Chapter Twelve
COYOTE GETS WELL
Thanksgiving was over on Thursday. By Saturday Coyote was waiting patiently for Raven to arrive. Did I say “patiently”? Well he was trying to be patient having spent the morning steaming feathers, checking his rattle, getting dressed for the Peyote Ceremony. Raven was always later than he said he would be. “That kid is just like my dad, always keeping me waiting!” thought Coyote. But he knew it was useless to complain, Raven would just get his feelings hurt and spend more time giving reasons why he was late and Coyote would have to listen to more thinking about thoughts and it made him sick just thinking about all that thinking. Coyote was ready to sit with his relatives around the fire.
Coyote was wondering about the Raven’s fears of facing the “chemical accident” memories during the Peyote Ceremony. Too much Ecstacy at Christmas the year before had ended the Raven’s love affair when the Fox dropped more tablets than requested into Raven’s cup. He might have overlooked the betrayal, since making love on the stuff was great, “like melting into one another,” he had said; but it was the craving for more in the morning that did it. Synthetic designer drugs, magic meth-amphetamines, wow! “Raven gets into the most entangling webs in search of sexual expressiveness,” thought Papa Coyote. Libido enters in where Ravens love to tread.
Peyote on the other hand reminded the Bird of the “accident” and made him vomit up the toxic waste products of synthetic love. “Medicine Pop,” the Raven said, “I had the strangest dream. We were setting up the fireplace in a Mediterranean town square, like Spain or Italy.” “Or Greece?” Coyote interjected. “Ya”, Raven continued, “like Europe. Uncle was in front of the Cathedral. There was a stream running through the middle of the plaza, with a little bridge. I decided to sit on the bridge, but Uncle warned me to be careful not to fall in the water. I ignored the warning and sat on the bridge. The meeting started; we passed the Medicine around. I dug into it and then, about Midnight Water time, started to fall asleep and tumbled off the bridge, into the stream. Uncle just said, “Nephews, fish him out.” And they used nets to pull me up. I was dripping. My feathers were soaked. They didn’t let me out of the netting, they just put me by the fire and every so often, turned me. All the relatives were sitting around. Whenever I started to doze off again, a Medicine Rodent came up and bit me on the foot. It was the strangest dream, what do you think it means?”
“Hum,” said Coyote hiding his excitement and thinking to himself, “Raven didn’t show up for the last two meetings I sponsored, my adopted kid keeps waddling in with his wish I could have, but I fell asleep on the way there story line again. Raven has such good intentions and such intense fears of the Medicine. Nets huh? Sounds more like entangling Raven in his own indecisiveness.” Coyote cleared the chicken off his face and said, “Well Medicine Son, that’s quite a dream. Sounds like you don’t listen to your elders very well. You decided to sit on that bridge huh?” “Ya, I did, right in the middle.” “Maybe tonight you can sit in the south east where you like being. That way you’ll be on the end of the bridge line which runs north/south across the tips of the crescent moon. That would be a way to honor the dream without falling into the water of the unconscious.” And that’s exactly where he sat.
Just before we went into the Tipi to put our things down, Coyote/Eagle, my nephew asked a favor of me. “Uncle,” he said, “I know I told you I was introducing the kid I am mentoring to the Ceremony tonight. He’s the one we have talked a lot about. Well, I was wondering if you could arrange it so I could sit next to the Little Humming Bird Woman. Since I have to sit Door tonight, I will only have one side open, so could you put her on one side of you and would you take care of the kid, Skywalker, for me?” “Sure, no problem, anything you want,” replied Uncle Coyote. It seemed simple. I would put the kid, Skywalker, between me and the Raven. The Little Humming Bird made me promise I would sit beside her, so she’ll sit between me and my nephew the Doorman. Yet there was one little piece of data which was about to make its entry into the night’s drama. My nephew’s mom (the lady with the ruby throated humming bird tattooed to her shoulder, whom I met after having the Hummingbird Man Dream) told me earlier in the day, “that kid Skywalker reminds me of my son at his age. He’s only eighteen, but he’s done the same drugs. He’s lucky he hasn’t gone any further down that path.”
