How To Be The Most Spiritual Person In The Room
By Rachel Ament
Change your name to Feather. Always say your name in a soft slurring hum. Don’t worry about fully pronouncing the “R” at the end. Let it drift out into the wind. Let it have a good time. Have a baby and name him Finn. Dress Finn in outfits that are made out of dried leaves and seeds. Listen to Finn’s outfit crunch as he walks by. Preserve the earthy sounds in the squiggly insides of a seashell.
Think of everything in relation to nature. Be so at one with nature that your body will start to feel like a tree and trees will start to feel like your body. Forbid yourself from thinking about anything too worldly or material. Shun the news. Abhor politics. Deprive yourself of frilly comforts like TV and air conditioning. Be overheated at all times. Let your body heat up so much that you can feel all of your arm hairs sizzling and sauteeing atop the stove of your skin. Your arm hair will smell like glistening fried chicken. You’ll want to have a bite.
Don’t have a bite. Only eat whole unprocessed foods. Eat apples with the stems, leaves and bark still attached. Appreciate the challenge of digesting bark. Savor the bark’s coarse almondy texture as it chafes against your stomach and intestines. Be grateful for the exquisite balance of the world. Remind yourself that the harsher the challenge, the more florid the reward. As you digest your bark, realize that you are becoming more spiritually whole, more radiantly in control of your life and your experiences.
Lose 20 pounds. Take up veganism. Snort vitamins, herbs and supplements every night. Notice the new yellowy vegany halos under your eyes. Tell yourself you are beautiful, even if in a withered anemic kind of way. See beauty in everyone and everything. If you have trouble finding it, look harder. See the beauty in murderers. See the beauty in the crackly cries of a Ke$sha song. Relish the cheesy charm of throwing a money sign inside your name. Insert one inside your own name. Fe$ther. Lose your last name. You’re a spiritual guru rock star now.
Tell strangers they are beautiful. Tell them you want to curl up beside them. Curl up beside them and imagine that you have morphed into a single sushi roll. Pretend that you are the seaweed and the other person is the rice. Cherish this feeling. When you have friends over, link all of your arms in a billowing flower chain. Stay like that for the rest of the night, everyone asleep on the floor, arms ringed together in the straggly stems.
Wake up smiling and then touch your mouth so you can feel the smile on your skin. Wish that you could track down the saddest person in the world, cut the smile off your face with a scalpel and graph it onto the person’s face. You won’t have a mouth or a smile anymore but that will be okay. You are at peace with yourself. You are so happy you don’t even have to smile.