Chapter 4 Mikey Likes It

 Chapter Four

   Mikey Likes It

      Later that summer, after hanging with the Hispanic Coyotes, I was invited to a Sacred Pipe Ceremony.  My friend Elk was becoming a Buddhist priest.  He had been a student at our Montessori school ten years earlier and had been dancing with the Puma's Modern  Dance Ensemble ever since.  He invited our family to his ordination ceremony in the San Francisco Bay area, but I was the only one strong enough to attend it.   My companion of thirty years, whom I affectionately called Mother Bear, was (and is) the matriarch of our clan,.  She believed that people should follow their ethnic roots, not some facinating new religion.  She based her opinion on Carl Jung, who, about one hundred years before, had expressed concern that Western people were falling in love with Eastern religious teachings and their (the Westerners’) practice of yoga, for instance, took on a scientific aspect instead of the mystical/religious form it had when encountered in its original environment, the culture of India.  

     Our Western scientific attitude to life often does pervert the essence of Eastern tradition.  Jung recommended we find the esoteric/mystical traditions with which we resonate within our own ethnic heritage.  All religions spring from what Jung called the Collective Unconscious. In the twenty-first century we often hear people say "Spirit" when refering to this psychic repository, which is not part of any one person's consciousness, but present in all cultures.  That is why  Jung used the rather odd term "Collective Unconscious";  it is both collective and  not conscious.  That is not to say that God is unconscious of Him/Herself, just that the gods are not part of our awareness, of what we regard as conscious.  They are in a realm of their own which has its own patterns and behaviors.  Following Kant, Jung believed we can only know what we can experience with our perceptual apparatus.  We experience the effects of the gods and goddesses, or the Archetypes as Jung referred to them, we know they are autonomous, laws unto themselves, because they do what they want to humans.  They have done that to us for centuries.  But we don't know what the archetypes/gods are "in themselves", so we don't, as empirical scientists anyway, practice metaphysics.  We do note , if we look for them, that there are similar practices to be found within one’s own ethnic traditions.   Mystical practice in the Gnostic Christian tradition probably has some Tantric aspects if you look for them, just as Tibetan Buddhism has the more ancient traditions of assimilated religios belief woven into it.

     Elk's ethnic background was German/Teutonic and Italian.  He was supported in his Buddhist vows by his family and friends, but since he fell into my wife’s category of those misguided souls who weren’t following their roots, she did not want to enable his going down the wrong path.  Of all our family members who had known Elk in many different situtations over many years,  I was the only one who attended his ordination ceremony.   My support was oddly literal.  Told to sit wherever I wished, I took a front row seat in the row in front of Elk's mother.  When the new monks filed in and knealed one after the other, Elk was last.  His feet were touching mine.  Coyote has so many surprises for us.  The connection was bare foot to bare foot and much appreciated .  After the service, my Elk invited me to visit him for fathers’ day.  He had conflicted relations with his biological and step-fathers, neither were interested in spending time with their twenty-two-year old son.  I was experiencing a lot of distancing from my children at that time, so I  was delighted to spend Father’s Day with Elk.  As you might expect, the two of us did a lot of walking, browsing on the vegetation, and drinking tea.  The Deer part of me was enjoying the Elk in him; we told stories for hours.  And Elk told me he had become connected to an organization which practiced Native American ceremonies, how he had attended a Pipe Ceremony.  He wanted to spend time together.  The Pipe Ceremony was a good way to do that.  I took him up on the offer.

      The Pipe Ceremony was a ninety-mile drive for me once a month.  Elk only had a few miles to travel because the site was near the Zen Center where he lived.  The ceremonies were introduced by the elder conducting them as a “sort of AA meeting with an eagle feather and our prayers packed into the Chenoopa, the Sacred Pipe”.  We didn’t have to confess we were drug and alcohol users and that we were helpless to overcome our addictions like one does in AA meetings.  These were Red Road Meetings.  We did talk about our problems and how we wanted to change our lives.  We put those hopes and dreams of change into our prayers when  the Chenoopa was packed with sacred tobacco.   We smoked the Sacred Pipe in the traditional fashion by passing it like a baby from person to person.  After the sharing our stories followed by the prayer smoke, we had a communal meal together and socialized.  I attended every Pipe Ceremony. I loved them!  Elk joined us occasionally.  At one of these Pipe Ceremonies we were told that in the fall, the group was having Humblacha/ Vision Quest.  (Humblacha means: crying in the night.)  It was happening in the mountains to the east of my home, so I decided to go. 

