Chapter Fourteen
The Jade Portal
In February after my daughter’s Las Vegas Wedding, I had told Raven’s Gift how lonely I felt, even with all the people around me who loved me. “Me too,” she said. Without thinking, I spoke from my heart with, “Then what are we doing apart? Couldn’t we try being lonely together?” She said that her renter was moving out of the extra bedroom at the end of March. OK, then would she rent it to me? That was settled quickly; all I had to do was figure out a way to fly to Seattle, quit my job, and start over again. Sounded a little scary, but why not try to be happy? There were a few unfinished items of spiritual business to complete. First was the trip to Tucson.
My Apache/Yaqui nephew wanted to go on a road trip with me. He invited me to his friend’s birthday Meeting. They had been good friends growing up on the reservation before Gabriel moved to California. After befriending me at the Meeting I sponsored for New Years, the Archangel became a solid, loving member of my family. After all we have the same Saints’ Day so why not celebrate together whenever we could? On the trip down to Tucson, Gabriel pulled out some tunes he thought I might like. These were tunes I hadn’t heard since high school, like I’m forty years older than him and he likes the music I liked in High School? What kind of magic is that all about? He sang Peyote Songs and introduced me to his family. Complete and loving acceptance for each other was the basis of our relationship. I just trusted the Medicine and this young tattoo artist said he wanted to hang with me, so we did.
Before leaving California we stopped at an oasis where my Coyote nephew and his lover the Fox lived. Gabriel was surprised with my spiritual resources, which came with dinner, shower and beds for the night. The Fox came from a Greek/Irish family and she knew how to make me feel at home. I knew how to support her art and love of the Coyote (even if I wasn’t sure the Coyote loved her the way she wanted to be loved). Earlier that spring I stayed with them for the Coyote's Aquarian clan birthday celebration, where all of the Aquarians the couple knew were invited to a Happy Birthday Party. That party epitomized Coyote's lack of boundaries, his lady's boundaries were clean and crisp, his were non-existent. It made for an interesting experience. My first challenge was in meeting his friend and teacher, another Aquarian elder, an Apache Medicine Woman. She said she knew me and I did feel that I had met her somewhere. We were talking about our lives, when it all came together. Fifteen years before we were both working for the inter-tribal Health Center in northern California. She was right, what a good memory she had.
Back in the desert oasis with the Archangel, the Coyote and the Fox, I shared the story of meeting the Medicine Woman and the amazing synchronicity which happens whenever I am around members of the Coyote clan. Finally exhausted I headed for the guest bedroom which the Fox had prepared for me. I went to bed, but rest I did not. All night long, over and over, I had dreamed I was fighting with a vampire in black pants and white shirt. By six am I was totally exhausted in body and spirit; that's when I finally fell asleep. A few hours of rest made it possible to tell the dream. He didn’t mention his vampire tattoo until the ride back home from Tucson. “That’s part of our past now; we know how to deal with that kind of energy,” were the Archangel’s soothing words. Why did I need soothing on the trip home? For that you must understand the strange, magical events unfolding when we arrived at our destination.
When we got to the reservation, it was during the tribe’s traditional annual celebrations, recounting their escape from genocide in Mexico. The people had identified with the story of Christ taught by the Roman Catholic missionaries in Mexico. It coincided with their mythology and was easy to assimilate in their own unique way of understanding the story of the Hebrews escape from Egypt and the crucifixion of Christ during the passover celebration within Judaism. Given the secret ways of these people, the reservation was closed to outsiders at this time. Consequently the Tipi looked a little out of place at the Tribal Center. We were assured that everything was all right, the tribal council had approved the peyote ceremony. We sat down to have the soup the sponsor’s mom had made. She seemed a little spaced out and the soup reflected it. The chicken thighs were attached to the legs, not cut up into pieces. The carrots came out of a bag pre-cut and washed. The potatoes were new red ones and uncut. The pepper and salt were in the soup. There was no salt on the tables. The Road Chief was Dine (Navajo) and had brought about fifteen younger men in their twenties and thirties to the meeting. I knew that they would want salt and asked the Sponsor and his mom about that. They had none to offer, even though their home was just a few blocks away; they didn’t think it was important. So when the Dine men asked for the salt, I said, “It’s in the soup.” Every time they would shape their heads, as if to say, "these people aren't like us Holy Ones, who need our salt." Coyote must have enjoyed watching me. I was trying to support the mother's attempt to nourish her son's friends, who seemed a little too macho for the setting. Here I thought I was just being an elder, who was more balanced than the other men. Buth there was a feeling that something was happening that I didn’t understand. When the Meeting started, I looked around me at the circle of natives. I was the only white man in the Tipi that night!
The Dine Road Chief sat talking to me in the Tipi before the Meeting began. He wanted to know who I was before he shared his Comanche Fireplace with me. He found my story of starting a Montessori Charter School for the Pomo people interesting and was curious about how I used dreams in the Wellness Conferences held in Tucson during previous visits. He knew the Sponsor’s friend had brought me from California and he treated me with the kind of respect one would expect from a younger man. He surprised everyone that night, when he asked me to pray over the Midnight Water with the Cedar. I did the best job I could in extending comfort to those who were grieving the loss of loved ones and wishing for the happiness of the Officers and their companions. As soon as the Fireman put down his Prayer Smoke and the Water was being passed around, the Dine Elder, wearing black pants and a white shirt, spoke up and verbally attacked me. He told me that I had no right to be eating Medicine with Natives; that was exclusively their right. He didn’t care what the Supreme Court of the United States said to the contrary. And he was insulted by my Californian references to their wives as “companions”. Fortunately I was prepared by my experience in the Dreamworld to do battle with the Dark Sorcerer.
When the Road Chief’s wife got up and walked out during a Prayer Smoke, I noticed her odd behavior. In our Fireplace, nobody would be allowed to walk on a Smoke. Smokes come first. Nor would a Chief’s wife absent herself at a time when he could share the Smoke with her. The second time she got up while her husband was praying with a Smoke, I turned to Gabriel and asked if he noticed what she had done. “Yes,” he replied, “what do you suppose that means?” I leaned over and whispered in his ear, “I don’t know, but I bet we’ll find out by morning.” Throughout the night the singing was superb. The Road Chief seemed a little uneasy when it was time to cedar off the Sponsor who was at least ten years younger than him. The twenty-three-year old Yaqui, who was a Drug and Alcohol Counselor by profession, stepped in front of the Chief in order to go around the fire. “Who do you think you are?” the Chief asked, “trying to lead me; I am your elder. You follow me!” It seemed a little excessive, but maybe the protocol was extremely important.
For Morning Water, the Road Chief asked the Dine Elder, who also happened to be a Road Chief, to pray with the Cedar. I was shocked with his berating everyone in the circle, telling them of their faults and encouraging them to continue to try to be good men and to continue to eat the Medicine. He emotionally abused the kids and thereby elevated his status. His wife had spent the night in a motel and she wasn’t there to have any input. He talked on and on for well over an hour while the Road Chief’s wife knelt over the water bucket in front of the fire. When the old Sorcerer, who turned out to be the Superintendent of Schools for the Navajo Nation, finally threw the cedar into the fire, the Road Chief’s wife was close to the ground with fatigue. The Chief then rolled his wife’s smoke and walked over to the fire and lit it, thus preventing her from expressing herself before the prayer. Again I was shocked with this rude treatment of the man’s wife. While she was praying, she finally broke down and, with tears running down her face, said, “Oh Creator God, please keep that alcohol away from my husband. I so hate the way we treat each other when he’s drinking.” There it was, out at last! Her disrespecting him by walking on his Smokes had a reason. I nudged Gabriel and he nodded his head in understanding. While the woman was praying, several of the young Dine men got up and turned their backs to the fire! What rude behavior! I was getting more and more angry.
After the Water Woman’s Prayer, which was extended by passing her Smoke to the old Sorcerer, who added more words, thus forcing the Water Woman to stay on her knees, the Morning Water was passed around. I could see my friend Gabriel wince as I began to speak. He was too respectful of his elder to stop me, but it was his friend’s Birthday and he knew that all the Sponsor wanted was to have a good time. I told the story of how an Arapaho Grandfather had corrected his Road Chief Grandson during Morning Water a couple of years earlier. He had been waiting all night thinking of how to be kind and gentle when he said, “In our tradition, we clean up before a Smoke so everything will be nice for the person taking the Prayer Smoke to express themselves before they talk to God. You and your Fireman didn’t let that man express himself and that was very rude. Then he refused to share the Smoke with you or your Officers. He put it down on the altar. What I want to say is this: in the Arapaho Fireplace you let people express themselves! I don’t want to see this happen again in your Fireplace.” I told the circle that I had told that story five months earlier. It was a Doctoring Meeting for my brother, who was trying to express himself about how he had felt suicidal and was going to share how the Creator had healed his hepatitis C, but the Fireman, who was much younger and frightened by talk of suicide, picked up the Lighter Stick and handed it to the Sponsor. My Brother looked surprised, like he might have done something wrong, and lit his Smoke. The Fireman said, “You can continue to express yourself after your Smoke is lit”. Although my brother attempted to do just that, when the Fireman returned to his seat, he motioned for the Drummer to begin the singing and the talk of suicide ended. As the Elder, it didn’t matter whether I was white, black, blue or green, I knew disrespect when I saw it and not allowing the Water Woman to express herself was rude and it resulted in the truth coming out in the way it did. The men who turned their backs to her and to the fire were rude too. We need to treat each other with respect and kindness. As the Arapaho Grandfather had said, “We need to get along with each other.”
The Road Chief surprised us all when he asked the Sponsor for help with his alcohol addiction. When the meeting ended and I went outside to stretch, several of the Dine men came up and shook my hand. They didn’t say much, just wanted to touch the White Man who stood up to their Elder and fought with him through the night. Gabriel hugged me California style and I apologized for being so outspoken. He was glad I escaped with my scalp after chastising the men for their rude, disrespectful treatment of the women in the Meeting. The women who spoke to me were in agreement, “what you said seemed pretty right on!” was the Fireman’s wife’s comment. Her husband told me he was the nephew of the Grandfather I was talking about and it felt good to hear me talk about him the way I did.
When I reentered the Tipi, the Old Sorcerer was sitting in my place! I went over and sat next to the Pima Elder talking to him. She knew my friend in Washington, the one I had prayed for in Albuquerque. His name came up during the fiery exchange of words during Midnight Water, when the Old Sorcerer aligned me with the Suquamish Nation and I said, “no, my friend is Skokomish. I have never sat up with the Suquamish people!” She wanted to tell me how my friend had started the Pow-Wows at the University of Arizona and how she met him at that time when he was a student there. He had demonstrated his gift of clairvoyance to her and she had never forgotten the accuracy with which he described her home and its surroundings. The Elder Woman was working on her PhD in Law and created the space for the Dine Elder and me to be friendly to each other. The Old Sorcerer treated me kindly and with respect now that the Fireworks of the dramatic evening were over. He realized that I wouldn’t back down and he was impressed that he couldn’t intimidate me.
The Archangel got us packed up and drove to his Uncle’s house. The Uncle worked in facility similar the one where I worked. He was familiar with both the drug addicts and the mentally ill, who were also his clients. He was happy to see his nephew and he approved of me as well, so we had a good rest, a meal and a loving send off. We stopped at the desert oasis on the way home and shared stories with my relatives, the Fox and the Coyote. The Coyote was laughing at all my experiences and looking forward to my supporting him during the Sun Dance up in Washington. He knew exactly who the Dine Elder was thinking about up on the Suquamish Reservation and he was chuckling to himself as he imagined the fun of introducing me to his relatives up there.
The second piece of unfinished business was another Peyote Ceremony I was planning to attend. It was the Black Labrador’s birthday Meeting, which was scheduled for the Saturday following his actual birthday. On the morning of his birthday, I had a dream that I was working for a new family in a beautiful garden which looked like Eden or Paradise. The phone number was 964-JADE. The mother of my protégé He Calls Owls, whom I hadn’t seen in over six years, was checking my groceries in a country store. She was happy to be doing this work, although she was trained as a nurse and counselor, so it seemed a bit strange. I woke up and thought about the number sequence 964, which in numerology would be treated as a sum of 9+6+4 = 19. Adding the separate numerals of the total would yield (1+9= 10). Ten is symbolic of completion/ending and a new beginning, a return to unity, and in the Tarot number X is the Wheel of Fortune or Destiny. I discussed the possibility of it being a literal phone number with my housemate, who checked that out. He discovered that it had been a working number, but in his Raven/Trickster fashion said, “now it is only working in the ether”. I looked up the meaning of jade in the I Ching. Jade has a combination of hardness and luster and was often associated with sexuality. Jade is very precious.
I was excited about seeing my young friend the Black Labrador on Saturday for his Native American Church Meeting. His adopted Peyote Road Chief Dad would be running it. My airplane tickets were purchased. I would fly to the Bay Area where I would meet up with my nephew Coyote/Eagle. The Little Hummingbird Woman was traveling to the Bay Area with her new boyfriend, whose Birthday coincided with the Black Labrador’s Meeting. We were planning to meet up in Mendocino County so we could sit up together. At lunch the Black Labrador called. I wished him Happy Birthday. He was just calling to say his Birthday Meeting was being “rescheduled”. His new Dad was unable to do the Meeting; he was coming back from the Peyote Gardens when his truck’s transmission died. It was being repaired. He went on to say that earlier in the morning, the Lab’s biological father, noted for his abrasive, emotional abuse and cold, legalistic distancing, had flown into a rage when the young Lab had mentioned borrowing money for his birthday. As we said good-bye, I couldn’t help thinking the Black Labrador’s new Dad, the Sandpiper, was just a mirror of the old biological one. His new Dad, the Road Chief, was the Drummer at my first Peyote Ceremony; the one whose rage turned on a dime into unconditional love.
The Sandpiper was the same man who had no difficulty praying for me when the Astrologer brought him over to bless my apartment in the mountains six years earlier. After that blessing I put up a dinner for the Astrologer and his English wife. On her first trip to America, while traveling across the south west, she noticed a Tipi on a hillside and went to investigate. She was told there was to be a peyote ceremony later that evening and she asked if she could attend it. She was told to come back later and ask the Road Chief. She did, he said yes, and that was how she met the Sandpiper's spirit father. That Arapaho road chief had invited her into her first Native American Church ceremony many years before. This happened about the time the old man met and adopted his spirit child, the Sandpiper's wife, who had been raised in Scotland and the Findhorn community. As I said, it was a gathering of the clan, so to speak. The Astrologer and his wife brought the Sandpiper's estranged wife and children with them. We were joined by my youngest sons for dinner. The Sandpiper, in his passive aggressive way didn't attend, he was busy working, putting up sheetrock at their ranch. A few weeks after the dinner, his wife moved back to the ranch with him. At the dinner she had shared some dreams with me and we talked about her study of Aikido, tigers, and singing.
The next experience of meeting up with the Sandpiper and his wife was the time he had forgotten the Medicine and asked me to go get it at his house and bring it to him in the Sierra Mountains. That’s when he wanted me to ditch the Glassblower and I refused. He wouldn’t let the kid sit up with us that time. I think that’s when he unconsciously started seeing me as his shadow. He treated me as if I were personally trying to thwart him, probably the way his father used to do. The following year, which happened to be my wedding anniversary, I was attending a ceremony on his land. That was the time his wife told him that his rage was destroying his children and unless he could put that behind him, she would be unable to continue being his wife. He had heard her words as a request for a divorce. When the Black Lab met the Sandpiper, he was living with a new woman. I think I function as the screen upon which people can project their abusive, critical father images. Whenever we are together, the Sandpiper is cordial and polite at first, but after sitting up and eating Medicine all night, I will invariably have said or done something by morning so that he feels justified in expressing anger and/or disrespect toward me. He grew up with an alcoholic, emotionally distancing father, who is about my age. It is easy for him to transfer his feelings toward his dad onto me. That’s usually what happens when we are together. I feel like I had been cast in a psychodrama as the abusive, emotionally distancing father image.
The Black Labrador knew all about my feelings and experiences when he took the Sandpiper as his Dad. He even wondered if I would have difficulty supporting his Meeting knowing I would be sitting up with his Peyote Dad. I had assured him that my issues with his dad were not of my making. If his Dad could hold onto his projections, everything would be fine. Naturally the synchronistic events around the angry, abusive and distancing fathers who changed Black Labrador’s Birthday plans to suit their needs did register on my radar screen as shadow images. And I was also wondering about my biological son’s emotional distancing. His birthday was just two days after the Black Labrador’s and the day before my daughter Dancing Bat’s birthday. He hadn’t communicated with me since his younger brother, the Puma’s wedding. I guess my mysterious exit from the foggy Mendocino Headlands Wedding Reception the year before was experienced as rejecting, so I got rejected in turn. That’s how Bears are, very strong and stubborn, hard to move unless they decide to do so themselves. His mom is a Bear also. I wonder where he gets it!
