Ode to the Odd Ones Out
The odd ones out: Yes, I count you and me among them.
There is so much I want to say to you about this. You, with a heart that leans toward the sacred, the way a sunflower seeks the warming radiance of the sun. You, who somewhere way deep down, have always known in your gut that this ain’t it; that despite what the rest of the world says, there’s so much more to life and the universe, than this.
You’re one of the the odd ones out. I’m sure of it.
By ‘odd,’ I don’t mean to suggest you’re not nailing it, by the way. Probably you’re a highly functional member of the modern world. Maybe you have a job, or even a career path. Possibly a mortgage. Hell, at first glance, you might even pass for ‘normal.’ Whatever that means.
But despite all this normalness, maybe, just maybe, something in you has been whispering the truth to you all along—dropping its bright coins, one by one, into the shimmering silent pool of your infinite identity.
And sometimes, when the light of your divinity touches one of those shiny coins just so, the sacred sparkle catches the eye of the mundane, everyday you. And this ‘normal’ you pauses to rest in wonderment, admiring, yet not fully grasping, the precise origin of that divine brilliance.
There are so many pennies in your pond, now. And because of this, something in you knows there’s way more going on in the universe, than what science is telling you. Way more, even, than what religion says. And definitely more than society thinks there is.
Because somewhere inside, your knowing is that there’s something infinitely richer and deeper about you, and your relationship to all that is.
Okay…maybe calling it a ‘knowing’ makes it sound alittle too grand. Maybe you feel it as more of a searching-yearning. Either way, inner certainty OR the inner drive to find that missing something, is you, responding to your own infinite nature.
On some level, you really do know.
And this knowing makes you different. No more special or sacred than any other human being, but different. It sets you apart from the mainstream, whether you like it or not. And others can smell it on you.
Because we’re all born into a culture that aggressively denies the truth of you, and of how the universe actually works. There is no room for any of that, in its mechanistic worldview—where absolutely everything, including you, is reducible to a series of separate component parts. Each one unrelated (and therefore replaceable); all parts disconnected from a blind and insensate universe.
There is no room there for the holiness of you. The wholeness of you. The infinite splendor, and the limitless mystery of your ever-present divinity…which both encompasses and intimately interrelates with all of life itself.
And so, you have long been part of a marginalized minority. Haven’t you?
Maybe you’re well liked and popular; maybe you’re successful in business and you have a supportive and loving family. I hope all of that is the case.
But do you speak openly of what you truly believe, to Great Uncle Fred over Christmas dinner? Do you wear your spiritual soul on your sleeve, in your client meetings? With your circle of friends down at the pub? In the supermarket checkout?
Sometimes it’s quite subtle, the all-pervasive societal othering that goes on. Sometimes it’s as innocently simple as being unable to find a bookshop category that fits your interests.
Hundreds of topics covering all the usual worldly stuff, but just one—Faith and Spirituality—to cover the entire religious, spiritual and metaphysical spectrum. (Even Substack, a pretty wonderful platform, reduces it all to this same single catchall category.)
So Eckhart Tolle is crammed in next to the Bible, cheek by jowl with Geomancy for Beginners, The Bhagavad Gita, and some guy who channels Archangel Metatron.
And so we learn early, in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways, that our interests are not the interests of the rest of the culture.
Different
Long before I had an actual spiritual practice, I (and pretty much everybody else) knew I was different. I saw things that others didn’t. I didn’t see things that others did.
While there may have been some shiny pennies glinting in my pond, I figured the less I knew about them, the better. Because in my experience, the universe was undeniably conscious, and I really wished it would stop trying to get in touch.
So, yeah. It was easy to tell I was different.
As my first employer, an ex-cop from Texas eloquently put it, “I want to like you, Carolyn. But you’re just so goddamn weird.”
“I know, Buck,” I replied sympathetically.
Why sympathetically? Because although I was only a teen at the time, the world had been reflecting its blank mirrors back at me my whole life. Naturally I assumed they were right: I was a goddamn weirdo. Bad luck that Buck had to put up with having me on his payroll.
Maybe your experience of life and the universe has not been quite that overt. (Or maybe it has.) But chances are, this same message of weirdo-ness, subtle or not, has been reflected back at you, too, by the culture at large. The othering is so pervasive, you probably don’t even think about it much.
But hey. It’s nobody’s fault.
In fact, the wavelength on which divine intelligence transmits its broadcast, is a wavelength that absolutely and truly does not exist at the denser frequency level where most of the mainstream makes its home.
And so, technically speaking, the cynics are not wrong. They are reporting accurately on their own experience. They’re just not accurately reporting on yours.
