Chapter 8 Enter The Raven

Chapter Eight
       

      Enter The Raven

“Affection as the essential principle of relatedness is of the greatest importance in all relationships in the world.  For the union of heaven and earth is the origin of the whole of nature. Among human beings likewise, spontaneous affection is the all-inclusive principle of union.” I Ching: The Book of Changes hexagram # 54: Kuei Mei/ the Marrying Maiden

      When you think you have everything covered Coyote pays a visit, often in her bird form, as the Raven.  I had driven down to southern California for a Medicine Ceremony and after Morning Water had been shared, I noticed a young man who had been sitting up strong all night long, suddenly began to weep.  That part of the morning is devoted to the feminine, the water is brought in by a woman who prays over it for healing.  Her prayer, in our Fireplace, is the last word.  None of the male officers who share her Smoke (each will take four puffs) or anyone else who shares her Smoke (often the mothers and other women present are offered the Smoke by her husband, the Road Chief) will pray out loud with that Smoke.  This tradition is different from other Fireplaces where the men may extend the Water Woman’s prayer by their prayers.  Since our Fireplace was originally passed down by the women and the Water Woman must remain on her knees until everyone has drunk from the water bucket, we show our respect for women and the water of life by letting the Water Woman stand up as soon as possible.  It is painful to be on your knees for an hour or more, so we try to be thoughtful of our Water Woman’s comfort.  The morning water is the time of the water bird and respect for the feminine.  With that in mind, I was wondering about the young man’s tears.

      After the Sacred Foods were shared and the Meeting was over, we filed out of the Tipi.  The young man, whose tears I was curious about, took his things and proceeded to his car.  He was breaking with the traditional way by leaving before the communal meal was served.  Before he could leave, I stepped in front of his car.  When he realized I wanted to talk to him, he had started the engine and was inching forward.  I refused to move.  He had to talk to me or run over me. That definitely got his attention.  When he acknowledged me, I walked up to the driver's car window and introduced myself.  Then I asked him why he hcad been crying.  He looked at me like a wounded puppy and asked, “Do you really want to know?”  My response was “Yes, why do you think I stood in front of your car, if I didn’t want to know?”  So he told me his story while the motor continued to run.

      Observing my behavior with curiosity was another man who had been sitting a few people away from me during the night.  Evidently he knew the guy who was trying to leave and he walked up to the passenger side and stuck his head in the window.  He was holding onto the door and balancing the image.  I was on one side and he was on the other.  The driver of the get-away car told us that his tears were because of a betrayal.  The young man was in a recovery program with his girl friend.  Both were heroin users.  As the guy recovered and used the tools of meditation and group therapy, he got clean and assumed this would make him more attractive to his lover.  Ironically it did not.  She betrayed him by sleeping with a guy who was still using.  She justified her behavior by saying she was trying to “save” the dirty one.  She said that she loved both men and it was her way of saving others.  His tears came during the feminine focus of the meeting because here he was being clean and sober and feeling rejected by his lover.  Why was he suffering?  He was no longer hooked on heroin, but the payoff was the loss of his love.  As he put it “I’m a one woman man and I can’t accept her behavior”.  Although he wasn’t aware of it, the tears were really for himself; he had given up his addiction and gotten better only to lose his lover.  Assuming they would get healthier together, he was stunned to find his assumption was all wrong; what he labeled “love” was really love/sex addiction.

       When one partner is hoping to change her companion through sexual means, the relationship just runs in circles, it self-perpetuates.  When a rehab program is successful where sexual activity was not, she would have to re-evaluate her assumptions and this she was unwilling or unable to do.  Her partner’s assumption that pleasing her by giving her what she said she wanted would make her love him even more, was also mistaken but, since he was finally clean and sober, he could feel the pain and the tears were flowing.  He was growing up and it hurt.  He was feeling his dependence on his lover as something harmful instead of nourishing, instead of the loving breasts of the good mother, he found the bad mother instead.  Sometimes Coyote enjoys watching her two-leggeds struggle and grow stronger.  We learn through our tears.

