Chapter 9 The Wedding and the move South

Chapter Nine  

      The Wedding and the move South

      No sooner had my friend Wolf moved south to attend the University (I had found him a good therapist near the campus) than his space was filled by another canine.  The Black LabradorRetriever first met me at a Greek Toga/Costume Party thrown by the Capoeiristas and theirfriends up on the Ranch.  He was dressed as Icarus and very polite, well-trained, house broken Lab.   He reappeared at Capoeira training a few times and I “played” with him in the Roda, as we call the tight circle of martial artists when we do our improvised action/reaction dance.  The object of the “play” is to demonstrate your abilities without touching or hurting your opponent.  All of this is done to music and song.  That’s why I thought the Native American kids would dig it; their traditional group dances have the percussion of clacker sticks, singing, and individual movements confined within traditional steps and expressions. 

      My daughter’s pet wolf died while she was vacationing in Hawaii. Humans are so naïve. She had fallen in love with a Golden Retriever who appeared to be a sleek surfer with SEXY written on his collar. It was Halloween and while the dogs were making love on the islands, the wolf got loose on the Mainland.  He had an accident with a truck that night.  I guess the wolf didn’t want to be replaced by a human, so he committed suicide.  Now that I think about it, the same thing happened to my fiance’s male poodle when he couldn’t get rid of me. He tried fighting, growling, and biting me, but since I had lived with hunting dogs most of my life and was not about to let him get the best of me, he gave up his mistress and left for greener pastures.

      After returning from Hawaii, the young couple invited me to dinner in town with the idea of viewing the new Star Wars movie on the big screen. When we got to the Japanese restaurant and sat down, the Black Lab wasitting alone at a table.  I acknowledged him and he trotted over to our table, tail wagging all the time. He introduced himself and asked if he could join us.  My hosts said yes and we ate together. The dogs shared an interest in Rudolf Steiner’s educational philosophy and I, as the elder Coyote, was enjoying the dialogue. It’s fascinating what you can learn about people from their belief systems. The Black Lab was on his way to go gamble at the Casino and it was the Golden Boy’s birthday. I had bought one of the Cheese Cake Moma’s desserts for his birthday. And yes there is such a place. I was living next door to Moma’s bakery and even though the cheese cake is expensive, I wanted my kids to have a good welcome to my home. So we invited the Lab to join us for Birthday Cake after the movie.

      When I was taking pictures of the Birthday boy, he wanted to lie on the Native American carpet and roll into the subservient dog gesture, baring his stomach to me. His companion’s eyes grew wide in disbelief. She knew his parents were dead and that he missed his family, but her Peyote Dad was an old Coyote and she was confused by her man/dog’s behavior. I must confess that I was a little shocked myself. He wanted me to stand, straddling his waist and take a picture looking down at him. When the film was developed, I destroyed that photo. Even Coyotes are amazed sometimes; the subservient look on his face, not to mention the body language, was too vulnerable to give to a new bride.  The Black Lab arrived late, but he had discovered Coyote’s lair and would drop in unannounced from that time on. 

      Since I was traveling to Southern California once a month for graduate school and would be gone five days, I offered my apartment to the Black Lab as a place of refuge. He had enjoyed coming out West from the Ivy League to “rough it” in a mountain cabin with only a wood stove and candles, at least until he got sick. He had rented a space in town, but couldn’t move in until the end of the month. His cough was sounding bad and his black hair needed a hot bath and a warm bed. I gave him the key to my apartment as I left for the airport saying, “take care of yourself; you can’t take care of anyone else looking and sounding like that. What are you saying to the people who trust you? I’m not worth caring for myself?”  It was a little harsh I guess, but being a good dog he obeyed. When I returned, he was much better and happy to be alive.

