my spiritual friends are brave. they are willing to plunge into the depths of consciousness, the places that none of my other friends dare tread. do you understand that both heaven and hell are contained within you? my spiritual friends do, because they went there willingly, time and time again.
my spiritual friends are finicky. they are very sensitive to sounds and smells. they are bothered by loud parties just like I am, aware of the way the loudspeakers’ vibrations burn into their inner ear. they are not into alcohol as much, and they don’t do drugs casually, only with a proper air of respect and sacredness.
my spiritual friends are weak. they don’t “toughen up” like my other friends do. they don’t just push through the unpleasant. they are more willing to walk away. my spiritual friends make a habit of escaping.
my spiritual friends are geniuses. they are the most ambitious people I know. they don’t settle for the status quo. why the hell should we settle for ordinary material pleasures, socially sanctioned successes? they are willing to let go of everything.
my spiritual friends are unlike my ordinary friends, the ones who compartmentalize, who put the unacknowledged pieces of their psyche in a drawer behind a closed door, not to be touched until decades later. not to be touched until a midlife crisis or psychosis in their sixties. my spiritual friends open the pandora’s box today and let it all spill out in the open, orderliness be damned.
my spiritual friends are fuckups. how could you not be? they have either fucked up life or life has fucked them up. ordinary people just go on vacations; me and my spiritual friends go on retreats. my spiritual friends and I all had the moment when the veneer of our personality began to show cracks, and we realized that it would not work to try to tape it back together again. so we let it all fall to the floor and shatter, and then we began the painstaking process of rebuilding the house of self, step by step, this time with a more rooted foundation.
I look at my spiritual friends and I see my own shadow. all the ways I’ve slowed down and fallen behind and not been as functional as I should be, as functional as my ordinary friends.
I look at my spiritual friends and I see my own brilliance. I see people who care so much that it hurts. I see people who opened their heart and let the world burn them, and dared to open their heart further after that. people who answered the call to something greater, who looked past the drama of winning and losing and asked what more there might be.
sometimes I look at my ordinary friends and I feel jealous, of how simple their life seems to be, how their day-to-day is not so heavy and disorienting as it is to me. other times, I look at them and think, man they are missing out on the greatest show of all time.
when I look at my ordinary friends I try to think of them as not so different from me. maybe they are further ahead than me or maybe they are very far behind. sometimes I look at my spiritual friends and think we are all confused, and other times I think we have figured it out better than anyone else on earth.
I look at my spiritual friends and I thank them for keeping me company.
thanks to grant for feedback on drafts.