While we were standing in line, the Skywalker, who was ahead of me stretched his shoulders and said, “Man that’s sore.” I reached up and began to massage his shoulders. They were hard as rock. As I applied as much pressure as I could, I said, “What are you trying to do, carry the weight of the world on your shoulders?” He chuckled and said, “Something like that.” In the meeting I told him to do what I did and ask the Medicine for healing. As the Medicine came around, I had four scoops and four sips of tea. The kid did too. The Raven, who was sitting to his left, was looking at the Skywalker’s copycat behavior and I could tell he was curious about how the evening would develop. In our Fireplace, two sets of Medicine are moving around the circle. The one, starting with the Chief and the Drummer, travels from the West to the East, toward where the Door is. The other starts at the Doorman and travels from there toward the West and the Drummer. Since we were sitting in the south, the Medicine came around twice and the Skywalker ate four more scoops and four more sips of tea. He was mimicking me completely. The Raven’s eyes were getting wider open as he stared at us. We were eating a lot more Medicine than he felt comfortable eating.
The Raven usually got well easily. My brother, the Roadrunner, told me how he was running a meeting once and the energy got stuck. It was a healing meeting, but the Sponsor wasn’t getting well, nobody was. Nothing would move, so he went over, picked up the jar of Medicine and set it down in front of the Raven. Sure enough within a couple of minutes after he ate the Medicine, the Raven vomited and the energy began to flow again.
What was happening to me with the Skywalker at my side felt like a mind meld. Every time I put my arm around the kid, I would feel compelled to start rubbing his shoulders and his back. He loved it and thanked me for it. But I was starting to get images of emotional and sexual abuse which he must have experienced in his childhood. He seemed to be about eight years old, judging by the way he would snuggle into me and the psychic images I was picking up. But there was some kind of block, like he saw and heard something he shouldn’t have or didn’t want to have heard or experienced. It took me back into my adolescence and my feelings of molestation, the emotional incest between me and each of my parents, the way they would play me off of each other like I were a basket ball to be played to make points. I always lost one or the other or both of them in that game. Mom used me to make Dad jealous. Dad used me to make Mom jealous. They always ended up drunk and in bed together. The Medicine was bringing all of those feelings of abandonment and rejection up again, and it was entangled in Skywalker’s story somehow. I felt like I was being rolled over by Coyote’s Acme Steamroller. Touching the Skywalker brought all those feelings to consciousness.
I knew the kid had used drugs and alcohol to numb his feelings. I knew from talking with him that he had a brilliant mind. I had taught college students his age for over twenty years and this kid was unusually smart. That too reminded me of my eighteen-year-old self. As the feelings surfaced in me, I couldn’t tell any more whether they were my memories or his. We seemed to be emotionally fused together. The Raven remarked later, “You two locked horns at the beginning of the meeting. It was wild seeing you guys mesh.” The nausea was mounting in waves. It felt like all those times in college when I drank too much beer and I was about to heave up my guts. Since I never get well in meetings, I was expecting the nausea to dissipate as soon as someone got well. I had a flashback to my Columbus Day meeting the month before, when my sister said she had a vision of me getting well. She told me that I just resisted getting well, and others made it easy for me by doing it for me. I have always felt the Medicine likes me and that there are lots of different ways of getting well, of healing the soul’s wounds. That’s what psychotherapy means, “Soul Healing.” But I wanted to please her and cooperate with her intuitive feelings. She is a Doctor of Oriental Medicine. So I asked her to make Medicine for me again that night. I was ready to get well. That was the fifth Ceremony that I ate thirteen Medicine Balls which were prayed over with special intentions to heal me. I didn’t get well in October, but I was going to for Thanksgiving. It was coming up like lava in a volcano!
No sooner than I got well, so did the kid. The Raven, turned toward us and announced, “Wow, Medicine Pop just got well! This is going to be a five star meeting!” When the Medicine came around again, the kid was looking at me wondering what I would do. I turned to him and said, “If you don’t feel better yet, eat more medicine. You’ll either get well and feel better, or you’ll feel better later. So eat more medicine.” I did and he followed suit. As the meeting continued I felt I had cleared most of the emotional abuse out of my system. The kid on the other hand, was vomiting up his guts an hour later, and he ate more Medicine and he got to feeling much better by morning. The Raven, to everybody’s surprise, didn’t get well nor did he fall into the deep sleep of the unconscious waters of his dream. He enjoyed himself. He got to see history in the making. The one and only time Coyote Got Well!
The Little Hummingbird had made herself a part of my life. By the last week in December we were preparing baklava for our friend Jaguar Woman’s Meeting. It was to be on Friday, New Year’s Eve night. We had a great day together talking and cooking for the meeting. When the baklava was in the refrigerator, we went to the inexpensive Mexican restaurant for dinner and more conversation. I told her about the conflicted feelings I which I had about attending the large Cathedral services at Christmas time with my sister. As we munched on tacos, I told her my dream.
