Unusually scheduled programming

I'm back! But with something a little out of the usual themes of this Substack.

Hello friends! I’ve been working on a spiritual triptych since April, and I would love to share it here! I’ll be posting it elsewhere, but this is where I have the largest following. This entry has very little to do with dating and is very off theme of QCB, but I like it and I want to post it here. This is part one of a the entire triptych, which is called “the three times i heard god.” (I’m not getting all fundamental, I promise.) I’ve been feeling at a distance from my spirituality this month, so I wanted to revisit it to pull me back. Anyways, enjoy!

I’ve always been a spiritually attuned person. From an early age, I was fascinated by the esoteric and the occult. I found the Bible stories told to me each day in Kindergarten to be fraught with illogic, frustrating loopholes that conjured up more uncertainty than faith. The horoscopes that my mother read aloud from the Sunday paper, however, replenished my comfort. Knowing that a pattern of stars in the sky connected to my birth were dictating my path in life instilled me with a sense of ease and peace. You can’t truly predict anything in this life, but astrology extended to me an olive branch that said, “but we can help you make some sense of it.”

Other forms of spirituality emerged as glowing lanterns along the darkened path of my awakening. Reincarnation, the spirit world, mediums, divination, witchcraft– all points of light that guided me away from the furrowed brow of Father God, the one who I cowered in fear from, the one who brought the great floods and turned women into pillars of salt for being sentimental. In my alternative practices, there was no denying an all-powerful Oneness. This always frayed me. I had sewn my belief into multiple pockets that all emptied out into one immense bank of the Divine. A divine I knew was God, but I was reluctant to call it that. The word God had its aged, sour connotations to me. It conjured up a feeling of oppression. A hardness. An unbreakable barrier. A bleak mirror of lead.

In recent years, I’ve been trying to repair my relationship with God. When removing gender from it didn’t work, I’ve tried to make her female. I’ve tried to minimize its infinite size and compartmentalize into deities, planets, and elements. I’ve gotten curious about Islam. I’ve gotten curious about Christianity again. I’ve called out in despair, in confusion, and in sorrow, and I’ve never received a surefire response. Immediately, that is.

In the last two years, God has announced Its presence to me three times. Sometimes soft, like breath on the back of my neck. Occasionally loud, like a thunderclap ripping me from sleep. But always clear and close– a bell rung at the base of my brain, the sound vibrating through every bone and tendon in my being. Listen. Here. See? Out of the blue, God has reminded me that Oneness is not bleak. Rather than an impenetrable shield in the sky, It is an immense quilt of every color thread. I am a stitch, and I am the thread, and I am the quilt, too. And God is a stitch in my quilt, like I am in Its.

The Butterfly’s Eyes

The first time God called out to me, reminded me that I did not exist in a vacuum, it was 2023 and I was in Japan. I was nearing the end of my two week solo trip, and spending my final three days in Tokyo. It was my last weekend there, in this land that I had dreamt of for a decade, and I was reeling from the striking extremes of the country, the culture, and my unfiltered reaction to finally being there. White/Western tourists blather on and on about the immense opposites that are present in Japanese culture; political conservatism but a general acceptance of human sexuality and nudity; kawaii culture emerging after a brutal empire’s regime; incredible hospitality and longstanding xenophobia. This white/Western tourist was no different– I was stunned by the coexistence of these odds, while barely scratching the surface.

I was fortunate to have a Japanese colleague who sent me off with plenty of helpful phrases. A professor at my work who frequently visited Japan even handwrote me directions on how to get from the train station to my hotel. My editor at the (now out of print) Chicago Gazette had a friend who ex-patted to Kyoto, where he now taught English, and he even agreed to meet with me for dinner.

With me on the trip, I took my roommate’s camping backpack, a travel skincare set gifted from my friend, and a sweater from my mother. I was armed to the teeth with the wisdom, guidance, and material support of those who cared about me. And still, as expected, after two weeks on the other side of the globe, I was terribly lonely. My Japanese language skills could get me dinner and the attention of a train attendant, but sadly could not carry me into a meaningful conversation. My English often fell on the selectively-deaf ears of other Americans who didn’t want to be associated with a clueless, wet-eyed tourist eager to jaw in a sharp Midwestern cadence. So, I drifted from place to place without real conversation, but with music in my headphones and my incessant internal monologue that I was growing wary of.

