Chapter 11 Shiva the Destroyer

Chapter Eleven

   

Shiva the Destroyer

      During the Labor Day weekend, a month after taking Shiva to his first Peyote Ceremony and within minutes of picking up the body of a Great Horned Owl, the Sacred Bird of our Chumash relatives, Shiva was in my car again and decided to spend the weekend in the canyon where I was house sitting.  The night I gave him the Great Horned Owl feather, he shared a dream which was very fresh with details.  The dreamer was a girl.  She and another girl were hiding in the forest from their pursuers, red eyed, male vampire gorillas.  Although the dreamer is able to wound her pursuer by plunging an arrowhead into his hand, this does not stop the pursuit, which goes on through the trees and into the canopy.  The male gorillas never hurt the girls nor will they let the girls get very far away.  The dreamer is frightened and running with her companion, but she cannot escape her pursuers. 

      “So you are a woman in the dream?” I asked thinking about Shiva’s attire: a bright flowered sarong worn as a skirt.  He told me he was sunbathing in the nude earlier in the day, but when a man appeared on the property, he put on his skirt.  Clearly he was identified with his mother who had abandoned him.  I was wondering if that was his child’s way of holding onto her, by being her.  It surely would explain his preference for being entered by men.  But then there is that harsh, emotionally cold male who rejects, justifying his passionate love making as “in the moment” and splitting off his feelings with “I told you I didn’t feel that way about you” as if the words created the reality instead of the body’s language.

      “How did the people in Texas feel about you?” I asked, “did they regard you as one of the gorillas?”  “Oh no,” Shiva replied, “my Aunt and Uncle loved me.”  I continued, “But what about the Child Protective Services people and the foster parents?  You said you were twelve when you molested your four-year-old cousin and they took you away from your Aunt and Uncle.  The people who removed you from your home were fundamentalist Christians, how did they regard you?  Did they think you were just curious and needed sex education?”  Shiva sighed.  “No they thought I was an evil sinner who needed to be punished and separated from my family.”  “So they treated you with fear and disgust, like a monster male vampire primitive animal gorilla?” I asked.  “Ya, like that,” he agreed.  “And what about the girl?  The four year old cousin, was she innocent, trusting, loving and pure in their eyes?” I wondered.  He nodded his consent.

      The dream was very interesting.  It showed how he viewed himself.  The feminine side was good, pure, and beautiful, frightened of the masculine and running away from it, hiding from it, but never able to get away from it.  The evil, vampire, monkey-man, who sunbathes in the nude and swings through the trees, like Tarzan, is the external form of the dreamer’s psyche.  What a powerful image of self-hatred the Self was showing to my friend.  So I asked him, “What do you suppose those gorillas wanted from you girls?”  “Isn’t it obvious?” he looked at me with incredulity.  “No, it isn’t obvious at all Shiva, the gorillas never hurt you, even though you wounded one of them.  They just stayed on your tail, like you couldn’t ignore them anymore.  Did you ask them what they wanted?” I wanted to know.  He hadn’t thought of asking these shadow energies why they were pursuing him, his assumption was that they were going to do something to hurt him, but the action of the dream didn’t suggest this, just the feelings of the dreamer.  “So I wonder what would happen if you asked them what they wanted from you.  You told me that you met the woman of the peyote vision, who asked you to ride with her.  And you both have a similar history.  Is it possible that your inner feminine is in relationship with your Irish girlfriend and the two of you are running from the abusive, molesting fathers you both have had?  Could it be that your masculine is just wanting the love, friendship, and acceptance from you that your actions express you want from me?”  I knew he knew what I was asking and decided to be as clear as possible. 

      “Ya, that’s probably true, but how do I do that now that the dream is over?” he asked.  “You could try imagining yourself back in the setting of the dream and ask the image of the gorilla if it would tell you what it wants from you.  You could write it all down in your journal.” was my reply, “now what else would you like?  Is there anything else I can do for you?”  “Yes,” he said, “how about a massage?” 

      Although we started that massage with his sarong around his waist, the minute I reached his lower back, Shiva removed his skirt and lay there nude.  His six feet four inches stretched and relaxed with each stroke of my massage oiled hands.   I had studied massage and was told by my teacher that I had extraordinary intuitive abilities, that I could be a powerful healer.  What I had discovered during that time was that the body holds memories and a good therapist can touch those spots releasing the memories.  That can be beneficial of course, but sometimes you get surprised by what comes up.  Since I love the stories people tell, I decided that talk therapy was more my forte, but personal relationships which involve massage are the Coyote’s forte and he was on the track of an unusual animal.  As I massaged Shiva’s lower back, thighs, calves, feet, he kept spreading his legs further and further apart.  My lack of homosexual experiences accounted for my curiosity about this phenomenon and when I rolled him over to massage the front half of his body, he said to my surprise, “You sly dog!  But it’s all good.  I want to feel you inside of me!”

      What that translated to me was “you sly Coyote, you turned me on again, and even though I’m in a relationship with a woman I love, it’s all good.  Right now in this moment what I want is to feel your penis inside of me.”   I was wondering just how to do that because our love-making episodes didn’t involve anal intercourse.  I didn’t have to wonder for long, because Shiva was excited to get into his moment and took matters into his own hands.  He greased my erect penis with massage oil, held his anus open with one thumb and inserted me with the other hand.  Man that guy was slick; he knew exactly what to do and how to do it.  All that yoga stretching made his body supple and strong.  He could bend and move as though he were dancing on his back.  I was bumping heads with a man younger than my son having my first homosexual experience of anal sex.  And I enjoyed myself.  It was very fun and exciting.  Two-Spirited men, shapeshifting back and forth from masculine to feminine just like the Winnebego trickster spirit Mazis had talked about.  When Shiva was moaning “Yes, Yes, Yes” I was wondering what it was like for him, who was he making love to in his mind?  Was it one of the fly boys from his Air Force days?  Could it be the gorilla?  I would have liked it to be me, of course, but something was telling me to get ready for a shock.

