Chapter 10 Owl Feathers

Chapter 10   

Owl Feathers

      Shortly after meeting and taking the Raven as my spirit son, I decided to get some professional training.  I enrolled in a Masters program in Counseling Psychology.  During a class on developmental psychology, we had a guest lecturer, a seventy-four-year old Apache elder, who told us of his boyhood training to become a medicine person.  As he spoke, my indigenous genes became activated and I wept openly, the tears streaming down my face.  His first task was to become one with the trees so that he could become invisible and melt into the forest or the desert.  He told us about the most sacred and cherished of all the people in his tribe, the Holy (Two-Spirited) One, who had the external spirit form of a man and the internal spirit form of a woman.  This Holy One gave each newborn child his or her secret name, which only he and the parents could know.  The best gifts the new parents could give were bestowed on him who knew the ways of man and woman alike.  This revered Two-Spirit was the most precious member of their tribe.

      The Apache elder then told us how the United States soldiers pursued his tribe into the mountains.  A few escaped to Mexico, but most were captured.  The tribal chief, Bear Watcher’s father, and half the tribe were sent to Texas.  The other half, which included his Uncles, the Holy One, and Bear Watcher, were held in New Mexico.  At the age of thirteen, this young Apache man, who would have become a medicine person, listened to the White soldiers belittle and abuse the Holy One.  They hit him, called him a woman, and pulled him into the jail.  The young Apache listened while the soldiers beat the Holy One to death and threw this body out of the upper story window.  They said he had jumped to his death trying to escape incarceration, but the boy heard and saw what happened.  Our storyteller told us that so much anger, and violent rage welled up in him, that he became a fighter, a boxer, and an alcoholic trying to drown his rage and his tears, numbing his pain in the only way available, with the White Man’s Whiskey. 

      That was about the time Hitler’s Brown Shirts were doing the same things to the Jews in Austria, Germany, and Poland.  Perhaps the dates are off, but it really doesn’t matter, because there is no such thing as time in the unconscious; everything is ever-present, just waiting for a story to activate the emotions, to occasion the tears of grieving, the rage of violation, the helplessness of rape and molestation.  And then we wake up one morning, not only in bed with the abuser but sometimes having become the abuser as well.  And then the self-hatred destroys us in our words and actions.  We too turn to alcohol and other more interesting drugs for their help and, like our ancestors, find ourselves addicted to these alien spirits.  When we hit the wall or the floor enough times, we then try to recover our sobriety and find the task extremely difficult. We want to blame someone or something for our victim selves, who have now turned into our abusers. 

      What Freud called the “repetition compulsion” becomes living hell.  We keep attracting people and situations so that we can re-experience the original trauma, sometimes as the victim and sometimes as the abuser.  It doesn’t really matter which of the roles we are playing in this reenactment.  And it doesn’t really matter whether we characterize it (like Freud) as an attempt to master the situation or (like Jung) an attempt to integrate it.  We keep repeating the pattern, wounding others and ourselves over and over again.  And we wonder why they call this genocide?  We are killing our genes, slowly, one child, one adolescent, one woman, and one man at a time, as we grow older.  Our communities fragment and dissolve; our ceremonies are not strong enough to hold us together.  Our way of life is gone.  And so are the Holy Ones.

      Well not exactly.  They have gone underground.  They have returned as white, black, and yellow skinned people, as those who survived by intermarrying with the conquerors.  Our histories were often lost, erased, denied, hidden away in closets, attics, and safe deposit vaults.  At least that is how it was with my life.  All the illnesses, the dreams, visions, and experiences of my childhood with the wild Native American characters and mythological motifs made no sense to me nor to my family.  The voyages through the unconscious dreamworld of myth  seemed to increase my suffering.  I wasn’t sure whether I was a momma’s boy or a girl born in a boy’s body.  When puberty was approaching, I was playing house with the girls, pretending to be the husband/father/lover and playing war with the boys pretending to be the nurse/doctor/medic/healer.  If the concept of a two-spirited nature were part of my worldview, it would have been easier to love myself, to accept my feelings, and my calling as a healer.  With no one to teach me to deal with my psychic phenomena, I was as helpless as Tristan adrift on the sea in a rudderless boat.  Every adventure was new and exciting.

