Chapter 11 Shiva the Destroyer

Chapter Eleven

   

Shiva the Destroyer

      During the Labor Day weekend, a month after taking Shiva to his first Peyote Ceremony and within minutes of picking up the body of a Great Horned Owl, the Sacred Bird of our Chumash relatives, Shiva was in my car again and decided to spend the weekend in the canyon where I was house sitting.  The night I gave him the Great Horned Owl feather, he shared a dream which was very fresh with details.  The dreamer was a girl.  She and another girl were hiding in the forest from their pursuers, red eyed, male vampire gorillas.  Although the dreamer is able to wound her pursuer by plunging an arrowhead into his hand, this does not stop the pursuit, which goes on through the trees and into the canopy.  The male gorillas never hurt the girls nor will they let the girls get very far away.  The dreamer is frightened and running with her companion, but she cannot escape her pursuers. 

      “So you are a woman in the dream?” I asked thinking about Shiva’s attire: a bright flowered sarong worn as a skirt.  He told me he was sunbathing in the nude earlier in the day, but when a man appeared on the property, he put on his skirt.  Clearly he was identified with his mother who had abandoned him.  I was wondering if that was his child’s way of holding onto her, by being her.  It surely would explain his preference for being entered by men.  But then there is that harsh, emotionally cold male who rejects, justifying his passionate love making as “in the moment” and splitting off his feelings with “I told you I didn’t feel that way about you” as if the words created the reality instead of the body’s language.

      “How did the people in Texas feel about you?” I asked, “did they regard you as one of the gorillas?”  “Oh no,” Shiva replied, “my Aunt and Uncle loved me.”  I continued, “But what about the Child Protective Services people and the foster parents?  You said you were twelve when you molested your four-year-old cousin and they took you away from your Aunt and Uncle.  The people who removed you from your home were fundamentalist Christians, how did they regard you?  Did they think you were just curious and needed sex education?”  Shiva sighed.  “No they thought I was an evil sinner who needed to be punished and separated from my family.”  “So they treated you with fear and disgust, like a monster male vampire primitive animal gorilla?” I asked.  “Ya, like that,” he agreed.  “And what about the girl?  The four year old cousin, was she innocent, trusting, loving and pure in their eyes?” I wondered.  He nodded his consent.

      The dream was very interesting.  It showed how he viewed himself.  The feminine side was good, pure, and beautiful, frightened of the masculine and running away from it, hiding from it, but never able to get away from it.  The evil, vampire, monkey-man, who sunbathes in the nude and swings through the trees, like Tarzan, is the external form of the dreamer’s psyche.  What a powerful image of self-hatred the Self was showing to my friend.  So I asked him, “What do you suppose those gorillas wanted from you girls?”  “Isn’t it obvious?” he looked at me with incredulity.  “No, it isn’t obvious at all Shiva, the gorillas never hurt you, even though you wounded one of them.  They just stayed on your tail, like you couldn’t ignore them anymore.  Did you ask them what they wanted?” I wanted to know.  He hadn’t thought of asking these shadow energies why they were pursuing him, his assumption was that they were going to do something to hurt him, but the action of the dream didn’t suggest this, just the feelings of the dreamer.  “So I wonder what would happen if you asked them what they wanted from you.  You told me that you met the woman of the peyote vision, who asked you to ride with her.  And you both have a similar history.  Is it possible that your inner feminine is in relationship with your Irish girlfriend and the two of you are running from the abusive, molesting fathers you both have had?  Could it be that your masculine is just wanting the love, friendship, and acceptance from you that your actions express you want from me?”  I knew he knew what I was asking and decided to be as clear as possible. 

      “Ya, that’s probably true, but how do I do that now that the dream is over?” he asked.  “You could try imagining yourself back in the setting of the dream and ask the image of the gorilla if it would tell you what it wants from you.  You could write it all down in your journal.” was my reply, “now what else would you like?  Is there anything else I can do for you?”  “Yes,” he said, “how about a massage?” 

