Howdy and welcome to the Daughter of Godcast, Episode 067, Belief. A podcast about the longest little movie ever, the movie that made me, and coming up the collaborative completion in 2018. Meanwhile we’re mopping up 2016, aswirl with hints, secrets and clues.

Here’s a true story of 2016 converted to a parable, one might say shamelessly exploited, a duct tape and tin foil allegory, but we take the connections wherever we can find them.

At the end of the summer in 2015,  the day Ben left, we chained the big buoy and doom raft to the bottom of Crystal Lake with two massive anchors, 600 and 300 pounds respectively at 20 feet of depth. Summer turned to Fall and I eventually brought the raft in, but procrastinated on the buoy. Fall turned to Winter and a hard freeze locked the buoy into the ice. Bennie and I had walked out on the frozen lake and pretended to be Scully and Mulder investigating an alien space pod.

The Winter blew and blustered into 2016. The spring melt came in April and  as the big ice plates started breaking up, the wind rose and overnight the ice pack dragged the buoy and the two massive anchors a football field to the west. The power of nature. I converted my rowboat into an icebreaker and busted through the jumbled melting plates to unchain and recover the buoy. The primary anchor was nuzzled into a sand crater in the shallows, but still 6 feet below the surface. Two scuba expeditions were needed to winch and roll it all the back to my place, out of the shallows and back into the deeps. What did I learn?

I learned that sometimes interesting things happen when we procrastinate, not necessarily bad things. Embarrassing perhaps and with luck metaphorical. Deeper appreciation for the wild forces and how easily they can shift our ephemeral beliefs.

When Ben and I filled the 55 gallon steel drum with gravel, 8 bags of portland cement, and a gnarly steel core fabricated by Alex, we incarnated a belief system, an idea of massiveness, of immovability. Keeping a doom raft from drifting to shore on a storm tossed Crystal Lake, certainly. But pure trivia when grabbed by sheets of ice and a little wind. An anchor pretty much not even there at all.

Letting the buoy freeze into the ice was probably not simply laziness. This was my way of calling bullshit on beliefs generally, especially my own. Let the seasons change, the sun shine less directly on this little patch of Michigan, and my idea of massiveness is negated. A metaphorical demonstration, a critique of belief.

Why was I wanting a belief critique? Because beliefs can be tenacious, especially about myself, reinforced over 40+ years. Calcified thoughts that make life frustrating. Core assumptions about limitations and unworthiness, while at the same time knowing, feeling magic all around. Like to tear a man in twain.

Making the Daughter of God was akin to discovering the owners manual for the universe. There on page 53, I discovered a detailed description of my vastness, my unique quest and awesome powers. I’d been operating impoverished, a bag of beliefs masquerading as a man.

Now 2016, having the cosmic blueprints laid before me, the formula for practical magic plain as day, my beliefs were so much trivia. The magic was primary now, my human adventure. All beliefs were now up for evaluation, did they support the flow of magic or not?

If not, then gently and delightfully assert a belief that would. By swapping one belief for another as easily as changing t-shirts, is to be liberated from the tyranny of belief altogether.

So the morale of the Anchor and the Ice? Seeing this huge hunk