A Scattered Collection of Tiny Gods
Random items that help me live a more connected existence
For as long as I can remember, I’ve found things. In my earliest memories, I zip around my Livermore neighborhood on a Big Wheel, hopping off curbs and collecting various artifacts from street gutters. Coins and bottle caps, lost jewelry and rusty tools. I place them all in my rig's latching blue trunk until, tired of searching, I return home to marvel over the treasures. Most of them I discard, but I put the keepers in an assortment of jars on shelves in my bedroom. The one labeled “GOOD” holds my favorite finds, which includes a silver Mercury dime with a nail hole in it, a scratched up Luke Skywalker action figure, a St. Anthony prayer card that deems him “the gentlest of saints,” and a large, clear-glass, shooter marble, banged up and textured, with a dark hazel ribbon through its center that’s the same color as my eyes.
These discoveries are physical evidence of my adventures. Of me, pedaling about on the hardtop, faithfully exhuming evidence of less obvious worlds. I roam, usually alone and deep in my imagination, aloof to neighbors’ station wagon honks that only briefly snap me from squinting intently under the cloudless California sky.
I wander about, spellbound by junked curios and forsaken remnants, ascribing meaning and, at times, power, to the found relics. Bits of cerulean glass, for example, bring good luck. Spotting a shard is proof that what I’m doing matters. That the seeking is worthwhile, and that things are going to be OK. Also, the prospect of passing of such fragments onto others gives me butterflies. “Here,” I’ll say. “I found this for you.”
As I enliven these vestiges, they give back an energy that’s commensurate to my belief in them. This practice has continued into my adulthood. And these days, whether it’s a found feather, a marble (because it’s so often marbles), or a stray and random playing card, whether it’s my pull from a tarot deck, a morning prayer, or an eclipse ritual, I ascribe meaning to their essence. They are my oracles.
In one way or another, these tokens help me live a more deeply connected existence. These miniature Gods remind me to embrace the unknown. The unplanned. To make room for spontaneous innovation. To note the reciprocal influence between things that don’t often exist together. I allow this bounty to guide me. To help me witness elements of hope and possibility in unlikely places. And when I take conscious time to look for them, I find them. Every single time.
Next month I am beginning a 16-month training program at the Spiritual Guidance Institute in Racine, Wisconsin. As the start date nears, I’m meditating on my own spiritual resume. A background which includes, but is not limited to, the influence of religion on my life.
Organized catechism plays a part in how I interpret and understand the divine, but it’s only one small piece of the complicated puzzle. My foundation of traditional learnings is less poignant than the heartrending and esoteric lessons I’ve had good fortune to bear. Moments that have stolen my breath. That have turned my skin inside-out.
My spirituality lives in my body. It’s ever-present and always available—I need only look inward for any evidence of God. Of the divine. My spirituality, I’ve come to believe, is galvanized when my body is overcome by things not easily explained with language. When I am a tearful beholder of the clusters of the Milky Way. When I am enraptured by a lengthy trail’s enchanted tree tunnel. When I am enveloped at altitude by a lightning blizzard, walking a tightrope of near death. When I am smitten by an old dog’s eyelashes. Or speechless. Or emotionally explosive. Or wholly taken over by the sudden racing of my inconsolable heart. The body—my body—responds fiercely to these grave and sacred moments. They inspire me to become more than I know myself to be. They become like God.
This spirituality, this God, the divine, or whatever we might call it, is anchored within me. Within us. We are its poetry. And poetry, in all its allegory and metaphor, its weighty imagery and magical turns of phrase, is as close to the language of the divine as we can ever get. The most moving poems often make us feel more than understand.
Poetry is the expression of in-between spaces. Of silence. Its speaks in fullness from its very emptiness. It’s when we describe grief by proclaiming calamitous beauty. When speech is only a sound. Or how we can only see certain stars when looking away. Such things, I’m pretty sure, are the infinite scatterings of God. And our own godliness is mirrored in our effort to seek them out and collect them for our jars.
I become more alive when I accept equality with this smallness. I am no more than that which I tuck into my little blue trunk. Just me, otherwise hidden under a windswept pile of suburban scree, living a muted existence beneath a protective wall of dried leaves, of garage blown wood shavings, of various webs of detritus connecting me to a million heavens. My hanging on, our hanging on, is a collective miracle.
Spirituality, I think, is us never forgetting how minuscule, and yet how crucial we are to and for each other. It reminds that we exist for the good of each other. That we all are here to endure the dramatic odyssey of love. To spend each day loving every weird and curious and flattening detail of the journey.
Spirituality is us taking time to stop. To pick up those extraordinary relics that catch our eye. To look closely at them. Maybe bring them home for safe keeping in our sun-catching jars on the sill. So that one day we may look at them and remember how we paid close attention and, in the midst of our cluttered and fitful lives, found a scattered collection of tiny Gods in the street gutter right outside our house.
That’s lovely Tom. I really like this one.
Weirdly, I found a marble this very day on a remote beach here in Tonga, nestling with bits of broken coral and a few tiny hermit crabs. And of course I thought of you.
Love, love LOVE this! :)