I want you to bring life to your inner world
A petri dish inside of a petri dish inside of a petri dish
My happy place is a bookstore. Not just any bookstore but the most ubiquitous of bookstores: Barnes & Noble.
There’s a particular energy it takes me back to—not just one time in my life but a series of times. Times when the world was simultaneously its most chaotic and also the most full of magic.
When I was 12-15, my mom would take me to the bookstore and it was the only time when I really felt free to buy anything. It was one of the few things my mom could reliably justify spending money on for me. It was the one time when I could unfold myself from the shadow of my financially irresponsible mother and my addict sister where I tried to be as small and easily kept as possible and safely want things.
I piled my arms high with books, tiny worlds within worlds, another shadowy spot to fold myself up in. And for as long as I could live there, I tasted other ways of living than the one I had been shown.
When I hear the word ‘microcosm,’ I think of cell cultures in petri dishes. Every time, I’m reminded that that’s all we are—all everything is. Petri dish inside of petri dish inside of petri dish. A Russian doll of petri dishes.
Books are petri dishes, too. They’re an ecology of someone else’s inner world. I have known my entire life the importance of those cellular cultures. The safe spaces inside of us that can easily turn stormy. Where we can imagine an umbrella or a rusty tin shed to wait them out when they do. Where safety is guaranteed if you can mold that primordial goo into something that serves.
That is why I’ve become a purveyor of these inner pastures. A champion of the creative arts.
I have committed my life to reminding people that their imagination is not just a haven, it is magick. It is a theater of healing and self-harmony. It is a seashell that, when held up to a time-deafened ear, still sounds exactly like the ocean that bore us.
I don’t just want people to return to their inner worlds, I want them to make a home inside them. I want them to colonize themselves again. Not the way school and their meager, state-gutted art programs tried to colonize and manipulate them, but as an honorable, empathetic explorer might if this wayward world had ever seen one.
I want you to walk tenderly into that untouched grass and green and befriend what you find there. I want you to cup a shy and fragile bloom and ask it what it could be if you summoned a gentle rain cloud to water it.
I want you to cohabitate and collaborate with your inner life like a group project with a wild god.
Listen to what it has to say without judgement.
Hear the desires under the ambiguation of so much abuse.
Show it another way if you must.
I want you to remember that what you see and hear in your head is not just real, it’s also not just you. You are a portal to a larger Self. One full of titans and tree nymphs. Good ancestors and bad. Wights of great wisdom. Higher and lower realms.
I want you to remember that whatever you imagine, you can create.
And whatever you imagine, you are responsible for making real.
What waits for you in inner space has no hands to build but it yearns to be born. It comes to you like a child, asking to be lifted on the shoulders of a giant.
It comes to you like an ancient power seeking a portal.
It comes to you like a virus seeking a host.
If you shut it down, shutter that imaginative engine, you shut down your ability to learn, to problem solve, to repair, to grow. You don’t just shut down your creative ability, you shut down your relational ability. Your very ability to live.
If you neglect to water that inner garden, you lay waste to the very fields that feed you.
So you fill it up with noise. You monocrop it with the seeds of other people’s inner worlds. You starve the ecology of you because you can’t bear to be present with it.
And the longer that you feast on that genetically modified, pesticide poisoned fruit, the more nutritionally deficient you become.
The more estranged from yourself.
The more numb and confused.
You wonder why you can’t make art. Why all your dreams come to nothing. The soil is starved of its most essential nutrient—your presence. Your vital attention. Your willingness to spend time fertilizing it.
Your lack of investments in your Self give you away.
You are a stranger in these lands.
But one day, when your eyeballs are sandpaper-raw and your ears ring from walking digital landscapes like a hungry ghost, you can no longer ignore that the empty calories no longer feed. The itch no longer scratches. The sponge won’t soak.
That is when you come back home to your Self. Your inner world. The ocean that bore you.
And you will find it just as you left it.
Wanting for care and nourishment…
But not dead yet.
Special thanks to Adriana Michelle for supporting this publication. <333
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