I saw a ghost yesterday. It was in a field. I had to stop mid-drive.
Ghosts aren’t that rare. They float between us, riding on the exhale, cradling our words, carrying the things we say about ourselves. Passing a joint is the same: cannabis becomes a ritual of shared breath, a rhythm where we breathe in and out, and space and time collapse into each other. When we light up, we bridge more than the distance between our lips with THC. We’re bridging it with smoke, with spirit, with something more ancient than the words we use to fill the chasms. Like smoke filling a basement, the walls remember every session; it becomes its own sanctuary. I know you know what I mean.
Green is my favorite color. Long before I ever rolled a joint. And driving by at 6 a.m., the mist just swirled out of the grass. A green lagoon, breathing a dew that hung in the air.
“What do you think lives out there?” My brother and I used to smoke in the woods. We’d go on long walks at night, watching dew drip from ferns, those walks where you could feel the forest breathing as we crunched into the leaves. He’d click the lighter, sparking a moment of honesty and light in the sleepy woods.
But an early morning poltergeist is something I would definitely recommend.
A spiritual experience is not something you just find in church. You can. But our ancestors believed that even the mist rising out of a field was a ghost. Seriously. In Gaelic folklore, early dew became “fairy mists.” For the Haudenosaunee First Nations, dawn mist is more than vapor; it’s the spiritual force energizing the hunters to commune with their ancestors in the fields, to give them luck on the hunt.
The dead don’t leave us. They rise like tendrils of what was and still is, permeating our space and time.
And when I light up, I know there’s a ghost in the air I can’t quite name. Not just the haze that billows out of our rolled-down windows and pours off our apartment balconies. It’s a ghost that’s everywhere. Do you feel it?
Spirit and Breath
As a preacher (I know, right?) I’ve written a lot of funeral homilies. Preaching is, at its best, about being led by Spirit. Some write them down, others trust the unspoken flow of the tap when it’s drawn open. Either way, it’s the stream of breath I feel at a pulpit that I follow and that pushes me toward whatever is beyond. We talk about the Gospel, the good news from long ago that’s still vibrating right now. Preaching is like standing on the edge of a cliff, letting that breath catch up with you, and watching the mist roll off the precipice. If you get too close, you’ll surely fall off. Sure, the “Holy Ghost” can be present, but preaching is what happens when the fire in your flesh meets the oxygen of your lungs.
It’s exhilarating. You should try it.
But lately, I’ve been looking out at the congregation and wondering if the ghosts are still with us in the sanctuary’s void.
Dead Christians
Pew Research says the decline of Christianity is slowing. Maybe that’s good news… or maybe not. Still, fewer U.S. Americans call themselves followers of Jesus, that radical Jew from first-century Judea that people keep misquoting and misunderstanding. To the atheist reader, maybe this feels like a victory. Fair enough. In the body of Christ, there are hands and feet. But there are also assholes.
By the way, I’m not dissing you atheists. Your confidence needs no faith. I respect that with my whole heart.
But to the Christian tokers out there, whether your church still clings to a Reagan-era hymnal or has a Coldplay-inspired worship band and a green room (yes, evangelical green rooms outshine mainline ones), the trend is the same: Empty pews, emptier and emptier. Things fall apart, and the center cannot hold.
So, I’ve found communion (little “c”) in puffing and passing. Not as sacrament, but as shared breath and time. God is there, too.
A few months ago, I got to see an old friend and pass a joint while listening to records we’ve worn thin (let’s be real, on YouTube). Jarrett, Coltrane, some new voices. When it’s used just right, there can be a spirituality to the smoke, the way it lingers, the specters of gray that fill the spaces between our lips. A misty balcony, Keith Jarrett’s on a Steinway in Tokyo, and suddenly we’re there. Spirit appears and the rhythm of smoke and sound transcends our flesh and elevates the light in our eyes.
You may have seen lots of folks on X talking about Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti. Mbiti explains that in some East African societies, there’s no concept of the future. Every moment is an eternal present. “The future is virtually absent because events which lie in it have not taken place.” This is hard for me to understand as a Hegelian who likes to imagine myself as a small part of the Geist dissolving into history.
When I’m taking a drag with a friend, time does stop, and yet the contours of the moment sharpen. The photons themselves, which will never experience minutes or millennia, suddenly make sense as we try to feel ourselves within something more infinite.
I don’t know. Most days, I’m too busy scrolling, racing to get to another distraction. The pews empty, and my spirit grows heavy. “The fog comes on little cat feet,” Sandburg says, but who will mourn when the last mist of the church vanishes into the harbor? Will the ghosts and Geist remain?
I guess I’ll keep puffing and passing to fill the time, to keep the connections warm. In our pandemic of loneliness, maybe all we can do is keep talking and toking.
Maybe there are ghosts in those fields, drifting from mist or smoke, warning us. Daring us to wait just long enough until the mountains of air coalesce into something solid, crystallizing this very moment into a sun of being.
Maybe we’re meant to stay here and commune with these ghosts in the fields.
Smoke rises, mist settles, and breath hovers—for the time being.
Amen.
Photo by Brother Jay
This article is from an external, unpaid contributor. It does not represent High Times’ reporting and has not been edited for content or accuracy.
