Haunted by the ghosts of myself, haunted by the ones who did and didn't make it out, the ones who carry the scars of the sexual abuse memories, the one who carry the scars of the abuse abuse memories, the ones who carry the ancestral legacies, the ones who bear the secrets that have been passed down epigenetically and manifest in illness and injury, quote, unquote, accidents, disease, chronic conditions, but that feeling, that thing I could never quite put my finger on in Austin, nostalgia for a thing that never happened, A weird haunting, a sense of presence of something highly personal, something vaguely disturbing but also transcendent,
the Crosshouse dreams in the desert, Stark and vaguely menacing, something that always seemed like it was about to happen and never quite did, mirrored in my own pattern of making it to the finish line and then choking, always on the verge of something always almost making it, gathering all the information, getting all the stuff ready to do the project, or take the step or make the leap, and then blowing it and abandoning everything. It's still happening over and over. I've got so many almost finished projects. The insatiable one keeps consuming because I think that if I can just have a little more, I can push through, and I can finally do it, and I can finally publish, and I can finally complete, and I can finally, finally, finally, but most of the time it finally never happens. It never happens. I never actually get there. I get so close, and then I blow it. I do think I need someone to help me, just to take the first steps, just to do one or two of these myself, just I mean, to do one or two of these with some help, I think then I could do them myself. We were never meant to do this alone. That's the point. The myth of the lone genius, the myth of the mythic creator, lie detector, there's a reason they all descended in madness. Were not meant to even create an isolation. Today is 11 bots, the day of creativity, of the creative genius, of making shit. I'm making something for my community today, of course, Richard batts, on the day of bats, I'm creating a celebration to help him feel honored in the community he made that has helped me awaken and so many others. And I know creativity comes in lots of ways, and I'm gonna let that be enough, but I also want to look at, I mean, I also got some new art stuff, and I want to play with it. And I also have to finish this stupid scene so that my brain power can be freed up.
Even the things I've finished, I don't know how to share. There's plenty of drawings that are done. There's like, all the information there, and I just don't know how to pull it together. And this is the Hyper meta, reflexive feedback, bullshit loop of everything the project is the work. The auto theory is the thing. The thing I'm documenting is the thing I'm sharing. This is trauma memories. This is sexual abuse memories. This is my creativity. It's all there. The information is all there. I just don't know how to put it together, and I need someone to help me. And I don't think that's a cop out anymore. I think that's a reality. And I mean, this is my whole theory now, is like, the way we heal is with assistance, and like, maybe I can do it by myself, with chat, GPT and plans, but I want a human to walk through it with me. And maybe it is the dead and the ancestors, and maybe it is the past parts of ourself. I mean, it's all of us alone together, but the material matters. I think we also need people who are still in bodies to help us remember how to be in our body. I don't know. Do we? Though that's that's a question. It's a research question. It's a question for life, because they all keep dying,
drop the body, dissolve the body. Salva coagula, my stomach hurts. I feel sick. I just drank my cacao, and it tasted good and it seemed nourishing, but now my stomach hurts. I
have we finally hit our limit? There's something very specifically about cacao she is showing us.
I don't know. She's interdimensional, she's quantum, she's a portal. And
there's something about her. In MDMA, they're activating the pleasure hormone. It's like the only time our body has experienced pleasure safely may be used with these substances, which maybe even they're not safe. You know, we take them to extreme places.
I don't know. But what I was trying to describe in the beginning that that presence, that feeling, it's being haunted by yourself, and very clearly, part of my work here is to bring the dead into everything. And ifs is about retrieving the dead parts of yourself, not just the ones who made it, who are frozen, but the ones who didn't.