      Being able to tell his story to two older men who were obviously concerned about him did calm the get-away driver down.  He shared some thoughts about the books he was reading and he expressed appreciation to his listeners.  Then he said goodbye and drove away.  The other man introduced himself to me.  He had a Greek surname.  He explained that he was interested in the story because he, too, had been betrayed by his lover.  Evidently he didn’t want to explain any more at that time, so he walked away toward the feast.  I followed him, but was stopped several times by relatives who wanted my attention.  We kept moving in the direction of the food.  After the blessing of the meal, I resumed my stories while we ate. 

      I was talking about Jim Jones’ commune and their mass suicide in Guyana.  My family settled near his first community in Mendocino County.  Jim Jones’ mistress was the daughter of the man I had first worked for when my family moved north.  The Greek man was standing nearby eating and eavesdropping.   My wife knew Jones’ mistress when they were girls; she had recognized her in the background talking to her brother in Greek while the California State Senator was being interviewed in Guyana on television shortly before he was killed.  The woman was the daughter of the Greek Orthodox priest who served my wife’s community in the 1950s. Speaking in Greek to her brother, Jones’ mistress said she wasn’t going back to America so her dad could tell her what to do.  Since the conversation was in Greek, my wife translated it for me and offered her explanation for the woman’s need for acceptance into Jones’ commune. She told me how the priest’s children were kept apart from the Greek community which he served; they didn’t bond to the other adolescents their age and missed the feeling of connection at a time when they needed it.   After their parents divorced, their father changed his residence to Mendocino County, he took his young adult children with him.

      Within the myth (myth in Greek means story) of Jesus, the Christ is the complementary opposite, a beautiful prostitute and who loves of the young teacher, the Rabbi.  Mary Magdalene was infatuated with Jesus and some modern scholars have suggested that she was actually his sexual companion if not his wife.  Jesus is the spiritual leader, the father figure of his disciples who followed him everywhere he went.  When I was a child, we were taught these stories in Christian sunday school classes.  My friends and I were imagining we were playing various roles within the ancient story pattern or mythos   Men might imagine they were the hero and women the heroine.  Within the Christian tradition nuns describe their vows as a mystical marriage to Christ.  Seeing oneself as the lover or bride of Christ is a well-established pattern or role within the Christian tradition.  When we were children the incest taboo prevented us from acting out our love for the parent of the opposite sex. 

      The love we felt for our parent(s) as children takes on a new dimension with the coming of puberty.  There is an added quality of chemically stimulated attraction and most cultures have found ways to discourage moving in the direction of the parent by re-channeling the sexual energy toward someone of the appropriate age as a possible mate.  Often during childhood parents tell stories to set up this transference onto culturally acceptable mates.  Cinderella is one such story where the child is encouraged to wait for the charming Prince, the “younger than father” person who is acceptable within the cultural mythos.  Jim Jones was such a prince, who like Jesus, was a Rabbi and (like her father) a priest.  The daughter could easily have transferred her feelings for her dad to the head of the commune, who later became her lover.She got to play the role of Mary Magdalene.  Freud would certainly understand the girl’s acting out her love for the holy man/father-figure.  When I mentioned her father’s name, the Greek man interrupted.  He asked me to repeat it and then said, “He was the priest who married my parents back in Pennsylvania.  I haven’t heard his name in years.  I can’t believe you know him!  This is amazing!”  The Greek, whom we later called the Raven, began to tell me his story.

      He was a poet who wrote his first haiku at age ten.  His teacher thought the boy had plagiarized someone because the poem was too good for a child to have written.  When he was five or six, the Raven told his dad that he didn’t understand how Jesus could be the Son of God. His dad put down the paper he was reading and said, “Don’t worry about it son, you’ll understand it one day.  Jesus is always with us.” and then he went back to his paper.  The Raven’s dad never seemed interested in interacting with him; usually he was traveling somewhere working as an engineer for the military/industrial complex trying to support his family.  The Raven decided then that if Jesus were always there, he was going to sleep with Jesus every night from then on.  As I listened to the story of the lonely, neglected, precocious middle child, who loved the dolphins, swimming, and wrestling, I verbalized my feelings saying, “It’s too bad you weren’t my son.  You would have loved growing up with my boys.  I stayed home as much as possible because I enjoyed playing with my children.  You would have enjoyed our family.  You would have enjoyed being my son.”  The Raven looked up at me and said, “Isn’t that what we are working on here?”

