The temperature was going to hit an all time high for the Pacific Northwest and my nineteen-year-old Spirit Son, Young Eagle, wanted to go for a swim in the ocean. We borrowed the truck from my companion, Raven's Gift, picked up her niece, and went to the beach. The kids got out to find a place under the pier for their things while I parked the truck. Everything I needed was stuffed into the new red bag my niece and nephew in Southern California had gifted me. It was a Navajo design with all of the Native American Church symbols painted on one side; just the thing for beach towels, books, and sunscreen. When I got to the pier, I scanned the people playing in the sun but couldn't find my son. As I walked off the pier, I heard "Hey Dad!" It was Young Eagle; he took me to their spot on the crowded beach. It was in the shade. I put my things down. The kids ran out toward the water to swim. It was low tide. After sitting there for a while, I noticed a very strong odor, which was coming from a decaying stingray a few feet away. Time to go do the Cherokee Dance of Life! I followed the kids out toward the water.
Facing the east, a few feet away from the receding water, I addressed the seeing-far eagle and began to move. I turned to the south and addressed the energy of the innocent, trusting mouse. When I was turning toward the introspective bear of the west, I was greeted by a beautiful, brown-skinned girl in a bikini and dark glasses, who said, "What are you doing?" "It's the Cherokee Dance of Life," I said. She smiled and asked,"Will you teach it to me?" "Sure," I said, "we'll start over by facing the east toward the place where the sun rises, the place of the eagle." And we danced each of the four directions. As we were coming around the circle for the second time and we got to the south, a young man indicated that he too wanted to join us, so I talked him through the next round.
From two students to five and then seven, I kept teaching the kids on the beach the revolving movements of the Dance of Life. We must have done twenty rounds when they slowly said, "thanks" and peeled off the dance. Eventually the Otter, who appeared to have come out of the water in the south, was the only one moving with me. That's when Young Eagle and his lady friend Rose came out of the water. He had never seen the Dance before. I had only known him for six months and he was curious. "Dad, what are you doing? Are you teaching or are you learning that?" Since there was so much silent, synchronous movement, Young Eagle wasn't sure what was happening. Coyote was feeling frisky and rejuvenated with all the young energy. What came out of my mouth was, "Well, I'm not sure. I think he's the teacher. I learned this Cherokee Dance of Life about ten years ago and I thought I knew all about it, but this guy is teaching me about silent movement." Young Eagle asked to join us. When the three of us were finished with several more rounds of the dance, Otter spoke for the first time, telling us his name. We headed toward the towels. Young Eagle offered to buy ice cream.
The Otter trotted alongside as though he had always been part of the group. I was wearing Shiva's parting gift from the thrift store in southern California, my buffalo shirt, which said, "Running Strong for Native American Youth". The silent Otter watched as Young Eagle dried himself off. As we were getting ready to walk up the hill for that cool ice cream, I decided to give the quiet Otter a quiz. I picked up my red bag and turned it so the symbols faced him and asked, "Do you recognize any of these symbols?" Pointing to each in turn, he said, "That's the moon, the chief, the rattle, the drum, the staff, and I think that's called the fire bird." "Well it's called the water bird," I said amazed. Meeting this young man, the silent one, is surely more magic of the Medicine. I stepped further out into the thin air and asked, "Who do you sit up with?" He told me his teacher's name, someone I had met in Native American Church Ceremonies, a Road Chief from Canada, one with whom I had sat up all night around the fire for several years in California. Although I told Raven's Gift that I didn't need peyote anymore, the Medicine had found me. Can't hide out, even on a Washington beach dancing with the local youth. Maybe it was the image of an old man wearing a buffalo tee shirt. I knew I was in for more surprises.
After the ice cream, Rose and Young Eagle went for a walk down the beach leaving me with the quiet one. Young Eagle later told me "I thought he was mute. You know, he couldn't speak, he didn't join the conversation, just body language." When I looked into the Otter's eyes, all I could see was sadness, hurt, and fear, not the playful, enthusiasm of a sleek otter. Something was wrong. This young man was very intelligent, attentive, and seeking. He seemed to be someone who should be in a college class instead of wandering a rural beach. He told me that he was in a very bad way after dropping out of college on the east coast. He couldn't cope with the depressing information he was learning about the earth, global warming, and the violent, inhumane treatment of indigenous peoples throughout history. It all seemed so hopeless and none of the professors knew what to do about it. Arriving in his rural town, he felt like a failure. His anger erupted, getting him into trouble, and then he fell into the pit of depression. Somehow he found his way to a sweat lodge on the reservation. The Chief liked him and invited him to travel with him on the Peyote Road The medicine man thought he could heal the Otter by introducing him to the various ceremonies and our way of life, which we call the Red Road. When his relationship with the Chief ended, the Otter felt abandoned and rejected. What Otter wanted to know was, "Can you heal me?"
