. Rivers represent the fast flow of energy cutting through the land. Traffic jams are hell on earth. Office parks are ugly and have deleterious effects on the psyches of anyone who has to dwell within them. A good, well-kept home feels cozy and nurturing. A neglected home feels scary.

If you’ve felt any of those things when in similar places, you’ve had a deep perception of the spirit of place. If you can get over John Ruskin’s weird mental hangups about being “pathetic”, the next logical step is to say “Hi, how are you?” I have never been saner in my life and I talk to places all the time. It sure as hell beats not talking to them. If this is pathetic, welcome to the Loser’s Club!

Accents and Idioms

One way the land manifests itself through us is by accents and idioms. The reason Culiacán Spanish is vastly different from Barcelona Spanish is because of the stamp the land spirit leaves upon the people via language. The particular region where I was born and raised, Chicago, has a distinct version of “English” that incorporates long, nasal AAAAH sounds. When I am teaching students to sing, I often train them to avoid nasal sounds, and there is no better way of doing this than showing them what not to do. I affect my most obnoxious Chicagoan accent and drawl “WHITE SAAAAAAHX DAAAAAHT CAAAAAAHM!” (Whitesox.com) in order to demonstrate this peculiar regional habit. The northern Illinois drawl, for all of its problems, is not elitist or snobby. There is a homespun, pragmatic quality to the accent, and it is the legacy of workaholics who could not be bothered to elevate their manner of speech in order to fit in with visiting European dignitaries.

The spirit of place lives within us and we live within it. Canada is a sparsely populated land with a tormented history of Native persecution much like the United States. The idea of Native suffering often gets in the way when we Americans try to connect with the land. Though it is not an excuse, neither Canada nor the US are unique in this respect. The Han Chinese once colonized the Japanese island of Hokkaido, decimating the aboriginal Ainu peoples; this fact does not mean anyone should be ashamed to be Japanese. When shame is put into order with proper limits and boundaries, we can see the place we dwell within. Yes, the place may have been somewhat ruined or disgraced, but it is obviously worth living in or we would not choose to live there. I am no fan of highways or suburban subdivisions, but I choose to live here, so my best bet is to appreciate what I have and make the best out of it.

Certain Astral Pyramids Not Welcome Here

Canadians need only glance at a few photographs of the land where they dwell to be awed by its hugeness and open spaces. Like its neighbor slightly to the south, there is a great deal of room. It’s easy to be captivated by the desire to wander such incredible vastness, and many have done just that. Others have been content to hunker down in the big cities that inevitably spring from a big land. Overall, there is the feeling in the Americas that the land is OK with us doing our own thing and exploring our own unique ways of being. We can scatter to the four winds if we so choose. We can reject the astral pyramids of others and skip off to be ourselves and create structures of our own.

When the astral pyramid of communism arrived on the European and Asian continents, it was a way of replacing the failing, dying pyramids of Christianity and Buddhism. These monotheist pyramids, however, were past their primes a hundred years before they attempted a worldwide coup in the forms of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. Past defeats have not stopped communism from another desperate grasp for the gold ring in the form of coronavirus-related restrictions and lockdowns. Communism in its latest Agenda 21 form is a violent hiccup from the death throes of monotheism. In the Age of Aquarius, there is no One God or One Way. The spirit of the American land is not communist and communism will not work here. I would argue that it is also decidedly not monotheist. We have many gods here and many of them are willing to reach out and cultivate relationships with the willing and the respectful.

The mass Enlightenment so many long for will never arrive: this is not the nature of Meatworld. There has been chatter about “waking up” some great, old force, but it was never asleep. We were the ones who slumbered while it went about its business. What may have changed is our awareness of it. When I began to feel its movements, I was happy because it meant I had finally done enough spiritual work to become vaguely conscious of its magnificence.