      We lay silent for a while, then Shiva hit the shower and emerged munching the fresh fruit he had prepared earlier.  When I tried to hug him, he rebuffed me harshly, saying, “I told you I didn’t feel affection for you.  In the moment, what I wanted was to feel you inside of me, that’s all.  If you feel something for me, it’s because you got yourself there, it’s not because of how I feel!”  I stared in disbelief as he walked into the bedroom and crawled into bed.  I slept on my pad on the living room floor where I always did.  In the morning Shiva was warm and friendly.  We had breakfast, and drove into town.  On the way Shiva was talking about how he wanted to take me skinny dipping up in the hot springs and how much he enjoyed our time together. 

      Two days later, after talking with a friend about my encounter with Shiva, while he was driving me back to work from lunch, we came up to the corner and I said, “Well, speak of the devil, that’s him ahead of us on his bicycle.”  He had come to see me.  I had talked with Owl about my experience and I wasn’t feeling safe anymore, my feelings were hurt and I was confused by the “come close and love me, go away I don’t want you near me” contradictions of my younger friend.  When I shared that with Shiva, he glared at me and said, “you’re the one who seduced me!”  I knew we weren’t going to be able to resolve things in the few minutes remaining before I had to walk into work, so I remembered that I was the elder and I apologized.  I told him that if I had hurt him in any way, I hoped he could forgive me.  He said, “Thanks, that means a lot to me.”  He got on his bicycle and rode away. 

      Shortly after that I had a series of dreams in which my spirit guide is (1) reminding me that everything is in the thesis, (2) showing me how to sort, file, and record the father stuff always in conjunction with a young male assistant, (3) telling me I have to show up, be present, and get the work done, (4) illustrating encrypted messages in the mail (male) box.  Looking back over my Master’s thesis, which deals with the healing and transformative aspects of the Peyote Ceremony, I discuss the unfolding process of my own awareness of the abuser/victim/rescuer triangle of behavior and how we internalize experiences and continue to act them out for generations. 

      All of my father/son issues having to do with repeating the traumas of my early childhood as victim/abuser were replicated with Shiva, the assistant.  He was the male box into which the messages of a lifetime were placed, encrypted in the language of the soul.  He is also the image of my young man/inner self who assists in sorting it all out, filing it, and recording it.  About that time, I had begun Eye Movement De-sensitivity Reprocessing or EMDR therapy.  In order to do the work, I had to show up in two ways, I had to be willing to feel and view images which were triggered in the imaging while at the same time observing from a higher perspective, like from the eagle’s vantage point thus bringing my more mature self into dialogue with experiences which in many cases were preverbal.  Doing that work was challenging, but it was the fastest move toward integration I have experienced.

      During EMDR therapy, Shiva’s image functioned to trigger images from the past of the bully, the father, the lover, the molester, the friend, complete with smells and body memories from infancy to the present.  And all the time I had a mentor/therapist in the room with me while I, as the eagle observe and could make comments to my child self like “they were ignorant, they didn’t know they were hurting you, they were just doing what they themselves had experienced.” Then I would stay with that feeling or image and a whole new array of events would flash before me, but in successive sessions an awareness of integration of the past into the present slowly evolved.  It is hard to describe how these changes took place over the following months.  It was a felt sense of an attitude shift, more compassion and understanding for my parents and for myself.  There was also the pain of rejection and severance of communication.  Shiva and my brother were both Cancers, just the opposite of me on the astrological chart.  I was going through a lot of changes in the month before my death and rebirth ceremony.

      Circling back around that house in the canyon where making love to my father was recurring again and again, the healing was getting closer and closer.  Although the pattern was recurring, and as part of the pattern, Shiva the Destroyer wasn’t taking any responsibility for his seductive actions, just like the Elk and the Wolf, he was projecting all the seduction onto me.  If I were Zeus and he Ganymede ( which in Greek means happy/beautiful testicles), the myth would be running out to a very different conclusion, but vampire gorillas are not gods and the play was cast with different characters.  The Raven could empathize, he told me how homophobic young guys are and that projection is a part of protecting themselves from having to accept their homosexual desires and actions. Owl, who was about the same age as Shiva, had a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology and was my colleague.  He had experienced homosexual relationships since he was ten years old and was very aware of his lovers’ emotional immaturity. 

      Given the fact that younger men are often emotionally less mature than their older lovers, Owl taught me the importance of teasing apart the mentor from the lover in relationships.  Most of these guys were wounded by their father issues, like I had been.  So it is essential that the mentor keep safe, well defined boundaries.  What Owl asked me was, “Don’t you think he was testing you, to see if you could keep a boundary?  All of the guys who hit on him are picking up his invitation.  He’s just hoping someone will love him without having to penetrate him.  He’s looking for a man completely different from his father, someone who will keep him safe, who will love him just the way he is.  Maybe next time you’ll remember what to do.” 

      I had read Richard Gartner’s book Betrayed as Boys: Psychodynamic Treatment of Sexually Abused Men (1999) earlier in the year but found integrating the theory and story into my personal awareness difficult work.  I had to get out of my own repetition compulsion while it was pulling me in like a powerful tractor beam.  I wanted to be pleased and to please my lover, and so did my partner, but what he later told me was “I thought that if I could make it with my dad, the gay guys would stop hitting on me.”  Setting myself up as the good dad, or maybe the universe did using the woman in the bookstore, Shiva easily transferred his love/hate relationship with his biological father onto me and we acted it out. For me, side stepping that one was impossible at the time.  I just got impaled on another of Eros’ arrows.  And so, with yet another wound in my heart, I stumbled toward Columbus Day.  Shiva was silent, meditating in his cave.

     Four days before the Columbus Day Death/Rebirth meeting, we still had no place to hold the ceremony.  I continued to cling to my faith that somehow, someway Creator would create a miracle for me.  I drove into town for a latte.  The magic of Albuquerque’s cup of coffee in the bookstore was in the background like a drumbeat.  So I went to the place where Shiva’s friend the Finch worked, the one who had Native American connections.  While I was sitting there, my brother called to say we had a site; a friend offered her horse coral and the meeting was happening.  I told him that I had to pick up the Hummingbird Man from the train station, he had just returned from Costa Rica and would be sitting up with us along with his brother.  When I clicked off my phone, a beautiful, brown skinned young woman, who had been listening to my conversation said, “I just returned from Costa Rica, and I wondered if you would tell me about the Hummingbird Spirit.  See here on my foot, the hummingbird? I had it tattooed there to remember my grandmother.”

