Following the Ghost Inside

By Diane Sprague

It was a simple shrine. Just a dark box holding a few items. Candles, incense, polished stones were lovingly placed inside for the time I would come back to discover them. It would remain a mystery just what they would help me to find, but I trusted their unknown meaning and purpose. Organized religion only gave me a life defined by masculine bullying and intolerance. This offered me the welcome alternative of forbidden pagan rituals and a feminine gentleness and wisdom that arose from something ancient and numinous. The shrine was located near a graveyard and I knew that the shrine was placed there to help me follow a ghost that was buried within it. So I stepped into the darkness armed with my simple items to guide me to something I did not understand.

Following a ghost is a simple religion. It has no inerrant Word of God, no large denominations to bolster the illusion of reveled truth, and no promised happy destination to ward off our fears of death. It's just me, alone, standing near a graveyard drawn by the silence and beauty of ghosts, spirits, and phantoms. Nobody understands, but that is okay because most people are idiots.

I had a dream once where I was on a boat. I fell from the boat into the deep, cold water. I knew what it was. I greedily said, "I know who you are; you are the unconscious. Tell me your secrets." Immediately I was surrounding by this incredibly black, endless, complete darkness. I woke up filled with terror. I was shaking as I pushed the covers aside to get ready for new day. I did not have time to ruminate. I needed to wake my children up for school. As we passed through our familiar morning routine, I forgot the blackness. It was a snowy, gray, sullen morning. The streets were slippery with a new covering of winter snow and the traffic was annoyingly slow. I felt grumpy and alone, but then I remembered my dream. A tremendous sense of peace and acceptance came over me. I realized that I could embrace the frightening darkness. We spend our lives fighting it, denying it, and escaping it, but in the end that is all there is and the surprise is that once we let go, once we stop fighting, we find it is something we can embrace. It is what we want, once it stops being our enemy.

We really have too many enemies anyways. My memories of going to church was a experiencing a constant stream of defining our enemies...the liberals, the Catholics, the feminists, the eccentrics. They needed to be ridiculed, silenced, and bullied. Now I have become one of these defined truants, and it offers a satisfying sense of freedom to let go of the notion that truth can be controlled, possessed, and defended. It just needs to stay where it is, in the darkness and silence, in the place where we can let it go, light a candle or some incense, and never mind what the rest of the world is believing.

We don't know who we are. Our biggest illusion is that we do know, and that picture of ourselves we hold is so insistent upon its reality that it will cause us to go to any ends to defend it. Even if we don't want it. Even if we look upon ourselves with a loathing that carries a great deal of pain and suffering. We will do anything but peer into the darkness to see what it might mean to let our illusions go.

So who am I? What am I following? A ghost in the attic. She came to me in dreams, in rich, ancient dreams. I could hear her chanting and when I attempted to approach her by going up the narrow staircases leading to her attic, I would be overwhelmed by her numinous presence. Many times she remained hidden, but a few times I met her and talked with her. I never understood her. She frightened me and intrigued me. She once tried to strangle me; another time she was crying inconsolably from years of being destroyed by ugly bullying. Sometimes she was a corpse. Other times she was beautiful, powerful, and wise. She was something ancient and eternal. Often she was wonderfully wicked, so different from anything I ever experienced. Even with all the mystery, there was always something that was clear, puzzling, but shockingly clear. She was me. She was me standing in that darkness, my ghost, my secret, and my surprise.

So each night I light a candle for my ghost. I burn incense so I can smell her. That is the only religion I have...one of letting go, a gentle feminine religion of accepting the truth rather than controlling it. It is the celebration of a mystery. Sometimes it is a bit spooky, but mostly is it silent and hidden, enclosed in a small shrine near a graveyard waiting for me to remember the peace and love hidden in the darkness.

Flowers from Lise's Garden