Darkly Devotions

Lyric prose meditations that play with elements from evangelical Christianity, Buddhism, yoga, reiki, Tarot and “weird voodoo shit.

~by Cindy Clem

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Opening exercise: Take a valuable object, a pearl necklace perhaps or a large silver platter, and hide it somewhere in the place you live. Hide it well. Then, pretend you have lost it. Let yourself sit with the loss that is not really loss and feel the loss as if it were true. Try to forget the hiding place.

Today’s passages:

1. He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.  (John 12:25, NKJV)

2. I used to get angry. All the time. Frustrated, too.

-You’re not frustrated anymore?

I’m not lost anymore.

-How did you do that?

Same way anything lost gets found. I stopped lookin’. (Lost, Season 2, Episode 4-ish)

3.  They are lost, but also not lost but somewhere in the world. Most of them are small, though two are larger, one a coat and one a dog. Of the small things, one is a valuable ring, one a valuable button. They are lost from me and where I am, but they are also not gone. They are somewhere else, and they are there to someone else, it may be. But if not there to someone else, the ring is, still, not lost to itself, but there, only not where I am, and the button, too, there, still, only not where I am. (Lydia Davis, “Lost Things,” from The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis)

Testimonial:

I lost my life once. Not because I loved it but because I didn’t watch it as carefully as I should have. I let it spend money on clothes it never wore and read poorly written erotica. I let it stay out at night until I was forced to stomp through the streets, screaming its name. Frequently, I pounded on its locked bedroom door. I began to hate it, then. I read books on Zen and detachment. I meditated on detachment hard, so hard that when my life came back, I stubbornly ignored it, even as it slunk around picking up the bits of grass and dirt that fell from its shoes, even as it bought me toilet paper in a pack as big as a small bus, trying, I think, to make up for itself. But I still hate it, which makes it stick to me even more, co-dependently. I’m afraid I’ll be stuck with it forever, here, where I am, still, now.

 

Closing Affirmation (repeat three times daily): I love my life. I hate my life. I love my life. I hate my life. Stop lookin. Stop lookin. Hey, it’s a button!

 

 

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Cindy Clem received her MFA in poetry in 2005 and has been writing non-fiction ever since. Her poems and essays have appeared (magically!) in Mid-American Review, The Normal School, Prairie Schooner, Memoir (and), Superstition Review, The Interrobang, Spittoon, and Michigan Quarterly Review (forthcoming).