      Although we started that massage with his sarong around his waist, the minute I reached his lower back, Shiva removed his skirt and lay there nude.  His six feet four inches stretched and relaxed with each stroke of my massage oiled hands.   I had studied massage and was told by my teacher that I had extraordinary intuitive abilities, that I could be a powerful healer.  What I had discovered during that time was that the body holds memories and a good therapist can touch those spots releasing the memories.  That can be beneficial of course, but sometimes you get surprised by what comes up.  Since I love the stories people tell, I decided that talk therapy was more my forte, but personal relationships which involve massage are the Coyote’s forte and he was on the track of an unusual animal.  As I massaged Shiva’s lower back, thighs, calves, feet, he kept spreading his legs further and further apart.  My lack of homosexual experiences accounted for my curiosity about this phenomenon and when I rolled him over to massage the front half of his body, he said to my surprise, “You sly dog!  But it’s all good.  I want to feel you inside of me!”

      What that translated to me was “you sly Coyote, you turned me on again, and even though I’m in a relationship with a woman I love, it’s all good.  Right now in this moment what I want is to feel your penis inside of me.”   I was wondering just how to do that because our love-making episodes didn’t involve anal intercourse.  I didn’t have to wonder for long, because Shiva was excited to get into his moment and took matters into his own hands.  He greased my erect penis with massage oil, held his anus open with one thumb and inserted me with the other hand.  Man that guy was slick; he knew exactly what to do and how to do it.  All that yoga stretching made his body supple and strong.  He could bend and move as though he were dancing on his back.  I was bumping heads with a man younger than my son having my first homosexual experience of anal sex.  And I enjoyed myself.  It was very fun and exciting.  Two-Spirited men, shapeshifting back and forth from masculine to feminine just like the Winnebego trickster spirit Mazis had talked about.  When Shiva was moaning “Yes, Yes, Yes” I was wondering what it was like for him, who was he making love to in his mind?  Was it one of the fly boys from his Air Force days?  Could it be the gorilla?  I would have liked it to be me, of course, but something was telling me to get ready for a shock.

      We lay silent for a while, then Shiva hit the shower and emerged munching the fresh fruit he had prepared earlier.  When I tried to hug him, he rebuffed me harshly, saying, “I told you I didn’t feel affection for you.  In the moment, what I wanted was to feel you inside of me, that’s all.  If you feel something for me, it’s because you got yourself there, it’s not because of how I feel!”  I stared in disbelief as he walked into the bedroom and crawled into bed.  I slept on my pad on the living room floor where I always did.  In the morning Shiva was warm and friendly.  We had breakfast, and drove into town.  On the way Shiva was talking about how he wanted to take me skinny dipping up in the hot springs and how much he enjoyed our time together. 

      Two days later, after talking with a friend about my encounter with Shiva, while he was driving me back to work from lunch, we came up to the corner and I said, “Well, speak of the devil, that’s him ahead of us on his bicycle.”  He had come to see me.  I had talked with Owl about my experience and I wasn’t feeling safe anymore, my feelings were hurt and I was confused by the “come close and love me, go away I don’t want you near me” contradictions of my younger friend.  When I shared that with Shiva, he glared at me and said, “you’re the one who seduced me!”  I knew we weren’t going to be able to resolve things in the few minutes remaining before I had to walk into work, so I remembered that I was the elder and I apologized.  I told him that if I had hurt him in any way, I hoped he could forgive me.  He said, “Thanks, that means a lot to me.”  He got on his bicycle and rode away. 

      Shortly after that I had a series of dreams in which my spirit guide is (1) reminding me that everything is in the thesis, (2) showing me how to sort, file, and record the father stuff always in conjunction with a young male assistant, (3) telling me I have to show up, be present, and get the work done, (4) illustrating encrypted messages in the mail (male) box.  Looking back over my Master’s thesis, which deals with the healing and transformative aspects of the Peyote Ceremony, I discuss the unfolding process of my own awareness of the abuser/victim/rescuer triangle of behavior and how we internalize experiences and continue to act them out for generations. 

      All of my father/son issues having to do with repeating the traumas of my early childhood as victim/abuser were replicated with Shiva, the assistant.  He was the male box into which the messages of a lifetime were placed, encrypted in the language of the soul.  He is also the image of my young man/inner self who assists in sorting it all out, filing it, and recording it.  About that time, I had begun Eye Movement De-sensitivity Reprocessing or EMDR therapy.  In order to do the work, I had to show up in two ways, I had to be willing to feel and view images which were triggered in the imaging while at the same time observing from a higher perspective, like from the eagle’s vantage point thus bringing my more mature self into dialogue with experiences which in many cases were preverbal.  Doing that work was challenging, but it was the fastest move toward integration I have experienced.

