One of the biggest hurdles I encountered in my early spiritual life was trying to find a way to make it not seem utterly insane. This isn’t to say that that I found a way to make that reliably happen, or that I even think it’s a good idea to attempt to try to force spirituality to lose its edge of madness. (In fact, that sounds like a great set up for a dangerously humbling experience.) No, I had accepted that much of this was always going to sound batshit, especially to people who knew my previous history of fantastical thinking and gullibility. For them I just hoped the proof would be in the pudding of how this set of odd choices actually showed up in positive, tangible ways throughout my life. Instead the concern here was about the much more difficult task of proving to myself that this leap of faith wasn’t completely unhinged.

At this point I’ve had plenty strange experiences that have added up in my heart, but there’s a pivotal one I often think about that showed up in the small, unassuming way that these things often end up doing. This took place in my spiritual starter year, during the infamous first round of clearing the Universe seems to do when you jump into the woo shit. The one where everything under the “housing/job/relationship” trio’s umbrella is scrutinized for how it’s contributing to your path, and if it’s found to not align, it abruptly ends. And so I was homeless, unemployed, and essentially single. I was lucky in the people I knew, though, and there was always a couch or floor I could throw myself onto for the night. But all the same I was self-conscious of my need, and often spent time on the go between places, wandering the local transit system or around the city, and sometimes chilling at a 24 hour Dunkin Donuts and just seeing what experiences came my way.

One of these times I found myself in downtown Boston well before dawn with the vague goal of getting to a pharmacy at some point that morning. And so I wandered. These moments of being able to just experience where I was without distraction were (and still are) some of my favorite times. Turning a corner, I was met with a breathtaking view of the Moon, perfectly framed by two large buildings, the foot bridge between them, and the street below. The city was nearly silent around me and there was no one else around, so I just stood and basked in the beauty of the moment. At that point I had begun learning about Mani, the Norse god of the Moon, and so I smiled up into His glowing face.

Then I started seeing this image in my mind’s eye of Him and His lover Unn, the Norse goddess of the tides. They were reaching towards one another, Him down from sky and Her up from the waves, but neither going past the horizon that separated them. I dug in my bag until I found a pencil, but no paper, so I grabbed a dropped receipt off the side of the road and made a very unimpressive sketch of what I saw. Like the visual version of scribbling down half-formed thoughts. Mani’s beads for counting hung around Him, Unn’s draped over Her, the waves of the ocean reflected the glow of the full moon, and between Their almost touching hands was a very small red orb. The last bit got me squinting. Everything was very logical from what I had learned, except for that red dot in the middle. But I left it and figured it was a problem for future me to worry about.

And when future me did a few more drafts to flesh out the scribbling on the receipt, that red dot refused to leave. Composition-wise it looked unnecessary and even out of place (nothing else seemed interested in being red), but every time I erased it, its absence annoyed me in a weirdly incessant way. I figured it wasn’t that big of a deal, and that me of the even more distant future would figure it out when it came time to start painting. Maybe I could make it a slightly more coordinating color or whatever.

Before that futurer me could make any decisions, though, I ended up taking my teacher to the beach. Every year he and his church ran a ritual for the Norse ocean deities (which includes Unn), but he enjoyed getting to do a solo trip as well to commune in a more personal way. His health keeps him from driving much, though, so we coordinated me getting him and his car out there. We wandered around the boardwalk for a bit and hung out, until eventually I was waiting on the shore as he waded out into the high tide. It was clear by his body language when They started showing up, and he started responding out loud to voices I couldn’t hear and presences I couldn’t see. Then from what he was saying it sounded like the topic of my art had come up, and he went quiet and looked kind of confused. He half-turned to me and asked, “They said to keep the red dot?”

I accepted the message gratefully, and in a much more calm way than I felt. He simply got back to what he was doing for a bit longer while I started slowly internalizing the experience. It was one thing to feel moved by beauty to create art or even to get answers through divination when the topics and context were already thoroughly explained. These were things I could have faith in, but still left a nagging doubt that I was joining in on someone else’s well-meaning delusion at best, if not being outright manipulated at worst. Wouldn’t be the first (or last) time for either. It was something entirely different to get a message like this, sudden and unprompted from a person unsure of what they were even talking about. That one confused sentence was the first bit of reassurance that didn’t rely on taking any sort of “leap”, be it one of faith or even of trust in my own historically shifting perceptions. It simply was, like the sand beneath my feet, the rhythm of the tide on the shore, or that part of my shoulder I didn’t quite get enough sunscreen on.

It’s been over a decade since I painted that image, and I’ve never found out what the red dot meant to Them or if it even mattered much outside this one piece. But you can sure as fuck bet I put it red and center exactly where past me had seen it should go on the back of that littered receipt.

https://www.deviantart.com/littlemonkfish/art/Mani-and-Unn-710387592