      One of my student/protégés, He Calls Owls, was experiencing major depression and talking about suicide.  He lived with his mom and step-father.  I asked him if he wanted to go camping and observe the Vision Quest with me.  He said that it sure would be better than  continuing to wonder why his girlfriend had dumped him.  He hadn’t eaten on the train ride back from the East coast and still had no appetite.  He was thin to begin with, but now he was twenty-five pounds lighter and needing to turn his depressive fasting into a more productive way of being.  We had been discussing his dreams for several weeks since his return to California.  The dreams had several images of the dreamer being touched and massaged.  Dreams not only diagnose but they also recommend treatment.  Every time he cracked his neck, I would start to rub his shoulders and neck.  The body doesn’t lie and He Calls Owls was asking to be touched every time we talked. 

      Although my protégé was one of the most physical outdoor guys I had ever met, he was out of touch with his body.  He Calls Owls was tangled up in this thinking to such an extent that he didn’t know what he felt like doing.  This was very frustrating to observe, because his mind was trying to get his body to sit still and meditate.  He was a Tibetan Buddhist who hoped (rather paradoxically) to overcome suicidal thoughts by thinking.  What he called meditating wasn’t letting go of the thoughts and feelings floating through his consciousness, although he said he knew that he was supposed to be able to just let things pass.  He was instead obsessing about his failure at meditating.  Since he had a very honest body, I tried to intervene with massage every chance I got.  I kept hoping that life would wake him up on a cellular level.  We agreed to meet at the mountanous site the day before the Quest.

      By the time He Calls Owls arrived, I had joined the work crew in collecting mugwort, helped prepare the individual spots, and had met several interesting people. Elk had arrived and was preparing the wood for the Sweat Lodge.  We had talked about his relationship with his fiancé which was becoming volcanic.  I was wondering, “Why do these young guys find Zen so attractive?  Are they trying to run away from their feelings of rage and hurt?” That’s when He Calls Owls arrived.  His usual pale skin was even more pale; he was as white as a sheet. “What’s wrong?” I asked.  “I was driving up the road and just wanted to end it all.  Suddenly I found myself in a ditch hanging over a drop to the river below; it was like I blacked out and didn’t know how I got so close to death!” he said, as the tears were forming in his eyes.  “Hum, that sounds pretty scary, step into my office over there,” I was pointing to my huge family size tent. He dutifully walked toward the tent and entered the door.  “Ok,” I said, “now take off your clothes and lay down on that mat.  I am going to my car to get the massage oil.”  I had been studying massage with a certified teacher and decided to try a non-verbal approach.  When I returned to the sun baked tent, there was a very thin, trembling Owl caller laying nude on his stomach.  I covered him with a blanket, got out the oil, and started rubbing his back and neck telling him to breathe.  With the massage and the breathing he was able to regulate his anxiety.  As I massaged his hands, I asked him to tell me what he remembered from the time he left home. His story flowed out smoothly and as he heard himself telling his mentor about wanting to give up his life, he seemed to realize that he had hope of getting better and had not driven all the way over the edge because of that hope.  When he sat up, wrapped in the blanket, he slowly leaned into me and let me hold him as he cried.  He said it was the first time he had allowed himself tears in the presence of another man.  His father would not approve of crying. I got to be the father I wished I had when I hit the telephone pole in my Dad’s car back in 1966.  When his tears were finished, He Calls Owls got dressed and we joined the community. 

      Upon exiting my tent, He Calls Owls immediately encountered a beautiful woman from Chile who was his age.  Since he had spent some time in Costa Rica and his Spanish was very good, they walked off together.  She was one of the Questors and later in the day,He Calls Owls was chosen to support her.  My friend Elk was chosen to support a young man whom he knew and, much to my surprise, I was chosen to support Deer Woman, a woman whom I had met at a Pipe Ceremony.  Deer Woman told me that I would be eating and drinking water for her while she was fasting.   She told me how Gatama, the Buddha was trapped on a rock in the middle of a river with nothing to eat while his companions watched the flood waters in fear for his life.  When the water receded and they were re-united, Gatama told his friends that their eating had nourished him as well and he thanked them for taking care of him by taking care of themselves. This story seemed a little mystical at the time, but I decided I would need to listen and not argue with her, since my job was to support her.  I went into the Sweat Lodge with her and the other questors, where we prayed.  I helped make her Whyloopa, a ball of tobacco wrapped in red cloth, held together with a circular disk of abalone shell to which her eagle feather would be hung.  We were ready to start the quest.

      After the Lodge, I carried all of Deer Woman’s gear up the mountain on my back.  After roping her into her sacred space with her prayer ties and the mugwort we had collected, I carried her unneeded objects back to her tent and went off to teach Critical Thinking.  At the college. I noticed that every time I took a drink of water, I could see an inner vision of Deer Woman sitting up in her sacred space on the mountain where I had last seen her.  I kept thinking about the power of her suggestion.  That night I listened to He Calls Owls tell me about his day and after sharing some stories from Seven Arrows, listened to him breathing.  He fell asleep easily that night. The second day at the college, I began to have cravings for things I don’t normally eat, lots of fish and vegetable dishes.  Silly as it seemed at the time, I decided to “play along with” my desire and drove down to town to have Chinese food.  On the third day of Deer Woman’s fast, I had a craving for salmon, which happened to be the special dinner that evening at the Japanese restaurant, so again I indulged my feelings at the expense of my Apollonian judgments.  Hermes, the younger brother of Apollo, was definitely making some victories in the field of my psyche.  The god, who brings messages from the divine realms, moved right in that night.  I had dreams which I knew were not mine.  The characters and content were totally foreign to me.  First I was eating and drinking for another person, then having her dreams, and who knows what I might have been feeling for her, these were things which didn’t fit into my twentieth century European paradigm.   I was considerably more humble having experienced phenomena which I couldn’t explain.

      On the fourth day we brought Deer Woman down off the mountain.  I interpreted her waking visions as if they were night images within dreams.  The interpretations resonated with her and, as I asked questions about her family of origin, my dreams of the night before jumped into my mind. They were filled with Deer Woman’s family members and her family’s dysfunctional (alcoholic) interactions. The Dreamworld had given me a preview of what was coming to consciousness through Deer Woman's Quest.   In circle Old Fox, the Native American Elder  who put the questors "on the hill" (and received donations for his spiritual support) said, looking directly at me "there was no one present who is qualified to interpret visions, only a Medicine Man could do that (humbly implying he was not a medicine person).  Deer Woman had already  told several of the questors about my interpretaions of her visions.  After the Old Fox had gone back to his tent for more coffee, Deer Woman brought those people who wanted my advice about their visions.  In order to treat visions as if they were dream images, one must ask a series of questions about the visionary/dreamer and his or her associations with the images.  The answers to the questions enable the questor to explore the symbolic meanings of his/her vision in the same way one would with dreams.  Since the waking visions are not qualitatively different from dream visions, and they originate in the Spirit World (the Collective Unconscious is what Jung called it),  these messages from the Divine (Spirit) dimension are the way Creator communicates with us.

      After the communal meal at the end of the quest, Old Fox (the Native Elder) asked me if I were coming to the Tipi Meeting that Thursday.  “Tipi Meeting, what’s that?” I asked.  “Peyote Ceremony,” he said. “You mean I can come?” I blurted out, dumbfounded that I was hearing properly.  “You’re coming all right,” he said.  “Will you be there?” I asked.  “No, but you will be,” was his reply.  He Calls Owls was standing beside me; he also was thinking about going.  I had two days to wonder about what would happen next and in those two days the Trickster (Coyote) was no doubt having fun planning more entertainment for Himself.  He certainly had fun with us at the Peyote Ceremony.

      That Thursday evening after teaching at the college, I drove up to the site.  He Calls Owls was out walking with the young Chilean beauty, whom I discovered was affectionately called Coyotita (little coyote) by her family, because she could out run all the boys.  Deer Woman told me where the food was being served.  She wasn’t going to attend the Peyote Ceremony.  She didn’t want to jeopardize her sobriety and her AA sponsor wouldn’t understand how or why a recovering alcoholic would eat an hallucinatory substance like Peyote, even if Natives do call it Medicine.  As I approached the food area where people were gathering, a young man said from across the lawn, “I know you!”.  “Really?” I responded, “I don’t remember meeting you before.” He was insistent as he walked toward me saying, “I have lived seven lifetimes and I recognize you old man!”  Not to be outdone, and not believing in reincarnation at that time, I said, “well, it must have been in the Spirit World then, because it wasn’t in this lifetime.”  He introduced himself as Blue Jay.  He had been orphaned in South America where he had been eating out of garbage cans.  When he was eight years old, an American couple adopted him and renamed him Jason.

      I asked him if he knew the story of his new name.  He didn’t and was eager to hear the story. As I told him about the Greek hero and his task of retrieving the golden fleece from Anatolia, the Jay was silent.  He loved hearing how Jason was befriended by Medea, the daughter of the king and priestess of Hecate, and how together they killed the Guardian, the many headed Hydra, took the fleece, and fled to Jason’s homeland.  He even liked the part of the story when they were caught by Medea’s brother on the high seas.  She talked him into coming aboard, cut him into pieces, and threw the body of Absurtos overboard, (hence our word absurd).  She knew her father would be curious to see to whom the body parts might belong, expecting them to be Jason, and when he discovered the truth, his grief would overcome him and the chase would be over.  She was right of course.

      Then there was the part of the story back in Greece where Jason and Medea had children and he was becoming popular at court.  The king made him a great proposal: "marry my daughter (the princess) and your children will be accepted at court.)  Sounded like a great up grade to Jason and he rushed home to tell Medea the good news.  She wasn’t impressed.  She felt betrayed.  At that point in the story, the Blue Jay ruffled his feathers and yelled, “I never betrayed anyone!”  He immediately turned and walked away from me.  That night he wouldn’t have anything to do with me.  I was concerned about him.  He was so touchy.  First recognition and warmth,  then rejection.  This was playing into my family of origin stuff, that was my dad’s pattern which used to drive me crazy.  I love you, come here, let me hold you.  I hate you, go away.  “What is this pattern thing which keeps happening around here?” I asked myself.

      The Meeting started with me sitting next to a very big Indian and his Scandinavian wife.  He told me to do what he did.  I watched him and did exactly what he did.  He ate four spoonfuls of medicine, so I ate four spoonfuls of medicine.  He took four sips of tea, so I took four sips of tea. He was very warm and helpful.  When he saw that I had done as he had instructed me, he said, “Good.  Very good.”  I enjoyed the singing and the drumming and the prayers.  After midnight when we had shared the blessed water, we were allowed to go outside to relieve ourselves.   I followed the Blue Jay outside.  As I was relieving my full bladder, I noticed that the Jay was walking down the road.   I watched and waited, then walked in that direction.  Soon I saw the Jay walking back, with a plastic baggie filled with white powder.  He stopped by a car, put his baggie on the hood, and started opening it.  I called to him in each of the three names he told me were his, but he ignored me.  Just then the Doorman came out and said, “Has anyone seen Jason?”  “He’s over here,” I yelled, standing behind him.  As the Doorman moved forward, the Jay closed his bag and walked toward the Tipi.  I walked behind, sort of shepherding him along.  When we got to the Tipi, he shoved the bag under the Fireman’s blanket, turned on his heels and grimaced at me waving his head back and forth like an angry coyote.  Shocked with this behavior, I followed him into the Tipi, stopping at my seat.  I told the big man beside me, “that guy is a little coyote.  Mind what I say, he’s going to be trouble.”  “Really?” he said, leaning to look at the Jay.  A while later, the Jay stood up and bended over turning his ass to the fire.  He wiggled his hips back and forth.  I asked the man beside me, “Isn’t that disrespectful toward the fire to act like that?”  He looked at me with a curious smile and said, “Yes, it is.” 

      My experience with psychedelic plants was restricted to marijuana, which I had been smoking for almost thirty years.  Not knowing anything about peyote, but suspecting it might have similar psychedelic properties, I closed my eyes.  My inner senses noticed a series of images.   Ancient medicine people began to appear, as though presenting themselves one at a time.  Each one, initially, appeared almost like a color photograph.  They appeared in full regalia as silent, yet animated characters, who made eye contact and by their facial gestures expressed recognition and acceptance of me.  Then that image would fade, to be replaced by yet another.  Some were women and some were men.  Some were frightening in appearance with wild eyes and others were more gentle in demeanor.  I felt as though some silent knowledge were being reawakened in me, something sleeping for a very long time.

      And then it happened; the Jay fell over in his seat!  The enormous Drummer got up, walked over to him and picked him up by his shirt. It looked as though the kid’s shoes were barely touching the ground.  The Drummer’s eyes were furious and he yelled at his victim, who was now swinging limply in the man’s hands, “Jason, you, of all people, should know better!”  The little coyote let out a yelp, “I’m sick, man.  I’m sick.”  The Drummer set him down, spun 180 degrees like he were turning on a dime, went back to his seat, picked up a feather fan, returned and with the most compassionate look said, “here, hold this.  It will give you strength.”  I had never seen anything like that in my life.  Rage turned into unconditional love like the snap of someone’s fingers.  I burst open.

      Tears were running down my face as sobs of grief broke like waves on a rocky shore.  I was crying uncontrollably in the midst of perfect strangers and neither I, nor they, were distressed about it!  What a strange and wonderful feeling.  The big man whose lead I had been following, leaned over and put his arm around me.  He said, “it’s ok, Mikey, let the tears out.  It will make you feel better.”  I loved the comfort of his embrace.  Something very powerful and magical was happening to me.  Not one person in forty years had called me by my family nickname.  My wife affectionately used to call me Mickey, like the Disney mouse, but she never used my secret family name.  Perhaps I had never told her.  My younger brother would call me Mikey when we were kids, but even he stopped when we hit high school.  It was Mike from then on.  How did this perfect stranger have access to the depths of my soul?  Was there some kind of telepathic mind linkage going on?  It was like he could read me like an open book.  What sort of medicine is this?  I liked it.  That’s for sure.

       My new friend sitting beside me had that same curly hair of my younger brother who had hurt me beyond belief when he just stopped talking to me five years before.  Not one word in five years!  And out of the blue, here’s this guy who treats me good, like I must be ten years older than him.  Then he offered me his eagle feather from his Vision Quest to hold.   And the guy on the other side offered me his gourd rattle showing me how to shake it.  This all seems too beautiful for words, I thought, but I like it and I am going with this experience.  I don’t care where it takes me.  I like it!  The big Lion, as I will now refer to my Peyote Brother, later told me that he was thinking of a television commercial for a cereal called Life, where the little brother is offered the new cereal by the older brothers to get his reaction before they will try it.  They exclaim, when
watching his reaction to the new food, “Mikey likes it!”  The Lion felt that way about the Medicine and my experience of it (and of life); “Mikey likes it!”

      Within two weeks of that Ceremony, I had a full-time job working for the Pomo Indians as their Education Specialist.  I was also involved in a course learning to be a Drug and Alcohol counselor.  I had to visit a Rehab center on the coast which required me to tell my story to the entire group before they would let me sit with them.  As I told my history of family use and abuse of alcohol and my use of marijuana, I discovered a sense of strength in telling my truth.  I was accepted and invited to their Sweat Lodge.  After the lodge, on my drive back home, I saw a deer lying on the side of the road.  It had been killed by a car or truck.  I pulled it off into the grass, laid down tobacco for its spirit, and lay down beside it talking to it about letting go of its body and moving toward the light.  Then I got up and headed home.  A couple of miles up the road, as I was making a turn, I saw a huge stag with the biggest rack of antlers I have ever seen standing in a clearing.  As my car approached, it bowed on one knee, lowering its head as if to say thank you, then rose up and nodded its head to me.  It all happened so fast, I wasn’t sure it really happened, but it seemed very real at the time.  When I told the story to my Lakota Sun Dancer friend, he just smiled and said, “He was just saying thanks.  That was a kind thing you did.  Be proud of yourself.  That was a gift you gave your people the deer.”  Then I started wondering how he knew about my being part of the deer clan. 