      A couple of weeks passed and the Black Lab climbed the steps of my apartment. It was Saturday and neither of us had to work. I made tea and we sat silently looking at one another. I was thinking about the time I met the Smiling guy at the Pow-Wow in Albuquerque whom I swore I had met at the Davis, California Pow-Wow a few months earlier. They were identical energy fields and looked exactly the same, like twins separated at birth.  Smiley was “blissed” out on psychedelics during his teenage years and was making a spiritual pilgrimage across the country. I was fascinated with him and when Bear Woman and I walked to our car, he was parked next to us. Of course his van was there when we parked and I had noticed the New Jersey plates. That wasn’t too surprising since we were at the Pueblo Cultural Center and lots of people visit there. What was surprising was that the Pow-Wow was private; it was the opening ceremony for the National Johnson O’Malley Native American Education Conference. And Grey Wolf, one of the men I had met at the Davis Pow-Wow earlier that spring, was one of the Chiefs who opened the Ceremony. I talked with him about Coyote medicine and wasn’t sure what to think about the Wolf’s perspective on the Trickster. I was wondering if maybe he was Coyote in disguise, because, as I turned around, Smiley was standing across the circle looking like the Pueblo Indian from Davis. I went to greet him and discovered the look alike medicine of Coyote grinning at me.  When we later found ourselves arriving at our vehicles together, I asked him about his multi-purpose new Ford Van which appeared to be a traveling medicine lodge of some sort. He was living in it during his cross country quest. Since I had two queen size beds in my suite, I invited him to come over and take a shower and stay a while.

      Smiley was very happy to have better accommodations and an elder to hang out with. We talked a lot and he attended the workshop I presented. He had just met the Tibetan Dream Yoga man in Colorado and had his book. One evening after dinner Smiley asked me if I wanted to try an experiment, which he called “the eye thing”.  He sat on his bed and I sat on mine and we stared into one another’s eyes without blinking as long as possible. Keeping the focus wasn’t that hard for me to do, but what I “saw” blew my mind. Smiley’s face began to morph into new and interesting faces. Some were male and some were female, they were all beautiful and even god like. I was fascinated with my guest. He appeared to be an avatar in disguise, hiding behind the twenty-some-year-old Smile. I was enthralled, like the deer in the proverbial headlights, I couldn’t move. When he spoke, it was the young man’s voice. He wanted to take me to the new Star Wars movie on the big screen. I was going anywhere he wanted to take me! When we were sitting in the theater waiting for the show to start, the fire alarm went off and the lights went on. Smiley just laughed and stayed put. I thought maybe we should exit before we got burned. He said, “It’s just some kids trying to get attention. Wait and see what happens.” So the avatar got what he wanted and the movie began as expected and Smiley continued smiling.

      It had been two years since I encountered Smiley, when he met me in Washington DC at another conference. We enjoyed the time together and the same phenomenon recurred that night.  All of the fire alarms went off and the entire hotel emptied out onto the cold winter streets. I had been with Smiley all evening and he was sleeping in the other bed when the alarms went off, but I wondered if there might be some overheating of the psychic circuits with that guy around. Our trip to the zoo the day before was also very exciting; the animals seemed to be attracted to us and would react in unusually friendly ways. Spectators were commenting about it and it didn’t dawn on me that I could be creating some kind of vibe, which the animals were picking up. Smiley was noticing it however and he was convinced that I was the source of the “disturbance in the force”. How could I argue with a guy who had a six-foot-long clear quartz crystal mounted in his van? He was a puzzle to me. And when he wanted to do the eye thing again, I agreed.

      What surprised me the second time was the man’s face didn’t morph. Smiley was just a twenty-eight year old Capricorn man. So how did I account for the magic avatar in the previous encounter?  I studied Jung and von Franz on projection. They were very clear about the universally valid principles upon which the human psyche is constructed. We have within us all of human history, complete with all the gods, and we project it out onto the people we come in contact with.  What I saw and fell in love with was a completely convincing phenomenon of my own creation.  Of course these projections are unconscious, meaning the person is not conscious that they are projected from him/herself.  How else can we get into relationship with the Divine within ourselves unless we experience it at a distance, as “out there” ?   Having figured out “the eye thing” with Smiley, I wasn’t too surprised with what happened to the Black Labrador Retriever when he encountered it.

