Missive to the Weird

Valerie Louis
5 min readOct 19, 2021

“I know this sounds crazy (weird, strange, etc.) but_______.” (Fill in the blank with your experience with Spirit, Nature, the Unseen, a Dream.) And you have just witnessed the most common conversation I have in my worklife. After the confession of crazy, my response is always some variation of “that’s not strange at all.” I am a normalizer of the “weird” for many. Maybe you have (or had) an experience with Spirit that has you unnerved or freaked you out. So many of us have these stories. My job is to listen, hold space, and provide context and then together we — with this tender experience — give the Unknowable room in the the rational world to be spoken. This transformative story is on the cusp of being hidden and possibly squirreled away in shame, or in the self talk of “I am crazy,” or that “didn’t really happen to me.” But if we can speak these stories to others in a sacred container — relief is felt. This relief is a sense of coming back into relationship with Self, being seen and heard without judgment, and with understanding.

Why do so many of us believe our experiences with The Mystery didn’t happen, are super uncommon, and make us strange, weird, or different? I believe the reason is we have lost the lineage of our magical roots & lineages. This rational world we live in has bullied many of us into choosing a binary side — rational or irrational, sane or crazy, seen or unseen, believer or skeptical, muggle or wizard (ok — that one I kinda believe ;-). Modern culture has tried to embrace the Spiritual by placing oracle and tarot cards in every bookshop, smudge sticks in upscale stores, ritual candles abound on the web — but instead of giving us fulfillment, it has left us feeling shallow and unconnected. We have lost our apprenticeship to the sacred arts and relegated them to branded modern experience, instead of a deeply rooted lineage that stretches back in time and space. Understanding the history of the sacred arts, knowing that others have done what we do now, and embodying the theory that anchors our praxis is missing in today’s Spiritual practice for many.

Historically, the spiritual was everyday life. Interwoven and interconnected, seeking spiritual guidance, getting your cards read, and using herbal medicine was once a part of our comings and goings. Tending to our spiritual lives was a daily practice done with our neighbors, family, and community. We have lost this wisdom as a culture — many of us do not have “lived experience” of a beloved aunt reading our cards at the age of 13, or sharing dreams over breakfast with our parents and friends. Few of us found a teacher that helped us set up our first altar or create our first ritual, and even fewer of us find a mystery school that teaches us the sacred arts of prophecy, symbolism, dreaming, crafting, and healing.

But in our collective consciousness we remember that this was daily life on our planet. And many of these practices were in the realm of women. Both women and men upheld the feminine energy that resides in each of us. But if you don’t know that your spiritual and magical practices have a LONG history of being sacred women’s work, woven into gardening, chemistry, cooking, tending to the sick, and managing religious institutions, then it is no wonder we place ourselves on the margins. If you don’t know that an ancient face of God as female exists in Christianity and Judaism, then you will think that the Goddess doesn’t belong to you. Do Jews, Christian, and Muslims who speak of miracles, prophecy, and natural cycles call their devotion “woo” and “weird?” Why then do we consider a personal spiritual practice of communing with the Divine any more deviant? Knowing where your practices come from helps to sustain you, root you in your practices, and assists you to think culturally about your place in the world.

If you find yourself saying your spiritual practice is weird, thinking that others wouldn’t accept you, or understand, I invite you to look deeper into these beliefs. Do you call your practice strange because you are uncomfortable with the weirdness label society has given it? Do you really want to call your practice “woo” — a word that has its origins in extreme skepticism of the unseen? Where does that uncomfortable laughter come from when you tell your friend about your oracle cards? Do you have internalized shame about your prophetic dream? Or is your weirdness about it all because you don’t have the historical knowledge to stand firmly in your knowing and experience?

I am not saying that everyone will accept your beliefs — they also won’t about very mundane things like your choice in reading material, food, careers, etc., and you have every right to keep your spiritual practices close to your chest and sacred (why you maybe don’t want to post your altar pictures on social media is a blog post for another day). But if your labeling of your practice is at odds with your real beliefs about your practice and experience with it, maybe a deep dive into what is underneath can help you embrace all parts of you. Do you struggle with others not accepting your practice? Or is it more an internal struggle and sussing out what you value with what society, family, community, says we should value? Society has told us that we can value our spiritual practices if we relegate them to the land of the weird, and that just isn’t honorable when you put it into historical context.

Trust me — I know the land of the weird and unusual — as a trance channel I realize saying Spirit comes in and talks through you isn’t a job description I give at every cocktail party. But — historically — HELLO — Delphi oracles, Vestal Virgins, Anchorites — I am not so weird or unusual. There are probably as many trance channels in the world as people who sing opera (and I don’t just mean professionally).

So why am I writing this call to embrace your weird? Because if you are lonely in your beliefs and practices, if you feel that no one gets your strange, weird, and unusual knowings, I want you to know I do and others do. I want you to know that I don’t think it’s strange or weird. I think it is beautiful, deeply personal, sincere, needed, required, and totally common. I want you to feel safe admitting to yourself that what you do has a long lineage of wise people. I want you to know that others can and will hold your experience as sacred and sincere. And most of all, I desire for you to feel wholeness in your spiritualness, nourishment from the deep well of lineage that is yours to access, and realness to all of the hidden, the unknowable, and unseen.

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