      When my older friend showed me how to masturbate him, it was exciting.  I got an erection too, but when he masturbated me, there was no ejaculation.  He, at fifteen, was a man and I, at thirteen, was not.  What was I then?    I knew that I was sexually attracted to men, in fact it seemed as though I was hardwired that way as long as I could remember.  When I went through puberty, it got really confusing.  I had fantasies about having sex with my guy friends and my gal friends.  Mostly the sexual exploration was with my male friends with the same pattern replicating itself.  First there was the mutual fun of touching one another, masturbating, oral sex, holding and kissing one another.  And then in a matter of weeks, days, hours, or sometimes minutes came the pushing away, the revulsion, rejection, and the abandonment.  This didn’t happen with women for some strange reason.  With women, the pattern in those days was let’s kiss and touch, go dancing, and feel good touching, but that’s as far as good girls and boys can go.  I was certainly a good boy.  Other good boys like me were giving each other oral sex, especially after consuming alcohol, so what’s wrong with this picture?  Well, for starters, there were no adults who were willing to talk about these things with us.  Counseling in the 1950s in Pleasantville was out of the question, as my Dad said, “Psychiatrists are all sick, that’s why they study psychology in the first place!”

      So after getting laid and enjoying a woman’s charms, dating and repeating the patterns with men and women, I got desperate enough to try killing myself.  I have told that story already.  It led to counseling and eventually to marriage.  As I began my career as a young college professor and my children were born, interesting things began to occur.  I started having flash backs of feet, naked bodies, large ones, like giants almost.  When my son was four, I had a desire to masturbate him.  I was horrified and confided in my wife.  She too was upset.  We had just had another birth.  She was angry and disappointed in me.  Just like the first pregnancy, I had acted out as though I was jealous of the new baby.  It was as though I were eighteen months old again and my new baby brother had just come home.  In fact when the twins were born, my son looked just like my baby brother.  I remember marveling about it, but decided it must have been the marijuana.  More brief psychotherapy, marital problems, study at the Jung Institute during the third pregnancy and boom, a full blown breakdown complete with inflation, visions, dreams, pain and suffering just like my childhood.  All of the grandparents, mentors, and elders died within three years.  Grieving was complicated by the threat of unemployment.  We escaped to a rural community and a new life.

      But the demons of the night didn’t go away.  Alcohol and marijuana were constant companions during my grieving and insomnia.  One night I found myself replicating the masturbation experience of my adolescence while giving my thirteen-year-old son a massage.  I stopped myself, before he could have an orgasm.  Was he asleep?  He seemed to be.  Perhaps he was pretending.  How could this happen?  I had done everything different from my father.  I stayed close to the family, didn’t abandon, have affairs, gamble, become an alcoholic like he did.  But there was this compulsion to massage guys like I used to massage my Dad.  It seemed innocent enough until I went too far with my son.  I was very careful after that.  Then ten years later, after my middle son’s graduation party, I was massaging a twenty-year-old man in the living room where both my son and his fiancé and the graduate were sleeping.  I finished the massage, went out on the deck, lit up a joint, and was enjoying myself, when my son and his fiancé burst out of the door.  They were leaving.  She remembered being molested by her cousin and he remembered that massage ten years before.  We went to family counseling.  My son told
the therapist that I had not requested keeping anything secret and it only happened once.  I had even asked him about it when he graduated from High School, telling him that I hoped I hadn’t hurt him in any way by that event.  Our therapist, an elder man with lots of experience treating emotionally abused children, told us to put the homoerotic episode on the backburner and value all of my training in education and psychology.  “Everyone makes mistakes, we can learn from them”, he said to me.  My wife was supportive at first, trying to keep our dream together, but eventually everything fell apart.

      It took four years or so for my wife to decide I was a vampire, separate from me, and run the family business herself.  That’s when I began long-term psychotherapy and slowly began to remember the traumatic events of my childhood, such as being masturbated by my parents during infancy, molested by a caregiver at age four, and being forced to give oral sex before that time.  I had discovered that our family secrets were the Jews on my mother’s side and the Indians on my father’s side of the family.  In a tribal community my childhood would have been seen as shamanic in nature and I would have been trained to be a medicine person.  My bi-sexuality would have been regarded as a special gift.  Unfortunately I grew up in redneck Idaho, where I was regarded as a very strange kid.  Being overly sensitive about my well-developed feminine, I hid it as best as possible.  My vision quest occurred while wandering into a lava flow cave on the Snake River, home of the Shoshone people.  There I met my spirit animal, the Bobcat.  Forty-five years later, when I was divorced and returning from a Sweat Lodge with friends on Mt. Shasta in California, the Bobcat bounded across our path again.