     We talked and she eventually told me that she wanted my large table to write a philosophy paper.  I offered to help her compose her thoughts.  She talked about my favorite movie “What the bleep” and spirituality.  Her bubbling enthusiasm completely overwhelmed me.  Such a loving, kind and caring child is just the sort of person we need in our community.  So I invited her to the meeting.  After reading the philosophy article to which she was to respond, asking her questions and talking to her about her ideas, and yes, I confess, lecturing for three hours, I finally left her alone to write the paper.   For someone with only seven years in the US, she sure spoke beautiful English.  I picked up the Hummingbird Man and his brother the Eagle/Bear from the train.  Then we went back up to town.  They walked around the town for an hour while I had my therapy session. 

     My therapist, a young woman from South America, had introduced Eye Movement De-sensitivity Reprocessing or EMDR about six weeks earlier.  I was frustrated before that time because she had no experience with marriage, parenting, or the pain of separation and divorce and her English comprehension left a lot to be desired.  In the EMDR work, she had me wear an
apparatus composed of a head set for auditory stimulation and hand held vibrating “clickers” which were aligned to alternatively stimulate the left and right sides of the nervous system.  Since I had learned “dual attention” in the practice of Jungian active imagination and in Native American meditation techniques, I found we could bypass our cultural differences and let me do my own work.  That day, while my nephews were strolling outside, I re-experienced neglect and sexual abuse, feeling fear, sadness, loneliness, anger, and confusion.  I experienced a large penis in my mouth on which I was choking.  The tears were flowing and then, within minutes, there was a period of understanding which I verbalized as “my parents were too young to have children”,  “they were ignorant, they didn’t know any better”, “they didn’t mean any harm”.  Holding the traumatic feelings in this way transformed their intensity.  I found I could remember more traumatic events with less affect.  I could incorporate my dissociated memories into my history in a way that no longer enabled denial as a strategy.  Although I had made progress in the session, I came out into the street feeling like a sweater that had just been thoroughly unraveled. 

     I took my nephews to a coffee shop nearby and unloaded the stories of Shiva, Turtle, Owl and my family history as it was manifesting in the present.  These stories didn’t seem to phase either of my nephews.  They listened with interest and concern.  When I got up to buy food to cook for dinner, four hours had passed.  When we got to the house in the canyon, my nephews from Florida had also arrived.  After dinner the five of us sat outside around the fire talking about the coming meeting.  When we went inside the house, I remembered the chickens.  I had left the cage open during the day and needed to close the pen.  It was dusk.  I found my flashlight and set off down the hill.

     As I was walking down the path, I heard a soft thud.  When I got to the coop, expecting to see the chickens and close the gate, I got a surprise.  No chickens.  “Hum, that’s strange,” I thought as I turned back. Then I remembered that strange thud and looked where it had come from. Sure enough, about six feet away from me was a chicken, sort of flattened out and looking lifeless.  A couple feet away from the chicken’s body stood the Bobcat, who froze in the beam of light from my flashlight.  He was beautiful, about the size of a coyote, just as I remembered him in that cave in Idaho fifty years before.  And just as startled as his ancestor, he didn’t move a muscle until I moved the beam.  Then he ran down the fence line.  I yelled for the boys to come see him.  He had jumped the fence, but was patiently waiting on the other side to come collect his dinner.  The Eagle/Bear spotted the cat and shined the light on it.  Once again, it wouldn’t move.  Later when I was checking on the one remaining chicken which I put it in the coop, the Bobcat was there too, on the outside with his paw reaching through the chicken wire trying to grab the stupid chicken which was roosting within claw reach of the cat.  That chicken survived, the other two were transformed.  The children would be disappointed when they returned, but their father had told me what a nuisance they were to him.  His negative feelings and my being distracted by my process and my family resulted in death and dinner.  The bobcat reaqppeared occasionally in the following weeks after receiving my generous chicken gifts.

     Remember how this story started with finding the Great Horned Owl?  I removed it from the freezer where I had been storing it. (The refrigerator/freezer itself died the next week.)  All the death seemed connected to Shiva and his devotees, the human incarnations of the Hindu Deity who were fascinated with the Owl energy.  I liked the beautiful Great Horned Owl which I had been gifted by the Universe.  The synchronicity was magical, but as I remembered the Owl’s connections with the goddess Athena, Elk, Two Bears, Turtle, Owl, and now Shiva, I decided I had to create a ritual to let go of their incredibly powerful influence in my life.  I wanted a new beginning.  I decided to mark out my new life by burying the old.  As a start I would bury the Great Horned Owl.

     The morning of the ritual burial of the owl, the house cats killed and presented me with a large wood rat, carefully placed in the middle of the family room carpet. The owners told me to expect gifts, if the cats found me acceptable as a caretaker.  I thanked them for their offering and support.  As I reached for the tobacco to pray for the owl and the rat, out rolled the braid of hair I had cut from my head when I separated from my wife.  I had been carrying it for seven years. Thanking the spirits for the reminder that I had to let go of everything, I added it to my collection of offerings to return to Mother Earth.  After digging a hole at the base of an ancient oak, I buried my braid with the Great Horned Owl, along with the rat, its prey, prepared by feline hospitality.  It seemed the cats were tuned into the spiritual dimension and wanted to contribute to the Ceremony.  The totem animal of my adolescent years, the Bobcat, had killed the frightened chicken inside of me.  From the earth elemental I moved to the free standing pot bellied, ceramic fireplace, the chimenia, and lit a small fire.  I prayed with tobacco and then, with the air elemental’s help, burned most of the photographs of my past life.  Next I offered up most of the art I had created during periods of depression, all of the watercolors I painted during the beginning of my separation from Athena.  I remembered the time, the situations, the feelings, and the hopes which those paintings expressed and decided I couldn’t take them with me into the next phase, anymore than I could take them into the grave when I left my body.  I watched the smoke rise toward the sky. Everything was ready for rebirth.

      That night I dreamed of Martin Luther King and soldiers who were serving in Vietnam.  We were on an island. I was making love to an Afro-American man every night and in the day we pretended we weren’t lovers. This sequence of day/night encounters ended with a white tiger called DENIAL. I woke up with the understanding that denial was at the heart of the problems we have being men. Unlike our Native American ancestors or our classical Greek ones, who were able to openly love one another and use that love to protect one another and their families, American Veterans were not permitted to openly love the men in their company.  They had to deny their essential human feelings for each other, the power of male bonding was weakened thereby and they weren’t allowed the time to tell each other their horror stories like my uncles who served in World War II.

