Recently I’ve been on a spiritual hiatus, which I would explain or you can just listen to my podcast episode about it (why reiterate when I can shamelessly self-promote?). I’m not sure the hiatus is entirely over because despite the infrequent whispers I hear and the vivid dreams I have, I still chose to go back to school while managing my job and relationship at the same time. It’s pretty loud in here. The thing is I can’t stop seeing all of these spiritual posts on social media and it makes me wonder how I veered so far off from relating to them. I’ve seen communities of mothers reclaiming their identity through the label of witch. I’ve watched videos of people showing what they’ve manifested in their life,  like a significant other or a job, with a sly smirk. I’ve acknowledged tropical astrologers continuing on, like old friends, writing horoscopes for astrological events I no longer care to witness. It feels a lot like the difference I feel seeing stoner posts, where once I felt like a part of a community and now I look at and laugh from the memories. As always, I’m not saying these spiritual communities of the internet are beneath me, just that I’ve moved into a new phase of myself that I don’t necessarily understand yet. Maybe spirituality has solidified as an inherent part of my identity, with or without the connection to like-minded people.

✯

I remember after one of my first shroom trips so many ordinary and reality-based things started to look like other things. One dollar bills, traffic lights, and my nail-bitten hands became indistinguishable. This isn’t a new experience, of course; artifacts from different decades, like music or clothes, take me to that time period in an instant. The lines of separateness just keep getting blurrier. How can you tell apart a certain kind of pen from your favorite shirt? What is the difference between the memories of falling asleep in the passenger seat and scraping your knee as a kid? Personally, I’ve found it harder and harder to find the lines even amidst a spiritual hiatus. This is one reason I’ve found solace in poetry, the world just makes more sense to me in similes and metaphors. In poetry, everything that ever happened or will happen can occur at the same time. It makes me feel like my real self. Which is probably why I wrote this poem recently, sitting in the car while running errands.

✯

the poetry behind astrology

my first love calls the scars on my body constellations, 

and reads them like an astrologer,

she says scorpio on my thighs indicates revelations,

but only if i acknowledge her.

pisces consumes my eyes although i’m an aquarius,

gemini in my hands despite being void of it in my chart,

she explains the stars have a way of misleading the best of us,

looking through a telescope i wouldn’t know where to start.

the vocabulary of poets stays darker than the night sky,

apparently the northern lights belong to the critics,

because no one really believes their beautiful lies,

but we all know the truth is found in the analytics.

not sure why people find more value in the pen of old white men,

or in the astrology of christianity when the math is faulty,

god knows modern humanity could use more ancient zen,

but when the yoga studios go out of style there goes the novelty.

my english teacher tells me my poems don’t have rhythm,

she teaches you can’t do what you want until you’re a legend,

i explain structure is the result of an inconvenient system,

and when i die i never aim to go to poetry heaven.

i’d rather be a sinner with my repetition too loose,

i’d rather find my moon in pisces than in aries,

than write stanzas that put my feelings to good use,

than be angry over sad for the weight it carries.

✯

I wouldn’t say my power is describing my emotions or locating the source of my physical pain, but I can acknowledge my gift of seeing everything all at once. This is probably because my first existential crisis, which started at the crisp age of thirteen, was centered around whether or not my eight-year-old self would be proud of me. For a while in my adolescence, I was under the assumption that I had peaked at eight because of one little viral video I made. In the comments, people claimed that I helped them through their darkest times or that I was the next coming of Christ. Although that certainly shaped the directory of my life passions, it was a lot of power to have at just eight especially when the following years would be filled with teen angst. So when I became that angsty teenager, the ghost of my child self would follow me everywhere I go. In my delusion, she would measure my actions and tell me if she was proud accordingly. Almost every time, I figured she wasn’t. I healed that concern by imagining little Sadie looking up at me in amazement, in awe of my authenticity and evolving coolness. It worked, and yet it left something behind. I could easily time travel to any version of myself, past or future, ever since.

As I got older, I spent more time with future Sadie. I went to her art exhibits, admiring paintings I haven’t started yet. She toured me around her house, showing me her office and her children’s rooms with pride. It powered me through my lowest lows, especially if little Sadie came along for the ride too. The three of us spend time together when we can, drawing maps from here to there and back. It is a power I’ve held through my most reality-based time periods, maybe even more so than when I have the time to daydream with the trees.

There have been times when I purposefully got lost in the woods on a daily basis and times when I’ve been constricted to a homemade schedule so my brain can process the requirement of hard work. I have learned to love both kinds all the same. I’ve talked about this subject before and I’ll likely speak of it again, but it’s not the purpose of writing this.