It was a Friday in early December, and I started my day at a hair salon in Shibuya for a blowout. The shampoos in Japan were quite rough on my hair, and when I brushed it, it crunched like straw. I found a salon that specialized in “foreigner hair,” and was delighted by the result. Feeling glossy like a fresh-brushed horse, I eventually ended up on the north side of the city, near Sendagi. I had marked the Tokyo Fabre Insect Museum on my “to-do” list for my first leg in Tokyo, but it had been closed due to a bank holiday. When I did finally arrive, I was surprised to find it was located on an L-shaped residential street in a two story, pale yellow home.

Inside, it was close quarters. A kind lady with grey hair and deep crows feet around the eyes handed me a pamphlet in English. Crammed upon every wall and surface, in mounted frames and standing glass cases, were the otherworldly bodies of creatures that triggered tingles of fear in the ancient structures of my brain. A regal, horned beetle. A massive praying mantis. Armies of petrified hornets, wasps, and honeybees, perpetually aloft.

Several children crowded around a table. The disembodied legs and exoskeletons of beetles were out in the open, ready to be played with. I felt a bit silly hovering over the children, who stepped aside and let me have a turn, at what was obviously an exhibit designed for kids. The legs were black, hollow and hard, like polished wood. The claws were edged with sharp, prickly thorns. I explored the rest of the museum, quickly becoming overwhelmed by the displays. Insects from every corner of the earth, grotesquely large and impossibly small, met me at every turn. Fatigued, I emerged in the butterfly corridor.

I had been carrying a lot with me on the trip, emotionally. I had always wanted to go to Japan with a significant other, so I was a bit sore about the whole solo-travel thing. Three months before the trip, a relationship had reached the end of a slow and torturous death. From my acute desire to heal, I visited a shrine in Kyoto for heartbreak and break ups. There, under the shade of autumn-tinged maple branches, a solemn line of girls waited, some in groups but most alone, to crawl under a stone arch, a symbolic gateway towards closure and release. The arch, decorated in fluttering rectangular papers, almost resembles a shaggy white sheepdog.

While you wait in line, you are given a strip of paper to write what you are releasing. You paste the paper on top of the hundreds of other strips and bow to the arch, then crawl through it, bow again, and return. After my turn was over, I took an omikuji, or a small paper with one’s fortune. In Tokyo’s Asakusa shrine, my first shrine visit, I had pulled a lucky fortune– classified as a small blessing, or shou-kichi. But in Kyoto, the fortune I pulled was of the “curse” class. Google Translate translated the word kyou into the word evil. My heart sank as the rest of the characters transformed into English.

“Disasters can occur while traveling.”

Superstitious and terrified of flying, I carried the weight of this bad omen from Kyoto and back to Tokyo. Even though I tied my bad fortune to the temple gate, and learned that priests would collect it and burn it and pray over it, I was convinced that I would die in a terrible accident somewhere between Russia and Alaska on the flight home. As my time in Japan ticked away, I was feeling existential and helpless. I didn’t want to talk to anyone about it, lest I manifest it into reality. As the afternoon sun expanded in the sky, growing large and lethargic at the end of the day, I was frayed with nerves about being one hour, minute, and second closer to my kyou.

I stopped in front of a frame of Blue Morpho butterflies, pinned flat to cream colored canvas. Six specimens were displayed in two lines, one column showing off the shimmering blue hue of the wing’s interior. I was dazzled by the iridescent green-blue, and the way that the light played upon it. But, the rougher, earthen, camouflaged underside of the wings brought me even more pause.

Growing up in Catholic school, we received a lesson about loving other people unconditionally. A “it doesn’t matter what people look like on the outside, it’s what’s on the inside that counts” kind of lesson. The butterfly’s “ugly” wings would open up to reveal the ethereal blue beauty of the inside if you studied it long enough. I always associated the species with this lesson.

Each of the pinned specimen’s exterior patterns had multiple sets of eyes. The eyes resemble an owl’s eyes, or some other large bird of prey, and are obviously there to fend off predators and extend the butterfly’s post-cocoon life as long as possible. It drew closer to the exhibit and noticed that every single eye had a unique point of white light, a small bright freckle on backs that they’d never see. It dawned on me then, how much God wanted them to live.

I was struck still by the realization. A hush fell over my body and mind. Almost as if a spotlight was cast upon me, I was enclosed in a ring of warmth. How could I succumb to the kyou, I wondered, if God puts this amount of effort into the smallest details of a creature’s survival?

I left the museum in a calm, reverent silence. I knew, deep in my heart, that I would be untouched by the kyou. I made it home safely, several days later.

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Thank you for reading <3 I’ll post the other two pieces in coming weeks.

Love to you all, and Free Palestine Forever.

QCB