- BACK-STITCH ON A SPIRAL
- Space walks on the dragon's teeth
- bend infinity's relentless movement back upon itself
and bring us round to loving friendship, close caring
- need to share a portion of this timeless time together
Wondering how a creative writing graduate would respond, I asked my son, the Puma, “What do you think of the title, Riding Coyote's Tail?” Smiling and waving that long tail of his, he replied, “Clever title! I like it, Da. Sounds like Writing Coyote’s Tale. What a great pun! ‘Riding’ or ‘writing’ and also ‘tail’ or ‘tale’. How fun! Are you going to talk about Coyote?” As agile and powerful as his spirit animal, the Mountain Lion, Puma loves to dance, with stories and language, as much as with his beautiful wife. “You should make each story stand on its own and weave them all together like a magic flying carpet.”
In case you are not familiar with Coyote, I should begin by saying that he/she is a fabulous character in Native American myths and legends. Coyote is a Trickster, who often plays tricks on himself while thinking he is tricking one of our four-legged relatives. A creative spirit,Coyote is the one who made us humans. I guess Coyote was bored one day, so he created us to entertain himself. He amuses himself by putting us into embarrassing situations to see what we will do. Often we surprise him, so he gets a good laugh as he plays with us.
My friend Roadrunner says that among his people, the Chumash of Southern California, the Coyote is a Balancer, a Teacher, who chases you down, jumps on your back, and won’t get off until you have learned the lesson he wants to teach you. Maybe you need to grow stronger or more humble. Maybe you are neglecting people who need your help or you aren’t listening to your elders. Whatever it may be, Coyote helps you get your feet back on solid ground, walking in balance with the Mother Earth again. Sometimes the lesson has to do with attaining a sense of humor, especially the ability to laugh at your self-importance. Coyote is a powerful deity; one to respect and to whom we must listen, because if we don’t, every step we take will be dogged in shit until we smell it and stop to clean off our shoes.
Often Coyote rides us. When we are lucky, he gives us a ride. You can imagine how small humans are to be able to ride on the tail of Coyote, our Creator. And of course, it can be a very tricky business. I think I am speaking metaphorically here about being whisked up by the magic of the Trickster. Sometimes it feels more literal than symbolic, but most of the time I am relatively certain this is a metaphor. When I first began sharing my stories, a friend told me that I had to publish them. “Why”, I asked her, “it’s just my personal journey.” “Because they inspire me, they remind me of the magic available to everyone, if we but take the time to listen. So much has been lost and forgotten, only to be rediscovered by people like you, Michael, come on, tell me another adventure.” So let me start with the time I met the Dragon.
It was during the time I was working for a California tribe as their Education Specialist. Beautiful Blue Heron Woman, the daughter of one of the tribal elders, was talking to me in my office. Ostensibly she had come to apply for funds to further her education. She got the information she needed and then to my amazement decided to share her secret life-long addiction to heroin with me. I felt honored and blessed to be asked to hold such a secret. Her spontaneous sharing came as a great surprise. I hardly even knew her and she was spilling out this secret. She said that it started when she was working with mentally ill clients at the State Hospital as a nurse. She could numb the pain temporarily and get away from the asylum in her mind by using the needle. Now she was back on the Reservation, but she was still using heroin. That’s what she said.
Twelve months later I went into the Tribal Office and was told that she had been taken to the hospital with symptoms of the flu, which turned out to be walking pneumonia. The disease had already attacked her organs and she fell into a comma. My friend, Beautiful Blue Heron Woman, died a couple of days later without regaining consciousness. The same thing almost happened to my mother, but I talked to her through the coma and she decided to come back. Mom had a very hard time after that crossing. I was concerned about Blue Heron Woman’s confusion. One moment she was in the ambulance and after a while she was someplace different. I wanted to do something to help her cross over into the Spirit World. When I got home, Turtle, my spirit son, told me that we had been invited to a prayer service that night. It was a one year memorial for a man who had committed suicide.