     My uncle Keith Melville was the Captain of a B-17 which flew supplies throughout Europe. Miraculously the aircraft was never hit by enemy fire, but he and his crew saw many of their friends killed in mid-air.  At the relatively young age of 23, he flew his last mission in 1945.  They and other Veterans like them, traveled home slowly, together, on trains and ships, which gave them the time to connect with their fellow travelers on their return from the underworld of battle. They told their stories to others, who like themselves, carried the emotional and physical wounds of battle. The psychic wounds could heal in such a slowly moving theater of stories. Unlike previous times, the Vietnam Veteran may be seeing action one day and sitting in his family living room back in the USA the next, with no time to process the traumas they had experienced with the only people who could comprehend their pain and anguish, other soldiers in the same predicament.  It seemed so obvious on a symbolic level that we love one another and need to acknowledge it. That’s why losing your buddy is so traumatic and the grief so intense!  I went to my closet and took out my Chinese white shirt with the dragons and the tigers.  The Dreamworld had given me more story to weave into the Columbus Day Peyote Ceremony.  I had my visual aid, the White Tiger shirt, to help me remember to talk about my dream.  I had already decided to make my nephews my protectors.  I would put Scott, the Eagle/Bear, on my left and Mikey, the Hummingbird Man, on my right.  Their energy was strong and loving.  I had earned their respect and devotion.  They showed it before in 2002 when they first sat up with me, having flown across the continent after continuously picking the Peyote Ceremony Card from Jamie Sams deck of Sacred Path Cards. Now in 2004 they were back, more experienced and more supportive.

     The Little Hummingbird Woman from the cafe, the one with the tatoo on her foot, came to the meeting and watched with excitement and interest.  She sat beside my Jewish relatives from New York, who were drooling over her luscious beauty and seeming innocence. My nephews were her age and available, but no match for her power. When I shared my dream and mentioned making love to another man, I heard the Buffalo, who sat beside me two months earlier in August (when Shiva was getting well), say “How’d that feel?” Back in August he kept commenting as Shiva writhed and vomited, “You must have done something really terrible to deserve this!” When he said it the third time, I turned to him and said, “One of these days you are going to be sitting over there taking care of the fireplace.  I’m going to teach you what is going on in here so you can take care of the relatives with respect and compassion.  You have no idea who I am and what I have done to deserve your insolence.  Your sarcasm betrays your wounds.  Shiva has suffered more in his 23 years than more people do in a lifetime.  He’s sitting opposite the Sponsor, my brother, who has the same story of alcoholism and abuse in childhood as Shiva.  In these ways those of us sitting opposite the Sponsor often have the honor of processing for ourselves and the rest of the relatives the Sponsor’s illness.  That is what is happening here.  Open your eyes and ears and you will learn how the Medicine and the Fireplace work.  I will be your teacher from now on.” By the time Shiva stumbled out of the Tipi, the Buffalo sitting beside me had heard how harsh a teaching an elder can dispense. It had only been two months since that experience, and evidently he was ready for the next lesson. 

     During the time Midnight Water was being passed around, the Buffalo decided to talk to me from his psychologist self and give me some advice. He told me that “It’s time to drop the Coyote, Michael, you don’t need to play that role anymore.”  He got support from the other psychotherapists, my daughter, the Princess, and my nephew, the actor, who chimed in with “Yes, Michael you should let the Coyote sit in the back of the bus and let the Buffalo or the Eagle drive now.” Although this advice was probably important and correct from their viewpoint, I had been fed eight prayer-filled Medicine balls of peyote.  My inner Coyote was feeling rather snarly and disrespected.  Of course I spoke up.  “Be careful how you talk about the gods, the ancient ones, the archetypes.  Coyote created us humans.  If we talk that way about the Creator, we are likely to feel His paw hit the back of our head when we disrespect him.”  My young Coyote brother snapped at the Buffalo in defense of our ancient relative. “That’s right!” The Fireman, the Roadrunner, calmed things down talking about how Coyote jumps on our backs to teach us a lesson. He said, “Three years ago my brother Michael Melville jumped on my back and I still can’t shake him off!” People laughed and I relaxed. By morning the Buffalo couldn’t wait to apologize. He said that as soon as the words left his mouth he realized Coyote had just tricked him into humiliating himself and the Medicine worked on him all night long so that he learned how the Medicine teaches us through looking in the magic mirror.  

     My nephews, the Hummingbird Man and Eagle/Bear sat up strong all night on each side of me.  My friend Jaguar Woman addressed me over Morning Water saying, “Unlike last year, when your sons (Turtle, Wolverine, and Raven) seemed to be distracting you from your prayer, this time the men beside you looked like Chinese Temple Guardians all night long.  They protected you completely, so you could talk to Creator without distraction.  It’s good to see you loving yourself enough to have such great support beside you.  It’s good to see you have grown wiser and stronger.  I’m sure your prayers will be answered, and what a joy to have this young woman you invited sitting beside me, this little hummingbird.  You certainly do have good taste Michael.” 

     My son the Raven didn’t sit up that night, nor did he at the New Year’s meeting ten months before.  He had been fed EMDA or ecstasy by his friend at a Christmas party and was struggling to recover from what he continually referred to as “the chemical accident”.  From the first experience the Raven had a craving for the drug.  He was in the darkest, most depressing funk of his life and was doing everything to change his body chemistry that he could possibly do. Staying out of the meeting was a survival mechanism which didn’t go unnoticed by my sister. She had remembered her life threatening trauma the first time she ate Peyote.  The Medicine helped her face the horror of a bad LSD trip that ended in rape, battery, plastic surgery, and residual post-traumatic stress.  She planned to confront the Raven and encourage him to deal with his issues.  My son Turtle showed up with a beautiful new woman. Instead of getting well all night long, as was his customary way of being in the Fireplace, Turtle was given a job by my brother, the Road Chief.  He had Turtle shoveling up the wellness.  His woman friend made up for him.  She was suffering from her own chemical accident and the Medicine was driving the drugs out of her system with a vengeance.

