Resonance

Writing again, but only if I can feel the hum of alignment

Victim of a screen-based childhood, my curiosity and play was railroaded by programmers’ whims. I didn’t meet my muse until I resonated with the Creek, my Realm of Pseudo Nature.

While I may finally feel comfortable considering myself a writer, the first medium I felt brave enough to speak up in public with was… well, rocks.

The Call to Create

“Why not be utterly changed into fire? / Why not be utterly changed into fire? / Why not be utterly changed into fire? / Why not be utterly changed into fire?”

The King Beetle on the Coconut Estate by mewithoutyou

Stoned enough to find meaning in everything, I named the boulder I had become obsessed with “Texas.” It was huge. The size of a full-grown person gone fetal. Over the summer that I built The Thrones, I rolled Texas through the creek at the rate of about one splashy flop a day.

It’s hard to articulate what commanded me to roll Texas from one resting place to another. Even harder to explain than the powerful and immediate grip of that specific shade-dappled bend in the creek. That bend that I’d worship with enough hard work to manifest The Thrones. A pair of chairs that emerged, like mushrooms, from my imagination. Much vaunted (by me) Flintstones furniture.

The name “Creekmason” was jokingly bestowed on me by my best friend when he got back from his Summer travels. He took in the Spot, the chair shaped rock stacks. He factored in my megalomaniac but kayfabe—as seriously unserious as professional wrestling—pretensions at global influence, then coined a play on the Freemasons.

But back to Texas. At the beginning of each session of creek masonry (before the compound proper noun Creekmason was coined) I’d saunter up to Texas and reach beneath it, trying to find a handhold that wouldn’t result in crushed finger bones if something went wrong.

I’d get into a half squat and rock my chosen boulder back and forth in the ankle deep water, my sneaker-clad feet fully submerged. The gentle current helped wash away the gravel on the creekbed in front of Texas. Eventually I’d manage enough momentum to tip it onto its side into that small ditch. Then I’d heave it over, spraying myself with silty water.

One flop a day.

Probably for a month or more.

I rolled Texas a good forty feet.

Sometimes I’d have to move other rocks out of the way. Smaller ones, obviously, but still enough to make my forearms strain. Sometimes these other rocks made additions to The Thrones. A chair arm. An end table. Other times, I just tossed them.

After a month of struggling with this task and with only a dozen feet left to go, I found a surprising surge of energy.

Out of nowhere, like my muscles were swelling with divine enthusiasm, I found myself almost effortlessly thrusting Texas end over end. Rolling it six or seven times and landing it—so damn perfectly—exactly where I was aiming. As it squeezed into the slot I’d left for it as a bulwark to the downstream Throne against Winter’s rising, raging waters, I was grateful I didn’t have to re-adjust it. Minor changes would have been more challenging than these adrenaline-addled, almost brutish shoves.

My battle with Texas is the kind of creating that I want to get back to. A project I was called to by forces or instincts unknown, that I accomplished at my own pace and was so energized by toward the end that I could have lifted a car off a baby.

Alignment, Fit, Purpose

Texas landed, like so many rocks in that project, perfectly where (it seemed) meant to be. This happened a lot. I often felt like I was finding connections, rather than architecting them.

I’d find myself faced with a strangely shaped hole and I’d confidently wander off, combing the area for only a few minutes before I’d find the exact rock that suited it.

As I said, the Spot itself held some kind of resonance. As I rounded the corner of the creek and saw the gravelly shore, it seemed to glow. The enormous gnarled tree towering above it. The gentle sussurus babbling of the creek through what had to be hundreds of angular, blue-grey rocks, ranging in size between a human’s head and their torso.

Weird that I keep describing things in terms of human bodies, I guess. An adult-gone-fetal-sized boulder. A head-shaped rock. I think I know where the impulse comes from: the place felt like a living thing. Like a room with a person sleeping in it, the way you sometimes hear the fae realm described in fantasy books.

Conscious. Full of intention.

That’s exactly what I want from any creative project: a felt sense of consciousness, a will to resonate with. Instead, I find myself too easily tempted into disharmony. Into dancing, dull and obedient, to the vacuous music of those damned programmers again: to metrics.

A Hungry Ghost with Nothing to Eat but Likes and Shares

“Drink alone and watch tv / you’re expecting harmonies / to tap your tune / with silver spoons / anthem of impending doom”

Do Better by Say Anything

You may recognize this essay as the first piece published on this blog in months. For a half dozen reasons, I’ve felt cut off from the sense of effortless alignment explored above in my more recent creative endeavors. In place of that effortless “knowing” of exactly where the next piece fits, is paralysis.