Native American Church (Peyote) Ceremonies are often called prayer services, since most people in the dominant culture approve of prayer. We pray, sing, and eat medicine all night long according to the ways passed down from the Apache people. Each service is unique, sponsored for a particular purpose. The one we were to attend was very unusual. The Sponsor was the sister of the dead man. She explained that her brother had suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome since his return from the Viet Nam conflict. He tried to self medicate with drugs of various kinds, but these seemed to make things worse over the years and he finally couldn’t take the pain and guilt any more. The sister, a high school teacher, asked a Lakota Sun Dancer, who was also a Peyote Road Man, to help her brother’s spirit cross over into the Spirit World. Because of the nature of the meeting, it seemed like perfect timing to contact the spirit of Blue Heron Woman about her crossing over into the Spirit World. The suddenness I also experienced many years ago during an auto accident, but I chose to come back like my mom did.
When Blue Heron Woman disclosed her addiction history, she had recognized me as a medicine person. My friend Bear Woman who sat on the Tribal Council had done the same. She shared her dreams with me because she considered me a Dream Doctor. I had helped her understand the messages of her totem spirit the Bear when she was confused and wanted to hurt people who had angered her. Bear Woman was the daughter of her tribe’s medicine woman and her psychic abilities were phenomenal. But she was afraid of her abilities and the responsibilities which went with her clairvoyance. She knew how powerful and dangerous she could be when she turned her rage toward destruction of others. That’s why she would seek me out for counsel, to diffuse her rage. Often she would tell me a dream of the Great Medicine Bear standing up, blocking her from casting a spell on her enemy. She knew that the Bear wanted her to turn her anger into blessings for the tribe. I told Bear Woman of my decision to try to contact Blue Heron Woman so that we could ease the grief of her father White Rock by making his daughter’s crossing swift and clear as possible. And exactly how was a white European looking guy like me going to accomplish that task without Coyote’s help?
Hanging out with Native Americans can be a little risky for people like me, even with Coyote’s help. My very noticeably white skin usually calls up images of the European conquerors and their abuse in Native people. Because of this unconscious process, most native people relate to me with cautiousness or down right hostility. They have a collective memory going back hundreds of years. It underlies their own personal experiences of being abused by European “white” people. When white men walk into the perceptual field, it seems to activate distrust and angry, resentful feelings which Natives have learned to hide or hold back when they are in the dominant society. When you are on the Reservation, you are on their turf and they are more likely to tell you about their “Indian radar” as one woman described it. This radar picks up warning signs which say “don’t trust this man/woman, they are dangerous, they will hurt you, they always do, just like they did to us over and over”. This radar phenomenon is very interesting. The person who told me about her radar was very angry, distrusting of others, hurting and resentful, yet she experienced me as though I were the deceitful, dangerously angry person not to be trusted. I had done nothing to warrant being treated with the scorn and distrust with which she viewed me. It was as though she could only experience her feelings of anger when she projected them out onto the white man standing in front of her. She wasn’t dangerous; I was. Her anger and distrust wasn’t hers, it was as though it were coming from the other person, from me. The anger and deceit was floating in the environment and she located it on me. She didn’t think she was angry, just careful of what she perceived to be coming from me. My experience was just the opposite. I felt calm, trusting and compassionate. When she told me about her Indian radar and what it told her, I felt it reflected more about her attitude. I wondered how she could “know” for certain how dangerous I was and what I was secretly feeling, when I wasn’t feeling it. I guess she needed to experience those feelings “out there” before she could experience and own the feelings as “in here”. For me it often feels like I am a living movie screen, showing memory images to the Natives as though they were living them out again, sort of like an interactive video program in the flesh. If these Natives could see beneath the surface of my white skin, they could observe the genes, which create my native blood. Some people like Bear Woman and my friend Blue Heron Woman and her father White Rock could see through my skin. In deciding to share her addiction with me, she had recognized me. What I learned from Bear Woman is that when you are recognized, you can’t duck the responsibility. You have to show up in the best way you know how. As my friend’s counselor, I felt it was my duty to attempt to contact her spirit.
