It’s been 12 hours of sleeping when I emerge into daytime from a deep dream in which I was trying to open a bicycle lock that just wouldn’t budge, and visited empty houses under construction that hadn’t been rented out for ages.
“Just let me live here!” I call out, still frustratingly fidgeting with the lock, “I can make this place look great and would love to turn it into a home, it has so much potential!”
“No, no, no,” the old neighbors push me out the door, “the renting agency doesn’t allow that, so it’ll probably just remain vacant for another decade.”
My eyes slowly open to perceive a daylight that’s still too bright for my brain. I pull the covers over my head and notice the pungent odor of sweat and flu and the exorcism of a viral invader. I smell like an animal, I think to myself. My first instinct is to recoil in shame. Uncover the sweat drenched blanket to let some air in. But I don’t have the energy, so instead rest in this faunal cavern for a while longer: I am an animal. This is my animal body working overtime to keep me alive. I haven’t eaten for days. Last week I thought: I feel a little oversaturated, I should really do a fast… Then Tuesday morning I yelled through the window at my housemate who asked how I was doing: “I’m semi-ok, not a hundred percent… sometimes I just wish for a real fever, you know? Just to just get it over with already!” She yells back: “Fevers are really good to reset your system!” If only my manifesting skills would work so well for my soul’s deepest desires… Within 6 hours I was projectile vomiting into a bucket with a shaking body that could not warm itself, heart racing, body aching from every possible angle.
I am this animal body. My mind is crystal clear from not eating for days. I have noticed this phenomenon on several occasions when I was unable to eat for stretches of time. The first 24 hours are horrendous. Every vile thought comes floating to the surface of the toxic cesspool of mind. Horrible thoughts. Self-depricating thoughts. And a dread befalls me: After all this journeying and healing in this world, this type of shit still comes up? This is still part of my subconscious? What’s the point of anything then? Exhausted and deflated from that first 24 hour delirium, I involuntarily fall into another 12 hours of sleep cycling.
Upon awaking it’s almost as if that toxic top layer of mind is skimmed off and discarded. That’s what they call a purge. Such that in the 36th hour of forced fasting a clarity is distilled. A hallway I’ve named *Crystal Mind*¹ which I suspect is the reason why so many religious disciplines prescribe fasting as a spiritual practice. It’s not the martyrdom of agony of those first 24 hours. That’s hard work, but that’s not where the gems are located. It’s the space that opens up after the struggle that’s light and luminous and unlike any other state I have experienced in multitudinous mind-bending adventures. Crystal clarity. Sharp focus. Weightlessness. Boundlessness. It’s such a bright cerebral sensation that it makes me question whether our modern overly-processed food is purposefully designed to weigh us down with oversaturated sluggishness. The mind wilts under the influence of simple carbohydrates… That much is obvious.
I stay undercover since there’s no physical energy yet to move. I notice my animal body becoming a planet. The blanket forms a dense and humid atmosphere. This morning dew. A flu dictating the temperature like a sun god. I notice hot salt-water springs bursting from the plains of my skin at random locations. Accumulating momentum and dripping down my body. If I would lay here for long enough these streams would turn into riverbeds, eroding their meandering movement into flesh. Steam rises. Microorganisms grow. I might be fertile soil for a mushroom now. Tectonic plates test each other’s boundaries as they effect one another’s positioning. Left Hip Bone Mountain tilts a few inches to the side as Right Kneecap Ridge demands a little more altitude. A careful and catastrophic dance. Subtle shifts, bombastic upheaval, depending on distance from which it is perceived. And from the very core of this particular planet a deep rumbling can be heard. Low and ancient. An emptiness that recalls the driving force behind this game of existence: Hunger.
I check with my animal planet body if it could receive some nutrition yet. No, not yet. But a hot shower and some sunlight through an open window might be nice. I heed the simple yet strenuous call. Drag myself wobbly like a newborn deer to the waterfalls of clean civility. I let the salt pools transform into sweet water droplets. I let the sun hit the bare skin of my solar plexus and notice how solar plexus, the chakra center for our identity, sits right at the height of stomach. You are what you eat, they say. I am deep space emptiness right now. I hear the neighbors quarreling and the song from their radio goes: “eeeeven aan mijn moeoeoeder vragen.” I feel the sudden urge to take immediate dominion of my own sonic experience. Sound can be invasive, it often gets under my skin. I can help myself with noise canceling melodies of my own choosing. Coma Salv is suggested, a new song by Sega Bodega, and as usual, the algorithm is suspiciously on point. A fever playlist² quickly assembles itself as my fingers move across buttons I know very well.
My mother comes over on her bicycle. I didn’t ask her to. She brings me figs and oranges (that come all the way from her garden a few neighborhoods over. Not the oranges. But the figs. A miracle.) Suddenly 30 years get subtracted from our timeline and I am nine and innocently talking from the pillow cave I made of my couch. I’m simultaneously hyper-aware of my present day reality in which I can’t help but miss being a mother to my daughter who hasn’t found an opportunity to be born as of yet. I haven’t found her a portal. I wonder if that’s selfish. Have I been too picky? Too slow to act? Or are these just the complex parameters of our time, of my life? I’m sorry, I feel like saying. My mother found me a portal in time and space through which to come forth. She helps me remove the soaking wet womb of atmospheric covers from my bed and changes the bedlinnen. Naturally. Thank you, I feel like saying.
I ask my animal planet body: Can you eat something now? Maybe a mandarine. Maybe a fig. I eat both. And then one more mandarine. How are these so good? How does this grow on trees? They are so ridiculously beautiful!
Well. Maybe… Sunlight. Water. The time and space to simply be and grow into themselves. A continuous process of becoming. A giant floral and faunal collaborative dance with the elements.
All the while this unfolds I am writing these lines in the background of my mind. It’s a compulsion I’ve know since I was nine. Trying to remember. And trying to remember my dream, the hues and colors of it. Wondering what it means to wrestle with a lock that simply doesn’t want to open. The frustration of not being able to change systems of bureaucratic decay. Being pushed away. Where am I barking up the wrong doors to open for a sense of belonging? Oh, lord knows I’ve tried. It’s a waste of time.
What is simple and within reach? Mary Oliver writes as a directive³: “You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
I can take care of my animal planet body. One mandarine and one fig. This meandering and inevitable dance with sickness and health. Who knows what’s around the corner. There are portals to be born through, to be born anew, carefully placed in the *everywhere* of each new moment. This field of *now* is fractal. Emerge from the slumber of sluggishness. Clear your mind from clutter. Detoxify. Treat exorcism like a verb. Marry a discipline of regular exorcising. Like sleeping. Like sweating. Like howling. Like dancing. Literally light up your solar plexus. Rest your soft animal body in the fresh blankets of quiet unassuming care. Allow it in. And when a hunger finally rises to the surface, any hunger, rumbling, low and ancient, feed it with what is ripe and ready and nourishing around you.
¹ *Crystal Mind* is a ~very temporary~ waypost on the pilgrimage that is embodiment, it’s not a destination. We need real food to live well and healthy lives!
² That fever playlist: right here.
³ The full Mary Oliver poem: over here.
Yvet Youssef 