Anxiety, overwhelm, depression, despair.

There are myriad contributing factors, but a primary one worth addressing is the cycle of addiction inspired by writing for an audience that finds me via a social media algorithm’s curation.

Crushed and secluded in creative absence, I’ve had time to introspect. I’ve realized how much I’ve been measuring my output—Likes, Shares, Views, Comments—instead of vibing on that somatic hum of resonance I felt in the creek that summer.

As I’ve wrestled with whether the journal writing I’ve done in absentia “counts” or “matters” when it isn’t shared, I’ve realized something. The problem is hidden in those words themselves. Something “counts” when it can be measured, as in counting my Likes. It “matters” when it is encoded onto the physical material of silicon.

But what I'm really seeking is something squishier than that. Something metaphysical and ephemeral. Something I have to experience, rather than something that I can simply measure.

The metrics offered by social media are a weak facsimile of the full body experience of resonance that can be achieved when I feel in-tune with my audience. Speaking in front of a crowd, an adept performer will sense when the group grows bored, or angry, or energized, or jovial, and with experience they can adjust their content and delivery accordingly. They can tend to the energy, building and relieving it to achieve their objectives.

Even alone with my laptop, I can sometimes sense the resonance—with an imagined audience, with my muse, or with source—in a sentence or even a single word.

It’s something we feel with our bodies, like the gnosis of a song’s bassline that you only get when sitting on the subwoofer.

A Like is such a vapid substitute for the somatic ping of validation that comes from self-expression that finds an enthusiastic in-person audience. It’s so empty of vibration. To try to sate the human drive for validation with Likes is like drinking salt water and only becoming thirstier.

Even better, it’s like drinking alcohol—“liquid courage”—to tame the social anxiety only to be struck with shame and embarrassment in the “hangxiety” that floods you the next day.

Trying to quench my need for authentic self-expression via Likes leaves me feeling like a Buddhist Hungry Ghost. Those beings with huge ravenous stomachs, but drinking straw sized throats, who eat and eat and eat but can never get satisfied.

There’s a certain pattern to being that thirsty.

The Archetypal Wavelength of Addiction

It’s the same cycle underlying everything my Bipolar brain experiences.

Writing about it feels like my next Texas sized project, and I’m itching to share that. I barely feel able to restrain myself from taking this essay off the rails and ranting… But I will, for now.

Here’s my ubiquitous six-phase “Archetypal Wavelength” pattern as it looks for the addiction-to-external-validation loop.

1. Rising: Increasing creativity, productivity, inspiration, downloads and resonance.

2. Peaking: Basking in the glory of the thing created.

3. Withdrawal: Beginning to feel unsure whether your creation is as good as you thought it was immediately after creating it.

4. Diminishing: Feeling even more intense self-doubt, refreshing Likes and Views looking for a hit of validation.

5. Bottoming out: Despair that can only be remedied with receptivity. At best you attempt to get validation from a specific person you have a genuine relationship with.

6. Restoration: Finally beginning to feel the vibe again. Whether from that trusted person or within you.

And then it starts over with Rising again.

This cycle, like any cycle, operates like a wavelength. You can picture a sine curve that it maps to rising and falling.

But I suspect there’s a way to reduce the suffering I experience while surfing that wave.

Instead of getting lost and being whipped around by the peaks and valleys, what if I could resonate with the whole ride, ups and downs included?

That’s exactly what I was naturally, instinctively doing in the creek. I was riding my waves of energy and inspiration with a sort of Radical Acceptance. By listening to my body rather than counting my Likes, I wasn’t being sucked into empty addiction. I rolled Texas however many flops felt possible that day; it’s very different from writing an essay a week to keep up with the algorithmic demand for endless content.

In listening to my body—resting when I was tired and pushing when I had energy—I built a lasting, vibey hangout for liminal stoners to get weird.

In becoming obsessed with social media metrics—fueled by the addiction prone neurochemistry that I’m stuck with—I provoked my own bipolar disorder toward excruciating mood swings. It was a lot of unneeded suffering.

Going forward, I am committing, instead, to finding ways to gently tend to the vibe in order to nudge myself toward more frequent alignment. It’s possible, after all, to use this very platform to lure Liminal Weirdos into a digital hangout where we can get just as weird as we want.

That’s a resonance I can still feel. Chatting on Discord where the latency between call and response is so much lower. Where you can work through disagreements and find alignment through shared vulnerability.