Peyote Ceremonies are traditionally held at night. The inter-tribal religion began near the end of the nineteenth century after the tribes were defeated and put on Reservations. That was the time of boarding schools and the general prohibition against native languages and cultural ceremonies. The Christian Missionaries were around during the day, but they were afraid to walk the Reservations at night, so the “Eating Medicine” Ceremonies, or Native American Church meetings (as they have been called since 1918), were held from sundown to sunup. Each tribe has their form of the Ceremony, which is held around a crescent shaped earth altar and fire; hence these tribal ways are referred to by the term Fireplace. During that night I communicated with my friend. I told her that she had died in the hospital, that she should go toward the light and find her way into the world of her ancestors who were waiting to welcome her. Her work was over in this world. It was ok for her to be confused. Everything happened so fast, but it was the way it was supposed to be, so all she had to do was accept it.
My spirit son seemed oblivious to my encounter with my friend. Turtle had enjoyed himself. He was sitting up strong all night, just what I wanted. He was the anchor to our Mother the Earth to which I could return after visiting my friend in the “in between place”. Turtle was impressed with the Road Man and his Lakota Fireplace. That morning, while the water was being passed around, I had the feeling that some other spirit was using my body. Two years before, in a Southern Arapaho Fireplace up in Oregon, a woman who had died of cancer used me to communicate with her son, who was sitting beside me. White Hawk and I met when he was caring for his mother. Then he disappeared. His mom had died and he went to Hawaii to grieve. I was very surprised to see him at the meeting. He asked if I would sit beside him as it was his first Ceremony and he wanted a elder’s comforting arms around him. The meeting was packed and we were squeezed together. I knew White Hawk relatively well. Most of our interactions were in Buddhist or Hindu prayer services and he was very warm and affectionate. The Peyote definitely was opening us both up. Whenever I touched the young man, I had this very unnerving sensation of intimacy, which was very sensual. I had the feeling I knew his body and soul from top to bottom. I could even read his mind, putting words to his thoughts and finishing his sentences. This startled both of us. It was his first meeting and he didn’t know what to expect. For a while I thought I could handle it, but as I felt overwhelming love for him flowing through me, I had to deal with the thought that other people might be seeing my feelings for him. He wasn’t my lover, yet it felt like he was. It was very confusing! In the morning, when I mentioned his mother’s presence, he said, “yes, I know. I could feel her beside me all night long.” That’s when my confusion vanished and I was myself again. Having shared that amazing experience, we have remained close friends. During the Lakota Ceremony, after being with Blue Heron Woman in the “in between place” something similar happened, it was much like the feelings I had for White Hawk, but they were focused across the fire during the morning water prayer.
Sitting across the fire from Turtle and me was a man who looked like an icon of Christ. Turtle thought he was my friend from Barcelona. Although they looked very much alike, this man was not the Catalonian. After morning water had been passed around to all the participants and the sacred foods blessed and eaten, the replica of Jesus caught my gaze and held it. He began a process of crying, smiling, expressingwide-eyed rage, profound depths of despair, puzzlement, and ultimately of acceptance. At the end of this emotional flow, he bowed to the ground while sitting, touched Mother Earth with his hands and head, rose up, his hands clasped together in the yogic “Namaste” gesture of East India. Then he bowed his head to me and mouthed the words “thank you”. Needless to say I was curious! We don’t talk across the fire unless there is a good reason, and then only with permission. Since I had never met the man interacting with such discrete drama, I decided to introduce myself to him after the prayer service. What a surprise Coyote gave me!