      Actually, I thought we were just talking.  I am used to talking, telling stories about all the remarkably true, synchronous things that happen when you are riding Coyote’s tail.  From that moment on the Raven’s comment echoed in my mind. It didn’t matter whether he was conscious of what he had said; he said it clearly for me to hear.  Just like Josh, the Eagle, this man wanted me to be his father.  There was that spontaneous affection thing again.  And then there was the synchronicity too.  How often do you meet someone whose parents were married by the same priest your wife had as a child when you are hanging out with Native Americans in southern California?  Never, right?  And then add to all that the fact that this man has degrees in classical Greek and Latin from the University of California and his ancestors were from Icaria, the island created when Icarus, the son of that ancient engineer/craftsman Daedalus, got too close to the sun and his wings melted.   I had studied Greek and Latin also, before falling in love with philosophy.  My teacher was a New Testament scholar.  When the Raven reached into his back pocket and whipped out a paperback copy of the Gospel of St. John in Greek, which he was translating, I was stunned!  This guy is really unusual.  Then there was the salad.

      In the dream I had the year before, the doctor had told me I had prostrate cancer and handed me the medicine to help cure me.  The label on the cobalt blue square shaped package read:  Peyote: sprinkle as a garnish on salads.  The Raven made his special salads for our ceremonies; his way of teaching was to make deliciously healthy salad using only organic materials, fresh from the farmers’ market.  Although we never literally sprinkled the salad with the Medicine, the peyote was eaten first and in a way was sprinkled throughout our bodies along with the Raven’s organic salad.  The connection between the Raven, the salad, and my dream got me thinking seriously about adopting the Raven as my son.

      We are taught in the Peyote Ceremony to take relations.  Bear Heart (1996) said in his book The Wind is my Mother: The Life and Teachings of a Native American Shaman that when new people “come into our circle, we immediately take them as our relatives; we even call them ‘relative’.  Psychologically, that person’s self-worth is lifted” (p. 208).  To me taking relations means that we acknowledge our heart felt attractions for others by making it real, by formally taking them as a relative.  The relationship reflects the feeling one has for that person.  From that time onward we call them by that title and introduce them that way as well.  The English Jungian psychotherapist Anthony Stevens claims that we have within us a two million-year-old self (1993) which expects to be met with the kind of environment humans have had for 99% of our history.  That is a small kinship group of about fifty persons, who sit around a fire talking and telling stories.  If he is correct, when the indigenous culture’s ways meet the expectations of that ancient self within us, it feels at home.  We thus create a container for the magic of new relationship.  We call this, on the Peyote Road, making relations.  After I returned to northern California, I called the Raven to ask him how he felt about being my son.

      The Raven answered the phone.  He had been crying.  He had been writing a poem about his Medicine Father, the one he wished he had.  He apologized, saying he was rather emotional.  I told him I had been consulting the I Ching about our relationship. He wanted to know
the translation.  When I told him I was using Wilhelm’s translation and the publisher, he said, “hold on a minute, I have a copy of it here in my bookcase.  I want to read the passage you are talking about.”  “What’s the likelihood of that happening?” I thought to myself, “very few people even know what the I Ching is let alone have a copy of the same text I am using.”  And so I read through the meditation #58 which “is symbolized by the smiling lake, and its attribute is joyousness” (pp. 223-4) It compares the image to the relationship of colleagues, like two lakes touching, they replenish one another.  Because there were moving lines, the meditation evolved into # 19 Approach, which talks of the sage and his inexhaustible willingness to teach; one who is without limits in his tolerance and protection of the people.   These were all images of the Medicine Father/Son relationship which the Raven had been crafting into his poem.  After our discussion, the Raven invited me to stay with him for the next Peyote Ceremony.  It was a birthday meeting for my friend.  The day following her birthday would be Father’s Day and I decided to gift myself with a relationship, a second spirit son.