And that's what the dead ancestors are here to help us with. Well, that's I'm getting that very clearly right now. The dead teachers are here to help us retrieve the dead parts itself. Of course, they're the only psycho ponds who can go all the way there. So it's like I'm getting an image of meeting each other halfway across the bridge over the river sticks. The dead teachers are walking our dead selves to the bridge. This is beautiful. This is what I'm going to draw with my new art supplies, and they're handing them over to the realm of the living. And the realm of the living were handing over the parts of us that did survive, that want to come home to the realm of the dead, because it's actually beautiful there, because here's a fragment that came in in a journey that now feels like it makes sense, because the Bardo is awesome. The Bardo is awesome. It's the liminal realm. It's the realm of imagination
where we can make anything happen. So what if we bring the unseen, unheard children who are part of this constellative self that's still living,
and we let them go play in the land of the dead, and bring those from the land of the dead who's been stuck in limbo, and we let them run around in the fields, in the Elysian Fields for a while. Or maybe it's just about bringing everyone to a place in the neutral middle, the Aqua ball, the Twilight place, the place that isn't here and isn't there, but is a little bit of everything, bringing everyone to the liminal space, which is the ceremony, which is the altar. That's what it is we bring everyone to the liminal space, where we all can access it, the dead and the living.
That's what it is. The altar conjures it. The ceremony holds it. The calendar guides it. We learn how to navigate it, but we got to bring our dead quantum cells there. There's
got to be a name for this phenomenon beyond ontology, when you're hunting yourself, and that feeling of almost nostalgia, of heartbreaking longing, the part that makes you want to drink until you fall down, the part that makes your heart rate open when you hear a certain song and you don't quite know why, the part that's never satisfied. Yeah, there's something to this, the part that's never satisfied as a part that died. I think maybe that's what it is. It wants to come back and it can't. We need to help that part make peace with its liminal space. I
The pleasure becomes pain, the thing that satiates you makes you sick, vice versa, the pleasure feels icky when you're told that this is what sex is. What does that do to you?
It's what my mom told me growing up. Every time we'd see it on TV, she'd say, You icky,
and meanwhile, she's carrying that legacy from her family touching her. Meanwhile, you've got the Catholic shame. You've got whatever happened with my uncle and my dad. Meanwhile, we've got repressed homophobia all around transness, not allowed to even come out, called cross dressing and shut down Bugs Bunny, what's opera? Dog? Kill the wabbit. Kill our urges. Kill the morphic habits that are trying to resurge because they're normal. Like queerness is a morphic habit too. Transness is a morphic habit too. It's just the labeling, it's just the interpretation, it's the contextualization. I mean, this is part of the same, too. Archeologists, old white guys interpreting things from 8000 years ago as if anything about our society is even remotely the same. Now you
how could we even pretend to assume that things would have been like? We have no frame of reference. We don't know what people called themselves. We don't know what their customs were like. We don't know what their worldview was like. The closest thing we have is the living memory of the indigenous people descended from them, because they do pass those things down. Collectively, they pass it down through acting, theater, through the bodies, remembering, because we can't talk about these things in the same way because language fails us, words create reality. What words did they use? Those languages aren't even around anymore, but we get fragments. I mean, the way to really understand would be to study Quechua. Would be to study the old Maya dialects. It's to look at the Codex, the images that communicate more than words can. It's to look at the theater the Regan allce, the actions that bring to life what can't be spoken. This is Astro drama too. This is improv as healing. This is theater as remembering. The body can act it out and the words fail us. This is archetypal consciousness. This is the planet speaking through us. They're speaking through me right now. I'm just staring off into the distance, receiving. I'm not even here right now. I'm Holly, I'm Riordan, I'm no one. I'm a hollow bone. I'm just a vessel, I'm just a radio dial. I'm just a lightning rod. I'm just receiving what's coming through me from outside. And it feels good. You know, it feels nice. It feels good to get out of the way for a while. So who's the insatiable one? Who's the one who doesn't want to see the bottom of their cup? Who's the one that wants more before they even have their first sip. It's the one who never learned what pleasure is. It's the one who never learned what safety is. It's the one who learned they had to have protection that things were going to be taken away at any second. It's the Irish legacy of scarcity and suffering. It's the kind that says art has to be painful and work has to hurt. It's the kind that says you don't get to be free. It's the kind that did have to operate in some sort of chattel slavery. There is a shared legacy between Irish and black people like Michaela talked about
not the same thing, but it's a similar flavor. We've all been exploited for our labor. We've all been exploited for our creativity. And there's so many Irish writers and artists and playwrights and poets who like I wonder what more they could have been if they weren't always drinking.