There was a video made of the Canadian trucking convoy that was about 13 minutes of “thank yous” to the truckers for their bravery. Though it probably escaped most people’s notice, I perceived this video as decisive. I believe the Canadian convoy will usher in an era of freedom for Canada. The atheist-communists of the Coronatarian movement will lose because they have no gratitude. They are eaten by the wendigos of greed and power. They are remarkably greedy and narcissistic, much like Justin Trudeau, who clearly sees himself as designated to be rich and powerful instead of rich and powerful because he was born into a wealthy, influential family. Trudeau seems to believe he can have merit as a total ingrate, yet he is consumed by his desire for power in direct proportion to the privilege he dismisses as granted. The Canadian elites think of themselves as little gods. They believe they can dominate the Great Land Spirit because they are special and chosen. They are wrong.

Just as the Donner Party headed into the wilderness thinking they would live in the lap of abundance at the end of their journey, the Canadian communist-atheist elite has vastly underestimated and misunderstood the spirit of the land. Communism may have sort of worked in China or Russia for a time, but the American lands have no patience for it. The best way of getting a land spirit to ignore or even actively seek to destroy you is to deny its existence and then constantly act as an annoying pill by attempting to spread a dated, faux-monotheist pyramid scheme. You don’t wander into the Canadian wilderness with the attitude nature will provide: it will eat you. Many have found this out the hard way in the same fashion as those who followed Sir John Franklin, the naval officer who repeatedly led hundreds of men to gruesome deaths in search of the Northwest passage. We see the same narcissistic “I AM HUMAN HEAR ME ROAR” streak in Canadian elitists, who honestly believe the forces of Progress will conquer all. It is my opinion they are about to be schooled to the contrary; make of that what you will.

It is hard to believe I was an atheist less than a decade ago. I was raised to be a casual Christian. I was baptized as a baby and confirmed at age 14. My parents took us to church when my brother and I were little. By the time we were adolescents, my brother and I would often walk to church unaccompanied by our parents. We were both confirmed around the same time.

I felt strung along by the Christian church. There was always the promise of being saved or “hearing good news” followed by empty posturing or rote recitation of mostly inscrutable Bible passages that I felt had no relevance to my life. It did not help that the most avid churchgoers in my life were also the most pushy, hypocritical, and obtuse. The deal breaker for me came at age 16, when the church had zero answers concerning the night terrors I suffered on a regular basis.

In my opinion, the average Protestant church has not been spiritual for a long time. By “spiritual” I mean within regular touch with the spirits/in contact with them. Catholics and Greek Orthodox have the advantage of saints and rituals items like rosary beads; casual Protestants have no such advantages. There is also the common Protestant assertion that any contact with non-corporeal entities other than Jesus himself is Satanic and/or witchcraft. Such an assertion, whether or not it is the correct interpretation of the Bible, excludes and shames anyone who seeks to experience the spirit of place. Those who develop the ability to recognize the differences and overlaps between the spirit world and our own are kneecapped by the insistence that all spiritual experience belongs to Jesus and Jesus alone.

Nah. From my experience, Jesus is truly great, however, he is far from the only god and he’s most certainly not the only spirit. To ironically paraphrase Carl Sagan, J.C. is but one of “billions and billions” in a complex ecosystem.

The Extremely-Haunted World

Most of us have been brought up to believe that if ghosties and ghoulies exist, then surely they must prove it by using their unseen hands to move furniture at night, to win lotteries for humans who beg and plead the right way, and to possess ugly dolls and teddy bears and make them prance about in a demonic yet amusing fashion. That’s not the way it works. Everything and every place is haunted nevertheless. Anyone who has ever sensed that someone doesn’t like them or that a place feels “bad” or “good” for no apparent reason is sensing the spirit ecosystem. The ecosystem is there whether the person astrally blind or profoundly clairvoyant.