When a Native American Church service ends, the people have been sitting up all night, eating medicine, singing chants accompanied by the water drum, meditating, and praying. We go outside and greet the other participants. It feels great to be standing up after sitting and kneeling all night long. As soon as I got outside of the Tipi, I went directly toward the man who had acknowledged me in this remarkable way. As I greeted him, he clasped my hands in his and didn’t let go. He told me about his Dad, who abandoned his family in Greece some twenty years before. His Mom then married a man who was emotionally and physically abusive. The young Dionysos heard occasionally about his father’s whereabouts and traced him to Northern California. The young man went in search of his father and met him. Their meeting was unpleasant, but Dionysos kept in touch with him. And then three years before our meeting, his father died of a heart attack. The son had his father’s body cremated and was returning the ashes to their homeland. I told him that during the meeting, someone’s spirit was using my eyes to see him and the feelings were pleasant, filled with love and pride. Dionysos wept openly, accepting the truth of the communication. He told me that he was thirty-two years old, the father of three children with different women, and was going home to his island in Greece to spread his father’s ashes and to get married to the mother of his daughter on July 12th of that year. “Really,” I said, “that’s amazing! My son, the Puma, is getting married the same day here on the Mendocino Coast!” I was delighted to have a new friend who wanted to make a relationship with me. I offered to become his Peyote Dad, but he said, “No, you have such a big family. Many people love you, just like my Grandfather who fought the Turks. It wouldn’t do to call you by any other name but Papou!” My Greek-American grandchildren call me Papou. My Greek wife of 32 years had taught them to refer to me that way. I decided I could handle a new relationship with a full-blooded Greek man who wanted to be my grandson. But what I haven’t told you is what I saw as I looked deep into his dark brown eyes.
Deep in those pupils an image moved slowly. It was pink and naked. I could only see it from the groin upward, definitely shaped like the man with whom I was talking, but it had no ears. Instead of ears there appeared to be slits of some kind. The serpentine man was slowly undulating, rhythmically from side to side in a cavern. It was as though I were peering in through a hole in the roof of this person’s cave. And, in reptilian fashion, he felt my gaze and looked up at me as though to ask, “What are you doing up there? How did you gain access to my sanctuary?” The young dragon lord was not threatening, just curious, acting as though some magic eye were gazing at him through the roof of his abode. I didn’t share that image with my grandson until a year later. Having studied the work of Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, the Swiss psychotherapists, I knew that I was probably projecting a part of myself onto the man into whose eyes I was gazing. It could have been a gift from the Peyote Medicine. Yet there was something very other, something very independent and autonomous in the image I saw deep in his eyes that morning. The dragon’s movements were so responsive to my inner actions, like a dream within a dream, it was very difficult to regard the image as an aspect of my unconscious. Having been the object of Native American negative projections, I knew it could be me who was looking into the magic mirror and seeing myself reflected there. Whether the dragonlord represented my Shadow or an unconscious aspect of Dionysos (its host), this ancient image appeared to be located deep within the eyes of another human. I decided that the better part of valor would be to keep my own counsel regarding the serpentine image. My new grandson wanted to know more about me, especially how I had found the Native American Church in Northern California.
“In 1976, I was about your age and on Sabbatical leave from the community college in Southern California where I had been teaching. I was trying to find a solution to my greatest fear.” I told him. Although teaching philosophy, logic, and ethics was smooth sailing during my early years at the college, I started to notice how fewer and fewer students were able to read the primary texts we were using. Eventually only the graduates of the local Roman Catholic High School were excelling in my classes. I was worried. The Counseling Department at the college informed me that the incoming students were reading at the eighth grade level. “How is that possible?” I asked, “Don’t they have to take proficiency exams?” “Yes, they do,” I was told, “but we are mandated to accept high school graduates and they are reading at much lower levels than 1969 when you started teaching here.” Well now, that’s a scary thought! I was wondering, “How much longer do I keep my job when the Dean uses behavioral objectives to evaluate the staff?”
The Dean believed that a good instructor makes his objectives clear and teaches them in such a way that the students successfully master the material. Instructors would get a good evaluation, if they met their objectives and the students master the material. The catch here is the operational part; the students must master the objectives. What the Dean was assuming was that the students were able to read and apprehend the material to be mastered. For the Dean, high retention rates were indicators of successful teaching. Although that might be true in some disciplines, philosophy is notoriously challenging for people whose learning style is not thinking. Many people have a feeling or sensorial approach to learning and those folk don’t performwell in highly intellectual disciplines.