✯

Explaining to people that sad music makes me sad but happy music makes me much sadder is a common happening. Feeling remorse for my past or present self is easy because the pain was already a part of the experience. It’s feeling present pain for a past joy that hurts more. For the past year, I have exclusively listened to new music I find. Spotify’s weekly New Indie playlist has been my best friend. The playlists I crafted years ago had more in common with my cassette collection; I could listen to them but it would require so much more than just listening. Like rummaging through my miscellaneous items box for the batteries my walkman needs, listening to those old playlists would force me to remember the times when I listened to them most. A requirement that, for the past couple years, was too much work for me.

As of recently, I’ve let them play. This transition has probably been easier as I’ve embraced habits I once tried to work out of my mind, like daydreaming (or manifesting?). I used to spend a majority of my time when I was a teenager daydreaming, mostly about girls, and I can’t dispute the daydreams turning into reality as time went on. Since I have a long-term girlfriend, navigating the reintegration of daydreaming seemed strange. If not girls, then what? I think I’ve figured out, as I allow worlds I will soon write into stories overcome my mind. During this process, I recalled the subject of my daydreams before girls: magic. I would imagine my own magic powers integrated into what I was really seeing, to my teachers’ disappointment. I’m not regretful of my temporary shame towards daydreaming, I know that things come and go as they’re needed. Anyways, like I said before, the resurrection of old perspectives has given me the space to accept the past as it was. So I can play my playlist, “Happy,” from years ago, singing along instead of time traveling.

There are many things we must reclaim as we age, from our bodies to our passions to our past. Maybe this is why I don’t resonate with Instagram posts and YouTube videos explaining things like new moon rituals anymore. All of the magic we practice, no matter how we practice it, is within the spiritual realm. It has no preference between candles and mantras or something as simple as our thoughts. One of my favorite methods is collage art, covering entire pages with smaller, detailed drawings that overwhelms from afar but inspires close up. This is the source of my separation from spiritual communities; I’ve discovered my way of living my truth.

I’ve always known that spiritual beliefs are a highly personal experience. Whenever someone asks me where to begin when embracing the spiritual journey, I explain the individualism required every single time. Subconsciously, I knew this meant that someday my journey would be mine and mine alone. This isn’t a lonely revelation, you know, though I can see why it would seem so. It doesn’t mean my conversations about astrology and my tarot card readings are over. In fact, this is a development I’m proud of. My study of astrology was a series of never-ending conversations; my tarot skills have flourished out of mid-hike questions; my spirituality bloomed from my exciting and embarrassing human experiences alike. These are things that will never end, they’re embedded in my physical, mental, and spiritual coding. The difference is in the reaction to solitude.

It’s been over a year since I’ve had a coffee shop to collect strangers’ charts to read and since I’ve had friends close enough to plan last minute existential crisis conversations with. It’s been a long time of asking myself questions and answering them myself. It was only a couple weeks ago when a thunderstorm developed in my mind, in the form of desperately wanting new friends to talk to. Sunny days in my mind followed soon after, when I embraced the solitude. Looking back, I’ve made a lot more decisions that align with my spiritual journey than possibly any year before. Alone in my journey, it was much quieter than ever before. My good friends might read this and think, “We were just talking about Mercury retrograde a week ago?” which is accurate, but it’s the overarching journey that this remains true for. The true self, undiscoverable by any other, is in the silence. It’s the past Sadie and future Sadie, who can only spend time with me and still be their fullest picture. This is what I attribute my sobriety and romantic and career commitment to. Day after day I have listened to my own thoughts until I knew what they really were, deep beneath the outside noise. 

One of the revelations that saved me as an angsty teenager was that no one could love me as much as I can love myself. Attempting to paint myself perfectly or pose just right for the picture, I was never capable of capturing the beauty I felt so obviously emitted from me. I could never make a crush appreciate the nuances of a perfectly picked playlist. My curated social media feeds could never encompass the true brilliance behind them, which was just me loving what I naturally loved. Only my three selves, in those moments of meeting, could give me all of the love I deserved.

I’ve spent my whole life arguing on behalf of a collectivistic culture, wondering how individualism can even be considered an option. Maybe there is art in growing up in a capitalist society, learning that each person is on their own to survive. It’s possible that this is the lesson that foreshadows my passion of being a teacher.

Here are the moments that will stay with us forever, the version of ourselves that will one day visit us in awe. So if you feel yourself drifting away remember that you’re only getting closer. After all, if you could walk past the sunset you’d arrive at a sunrise.

✯