Personally, I don’t usually physically see or hear spirits. Every now and then I do, for instance I saw my first full-body apparition in a forest preserve in 2020. I thought it was a man until I got close enough for it to disappear. I usually don’t see spirits. I’ll catch one of my many ghost cats out of the corner of my eye and sometimes ghosts will make a lot of racket in my house. These are not common occurrences. My usual experience is a kind of awareness. For instance, right now I have several spirits hovering nearby. One is always with me -- it’s my Holy Guardian Angel or HGA. Others come and go. Some have bad intentions and are thrown off by my daily Sphere of Protection. Most are just there, like birds in the bushes and trees and insects on the ground and in the air. No big deal. Places also have spirits. My music studio has a spirit. The piano has a spirit who I have named Rex. The desk calendar has a spirit. The elderberry lozenges have spirits. The plastic they are wrapped in has a spirit. The list is endless.

When people ask me “Is this place haunted?” my answer is always “Yes”. Haunted is the natural state of everything. What they mean is “Is one of the entities who lives here disturbed or angry?”

The key realization here is that nobody is ever alone. Manly P. Hall’s Path of the Lonely Ones is only genuinely lonely if non-human entities cannot be perceived, and most people who study the occult find that studying occultism opens the inner eye that perceives the world for all of its genuine weirdness. The supernatural isn’t all that super because it is perfectly natural; it’s just that we humans have fallen into severe blindness.

The Ancient Seers

I believe people used to be able to see the astral plane nearly as easily as we see the physical plane. Over thousands of years, humans lost the second sight. I have always been afflicted with a feeling of sadness and longing for the pre-industrial world when nobody worried about radiation, toxic dumps, or plastic garbage. I don’t feel I am anywhere alone in this or the sense that the world of fairies, angels, ghosts, and other non-corporeal entities has been beaten back. The clincher is that it wasn’t beaten back at all -- it’s just that we have beaten back our ability to perceive it. We are so vain as a species that we came to assume that because we invented our own apparatuses and systems, they can have no consciousness apart from us. The first step to perceiving entities is admitting that humans aren’t so great and special. We are cogs in the machine just like anyone else. We may be creators, but we are also the created. The second step is to try and make contact.

Reach Out and Touch Someone

The primary way to begin to sense the rich, unseen world is to thank it. Grateful people are the best sort of people: everybody wants to hang out with them, including spirits. That’s why I suggest genuinely thanking household objects as a first exercise in spirit communication. The next time you shut your front door for the night, thank it as if it was another person who was your devoted personal security guard. Say Hello when you get into your car and Thank You every time you get out of it. Say thank you to the washing machine and dryer for your clean clothes. Thank your bed after you sleep in it. Once you have started thanking the objects you used to take for granted, you might just notice they appreciate being thanked. It’s a subtle, almost indiscernible feeling, but once you start a habit of thanking objects, you’ll sense that it grows and that an aura of protection grows with it. A wise entity once told me that gratitude sublimates what it touches to the power of seven. I took this to mean that the thank-er and the thank-ee become improved and encouraged by gratitude in at least seven ways.

Bad Practices

I don’t use or recommend Ouija boards or seances to contact spirits. Ouija boards are a good way of inviting a demonic infestation, and here is why: they are like giant nets that do not discriminate in what they catch and bring through. Demons want nothing more than to get a foothold on the material plane where they can proceed to wreak havoc upon their enemies (us humans). The Ouija board is usually piloted by a group of know-nothings who seek contact with dead relatives or dead famous people. A bunch of people create an amorphous blob of astral energy that is easily detected and commandeered by demons. It’s not that dead grandma doesn’t want to get through, she cannot get through because the demons will push her out of the way.

The seance is another extremely ignorant practice that invites the demonic from portals on the lower astral plane. Once again, we have a bunch of random-intentioned people creating an amorphous blob of astral energy through which demons may happily travel. Seances are the astral equivalent of going to a seedy bar and then stripping oneself naked and taking a roofie. Though it is possible that nothing will happen, it is more probable that something bad will happen and that it will have at least one VD. To add insult to potential injury, seances are not bookended with any form of banishing rituals.

