Trinkets from the Subconscious

and building altars for 'the thoughts that chose us to think them'.

Now and then, I write something in my journal that appears to drop out of the ether in a complete simplicity and obscurity at the same time. I stare at the words on the page and marvel at the playfulness of my subconscious, how she refuses to explain herself and settles instead on the page with a total firmness but no desire to be understood intellectually.

She is quite content to ‘bamboozle’ me, flirting with the part of me that likes a challenge. It’s a spiritual challenge more than anything else, as it pushes me beyond the confines of my normal operating faculties, but still requires me to activate them to get the ball rolling.

The thoughts are less mine and more like thoughts that chose me to think them. So what do they want to be? A song? A painting? A pause?

She requires my willingness, of course, to bring her forth. To bring her into Being-ness, to give light to her path, to give form to her frenzied energy, to take the idea she started in little spurts and run with it, give it life. She asks me to metabolize the vague taste of something to come. Ah yes, to attempt to digest the subconscious is a grand act. A gesture of courage. For we could let these thoughts float away, call them silly ponderings, schizophrenic scribbles on a stoic page, belches from the brain — we could write them off as mental sediment or a film to be discarded from the fishbowl mind!

But no! I vow to write them in to the Book of Life, they are not simply after-thoughts from a long, tired day. I think they might be the stuff life is made of (shhh) and not surprisingly, they’re very unreliable ‘commodities’. The world likes salty snack-thoughts packaged up for selling but these are the kind that seep out their wisdom as you suck on them like throat lozenges.
So you’ll need patience, pack that for your trip into the unknown.

Watercolour by me

If I don’t birth these nudges from the subconscious quickly into being, are they destined to be forgotten in the non-discriminate and all-consuming nature of time? They feel so ripe for knowing. So fully ‘now’ and worthy of my attention. But I get the feeling, they don’t like to be gripped at. I think they want to be held like a newborn. When the world — both online and offline — is at its loudest, perhaps there is no better time to go inward, searching carefully for the quiet voices, the little cosmic winks, the baby hairs of some furry soul catching in the light of dawn, listening for the echo of grievances that had to be shelved throughout the year in order to keep moving forward (mind says : MUST KEEP MOVING FORWARD).

But the shelf I’ve cluttered with all my grief junk is in need of some attention. Soon there won’t be room for another trinket. Maybe it’s time to make an altar with all the trinkets. All the things I vowed to ‘deal with later’. What does the light of a candle do to the harsh edges of objects I’ve collected? What if I placed all the trinkets around a tea-light candle like little wise men gathered around an infant in a manger they were led to by the stars? And what if I said they could all share in the warmth of that fire until the candle burned out and we would listen and talk and laugh and cry and get to all the conversations we should have had years ago but instead relegated to the ‘maybe later pile’? And maybe then we would cry out in gratitude to the subconscious. Not scoff at her like she’s a silly kid who still believes in the kinds of magic we’d given up but instead say, “thank GOD you were keep tracking of all this, I knew I could count on you to lovingly bring this to my awareness in your abstract ways until I listened!”

And perhaps it’s a good thing she was so absurd in her prodding (a random mantra that came to you in the shower? a crass cartoon sketch in a notebook with an unexpectedly profound phrase pouring out of a lazy speech bubble? a half-remembered dream where you had two tails and all your ex-boyfriends were actually one person and you were stuck inside a banana trifle for gods sake?) She is wise enough to bamboozle me, because I won’t pay attention otherwise.

I spoke to one of my favourite songwriters Mitski about my love of the word ‘bamboozled’ on Episode 1 of Playing With Fire (my podcast on the topic of Transcendence - my endless fascination). I think it’s a necessary strategy to disengage the everyday faculties of understanding and urge us to open up the parts of us that speak in the language of imagination, mystery and paradox. No wonder the mystics and authors of sacred scriptures seem a bit off their rocket upon first reading. I’m not sure they were really writing this stuff for the mind in the first place (though I am a solid advocate for applying intellectual discernment to religious texts!) It seems however, that most sacred text and poetry invites us to read it through a different lens of awareness. A heart awareness. The heart that can stomach a certain paradox that the mind cant. I have a hunch, that I am being called into awakening these kinds of faculties in this season. That call is a little threatening to my mind. She doesn’t know quite what to do with it. The ground is a little shaky, I keep slipping on abrupt indentations in the dirt, but I feel compelled to take my shoes off. It feels holy here.

I’ve loved David Whyte’s poetry and writing for a long time but I wasn’t expecting him to summarize this tension between the different inner faculties so perfectly when I opened a recent Substack post of his…. but look at that, he did it.