The Irish people stay small, and they're stuck on this little island. The legacy is the Tuatha teden and the people of the light, the people who lit the fires on top of hills and the line things with solar activations.
The place is so small, the mindset stayed so limited, big dreams, big lofty goals, but the Irish never even built temples. They burrowed down in holes. They have mounds, they have tunnels. They're mycelial, but I never even made it above the surface. Like, these are my people, the ones who didn't even get to build the temples. Something about, like, maybe we gave up before we even got there. I think that's also part of the Irish legacy is just giving up.
I don't know.
Nobody sees other civilizations of temples to show for it. What do we got? A bunch of mounds? It's kind of funny.
It will never be enough to fill your cup. When you're dead, you don't even have a stomach. The Hungry Ghost is insatiable because they don't really have a body.
So how do you bring the dead parts home? Tell them they're ghosts, but it's okay. How do we fear death so that we can really live, but also welcome the dead into the realm of the living?
Sure we don't know when we need a healthy humility, but, but they are here, and they are speaking. I
I wonder what I'll call this phenomenon. Okay, now that's making it go to thing. What is the name of this phenomenon that I am simply experiencing? Not the first one too, not the last one too. What does this phenomenon want to be called, where you're haunting yourself, the metacognition of quantum death? I don't know. I really hate academic speak, that reflexive thesis thing that my advisor shared with me, talking about the thing, talking about the at a certain point, it's just masturbation. I don't want to coach it, couch it, cover it in over the academic language, but it's got to have a fun name. May not try to make something up, but simply receive what is it called when you're haunted by yourself? Someone's got to have already figured this out. I
like, maybe that's the thing I was always looking out the bus window at, you know, the thing I'm always longing for that can never be filled. It's a part of me that's already dead. I'm trying to reach out, but I'm not dead yet, and there are these quantum selves that are stuck and frozen. This body could still experience pleasure. This body could still be in the land of the living, but it's halfway out.
I there's a key in the part that feels like pleasure, feeling like pain, wanting to hit myself, wanting to hurt myself when it starts, feeling pleasurable, wanting to cover myself up and run away from it.
Someone did something to me. I think that has to be acknowledged, and I've told myself that, but maybe I didn't believe it,
and maybe part of me still doesn't believe it, and maybe part of it is still my own skeptic. Something happened. I just don't know what it is, and that's the cry of the ghost, isn't it? They don't remember how they got there. It's the experience I had in that liminal hospital room in Austin. Mean, that was death. I didn't know how I got there. Nobody would tell me, and they just kept drugging me over and over, and I went back to sleep, and I'd wake up and I'd scream, and no one could hear me, and I saw the world going on outside without me, and I wanted so desperately to get back into it, and I sat there for hours just watching them do their normal lives, eating snacks and talking on the phone and being bored. And that moment, I would have done anything to be bored, eating Doritos again, and I couldn't, because I was trapped in the realm of the dead with a pane of glass only separating me from them. I could see them, I could hear them, I could almost touch them, but I couldn't rejoin them. That's what death is for the ghost, it hasn't integrated. That's what death is. So can we welcome them in? Can we break that glass window. Can we break that barrier that seems to separate us from the dead? Because I think they used to. I think that's what the funeral feast is. I think that's what the ancient cultures know. The barrier is permeable like maybe we don't have to have the ghosts on the outside looking in, and maybe we don't have to have this sense of bread and fear and longing that we can't quite place. Like, can we just break down the barrier and meet us, meet each other in the liminal place? I think that's what's missing Ayahuasca is the vine of the dead. There's a reason she's calling me back now.
