Experiencer

After I was asked to explore my intuition story, I started confronting for the monsters under my bed in earnest. This was about a year before I realized I was an experiencer.

I became obsessed with the moments in my life when I had felt that sense of heightened awareness, coupled with a deep, tingling fear. That is terror: when you sense something but cannot see it, and your imagination fills in the rest.

I began spelunking through my memories, searching for those flashes of electric emotion. I made lists and lists: Oak Drive. Bigfoot. Everglades. Witchduck Lane. The “dragon” I saw outside the airplane window.

Once I found the word experiencer, everything began to connect. I looked at my Easter Bunny story with new eyes. I reconsidered Witchduck Lane. I realized that the dragon had meaning too.

Stringing these stories together feels like a meditation on terror, supernatural terror. The fear of the unknown, the unseen, the larger than life. That primal sense of being watched, observed, hunted, or chosen.

But alongside this terror, I’ve also felt moments of pure and radiant love. Uncanny moments that filled me with comfort, care, and a sense of being deeply seen.

Both kinds of encounters, the loving and the terrifying, have brought me to my knees. I have felt humbled by the vast, invisible energy that takes interest in me, for better or for worse.

It would be easy to call these entities angels and demons, the angelic love and the demonic hunger, but I am not convinced it’s that simple.

I know I have protectors. I also know that some energies are drawn to my eros. I always have. I move with both through dance, learning how to shape my energy and touch the plasma around me.

I dance with my angels. I dance with my demons. I dance for my ancestors and let them dance through me. I dance for the unseen, and with the unseen.

I wish we had better words. Terror and horror sound like gore, not mystery. The language of angels and demons feels too dualistic; reality is more fluid.

I’ve known lusty angels and tender demons.

The unseen stirs both awe and fear because what we cannot see, we must imagine.

Perhaps the unseen is not meant to be solved, only met again and again, in motion, in wonder, in love. And maybe that is the work of being alive, to imagine what we cannot see and to keep dancing with it anyway.