How To Walk on the Ceiling in an Upside Down World

Experimenting with Survival Through Imagination

When I was maybe 5 or 6, living in a turbulent household with sometimes constant yelling that the deeply sensitive child I was felt persistently rattled by, I would sometimes lie on the floor in the living room, look up at the ceiling, and imagine that the ceiling was the floor. I’d vividly imagine myself walking around on it. There was a little thrill in the pit of my stomach seeing the old 70s style stained glass hanging lamp upright on its chain, defying the forces of gravity as I walked around it and then stepped gently over the doorway from the living room into the kitchen. I’m fascinated and a little proud looking back on this from my adult perspective, seeing this little kid find a creative way to approach their terror, to in some sense escape, while also working with a mindful curiosity to discover what else is here, besides the obvious reverberating rage. Creating for myself a changed experience of the moment.

As we descend further and further into fascism, seeing worsening human rights violations and whatever degree of freedom we have ever had slipping quickly away, I am curious about how I might approach this time creatively. How am I—how can I—adapt this child’s ways (and new ways too) to use my internal landscape as a creative tool of survival (and thriving when possible)? Sometimes I am too overcome with despair to find anything within myself to hold onto. Sometimes all that comes is a spiraling that I can’t find my way out of. But I’m trying to really value the moments when the receptivity to something more transcendent is there. Slowly, I am finding such moments.

Conduit

The wind—which sees 
so much—brings tales 
of the world to a huddle
of trees. It whirls itself 
into a whoosh of waves 
that ripple through 
as it whispers 
with ferocious  
joy: This is what 
it feels like to be
the ocean! 

Perhaps in the project of imaginative survival, I’m also harkening back to my childhood of engaging with imaginary friends. Unlike most children, I had both an imaginary friend and an imaginary enemy as a child (who was routinely mean to me and my imaginary friend—always a bit of a realist?). While I’ve ditched the imaginary enemy, in the past several months I seem to have found in myself a sense of these internal guides who approach me with a great deal of compassion and wisdom, both when I feel lost or when I simply feel the need to seek comfort or guidance to nurture or maintain my grounding. I sometimes self-deprecatingly call them my adult imaginary friends, but they are really just an imaginative personification of intuition and wholeness.

There is a sense of a spiritual guide, a kind of conduit and translator between the inner and outer worlds, between my past and present, between struggling parts of me and the entirety of my being. And there’s also a sense of my higher, most coherent and integrated human self who can empathize with my terror, my despair, my rage, but who also embodies the wholeness of my being. This entity encapsulates those difficult feelings too, but they exist as a few buckets in a larger body of water, diluted enough when held in the fullness of me that they don’t overwhelm so much. Strangely, I can sometimes tune into these guides and feel a sense of not being alone (even if they really are just me) and a sense of being deeply cared for and helped to find my way.

Bracing Unknown

Precarious as existing
in space with no floor,
no walls, nothing
to give bolster or brace
for bearing the heft
of this world. No certainty at all
how to move through, what
first step in this abrupt
dimension of non-substance.
The point is just to move.
Learn how to swim without
water. Experiment with what
this means. Probably flail.
And flail again. Until 
the nothingness gives way.

With regard to the pain of the current precariousness and cruelty, when I can access them, these guides have been helping me to temper some of the catastrophe in my brain, without gaslighting me into believing it’s all fine. It’s not fine! And they are very well aware and validating on that point too. But they remind me: it’s not all one thing. There are forces of evil for sure and forces that are fighting them: millions of people marching, sometimes a brave coach turning ICE away from a sports team of kids or a lone woman putting her body in front of an ICE truck at a farm raid. There are countless people doing the ordinary and essential work of nurturing and comforting one another, their children, pets. My guides also remind me that sometimes tragedy and turbulence make way for desperately needed change for the better. They don’t suggest that it’s not still horrific what is happening on so many fronts already but that there is both the horror and the potential for something better and unexpected to emerge…eventually.

Courage to Lurch On

Stability can be
a kind of stuckness.
Trying to have reverence
for tectonic shifts,
the necessity of lurching
to detach from all that was 
never really working. Wanting
to believe that there's a light
somewhere if we are brave 
enough to stumble deeper in
toward what we cannot see.

There’s also some comfort in imagining through the lens of history, knowing that human evil and the greed, hatred, and delusion that drives it have always been part of the human struggle. There is an endless lineage of people who have in ways big and small endured and fought against the forces of evil in humanity. There’s grief in this, and in fact this whole experience feels like a process of ongoing and ambiguous grief. I suppose there’s a bit of a moving into the phase of acceptance (oh, but how nonlinear!) in recognizing this is part of what we are as a species, part of what we always have been, shameful and distressing though the fact of it is. But it also connects us to all the righteous human efforts that have come before. The connection to this mass of past people is a balm of sorts. 

I like to believe it may be possible to in some way move toward a time when the evil is but a few barrels in the ocean of humanity, while right now it’s feeling more like a series of massive oil spills that taint wide swaths of the whole body. Perhaps we will never get there, but it still feels important to allow for the possibility, to help guide our actions in a direction that creates room for it. And when all else fails, in an upside down world, imagine inhabiting it from another angle. Or consult the wisdom of the trees. Use your imagination for survival, as people have always done, from the beginning of our time, celebrating the beauty and magic of what it is to be a human on this Earth, even amidst horrors.

Untethered

Their chatter is a whispery scrape
along the paved path. They rush
at me, tumbling and twirling
as if in celebration. 
Do the leaves feel
free, loosed from their branches,
getting to see the world
from new angles? 

Thank you for reading! I’d love to know your creative survival strategies. May you find solace and strength in difficult times, both in your inner and outer worlds.