By Mike Nagel
My sister-in-law Molly grew up as a pastor’s daughter but at some point in her mid-thirties she became more of a witch. I thought that being a witch meant you invited the devil into your heart and learned how to cast fertility spells, but it turns out it mostly means you just get really into backyard gardening and start saying things like, “Happy winter solstice!” instead of “Merry Christmas!”
Early on, I let her do a few tarot readings on me, as practice. I’d never had a tarot reading done before, and I figured it was going to be complicated. So I was surprised when she just fanned the cards out like a magician and asked me to pick one.
“Whichever one feels like it wants to be picked,” she said.
Molly was still pretty new to all this witchy stuff back then — “woo woo shit,” she called it — and wasn’t always familiar with what some of the more obscure cards meant.
“Six of wands…” she’d say, tapping her upper lip. “Hmmmmmmm.”
“Sounds bad?” I’d say, trying to be helpful.
“It does sound kind of bad, doesn’t it?”
“Like maybe I should be extra careful or something?”
“You know what?” she’d say. “It wouldn’t hurt to proceed with caution.”
Around the time Molly became a witch, my friend Amy got really into something she called “Water Theory.” She’d watched a documentary about it on YouTube. “They put all these water molecules under a microscope,” she explained to me over lunch one day without me having asked any follow-up questions. “Then they said some very nice things to half the water molecules and some very mean things to the other half.”
I nodded and stirred my soup, which was a creamy tomato with a glop of sour cream slung into the middle.
“And the water molecules they were nice to, they turned into these crystal-looking structures that looked like I don’t know what. Cathedrals or something. And the water molecules they were mean to…they just turned into these cancer-looking blobs.”
“Yikes,” I said.
“And the human body is what? 90% water, right?” she said.
I blinked a few times.
“Right?!” she said.
More recently, my other sister-in-law, Marsha, became a devout believer in natural fabrics. She read an article about it online. It said that all our synthetic clothing is killing us. All those fake chemicals leeching into our skin. It’s causing all kinds of problems. Cancer. Heart disease. You name it. Now Marsha is on what basically amounts to a fashion diet. A wardrobe cleanse.
“I’m doing natural fabrics only,” she explained at a recent family get-together. “Wools. Linens. Silk if I want to get fancy. Hemp.”
“And that…does something?” I said.
She shrugged.
“Apparently.”
I like to think of myself as an open-minded person. Just not when it comes to things that will require me to change the way I live or shop or that otherwise strike me as being inconvenient. When it comes to those things, I can be pretty closed off, actually.
Which is why I was surprised to find myself spending a recent Sunday afternoon attending the type of group meditation session that involves yoga mats, essential oils, and a playlist featuring more than one contribution by Imogen Heap. I wondered if I was having some sort of crisis. It would make sense. For the past 18 months, my wife, J, and I had been living with my in-laws, helping out after her dad’s stroke. He was seventy-four years old and could no longer walk, talk, shower, or go to the bathroom without our help. After such a harsh reality check, it was only reasonable that I would go looking for consolation in other realms. If there was ever a time to be open to this woo woo shit, it was now.
“Sure,” I’d said when my sister-in-law Molly texted me the invitation. “Why not.”
Molly was running the session and was convinced that I, in particular, might get something out of it. I tend to trust her judgement about these sorts of things. In addition to dabbling with the occult, Molly also recently became a certified life coach. She took a class online.
“I want you to imagine a bright, beautiful star living between your eyes,” she instructed us as our guided meditation began, melting each word into the next like they were made of wax. “Now follow your bright, beautiful star…inward…into your inner space.”
There were six of us here today. Seven if you counted Molly. We were laying on yoga mats that had been arranged in a large rectangle in the middle of the room, on the second floor of an arts collective in Downtown Garland called Into the Well. The place had the worn-out wooden floors and large, dusty windows that I associate with old-timey New York factories. It looked like the kind of place where a couple hundred toddlers could have made an honest living a hundred years ago, hammering together lunch boxes and rubbing shoe polish onto their faces. It was me and six women, all of whom were wearing hot-colored yoga pants. I didn’t mind. I like being around women. I’ve been told I have a feminine energy myself.
“You remind me of my friend,” a woman had told me recently at a literary conference in Boise.
“Oh yeah?” I’d said. “What’s his name?”
“Her name is Sarah,” she’d said.
“I remind you of your friend Sarah?” I’d said.
She nodded.
“Same energy.”
I wasn’t offended to hear that I have the same energy as a woman named Sarah. It was better than the other energies I’ve been accused of having throughout my life. Nervous energy. Anxious energy. Weird energy.
“What’s with all the weird energy, Mister,” J had said a few days earlier. This after I’d just been sitting there on the couch, minding my own business, reading a Jonathan Franzen novel, the one where everybody is having a hard time.
“Don’t act like you know about energy,” I’d snapped. “You don’t know anything about energy. And you don’t know anything about me!”