Chapter 10 Owl Feathers

Chapter 10   

Owl Feathers

      Shortly after meeting and taking the Raven as my spirit son, I decided to get some professional training.  I enrolled in a Masters program in Counseling Psychology.  During a class on developmental psychology, we had a guest lecturer, a seventy-four-year old Apache elder, who told us of his boyhood training to become a medicine person.  As he spoke, my indigenous genes became activated and I wept openly, the tears streaming down my face.  His first task was to become one with the trees so that he could become invisible and melt into the forest or the desert.  He told us about the most sacred and cherished of all the people in his tribe, the Holy (Two-Spirited) One, who had the external spirit form of a man and the internal spirit form of a woman.  This Holy One gave each newborn child his or her secret name, which only he and the parents could know.  The best gifts the new parents could give were bestowed on him who knew the ways of man and woman alike.  This revered Two-Spirit was the most precious member of their tribe.

      The Apache elder then told us how the United States soldiers pursued his tribe into the mountains.  A few escaped to Mexico, but most were captured.  The tribal chief, Bear Watcher’s father, and half the tribe were sent to Texas.  The other half, which included his Uncles, the Holy One, and Bear Watcher, were held in New Mexico.  At the age of thirteen, this young Apache man, who would have become a medicine person, listened to the White soldiers belittle and abuse the Holy One.  They hit him, called him a woman, and pulled him into the jail.  The young Apache listened while the soldiers beat the Holy One to death and threw this body out of the upper story window.  They said he had jumped to his death trying to escape incarceration, but the boy heard and saw what happened.  Our storyteller told us that so much anger, and violent rage welled up in him, that he became a fighter, a boxer, and an alcoholic trying to drown his rage and his tears, numbing his pain in the only way available, with the White Man’s Whiskey. 

      That was about the time Hitler’s Brown Shirts were doing the same things to the Jews in Austria, Germany, and Poland.  Perhaps the dates are off, but it really doesn’t matter, because there is no such thing as time in the unconscious; everything is ever-present, just waiting for a story to activate the emotions, to occasion the tears of grieving, the rage of violation, the helplessness of rape and molestation.  And then we wake up one morning, not only in bed with the abuser but sometimes having become the abuser as well.  And then the self-hatred destroys us in our words and actions.  We too turn to alcohol and other more interesting drugs for their help and, like our ancestors, find ourselves addicted to these alien spirits.  When we hit the wall or the floor enough times, we then try to recover our sobriety and find the task extremely difficult. We want to blame someone or something for our victim selves, who have now turned into our abusers. 

      What Freud called the “repetition compulsion” becomes living hell.  We keep attracting people and situations so that we can re-experience the original trauma, sometimes as the victim and sometimes as the abuser.  It doesn’t really matter which of the roles we are playing in this reenactment.  And it doesn’t really matter whether we characterize it (like Freud) as an attempt to master the situation or (like Jung) an attempt to integrate it.  We keep repeating the pattern, wounding others and ourselves over and over again.  And we wonder why they call this genocide?  We are killing our genes, slowly, one child, one adolescent, one woman, and one man at a time, as we grow older.  Our communities fragment and dissolve; our ceremonies are not strong enough to hold us together.  Our way of life is gone.  And so are the Holy Ones.

      Well not exactly.  They have gone underground.  They have returned as white, black, and yellow skinned people, as those who survived by intermarrying with the conquerors.  Our histories were often lost, erased, denied, hidden away in closets, attics, and safe deposit vaults.  At least that is how it was with my life.  All the illnesses, the dreams, visions, and experiences of my childhood with the wild Native American characters and mythological motifs made no sense to me nor to my family.  The voyages through the unconscious dreamworld of myth  seemed to increase my suffering.  I wasn’t sure whether I was a momma’s boy or a girl born in a boy’s body.  When puberty was approaching, I was playing house with the girls, pretending to be the husband/father/lover and playing war with the boys pretending to be the nurse/doctor/medic/healer.  If the concept of a two-spirited nature were part of my worldview, it would have been easier to love myself, to accept my feelings, and my calling as a healer.  With no one to teach me to deal with my psychic phenomena, I was as helpless as Tristan adrift on the sea in a rudderless boat.  Every adventure was new and exciting.

      When my older friend showed me how to masturbate him, it was exciting.  I got an erection too, but when he masturbated me, there was no ejaculation.  He, at fifteen, was a man and I, at thirteen, was not.  What was I then?    I knew that I was sexually attracted to men, in fact it seemed as though I was hardwired that way as long as I could remember.  When I went through puberty, it got really confusing.  I had fantasies about having sex with my guy friends and my gal friends.  Mostly the sexual exploration was with my male friends with the same pattern replicating itself.  First there was the mutual fun of touching one another, masturbating, oral sex, holding and kissing one another.  And then in a matter of weeks, days, hours, or sometimes minutes came the pushing away, the revulsion, rejection, and the abandonment.  This didn’t happen with women for some strange reason.  With women, the pattern in those days was let’s kiss and touch, go dancing, and feel good touching, but that’s as far as good girls and boys can go.  I was certainly a good boy.  Other good boys like me were giving each other oral sex, especially after consuming alcohol, so what’s wrong with this picture?  Well, for starters, there were no adults who were willing to talk about these things with us.  Counseling in the 1950s in Pleasantville was out of the question, as my Dad said, “Psychiatrists are all sick, that’s why they study psychology in the first place!”

      So after getting laid and enjoying a woman’s charms, dating and repeating the patterns with men and women, I got desperate enough to try killing myself.  I have told that story already.  It led to counseling and eventually to marriage.  As I began my career as a young college professor and my children were born, interesting things began to occur.  I started having flash backs of feet, naked bodies, large ones, like giants almost.  When my son was four, I had a desire to masturbate him.  I was horrified and confided in my wife.  She too was upset.  We had just had another birth.  She was angry and disappointed in me.  Just like the first pregnancy, I had acted out as though I was jealous of the new baby.  It was as though I were eighteen months old again and my new baby brother had just come home.  In fact when the twins were born, my son looked just like my baby brother.  I remember marveling about it, but decided it must have been the marijuana.  More brief psychotherapy, marital problems, study at the Jung Institute during the third pregnancy and boom, a full blown breakdown complete with inflation, visions, dreams, pain and suffering just like my childhood.  All of the grandparents, mentors, and elders died within three years.  Grieving was complicated by the threat of unemployment.  We escaped to a rural community and a new life.

      But the demons of the night didn’t go away.  Alcohol and marijuana were constant companions during my grieving and insomnia.  One night I found myself replicating the masturbation experience of my adolescence while giving my thirteen-year-old son a massage.  I stopped myself, before he could have an orgasm.  Was he asleep?  He seemed to be.  Perhaps he was pretending.  How could this happen?  I had done everything different from my father.  I stayed close to the family, didn’t abandon, have affairs, gamble, become an alcoholic like he did.  But there was this compulsion to massage guys like I used to massage my Dad.  It seemed innocent enough until I went too far with my son.  I was very careful after that.  Then ten years later, after my middle son’s graduation party, I was massaging a twenty-year-old man in the living room where both my son and his fiancé and the graduate were sleeping.  I finished the massage, went out on the deck, lit up a joint, and was enjoying myself, when my son and his fiancé burst out of the door.  They were leaving.  She remembered being molested by her cousin and he remembered that massage ten years before.  We went to family counseling.  My son told
the therapist that I had not requested keeping anything secret and it only happened once.  I had even asked him about it when he graduated from High School, telling him that I hoped I hadn’t hurt him in any way by that event.  Our therapist, an elder man with lots of experience treating emotionally abused children, told us to put the homoerotic episode on the backburner and value all of my training in education and psychology.  “Everyone makes mistakes, we can learn from them”, he said to me.  My wife was supportive at first, trying to keep our dream together, but eventually everything fell apart.

      It took four years or so for my wife to decide I was a vampire, separate from me, and run the family business herself.  That’s when I began long-term psychotherapy and slowly began to remember the traumatic events of my childhood, such as being masturbated by my parents during infancy, molested by a caregiver at age four, and being forced to give oral sex before that time.  I had discovered that our family secrets were the Jews on my mother’s side and the Indians on my father’s side of the family.  In a tribal community my childhood would have been seen as shamanic in nature and I would have been trained to be a medicine person.  My bi-sexuality would have been regarded as a special gift.  Unfortunately I grew up in redneck Idaho, where I was regarded as a very strange kid.  Being overly sensitive about my well-developed feminine, I hid it as best as possible.  My vision quest occurred while wandering into a lava flow cave on the Snake River, home of the Shoshone people.  There I met my spirit animal, the Bobcat.  Forty-five years later, when I was divorced and returning from a Sweat Lodge with friends on Mt. Shasta in California, the Bobcat bounded across our path again.

      When the Bobcat appeared that second time, I was replicating my adolescence by going deeper into my experience.  I was experimenting with my two-spiritedness, by sleeping with Wolf, a twenty-four year old man, massaging him, masturbating him, and giving him oral sex.  I was still in psychotherapy with the same “good mother” analyst.  I had been processing the relationship with my lover, and while attending a counseling workshop, I was intrigued when the presenter said the unconscious can’t resist completing a sentence.  Since I had been trying desperately to end my “love addiction” with Wolf, but kept going back for one more night with him, over and over, compulsively, I wanted to try the experiment.  I started the sentence “I can’t give up my lover, because if I did, then . . . . . . . .(the unconscious completed it thus) then I would have to accept my father is dead and I will never get his love.”  Wow, it was like a bolt of lightning!  I could feel the truth of it in my gut.  I wrote the sentence on two index cards, taped one to my car’s dashboard and the other to the mirror in my bathroom.  Every day I was reminded of the unconscious truth that my compulsion to repeat the sexual encounter was part of the ever-present past; my inner child was trying to win his Daddy’s love.  Every time Daddy left, I felt abandoned, every time he returned, I could love him up again, until puberty when he pushed me away emotionally.  So I felt my boyfriend’s welcoming embraces and was back in my Daddy’s arms again.  The hardwired sexual attraction to guys was always present, and is to this day.  But now I remember how it happened and can choose to enter into relationship knowing why.  And having embraced my Native American roots, ceremonies, and traditions I find there is a sense of belonging as a Two-Spirited Person.

      When I attended an Inipi (Purification) Sweat Lodge, before moving to Southern California, I met a Two-Spirited young man, about Wolf’s age, who was in a heterosexual relationship.  He recognized me as someone with whom he resonated.  After a month of communicating and getting to know one another better, he recommended a book, The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon.  Set in turn of the century Idaho, I found the novel fascinating.  It recounts the story of three Two-Spirited characters.  The first, a full-blooded Native discovers the second, a fourteen-year-old white boy, whose parents have just been killed by stage coach robbers who forced him to bury the bodies and abandoned him to die of exposure.  The old Two-Spirit gets the boy down out of the tree in which he has climbed, takes him to a hidden place in the lava fields, and nurses him back to health by making love to him.  Trauma is healed through unconditional love, but the boy’s fragile psyche is educated as a Two-Spirit.  We aren’t told whether the boy would have become bi-sexual if this event hadn’t happened.

      The boy, having become a man, reenters the story as a frequent customer of the whorehouse/saloon, where the third Two-Spirit’s mother works as a prostitute.  The third boy had been invited into the Madam’s bed, until he becomes sexual and the Madam feels his erect penis.  Her response to nature was to put him to work servicing the men out in the shed.  Here again, we don’t know about the boy’s natural inclination, and since the story is told from his perspective, we just know that he is educated through experience to make love to men.   Shed, as he is called, is eventually rescued by the father figure, and taken to the hideout in the lava fields, where the two men make love until all their food is gone.  Having been taught the secrets of the Two-Spirit, Shed then goes looking for his Shoshone/Bannock relatives and receives his name, Owl Feather.  The story is definitely a wild tale, yet there is a ring of truth to it.  It took me back home to Idaho, the lava fields, the secret caves, and the Bobcat, who appeared in October for Columbus Day in 2004. 

      I was house sitting a remote property in Southern California.  My job was to the water the garden and feed the animals, which included three cats and three chickens.  There had been a lot of Owl energy for the past year.  My spirit son Turtle had shapeshifted into an Owl and flew away into the night sky.  He had literally disappeared with his friend the Wolverine.  They borrowed a couple of vehicles for a month or two without making any contact with me or the vehicles’ owners.  (I guess you could call it theft, if someone hadn’t originally given them permission to borrow them.  The community still regards those boys with contempt.)  Evidently they were running some illegal missions for the Wolverine’s employers.  Actually the Wolverine called it his mother’s family business, something he forgot to tell the guys running the Drug and Alcohol Counseling Center where he worked as a counselor.  Wolverine told me that he was doing meth every day and was disappointed because the recovery staff never noticed he was using. 

      The tangled web of intrigue began after I met Owl.  Both he and my biological son, the Bear, gifted me Owl Feathers.  The Owl Spirit flew into my friend the Elk’s life five years earlier.  He had picked up an owl on the road after becoming violent with his fiancé.  (He didn’t mention that until a year later.)  He called and invited me to visit him and his dad at a friend’s cabin.  I knew he had a lot of anger toward his dad (as well as conflicted sexual feelings for his step-brother who had been his playmate-lover during puberty), but I wasn’t thinking about those things. I was inflated, having arrogated the savior archetype into my psyche, and like the Flying Boy/God was high on love.  I didn’t feel the least hint of Coyote or his trap until it was too late.  The Elk, a massage therapist, wanted a massage in front of the roaring fire.  He sent his dad to bed, and by the time I rolled the Elk over onto his back, he had an erection that could be felt all the way through his groin muscles. I was experiencing the childhood pattern again and, as I told my therapist later in the week, just like I did in childhood, I felt an overwhelming desire to please the man, whose body I was massaging: so I did. 

      Everything seemed to be running smooth and pleasantly until the following week.  That’s when Elk angrily rejected me, severing communication.  When we did speak to one another a year later, he confessed that his rage had ignited thoughts of revenge, which evolved into plots of murdering his abuser.  I wasn’t seeing myself as his abuser; I was identified with the victim.  I felt Elk had set me up and I went happily into the act of love making only to find myself rejected and isolated again.  I told the elder Buddhist monk at the Healing Center about the encounter. He is the one who got me to be conscious by asking, “Do you feel you were set up by him?”   After meditating on that and discussing the feelings which came up for me during the intervening year, I was ready to accept the Elk’s gift: a wing of the owl which he had picked up the night I was tricked into seducing him. 

      As I was saying, my younger colleague the Two-Spirited Owl, had gifted me a Great Horned Owl feather.  That May when I was headed north for my Spirit Son Eagle’s MA graduation, I turned up highway 20 and there was another hitchhiker with a sign.  It read:

 

Cache Creek Environmental Conference.

 You won’t be sorry you stopped.  I’m worth it!
 

I passed him by and then that feeling, which I had passing the Hitchhiker 5 years earlier, overcame me.  It was right on my way, maybe it would be worth it!  I turned my red Mercury sable around to go collect the next piece of Coyote’s jigsaw puzzle.  The Hitchhiker was amazed, because he had just put up the sign.  Not only was the tall, slim twenty-some-year-old man from Southern California, he lived in Santa Barbara just three blocks from where I was working.  He had been visiting a friend whom he had met in Santa Barbara whose dad was a local psychotherapist.  Ironically I thought that I had taught his friend and knew the father.  I was definitely happy I stopped to encounter this slightly frightening slim Bear.  He had broken one of his front teeth out on Valentine’s day as he said, “trying to have the childhood I never had, I was riding a bicycle and rubbed up against my friend’s tire, hit a bump, grabbed the brakes and went flying face forward over my bike onto the street.” I told him how I had the same experience when I was eighteen, but was luckier. No broken teeth.

      When my new friend asked about the Turkey Feather behind the garnet on the dashboard of the car, a wild turkey flew across the road in front of us.  Since I had never seen wild turkeys fly before, least of all on cue during a synchronous conversation about magic events in our lives, I was beginning to wonder who this guy really was.  I’ll call him Shiva, because that was the god whose bracelet he wore.  He practiced yoga like Shiva, meditated like Shiva, and had Shiva’s dark, destructive potential.  He was charismatic, charming, interested in everything I had to say, an Air Force jet mechanic, with an alcoholic father and a mother who had abandoned him when he was five. The last time he had seen her was when he was nine years old.  I was fascinated by his story.  I wasn’t thinking about how this story should have reminded me of a pattern. Thinking back on it later, he sounded like one of the wounded guys who wound up hurting me. His energy was very much that of my dad, my young lover the Wolf, Turtle, and Wolverine.  Having had some success with Eagle, Mikey, the Raven, and the other young men I had encountered, I was flying high on positive energy and by the time we got to Cache Creek, Shiva had made a place for himself in my heart.  I taught him how to pray with tobacco.  I gifted him with cedar and the turkey feather.  He promised to call me when he returned to the south.

      Within a few weeks Shiva called, rode his bicycle over to talk, shared dreams and told me more about his childhood.  We went out to dinner for his twenty-third birthday and I helped him restructure his relationship with his dad.  He introduced me to his friends, one of whom, the Finch, had been to Sun Dance and knew most of the members of my community.  During the Sun Dance he had participated in Peyote Ceremonies and had told Shiva about his experiences.  Shiva wanted to go with me to the next peyote ceremony, which happened to be in northern California.  I was going to my brother’s meeting in August.  One evening later in the week when I was driving Shiva home, he noticed the Great Horned Owl feather which Owl had gifted me.  It was stuck behind the garnet where the turkey feather had been. “Wow, that feather is mesmerizing!” he said in a dreamy voice.  I pulled it out from behind the garnet and said, “Here, it’s yours. Shake my hand on it.”  Passing him the feather must have made something click in him.  He really wanted to travel north with me.

      When the day of our trip arrived, I hadn’t heard from Shiva all week.  His friend, the Finch, told me that Shiva told him he was planning to go, so I tried to wait patiently.  Hours before the time I had planned to leave, Shiva called.  He was excited to continue talking about his life and how it was interweaving with mine.  Owl had invited me to stay at his apartment while he and his Lioness were at a Zen retreat. He was open to having my friend Shiva there too.  