"What's wrong?" I asked. "Here!" He touched his neck and shoulders, "and here": he touched his lower back, "and here": he touched his lower abdomen. "It hurts, I can't get it out of me." Wondering what the "it" was, I responded with "Well, I can try, sometimes my hands can find the spots and rub them out," I said, wanting to be helpful. And so I massaged his back and shoulders, warming his muscles with the heat of my hands. He said he felt a little better, but I knew there was something deeper than the surface, something inner, like a voice or two which was having a dialogue within him, something holding his attention so that his words had difficulty reaching the surface and communicating with other people.
When I was working with my EMDR therapist, he taught me about neurological patterning in infants. He said the research indicated that the left eye takes in the mother's gaze. That's how the infant builds attachment and symbolic language networks. Those networks later must be transferred to the opposite side of the brain for language use. My therapist had held me in his gaze like a loving caregiver and I had felt comforted by this human-to-human visual touch. I asked the Otter to play a game with me, to gaze into my eyes as long as he could. I focused on his left eye and found he could hold my gaze indefinitely, just like a nursing infant in my arms taking my face completely into him. We were standing there staring at each other when two Native American boys came up to us and tried to interact. We didn't respond. One of the boys explained to the other that his Grandfather played that game with him and that he could never win, the old man would always outlast him. They continued down the beach as Otter's gaze moved from my right eye to my left eye, as though he were searching my face for information.
"Do you see things in people's faces when you do this?" he asked. I knew what he was curious about. The first time I did this game, the face I was gazing into began to morph into images of gods, goddesses, animals, men, and women. I thought I was in the presence of an extraordinary being. I fell in love with the images I saw on the man's face, unable to see him as an ordinary human. I suspected that I was experiencing unconscious projections of my inner world out onto my friend, but the experience felt so real, that I didn't want to believe I was in any way responsible for what I saw. It seemed so very much "out there" that I must be reading the spiritual reality of the other person. I think I would have fallen in love with that magical person, but I had been reading Carl Jung's psychology for over twenty years and I had experienced my own projections before. Although the experience wasn't entirely new, something within me didn't want a scientific explanation. Falling in love with the other as though it belonged to a person is so much fun. When you get to know your lover better, you realize they are human. That means there has to be another explanation for what was perceived. At that point you can play the eye game safely, because you don't see the projections any more, only the other person. Anyway that's what I saw, just a sad and lonely young man.
Once I had been introduced to face gazing and experienced the magic of projection for my self, I wasn't at all surprised when one of my students would tell me that they could see whole worlds when they gazed into my eyes, that infinity was looking back at them. So, in response to seeing things in others' faces, I said to Otter, "I used to, but not anymore." I knew that whatever he saw on my face was the image of his inner world and that it would continue to be projected onto me throughout the course of our relationship. When Young Eagle returned, his friend wanted to take us to a secluded beach where the eagles nested. I agreed to drive the group down to the other beach.
Rose was my companion's neice. On the day Young Eagle arrived, Rose and her mom saw Raven's Gift and me walking with him. She came running up to us and I could tell she wanted an invitation to hang with us. She wondered where that cute guy had come from. We had just picked him up from the ferry a few minutes before and the synchronicity of the meeting didn't escape me. I suggested she join us; we could see the new Star Wars movie that afternoon. The four of us spent the day together. We saw the transfiguration of the young Jedi into the Dark Lord at the movies, had dinner, and then visited with her mom and dad. Young Eagle wanted to tell me about his latest adventures, so the two of us stayed up late. Raven's Gift had to get up at 5 am for her commute into the city. Instead of inviting the tired Raven's Gift to join us on the beach the next day, I thought I would take care of the kids and give her a break. They wanted to extend the time as long as possible. Young Eagle wanted to catch the last ferry of the night, so he could spend time with another friend in Seattle before his flight to the east coast. After dropping off the eager Rosebud at her home, the boys and I had a late dinner and conversation. When we got into the truck for the hour-long drive to the ferry, Otter began to shake the gourd rattle and sing peyote songs. The three of us really had fun sharing songs all the way to the midnight ferry. By the time I took Otter home, it was 1am and guess who was waiting up for me?