      During EMDR therapy, Shiva’s image functioned to trigger images from the past of the bully, the father, the lover, the molester, the friend, complete with smells and body memories from infancy to the present.  And all the time I had a mentor/therapist in the room with me while I, as the eagle observe and could make comments to my child self like “they were ignorant, they didn’t know they were hurting you, they were just doing what they themselves had experienced.” Then I would stay with that feeling or image and a whole new array of events would flash before me, but in successive sessions an awareness of integration of the past into the present slowly evolved.  It is hard to describe how these changes took place over the following months.  It was a felt sense of an attitude shift, more compassion and understanding for my parents and for myself.  There was also the pain of rejection and severance of communication.  Shiva and my brother were both Cancers, just the opposite of me on the astrological chart.  I was going through a lot of changes in the month before my death and rebirth ceremony.

      Circling back around that house in the canyon where making love to my father was recurring again and again, the healing was getting closer and closer.  Although the pattern was recurring, and as part of the pattern, Shiva the Destroyer wasn’t taking any responsibility for his seductive actions, just like the Elk and the Wolf, he was projecting all the seduction onto me.  If I were Zeus and he Ganymede ( which in Greek means happy/beautiful testicles), the myth would be running out to a very different conclusion, but vampire gorillas are not gods and the play was cast with different characters.  The Raven could empathize, he told me how homophobic young guys are and that projection is a part of protecting themselves from having to accept their homosexual desires and actions. Owl, who was about the same age as Shiva, had a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and was my colleague.  He had experienced homosexual relationships since he was ten years old and was very aware of his lovers’ emotional immaturity. 

      Given the fact that younger men are often emotionally less mature than their older lovers, Owl taught me the importance of teasing apart the mentor from the lover in relationships.  Most of these guys were wounded by their father issues, like I had been.  So it is essential that the mentor keep safe, well defined boundaries.  What Owl asked me was, “Don’t you think he was testing you, to see if you could keep a boundary?  All of the guys who hit on him are picking up his invitation.  He’s just hoping someone will love him without having to penetrate him.  He’s looking for a man completely different from his father, someone who will keep him safe, who will love him just the way he is.  Maybe next time you’ll remember what to do.” 

      I had read Richard Gartner’s book Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men (1999) earlier in the year but found integrating the theory and story into my personal awareness difficult work.  I had to get out of my own repetition compulsion while it was pulling me in like a powerful tractor beam.  I wanted to be pleased and to please my lover, and so did my partner, but what he later told me was “I thought that if I could make it with my dad, the gay guys would stop hitting on me.”  Setting myself up as the good dad, or maybe the universe did using the woman in the bookstore, Shiva easily transferred his love/hate relationship with his biological father onto me and we acted it out. For me, side stepping that one was impossible at the time.  I just got impaled on another of Eros’ arrows.  And so, with yet another wound in my heart, I stumbled toward Columbus Day.  Shiva was silent, meditating in his cave.

     Four days before the Columbus Day Death/Rebirth meeting, we still had no place to hold the ceremony.  I continued to cling to my faith that somehow, someway Creator would create a miracle for me.  I drove into town for a latte.  The magic of Albuquerque’s cup of coffee in the bookstore was in the background like a drumbeat.  So I went to the place where Shiva’s friend the Finch worked, the one who had Native American connections.  While I was sitting there, my brother called to say we had a site; a friend offered her horse coral and the meeting was happening.  I told him that I had to pick up the Hummingbird Man from the train station, he had just returned from Costa Rica and would be sitting up with us along with his brother.  When I clicked off my phone, a beautiful, brown skinned young woman, who had been listening to my conversation said, “I just returned from Costa Rica, and I wondered if you would tell me about the Hummingbird Spirit.  See here on my foot, the hummingbird? I had it tattooed there to remember my grandmother.”

