The Mystery and a Bag of Chips
A field report from the holy mess
I sat down to write something holy.
And reached for a bag of potato chips instead.
Salt. Crunch. Immediate.
A strange communion—my mouth full of resistance,
my body railing against the act of turning the sacred into content.
I know what’s true:
This work is not a product.
It’s a pulse—
a living, breathing relationship with the feeling of being here.
I feel it in the space between words and experience—
a place we’ve all touched, even if briefly.
And it begins, always, in the body.
But when I sit down to “write a blog,”
the Mystery I carry gets compressed into metrics,
formatted for headlines,
distilled into points.
And something in me says no.
Or not like this.
Or not again.
Because I have shaped myself before.
I have squeezed the truth of who I am
into something digestible, palatable, profitable.
I know that maneuver in my bones.
It tastes like betrayal.
And it’s bitter—
even chased by chips.
What if this piece—raw, unshaped—
was the protest?
What if this is the post?
Me, in real time, refusing to polish the sacred
just to make it perform.
I want my voice back.
Not the one I’ve trained to sound wise and clear,
but the one that growls when something precious is mishandled.
The one that cries when the wild is put in a cage and called “readable.”
This is my vow:
I will not flatten Mystery into messaging.
I will not smooth the edges of something alive
just to make it fit the screen.
I will write from the body.
I will speak from the ache.
I will listen to the chips,
the clenching, the pulse in my gut
that says something is off here—don’t ignore it.
Let this be a beginning.
Not of another blog,
but of a voice that doesn’t twist itself
to meet the form.
Let it break the form.
With salt still on my fingers and Mystery as my guide,
—Jacquie
If this met you where you are—if you've ever reached for the chips, the screen, the silence instead of what wanted to move through you—you're not alone.
You're invited to stay in the body, stay with what's real.
This is the work we're doing inside The Wildcrafted Mystery School.
