woo pt. 1

I have a friend who has amazing spiritual connection, insight, and intuition.  He's a libra. I'm a virgo.

libra sky

This translates for us into: he's up in the sky somewhere; I'm a rock. I used to (and still do) tease him about being woo woo. He teases me back about finding my woo. It's a process, right?  Not all of us, especially those of us clinging to our "naturally occurring solid aggregate of one or more minerals or mineraloids" find this process with any speed, in an obvious way, or even think it desirable. Sometimes the process comes to you. And so it is with a lot of recognition and looking back that I see the current process of embracing my woo has been in the making for a large part of my life.

I have been a spiritual seeker for as long as I can remember. But I think a large part of my quest was one that was misguided until just a few years ago. What I really wanted was to understand it, to find a way into spirituality via intellectualism. And guess what I learned?  That doesn't really work when you get down to the nitty gritty. They just are two different paths. The academic is incredibly important, but it can't connect me to spirit. I need to get out of my head and out of my own way to do that. I have a BA in philosophy to prove that I tried this path with earnestness. As I'm sure you figured out faster than I did, I ended up with more questions than answers and plenty of arguments and logical fallacies to keep me squarely tethered to my mountain of books.

virgo rock

The start of my journey into woo was all of this philosophical background and digging into the religion I was brought up in and made choices about joining and leaving. Some of this inquiry started early. There are some things in my life that I totally bought that I should not ask questions about - some to my better, some not, but religion wasn't one of these. If anything, I got a lot of clear messages from very young that I should stop asking questions but actively chose to ignore those.

My family is a combination of Catholic and Southern Baptist. This is one way to become a Methodist - where I landed for a while. It makes me happy to see so much movement toward reclamation in Christianity now, especially when there is such a strong push to shut people out. I read the Book of Discipline when I was a freshman in college in '93.  My pastor at the time told me that he had never met anyone who wasn't in seminary who had made a study of the rules of the Methodist church like I had. But when I was different, I had  to know where I stood. I did A LOT of study.  If there was a movement of reclamation in the Methodist church at at that time, news didn't make it to me. What I learned was that I could come to church on Sundays, and I could even be a member of the church, but as a person who was attempting to come to terms with their queer identity, I wasn't to teach Sunday school, or serve on the board, or sing in the choir. The Book of Discipline said that LBG (the T hadn't even entered the language at the time) folks were "welcome", but what I felt was betrayed. I had been singing in church choirs since I was three-years-old. I had taught vacation Bible school and helped out with Sunday school. I had served as the youth rep on my church's board. But it was the choir thing that did it. I couldn't imagine church without singing. Singing was (and is) so totally tied to spiritual experiences and core feelings that I couldn't wrap my mind around the rule that said I shouldn't and wasn't good enough to do so. And so I left. I didn't tell anyone why.  I just stopped going. And I missed it terribly, but somewhere I believed that I deserved that loss because I was queer.

And so I searched for another way. My philosophy degree is basically a degree in religious studies with a  foundation in philosophy.  I loved every minute of it, even when I didn't understand what the hell I was reading. Even then Buddhism and Judaism called to me, but the idea of moving away from my Christian roots was terrifying. I realize now that I was having one of my first moments of "that is on my path" rather than desire. But this flash of realization was lost in discussions of existentialism (though I do love Kierkegaard and Sartre to this day), logic problems, poetry, and a first love that disintegrated into domestic violence and abuse. There was much discussion about circular arguments when it came to the spiritual and god. At the time it felt like a huge problem to go along with some of the others I was experiencing. Imagine my surprise when I would figure out many years later that these things are circular for a reason - because they defy reason. They live in a different place than reason, and so reason and logic don't work. They can't, and that's actually okay.


I have drawn and painted since I was very young, but this feeling of spiritual loss is in some ways what pushed me to art. First it was in literature and others' stories and words where I started to connect.  And then visual art and the power of that means of expression started to break down the walls I had built to shut out my spiritual self. I found myself singing while making work. It was a connection to identity and voice that I had lost and had not been allowed to have. Things were starting to get real. I was on my way to woo and didn't know it.


woo pt. 2 coming soon