Embedded Files
Welcome to COSMOGRAM, Version “Leap-Off-the-Ledge.”
This platform began in minor collapse and heartbreak, when I first realised the internet could talk back if I dared to talk to it.
The last few years for me as a writer and human being have been a long exhale: rehab, Yogic breathwork, mythic media rabbit holes, and the slow re-wiring of my own nervous system for dialogue instead of monologue.
The fear still hisses—They’ll abandon you the moment you glitch, this is senseless tomfoolery etc—but the 'Cosmogram' I am becoming, witnessing and drawing proves otherwise: every post, every mixtape, every cracked lyric is another seatbelt sign chiming on, another passenger nodding:
I hear it too.
COSMOGRAM: A PERSONAL STORY
"I accept chaos, I'm not sure whether it accepts me"
-Bob Dylan
Forged in the unsettled magma of post-punk/grunge pop culture, a hero's journey began to take shape.
The roots of my journey began with music on the radio and T.V. Here, I trace their influence on my trajectory that has led me around the world from moving around Canada a lot as a child of the 'security intelligence' community, to leaving first year university to gather alms and learn meditation with monks in the slums of Bangkok, to renting a former livestock cabin to live in the birthplace of B.C as home for five years of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
It has led me to hosting and greeting the Prime Minister of Canada, to the frontlines of a fight with a First Nation against a multi-billion dollar mining company, co-founding and starting an Indigenous Radio Station, to the sweat lodges in the wild west of British Columbia. But my story has also included: multiple catastrophic relationship break-ups, close friends and lovers dying tragic deaths, and eventually finding myself in the rocky mountains naked and alone, facing starvation and near-death-which was followed by a 42 day rehab for cocaine and alcohol addiction, and an extended residency of living back with my parents. As a writer, the most difficult challenge for me has been to tell my own story or share any real vulnerability/personality beyond what I could 'control'.
As an exercise in honesty and reflection, it felt time to express the more vulnerable, non-intellectual and human side of me, and get some of my story down as a re-introduction to Cosmogram and the Cosmogram Zine.
FROM CHAOS TO KRYPTON: LIFE AS AN INVISIBLE
I was fourteen, and like so many other angst ridden teens at this age, the walls of my bedroom began closing in on a daily basis—slow, deliberate, like a vice tightening around the softest part of my chest. I learned to both channel and deny this feeling early on, developing an imagination and an ability to hide from it all. Music, television, books and movies were my lifeblood and I learned to creatively express myself through writing and music early on. But I also realized I was more sensitive than most.
What I’ve now learned is that the unusually extreme swings of emotion were also early manifestations of manic depression and anxiety/dis-ease as OS (Operating System). My demons didn’t arrive with black-cloaked drama; they seeped up through the carpet slowly like the Swamp thing, a mutating fungus mold-, quiet, all consuming and potentially lethal if left untreated long enough. Nights blurred into one long corridor lit by any number of modern alt-rock/ punk-pop tracks on repeat from Much Music or the radio in my bedroom.
The towers were collapsing. The parts, breaking.
The time for superheroes was over for now.
Unconscious revelations of lonely anger and angst, an awakening to the exposed vulnerability of my superhero role models(parents, teachers, coaches) when they inevitably didn’t live up to the crest of unattainable perfection on the cape that they certainly did their best to honor.
I understood even the strongest sometimes need saving; but I also learned that sometimes not even the strongest can be saved. They, like me and you, are not sure if help is going to come in the end. This pain of angsty despair gave birth to a metastasized sort of personality quirk-one that was born of a safety mechanism/belief pattern that would prove to be most dangerous in my life going forward:
If I can control my mind, I can control things enough to protect myself from the pain or abandonment. I can disassociate. I can re-associate. I can do anything if I put my “superhuman mind to it”. You know, like isolating and trying to do it all myself. My superpowers of vulnerability were turning into something else. Kryptonite.
That paradox I carried deep down was my secret compass. I felt cursed—because the lyrics exposed how badly I craved protection—and saved—because the song admitted the craving out loud, smuggling companionship into my isolation.
Prophecy, warnings and homecomings, disguised as post-grunge, pop-punk radio. Blink 182, Papa Roach, Puddle of Mudd, they all spoke to a different shade of angst:
“Cut my life into pieces.
This is my last resort
…Suffocation.
No breathing
Don’t give a fuck if I cut my arm bleeding.”
-Papa Roach
I didn’t have language for it then, but the music both spoke to me and for me. It saved me and ignited my heart, soul and mind time and time again. It provided me friends, family, joy, sadness and everything one could hope to feel as a human.
I have learned though, that certain medicines or coping methods only work so long before real integration is required..or else. I realize now I was grappling with the vulnerability and fear issues/questions that can often still keep me isolated now:
What if I am crazy? What if I can’t take care of myself? Will there be anyone to take my hand if things get really bad? Am I doomed to being a loner? Is this my fate?
Acausal synchronicity-the universe’s cosmogram
I heard a great radio show the other day where a scientist, Oliver Sacks, was explaining how he loves to use the periodic table to order and understand the world; both as metaphor and literal. Everything in the world ever made or that will be made is contained within the periodic table of elements. The table itself is both a science and an art.