      It took almost a year, after being asked to leave my wife’s bed, for me to get a full-time job. That brought yet another request, or was it a demand, to get a place of my own.  It was December and I had arranged to move into an apartment on the first of January.  I had a chance to house-sit from the solstice to new years, so I thought I was keeping my agreement to move once I had a full-time job.  But that wasn’t the way my wife, the Bear, understood the agreement. I had been employed for six weeks and I was still living in the trailer on her property.  The holidays were approaching and she needed the space to accommodate our children and grandchildren. I had to move out.  So I went over to my friend’s Buddhist temple and asked if he could put me up for a couple of weeks.   It snowed that Christmas.

      My new little house (duplex) in the mountains had a woodstove, a table and chairs, a futon, and all of my icons, paintings and stuff.  When I discovered a turkey on the side of the road, I put down tobacco and brought it home.  I cut off the wings and tail and hung them in the space. Then I put up a print of a Zuni man on the wall by the dining room table.  Next I discovered a vulture, which had been hit by a truck.  It was so beautiful, those eagle like wings which could hold the hang glider aloft.  I put down tobacco for it, took it home, cut off the wings, and spread them out wide, pinning them to the wall on the sides of the image of the Native man.  The wings were enormous, and since I was experiencing the death of my old life style, they seemed appropriate.   Both Hermes and Saint Michael guide the souls of the departed into the underworld, so why not have angels of death in my space?

      One of my Dreamwork clients, the Astrologer, was a follower of Stanislav Grof’s work.  As a condition for the Astrologer to continue training in Holotropic Breath Work, Stan had insisted he begin dream work.  The Astrologer studied with me for two years and attempted to teach me Astrology as a way of communicating in his symbolic language.  He was a friend of the Drummer in the Native American Church Ceremony I had attended; the big man who shifted from rage to love in a split second turned out to be a Road Man as well as a Drummer and a local resident.  The Astrologer asked his friend to bless my apartment and the three of us spent a morning doing just that.  In addition to that blessing, the Astrologer gifted me with a free, Holotropic Breath Workshop, which I respectfully accepted.  The Workshop was a very moving experience.  During the guided breathing exercises, I re-experienced images from my birth process and moved my body as though I were being reborn.  As part of the final stage of the Workshop, I was invited to create an image of the new person who I was becoming.  After finishing the rather childlike image and discussing it with the other participants, I took my pastel chalk drawing home and put it up in my living room. 

      The new me was very different from the Deer I had been for the previous twenty years.  It felt as though I were changing into a new form, more like a bird molting or an animal changing its pelt.  For the winter holidays, I broke fifty-six years of tradition.  I strung branches of evergreen up the wooden handrails of the steps and into the house.  The living room was decked with boughs of Douglas fir and cedar.  There were no Christmas ornaments.  Only a few Christmas cards were noticeably hung from ribbon.  My granddaughters wondered where the Christmas tree was saying, “Papou, where’s your tree?”  I told them that Yaya, their Grandmother , had the tree with the lights and ornaments at the school.  My house was more like the ancestors’ dwellings with few commercial items. I told my granddaughters that “I like it to look more like the forest, with the trees, spiders, and the birds welcome inside and out”.  That explained why the spider webs were still hanging in the corners.  Their mom was uncomfortable with spiders, but since the spider relatives stayed on the ceilings, and our time together was short, my daughter-in-law contained her anxiety and appeared relatively comfortable.  My son, her husband, had been the only one in the family who as a child had no fear of snakes.  He used to pretend to be a fierce Cheetah hiding in the long grass, waiting to chase down an unsuspecting meal.  He was gifted a boa constrictor by one of my colleagues, who was impressed with his love of reptiles when I was teaching in Southern California.  When the Cheetah was dating the mother of my beautiful granddaughters during his study of Physics at the University, he had a King Snake as a pet in the apartment he shared with his twin brother who was studying Zoology.  How my Cheetah fell in love with a Baby at a Halloween Party is still a mystery.  I guess opposites attract.  Anyway, their daughters did mention liking the “angel” wings on the wall at the head of the dining room table which were framing the print of the Zuni man.  My son and daughter-in-law did mention their huge size, but since the wings had no odor, no one was offended by their presence.