     We talked and she eventually told me that she wanted my large table to write a philosophy paper.  I offered to help her compose her thoughts.  She talked about my favorite movie “What the bleep” and spirituality.  Her bubbling enthusiasm completely overwhelmed me.  Such a loving, kind and caring child is just the sort of person we need in our community.  So I invited her to the meeting.  After reading the philosophy article to which she was to respond, asking her questions and talking to her about her ideas, and yes, I confess, lecturing for three hours, I finally left her alone to write the paper.   For someone with only seven years in the US, she sure spoke beautiful English.  I picked up the Hummingbird Man and his brother the Eagle/Bear from the train.  Then we went back up to town.  They walked around the town for an hour while I had my therapy session. 

     My therapist, a young woman from South America, had introduced Eye Movement De-sensitivity Reprocessing or EMDR about six weeks earlier.  I was frustrated before that time because she had no experience with marriage, parenting, or the pain of separation and divorce and her English comprehension left a lot to be desired.  In the EMDR work, she had me wear an
apparatus composed of a head set for auditory stimulation and hand held vibrating “clickers” which were aligned to alternatively stimulate the left and right sides of the nervous system.  Since I had learned “dual attention” in the practice of Jungian active imagination and in Native American meditation techniques, I found we could bypass our cultural differences and let me do my own work.  That day, while my nephews were strolling outside, I re-experienced neglect and sexual abuse, feeling fear, sadness, loneliness, anger, and confusion.  I experienced a large penis in my mouth on which I was choking.  The tears were flowing and then, within minutes, there was a period of understanding which I verbalized as “my parents were too young to have children”,  “they were ignorant, they didn’t know any better”, “they didn’t mean any harm”.  Holding the traumatic feelings in this way transformed their intensity.  I found I could remember more traumatic events with less affect.  I could incorporate my dissociated memories into my history in a way that no longer enabled denial as a strategy.  Although I had made progress in the session, I came out into the street feeling like a sweater that had just been thoroughly unraveled. 

     I took my nephews to a coffee shop nearby and unloaded the stories of Shiva, Turtle, Owl and my family history as it was manifesting in the present.  These stories didn’t seem to phase either of my nephews.  They listened with interest and concern.  When I got up to buy food to cook for dinner, four hours had passed.  When we got to the house in the canyon, my nephews from Florida had also arrived.  After dinner the five of us sat outside around the fire talking about the coming meeting.  When we went inside the house, I remembered the chickens.  I had left the cage open during the day and needed to close the pen.  It was dusk.  I found my flashlight and set off down the hill.

     As I was walking down the path, I heard a soft thud.  When I got to the coop, expecting to see the chickens and close the gate, I got a surprise.  No chickens.  “Hum, that’s strange,” I thought as I turned back. Then I remembered that strange thud and looked where it had come from. Sure enough, about six feet away from me was a chicken, sort of flattened out and looking lifeless.  A couple feet away from the chicken’s body stood the Bobcat, who froze in the beam of light from my flashlight.  He was beautiful, about the size of a coyote, just as I remembered him in that cave in Idaho fifty years before.  And just as startled as his ancestor, he didn’t move a muscle until I moved the beam.  Then he ran down the fence line.  I yelled for the boys to come see him.  He had jumped the fence, but was patiently waiting on the other side to come collect his dinner.  The Eagle/Bear spotted the cat and shined the light on it.  Once again, it wouldn’t move.  Later when I was checking on the one remaining chicken which I put it in the coop, the Bobcat was there too, on the outside with his paw reaching through the chicken wire trying to grab the stupid chicken which was roosting within claw reach of the cat.  That chicken survived, the other two were transformed.  The children would be disappointed when they returned, but their father had told me what a nuisance they were to him.  His negative feelings and my being distracted by my process and my family resulted in death and dinner.  The bobcat reaqppeared occasionally in the following weeks after receiving my generous chicken gifts.

     Remember how this story started with finding the Great Horned Owl?  I removed it from the freezer where I had been storing it. (The refrigerator/freezer itself died the next week.)  All the death seemed connected to Shiva and his devotees, the human incarnations of the Hindu Deity who were fascinated with the Owl energy.  I liked the beautiful Great Horned Owl which I had been gifted by the Universe.  The synchronicity was magical, but as I remembered the Owl’s connections with the goddess Athena, Elk, Two Bears, Turtle, Owl, and now Shiva, I decided I had to create a ritual to let go of their incredibly powerful influence in my life.  I wanted a new beginning.  I decided to mark out my new life by burying the old.  As a start I would bury the Great Horned Owl.

