Where Ya Gonna Run To (Sinnerman)
Long ago, after feeling rejected by the Christian faith through circumstances that centred around an experience with a religious organization from the United States, I delved into an investigation of alternative religions. I became totally disenfranchised by the notion of Christianity mostly due to the people representing it. It is a very long story, but suffice it to say, I was jaded. This happened when I was in my early twenties. While in this frame of mind, it was recommended to me to read the book Satanism and Witchcraft by Jules Michelet and though I was very skeptical and a little bit afraid to look into this, I took the recommendation and read it cover to cover. I was surprised and horrified all at once. Its main theme offered the backstory as to why Christians turned to Satanism in the medieval era. This turn of events was in reaction to the rejection of organized religious institutions requiring some sort of financial renumeration for the propitiation of sins and of course, those living in poverty could not afford to pay the fee for the forgiveness of their sins, as required by the church at that time. In desperation, people started to turn to Satan instead mostly because it was free and therefore, offered a place of refuge for believers with nowhere else to go. This, of course, flies in the face of everything Jesus Christ represents in the unpolluted sense of the concept, but when man gets involved, things get messy and often quite ugly. However, the ugliness in this scenario wasn't stemming from the self-proclaimed Satanists, but the self-proclaimed Christians and the ugliness of man-made Christianity has troubled this world many many times. This is a topic unto itself but I won't get into it right now. Instead, I am attempting to build a foundation of comprehension when it comes to my personal belief systems as they existed in the year 2020, the year my entire life fell apart.
I had become well versed in the concept of witchcraft after an extended period of experimentation, largely due to my sense of rejection from the Christian side of things, while also being aware of the polar opposite choice of Satanism. I couldn't ever go so far as to say I wanted to be a Satanist, but some of the philosophies of Satanism, as well as witchcraft, jived very well with my personal views as an individual. Specifically, the ideals I was attracted to under both banners was this one simple concept; do what you will, but harm none. I loved that idea and took it to heart very sincerely as I embarked on a new journey within my personal belief systems. The first step on this journey began with resolving to keep my religious views to myself as best as I could, after publicly announcing to my friends and family I no longer wanted to attend any type of church of any kind. I decided I would walk alone if I was going to walk this particular path and, in conjunction with living in the woods, isolated from the rest of the world for over a decade, it went well for me. The aspect of witchcraft I identified with the most was one that was based in connecting with nature and the inherent powers within it, of which there are many and they are extremely powerful, indeed. After many years of testing this theory, I have determined that God must surely have created women to be particularly attuned to the powers of nature, for sure, which circulate all around us at all times. In times passed, women who tap into this power have been viewed as evil and given over to the control of Satan and so on. As we know, countless women have been burned at the stake for this very reason and though it's not exactly funny, many times my mother and sisters and I have joked that there would have been a time when we would have all faced the risk of such a fait. Every woman in my family has exhibited a form of innate spiritual gifts regardless of their faith. I believed we were designed that way because we were never meant to be separated from our connection with the natural world to begin with.
When 2020 came along, my life was on a very slippery slope but I didn't know it at the time. Everything I held dear was in the path of destruction that inevitably crashed into my world over and over again like the waves of a very tumultuous sea. Grief riddled my system due to the deaths of my eldest sister and my grandmother, but my personal life was also experiencing extreme difficulty too. I did not feel like I could pray as one would normally do, but I did whisper the name of Jesus over and over to myself when I felt particularly under pressure as I knew it was a name that repels demonic forces (and that is a fact). Aside from that fact, I called on the powers of nature to guide me and to soothe my spirit. I found it to be quite a powerful thing to do on levels I don't really have the words to explain, but fast forward to the time when my family and I relocated back to the "Purple House" and I will do my best to explain how things unfolded for me there.
To make a really long story short (so many long stories to tell!) it was my decision to paint this house I am referring to in the gorgeous shade of purple it became known for. The reason I chose this colour was because the house was rumoured to have been a part of the Underground Railroad (it had numerous underground rooms and spaces which lead to a nearby body of water) and so, I very sarcastically chose that colour to the people around me because I knew everyone would assume I was just trying to be eccentric. I was not trying to be eccentric at all, but I was trying to allude to the history of the house itself, which had a very colourful past. It was the oldest house in the village as well and I felt it deserved to be appreciated as such. I hope to handle this subject sensitively but to put it as plainly as I can, my ex-husband, kids, and I are white as was the community, for the most part, that this house is located in and I only mention this because it is very important to the story as a whole. My family and I had lived there for four or five years and then relocated, but in 2020, we ended up back at the Purple House and when that happened, my life went haywire. Or so I thought. Leaving my personal struggles aside, in hindsight I can see now that what I spent that entire summer doing was calling upon the powers of nature to offer up a prayer for the house itself. No one quite believes me but I am able to hear other people's thoughts and I could sense my ex-husband had no intentions to build a life with me at this house and I knew he was thinking a lot of things that were not good and as time went on, this all proved to be true. But I tuned all that out and listened to what the house itself was trying to tell me.
