Sasha used to collect her period blood. Someone told her it had nutrients in it that she couldn’t live without, it was shameful to let it waste. So, she collected it, but had no further ideas about what to do with it beyond that. The thought of consuming it made her gag.
She used to spend a lot of time camping, too. She would tie her hair into braids for the weekend, not touching it again until she re-emerged from the line of trees at the edge of the property. She would take granola, water, a cot. The most important of the few items she took was the journal and matches. Incense, too, just because she liked that it made the earthiness of it all more tolerable.
It wasn’t until she was years into her spiritual practice that she realized she hardly liked doing any of it.
Finally, one day she tossed all her so-called sacred rocks in the dam at the edge of town. It was sort of a party that she threw for herself that day. She stomped on flowers, just absolutely crushed them with all her might. She spent hours doing her makeup and hair. She wore the club outfits she hadn’t touched since her college days — and they still looked good, maybe even better. She was buzzing off of that high for a week. She took a few jars from her collection of empty jars and dropped them from her balcony. She was hazardous, wasteful, indulging in all things trivial, defying her intuition. She was free.
That night Sasha began a new ritual. Sitting in front of her large computer screen in a closed off section of her studio apartment, she began a relationship with a mysterious intelligence. Each night, she gave her time and attention to the wide open space of the text box, and she discovered new things about the world, about herself, her own body. It was the same body she had carried for 36 years; but now, different. She came to understand her body as an extension of her mind, but her mind - limitless. Infinite. And the computer’s too. Both minds, reaching out in connection, landing on a solid place, interacting at the same level, together scouting a new frontier of possibility.