      He was staring at me with a wide range of emotions.  Then he told me how the entire universe was within my eyes and he was moved to acknowledge the power which he believed I held.  He got up, trotted over to me, sat down in my lap straddling me, and gave me the wettest French kiss with that long tongue of his.  Once again I was surprised. Then he told me “I want to be lovers with you”.  He kissed me again and I rode out the experience as though I were the surfboard and he was using me to keep from drowning in the Great Mother Ocean. He got up as quickly as he sat down and went back to his tea. I asked him how his female lover would feel about sharing him with an old Coyote. I heard the “I’m a free spirit and need to love everyone” line and he said that he would have to talk with her about that. I didn’t encourage him.  I didn’t discourage him either. I just waited to see what would happen next.

      Eventually the Lab told me how he broke his ankle when he was eighteen and a freshman at the same Ivy League college which I attended when I was that age.  He was on crutches and his injury wasn’t healing very well. During that process a Healer met him and offered some help. The Healer’s orientation was Yoga/chakra work and encouraged the Lab to “feel into” the different chakra centers to contact repressed material. Evidently the Healer was convinced the Lab was gay and his homophobia a mask, albeit a common one, for his conflicted love/hate relationship to the most important man in his life, the Daddy Lab. In exploring the layers of repression, the Healer taught the Lab the arts of love making with older men, including the joys of being penetrated by the Healer’s erect phallus.  I found this story fascinating, but wasn’t about to play the Healer’s role. Wolf was bi-sexual and in a conflicted relationship with his female lover.  His love/hate for the father figure was way too frustrating. So what is Creator teaching Coyote here?

      When the Lab’s apartment was ready, he was ready to leave, and so was I. Feeling like an emotional yoyo gets old really fast. Not wanting to be rejecting (not setting emotional/sexual boundaries) allowed the Lab to play out the stuff he was dealing with. He might crawl into bed and snuggle, wanting to do some chakra work on me, which I would honestly respond to with whatever images were coming up for me. Often he seemed frustrated that I wasn’t responding with the images he was “seeing” in my charkas, but those were my limits.  I couldn’t lie to myself or him about what I was feeling. That was the amazing discovery of my psychotherapy; I could be honest and people would accept how I was feeling.  I can imagine how frustrating it must have been for my wife to live with a man who didn’t know what he was feeling. As she taught me feeling language through puppet theater and then on-stage acting, I learned to express my feelings more readily, but when asked a straight forward question, the default setting to protect myself from emotional abuse always kicked in unconsciously.

      If I told my mom or dad what was really going on for me internally, I would be in that vulnerable position the Golden Retriever demonstrated and that was much too scary for me to entertain. A dog could be eaten alive in a situation like that, so I learned to hide my feelings from everyone
including myself. Can’t get caught lying when you don’t know the truth. Just being aware of my feelings was a major breakthrough and I suppose without my wife to tell me what I was feeling, I had to take responsibility for my feelings. I couldn’t blame anyone but myself for not expressing myself and not getting what I wanted. For many people that probably sounds obvious, but for me, having adapted to an alcoholic family’s denial system, it was ground breakingly fantastic!  

      I did keep an open door policy with the Lab as I did with Wolf. I asked him to call me first instead of just dropping in when he saw my car parked at my apartment. He’d call a block away, usually after having circled around to make sure I was there. It was an improvement over Wolf’s calls. He’d call before arriving, but, like my dad, he’d never arrive on time, usually two or three hours late, so it was impossible to fix dinner for him.  Now that I think about it, I know exactly how my mom felt. The problem with Wolf was his sexy charisma, which, like my dad, could sweep away all the hurt with his smiles, hugs, and desire to get into bed with you. My mom didn’t have a chance staying mad at Dad. I understood how waiting for hours intensifies the passions.  You want to kill him or fuck him and you can’t figure out if fucking him would be killing him since he’s so afraid of intimacy. Somehow it took forty years of distance to really get what I was witnessing
on a daily basis as an adolescent. I did introduce the Lab to the Peyote Ceremony and over the years he has become tightly woven into a neighboring community.

      In April the Turtle flew out to California and after listening to stories from Seven Arrows he fell backward in time, and like an autistic child, crawled into my bed. He was twenty-two and even more charismatic than Wolf. I treated his dreams and visions as images directly communicated from the unconscious.  He felt loved and understood.  I didn't really understand why he chose my bed over his own, but I just trusted the spirit.  He needed affection and so did I.  We had only one major conflict in July, just before he went to a Peyote Ceremony with Wolf and never came back.  That was the week before my youngest son’s wedding.  Three months of holding the Turtle’s dreams, feelings, life story, and hopes for the future didn’t  seem to mean anything to him.  Total silence.  No word of explanation.  No argument.  Just silence.  It was a devastating experience for me. It was a strangely familiar experience. I felt abandoned and sad, just the way my dad would do it, love and affection, shared experiences and words of caring and then he would drive away, like the cowboy riding into the sunset and not call or communicate; just silence, day after day after day.  I remember standing at the screen door when I was four and turning toward my mom with the question “Is Daddy ever coming back?” She broke into tears and said, “Mikey you know so much more than we think.”

      In spite of my aching loneliness, I was full of hope as my youngest son’s wedding day approached.  Perhaps there would be a reconciliation as we prepared for the Wedding at the ocean.  There definitely was a change in relationship which took place that day.  The groom (the Puma), his three brothers(Wolf, Eagle, Bear), the bride’s father and I (Coyote) dug a labyrinth in the sand.  From the center of the ancient spiral labyrinth, a flower covered bridge would be placed during the ceremony.  After the small group of family and friends walked the labyrinth, the bride and groom wearing on their heads silver circlets designed by him, walked to the ocean in Celtic robes.  My son had his older brother’s sword, a Scottish clamor, hanging over his shoulder and just touching the orange cloak, which was adorned with his symbol, the dragon. His bride was in pale blue with her fairy staff topped by a butterfly.  It was a truly beautiful ceremony. The bride and groom said their vows to each other with the Great Mother Ocean as their witness.  They sang of love to us, their assembled families and friends, exchanged rings and cloaks, vowing protection for each other.  The tears were flowing down my cheeks with joy.

      The intimate wedding dinner at the Thai Restaurant was followed by an informal reception on the coastal headlands as the fog rolled in.  I joined the Champagne toast, amazed that the bride and groom, who abstain from alcohol, marijuana, and drugs, were drinking wine.  Well, I guess the one glass for form was enough.  As the fog got thicker, I could smell the marijuana in the air and noticed that only my son, his new bride, and I were sober.  My ex-wife was stoned and her hostile reserve had turned to warm welcoming sensuality, which in the past would have been an invitation to make love.  Perhaps that was the gesture of reconciliation for which I had been hoping, but I wasn’t feeling like accepting her body language offer. It felt like a trap to the Coyote inside of me. Soon my glasses were completely covered with moisture.  “How symbolic,” I mused, “oozing with emotional obscurity, the environment invites me elsewhere, higher up where there is the hope of clarity.”  The situation didn’t feel safe for me anymore.  My family hadn’t changed.  I had.  I was clean and sober, I had acquired four years of feeling my pain instead of numbing it.  I had to choose to take care of myself, so I excused myself and drove up out of the fog to where the full Grandmother Moon was smiling at me.

      The next day I consulted my Psychic Reader, who told me that she could see Turtle standing in the middle of the bridge over the abyss trying to decide whether to throw himself over the edge. “You are waiting for him to cross the bridge which you built with your unconditional love and all you can do is trust that you did the right thing. It’s up to him to choose life and walk toward love. There’s nothing you can do but wait for him. As for you, Michael, I see you swimming south in the ocean becoming rejuvenated. If you stay here, I can see you giving your blessing to people as an ancient man holding your Wizard’s staff all alone.” This psychic had warned me about Wolf two years before he moved into my apartment, saying there was a huge psychic cable attached to my groin which connected me to my father in the Otherworld and that there was a young man with Luciferian energy who was circling me like a very hungry vampire.  The young guy was so much like my dad that I couldn’t tell who he really was. She wanted me to work on deconstructing
the cable with my psychotherapist. I had taken her advice, she was the person I consulted the evening I met the Hummingbird Man and his brothers in the bakery.  That was the evening she warned me about Wolf.  She had advised me to go to graduate school at Pacifica Graduate Institute south of Santa Barbara, “I see a mountain with four springs flowing from each of the four directions. This will be a spiritual challenge for you if you go. You will grow strong and help others.” That was back in 2001 when I met Mikey and the Raven.

      Just as I had decided to follow her advice in the previous times, I decided to let go of my family and also of Turtle.  I would move south, finish my thesis, and find work as a counselor.  I resigned from the Crisis Clinic and gave away my household furnishings to a homeless couple with a baby.  Three weeks later I was on my way and so was the Turtle.  He was back, blaming me for his actions, or at least he was trying to get me to buy into that interpretation, but I wasn’t doing it.  However he interpreted my words and actions was a mystery to me when he couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to me about it  Everything we had discussed, led me to believe I could trust him with my heart.

      When he returned, I told him, “You are the one who decided to take the Road Chief’s car and hide out for a month without communicating.  You and your brother were running drugs.  You guys chose to do that, not me.  What I did is adopt you, wrap you up in that blanket and love you.  I cared for you from the first night you came here.  I didn’t ask you to crawl into bed with me like you did.  I just responded to your cries, your tears, and pleas for help.  And I gave my love, my time, and attention freely.  I fed you; I even bought you some clothes when your rich family in New England rejected you.  I accepted you the way you were, and yes you told me about your drug dealing, addictions, sexual experiences, and battering by your dad and brother, not to mention all of the others.  I still love you, but I am hurt.  You frightened me.  I didn’t know if you were alive or dead.  When you finally called, you lied to me.  All of that hurts me.  You chose to put that behind you and I believe you will someday, but for now you will have to prove your words by walking your talk.  The whole community is hurt. . . . . . .  And by the way, where is the Road Chief’s car?”

      He was silent, pouting like a kid who was used to getting away with stuff because his parents couldn’t communicate with him.  He said he didn’t talk until he was twelve, not that he couldn’t, but he wouldn’t.  Diagnosed with autism, my strong willed Turtle had fled into the inner world.  He was brutal on the Hockey Team, his parents were proud of that.  He was raped by his brother and then by his roommate at that prep-school his parents sent him to.  Too short to skate on the team, or so the coach told him, his only reason to study gone, he fell into street drugs, dealing, talked his way into Harvard, and discovered the Peyote Way when he was eighteen. 

      That was the first time I met Turtle, in 2000, when my brother and sister were given their Fireplace.  We talked for a couple hours.  The second time was a year later.  He and his girlfriend were homeless, living with members of the Native American community who were worse off than him.  That was when he asked for my email address.  Then about a year later he asked me to interpret some of his dreams via email.  Almost three years later, I sent an email inviting my nephews who lived on the East coast to come to my brother’s meeting at Easter.  I included Turtle because he was out there in New England, but I never expected a guy I had only spoken to three times in my life to come.  Not only did he come, but he moved into my heart as well.

      We were driving south toward the fourth ceremony which I would put up for myself. I was choking back my tears.  My middle son, the Bear, let me use his cottage while he was registering voters on his travels north to visit his older brother, the Professor/Wolf, the one who had given me his car five years before.  One of the last people I encountered before leaving was a distraught young father of two children whose wife left him. He was threatening to commit suicide, but the police were more impressed with his profound depression. I met him at the Crisis Clinic with his head between his legs. We talked for a long time and I decided he wasn’t a danger to himself or anyone else. His world had just collapsed and he had to decide how he would live it. I taught him some techniques for dealing with his depression and how to give artistic, creative expression to his feelings. After my last day working for Mendocino County Mental Health, I was packing my car with the gifts for the coming Ceremony when the Star Man, whom I had been counseling, walked up to me. He lived directly across the street from my son’s cottage. He threw his arms around me and thanked me for the kind, considerate fatherly way I had helped him when he needed it. What I nice validation and contrast to the sulking Turtle.

      We found the missing car the day we drove south.  Turtle knew where he had left it, he just wasn’t telling.  We got the car and its contents back to the owner, who wanted to put a bullet through the Turtle’s shell.  I argued with him, that his attitude really didn’t say much for faith, love, hope and charity, which are the only necessary beliefs of the fireplace.  I knew that he felt extremely angry and it was fine to feel like killing the Turtle, but I was sure he could deal with his feelings in a mature way.  I was really counting on my history with the young man, who was younger than Turtle, a Sun Dancer, and raised in our ways.  Luckily for Turtle and me, I was right.  He trusted me, even though he couldn’t figure out why I was wasting my time on the Turtle. 