The Dean’s approach to faculty evaluations had the effect of causing grade inflation. Instructors wanted to be seen as good, successful teachers and if the number of people passing a course was an indicator of the value of the teaching going on, then more people will have to successfully pass the class each year. A clever instructor could manipulate his or her own goals and objectives to make sure more people pass each year by lowering the standards. This does raise a few ethical questions about honesty and integrity, but college professors are concerned with survival and having a job is important if you want to feed your children. So what does a tenured instructor do when fewer and fewer students can read the texts? From the Dean’s perspective, it would appear that such a person was a very inefficient teacher. Although it seems ludicrous to suppose there could be a Dean of Instruction smart enough to get a Doctorate in Education from a prodigious school like UCLA and hold beliefs about teaching and learning which are so stupid; sometimes Coyote has fun creating just such a person. Yes, Coyote did precisely that. Perhaps He was bored and wondered what might happen when a very intelligent, well-qualified, and professional faculty were challenged by Administrative stupidity. Sixteen irate faculty members filed grievances against the Dean that year. Poor fellow was facing a marriage separation, rejection by students who refused to attend his History lectures, and projecting his Shadow side onto everyone around. How that all turned out is another story. What I was concerned about was, that the love of my life, the love of wisdom, known as philosophy, might be lost forever because people could no longer comprehend the big words in which philosophy is written.
Some fifteen years earlier, when I was a freshman student at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, I was introduced to the work of Carl Jung, the Swiss Psychiatrist and colleague of Sigmund Freud. Jung had claimed that there was something he called the Collective Unconscious, a kind of psychic repository of all the wisdom, symbols, art forms, and myths of humanity. If that were true, then, even though philosophy might be lost for several generations, it could sprout again spontaneously from the mind of someone yet unborn. What a comforting thought for a philosophy professor gazing into the abyss of ignorance opening before my eyes. I decided I would explore this Collective Unconscious. I found mentors at the C. G. Jung Institute in Los Angeles. That is when Coyote really had me in his teeth. I neglected to mention that Coyote is roughly equivalent to the Greek god Hermes, the guide of souls into the underworld, i.e., the unconscious realm of Hades and Persephone. Or perhaps I forgot to remind myself that the first step toward learning is often, as Alice discovered, down a Rabbit Hole into Wonderland!
The city of Santa Monica on the coast of Southern California was where my mentors lived. I read Jung’s work with one, the college professor and director of training of analysts at the Institute, and had my dreams analyzed by the elder of the two men, a friend of Anais Nin and a member of the Jungian community since the nineteen forties. Malcolm Dana was in his seventies, had just been diagnosed with liver cancer, had closed his practice, and cancelled his Institute class on the Myth of Christ. Perhaps it was my persistence in contacting him or there was the unconscious reality that we were distant cousins through our New England Melville-Dana line, but in any case, he had graciously taken me as, what would turn out to be, his last student. I fell head long into the unconscious and experienced all manner of projections onto my wife, friends, and family. Malcolm was interested in how my dreams related to these projections. After a few months of discussion, he was treating me as a colleague, telling me his dreams, asking for my interpretation of them and judging my intuitive abilitiesby my responses to the imagery. He would of course share his feelings brought up by my dreams in addition to interpreting the dream images.
Near the end of our time together, Malcolm shared some very troubling dream images, which he believed were related to his cancer. One was a huge lobster eating a pile of shit in his living room, where we had our sessions. He found the image disgusting. I later discovered the lobster’s function in cleaning up the garbage of the sea is very similar to the function of the human liver. Perhaps loving the lobster and its life style would have made it possible to love his liver. Malcolm looked a lot like members of my Dad’s family. He used alcohol throughout his life, like the men in my family, but not to the extremes to which I had been accustomed growing up with my dad’s Mormon family members. Malcolm had been the President of a Baptist College in the South before becoming a Jungian Therapist, and strong judgments against “demon rum” must have been familiar in his youth.