One of the types of entities I used to see in my unprotected astral travels is the Impersonator. Impersonators are spirits who form themselves into mock-ups of your loved ones and then try to get your attention by using that person’s form to torment you. Let’s say you dream of your aunt and in the dream, the nice old lady you know suddenly seems menacing and sinister. Her form seems to bulge at the edges, rearranging itself. The arms are too big, the head is too small, the eyes seem wrong. My guess is that you didn’t dream about your aunt; that was an impersonator. Impersonators love to play ghost and many ghost sightings of dead “people” are not people at all.

The Rudeness of Humans

Many entities don’t want to connect with humans because let’s face it, we can be very rude. When I was an atheist who believed in The Science, I truly believed if a demon or angel didn’t manifest as a humanoid creature and march up to me and shake my hand, it couldn’t possibly exist. When a bunch of humans sit in their stupid, unbanished seance and demand that spirits make knocking sounds in order to prove their existence, the spirits have every right to be pissed and angered. Part of me doesn’t even blame them for infesting houses and apartments and making the cupboards vomit dishes and flatware onto the floor.

Let’s say I was stricken blind and deaf. Just as I wouldn’t march into someone’s home and demand that people living there prove they existed by doing an impromptu tap dance so I could feel the vibrations, I no longer presume I can force astral beings to do my bidding, nor do I want them to do my bidding. I wouldn’t dream of thinking of contacting spirits as a game (many Ouija boards are made by Hasbro) because that’s freaking rude.

The Beauty of Talking to Trees

The Druid Tree Ritual, which really isn’t much more than an elaborate way to sit up against or hug a tree, is a wonderfully polite way to introduce oneself to the world of the unseen. Though not every tree is friendly, most trees and plants in general love to chat and exchange energy with humans. The Ritual is simple: 1.Spot a tree 2.Ask it if it wants to exchange energy 3.Sit with back against tree for whatever amount of time seems right 4.Thank tree and exit the scene.

You won’t hear a literal voice from the tree, but you’ll probably feel all sorts of unexpected and odd sensations. Paying attention to them and more importantly contemplating them later is an excellent way of opening the avenues of spirit communication. The ritual has three key elements: the asking of permission, the opening of oneself to possibility, and the all important gratitude afterwards.

The western industrialized world has a problem with etheric starvation. Though it is probably the most dismissed phenomenon of our time, etheric starvation affects every aspect of our lives and is the secret to understanding our most dreaded diseases, especially addiction and auto-immune disorders.

Etheric starvation easily goes unrecognized in an era when it is downright unfashionable to acknowledge the etheric plane. Beyond atheist-materialist delusions that only one plane exists, Meatworld, we have already been introduced to the subtle planes. They include the etheric, the astral plane of the imagination and dreams, the mental plane of abstract concepts, and the spiritual plane which is the domain of forces much smarter than humans. The etheric, to my mind, is one level more subtle than smell, that is to say it is nearly physical. People who have a good sense of the etheric can read a room by walking into it. They know how the weather will be tomorrow by the color of the air today. They can walk into an empty house that is for sale and sense what kind of family lived in the house a few weeks before. They are often good at mundane tasks that give comfort to others, such as arranging furniture, construction, sewing, cooking, and/or cleaning.

Etheric Energy Transfer

Human life is a constant set of etheric energy transfers. For instance, last Sunday I went to a small Easter celebration at my parents’ house. Holiday gatherings are etheric pyramids. The host becomes the head of the pyramid and must make an etheric sacrifice, usually in the form of cooking food, to the guests. The guests in turn rev up the etheric energy in the place where the party is thrown and send it back up the pyramid in the form of imagination and memory (astral plane forms). In order for the etheric pyramid to become strong, people must physically be present and around each other, which is a huge part of the reason food is so important. When the host cooks, much of his or her etheric power is transferred to the food, and that power comes back when the guests sit around enjoying the food. An Easter gathering on Zoom cannot by its nature facilitate the transfer of etheric energy because the physical component is missing. This is why social distancing wrecked so many families, businesses, and churches — take away the etheric transfer and you no longer have a bond. To add insult to injury, when the etheric transfers are subtracted, you get rampant etheric starvation.