When it comes to writing, I want to prioritize that space—the Digital Sangha—and the one that exists ephemerally between me and my muse. Without sacrificing resonance with my home-life or temperance in my relationship to the inevitable peaks and valleys of my bipolar experience.

I want to prioritize those things. Not the Forbidden Numbers that pretend they’re all that “counts.”

Re-Sounding Voice

“This is my voice. There are many like it, but this one is mine.”

My Voice by Shane Koyczsan

Anodea Judith, author of Eastern Body, Western Mind, might say “resonance” is exactly the right word for the alignment I can only feel when listening to my body. Whether its in-person Shares at a recovery meeting or the digital rave in the Creekmason Discord, resonance is the right word for a vibe of belonging that you can tangibly feel.

In that book’s exploration of the chakra system’s correspondences with psychosocial stages of development, she identifies the Throat chakra as the point at which a person’s vibration projects into the world. It’s the stage where my vibration blends, meshes, echoes, and bounces off other vibrations.

The Throat chakra is what tells us whether we are receiving harmony or discord as a result of self-expression.

This is a useful metaphor whether Chakras are part of your belief system or not.

The feeling of “resonance,” Judith writes, can be conceptualized as two waves overlapping each other and doubling in height as a result. Many people will recognize this phenomenon as what causes glasses to break when a person sings at just the right pitch or what sets a tuning fork vibrating on its own when you play its note on a nearby piano.

When we resonate with reality—when our ups and downs align with those we encounter—everything seems to go right. These are the days when everything falls into place. When all your decisions and intuitions yield the exact outcomes you’re looking for.

When I was finding those puzzle piece rocks or rolling Texas or even when I simply first came across the Spot and felt its energetic pull, I was in resonance with the Realm of Pseudonature. It was as if the Realm wanted a hang out spot and I was just the vehicle to actualize it.

A Renewed Commitment to Resonance

I’m going to be less involved in the administration of this Substack. I’m not going to follow the prevalent advice on Notes to signal boost my work by feeding the platform an endless, punctual conveyor of long form and short form content.

The temptation is too strong to look at and obsess over the addictive empty calories offered by metrics. Imagine my sour-lemon face as I say the word. An addict remembering rock bottom.

Since the pandemic, I’ve quit cigarettes, alcohol, and scrolling. With each exorcised demon, another whispered, disharmonic voice lifts from my subconscious.

Each of those voices was constantly tempting me.

Not just with urges to stop at 7-eleven and buy a pack, but with instincts to get myself into situations that I’d certainly need to self-medicate my way out of: unnecessary conflicts to excuse leaving to drink, uncomfortable social settings coped with through frequent smoke breaks, or embarrassing sober mistakes that I’d need to use something to distract myself from ruminating over afterward.

Each of my mistakes and faux pas were so much more likely when the little voice of some chemical was given license to hijack my consciousness. Just like the wrong gut bacteria can cause you to crave more sugar, introducing the wrong psychoactive chemical can steer unconscious, automatic instinct in awful directions that I might once have easily mistaken for my own faulty true will.

With my addictions, it was that Rising, Peaking, Withdrawing, Diminishing, Bottoming Out, and Restoration pattern again and again:

Using. Bliss. Come down. Hangover. Depression. Craving. Using….

And similarly, posting with an eye on metrics lets me eat and eat and eat pseudo-validation, but never feel full or satisfied. A Like is meant to simulate or stand in for the experience of vibrational alignment, but it doesn’t do the job well.

I can so quickly become an addict that is always chasing the dragon of “Post with the most Views.” Every article has to top the last. Each like a ping of dopamine. The slow draw on a cigarette or the burn from a shot of tequila.

And just like those vices, the addiction to metrics can whisper sabotage into my ear at any moment. And it will. If it can find ways to get me checking my phone more and more often, because I have a Bipolar addict’s brain, it will shove everything else out of the way—it will stomp on my other priorities—to make it happen.

These voices, these whispers, they’re like other wavelengths that exist in the ecosystem of my consciousness. They bounce off of the wavelength of my True Will and distort it, send it peeling off in self-destructive directions. As I’ve stripped the addictions away, I’ve discovered my own true frequency.

And now that things are quiet enough in here for me to sense my own vibration, all I want to do is gently tend to it to better align it with the things that really matter to me.

My family. Source. My muse. The Creekmasons.

My Digital Sangha.

I want to move slowly. To vibe. To resonate.

To roll massive boulders in accordance with my own inscrutable inspiration.

Not just to investigate the mysterious light and heat, or wax poetic about it, but to be utterly changed into fire.