She was right, of course. I was in a bad mood. I can’t remember why. Later, I apologized and asked how she could tell I was feeling off. “Are you kidding?” she said. “When you’re in a bad mood, I can feel it across the room. The whole house changes.”
So, I don’t know. Maybe there’s something to this energy stuff after all. Laying there on my yoga mat in the loft, I let Molly take me on a guided tour of all the energies hidden within my body, starting from the bottom and working our way up.
“I want you to notice the energy in your toes,” Molly droned in that same voice poets use at open mic nights, where every sentence curls up at the end like a water ski. “And now in your ankles… And now in your calves…”
She must have read an anatomy textbook or something because her instructions started getting pretty specific.
“And now in the medial meniscus of your right knee… And now in the articular cartilage of your left hip…”
I didn’t know what these parts of me were, what they did, or what they looked like, but I started to imagine myself as one of those skeletons that doctors always have hanging in their offices in movies and TV shows. Just a collection of parts and pieces. Proximal filanges. Mandibular notches. It was relaxing to see myself that way — as a hanging doctor’s office skeleton — and pretty soon, I started drifting off to sleep.
“And now the transverse cervical nerves in your neck… And now the sphenoid bone in your skull… And now your skull…”
I figured Molly would stop when she got to the tops of our heads, but then she kept going, out of our bodies and off into outer space.
“And now up past the clouds… And now up past the moon…”
One reason I think Molly makes a good witch — and now a good life coach — is that she has a great voice for this type of thing. It’s soothing and firm at the same time, like a waitress at a fancy restaurant telling you your credit card has been declined. She could tell me anything and I’d go along with it, if only because it sounds so pleasant coming from her.
“Your anal chakras are completely out of whack,” she could say, and I’d say, “You’re making a lot of sense to me right now.” She could read me the Ikea instruction booklet for a bedside table, and I would have an out of body experience.
Some people are just made for this type of thing, I think. You spend five seconds with them, and you can tell they have access to other realms. I’m thinking of this guy I saw the other day who was sitting in the middle of my favorite coffee shop, 1418 Coffee in Downtown Plano, eyes closed, transcendentally meditating. He was wearing the type of free-flowing outfit that cult members put on before walking into a live volcano. His necklace looked like it was made of billiard balls and horse tails. I was so distracted by his level of concentration that I couldn’t get anything done. I just stared at him for an hour. Then I got up and went home. Later, I described him to J as an asshole.
“So this asshole is sitting there meditating in the middle of the coffee shop,” I said, as if he’d been sipping a chai tea latte naked. “Full lotus pose. Eyes closed and everything.”
“What a showoff,” J said.
“Exactly,” I said. “Thank you. He was showing off. Shoving his mindfulness in all of our faces.”
“What was he trying to prove anyway?”
“Just what an asshole he is, I guess,” I said. “And boy did he succeed.”
One of the many things I love about J is that I can always count on her to back me up when it comes to thinking people are assholes. Especially people who believe in things. A few years ago, on a train to Downtown Dallas, J got in a fight with a woman wearing a t-shirt that said, “ASK ME ABOUT WATER BAPTISM.” The fight started innocently enough — just a friendly conversation between strangers, really — but ended with the woman informing J that she was going to hell and J yelling, “Great! I’ll save you a seat, bitch!”
I don’t know why we’re not more open to these spiritual sorts of things. I don’t know why we resist them so strongly. Wouldn’t it be nicer to see the world the way Molly does? As a series of energy fields we can hop between like lily pads? Wouldn’t it be more pleasant to see people the way Amy does? As human-sized water bottles just waiting to be transformed into Disney-style cathedrals by a kind word or gesture? Wouldn’t it be more comfortable to dress like Marsha? In natural fabrics that are not only breathable and self-cleaning but may prevent cancer?
Realists, J and I call ourselves. But what’s so great about reality, anyway? What’s so appealing about it? In reality, people have strokes and never bounce back from them. In reality, people die for no reason and nothing interesting happens next. In reality, we’re all nothing but doctor’s office skeletons, just hanging there in the corner, hoping someone will come along and give us a poke every now and then.
It’s enough to keep you up at night, if you think about it too much. Which is maybe why, laying there on my yoga mat up there in the artists’ loft, I never did fully drift off to sleep. I just laid there, hovering somewhere between consciousness and unconsciousness, right there on the edge of reality, as Molly led us out past the moon, and then out past the planets, and then out among the stars where she made a U-turn somewhere out there in the cosmic black and led us all slowly and gently back into our bodies — and then even more slowly and more gently back into the room — where she dusted us off, spun us around a few times, and kissed us all on the cheeks before sending us, blinking and stumbling, back into the real world.
Mike Nagel is the author of Duplex and Culdesac, both from Autofocus Books. Find selected nonsense at www.beefham.com.