Etheric starvation was already a huge predicament because of the hideous disfigurement modernity has wrought upon the land. Every ugly highway, brutalist office high-rise, asymmetrical McMansion, chain link fence, and casually-discarded cigarette butt poisons the etheric plane and drains it of the energy we need to replenish ourselves. Our ancestors may have lacked indoor plumbing and transcontinental air travel, but in comparison they seldom dealt with etheric starvation. Our forbears were surrounded by sources of etheric wealth such as close knit communities, beautiful and pragmatic architecture built on the human scale, and easy access to wilderness and semi-wilderness. Us? Not so much.

What It Feels Like

We are all familiar with etheric starvation, I think. Etheric starvation feels a great deal like hunger but it cannot be satisfied by eating. It has the same hollow, tired feeling. If you've ever laid in bed, unable to sleep because your mind is racing yet you have yet to think of anything important or meaningful, that's probably etheric starvation. If you've been bored yet too tired or lazy to do anything about it, that is probably etheric starvation. Listlessness in general points to etheric starvation. The urge to eat far too much, to binge drink, or to spend hours in front of a screen when you don't have to is often etheric starvation. Being drawn to people you cannot have or who treat you badly is often a condition of etheric starvation. You don't want them so much as you want their energy to fill you, whether you realize it or not.

Etheric deprivation manifests as depression, excessive fear, anger, hopelessness, and anxiety, but by far the most common symptom of etheric deprivation is addiction. Addiction is the most instinctive remedy when you have an etheric deficiency; it seeks to fill the void of etheric energy with food, alcohol, drugs, shopping, sex, you name it. The etheric plane is a plane of satiety: to be etherically fulfilled is to have a sense of well-being and comfort like the kind that comes from eating a lovely meal or getting a good night’s sleep. Addicts destroy their ability to feel satisfied, that is to say they zap their etheric bodies. Food addicts abuse food until their bodies cannot handle the glut and begin to shut down because of the strain of excess fat tissue. Drug addicts raise their threshold for happiness until the only thing that can facilitate the semblance of joy is ever-increasing amounts of drugs. Sex addicts pour their energies out until their etheric body is a hazy, compromised, torn up mess.

Repair of the Etheric Body

Like most people, I have problems with etheric starvation. In my case, it likes to manifest in the form of depression because I don’t have issues with addiction. The best fix-it strategy I have found is a daily banishing ritual: in my case, that is the Sphere of Protection. The reason this seems to work is that it cleans the aura while repelling future etheric and astral attacks.

For those who do not or cannot do a daily banishing ritual, a combination of prayer and daily hoodoo baths is the next best thing. Any hoodoo type bath seems to be better than none, whether that is a cool shower or a full-on river baptism. By prayer, I don’t mean incessant begging, meaningless rote memorization, and masochistic self-deprecation that has become endemic when praying to an Abrahamic deity. Prayer, at least in my case, only seems to work when I express genuine gratitude as a foundation of the relationship. Gratitude sublimates where begging for more goodies degrades.

Pinterest = Evil

When I have etheric depletion, I tend to turn to Pinterest. For those of you who are like “What is Pinterest?” it is a digital bulletin board where you can save snapshots of web pages that interest you. Mostly, it is a waste of valuable time, though every now and then I stumble across a great recipe or a craft project I actually end up turning into a real-life item instead of leaving it to languish as a pipe dream. Pinterest reminds me of a marijuana high: relaxed, colorful, and full of delicious recipes I’ll never attempt to make and craft projects that I’ll never do. There are certainly worse ways to soothe the pangs of etheric starvation, but Pinterest is unfortunately a gateway to all kinds of toxicity, for instance, this race-hustler masquerading as wellness guru who popped up on my feed.

Other Methods of Etheric Repair

Remember that etheric deprivation arises from not spending enough time in the sunlight — if scientists ever manage to pull their heads from their rectums and study the etheric body, they’ll likely find it can be fortified with daily Vitamin D supplements — so if you have etheric deprivation and it’s sunny outside, for heaven’s sake just GO OUTSIDE.

