Nephelomancing the Body
It is time to open the channel
One thing we have a lot of out here on the prairie is sky. So much sky - 180 degrees at all times. You can see it all without any of the noise of elevation changes - no hills or ridgelines to get between you and what’s going on up there. Now that we’ve been living here a few years I’ve developed a closer relationship with the sky - I guess that’s what happens when there’s nothing in the way. I have a more complex visual vocabulary for cloud formations now. Definitely don’t mistake me and think I know the science names, I do not. But I can tell you about streaky bois or torn-out sky-holes or upside-down sandy-bottom-of-a-shallow-sea-cake-clouds.
Somewhere along the way I learned of nephelomancy, which is divination through the observation of cloud formations. I love how many different ways there are to receive messages from somewhere else - wherever you think that may be - so many activities that can be channels for meaning; nature’s activities and human activities, which are also a part of nature. Tea leaves at the bottom of the cup, birds flying, what the mountain looks like at a given moment, tarot cards, egg yolks, on and on endlessly. I love it, it delights and fascinates me. And in a place with an abundance of cloud drama, nephelomancy is one that drew me towards it easily.
For a long, long time I have wanted to be a vessel for messages from somewhere else, I have wanted to open the channel, without a very firm conviction about the exact nature or place of origin of those messages. Not knowing in no way diminishes my desire. My poetry writing practice was an expression of this for a long time, but it was clouded by my neurotic need to deeply encode what I received for fear that it would seem silly, not smart enough. Poetry is a medium with a long history of practitioners of various kinds of clairvoyance. It brings up questions about authorship - it makes me think a lot about the unseen collaborators we are co-creating the world with at all times; art is just a distinctly obvious aspect of this fact. Some examples:
In the early 70s Hannah Weiner started seeing words everywhere - in the air, on every surface, on her own face in the mirror, some in all caps giving instructions, multiple different registers, and she started writing them down seemingly without restraint. She was avant garde event for the avant garde at the time. Reading her clairvoyant works feels to me like a transcription of an interior monologue or narration, constantly interrupting itself with the different voices all tangled together.
A couple decades earlier Jack Spicer started receiving “dictations” that he variously described as arriving from aliens or the dead or “the invisible world” and compared himself to a radio antenna - his goal was to efface the Self as much as possible in order to most fully and completely receive the missives that arrived on the frequency he tuned to. He once said, “The ghosts the poems were written for are the ghosts of the poems. We have it second-hand. They cannot hear the noise they have been making.” James Merrill wrote his most famous work with the help of a Ouija board. W.B. Yeats got the credit for the automatic writings of his wife, George, who acted as a spirit medium.
Selah Saterstrom is a contemporary writer who describes divination as a conjunction of invisible technologies; her book Ideal Suggestions: Essays in Divinatory Poetics has been hugely influential to me. She describes her understanding of divination, which “by its inherent nature, refuses to be a fixed phenomenon and does not submit to the limits of a human imagination.” She goes on to say:
“Being an effective reader is contingent upon the quality of presence with which one positions oneself in the constant stream of information and texts. That stream is wherever you are, all of the time, in every grand place, and in every suffering pit. … Becoming a reader includes entering the stream. Risk and disorientation are part of the price of admission and, on this matter, there is no negotiation.”
I began learning and practicing with tarot cards (with the help and wisdom of my friend and expert channeller Candice) around ten years ago, feeling inspired by writers like Lucille Clifton, and that has been an important tool for sharpening my ability to receive information. Like many tarot readers, I do not see this practice as fortune-telling in any sense, but more accurately as a mirror that helps me to see what is already present. In the early days, I have absolutely been guilty of receiving a card whose meaning I didn’t care for and pulling subsequent cards to get an answer I liked better. I’ve learned that the cards will only make a mockery of this folly.
Only recently would I consider myself a good steward of the space of this intended vessel, though - or at least I am trying to be. Morning pages and meditation have become daily parts of my life, devotional practices both. Both have similar functions: to keep the incessant patter of thoughts moving through, to help prevent me from anxiously attaching too hard to any one of them, and creating space for missives from elsewhere to come through without placing demands. When you kick the log the stream starts flowing.1
I am usually the type of person who wants to read every book about a subject before trying to put that information into practice, into life, or to imagine that I know anything about it. I have historically found it impossible to feel like an authority even on the subjects I have spent years studying. Call it imposter syndrome, self-doubt - whatever. I am lately more and more able to see clearly how this form of perfectionism keeps me from the world, keeps me from living a fuller, funner life because I don’t feel like I have permission to experiment, to play, to try something out, to fuck up a little bit, to be bad at something new, to look foolish. The stakes feel irrationally high.
But I didn’t do that with nephelomancing. I didn’t looked up a single thing about it, not even Wikipedia. I just decided to practice opening the channel to whatever wanted to come through from the clouds. I invoked the archetype of the Magician in the Smith-Rider-Waite tarot deck - he points up to the sky and down to the earth, becoming the conduit between worlds. Anyway, I thought I would try it out and see what happened. For many months I looked at the clouds and received no discernible messages. But the more I looked at them with intention, the more I felt increasingly flooded with raw emotion. I was overtaken by something unspeakable. I felt hollowed out entirely and entirely refilled by the ineffable feelings of the clouds. I wept on several occasions - the fucking clouds brought me to tears!! The inner movement was geologic.
Fast forward to August of this past year and I’m driving from Boston to rural Maine at 5pm on a Friday. The highway is a parking lot, there’s nothing to do but surrender. The sun is setting and it inflames the sharply defined clouds with intensely hot pink rays. No matter how many times I see a sunset like this I will never not be incredulous. Do you believe this shit? This shit just happens here on Planet Earth all the time, while we’re stuck in the midst of something mundane and irritating, and the only thing we can do is receive it in the manner of our choosing. I’m glad the traffic isn’t moving because I can’t stop staring. And that’s when the message comes through - silently but very clearly in all caps: YOU DON’T HAVE TO KNOW ANYTHING. As in: you already have everything you need. My body fills with liquid light.
It feels important that I tell you the message I received, that I don’t encode or hide it because I’m afraid of what you’ll think. I know that that’s what I needed to hear, maybe someone else needs to hear it, too.
Later on that drive, after the sun had set, a bright white light fell straight down from the sky to the earth. My friends waiting for me at my destination saw it too, several dozen miles away. We never found out what it was, but that doesn’t bother me. Some unknown collaborator was visible. The messages that need to get through will reach you if you make a space for them. When you kick the log, the stream starts flowing.
One Unsolicited Recommendation
If you are interested in the topic of writing, and particularly if you are interested in writers writing about writing, do yourself a solid and check out the newsletter of my brilliant and hilarious pal Sarah Elaine Smith (a fellow tarot reader and an extremely incisive one at that!). She is the author of the incredible book Marilou is Everywhere and lately she’s been putting out a series through her newsletter called How to Promote Your Book Without Dying of Shame and it’s so good, y’all. I don’t even have a book manuscript that I’m actively working on at the moment but it’s helping to make it possible for me to tell people about my own newsletter that you are reading now (and to write it in a way that feels very vulnerable at times!!!) - I think if you do any kind of writing or art it would be helpful. There’s a free version but the tiny amount you pay for the weekly missives is 1000% worth it in my humble opinion. She’s the kind of writer who makes me want to become more and more myself. Subscribe and find the portal: https://sarahelainesmith.substack.com/
Thanks for being here. See ya next Wednesday.
Mere
Bessel van der Kolk says something like this in The Body Keeps the Score in the context of therapy - a little bit goes a long way. I have found the image useful in many unrelated areas as well.