Our strategic minds are desperately afraid of approaching something which it cannot name. This one clear path, this trajectory is both an object of intellectual fascination by our strategic minds, but that same organizing mind is also slightly terrified of the fact that it's going to be suborned and subverted by whatever revelation occurs in the physical arrival experienced in that trajectory. The strategic mind’s job from an evolutionary point of view is to keep us safe and not get involved with enterprises that put us at risk – that's why it's very good at undermining our more moveable sense of self, our sense of courage.

Ah yes, the courage – it’s the first hunk of meat to hit the chopping block of self-preservation! That slippery ‘moveable sense of self’. The type that could jump into the abyss when you’re not looking. That slightly dangerous ambition to push onward in the face of obscurity. The rational mind will happily hack away at that wilder part of us to keep us safe. And you know what? Bless her.

As the year winds down, you too may feel a call to go inward. Reflect or deflect. They’re both valid, and they both warrant a seat around the tea-light candle with the other cast-aside trinkets. I want to do the first (reflect) but I see where my mind would rather retreat into old habits and approach this coming season with a kind of passivity, letting time roll out like an unavoidable oil spill in some great sea of possible growth. Growth is scary and doing it in front of people is scarier still. But it’s the way I want to be witnessed : In Process. Not : At Arrival. Because otherwise, I might be waiting forever to be seen.

There is always a temptation to numb. And yet, the greatest protest to this lies in my thumb, pushed to the surface of a pen, met with an index finger!

I’ve been enjoying a writer here on Substack called Franco Amati. He posts poetry with short reflections on what each of the poems are about in a footnote he calls ‘Garbage Notes’ appealing nicely to my self-deprecating Kiwi sense of humour. I randomly commented on a recent post of his after feeling really seen when he spoke about his writing as ‘chipping away at the pretense and getting to what really matters to each human being, each individual person who dares to tackle the page.’

A clue, yes. The hesitation is likely a sign that we are coming upon a land not yet travelled. You brought a backpack full of practical tools that worked for all types of problem-solving last time, but sorry, none of that will do. Here comes the invitation to open new departments of perception. And yes, it’s scary! Because there’s no road map, except the one you start jotting down, if you dare.

I think of my writing here on Substack as a way to process the inevitable ebbs and flows, joys and disappointments, conscious and subconscious critters that (if given the time and space) become cherished characters in the Creative Life. Is there any other kind of life but the creative one anyway? All we do is create, with every little choice we make. I don’t want to whisk away the moments when my subconscious attempts to lure me into a deeper discovering. I want to have the courage to tell Strategic Mind I’ll be back but for now I’ve got to go dancing! With the trinkets!

Here’s a final trinket from the subconscious I’ll finish with. I wrote it down on a napkin this past week and thought nothing of it, till I looked again. A series of words that feel rather ordinary on the surface, but with a little attention, become quite revelatory.

It occurred to me that we often say this phrase to one another (I remember it most from childhood) with a cautionary tone :

“Watch where you’re going”

Be careful, look twice, take a vigilant posture, look out for threat. Right?

Sure, that’s one way of digesting the phrase.

But what if we slow it down?

“Watch… where you are going….”

Imagine it said in a very nurturing voice, from someone who has passed away perhaps and maybe they see everything now (and even emanate from everything now too) but they no longer experience ‘time’ like we do. So tenderly, they ask us to watch the path to where it is we are going. Because it probably won’t look like this ever again!

So take a good look. And if some foreign song sings to you from the side-street and you don’t understand it but it feels like a memory or an echo from the future, stop a while, light a candle. Build an altar for that subconscious thought to rest and be lovingly examined like a precious crystal you’re seeing for the first time. She’s not asking for analysis with hopes of being perfectly understood, she’s inviting you to see her…. with the eyes of the heart.

“Acknowledging and approaching what is hidden in ourselves is one of the most powerful things we can do. That's how we know it's the path we are supposed to be on; there is the feeling of being in the right place, but this place is not a solid, arrived platform – it's not static. It is a conversation between this deep sense of origin inside us and from which emanates the trajectory that is going to take us beyond ourselves”

-David Whyte

Here’s to the paths that lead us out into the land we’ll know by its seriousness (thanks for saying what we were all thinking, Rilke) and to little altars made for trinkets of the subconscious….

Till next time,

Ps. One of my best friends shared with me a practise she’s employed during this season, a means of holding some of the frenzied loose ends of her life with a ritual. This way she gives them a little attention, but they don’t take over and suck energy from Strategic Mind who, hard-working as she is, simply can’t solve these ones. She built an altar out of little found objects, a mosaic of sorts, all the broken pieces catch the glow when the candle is lit. She lights a candle, aligns it with a prayer, and falls asleep to the shadowy flickering that is gone by the morning. A ceremony of relinquishing, letting go but also paying some kind notice to the unsolvable parts of life. Or as Buechner puts it, living patiently with the ‘not yet’.

We’re not discarding you, sweet unresolved questions and loose ends, we’re lifting you up with the smoke from a little flame and honouring the way you hover until you’re ready to ground.