Raven's Gift had tried going to bed, but she was angry. I thought I was being sensitive and protective of my companion's health, which was seriously compromised by her liver condition. But she felt excluded, abandoned, and rejected. Raven's Gift was recovering from two marriages to deceitful men who were having affairs with other women behind her back; my behavior played into her insecurities. We talked it through. I apologized and promised to invite her the next time and that I would try to be more sensitive in the future. What she was most angry about was that she had missed the opportunity to get to know Young Eagle. She had shared him with her niece thinking there would be more time to get to know him. That didn't happen and she was angry about it. She also wondered who this Otter Man was and why she didn't get to meet him either. I assured her that I would bring the Otter over and introduce him to her. I wondered how she would take him in. She had such good intentions, but the unconscious really works her and this young man was deeply troubled.
Looking back at our relationship, I can see that I was always trying to protect Raven's Gift from a distance. The second year of graduate school, she sat up with us during that terrible meeting when Turtle and Wolverine were misbehaving. I had forgotten Raven's Gift's birthday and her projections onto me of the perfect older man/lover were falling to the ground into fragmented pieces. During that meeting I tried to safely put her near my nephew Coyote/Eagle with his huge heart. What she wanted was to sit next to me and that she never got. Considering the way I was feeling at the time, I must have been a great actor, because she didn't have a clue what was happening in my shoes. The agony of being me was excruciating. My integrity was on the line. The young Road Chief, whose car my son Turtle had stolen, questioned my judgment. Turtle and Wolverine had wounded me, my older son,the Raven, sitting on my right was glaring at his little misbehaving brother and I was emotionally showing my wounds, symbolically bleeding in public and she wanted to sit next to me? I guess I should have thought more about that instead of trying to protect her. Even then she was an adult with college age daughters, sort of the same as me healing from her broken dreams. How did we get together in that case?
Well three and a half years had passed since we met. She was divorced and we continued to talk. When I applied for a job near her, she offered to rent me a room in her home. I visited for a week while I went for the interviews. Her home is essentially the same design as the one my ex-wife and I lived in for ten years. Something of a mind blower to revisit all those memories by making a visit. I remembered what the psychic had said the year before, when I mentioned Raven's Gift. She warned me that it wasn't safe for me to be with Raven's Gift. She said I needed a round house to be safe and that the Raven's Gift had a house which was blasted wide open from her divorce. I had listened to the Psychic and waited a year to visit. She was right about the feeling of danger; the house brought up my old wounds. But I had taken a different job near my family and was relatively successful. It's just that I felt incredibly lonely and when I shared my feelings with Raven's Gift in the spring, she said, "me too!" So what were we doing so far apart? Couldn't we try living together and see what happens? After discussing that idea for a while, the Jade Portal opened and I stepped through into the Eagle's world.
Just down the street and overlooking the Puget Sound was a sanctuary for wild life. A family of Bald Eagles had its nest there and we often would walk down for a chance to see them in the nest. The weekend after meeting Otter, Raven's gift and I went for a long walk on the beach. We climbed up hill and were sitting in the Eagle's sanctuary enjoying the quiet afternoon when I heard a Raven cawing loudly for a long time. "Some thing's wrong. That Raven isn't happy. It is trying to drive some animal away." Raven's Gift heard the voice cawing but doubted there was anything strange happening. After about twenty minutes, we walked toward the sound. In the middle of the forest about fifteen feet above the ground on an inner branch of a pine tree sat a mature Bald Eagle staring at us. Above it sat the cawing Raven, who would make flights toward the Eagle trying to get the eagle to move. It even hit the Eagle once, but the Eagle refused to move. Finally the Raven gave up and flew away.
That's when I spoke to the Eagle out loud, telling it how beautiful it was to see it and what a blessing it was to be in its company. I thanked it for showing itself to us and how I had some of its relatives' feathers and how we used them in the Native American Church Ceremonies. I told it about the Peyote Ceremony and my relatives who were part of the Eagle Clan. It never took its eyes off of us. Finally Raven's Gift was getting tired and I said good-bye to my Eagle relative. As we were walking home, a little Jack Terrier, who was usually friendly to Raven's Gift (not to me however), barked incessantly at her. She tried to reach down to pet him and he snapped at her, growling and barking loudly. She looked at me puzzled. I said, "What else would you expect, you just got an Eagle attunement and you're big enough to pick him up and carry him home for dinner. Oh course he's afraid of you!" "But he's usually very friendly." she insisted. "Well, yes when you are a Raven, but today I think he sees you differently. He's always afraid of me. Today it's Eagles we are, and they are very scary". She shook her head in disbelief.
When did I begin to change from a Coyote to an Eagle? The first time I noticed it was back in 2001 during the Morning Water after my Brother fed me the thirteenth (Christ) Medicine ball of peyote. I was stretching my arms as though they were wings still wet from breaking out of the egg. I used my white eagle feather shortly after that to entrain the vampire across the fire and get him to gently massage his chest instead of digging into it which was putting the Sun Dancer next to him through the agony of being pinned to the Tree again. The "vampire" entity using the man's body was caught in the power of the Eagle's energy and couldn't look away from my gaze. "Gently, gently," I said, petting the man's chest with my feather. He stopped hurting my friend but the connection continued until I shared the Water Woman's Prayer Smoke. Then it stopped. After the Meeting, my Cherokee brother, the Mojo Puma, asked me what was going on, because he saw the energy streaking across the fire which was coming from my feather. That was the Meeting when my friend from Vermont followed a car onto the site with the license plate which read VAMPIRE. Four years later I was talking to the Eagle in the forest.
That summer in Washington I was supposed to be supporting my friend at the Sun Dance. When I took the Otter along with me the first day of the dance, I got the surprise of a lifetime. Otter's mentor was singing and drumming a dance song. One of the Sun Dancer's daughters was playing with the coffee can full of hot coals used to cedar off the participants as they entered the Dance grounds. While the adults were singing around the Sun Dance Drum, the girl was dropping twigs into the can. Otter was kneeling there beside her trying to keep his eye on her when the can burst into flames. Otter's mentor greeted him with "So you come back and the first thing you try to do is burn down the forest." The Otter answered truthfully, "It wasn't me." The Chief slapped his words across the Otter's disbelieving face with the question, "Who was it then, your evil twin?" The Chief must have realized his welcome was rather harsh, so when they passed the Chenoopah around, he offered it to the Otter saying, "Here smoke the Chenoopah with us." He didn't offer the Pipe to me as he had several times in Southern California. I felt snubbed. I was with Otter, the Chief knew that, like him, I too hoped to heal Otter through relationship with him. I didn't know what had happened to the young man during his time with the Chief, but I knew he felt hurt and abandoned, so I tried to facilitate by encouraging Otter to talk to his mentor privately. I walked discretely at a distance behind the two men as they walked and talked.
Then I saw the old man turn away from his student. When I reached Otter he was choking back his tears. I put my arms around Otter and he put his head on my shoulder sobbing uncontrollably. We were in a narrow part of the path and everyone had to squeeze past us. When we got to the truck and started home, the clutch broke and we pulled to the side of the road. I had to call a tow truck. Raven's Gift had to rescue us. After we dropped off the Otter at his home, the Raven flew into me, angrily accusing me of "abusing" the truck. She was confused about the red-eyed, tearful Otter, whom she found frightening. It seemed obvious to me that the Otter was frightened, angry, and hurt, but he was the kid right? What kid wouldn't have those feelings after what had just happened? Although I tried to explain when we were alone, I began to realize that my commitment to the Medicine and my path as a Healer was taking me to a lower branch on the tree of life and a stance from which I would not budge. The Relatives, the Community, the Medicine, the Dreamworld were my priorities. So I wrote a story to explain it to her.
Once upon a time, when the Dragon opened the Jade Portal, the hero jumped through it and found himself in a magical realm. In that beautiful world was a Princess who needed rescue and many trials with which the hero would be faced. Moving from trial to trial, episode to episode, the hero's knowledge was slowly transformed into wisdom, and the hero, who was now a wizard, wondered about what he had done to the inhabitants of the magical realm. The Princess, a human form of the Greek Goddess of Wisdom and Strategy, came complete with Owl, shield, sword and spear. Her desire for romantic love wove up a fantasy of relationship with the wandering hero/wizard and she accepted him as he was. At least that was what she said, but her suspicious, jealous nature was a force neither she nor her lover could counter. She knew his love of mentoring young men and women was central to his character. She also experienced him in relationship with these young persons, his affection, attentive listening, supportive ways had charmed her while observing him on the other side of the portal.
The Princess had been abandoned her father, who seemed to love her brothers more than her. She wondered if she were less valuable because she was a woman. She was jealous of her brothers, who, by just being boys, were showered with her father's love. Then the father and mother separated and the mother told her children a lie, that their father didn't want them anymore. That early loss set up a desire in the Princess for the good father who would love her for who she truly was. Her step-father was a disappointment, too dependent upon her mother's career and not a good father. He violated boundaries. She escaped, going out into the world seeking love. Although our heroine found lovers and married them, the story was always the same. Each lover/mate betrayed and abandoned the relationship emotionally, just like her father had with her mother. They had affairs, were secretive and pretended to love her, even professed their continued love, but she felt something was wrong. She tried to keep it together for the children, for her dream of a happy ever after, and yet her man wasn't the man with whom she fell in love. Somehow he changed, morphed into a vampire, sucking up psychic energy and behaving very unprofessionally, which put her on guard against these predatory qualities. She divorced the father of her children and, after many tears, talking it through with wizards and crones, she felt strong enough to venture forth with hope and trust in her new found freedom and self-confidence.
But what happened to the Princess then? She attracted another wizard who could wear all her projections, so she could face her unconscious yet again and perhaps learn more about herself. And the same happened to the wizard, since he had unfinished business with his inner feminine too. All his unconscious shadowy stuff was re-constellated and he was dealing with it on a daily basis once again. The only difference was that both the Princess and the Hero had studied at Hogwart's School for Wizards and had grown wiser in the process. All of the Hero's issues of previous relationships were right there in his face. His lovers from the past re-entered his life and confronted him in the presence of his lady fair. The Hero/Wizard answered truthfully and with integrity having grown strong in the spirit. He was determined to do it right this time around. Painful as it was, he accepted the consequences, the slowly it dawned on him that he was deconstructing that same fantasy, the one of another happy-ever-after. And what did he learn? That love and care of one's self must come before all else, for without that self-confident love of self, he could not care for anyone else. Choices to stand up for what we know from our personal experience may be very unpopular with those we are in relationship with. Yet they are the only way.
Carl Jung wrote a letter in 1945 to Olga Froebe-Kapteyn, where he observed that the opus, the work of the soul, consists of three parts, "insight, endurance and action." Psychology, he noted "can assist only in the provision of insight. After that comes the moral courage to do what one must and the strength to bear the consequences." Although I have found a haven on this side of the Jade Portal with much magic and healing of my wounding, I often feel the need to remember traveling through the Portal, which I call the Hokeyo. When I sing I can return to my family on the other side, by remembering how to shape shift and jump onto Coyote's tail.
In caring for Otter and Raven's Gift I encountered my lost inner child, my wounded adolescent self, and the wise old man mirrored in my relationships. James Hollis, discusses a poem by Rumi and the poet Dante in The Eden Project: In Search of the Magical Other. (1998) The poem by Rumi, which can be found in Coleman Barks The Essential Rumi (1997) goes like this:
The minute I heard my first love story
I started looking for you, not knowing
How blind that was.
Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.
They're in each other all along. (Barks, p. 106)
Hollis relates the poem to Dante's projection of his inner feminine onto a woman he saw in the street, who became famous as Beatrice in Dante's opus The Divine Comedy. Tying Rumi and Dante together, Hollis says, "the one who inspires us, the Beloved, has been in us all along. Indeed, this is one of the wonderful things about projection: it spurs the release of energies that might otherwise lie dormant" (p. 46).
Regarding the individual and his unconscious material as it is expressed in relationship, Hollis says, "we cannot know that of which we are unconscious, but we must never forget that the unconscious is active and projecting" (p. 55). We are continuously learning more about ourselves as we take back the projections, embracing parts of ourselves and welcoming them into communion with the ego self, the conscious self.
Of those persons who have "the capacity to activate our unconscious imagos of self and Other" (p.55), Hollis reminds us that "these imagos are comprised predominantly of our primal experiences of relationship, Mom and Dad and the dynamics between them, set in psychic granite long ago and far away. When we meet these candidates [for projection], energy is exchanged, at least from us to them, and occasionally reciprocally. When our projection hits the Other and bounces back, we experience a kind of resonance, an intimation of wholeness, and this is a form of homecoming simply because we are reconnecting with, falling in love with, ourselves (p. 55)." Hollis goes on to say that the person we have fallen in love with may indeed possess the qualities we perceive in them. And these may range "from kindness and beauty to the capacity to hurt us and repeat our historic wounding" (p.55). His point is that the Other, the lover/mate/companion, remains ultimately unknowable. What we can "know" is our own experience. Our aspects may be mirrored in the lover, and when the experience is reciprocal, "violins play, glowing colors fill the sky, hope is renewed, the world begins afresh" (p.56). All of these aspects are qualities of Eros, the Greek god of love. After Eros enters, "then begins the process of wearing away the mutual projections. But as nothing is more painful than the disappointment of projected hope, nothing is more intoxicating than its arousal. This arousal of hope, this shadowy origin of attraction, is what is called romance" (p. 56). And we all know how relationships change, grow, and dissolve.
These projections are a part of life. We fall into and out of love with an opportunity to learn from these experiences. What part of myself do I find reflected in this new person? Can I embrace these qualities of myself? Can I accept this person, this Other, as who she is and stay in relationship with her after the projections have fallen away? Or must I let go and let God direct my path?
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