     The morning of the ritual burial of the owl, the house cats killed and presented me with a large wood rat, carefully placed in the middle of the family room carpet. The owners told me to expect gifts, if the cats found me acceptable as a caretaker.  I thanked them for their offering and support.  As I reached for the tobacco to pray for the owl and the rat, out rolled the braid of hair I had cut from my head when I separated from my wife.  I had been carrying it for seven years. Thanking the spirits for the reminder that I had to let go of everything, I added it to my collection of offerings to return to Mother Earth.  After digging a hole at the base of an ancient oak, I buried my braid with the Great Horned Owl, along with the rat, its prey, prepared by feline hospitality.  It seemed the cats were tuned into the spiritual dimension and wanted to contribute to the Ceremony.  The totem animal of my adolescent years, the Bobcat, had killed the frightened chicken inside of me.  From the earth elemental I moved to the free standing pot bellied, ceramic fireplace, the chimenia, and lit a small fire.  I prayed with tobacco and then, with the air elemental’s help, burned most of the photographs of my past life.  Next I offered up most of the art I had created during periods of depression, all of the watercolors I painted during the beginning of my separation from Athena.  I remembered the time, the situations, the feelings, and the hopes which those paintings expressed and decided I couldn’t take them with me into the next phase, anymore than I could take them into the grave when I left my body.  I watched the smoke rise toward the sky. Everything was ready for rebirth.

      That night I dreamed of Martin Luther King and soldiers who were serving in Vietnam.  We were on an island. I was making love to an Afro-American man every night and in the day we pretended we weren’t lovers. This sequence of day/night encounters ended with a white tiger called DENIAL. I woke up with the understanding that denial was at the heart of the problems we have being men. Unlike our Native American ancestors or our classical Greek ones, who were able to openly love one another and use that love to protect one another and their families, American Veterans were not permitted to openly love the men in their company.  They had to deny their essential human feelings for each other, the power of male bonding was weakened thereby and they weren’t allowed the time to tell each other their horror stories like my uncles who served in World War II.

     My uncle Keith Melville was the Captain of a B-17 which flew supplies throughout Europe. Miraculously the aircraft was never hit by enemy fire, but he and his crew saw many of their friends killed in mid-air.  At the relatively young age of 23, he flew his last mission in 1945.  They and other Veterans like them, traveled home slowly, together, on trains and ships, which gave them the time to connect with their fellow travelers on their return from the underworld of battle. They told their stories to others, who like themselves, carried the emotional and physical wounds of battle. The psychic wounds could heal in such a slowly moving theater of stories. Unlike previous times, the Vietnam Veteran may be seeing action one day and sitting in his family living room back in the USA the next, with no time to process the traumas they had experienced with the only people who could comprehend their pain and anguish, other soldiers in the same predicament.  It seemed so obvious on a symbolic level that we love one another and need to acknowledge it. That’s why losing your buddy is so traumatic and the grief so intense!  I went to my closet and took out my Chinese white shirt with the dragons and the tigers.  The Dreamworld had given me more story to weave into the Columbus Day Peyote Ceremony.  I had my visual aid, the White Tiger shirt, to help me remember to talk about my dream.  I had already decided to make my nephews my protectors.  I would put Scott, the Eagle/Bear, on my left and Mikey, the Hummingbird Man, on my right.  Their energy was strong and loving.  I had earned their respect and devotion.  They showed it before in 2002 when they first sat up with me, having flown across the continent after continuously picking the Peyote Ceremony Card from Jamie Sams deck of Sacred Path Cards. Now in 2004 they were back, more experienced and more supportive.