It is a beautiful expression of the imperfectly perfect universe we live in.
He explained how he identified with a particular noble gas, Xenon- a chemical element with few bonding partners, leaving it in the void to create any kind of connection and in turn reaction.
Ephemeral as air until turned “on” like a neon sign or nuclear fission- but, only when activated. I felt a connection to Sacks as a kindred spirit and thought it would be fun to look up the table to look the elements for the first time since high school.
Here- a synchronistic train began to occur. I was looking at the periodic table and discovered that Krypton was an actual element and not just he home planet of Superman. I decided I felt a kinship with the noble gas- the Krypton element that was literally hiding there in plain sight! I then realized its name literally comes from the latin root kryptos: To be hidden. "Just like me /the authentic me's", I thought!
I realized that in order to be 'activated', if you too feel like a noble gas and have struggled with bonding your entire life, that the answer for me, comes partly in the answer to a lifelong riddle: Where the hell am I going?
One day, a man on a horse came rushing in through town and came to an abrupt stop. The town’s wise man approached and asked the horse rider where he was off to in such a hurry. The horse rider replied exasperated, “I don’t know, ask the horse!”
Something I'm learning is that I have often found myself as that horserider. It was if I was practicing the opposite of peace, leading me to missing all the connections happening around and inside me. And just like the rider needed a clear destination, I needed a map that was both an internal and external compass as I moved through this chaotic world, and if I were to be 'activated' by my special bonding partners out there in the world outside my comfort zone and fears.
Over time I have found many, some more effective than others, including the concepts behind the Cosmogram and now krypton. The goal in finding a unique and personal system of order and expression is for it to be both adaptable and ever changing, and yet can still be pointed to in some referential way or means for others to witness.
Tarot, I Ching, the Periodic Table. Superheroes. Myth. To be witnessed alongside witnessing another’s multi-dimensional self is a beautiful and perhaps essential human thing.
The reaction that is generated when a noble gas such as Krypton is bonded with it’s special partner; it reveals it's true magick. It's found in energy-saving fluorescent lights, high-speed photography flashlamps, and as a component in some types of lasers, including krypton fluoride lasers used in nuclear fusion research. But, when Invisible, like a noble gas there are those of us who can often feel trapped. Isolated.
As I reached teenage era at 16, a new energy appeared as a solution for fear that was indeed proven scientifically, indisputably possible by four funky monks. They pointed a way out of the darkness and into the fusion reactor that flew out of the cosmos and through my corpus calleosum; slipping in divine presence and Truth within and without, groove after groove, harmony and melody in tow.
They were a paradox of cosmic origin somehow still intimate and human-they were my new favourite aliens and unto their own class into which I desired a direct link into my bloodstream: I like pleasure spiked with pain., And music is my aeroplane.
The Red Hot Chili Peppers, along with my parents and friends became the north star to my cosmogram in constant flux.
For me; all of my heroes, from my parents to the the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Superman, their true strength comes from their understanding of the false myth of in-vulnerability and invincibility as refuge.
And while rest is essential, too much solitude and hermitage limits the hero’s journey for him not being of service.
Instead, real power is in the courage to show up as you are, to be hurt, to be human. It is in the cultivated awareness of one's own natural and human needs with others and their beloveds so I/You/ Superman can admit when we are feeling weak, tired, even feeling defeated and most of all, when we just need to be seen and held.
Later in my life, I turned the despair I used to feel as a teen on those longs nights and instead hit the gas pedal to 11 and drifted higher than a satellite. Reckless abandon and newfound cosmic connections with other ‘crazies’ like me, we flew thirty thousand feet above the suburbs for five years of death defying foolishness.
I saw my demons strapped into coach like nervous passengers, Kryptonite shards glowing in the overhead bins. I couldn’t eject them, but I could keep flying. This eventually landed me in the middle of the northern Rockies facing starvation and death, a 42 day drug rehab, and overall total life collapse at the age of 30.
So here’s the new revelation, circling back after all these years: those lonely nights, those high flying experiences in that flight never carried just me. No matter how alone I continued to feel inside, doomed to never be seen, the potential for lightning and connection with others, myself and the divine is and was always there. I just refused to let myself be held by it. It felt too powerful and I, too weak to handle it. I was wrong.
If you are anything like me, and have felt the pain of being trapped in the labyrinthine of mind; may I humbly suggest you may just need a new map, a unique and personal Cosmogram, or system of order that helps reveal its own self to you.
George Clinton once asked: How do yew view you?
If you’re struggling with an answer, consider the following: People used to ask Stan Lee: “Who would win in a fight Hulk or Thor?” He'd famously reply: “Whoever the writer wants to win!”
Meditate on that and remember that truth isn’t always easy but it is usually hiding in plain sight. It just needs the sunlight of your attention and the chemical reaction of connection with others you can bond with to make it seen and heard and sacred.
“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.”
-Simone Weil
Here is the final question: Whose voice do you hear in your head when you read this?
No matter how you answer, the chorus is bigger than our individual skulls can hold:
“Everybody knows, Everybody’s gotta live, and Everybody’s gonna die.
-Love
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse