Dear Hallelujah,

On living a life of sacred demotion

Dear Hallelujah,

I almost lost you. And no no I’m not doing the thing where I pretend like I’ve got you now, something to hold on to, and never let go. You’ve been breath this whole time. Every in, every out, a collaboration with something absolutely bigger than me, bigger than us, bigger than all.

I was thinking about how I’ve been living a life of steady, skillful and unskilled demotion, a timely and wildly wrong demotion, a big crescendo to flat silence demotion - how it’s gifted me something still and dark and quiet. It might be my name.

How demotion is different than renunciation, it’s nonsensical in some ways, to me most of all, and yet flows like river. Most people spend their lives trying to get to the beautiful place, and we agree upon that collectively in our culture, we walk around in that agreement we never made, a plan we never hatched - maybe a big pretty house, a marriage, a family, a booming career, a making of one’s mark - even typing this has an energy I no longer like in my hands.

[Demotion definition: reduction in rank or status; “too many demotions would weaken morale”]

I left the wide mountains for the sticky city, a big house for the tiniest studio, a marriage for a truer loneliness, the stable career for instability by day, mouth breathing by night. It’s a Benjamin button type something. Something is becoming wiser in me though at the same time, on surface level it all looks … stupid.

[Stupid definition: having or showing a great lack of intelligence or common sense; “I was stupid enough to think she was perfect]

Sometimes I can feel the gaze of the outside world on my life, it sits hot on my skin like a humid summer gripping until it’s through with you. Drops you like fall. You’re done giving what it expected and so its gaze turns from soft adoration to a scornfull quiet violence. The most unnerving is that the scornful violence is often dressed with a smile, pleasantries, but you feel the open grave below it - waiting for you to trip. I wish I could say that my own judgmental gaze on myself didn’t join in with the world’s sometimes, and that it didn’t feel like relief.

What a relief to join in on occasion, ‘you stupid girl! what are you doing what have you done!’ because joining in, even on judgment or self-hatred, means at least you have a place to sit.

(And we all know you’ve been treading water for a while.)

But this life of demotion, has had me fall like a feather onto some bedrock of a known love, universe wide. And on the days I’m not afraid, I let myself feel it.

Because truer still than all the surface water, is a love in me so profound, that it could never shrink in the sun. Something is becoming truer here. And it hurts most days. And it doesn’t show very well in small talk and the lines of logic aren’t there, nothing for the trackers to track really … except by feel.

[Stupid, etymology: mid 16th century: from French stupide or Latin stupidus, from stupere ‘be amazed or stunned’; comes from the Latin verb stupere, ‘for being numb or astonished’, and is related to stupor]

I feel the slow becoming. A train rolls just barely down the track and my only job is to shed all expectations, ideas or visions I had and clung to about who I think I am or where I think I’m going. And trade it all in for a more uncomfortable, holy answer:

I don’t know.

My truest, most faithful words yet.

The caption of an old-timey newspaper, reads:

“Stupid girl looks out window of slow moving train of demotion, devotion, and when asked where she’s going she smiles softly to say ‘I don’t know!’ and when asked who’s driving the train she laughs to say ‘I don’t know!’ and when asked why she’s on this train she sings ‘I don’t know!’ in strange falsetto, and throughout all questioning never ceases looking out the window.”

Stupid. Amazed or stunned.

Stupid. Numb or astonished.

The I don’t know train, is a holy one.

The I don’t know train, bound for glory.

Hallelujah.

Yours (too?),

Amelia