The dream Malcolm found the most disconcerting involved a character named Bill Barns who said to the dreamer, “this time you have to take me with you!” When I heard Malcolm’s anxiety about this character, I leaned into the room with obvious curiosity. “So who was Bill Barns?” I asked my teacher. He told me that Bill was the drunken, half-breed Indian who had frightened Malcolm as a boy of seventeen in Colorado. Malcolm’s father was at that time a Christian Missionary in the town. One day, when young Malcolm went to get a haircut, the men in the barbershop teased him, saying, “Bill Barns is looking for you. Ya, he’s looking for you all right” and then they laughed. This terrified the boy, who knew of Bill’s violence and drunken rages, and didn’t want to be on the end of Bill’s fist. As he left the barber’s shop, he ran into Bill, who pushed him into a doorway. His alcoholic breath must have frightened the boy even more. What Bill wanted was for Malcolm to write a letter to the bank explaining why he hadn’t made his loan payment on his ranch. Bill’s cattle were in quarantine, and when that was lifted, he would sell some cattle and make the payment. Malcolm did his Christian duty by writing the letter for Bill, but his judgments of Bill lingered on in his unconscious for over fifty years.
I felt a lot of compassion regarding the image of an unwanted child, who had been dropped on his head at birth by his Indian mother, and wasgiven to his European father to raise. Evidently the father was already married to a white woman who treated the baby badly. Considered to be retarded and half-savage, Bill had never been educated. He could neither read nor write. He had fallen into despair and, like many people with Native American blood of that time period, found comfort in the white man’s firewater. Malcolm recognized all of Bill’s traits as disgusting aspects, which he saw in himself, of his shadow. As Jungian psychologists would say, the shadowis the unconscious part we have difficulty seeing and embracing as ourselves. We usually start by projecting it out onto an external object. In my case it was the bully who tormented me. I couldn’t see how I bullied my younger brother, but I could see it outside of myself. My suggestion to Malcolm was to read the book I had discovered called Seven Arrows. It was written by Hyemeyohsts Storm on the eighth grade level (the emotional age of the young shadow figure of Bill Barns?) and all about Native American psychology and religion. I thought it would be a good way for Malcolm to nourish his shadow and take him along as a friend and companion instead of a rejected “other”.
My parting gift to my mentor at the end of my Sabbatical was a copy of Hyemeyohsts Storm’s book. Unfortunately Malcolm couldn’t follow his soul’s advice and embrace the rejected, Native American shadow self. He never read the book. He chose to follow East Indian Ayurvedic medicine instead. Always attracted to the light of Christ, Malcolm walked toward it neglecting to look back at the enormous shadow trailing behind him. His widow and I were heart broken that he could not trust the Greater Self, the Author of our Dreamworld, but instead chose to embrace Death, leaving us to grieve his passing, a beautiful man, a wonderful friend and mentor.
Shortly after Malcolm’s death, I had a dream that I was in a sweat bath with a man named Basilides and his wife Sophia. He said to me, “what you do is called hermeneutics.” When I awoke from this vivid dream image, I thought to myself “Sophia means Wisdom. [The ancient Greek word, philosophia, from which our modern English word philosophy is derived, means literally the love of wisdom.] Who was Basilides?” I dug out my volume of Carl Jung on Psychology and Religion and discovered that Basilides was an ancient Greek (Gnostic Christian) Bishop who lived before the Council of Nicea determined the Orthodox belief structure of the Christian Church. Basilides, means serving the King (Christ was the Spiritual King) and gnosis, or the knowledge based on spiritual experience rather than on dogma, was apprehended in ancient Greek thought through the agency of the god Hermes. The work of the Gnostic tradition is navigating the way Hermes does, through symbolic meaning as a messenger of the gods, through visions, dreams, mystic experiences, and divine inspiration. This navigating in Hermes’ way is Hermeneutics. The Dreamworld characters of Basilides and Sophia (who are part of the Collective Unconscious) communicated this word hermeneutics to me. I had to make the conscious connections and do the research in the texts, but having dream mentors like that was a gift which has continued over the years.
Perhaps there is a genetic memory in our cells which accounts for the way dream symbols communicate. Some traditions account for this phenomenon in referring to past lives, which some people are able to remember in detail. Whatever the source, these unconscious memories occasionally break through into the conscious realm and get our attention. It feels like Coyote’s paw gives us a gentle tap occasionally saying, “Wake up! Remember where you came from!”
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