I had dreamed my dog was tied, with a long rope, to Holy Trinity Church and that Russian hunters were trying to kill him. In order to save my dog (which looked like Coyote), I diverted their attention to a Hunting Lodge covered inside and out with snow. It looked like the one in the movie Doctor Zhivago, which came out during my senior year in high school. I lay down in a bed and pulled the frozen covers over me and quietly waited. Although it was clear I was in the room, the only thing the hunters did was pour water on the snow covering the bed. When I didn’t move, they left. My dog was safe.
During the previous year, before moving to Santa Barbara, I had been attending St. Herman of Alaska Russian Orthodox Church. My experience there seemed to be mirrored in the dream. The Priest had been a Baptist Minister before converting to Orthodoxy and still had a lot of his fundamentalist ways about him. I had been wearing my Tlinklit hat with stylized eagle feather on it to church. It was Russian style and the old women loved me, but the Priest was distrustful and eventually forced my hand. He wanted me to explain the Native American clothing. How was it Orthodox? When pushed, the Coyote (or doggie, as they are called by Western singers) got irritated with the guy’s attitude and snarled back at him. I announced my commitment to the Native American Church, which was my religious preference. When I walked away that day I guess psychically I had left my Coyote tethered to the Cathedral. That is how it seemed talking to the Hummingbird. Every time I try to embrace my Celtic roots and sit in the beautiful atmosphere of the stained glass, candles, and crafted stone, someone talks to me about politics, relationships and Native American culture.
At the Cathedral one morning when I was listening to people talk after the service, one of the elder women was expressing her frustration about the way we humans are treating the planet. I was thinking she was being too negative if she wanted to be heard, she needed to give the younger people some hope. She changed her attitude to a more positive one and after she finished talking, she came up to me and introduced herself as Eagle Song (the name given her by the Chumash Medicine Man). She was as direct as her name; right to the point she asked, “How long have you known you were telepathic?” I was surprised and delighted by her directness. She told me that she heard me saying that she was too negative. She then told me about her psychic abilities and how they were difficult burdens to carry over her seventy-five years.
Eagle Song told of how the Spanish Missionaries had dumped the bodies of the Chumash relatives in a ravine near her first home in the area and when the Medicine Man visited they both could feel the anger of the spirits. I have heard these stories whenever I visit the Christian Churches of California. Our ancestors were converted or killed and their ways forgotten as quickly as possible. Yet we were raised in the tradition of our conquerors. We are the conquerors. Our mixed up blood can be very confusing at times. At Christmas when the well-intentioned folk singer sang about the Lakota man found dead under a bridge in South Dakota right after a traditional Christmas carol, I got up and walked out of the Cathedral. I untied the Coyote and headed home. It was cold and lonely just like the Hunting Lodge of the Dreamworld, but I had saved my instinctive character from being killed and I was looking forward to sitting up with the relatives on New Year’s Eve.
The day before the meeting, I went to have brunch at the coffee shop. The man at the next table started a conversation about how he had thought of buying the building when it was a service station. I listened to his story about moving to Oregon and bars and restaurants his sister owned and how he was just traveling through. Throughout my listening patiently I noticed a young man, a girl, and a couple of elder men sit down for coffee at the table behind the talker. By their behavior I decided they were probably stopping by after an AA meeting or something like that. They weren’t family and their conversation seemed disjointed. Eventually all of them left except the young man, who reminded me of one of the deer who walked with me in Mendocino County. He seemed to be watching me as I talked to the stranger. When the guy left for Oregon, the deer was still attentively watching me, so I said in Coyote fashion, “So, What are you all about?” He responded with “That’s an interesting question. No one has ever asked me that before.” And he began to tell me all about himself. Several hours later I invited him to join us at the Peyote Ceremony. He said he would consider it. Since he was in an alcohol recovery program, I wondered if he would really come. People don’t have to eat peyote to pray all night with us, but the Medicine is such a blessing it would be hard to resist trying to heal oneself with its help.
The next day I stopped at my favorite Coffee Cat espresso shop during lunch and who should be sitting there but Shiva and his black belt friend the Lion. Shiva’s body was to be used to demonstrate acupuncture points in the Lion’s Oriental Medicine final exam. When I invited them to the meeting that night, I also mentioned they could stop by my house for baklava before we left. Shiva was interested, the Lion only ate natural food and was shaking his head no, when Shiva said, “Baklava is my favorite dessert. We’ll stop by for that at least.” And so they did; late of course, just before we left. The Lion was another wounded boy; his mother had immigrated from Germany to marry a man who turned out to be an alcoholic. When the parents divorced, the boy was in his early teens and felt abandoned by his father when he needed a dad the most. The mother had lived through Hitler’s control of Germany and she sounded like a candidate for the Gestapo, very rigid, cold, and harsh. The pain of his situation must have been intense and in order to numb himself, the Lion had resorted to alcohol and then psychedelic drugs during high school. A brilliant college student, he found meaning in martial arts and now Oriental Medicine.