The vine of the dead is beautiful. People feared in this culture, even the hippies, like in Ireland, hunting to the herbalist who seemed so dipped in and then I started talking about the darkness, and she was like, Oh, I'm out. No, there's nothing scary about the darkness. Is where the magic happens. Is for the Greek and Roman ruins pop up in the middle of your neighborhood at 2am when you're on MDMA walking around. It's also when the shadow people come out. But maybe they're not scary. Maybe if we just knew how to engage them again, like, maybe if we could just fucking talk to the Mothman, he wouldn't be frightening. Maybe he'd just be like, Yo, dude, there's a loose cable on that bridge. Someone should fix it. You know, maybe that's all it is. I think we're always trying to help no matter what. I think we're trying to help ourselves. I think we're trying to help each other. The problem is just that we don't know how to communicate. It. Cacao is a plant of the dead. She only blooms at night in darkness, pollinated by a little bug, a Midge. That's how this big, beautiful planet flowers and humans learned how to unlock the dark secrets of dark mysteries by taking the bright, fruity pulp and fermenting it and roasting it, drying it, doing all these labor intensive processes that they never would have known about, like there's no way a human would know to do that Unless someone was communicating it from beyond
divine guidance.
I mean, it is almost by killing the seeds, right? You roast them, you dry them, ferment them, you let them rot, and then they become the most intoxicating product you could ever imagine one that topples empires like destroys lives? You know, one that people are willing to kill and die for, one that will that people are willing to enslave each other for. They don't do that for the fruity pulp. They do it for the rotten darkness, the transformed product, because after the death, comes something more complex and beautiful than you could ever imagine.
But we have to do these same processes with intention, with care, with grace. We can't just go in and kill everyone, mow everything down and expect it to turn into cacao on its own. You know, no that process has to be guided and held gently and done carefully and respectfully in every part, if the chain needs to be handled beautifully, willingly, tenderly. We have to go back in carefully to retrieve these selves. We can't just barge into the realm of the dead without knowing what we're doing. Then they'll freak out, and they'll do things that scare us and we'll do things that scare them. You know, it'll be a fucking mess.
And we can't just rip open these portals to parts of self and memories dead things, whether they're us or others like we can't just barge in. I it or it does leave us vulnerable. It does leave us worse off than before. It does leave us unsafe. People need to know how to hold this space, and this is why I need to help integrate, facilitate, prepare our communities need this. They need care. We've lost the old ways. Need them to remember. We need to go back and experience the medicine in their lands from the people who started the traditions. And we need to bring our own syncretic knowledge, because they don't have the awareness of what it means to be trans or queer in today's environment, like they don't. The Shipibo shared their medicine traditions with us, but they don't know what it means to be queer in an urban environment in the 21st century, like they don't. So we have to meet each other in the middle. We have to have mutual dialogs for understanding like we can't also say that the old ways are so sacred that nobody can be taught anything. You know.
What is it called when you haunt yourself, you can't quite shake that feeling that there's something that you haven't done you can't quite get all the way to the finish line.
You kind of always feel like you were meant to be somewhere else. You are always sitting in the bus staring out the window longingly, no matter what's happening. When you're haunted by the ghosts of yourself.
There are the vines of the dead, the vines to the soul that we follow, the plants, the trees that we climb to go home. I have goose bumps right now. So there's something very true about that, Ayahuasca, the vine of the souls, the pine, the mushroom that lifts my car easily with it. I have goose bumps all over my body, and then you take a cow. These are mechanisms of remembering, but also the dance and the theater and the acting and the journaling and the art. It's all part of it. I just don't know how to stitch all these quantum threads together.
This is the myth of fuckedness of it all. How do I share about the sharing? This is important, but when I'm stuck in my own process, that's exactly what I'm describing. How do I break that loop? I loop.