But beyond all that, there’s another important reason this pervasive marginalizing of your inner reality occurs:
There is very little room in a world made of fear, for your growing awareness of your own luminosity.
Because, your acceptance of your own divine radiance, rocks the boat.
It messes with absolutely everything that this current fear-based world is made of. Nobody wants that. (Probably not even you.)
But I’ll tell you what. The world made of fear is a leaky little dinghy.
You, yourself, are the vast ocean surrounding it.
So let’s imagine a different world instead
A world made of love, in which the limitless spiritual intelligence of the heart is clearly self-evident to all.
A world where the culture at large understands and knows the divine nature of all that is—simply because so many of us, maybe even a majority of us, know and accept divine love as the obvious foundation of life itself.
No matter how you look at it, a lot of things about how we live will change, radically, when interconnected intelligent divinity (AKA holiness) is recognized as the baseline underlying all life on Earth.
That world is not just on its way: It’s here. Now. And you, my friend, (whether you know it or not) are one of its earliest residents. You’ll be on the welcoming committee, standing by to greet the later wave of immigrants.
But uh, I don’t see no world made of love.
Look closer. Ask within, to see it with the eyes of the heart. Because it’s fully present—at a higher, but currently unmanifest, level. Ask within, to feel firsthand for yourself, even if just temporarily, what that world is actually like.
And then ask within, what you can do on a practical, tangible worldly level, to help ground and anchor these magnificent high frequencies of love here, now, forever, on this earth.
Because the process is unstoppable: Sooner or later, divinity will form the predominant foundation of business as usual, here. Sooner or later, all will be aligned with holiness, freedom, and respect for all life.
And we can each do our bit, to make sure the transition comes about sooner, not later. (Later would suck. Seriously.)
But either way, sooner or later, it’s going to be very, very beautiful here on Planet Earth, in the not too distant future.
Between then and now, I agree, it’s looking pretty shitty.
But hang in there. The shitstorm will pass.
Keep noticing those sparkling pennies in your pond. And know that your spiritual knowings/yearnings/hopes and dreams, are actually beautiful harbingers of what’s ahead.
Your time is coming.
Update: Mondays at 8
As only a ridiculously few of you may know, I’ve been having technical difficulties with getting Mondays at 8 off the ground.
The idea is, you’re supposed to get an email each Monday just before 8pm UTC, which contains a link to the live discussion thread. (And if you don’t want that weekly email, you can unsubscribe from it separately, while staying subscribed to this newsletter.)
That’s the theory, anyway.
I’ve been trying to send the notification emails to the full mailing list, but only 7 people have actually received them. Not sure why. The Substack support team will hopefully be able to sort it out for me.
The chat thread is there each Monday (and so am I)—check out the discussion I had yesterday at the appointed hour with someone I sent the link to manually, to get the basic idea of what Mondays at 8 is all about.
In the meantime, the Mondays at 8 email program is on temporary hold. Thanks!
Anyway, that’s all the news for now. Big hugs from me to you.
Love, Carrie
Carrie, when I was in the 4th grade, my elementary school offered free music lessons. I grew up in Los Angeles, California. My father wanted to be a concert violinist. I grew up hearing stories about his crushed dreams of being a musician. I decided to play the violin for a short time. I wanted to please my father. My father decided I would live his dream life. I told him that was not my dream. I wanted to be a veterinarian. He decided my life was to be a violinist in the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. When I turned 18, I told him I was not going to be a professional musician. That was brave. I still lived at home while I attended college.
I got married when I was 20 to leave home. I didn't take my violin with me. I went back to my parents house a couple of months later. My mother sold my violin.
The piano was my second instrument. I got a keyboard which I liked to play better than the piano. Then I got a small, family organ. I loved to play the organ. One day, when I get a place big enough, I will look for another home organ. I have several fake books or books which use guitar chords instead of left hand notes. I can read the guitar chords for my left hand and plan the melody with my right hand. I like that plan. I am still looking for a mobile home to buy.
Nancy
From my earliest memories, I knew I was different. I saw things no one else saw. I knew things no one else knew. I did thing other 6 year old kids didn't do. I healed animals with the help of my grandmother. I knew the animals in my neighborhood communicated with each other and they shared I was the human to go to when the animal was hurt, abandoned or lost. Most days, when I walked home from school, I had one or two dog or cats follow me home. I called out to my mother, today two "Today, two dogs followed me home." She told me to stop allowing them to follow me. That would be like me not breathing. A life time later, I live with a rescue cat that is my companion.