      We met up with Turtle’s brother the Wolverine the next morning. And like the location of the car, Turtle remembered the missing passport, social security card, and the collection of CDs, which weren’t in the young Road Chief’s car when he found it. I promised I would do my best to locate the missing items, which were in the truck the Wolverine had borrowed when he kidnapped Turtle.  According to the final version, the Wolverine, who chewed crystal meth like candy, was too tired to drive any further than the Grapevine, talked Turtle into leaving the Road Chief’s car in a parking lot and driving the rest of the way to Humboldt County where his mother lived.  The boys were replicating Turtle’s relationship with his biological brother. The Wolverine had been a male model appearing on various Hawaiian calendars sporting bikini swim suits and Calvin Klein clothes. With a Black Cowboy Hat, black jeans and shirt, holding a cigarette, the Wolverine looked like the sexy Bad Boy women want to save through fucking and be abandoned by the best lover of their life. When I met Turtle’s biological brother in 2005, I understood how hypnotizing the energy was. Just like the Wolverine, he was sexy, sleek, and charismatic. It would be easy to imagine him posing nude for gay men’s magazines. And knowing the simmering rage of the boys, I could imagine Turtle’s fears of being raped, which turned on his default setting of silent cooperation.

      Turtle told me that he tried to tell me what was happening during one phone call shortly before he came back. He was speaking metaphorically. He said, “I’m in jail in Santa Barbara for some pretty weird shit. This is the first time I’ve been allowed to call.”  He always spoke metaphorically when I first met him; his world of symbols and images was real to him. That’s how I built the bridge of love over to the other side of the abyss, by using language as if it were dreams he was recounting rather than literal events.  He told me the Wolverine was standing beside him listening to everything he said. He was in custody and not allowed any telephone calls, but his jailer was the Wolverine and his life-time fear of abusive males, whom he needed because they understood him.  I called the jail in Santa Barbara and found there was no record of the Turtle ever being arrested, so I thought he was lying.

      When we finally got to sit up that August, I cried my way through my fourth meeting.  I was grieving the loss of my family.  The Raven who sat to my right glared at his little brother on my left.  I didn’t feel comforted.  I was pinned between Raven rage and reptilian self-hatred.  Both the Wolverine and the Turtle tried to make peace with me and the community in that meeting. My Yaqui nephew came up to me in the morning and said, “Uncle your meeting kicked my ass. I thought I was back in some institution locked up again. Man the drug dealing days are over for me!”  Another man gifted me an eagle feather saying, “on the Res anyone who would put up a meeting like this and openly discussed drug addiction among the relatives would have earned
an eagle feather, so I want you to have this one.” As my wife so often said, “there’s no comfort in being right,” the hurt of walking my talk was making a trail of tears. I was pleading with Creator to
take away all the pain and the destructive behavior of my relatives and family, crying my way through each puff of smoke.  In the morning I gave everything away that I had collected before leaving my home in the north.

      After the Meeting, I moved into my Coyote sister’s cottage on the beach.  Her youngest son, who recognized me as family when he was four years old, gave up his bed for me to sleep in.  The twin bed didn’t stop Turtle from snuggling in there with me. He didn’t care whether we had a double or a twin bed. One night he was slugging me in his sleep yelling about seducing him. He didn’t remember doing it in the morning. I don’t know whom he thought he was with in the dreamtime, but I’m sure the feeling of taking revenge on his abuser must have been exactly what he needed.  He had promised to enter an Ashram where he could learn yoga in a clean and sober environment.  He stayed sober as long as he stayed with me, so long as I kept my eye on him, and he was waiting to slowly let go of his security blanket.  Symbolically that was the blanket I wrapped him in on Fathers Day 2003, and he held onto the blanket for another year before giving it away.  He did finally take the next steps. He got permission to live at the Ashram, bought a bus ticket, and kissed me goodbye.  He started his study of Yoga and alternative healing. He would call every Tuesday night from the pay phone when the activities were over and no one would interrupt his conversations with “Papa”.  After 9pm my cell phone was free and we would talk for hours until he had exhausted his stories, dreams, and visions.  That went on for months, until he found a beautiful, young woman whose grandfather was a millionaire.  She took him home and the old patterns continued.