Yesterday morning I did what I know I shouldn’t do before coffee, but most mornings of late I’ve been unable to resist: read an argument on X. Two people going back and forth, each one certain the other was the villain – in this instance, the villain of history. Both had points. Both had errant perspectives on one detail or another. Both missed the point entirely.
Scripture named what I was looking at, and am almost always looking at, on X, and it did so a long time ago. James said to be “swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath: for the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.” That’s most of public discourse right now. People feel first, then force the facts to fit, and they’re almost always unable to hold complexity in their arguments without it catching fire.
I closed the app and thought, “this is exactly why I have withdrawn from sharing certain thoughts or ideas in most forums – even in real life discussions.” People don’t want to discuss. People don’t want to consider perspectives. People utterly refuse to step into the shoes of another. At this point, people are generally not interested in anything but being right, and being as loud as they need to be to feel like they’ve won their case.
I chuckled at this thought, then logged off, and made my way to the kitchen to get my coffee. Then, promptly, I dove straight into what would make my world the best it could be. Yesterday morning, that was deep cleaning my bathroom. That task took no more than 20 minutes, but I was in a flow so… surprise! I decided that completely gutting and rearranging my room was the ticket.
The Cocoon
Inspired by the wisdom churned up in me by the previous trains of thought around the X discourse (or, derangement, really), I decided to give my big screen, PS4, and TV table to my partner in crime for his man cave, and what I morphed my cocoon into instead feels like my true home, like the truest version of where I actually live. I placed my two bookcases on either side of my dresser, set a tiny TV on top for late-night movies or true crime decompression, and suddenly had the sanctuary I’d always intended my space to be. A little library cocoon.
Isaiah said “in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength,” and as I settled into bed last night and let my eyes meander the panorama of the room, I realized I had felt that in a practical, physical way as I had arranged the shelves. These shelves hold what I actually live with: theology and Bibles in several translations (Apocrypha included), Christianity and Catholicism, paganism, Zen and Buddhism, Eastern and Native belief systems, then the occult ideas of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky sitting directly beside Jung’s Psychology and the Occult. From there, broad psychology in its many forms, from the physiology of the brain to schools of thought and research, then Marcus Aurelius and a plethora of other philosophy, including a great deal of my favorite, Mr. Alan Watts. And, on the literary end, more favorites: Zora Neale Hurston, Edgar Allan Poe, Khalil Gibran, Shel Silverstein, my old English Lit textbooks, and more.
As I write this post and ruminate about what has landed and ultimately planted itself on my shelves over the years, I am stuck on how much Alan Watts helped me to grow in every way. He changed me, at my core, and there’s a story in how he found me.
Razor Blades and Soft Edges
I was twenty-three, in graduate school, teaching computer classes at a community college for a department head named Ralph – the same Ralph whose name appears in my dedications and in many of my posts, whose final chapter was lived in our home. Ralph had seen something in me before I had fully seen it in myself. That is the particular gift of certain people; they hold the mirror at just the right angle.
One day he handed me a book. It was my first introduction to Alan Watts. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are. Ralph didn’t make a ceremony of it. He gave it the way people give things when they know exactly what they’re doing – quietly, like it was obvious, but with a brief yet intentional warning: “It’s a hard book, one that will take time for you to be able to digest and finally read from start to finish. Allow that. Sit with it, even if it’s one bite at a time, and don’t let frustration fire up your ego. If you can do that, if you can embody patience and humility, this book will serve you well.”
Ralph was right about almost everything, and this was no exception. It took me years to get all the way through without getting stuck or completely lost. Nearly a decade, in fact. Every time I picked it up, it quietly dismantled something I thought I knew. It kept peeling back “the layers of the onion,” as Ralph always said. It kept peeling back the idea that I – this particular, too-intense, “separate” person – was really as isolated as I felt. That’s a slow thing to dissect, deconstruct, and ultimately undo from within. It’s a good thing to undo, though. For me, it was one of the best things I ever did for myself, and for those around me.
What I Carried Without Knowing
I grew up in the South, with lightning bugs (fireflies). They came at dusk – first one or two like punctuation, then more, and then all at once they were everywhere, blinking out of the dark in their hundreds, their thousands. A beautiful nightly experience. And, underneath that beauty, for a child raised on scripture and sermon, they reminded me of a word that had been pressed into me to fear: Legion. “For we are many.” Something swarming in the dark, to be wary of. Unlike Ralph’s quiet gift of a book meant to open something in me, this was a word handed down not to free but to control – and all my life I had carried that warning and what it instilled without fully knowing I was carrying it. Ultimately, that was what Watts helped me to deconstruct.