The main thing is to get away from the computer, and I savor the irony of typing that sentence as it is a sunny day with perfect weather, yet look what I’m doing!

Think of cooking a well-crafted meal, even if the meal is made by you and for you, as a way of replenishing the etheric body via alchemy. By transmuting the ingredients of your dish by a labor of love, you create a potent etheric fuel.

Cleaning a room, thanking it for its gifts on a daily basis, and adding a decorative touch will amp up its etheric power and boost your etheric health.

Turning on music you like, seeing a live performer, or performing music yourself is a great remedy for etheric starvation. Music is "painting the air with sound waves" to paraphrase composer Kim Carcone. To add to the effect, burn incense as an offering to the gods, light candles, or heat scented oil in a diffuser. This will charge the air with another dimension of pleasure.

Getting rid of the television is probably the greatest thing that you can do to improve the etheric quality of your living space. The television, even when off, radiates foulness. Anything that functions as a prosthetic for the imagination will act as a vortex of dissatisfaction and confusion. Televisions create noise pollution and they cause people to be distracted and rude. Many Americans find it normal to have the television on in a room when they are having a conversation, and it's no big deal to completely derail one's train of thought to comment on an item that flashed across the screen. The larger the television screen and the sound system that goes with it, the worse the etheric drain on the room. I would sooner put a lidless toilet in the middle of my living room wall than a television. If I ran the world, televisions would not be allowed in hospitals, doctors offices, or any place healing was supposed to occur.

Playing with your kids (not video games) or pets provides etheric nourishment for you and them. If you are sensitive, make a note of the vibe of a room before and after you’ve played with your pet in there. I think you’ll find it improves.

Picking up trash at the forest preserve or anywhere else will give you a huge etheric boost, as it is a form of gratitude to the land and a service the gods smile upon.

Overall, to heal etheric deprivation, one must "earth out" the frenzied "tired and wired" energy that etheric deprivation causes. Cooking, playing with kids and pets, or heavy-exertion activities such as gardening or scrubbing floors will do the job. All too often, the etherically starved will seek to remedy their starvation by bingeing on food, sex, or chemical stimulants and tranquilizers. Such a strategy is doomed to failure. Food, sex, and drugs in moderation are fine -- if you're not etherically imbalanced, you are unlikely to want to over-consume.

There's a common trope of envy for the Italians and the French. I will call this the Mediterranean Lifestyle trope. In the Mediterranean Lifestyle, everyone eats beautiful, healthy, handcrafted meals while sharing wine with friends. The men are hardworking and suntanned and the women are effortlessly slim and chic in the Mediterranean Lifestyle trope. They can be seen in the flesh if you can manage a flight to Provence, and then maybe you can partake in their semi-rustic sun-drenched utopia. Etheric richness is what we envy about the Mediterranean Lifestyle trope. I'm here to tell you that you too can have the trope even if you cannot replicate the lifestyle. Etheric richness is not unique to Italians, the French, the lucky, or the wealthy. Every one of us has the ability to repair our etheric bodies and spaces, but it is up to us to figure out which methods will serve us best as individuals.

If you think sensing the spirit of place is beyond your ability, ask yourself one question: At any time during your early childhood, did you have a friend whose house was considered the best? If you knew that friend with a “cool mom” whose house was laid back and friendly, that was you sensing the spirit of place. The spirit of a place is rooted in the pragmatic: what happened there, who lives there, and what their general attitude tends to be. Even for someone who does not consider themselves a psychic at all, an abandoned mental hospital with crumbling walls, decrepit cot beds with rubber straps languishing in the corners, and piles of syringes lying in a puddle in the middle of the mildewed hallway is not going to be a comfortable place to spend an afternoon. There are both seen and unseen factors that make the abandoned mental hospital a scary place to be, and one of them is the invisible energy that torture and incarceration attracts. Scientists of our era frantically deny any such energy exists, even though over sixty percent of people believe they have seen a ghost and one out of three report they have either lived or stayed in a haunted house (research by OnePoll on behalf of Groupon of 2000 people). I’ll guess that near 100% have sensed the spirit of place, regardless of clairvoyant ability of belief. Of course some people are more sensitive than others, just as some people are better at math or knitting than others, but everyone has got some ability where spirit of place is concerned. It follows that sensitivity to the spirit of place can be developed and refined.

