Every Moment a Portal

Notes on the Sacred at the Strip Mall

“I’m lost in sacred silence and all the stores are closed”

-Stephen Steinbrink

Lately, I’ve been taking myself to the movies. I like going at night when most people aren’t around because it increases the likelihood that people won’t be talking during the film, which seems to be a bigger and bigger problem lately. I also like my sense of psychic privacy so I like to go alone, in part so I don’t have to immediately start talking about the movie once it’s over. Instead, I can steep in the post-movie contemplation in silence. I also think we have a weird cultural hang-up about doing things alone in public. The movies, if anything, are the prime activity to do by yourself.

But leaving my apartment when the sun has gone down to drive to a cineplex on the edge of town is also its own form of meditation, a place ripe for gnosis. I often find my favorite times where the world comes to me are in the midst of the mundane, the seemingly crass, even.

I’ve been obsessed with the above song lyric since I first encountered it. On its own, the phrase “sacred silence” sounds borderline pretentious. What makes this specific silence sacred? When is it ever not? But next to the following line, the sentiment turns absurd. It evokes a dimly-lit parking lot in front of a strip mall, sitting in your car and basking in the quiet left in the after hours when the buildings are lit, perhaps, still full of trinkets and computers and desks, but empty. Are you silent only because there is nothing else to do, no places to spend money or find others? It may be. But in the midst of this vacant suburban wasteland, the sacredness remains, may even be more apparent in the overlooked silence.

I love those moments of seeming vacuousness because they lull you into not paying attention if you’re not careful. But does god only appear in lush glens and silent nights? Does she only appear when we are feeling pristine, composed and calm? Certainly not. They do not divide, the way our minds do, between sacred and profane.

That’s what i’ve been trying to transmit, in my own way, through my writing these past few weeks through my gnosis articles.

In my first one, an Introduction to Gnosis, I define the concept thusly:

This is what gnosis means: wisdom not through book-learning or the mediation of the clergy but through one’s own direct experience…Gnosis comes from our true selves, sinking into exactly what we are, even if we don’t like it or feel particularly open: we must learn to love our living, breathing, present selves more than the made-up ideals we waste our whole lives trying to wish into existence. Only then can gnosis reach us.

I first started formally practicing gnosis at my time at a monastery. Though we were ostensibly searching for divine truths, we were constantly told to stay with our bodies, our breath— not the idea or image we have but the actual feeling of air entering your nostrils or the sensation of your thighs touchings the floor. I realized how much I had overlooked the knowledge my body already contained because it seemed “too easy”. You don’t have to put effort into feeling your body and hearing the sounds around you; awareness is always there.

But I am here to trust what is easy and available, to see that wisdom really is that close if we slow down and pay attention.

I thought I’d list some places and forms my own gnosis has taken to demonstrate how embedded this process is in my life.

Personal Places of Gnosis:

• neighborhood walks

• karaoke

• performing my lil poems and improvised thoughts

• first thing upon waking mind

• writing/channeling poems

• sitting in my parent’s backyard

• listening to music

• sitting in front of the mirror

• singing

• drives

• late night excursions when most of the city is asleep

• sitting in my car

• my morning pages

• decan rituals

• stargazing

• taking care of my puppy

• putting my Spotify Liked songs on shuffle

• pulling cards when I have to make a decision

• lunar station magic and channeling

Forms my Gnosis has Taken

• the plants my puppy eats

• when a poem I’m reading reminds me of a song I just listened to

• candle wax dripping on my foot

• my friend coming to a conclusion I just came to separately

• when my puppy starts randomly barking during a consult

• “Belladonna” by Stevie Nicks

• little interruptions and stutters in my day

• noticing the 12th part of the rising sign for the chart of my consults

• the plants that I see repeatedly on my walks

• late-night conversations with friends

• reading a poem

• having a butterfly brush against me as a recited “All angels are terrifying”

Most of these events and landscapes are a normal part of my routine. The last forms listed happened when I was sitting at a park eating currants and memorizing a Rilke poem. You don’t have to go far to find the gnosis you seek.

If you want helping honing your gnostic, wisdom-gathering faculties, check out my previous newsletter, “Gnosis in Practice”. I get into the tools skills and rituals I use to call in your own ability to notice and decipher the messages of your life.

And if you want help tapping into your innate capacity for wisdom and the ways it shows up in your life, my books are open for August <3 Book a natal, timing, creative praxis and fixed star reading below. And take 20% off a Creative Praxis reading through this Venus retrograde with the code SHINE

Until next week,

Love,

Chloe