In the Company of Spirit

I am enjoying the fade of my engineering skills and the various annoyances of corporate life—all the ways people try to control the lives of others that are baked into rules, cultures, and timekeeping in companies.

I am not referring to the ability to sleep in here. I am generally getting about the same amount of sleep, but eating less. I get to a gym a LOT more often now. All that stuff is great, but what I’m enjoying most is nothing that obvious.

I’m enjoying what Papa refers to as the flow of life: the chaos of following the spirit, which might wake you at 6 am to listen to someone, or might land you in a bar at 2 am as the only person dancing, and four hours later might find you sitting attendance on a spirit in possession, delivering messages about greed and obsession as the sun pricks the sky to pink. The next day might find you sitting in the kitchen, a steaming cup of coffee in hand, talking about travel and the ecstatic process of being yourself.

The spirits are extremely good company. Insightful, hilarious, solemn, and fierce, their presence delivers a refreshed flow of energy, a rill of excitement or focus that ripples through the people around you like the muffled vee of a crocodile swimming just beneath dark water.

Where they are, people feel more alive. The spirits are emissaries of life, which we often deafen ourselves to, and which every sort of social institution attempts to dampen in routines.

I am having far too much fun to go back.