      When I called my sister to tell her about my feelings, she said, “Do you have a blanket?”  She was used to my spontaneous expressions of affection and relationship and wanted me to do it right, to model the correct way of making relationships in the Tipi.  The Pendleton blanket at the store had been displayed long enough to have a couple of moth holes in one corner.  I decided that my role was to bring imperfection and impermanence into the Raven’s tidy life.  Intuitively I felt there were going to be challenges which had to do with perfectionism and its relationship to fear.  The initial connecting conversation had betrayal of expectations as its theme.  First there were the young man’s expectations of his lover and then doubling back to childhood, the child’s expectations of his parent.  The parent and the lover fell short of the Raven’s expectations, they weren’t perfect.  Because I wanted to share the Raven’s life and I too loved ancient Greek culture, I felt relatively sure that I could be the good friend and father for whom he longed.  We had both rediscovered our indigenous roots in the Fireplace with the help of the Medicine; it had led us there where we found each other.   I am just like my gift, the wholly imperfect blanket, and that makes all the difference because my heart opened with the Medicine.  I found love.  I found relatives.  I found a sense of humor and someone who appreciates me.  As the Raven recently said, “I love the way you answer my rhetorical questions!”  You have to have a good sense of humor to appreciate a gift like that.  It is powerful enough to make The Trickster Himself laugh.

      Just before Fathers Day 2001, I boarded my flight with a Pendleton blanket box tucked away in my luggage.  Three years of Indian Education and Wellness Conferences introduced me to large luggage on wheels where I could hide books, journals, and other treasures of various kinds.  I slept in the Raven’s bed and he took the living room couch that night.  After breakfast we left Santa Monica for the hills of Ventura County and our relatives.  One of the first people we met after arriving at the Tipi site was Weasel.  He had been skinning wood all day and was covered with sweat and wood shavings.  He wanted a personal blessing, which he believed he was creating by preparing the ceremonial wood for the fire.  He was a Sun Dancer and proud of his sacrifice for the people.  My experience with Weasel had taught me to be careful of him.  He was basically a very lonely, abused, and wounded artist with a history of drug abuse.  Although he was clean and sober at the time, his jealousy and need to be the center of attention would frequently get him into trouble.   Raven likes to arrive late and so we had our “Sunday best” clothes on.  The Road Chief, an elder Dine (Navajo) was telling everyone to “get ready to go in.” It was his granddaughter’s Birthday Celebration and he wanted to get out early in the morning.  That means starting on time and in the summer that is before sundown.  Weasel turned to Raven and asked him to drive him down the mountain to his apartment where he could shower and get changed.  If the Weasel returned late, it would focus attention onto him.  The Sponsor was a beautiful Hummingbird whose life was beginning to change for the better and I wanted to support her prayer for herself.  I decided I would go into the Tipi and put our things down beside my sister and her husband (my brother) who was taking care of the fire.  I would have to wait for the Raven to decide what he wanted to do.

      Weasel is a complicated man.  His dad had abandoned him emotionally when his parents divorced.  The little Weasel, found himself on the streets of the ghetto, would do anything for male attention and approval.  That’s how he got raped in a gang-bang, doing what the older boys wanted him to do.  Without a father to guide him, he was introduced to homosexual experiences before he could make a conscious decision about his sexuality.  Drugs, alcohol, theft, manipulation were his life style.  Only art gave his pain expression and through his paintbrush and guitar he could buy enough stuff to numb out.  He was just turning forty when I met him.  He was very attractive, clean, and sober but still co-dependently facilitating his sister’s addiction to prescription drugs by caretaking her.  His was just another sad story born of poverty and abuse and the struggle to maintain some sense of self-respect in being a Sun Dancer and pouring Inipi Sweat Lodges in the middle of the drug dealing area.  He felt that anyone who needed to pray was welcome in his Lodge.  He presented hope in the midst of despair.  The question for me was whether his jealousy of the Raven would destroy my Fathers Day.  I had to let go of that and let Creator take care of it.  Soon the Raven appeared in the doorway, put his things down beside me and sat down.  Raven wouldn’t leave, so the Weasel got someone else to give him the keys to her car.  The Weasel never came back that night.  He did make it back for the feast the next day.  By that time I had my son wrapped up in his new blanket.  The Raven was astonished.  He hadn’t noticed the box resting behind us all night long.

      A few months later, I dreamed of a lone tree standing at the edge of a ravine into which a father in coveralls discarded his young child. The man turned toward a beautiful giant Cecropia moth on the tree.  I went down into the abyss to save the child.  When I began thinking about the images in the dream, I remembered that the Raven’s Greek name was Eustathios, which means well rooted.  He told me that his totem during his childhood was a Sassafras tree.  Often the Christ image is portrayed with his arms extended hanging from a living tree or seen as the spirit of the tree itself.  The ancient Greek god Adonis is born from a tree and the dying and rising god Attis is synonymous with the pine tree.

      Raven’s father was an Engineer.  That’s probably why the dream image father was wearing coveralls.  When I was a child, people would often wonder if we wanted to be an Engineer, the man who drove the train’s engine, who was usually portrayed wearing coveralls.  Raven’s dad (like my dad) couldn't relate to his precocious little philosopher/poet son.   The dream image father is discarding the child and turning toward the giant moth.  I rescued the son and returned to the surface.  In sharing his dreams, Raven had taken me into his psychic past and said one day, "Medicine Father, I can't remember a time when I didn't know you."  In the timeless time of the Dreamworld, I have walked with Raven through many traumatic experiences.  I decided to honor my dream and Raven's growth by creating a large bejeweled moth out of translucent beads to give him for his fortieth birthday.  While making the necklace one bead at a time in the traditional peyote stitch, I remembered the moth's connection to the Japanese myth of Okuni, the Brave Warrior.

       The myth begins with a group of hunters pursuing a deer.  Okuni is so eager and determined to shoot the elusive deer that he soon leaves his friends behind.  The deer leads him through a narrow canyon to a mysterious world.  He hears a stringed instrument and a voice singing sadlyof Beauty Unseen.  Attracted to the voice he meets the beautiful maiden Suseri whom he immediately wishes to wed.   This becomes a challenge because Suseri is the daughter of Susanoo, King of the Underworld.  With Suseri's advice and magic dagger, Okuni defeats a Red Hot Dragon and a Giant Moth, recovers an arrow from a lake ringed with fire and destroys the Deceitful Father/King by tying his hair to the rafters of the bedchamber.  When Susanoo hears his daughter's instrument brush against a bush, he wakes up in a rage and pulls his house down upon himself.  When I found the story thirty years ago, I identified with the hero.  The giant moth is one of the hero’s challenges; it attempts to smother the hero.  When we project our unconscious material onto the outer world, it can be fascinating.  We don’t have to own the images as our actions; they are experienced as “out there”.  In my dream the abandoning father image, having discarded the child, is fascinated with the moth, he has turned away from human life forms toward nature.

      The beaded necklace took a long time to create one bead at a time.  When I gave it to the Raven and told him the dream, he recognized Cecrops as an ancient Greek name.  Kecrops was the first king of Athens, purportedly half serpent, and ancestor of Daedelus, the master craftsman who created the Labyrinth in which to contain the Minotaur.  Daedalus fashioned wings for himself and his son Icarus so that they could escape from the Labyrinth in which Minos, King of Crete, had imprisoned them.  When Icarus failed to heed his father’s warning not to fly too high, the wax melted which was holding the feathers on the wings and the boy fell into the sea.  The island where the Raven’s family originated was none other than Icaria, the island created by Icarus’ falling into the sea.  The dialect of their island is that of the original inhabitants of Athens and of king Kecrops.  All of this came to light because I wanted to honor the Cecropia moth, which inhabits the waking world of Mendocino County, California.

       During the following Thanksgiving holidays, the Raven flew north.  We ate salmon, attended Ceremonies, saw the latest movie, and went for hikes.   He gave me a wall hanging of the Tibetan sage, Mee Tsering, the symbol of longevity surrounded by vegetation, fruit, deer, birds, and the waters of life.  This poem, called Lodgepole Pine, the Raven wrote to accompany the image.

Medicine Father, Mee Tsering, Long-life Person,

this your prayer Lodgepole Pine writes upon my mind. 

A native of the earth, I come to you,
traveling many miles into high mountains to take
for teepee’s sake the choicest tree—Lodgepole pine’s perfect trunk. 

Medicine Father, Mee Tsering, Long-life Person,
prop me up from within, be the ribs beneath my skin!  
A needle-miner moth, I come to you,
continuing a friendship of thousands of years,
amid your needle clusters is food and shelter for thousands more. 

Medicine Father, Mee Tsering, Long-life Person,
read me your ancient wisdom, leverage my life with pure love!  
A red-breasted nuthatch, I come to you,
upside-down, scouring the bark for spiders and pine nuts,
my feathers are fragrant with resin from your heartwood. 

Medicine Father, Mee Tsering, Long-life Person,
show me the forest for all the trees, limn the path of light and night!  
A late-summer fire, I come to you,
Sparked by lightning from the sky, anticipating
The delicious flammability of your pine cones. 

Medicine Father, Mee Tsering, Long-life Person, 
teach me to dream in centuries, entrust to me the seeds of new life! 


Medicine Father, Mee Tsering, Long-life Person,
this your prayer Lodgepole Pine writes upon my mind. 

      Here is again the image of the moth in relationship with the tree, the fire which helps propagate the seeds of the pine, and the bird which feeds there as well.   Life feeds upon life. Life transforms us all.

      A few months after Mikey, the Hummingbird Man, went to Wisconsin, and just before the Raven’s birthday, I went to an Inipi (Sweat Lodge/Purification) Ceremony at my spirit brother Black Horse’s Lodge.   A Cherokee/American man greeted me, saying he had met me at the Peyote Ceremony the previous March (the one following the Humming Bird Dream).  He introduced me to his mother and we made prayer ties together.  After the prayers were finished for the loading of the sacred pipe, the Chenoopa, we took off our street clothes and got ready to go into the lodge for purification.  As I approached the Cherokee and his mother, I noticed that she had a ruby throated hummingbird tattooed on her right shoulder.  Having just seen the movie The Matrix, I could not help thinking of that line, “follow the white rabbit” and the hero Neo’s decision to follow the girl who came to his door with the white rabbit tattooed on her arm.  I sat down beside this new hummingbird lady and then followed her    into the lodge. 

      The Lakota tradition has the women separate from the men.  The women go in first, followed by the men.  My brother’s lodge has two rows; there is an inner circle where the more experienced people sit.  As the eldest, I was told to sit under the sacred hoop in the seat of honor, which is very close to the pit where the red-hot lava Grandparent stone people are placed.  Creator had arranged the lodge just the way it was supposed to be. The hummingbird lady’s son sat right behind me.  After they brought in the stones, they lowered the door flap.  In that moment of utter darkness, I felt the bird, which in my dream the Hummingbird Spirit had given me, land on my shoulder.  I turned and told the Cherokee, “I want to tell you a dream when we get out of here.” 

      After the water was poured on the stones and we prayed in the searing heat, the door was opened and I leaned back away from the heat.  Coyote in human form, the Cherokee son of the hummingbird lady, was sitting behind me. He didn’t move when my shoulder touched his.  He held me there, supporting me.  I thought to myself, “this is nice, a man who is not afraid to be touched.  My bird is back and he is it.”  After the lodge, I told Coyote my dream and he told me of a dream he had four years earlier about the mentor he would have, which described the mentor’s characteristics but not his face.  That’s when he said smiling, “what I want to know is, what took you so long?”  I was delighted!  I was the mentor he had dreamed about. My dream bird was back and this time in the flesh.

      Later that night after the Inipi lodge, I went to a Peyote Ceremony on the Pomo reservation. As I meditated throughout the night, I kept seeing my new friend.  The images were rather strange, but fascinating.  When I called him the next day to tell him, he said, “Ya, I know.  Twice you sat on my bed last night.  I felt it go down with the weight.”  When I shared the images which I had experienced during my meditation, he acknowledged the symbols, “Ya, that’s a lot of what I have been doing during the past year.  It’s something I want to change.”   That kind of validation holds me tight. The Spirit path was obvious to me.  The way to stay in relationship with this man was make it real.

      I took Coyoteagle as my nephew, acknowledging the spirit of the Eagle who sat on my shoulder.  He has been a delight.  We attend ceremonies together and I have had the pleasure to be the mentor he dreamed about.  Coyoteagle in turn mentors young men from the inner cities.  He takes them to the men’s Inipi ceremony once a week and has been teaching the ways of our ancestors, thus meeting the needs of that two million-year-old self in each of them.  I have seen some amazing transformations of young street gang members and addicts in his mentoring program.  Some of the older ones, in their twenties, have even started attending the Native American Church meetings.  What they need is the extended family of the tribal community, and since that isn’t a possibility in the urban setting, the Peyote Ceremony and the Sweat Lodge provide as much of that family as is possible.

      My beautiful friend Raven’s Gift started graduate school with me in the fall of 2001.  At the end of a Counseling Psychology seminar, we were asked to make a comment about ourselves, which could be no more than a sentence in length.  At that time I was still struggling with love/sex addiction; I said, “I’m addicted to love”.  Raven’s Gift had spent years studying the Course in Miracles and believed that love is the source, the only true relationship to the Divine, so she started to hang out with me.  Within a few months we were both excited about the possibilities for romance; she gifted me her turquoise and silver ring, which I wore every day.   I had been divorced two years.  She was just separated from her unfaithful husband and father of her children.  Her mother had died the year before;she was grieving the loss of two relationships, her mom and her husband. 

      Raven’s Gift lived in the Pacific North West and there were nesting bald eagles in her neighborhood.  She had visions of eagle kachinas, who pierced her with lightning.  She had long been attracted to Native American art, never knowing she had Native American heritage until her dentist told her that her teeth were not European.  We both were wishing we had someone special in our lives and were dancing around each other trying to get closer.  But there was a hesitancy on my part.  We were studying psychotherapy, I was in therapy, and I was afraid I might become her rebound lover.  As I got to know more about her story, especially about the part where her parents divorced and she felt her dad abandoned the family, I wondered if I might be cast as the good father figure.  If that happened, then romance was out of the question because it would constellate the incest taboo on an emotional level and I was already working on that one in therapy. 

      I had cast my ex-wife in the good mother role as our children were born and that re-constellated my feelings for my mother within our marriage.  As the incest taboo became more powerful in our relationship, larger and larger marijuana cigarettes had to be smoked for me to get over the hump of resistance to making love to my symbolic mother.  Once over that crest I could make love to my companion/wife/lover, the flesh and blood woman who loved me. At that time I wasn't aware, since the pattern was mostly unconscious, just barely felt as “something is wrong here.” The final result, or finale of the pattern, was acting out my dad’s sexually inappropriate behavior. I felt myself backing away from Raven’s Gift.  Just dealing with my dad’s patterns in therapy was bad enough without also having to play the role of the potentially abandoning father in absentia.  Nope, it was getting too scary!  Things might have developed differently, if I had remembered that my mother’s dad died when she was four and that was experienced as abandonment.  She married an emotionally abandoning man, my dad, and I might have been able to use the opportunity to heal my wounds with the feminine, if I could stay in relationship with Raven’s Gift.  My conscious choice was to become cautious and back away.

      At the end of our first year in graduate school, I invited four friends from the Counseling Psychology program to sit up with us in my (Peyote Ceremony) doctoring Meeting.  Raven’s Gift was one of those who chose to experience the Medicine in action.  After the Ceremony, she introduced me to her daughters who were waiting for her at their Aunt and Uncle’s home.  Her daughter was shocked to see me wearing her mother’s ring.   Another classmate, who had joined us for the peyote ceremony, was an actress.  I decided to take her as a relation, as my daughter.   At the time it seemed like the thing to do.  I had never had a Jewish Princess as a daughter and Coyote must have thought I needed more education, so there we were sitting up looking into the magic mirror again. 

      The Princess was also a hummingbird.  She married a stockbroker from England and had traveled around the world.   Her mom had just died and her dad was in the process of following his wife into the Spirit World.  Her husband, the Capricorn Prince, was a very young soul.  Not only was he a Capricorn like me, but he also had an alcohol problem running back to age thirteen.  Yes that too was when I started drinking.  His dad was a Don Juan type, an English RAF pilot, debonair and emotionally abusive to his Irish wife, whom he had abandoned about the time the Prince started drinking.  The Prince and I had the same kind of incestuous relationship with our mothers, so hanging out with him was like being with a younger version of myself.  It was painfully reminiscent of the unconscious anger and passive aggressive behavior of my early married years.  Their marriage was like my life cast into living drama.  I sure could relate to the humor and the pain of the characters’ hopeless dance.  I just wanted to be there for their kids, who weren’t getting much attention.  

      Another first timer at my doctoring ceremony was my roommate in the graduate program.  I called him my nephew.  That is the mentor/student relationship in most indigenous traditions.  He was the youngest male in the program, also an actor, and a dreamer who talked in his sleep. The older actress was mentoring the younger actor and the three of us would go dancing or act out situations from our emotional history.  They were both Russian Jews and I felt very at home with them.  Raven’s Gift, however, didn’t trust actors, they were professional pretenders, and that was too close to home for her.  Both of her husbands had pretended to be loyal and she was angry with herself for trusting them.  Pretending can actually be very helpful in psychotherapy. Several approaches invite the client to imagine being in the room with the person who has hurt or loved them and acting out or saying what they would want to communicate to that person.  In Jungian analytical psychology, we call it active imagination and it can be very healing to interact with the images of one’s dreams.  For the sixteen years that my ex-wife and I did our private school, we had two or three dramatic performances a year as part of our curriculum.  My children have been on the stage dancing, singing, and acting fromthe time they were four years old.  So were my new Spirit grandchildren; their actress mom had them on the stage too.  Her son, the little eagle, had eagle dreams which connected us before I met him and his younger sister loved me from our first meeting.  It made perfect sense to me that I would attract actors.  And Coyote is one of the finest actors there are, so how did he decide to pair me up with a woman who distrusted actors?   

      It seems Raven’s Gift had overheard my new relatives, my daughter and my nephew, making fun of the events at their first Peyote Ceremony.  She felt they were two faced and withdrew from relationship with them.  Of course she only recently told me that story, so if her shadow had been more honest, perhaps she could have told me that my confidence in these new relatives was something she doubted.  She also believed that making judgments is spiritually bad karma, so I guess she was in a double bind; shouldn’t make judgments, did make judgments, therefore
suffered negative self-judgment.  Sounds like a Coyote trick to me! 

      My nephew/roommate loved having his old man Socrates all to himself.  He was in Jungian therapy and loved talking about dreams.  He was lithe, sleek, a swimmer, who bore a strange resemblance to statues of the young god Hermes.  He called up Hermes’ image with his curly locks of hair and swagger, examining his nude body in the full-length mirror as he walked out of the shower.  And like Hermes, he traveled through the underworld at night, sometimes shouting out loud at his dream images.  Often I would remember these utterances in the morning and ask him about his dreams.  We had a very rich relationship talking about Jungian psychology and the symbols in our dreams.  When my spirit son, Turtle, came to visit, the two of them would make music, drum, sing, and dance.  They became very close, like brothers.  Hermes wasn’t jealous, because he had known me longer and deeper.  Our relationship was very Platonic but warm, and affectionate, probably just like Socrates and his young friends.  And that’s another reason why Raven’s Gift was cautious, she wasn’t sure of my “gender orientation”.  Was I pretending to like women all those thirty years of marriage?  Most of my relationships which Raven’s Gift witnessed were with younger men.   When she discovered that Turtle was sleeping in my bed, she “un-chose” me as her romantic interest. Of course she didn't talk to me about these things until years later.