The first time we lived there, I was completely unaware of my spiritual gifts (clairvoyance, for example) but always felt like I could hear the voices of people crying, feeling lost, feeling trapped, feeling intense fear. In my mind's eyes, I could see Black men and women looking at me through the darkness but I chalked it up to having a vivid imagination, nothing more. I didn't tell a soul what I saw or what I felt. But when we relocated back to that house in 2020, all other events considered, I thought I must have hit some sort of existential crisis and I started to channel my intuition full force at what I was going through. I opened myself up to any and all spiritual influences as I was experiencing them at that time but even I didn't fully understand my motives and I know nobody else around me did either, to say the least. Nevertheless, I felt spiritual energies all around, I listened to the music of Nina Simone to amp up the energy and on one particular night, I cranked the music so loud, I blew a speaker while a thunderstorm rolled in, crashing and banging through the air as I played Sinnerman as loudly as I could. Even my ex-husband could not deny the energies swirling in the air that night and I made sure to open the door and let the rain in and let the spirits out, because I was doing whatever I could think to do to release them from that house. Conjuring their freedom, I guess. I wanted them to know their hour of bondage had come to an end and it was their time of Jubilee. And what a jubilee it was. I still remember the power and the force and the energy filling every cell of my body and it was exciting and vivid and so very real. It was a perfect storm, in the best possible sense of the term.
Looking back on the era of my life, though many heartbreaking events occurred shortly after, these times precipitated the current trajectory my life is on now. I have learned that I have gifts, I have learned that I can make it on my own, I have learned I have an intense storehouse of information within my mind that allows me to generate meaning in my life where it might not otherwise exist. But I also experienced intense heartbreak, abandonment, loss after loss, as a price to pay for all that freedom. Thankfully, I am someone who keeps a very detailed record of my life and there were many times throughout this experience where my memory failed me as a consequence of a mental burnout, I still had the wherewithal to take pictures of every single moment that seemed pertinent to the overall retelling of the story, which I knew I would eventually do. I have always had the heart of a storyteller. I knew the day would come when I would be able to organize my thoughts well enough to share this story when the time was right and that time has finally come. So, as I review my photos, I can see I was very focused on what was going on in the natural world around me. All the pretty flowers I grew were like babies to me, representative of the liberation of the souls I felt swirling around in the atmosphere. All the walks I went on to listen to song after song which brought me to conclusions that furthered my interest in the mental landscapes within my mind and so on and so on and so on. I was coming to terms with many scenarios.
At that time, George Floyd's murder was in the news and the entire world had erupted in protest. In the United States, slave owner iconography was being torn down, the Black Lives Matter movement went into full swing, and everything changed on a global scale. I remember watching the news and crying so many times, feeling so discouraged by the problem of police brutality and the general state of things in the States for reasons I can't entirely explain, but I cried all the time. I could not overcome my sense of grief. So, to connect this story to the original point about witchcraft that I was trying to make at the beginning of this post, I can see I called upon nature itself as a form of prayer not just for the state of the world, but for this Purple House, specifically. It was there that I felt I had connected with my own inherent power. It was there that I sensed a time of sweeping liberation coming to the Black people of North America, it was there that I gleefully blew a speaker while blasting Nina Simone during a powerful thunderstorm and it was there that the door to freedom was flung wide open as the rains came down, down, down.
I have a penchant from drama, by the way. Does it show?
On a more personal note, this home was also a part of my family's history, it was where my kids spent a lot of their childhood years, and it was where we had a lot of good times as a family, overall. My despair grew by leaps and bounds as I became more attuned with the intentions of my ex-husband. I could feel he was getting ready to make his big exit from my life and I think I knew it even before he did, in fact. I was also told repeatedly that the house itself was too old, to decrepit and too valueless to bother with and one of my ex-husband's friends even suggested it should be torn down. This was how my life was going at that time. Everything I cared about was deemed worthless and my life seemed to slip away from me and no one seemed to care at all. My family didn't fight for the house, my family didn't fight for me. They were willing to let us both erode and fade away to nothing, I guess.
But I did what I did and what I did was pray, in my own way. I prayed with music, I prayed with dancing, I prayed with flowers, I prayed with sex, I prayed with singing, I prayed with walking and thinking and seeking. I prayed by communicating with the spirit realm and I prayed that someone, somewhere, would help me.
I know my Christian friends would be appalled by some of the content of this post but it is not my intention to offend, rather to explain in hopes to build some sort of bridge from one point of view to the other and somehow stitch together a commonality that helps make this world a better place. I look back through all the photos I took in this timeframe and I see a woman who was doing her best to focus on the beauty of the world around me, attempting to reach through time and space to answer a voiceless call I heard within my heart, which translated as a call to be free.
I've mentioned this before, but for me, if there is a God, the evidence of the presence of God exists within shape of a circle. Everything comes back around.
It just so happens that the Purple House was not torn down but it was purchased by a Black family from afar, who saw it online and fell in love with it and I cannot tell you the joy that wells up within me when I drive past this house now (I live close by) because the husband/new owner told me directly that the house was absolutely solid and had much life left in her yet. And his wife told me she could almost hear the house crying out to be saved. Well, save it they did and they are dressing it up just like a princess getting ready for the ball. It's like a match made in heaven for the house to find this family and for this family to find this house. My prayers were answered, however they were offered–whether through flame or tears, silence or screams, there is joy to be found in this outcome.
It is also a joy to see their vision for this home come to life and it makes me see that my prayers were most certainly answered. Every whim, every wish did not go unanswered. This family, by the way, owns a little eatery in town called Buttermilkcreek Eatery and the reason I felt inspired to write this post today is because the man who bought this house (a Black man, let me remind you) was standing in the exact same window where I once painted the Black Lives Matter slogan and he saw me drive by, smiling. He smiled back and waved. It was awesome. History is being made as well as preserved at this house and me and my family represent its last lifeline to a better day, day by day. I don't think I was in the wrong place at all and I don't think my life was actually falling apart at that time either. In fact, I am starting to see it may have actually been coming together. What a welcome sight it is for me, not to mention a near mythical response to the past meeting with the present. It is all playing out in real time because this is real life, and real life sometimes plays out like a miracle.
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