      When the Bobcat appeared that second time, I was replicating my adolescence by going deeper into my experience.  I was experimenting with my two-spiritedness, by sleeping with Wolf, a twenty-four year old man, massaging him, masturbating him, and giving him oral sex.  I was still in psychotherapy with the same “good mother” analyst.  I had been processing the relationship with my lover, and while attending a counseling workshop, I was intrigued when the presenter said the unconscious can’t resist completing a sentence.  Since I had been trying desperately to end my “love addiction” with Wolf, but kept going back for one more night with him, over and over, compulsively, I wanted to try the experiment.  I started the sentence “I can’t give up my lover, because if I did, then . . . . . . . .(the unconscious completed it thus) then I would have to accept my father is dead and I will never get his love.”  Wow, it was like a bolt of lightning!  I could feel the truth of it in my gut.  I wrote the sentence on two index cards, taped one to my car’s dashboard and the other to the mirror in my bathroom.  Every day I was reminded of the unconscious truth that my compulsion to repeat the sexual encounter was part of the ever-present past; my inner child was trying to win his Daddy’s love.  Every time Daddy left, I felt abandoned, every time he returned, I could love him up again, until puberty when he pushed me away emotionally.  So I felt my boyfriend’s welcoming embraces and was back in my Daddy’s arms again.  The hardwired sexual attraction to guys was always present, and is to this day.  But now I remember how it happened and can choose to enter into relationship knowing why.  And having embraced my Native American roots, ceremonies, and traditions I find there is a sense of belonging as a Two-Spirited Person.

      When I attended an Inipi (Purification) Sweat Lodge, before moving to Southern California, I met a Two-Spirited young man, about Wolf’s age, who was in a heterosexual relationship.  He recognized me as someone with whom he resonated.  After a month of communicating and getting to know one another better, he recommended a book, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon.  Set in turn of the century Idaho, I found the novel fascinating.  It recounts the story of three Two-Spirited characters.  The first, a full-blooded Native discovers the second, a fourteen-year-old white boy, whose parents have just been killed by stage coach robbers who forced him to bury the bodies and abandoned him to die of exposure.  The old Two-Spirit gets the boy down out of the tree in which he has climbed, takes him to a hidden place in the lava fields, and nurses him back to health by making love to him.  Trauma is healed through unconditional love, but the boy’s fragile psyche is educated as a Two-Spirit.  We aren’t told whether the boy would have become bi-sexual if this event hadn’t happened.

      The boy, having become a man, reenters the story as a frequent customer of the whorehouse/saloon, where the third Two-Spirit’s mother works as a prostitute.  The third boy had been invited into the Madam’s bed, until he becomes sexual and the Madam feels his erect penis.  Her response to nature was to put him to work servicing the men out in the shed.  Here again, we don’t know about the boy’s natural inclination, and since the story is told from his perspective, we just know that he is educated through experience to make love to men.   Shed, as he is called, is eventually rescued by the father figure, and taken to the hideout in the lava fields, where the two men make love until all their food is gone.  Having been taught the secrets of the Two-Spirit, Shed then goes looking for his Shoshone/Bannock relatives and receives his name, Owl Feather.  The story is definitely a wild tale, yet there is a ring of truth to it.  It took me back home to Idaho, the lava fields, the secret caves, and the Bobcat, who appeared in October for Columbus Day in 2004. 

      I was house sitting a remote property in Southern California.  My job was to the water the garden and feed the animals, which included three cats and three chickens.  There had been a lot of Owl energy for the past year.  My spirit son Turtle had shapeshifted into an Owl and flew away into the night sky.  He had literally disappeared with his friend the Wolverine.  They borrowed a couple of vehicles for a month or two without making any contact with me or the vehicles’ owners.  (I guess you could call it theft, if someone hadn’t originally given them permission to borrow them.  The community still regards those boys with contempt.)  Evidently they were running some illegal missions for the Wolverine’s employers.  Actually the Wolverine called it his mother’s family business, something he forgot to tell the guys running the Drug and Alcohol Counseling Center where he worked as a counselor.  Wolverine told me that he was doing meth every day and was disappointed because the recovery staff never noticed he was using. 