I was born insensitive in some ways and oversensitive in others. For instance, my hearing is so acute, I have to sleep with earplugs and become extremely stressed when in noisy spaces, including American movie theaters with surround sound. I am an extremely high functioning autistic, and that has caused me to often misread people’s verbal or physical signals and subtexts, a form of often devastating insensitivity. I am extremely sensitive to the spirit of place. I’m not a neatnik, but clutter bothers me enough that I keep my small house at a constant wabi-sabi level of clean, because any more clutter than that would disrupt the good feeling of the rooms of my home. Conversely, I will never live in a Mies Van Der Rohe minimalist space if I can help it, because I am confident the bareness and sharp angles would impede my ability to concentrate and/or sleep at night.

I can sense the aura of a neighborhood much like one can sense the nature of a person by knowing them over many years. The area where I grew up has changed radically in the half-century I have been alive; it has changed to the point where I can no longer comfortably spend a significant amount of time there. I grew up in a distant suburb of Chicago. If I fictionalized the place I grew up, she would be a Baby Boomer era woman with an idyllic childhood. Her teenage years were staid and placid, nevertheless, she grew into a compassionate, earthy, pragmatic young woman with her heart in the right place. This all went down the toilet when she married a scientist and stumbled into wealth beyond her wildest dreams. She about-faced from her former hippie ideals and replaced her old compassion with a new and miserable standard of racing the Joneses. She’s enjoyed prosperity and wealth, but she’s also been immersed by the byproducts that come from being engaged in constant competition with rich idiots. Though she speaks much rhetoric to indicate otherwise, she is a snob and a racist. She is all quaintness and charm as long as you don’t scratch her surface. She’s a woman who has had every single appetite in life satisfied except the ones that matter. She’s not just hungry; she’s ravenous. That’s why I don’t like spending time in my hometown. She feels hungry for whatever I’ve got.

I also don’t care for Chicago, which is where I went to University. Chicago is a fast-talking, slick, sophisticated middle-aged man to me. He’s Plutonian, charismatic, and powerful. He’s no wimp or shrinking violet either. He has zero problem getting his hands dirty. Though I like those things in a man, I consider Chicago to be my ex-boyfriend. We have had a passionate relationship at times, but in the end, he wasn’t for me. I don’t see him much anymore, and when I do, I try not to get deeply involved.

Where I live now is an old woman. She’s what I hope to become — a crazy cat lady and a wise old witch. Her beauty is hidden under a rough at the edges exterior. People are afraid of her because she is fierce. She doesn’t tolerate bull. She is nurturing and she welcomes me home every night. We are just getting to know each other and I hope to know her much better in the future.

Portraying a city or a town as a person is common enough in writing to be a trope. I’ve read enough novelists of varying talent who have called London or Paris an “old whore” to roll my eyes when I see the cliché in print.

Beyond towns, streets have spirits of place. So do individual living spaces such as houses or apartments. There are a couple of streets where I work that genuinely feel good. There isn’t anything special about them — one is a hill with some schools and malls on either side and the other is a somewhat busy thoroughfare that splits a couple of townhouse subdivisions. Why they feel warm and pleasant is a mystery, much like why my current town feels like an old woman.

A childhood friend of mine has a bad family. Lots of shouting, verbal and sexual abuse, and the kids often ran away. I went to her house once and it felt like living a nightmare. The worst part of it was the thin veneer of stability they slapped on for the brief period of hosting a guest. Sadly, I can see someone preferring to grow up homeless than to grow up in that house. If her house was a person, it would be John Wayne Gacy. The experience of meeting my friend’s family was so traumatic, I wasn’t able to process the information I took in for many years. I can’t imagine trying to grow up there. She deserves a medal for even making an attempt to stay in that house as a young person, though what choice did she have? She had no control over what happened then, however, she can control what happens now and so can I; so can you.