Often I would encounter the Lion alone and he would sometimes be cordial and invite me to talk. But whenever Shiva was with him they would act in ways that would usually have resulted in rejection. Maybe that’s what they were expecting, to be rejected, so they unconsciously created the rejection. I sure had a hard time fighting them as they threw East Indian philosophy and religion at me like lightning bolts. Fortunately, that is an area I feel confident about. I could defend myself, but I could never win. They would never allow me to “get to them” with my questions. Not that I was trying to win an argument, I usually felt like the wily coyote set upon by an intellectual bear and lion team. They were physically bigger, so I had to be more clever. But it always hurt to be attacked by angry kids whose fathers had hurt them. I understood what was happening; my intentions were loving and compassionate. I was trying to hold their pain and process it with them, but it still hurts and I often felt like I had psychic holes in me after one of those encounters. Usually that occurred when they had been drinking beer and I ran into them on the street or at the coffee shop.
The Deer, who was sitting with me in the coffee shop, before I got distracted by talking about the bear/lion tag team, had a lot of rage in him too, but he was more open to dialogue. Actually he appeared as a Deer, but his shadow was a Young Raven, he seemed to be a younger version of me in a way, just before the Deer turns into the Trickster. He had been raised by a violent and usually absent father who had a tough job. The was a cop, actually a narcotics cop. The Young Raven had the job of tending his younger brothers and sister while both parents worked. When the father returned the Young Raven would have to step between his dad and his younger brothers to prevent them from getting a beating. Another brilliant mind with no parents at home went in search of a family. His friend’s parents were home a lot, usually drinking beer and that’s how the Deer/Raven became an alcoholic at thirteen. He was an excellent soccer goalie and center fielder, in fact he lived for soccer. It was the safe place where no one beat him or emotionally abused him. His friends were there and he could excel. His anger could be focused in a culturally acceptable way. After High School, he decided to join his uncle’s marijuana farming operation as a way of snubbing his nose at his dad. That’s when his submerged anger when mixed with alcohol became explosive and turned against himself in suicidal behavior, risk-taking, and hooking up with women who acted things out. He could hold their hands after they took an overdose, call the ambulance, worry at the hospital all night, and go to work in the morning with no sleep. He lived that way for a long time, until he finally literally cut himself open and swallowed all the prescription drugs his lover had in the house. He did this to “show her what it feels like” but much to his surprise, she was angry he took all the pills and didn’t bother to visit him at the hospital. Shortly after that he tried to drink himself to death and wound up in jail, followed by a rehab program including AA and 12 steps with his own East Indian Meditation twist. Sort of like a twist of lemon on an old fashioned I guess.
It was New Year’s Eve and Young Raven arrived at my house in time for conversation and tea. He doesn’t drink coffee any more; it’s bad for the liver and it’s addictive. We did sample the baklava and I explained the ceremony, showed him my sacred objects, my rattle, feathers and burned some sage to clear the air. When the Little Hummingbird arrived, I introduced her and she discovered they were the same age, sign and their birthdays were eleven days apart. She was older. She had coffee with me and we tried the baklava again. Yes it was delicious. The Hummingbird is a body worker and did some work on the Young Raven’s aching back and soccer knees. He was interested in attending massage school and she had a lot of good ideas about that.
The rain and snow in the mountains almost cancelled the meeting. When my brother called, we talked about the dream I had about the meeting and I suggested he drive up to the site to see for himself what it looked like. That way he could feel good about his decision, whatever it was. The Papa Lion drove up into the mountains around road crews moving landslides and as he stopped his truck, he was wondering whether or not to continue up the road. Just then he saw a red-tailed hawk take flight in the direction of the meeting site. He felt it was a good omen and decided to go ahead. He had called before I encountered Shiva and his buddy the Lion in the Coffee Cat.
When the beautiful Cherokee sisters arrived, I introduced them to the attractive young man who was going with us. Young Raven is charming, agile physically and spiritually. His dark side, the inner young dragon, is well covered in public. As we were packing the cars, Shiva and his buddy arrived. I offered them baklava. Shiva took two and enjoyed them both. They had decided not to join us, but were enjoying flirting with the three girls. That ended when I announced it was time to go. Shiva and his lion drove off into town and we drove up into the snow-covered mountains. Even though the road was closed except for local traffic, someone had told the flagman there was a Native American Ceremony, so he let us through.