Watts didn’t ask me to abandon what I believed. Not even close! He asked me to look at it more honestly – to ask who had handed me my fear alongside my faith, and whether those two things were always meant to arrive together. As I considered that, throughout the course of that decade of self-exploration and deconstruction, I always thought of the fireflies. Legion, but not demons. Never demons. Just light, doing what light does in the dark.
I’ve asked the big questions since I was a child. I’ve always been drawn to many often contradictory ideas and realities, and more than willing but elated to explore, compare, contrast, and consider them. But before Watts, that intensity came out harder. It was judgmental, arrogant, haughty at times, bitter in others. I was “too much” for most people, and I wore that like armor. Looking back, I often see that version of myself as someone who was not just wearing armor, but armor adorned with razor blades and spikes. But, Paul said, “when I became a man, I put away childish things” – and I think that maturity isn’t just about behavior. It’s about what you need from people.
Back then, I needed to be understood, agreed with, validated. I needed the argument won. Watts helped me loosen that mighty grip, mostly from ego. What I’d add throughout my journey that Watts couldn’t quite give me was the fulfillment that comes only from God. Watts was circling something real, but he found it dissolving into an impersonal universe. I found it anchored in a personal God. Galatians says “yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” – and that’s the difference. The defended, isolated self didn’t disappear into nothing. It was given over to Someone. That’s not the same thing, and I think that’s important.
The Softening
The fire in me didn’t go out. What happened was that the fire in me stopped needing to lecture. It settled into something quieter, something more like, “These ideas and explorations matter whether you understand it or not. I don’t have to make you understand it – it is my job to help you see it.” That’s not arrogance anymore. It’s actually the opposite. It’s planting the seed, and then giving the fertilization and maturing of that seed to God. Ultimately, it’s release.
That shift – that softening – brought real peace inside me. It also created distance. A lot of the deeper people in my life are gone now – Ralph among them. They’ve made the transition to whatever comes after this life. What’s left in my 3D reality, too often, are conversations that don’t go anywhere. A majority of people who aren’t really interested in learning or growing, certainly not exploring the depths of psychology, theology, philosophy and the like, or even using words with any care. So I withdrew. I started blogging what I used to merely note ideas about on random napkins and scraps of paper and eventually journal in notebooks, publicly instead.
Watts wrote often about inspiration. His perspective of it was not as something you summon but as something that arrives when you stop trying to control the room. The midnight hour, literal or felt, is when the ego gets tired and steps aside. Habakkuk heard it from God directly: “Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it.” I think about that a lot. The writing isn’t for arguments. It’s putting something true into the world clearly, the same way I arranged these books into a cocoon: for my own peace, and for whoever happens to need it. The views come. The engagement mostly doesn’t. And, that’s okay.
Intensity is still here. Curiosity is still here. The wondering that lived in me as a child is still here – the child who used to slip outside on summer nights, sit in the yard while the fireflies blinked their quiet light, and let whatever was moving in her move, uninterrupted. I didn’t know then that I was doing what writers do. I only knew it felt necessary.
It still does.
Closing Thoughts
If you’ve ever felt “too much” for the room, you probably know exactly what I’ve described here. You’ve likely had experiences where you’ve edited yourself down. You’ve swallowed the question that would have taken the conversation somewhere real because you already knew it wouldn’t be followed. You’ve walked away from exchanges that should have meant something feeling strangely lonelier than before they started. And, at some point, you stopped calling it loneliness and started calling it discernment, because that’s what it is.
You were never “too much” for anyone. You were too honest, or too awake, for spaces and for people that had quietly agreed to stay comfortable or to settle. That’s not a flaw to sand down. That’s something to understand and steward well.
A cocoon isn’t for hiding. A cocoon is where the real work happens – the transformation that can’t be rushed or performed or explained to anyone who isn’t in one. You go in one thing and come out something that was always there, just not yet free. The book of Romans says: “be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.” That renewing rarely happens in the noise. It almost always happens in the quiet. In the rearranged room. In the books that dismantle you gently. In the writing that asks nothing back. So, if you’re building a cocoon right now, in whatever form that takes? I see you, and I encourage you – stay in it as long as you need.
I’m curious as to what books or thinkers helped you move from sharp reactivity to deeper peace? Or are you still in that refining process? If you’d like to share, I’d love to hear your story and/or your experiences.
See you next Sunday.
God bless.
Twin Tree Project 