Hi! I’m Lex Orgera, and this is the Finding Spirit: Feeding the Ethereal Self column, where I discuss nature + culture through the lens of herbalism, literature, art, ecology, and more!
Finding Spirit
I’m toying with the idea of writing a small series of essays about finding spirit outside of God or religion. Ways I’ve found to worship without an object of worship. I guess the first question is what the heck is spirit? I’ll write more about this because there’s lots to unpack, but my working definition is that spirit is the immaterial [ethereal, intangible] part of us that needs to be nourished just like our bodies do. Without spirit, there’s no wonder, no magic, no creative force, no imagination.
On my way home from a herb gathering and medicine making weekend last week, I was listening to The Emerald podcast, which I kinda love. The host, Joshua Michael Schrei, basically looks at the human experience through the lens of myth and story. The episode I listened to was called “Animism Is the Normative Consciousness” and Schrei posits that for the entirety of human history, until now basically——which is the tiniest sliver in the time pool——humans have believed that everything has a spirit. Rocks, trees, oceans, drums, shells, clothes. I could go on, but you get the picture. Us modern folks...we are the outliers.
And what are we losing when we don’t find spirit in the most mundane places?
Not-Spirit
“Just think, Lucky, that’s going to be you soon enough.” We were gathered in the kitchen, looking out the window at Mr. M—’s teenaged daughter, barefoot and very pregnant in a long housedress as she walked across her yard (she lived in a trailer next door). I was with a group of grown men, with whom, until this very moment, I had always felt very comfortable. They were church men, gathered after Sabbath services at the M—— farmhouse for food and fellowship.
They all called me Lucky, a slant of Lecky, the nickname my mom gave me, derived loosely from my given name. Two of these church men were single guys who lived with my family on and off over the years when they needed a leg up. They’d seen me in my pajamas with my hair rumpled and sleep in my eyes.
Now, at 16, I was uncomfortable that they were thinking of me pregnant. But mostly I was angry. A flash of caged animal. This is what women in the church were supposed to do, of course. Get married, have some babies, be a doting and supporting wife to the head-of-household husband. Years later, after I got divorced and hadn’t spoken to any of these church men in more than a decade, one of them who’d lived with us messaged me on Facebook, “I’m worried about you Lucky. You need a good man to take care of you.”
I blocked him.
So, there we were in the kitchen, standing around, probably talking basketball, which was my favorite topic at the time, and Bam! You are a woman, and this is what you’ll be in a few short years.
I said, my throat constricted, “No, I’ll never have children,” which was met with snorts and guffaws. The more adamant I became that I’d never have children, the more annoyed they became.
Amidst the discomfort and silence that ensued, I walked away to go hang with church friends who were my age.
That moment has been etched into my psyche. I never did have kids.
That sort of thinking, the narrow, unimaginative, binary thinking that pervades so much of religion and, frankly, patriarchal, hierarchical, systematized modern life in general, did a number on me.
I’ve always been a seeker of possibility and magic, and those men in their ill-fitting suits and knowing grins——well, that wasn’t spirit. Not by a long shot.
Maybe you’ve felt the oppressive hand of someone telling you what should make you tick, what should ignite a fire in you?
We live in a burning world. Even climate deniers can’t argue that empirically things are wonky. Shit is burning, crumbling, flooding. Climate refugees are real, escaping homelands that have been rendered uninhabitable.
We live in culture of productivity worship.
We live in a culture of screen addiction.
We live in an increasingly fear-based landscape where religion is being used to induce terror, laws enacted to limit freedoms.
Binary thinking is the law of the land. This or that. Right or wrong. No grays, no in-betweens.
That’s not spirit.
We get fed pop-spirituality in the form of Instagram self-help memes and Lululemon poses from self-made gurus.
Not spirit.
But humans are seekers. We want to connect with something beyond this shitshow and beyond ourselves. In fact, I think that we have to connect with something deeper, more mythic, more encompassing than our productivity, our scrolling, our unloading the dishwasher. Because daily life can suck. Domestication and rat race. The grind and the loneliness of remote work. It can suck.
How do we practice spirit then? How do we connect without connection? Worship without church? This is a question I want to explore in this series.
I love how Mary Oliver poses the question: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”
Why, oh why, waste it with mindless obedience to capitalism, to the systems built for assembly-line productivity and mindless entertainment? What sort of legacy does that leave behind?
In a sense, anything we do deliberately can be an act of worship. Any time we’re fully present, we are engaging in a form of meditation. There are ways to change our perspective just enough, just a slight movement to the left, a tilt of the head, just notice the way the light bends a certain way...
Why would we choose to live any other way?
Stay tuned for more on finding spirit...
Happy Friday, big hugs,
Lex
Remember the old children "Where is Charlie?"? How about having Where is spirit? I just ask ChatGPT what was spirit... interesting. Always a pleasure reading you. May the force be with you ;-)
I love this so much.