The smallest of efforts can make a place much better and improve its spirit. A classic case in point is Christmas lights. Even the most pathetic, single string of giant bulbs from the year 1983 thrown on a lopsided arbor vitae lift the mood of the general area. Electric lights produce such a tangible effect, manipulative corporations rely upon lighting up stores like constant fourth of July fireworks displays in order to make it seem like happy things happen at Walmart. Another small action that helps lift the mood of the general area is gardening. Personally, I appreciate the smallest and most bungled attempts at gardening when I see it on other people’s patios or in their front yards. When you go through the trouble of planting violets or canna lilies in a pot and watering them for a month or three, that is care manifested on the physical plane. You may see it as insignificant but I don’t. Every little bit helps, and conversely, every little bit hurts. That’s why it’s so frustrating and annoying for some of us to see a new mini-mall or being installed in an area that already teems with half-abandoned mini-malls. When the tiniest scrap of fragile, wild space is subject to being asphalted over for the almighty force of Profit, it reflects the attitude of a generation and an age. Ripping out one’s front lawn in order to replace it with native plants (if the city zoning and homeowner’s association overlords allow it!) becomes an device of rebellion against the prevailing spirit of our age that wants to stamp out wildness and individuality at every turn. We are in a psychological war where every consumer lifestyle choice is a test of what side we are on; if you think about it too hard, it is easy to become overwhelmed. The average person isn’t conscious of this war, but that doesn’t stop it from going on all around them. Nevertheless, perhaps that is a topic for a future post.

East Asians of various flavors have traditional notions of household gods. Japanese call these spirits “kami”. Western atheist and Christian know-it-alls have done their level best to stamp out the idea of kami residing in homes this side of the oceans, however, the West has its own rich traditions of fairies, elves, brownies, and ghosts as counterpart to Eastern tales of ancestors hanging out after death and prankster fox spirits. I have gone through my own phases of belief and disbelief about such disembodied creatures and am currently in a belief phase. What changed for me is that I realized that I don’t have to believe in non-embodied entities for them to exist: pragmatic evidence from every world culture except for our current Western industrial one shows they do, and though they can’t be proven (because they’re not physical) it makes sense to try to figure out what they are and what they are possibly saying. There is no proof, there is only This Stuff Works. Most people talk to their cats and dogs, and they talk to themselves. I talk to my cat (I don’t have a dog at this time), I talk to myself, and I also talk to the spirits in my house. I have a relationship with the spirits of my house just as I have a relationship with my cat. I also talk to the spirit of my car and thank her after I’ve finished driving her for the day. I talk to trees when I visit them in the forest preserve and yes, sometimes they answer back. Do I hear voices? No, I do not, though every now and then I’ll have an episode of clairaudience, like when I hear birds in trees in the middle of night in winter or music that isn’t there before going to sleep. Hearing what spirits have to say is like tuning into a radio station. I have to carefully filter out my own thoughts and wishful thinking, including my negative wishful thinking and fetish for portents of doom. There is also the important consideration that not all of these spirits wish me well and the whopping majority are as omnipotent as I am, which is to say they aren’t at all omnipotent. Spirit voices can be a scary place, and I went through that place when I was sixteen and began to study the occult via Gardnerian Wicca. Opening those channels resulted in mostly bad experiences for me, and because of my skepticism, I was ill prepared to deal with both spirit attacks and the consequences of my own stupid intentions. Thankfully, I did not end up dead or permanently messed up, but looking back, I shudder at how easily that could have happened. After my nearly 20 years of atheism, I began studying Druid magic and with it, the Sphere of Protection, a well-known invocation/banishing ritual that has changed my life for the better.... but that is a long story. Once again, I’d like to save that for another post!

If you’ve ever seen a ghost or felt a space you lived in was haunted, I invite you to share your experience in the comments.