      The tangled web of intrigue began after I met Owl.  Both he and my biological son, the Bear, gifted me Owl Feathers.  The Owl Spirit flew into my friend the Elk’s life five years earlier.  He had picked up an owl on the road after becoming violent with his fiancé.  (He didn’t mention that until a year later.)  He called and invited me to visit him and his dad at a friend’s cabin.  I knew he had a lot of anger toward his dad (as well as conflicted sexual feelings for his step-brother who had been his playmate-lover during puberty), but I wasn’t thinking about those things. I was inflated, having arrogated the savior archetype into my psyche, and like the Flying Boy/God was high on love.  I didn’t feel the least hint of Coyote or his trap until it was too late.  The Elk, a massage therapist, wanted a massage in front of the roaring fire.  He sent his dad to bed, and by the time I rolled the Elk over onto his back, he had an erection that could be felt all the way through his groin muscles. I was experiencing the childhood pattern again and, as I told my therapist later in the week, just like I did in childhood, I felt an overwhelming desire to please the man, whose body I was massaging: so I did. 

      Everything seemed to be running smooth and pleasantly until the following week.  That’s when Elk angrily rejected me, severing communication.  When we did speak to one another a year later, he confessed that his rage had ignited thoughts of revenge, which evolved into plots of murdering his abuser.  I wasn’t seeing myself as his abuser; I was identified with the victim.  I felt Elk had set me up and I went happily into the act of love making only to find myself rejected and isolated again.  I told the elder Buddhist monk at the Healing Center about the encounter. He is the one who got me to be conscious by asking, “Do you feel you were set up by him?”   After meditating on that and discussing the feelings which came up for me during the intervening year, I was ready to accept the Elk’s gift: a wing of the owl which he had picked up the night I was tricked into seducing him. 

      As I was saying, my younger colleague the Two-Spirited Owl, had gifted me a Great Horned Owl feather.  That May when I was headed north for my Spirit Son Eagle’s MA graduation, I turned up highway 20 and there was another hitchhiker with a sign.  It read:

 

Cache Creek Environmental Conference.

 You won’t be sorry you stopped.  I’m worth it!
 

I passed him by and then that feeling, which I had passing the Hitchhiker 5 years earlier, overcame me.  It was right on my way, maybe it would be worth it!  I turned my red Mercury sable around to go collect the next piece of Coyote’s jigsaw puzzle.  The Hitchhiker was amazed, because he had just put up the sign.  Not only was the tall, slim twenty-some-year-old man from Southern California, he lived in Santa Barbara just three blocks from where I was working.  He had been visiting a friend whom he had met in Santa Barbara whose dad was a local psychotherapist.  Ironically I thought that I had taught his friend and knew the father.  I was definitely happy I stopped to encounter this slightly frightening slim Bear.  He had broken one of his front teeth out on Valentine’s day as he said, “trying to have the childhood I never had, I was riding a bicycle and rubbed up against my friend’s tire, hit a bump, grabbed the brakes and went flying face forward over my bike onto the street.” I told him how I had the same experience when I was eighteen, but was luckier. No broken teeth.

      When my new friend asked about the Turkey Feather behind the garnet on the dashboard of the car, a wild turkey flew across the road in front of us.  Since I had never seen wild turkeys fly before, least of all on cue during a synchronous conversation about magic events in our lives, I was beginning to wonder who this guy really was.  I’ll call him Shiva, because that was the god whose bracelet he wore.  He practiced yoga like Shiva, meditated like Shiva, and had Shiva’s dark, destructive potential.  He was charismatic, charming, interested in everything I had to say, an Air Force jet mechanic, with an alcoholic father and a mother who had abandoned him when he was five. The last time he had seen her was when he was nine years old.  I was fascinated by his story.  I wasn’t thinking about how this story should have reminded me of a pattern. Thinking back on it later, he sounded like one of the wounded guys who wound up hurting me. His energy was very much that of my dad, my young lover the Wolf, Turtle, and Wolverine.  Having had some success with Eagle, Mikey, the Raven, and the other young men I had encountered, I was flying high on positive energy and by the time we got to Cache Creek, Shiva had made a place for himself in my heart.  I taught him how to pray with tobacco.  I gifted him with cedar and the turkey feather.  He promised to call me when he returned to the south.