After talking with the Black Lab I cancelled my airline tickets and called my relatives, postponing our plans to meet until a later weekend. I then went home to have dinner with my housemates. When I shared the morning's dream with my landlady, she seemed to go into a trance and suddenly sat up very erect with her head held high. Her totem animal was the Dragon and at that moment she looked like a Dragon Lady. She said in a strange voice, “Oh, that means the JADE PORTAL is opening for you.” She then relaxed into her regular posture and told me how she had experienced a miracle that day. Her normally conflicted relationship with her brother shifted when he suggested their Grandmother, who was almost 100 years old, move into the room I would be vacating when I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Later that night the Little Hummingbird Woman and I went to hear her boyfriend’s band. We looked for jade to mark the dream image. I wanted a Dragon with its tail in its mouth, the ancient uroboros symbol of totality like the yin-yang which consumes itself and begets itself, the life/death/rebirth symbol. We could find no jade, so I settled for an abalone disk with a hole in the center.
The Hummingbird Woman later told me that she had discovered that one cannot buy jade for oneself; it has to be given to you by a friend. That was why I couldn’t find any jade when I was looking for it. During her trip to the San Francisco Bay area over that weekend, she had been looking for the jade uroboros everywhere in Chinatown. She had almost given up hope, when she saw a street vender’s cart and asked the woman if she had a Dragon with its tail in its mouth, like a large ring. She did indeed have a hand carved Dragon meeting the description. The Hummingbird opened her hand and offered me her gift of a Jade Dragon. “It’s for you Papa, from a friend. That’s how I could find it, because the Spirit drew me to it. I am both your friend and daughter, what better person than me to give it to you!” The tears welled up in my eyes as I grasped the large, jade pendant. What a wonderful child to have adopted me as her dad. Within two weeks everything opened up, just like the Dragon Lady suggested. I flew up the first load of things to Washington. When I returned, I gave my daughter, all my kitchen and camping equipment. Although she was only 22 years-old, I knew that one day the Little Hummingbird would need to set up house and she might as well have the pots and pans we used to cook for all the Peyote Ceremonies. My little hummingbird flew away to Brasil to be in a wedding and then another miracle happened. When my youngest Spirit Son, Young Eagle, left Santa Barbara, he had given the lighter stick from the New Year's Community Meeting of 2004, which I sponsored, to his friend. He didn't tell me that.
Just before Amazing Grace's meeting on May 7th, I wanted to find Shiva, the hitchhiker I picked up on the road to Lake County from Ukiah in May the year before. Shiva’s default setting was to hide when frightened, only reappearing in Santa Barbara the day before or the day of a Peyote Ceremony. He never would come to one, but for nine months I always invited him. So on Friday May 6 he called me out of the blue (not really too surprising given the Owl’s ability to see through the night) and when I invited him to join the community at the Meeting, he said, “Yes and could I bring a friend?” "Of course", I said. Then he told me the friend was recently gifted a lighter stick from a Peyote Ceremony. Hum, I thought that is a very rare gift; usually Sponsors keep their stick in their homes. Then I asked him who the person was, "Young Eagle" was the answer. “Oh that’s my son. I gave him the Lighter Stick. His giving it to your housemate has brought you back to me and he doesn’t even know who you are. Far out! Creator certainly does work in mysterious ways!”
So Shiva and his friend sat up with us. Much to my surprise, (it was Shiva's second meeting) the Fireman chose him to sit Door and clean up wellness and help him with the fire! Creator healed a psychic wound that night which only could have been healed through Love’s magic. I got to sit next to Shiva. We ate Medicine together like we had done ten months earlier, when he asked me to teach him how to be intimate with a lover. After that traumatic experience when I confronted the Fireman with the story I told in Tucson, I set about doing more research on how to treat sexually abused men. Sitting beside him, I could honestly tell him that I didn’t know how to love him the way he needed to be loved. I gave him what he literally asked for instead of what he was wanting symbolically and I was sorry I didn’t know how much it would hurt both of us. I told him that I would try to do better if he would let me back into his world. I helped him do his job and was able to openly love him up in public in socially acceptable ways. He was so grateful to receive a hand painted ceramic gift from the sponsor and get all of the praise for a job well done. In the next two days, I gave Shiva the rest of my things, the futon, sleeping bag, quilt, sheets, a bell, basket, and cedar, got on the train and went to the Raven's in Santa Monica. From there I flew to the Bay Area, sat up for my nephew the Coyote/Eagle's 37th birthday. The Owl was there too and the next day I stayed with him. He was happily chewing my ear with his ideas of how to use his PhD Dissertation to build a bridge between shamanism and psychotherapy. After a wonderfully long theoretical discussion, dinner, and a relaxing sleep, I caught the plane for Seattle.
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