     The Little Hummingbird Woman from the cafe, the one with the tatoo on her foot, came to the meeting and watched with excitement and interest.  She sat beside my Jewish relatives from New York, who were drooling over her luscious beauty and seeming innocence. My nephews were her age and available, but no match for her power. When I shared my dream and mentioned making love to another man, I heard the Buffalo, who sat beside me two months earlier in August (when Shiva was getting well), say “How’d that feel?” Back in August he kept commenting as Shiva writhed and vomited, “You must have done something really terrible to deserve this!” When he said it the third time, I turned to him and said, “One of these days you are going to be sitting over there taking care of the fireplace.  I’m going to teach you what is going on in here so you can take care of the relatives with respect and compassion.  You have no idea who I am and what I have done to deserve your insolence.  Your sarcasm betrays your wounds.  Shiva has suffered more in his 23 years than more people do in a lifetime.  He’s sitting opposite the Sponsor, my brother, who has the same story of alcoholism and abuse in childhood as Shiva.  In these ways those of us sitting opposite the Sponsor often have the honor of processing for ourselves and the rest of the relatives the Sponsor’s illness.  That is what is happening here.  Open your eyes and ears and you will learn how the Medicine and the Fireplace work.  I will be your teacher from now on.” By the time Shiva stumbled out of the Tipi, the Buffalo sitting beside me had heard how harsh a teaching an elder can dispense. It had only been two months since that experience, and evidently he was ready for the next lesson. 

     During the time Midnight Water was being passed around, the Buffalo decided to talk to me from his psychologist self and give me some advice. He told me that “It’s time to drop the Coyote, Michael, you don’t need to play that role anymore.”  He got support from the other psychotherapists, my daughter, the Princess, and my nephew, the actor, who chimed in with “Yes, Michael you should let the Coyote sit in the back of the bus and let the Buffalo or the Eagle drive now.” Although this advice was probably important and correct from their viewpoint, I had been fed eight prayer-filled Medicine balls of peyote.  My inner Coyote was feeling rather snarly and disrespected.  Of course I spoke up.  “Be careful how you talk about the gods, the ancient ones, the archetypes.  Coyote created us humans.  If we talk that way about the Creator, we are likely to feel His paw hit the back of our head when we disrespect him.”  My young Coyote brother snapped at the Buffalo in defense of our ancient relative. “That’s right!” The Fireman, the Roadrunner, calmed things down talking about how Coyote jumps on our backs to teach us a lesson. He said, “Three years ago my brother Michael Melville jumped on my back and I still can’t shake him off!” People laughed and I relaxed. By morning the Buffalo couldn’t wait to apologize. He said that as soon as the words left his mouth he realized Coyote had just tricked him into humiliating himself and the Medicine worked on him all night long so that he learned how the Medicine teaches us through looking in the magic mirror.  

     My nephews, the Hummingbird Man and Eagle/Bear sat up strong all night on each side of me.  My friend Jaguar Woman addressed me over Morning Water saying, “Unlike last year, when your sons (Turtle, Wolverine, and Raven) seemed to be distracting you from your prayer, this time the men beside you looked like Chinese Temple Guardians all night long.  They protected you completely, so you could talk to Creator without distraction.  It’s good to see you loving yourself enough to have such great support beside you.  It’s good to see you have grown wiser and stronger.  I’m sure your prayers will be answered, and what a joy to have this young woman you invited sitting beside me, this little hummingbird.  You certainly do have good taste Michael.” 

     My son the Raven didn’t sit up that night, nor did he at the New Year’s meeting ten months before.  He had been fed EMDA or ecstasy by his friend at a Christmas party and was struggling to recover from what he continually referred to as “the chemical accident”.  From the first experience the Raven had a craving for the drug.  He was in the darkest, most depressing funk of his life and was doing everything to change his body chemistry that he could possibly do. Staying out of the meeting was a survival mechanism which didn’t go unnoticed by my sister. She had remembered her life threatening trauma the first time she ate Peyote.  The Medicine helped her face the horror of a bad LSD trip that ended in rape, battery, plastic surgery, and residual post-traumatic stress.  She planned to confront the Raven and encourage him to deal with his issues.  My son Turtle showed up with a beautiful new woman. Instead of getting well all night long, as was his customary way of being in the Fireplace, Turtle was given a job by my brother, the Road Chief.  He had Turtle shoveling up the wellness.  His woman friend made up for him.  She was suffering from her own chemical accident and the Medicine was driving the drugs out of her system with a vengeance.