      Within a few weeks Shiva called, rode his bicycle over to talk, shared dreams and told me more about his childhood.  We went out to dinner for his twenty-third birthday and I helped him restructure his relationship with his dad.  He introduced me to his friends, one of whom, the Finch, had been to Sun Dance and knew most of the members of my community.  During the Sun Dance he had participated in Peyote Ceremonies and had told Shiva about his experiences.  Shiva wanted to go with me to the next peyote ceremony, which happened to be in northern California.  I was going to my brother’s meeting in August.  One evening later in the week when I was driving Shiva home, he noticed the Great Horned Owl feather which Owl had gifted me.  It was stuck behind the garnet where the turkey feather had been. “Wow, that feather is mesmerizing!” he said in a dreamy voice.  I pulled it out from behind the garnet and said, “Here, it’s yours. Shake my hand on it.”  Passing him the feather must have made something click in him.  He really wanted to travel north with me.

      When the day of our trip arrived, I hadn’t heard from Shiva all week.  His friend, the Finch, told me that Shiva told him he was planning to go, so I tried to wait patiently.  Hours before the time I had planned to leave, Shiva called.  He was excited to continue talking about his life and how it was interweaving with mine.  Owl had invited me to stay at his apartment while he and his Lioness were at a Zen retreat. He was open to having my friend Shiva there too.  

     After getting out of Santa Barbara’s Fiesta Days traffic, Shiva and I talked about our lives and our beliefs.  He had been raised in the Krishna Temple in Hawaii, had been put into foster care when he tried to run away from his father, who used to feed him LSD as a kid.  After being raised by redneck foster parents who taught him to ride horses and be a cowboy, he emancipated himself by enlisting in the Air Force (thus identifying with his uncle who was a jet pilot).  Shiva was much like his dad.  He enjoyed alcohol, but he had his mom’s Cherokee/Irish genes and alcohol made him crazy, then he would get into trouble and revert to his childhood survival strategy of going into hiding.  I guess that’s why it was so difficult to find him unless he wanted to be found. 

      When we got to the Bay Area, we visited a bookstore where Shiva showed and told me through a picture book the story of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita.  One of the employees brought us a book about a man who visited Tibet, was gone a long time, and then brought his son some special things from the Boy/God King of Tibet.  After looking through the book, Shiva turned and looked at me saying, “Why do you suppose she brought us this book?”  “Maybe she thought you were my long lost son,” I replied; I was feeling amazing tenderness and love for my friend.  As we left the bookstore, I bought Shiva a piece of black tourmaline.  I wanted to honor the young wizard who was attracting people’s attention and at the same time offer protection, since the crystal is a favorite of shamans because it deflects negative energy.  In our Native American tradition, special moments are honored and remembered by something which grounds the experience in reality. What better way to do that than with a piece of Mother Earth’s body?

      At Owl’s apartment Shiva cooked us a delicious dinner.  Shiva was stretching and talking about how his back hurt, so I gave him a massage. Then we took turns in the shower.  When I emerged from the refreshing water wrapped in my robe, I was greeted by my smiling friend, who had set a place on the floor for tea.  I suggested we consult Jamie Sams’ Sacred Path Cards about our trip and the meeting we were about to attend.  That’s when Shiva asked for my advice.  “All the while we have been traveling, this feeling has been building up, and, well, I’m not with anyone now. My ex-girl friend says I have trouble with intimacy, and I wonder if you could teach me to be intimate.  I’m really attracted to you; it’s growing stronger and I’m wondering what do you think I should do about it?”  “Hum,” I said feeling flattered at being desired; he had just asked me to make love to him. I was stunned, flattered, and frightened at the prospect of making love to someone who looked like a lean and hungry bear.  “I always advise people to follow your heart, that’s what you should do about it, whatever your heart tells you to do.”  He didn’t need to think about it.  He had already decided what he wanted. He said, “I’ve never done this when it was mutual. . . Since you’re the teacher, I’ll follow you.”