Much to my surprise, my son Turtle had driven all the way from Utah to join us. He sat on my right and Young Raven on my left. They looked so much alike that everyone was asking if they were brothers. Turtle was disgusted. “No he’s not my brother. I don’t know who he is. Someone my dad brought!” The jealous Turtle was pretty transparent to the relatives. He had been my companion for three months before he disappeared. After that episode, I loved him but didn’t trust him anymore. It was the first time in over a year I had let him sit next to me. I even let him drum for me that night. I wanted to make peace with him without letting him get too close again. The pattern was obvious to me now. After years of trying to get my dad’s love from wounded don Juan type guys, who like my dad would abandon me once they got too close, I knew I had to protect myself. It is possible to love one another and still have safe boundaries. I was learning to take better care of myself and the Little Hummingbird’s loving smile was a reminder that things could be different. I might be sitting next to the source of painful memories, but she was emitting love and light to me all night. She invited me to remember to love myself as well as others. These were new ways of being in relationship. I was trying to re-pattern myself.
Young Raven, the Hummingbird, and I went outside after Midnight Water to discover the grass was frozen solid. As the ice crystals were forming, it seemed the reflected light of the moon and stars were moving. Young Raven looked up to see Orion in the night sky; then he saw Orion in the ice crystals. When I opened my mouth, the philosopher spoke, “The Alchemist Paracelsus said “so above, so also below”. See above in the stars and here below, we are the microcosm." Amid smiles and expressions of amazement, the Young Raven put his arms around me and held tight, he said the world was spinning and it felt so good he couldn’t believe it. He was glad to have crossed the boundary and eaten the Medicine. On his vision quest in the mountains the day before I met him, when he had to crawl on all fours like the Coyote, he had prayed for a circle of strong men. Not macho men, but men who were in touch with their feminine and felt strong because of it. He told us all that story in the morning, “And here I am sitting in a circle of strong men before the end of the week! I certainly am getting what I prayed for,” said Young Raven.
After Jaguar Woman’s Ceremony, Young Raven had gone home with the Little Hummingbird who adopted him as her brother. He in turn had introduced her to his friend Young Eagle a few days later. The three of them were together a few nights later, when I had just sat down in the East Indian Restaurant to order dinner. That’s when the Hummingbird called on her cell phone wondering if I wanted to have dinner. “Yes, I would,” I said, “how about Indian food? I am in the Taj Mahal. Can you join me? How many of you are coming? Three? OK. I’ll be waiting.” She had just parked her car across the street when she decided to call. When they arrived within minutes, I had moved to a larger table in the center of the empty restaurant. When Young Raven ordered, he asked, “Can you cook that with extra portions of love?” The Punjabi waiter beamed and later returned with our food and two desserts, which were “on the house, with extra love!”
The youngest of my three guests was only eighteen, but he easily could have been four thousand. His long curly locks of hair fell to his muscular shoulders. He smiled and laughed like Robin Hood or one of the Merry Men of Celtic stories. He exuded love, hope, trust and compassion. Could he have come through a time portal? He looked as if he had just walked out of Sherwood Forest, changed clothes to match the Twenty-First Century and joined two other shapeshifters for a night out with their Dad. These young people felt like my youngest children. We had become family around the table that night.
Later I discovered Young Eagle was a tree climber, who could disappear in the Standing People. Once he climbed up onto the roof of the outdoor Spanish style mall (five stories up) and was enjoying looking down on the people. Only the children looked up and noticed him. Young Eagle loves to perch in trees and observe. During Young Eagle’s first Peyote Ceremony, my Brother Papa Lion saw Young Eagle as a Tree Spirit. I guess the Greenman (or Cernunnos) of Young Eagle’s Celtic ancestors was looking out of Young Eagle’s eyes, showing his face to everyone. That would account for his appearance as a tree spirit I guess. By the time Young Eagle sat up for his birthday a month later, I had adopted him as my son. His sister, the little hummingbird, was being recognized as a powerful healer and was gifted hawks over and over again by men who were stunned by her beauty and kindness. She brought the Young Raven back to life a couple of times when he just couldn’t take any more pain. The last time was when she kept inviting him to ride to Ceremony and he kept saying no.
When she pulled into town, she dropped her baited hook “Michael will be there” and he changed his mind. He sat beside me and let me hold him and adopt him. In the morning he told me, “Michael you are the only man I have ever trusted in my life. Everyone else was cruel and abusive and couldn’t relate to their feminine side, filled with denial like my dad. You are so different, so kind, and loving, and not afraid of your feelings. I love having you as my dad.” So within the year I had three new children who reciprocated the love I gave so freely. They are quite the contrast to the Turtle and the Wolverine.
No comments:
Post a Comment