      My default setting emotionally is to slow things down.  Coyote was really frightened and excited at the same time.  My heart was pounding.  I was wondering, “what do I do?  I’ve never initiated a man sexually. I’ve only had anal intercourse once in the early years of my marriage.  Neither of us enjoyed that. But my heart is telling me to accept this offer of spontaneous affection regardless of where it is coming from in this man’s psychic history.  I too feel sexually attracted to him, just like the first young man who initiated me, he is taller, lithe, and a smooth skinned swimmer/surfer. Somehow the Idaho boy needs to get his sea legs, Shiva’s body is only covered with those surfer shorts.  Maybe the Cards will help.”

      The Coyote inside of me suggested turning over the cards. “Hum, Kokopelli’s lovemaking flute music for you, and for me, the Northern Shield, the Buffalo.”  “That’s perfect,” said Shiva, “that’s what I need you to be, a strong, wise buffalo.”  “Well now,” thought the trembling Coyote inside of me, “he liked the massage. It soothed his aching back.  Maybe just rubbing my hand down his back would be soothing for me.”  So I touched his back, and as my hand slid down across is back, his muscles tensed ever so slightly.  “Well, that felt ok,” I thought, trying to ease my way over the abyss where I could abandon myself to Eros, “maybe one more time.”  I slid my hand further down his back and discovered the only thing Shiva wore under those pants was skin.  Pondering the touch of his bare ass under his shorts, I took another sip of tea and continued talking about the meaning of the cards, as we continued to turn over our future together.  When I finally had the strength to slide my hand down his back and over his butt again, he rolled slightly up toward me inviting my hand to rub his stomach.  I was enjoying myself.  It felt good, like all the times I used to rub my dog’s tummy. Within seconds of touching his erect penis and sliding further down over the soft packages of seeds for the future, which we call testicles, I heard the sound of Velcro, which held his pants together, rip open.   As he stood up to his six-three height, his pants fell to the floor and his erection beaconed like a Star Wars tracker beam.  I was entrained, towed toward the affection, the touch and the excitement which invited us both.  I wanted to be his teacher.

      Making love to a bear, who appeared to have a lot more experience in these matters than I had, was exhilarating. I was in paradise: someone wanted to make love to me and had risked rejection to get what he wanted. After making love, Shiva went into the shower again and emerged tired.  I was sure he would sleep beside me, but just in case I was assuming something, I offered him his own space on the other side of the curtain.  He took it! He preferred to sleep alone. Perhaps I was getting information about the lack of intimacy in the lack of physical contact after such intimate sharing. I wondered about that for a while, and then I remembered how bears have a way of getting their space when they need it.

      The next morning I greeted my bear by laying down beside him.  With one hand touching his hair and the other inside his sleeping bag, I was embraced.  He rolled toward me placing his erect penis in my hand. Another invitation to teach and make love answered, we showered, got dressed, packed, and headed off to breakfast and the trip across the bay to the Peyote Ceremony.  I was beginning to think something remarkable was happening.  This mutual, reciprocal relationship had never happened to me, except with my wife.  Who knows where it might have gone if we hadn’t eaten Medicine that night.  But one thing I know for sure is that I trust the Medicine completely and I was hoping Shiva would discover the healing he needed in his life. 

      The meeting was challenging.  The Medicine makes you face your demons, your unconscious hopes and dreams, your potential self.  Shiva was no exception.  He writhed, flopped, wanted to die, vomited, stretched, and acted out his inner child’s emotions.  One of my students, the Black Labrador Retriver, was on the other side of him, so we supported his process and kept him in his body in every loving way we could.  By morning Shiva felt wonderful.  He said that the many automobile accidents he endured while his dad was driving had done a lot of damage to his legs and back, but much to his surprise, all the pain was gone.  And he had a healing vision.

      This is what he saw: Out of the fire, rode a beautiful woman on a white horse.  She stopped in front of him and told him to get up and sit with her on the horse.  He did and then she rode off with him.  He interpreted his vision as a prophecy, that he was to pursue a heterosexual relationship, which was coming his way.  I was happy for him that he had found his inner feminine which had rescued him from his confusion.  Had he stayed connected to me in the days to come, I think I could have adjusted to what the Medicine was teaching me, but he didn’t.  He hid from me just like he would hide from his father.  It drove me crazy!  Here was the pattern of intimacy, feeling loved and appreciated, and then abandoned.  All those severed relationships hurt:  my brother, my wife and children, Wolf, Elk, Turtle, even the Wolverine (who called me Dad) got me caring about him before he broke away into the silence which becomes an invisible barrier.