     After getting out of Santa Barbara’s Fiesta Days traffic, Shiva and I talked about our lives and our beliefs.  He had been raised in the Krishna Temple in Hawaii, had been put into foster care when he tried to run away from his father, who used to feed him LSD as a kid.  After being raised by redneck foster parents who taught him to ride horses and be a cowboy, he emancipated himself by enlisting in the Air Force (thus identifying with his uncle who was a jet pilot).  Shiva was much like his dad.  He enjoyed alcohol, but he had his mom’s Cherokee/Irish genes and alcohol made him crazy, then he would get into trouble and revert to his childhood survival strategy of going into hiding.  I guess that’s why it was so difficult to find him unless he wanted to be found. 

      When we got to the Bay Area, we visited a bookstore where Shiva showed and told me through a picture book the story of Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita.  One of the employees brought us a book about a man who visited Tibet, was gone a long time, and then brought his son some special things from the Boy/God King of Tibet.  After looking through the book, Shiva turned and looked at me saying, “Why do you suppose she brought us this book?”  “Maybe she thought you were my long lost son,” I replied; I was feeling amazing tenderness and love for my friend.  As we left the bookstore, I bought Shiva a piece of black tourmaline.  I wanted to honor the young wizard who was attracting people’s attention and at the same time offer protection, since the crystal is a favorite of shamans because it deflects negative energy.  In our Native American tradition, special moments are honored and remembered by something which grounds the experience in reality. What better way to do that than with a piece of Mother Earth’s body?

      At Owl’s apartment Shiva cooked us a delicious dinner.  Shiva was stretching and talking about how his back hurt, so I gave him a massage. Then we took turns in the shower.  When I emerged from the refreshing water wrapped in my robe, I was greeted by my smiling friend, who had set a place on the floor for tea.  I suggested we consult Jamie Sams’ Sacred Path Cards about our trip and the meeting we were about to attend.  That’s when Shiva asked for my advice.  “All the while we have been traveling, this feeling has been building up, and, well, I’m not with anyone now. My ex-girl friend says I have trouble with intimacy, and I wonder if you could teach me to be intimate.  I’m really attracted to you; it’s growing stronger and I’m wondering what do you think I should do about it?”  “Hum,” I said feeling flattered at being desired; he had just asked me to make love to him. I was stunned, flattered, and frightened at the prospect of making love to someone who looked like a lean and hungry bear.  “I always advise people to follow your heart, that’s what you should do about it, whatever your heart tells you to do.”  He didn’t need to think about it.  He had already decided what he wanted. He said, “I’ve never done this when it was mutual. . . Since you’re the teacher, I’ll follow you.”

      My default setting emotionally is to slow things down.  Coyote was really frightened and excited at the same time.  My heart was pounding.  I was wondering, “what do I do?  I’ve never initiated a man sexually. I’ve only had anal intercourse once in the early years of my marriage.  Neither of us enjoyed that. But my heart is telling me to accept this offer of spontaneous affection regardless of where it is coming from in this man’s psychic history.  I too feel sexually attracted to him, just like the first young man who initiated me, he is taller, lithe, and a smooth skinned swimmer/surfer. Somehow the Idaho boy needs to get his sea legs, Shiva’s body is only covered with those surfer shorts.  Maybe the Cards will help.”

      The Coyote inside of me suggested turning over the cards. “Hum, Kokopelli’s lovemaking flute music for you, and for me, the Northern Shield, the Buffalo.”  “That’s perfect,” said Shiva, “that’s what I need you to be, a strong, wise buffalo.”  “Well now,” thought the trembling Coyote inside of me, “he liked the massage. It soothed his aching back.  Maybe just rubbing my hand down his back would be soothing for me.”  So I touched his back, and as my hand slid down across is back, his muscles tensed ever so slightly.  “Well, that felt ok,” I thought, trying to ease my way over the abyss where I could abandon myself to Eros, “maybe one more time.”  I slid my hand further down his back and discovered the only thing Shiva wore under those pants was skin.  Pondering the touch of his bare ass under his shorts, I took another sip of tea and continued talking about the meaning of the cards, as we continued to turn over our future together.  When I finally had the strength to slide my hand down his back and over his butt again, he rolled slightly up toward me inviting my hand to rub his stomach.  I was enjoying myself.  It felt good, like all the times I used to rub my dog’s tummy. Within seconds of touching his erect penis and sliding further down over the soft packages of seeds for the future, which we call testicles, I heard the sound of Velcro, which held his pants together, rip open.   As he stood up to his six-three height, his pants fell to the floor and his erection beaconed like a Star Wars tracker beam.  I was entrained, towed toward the affection, the touch and the excitement which invited us both.  I wanted to be his teacher.

      Making love to a bear, who appeared to have a lot more experience in these matters than I had, was exhilarating. I was in paradise: someone wanted to make love to me and had risked rejection to get what he wanted. After making love, Shiva went into the shower again and emerged tired.  I was sure he would sleep beside me, but just in case I was assuming something, I offered him his own space on the other side of the curtain.  He took it! He preferred to sleep alone. Perhaps I was getting information about the lack of intimacy in the lack of physical contact after such intimate sharing. I wondered about that for a while, and then I remembered how bears have a way of getting their space when they need it.

      The next morning I greeted my bear by laying down beside him.  With one hand touching his hair and the other inside his sleeping bag, I was embraced.  He rolled toward me placing his erect penis in my hand. Another invitation to teach and make love answered, we showered, got dressed, packed, and headed off to breakfast and the trip across the bay to the Peyote Ceremony.  I was beginning to think something remarkable was happening.  This mutual, reciprocal relationship had never happened to me, except with my wife.  Who knows where it might have gone if we hadn’t eaten Medicine that night.  But one thing I know for sure is that I trust the Medicine completely and I was hoping Shiva would discover the healing he needed in his life. 

      The meeting was challenging.  The Medicine makes you face your demons, your unconscious hopes and dreams, your potential self.  Shiva was no exception.  He writhed, flopped, wanted to die, vomited, stretched, and acted out his inner child’s emotions.  One of my students, the Black Labrador Retriver, was on the other side of him, so we supported his process and kept him in his body in every loving way we could.  By morning Shiva felt wonderful.  He said that the many automobile accidents he endured while his dad was driving had done a lot of damage to his legs and back, but much to his surprise, all the pain was gone.  And he had a healing vision.

      This is what he saw: Out of the fire, rode a beautiful woman on a white horse.  She stopped in front of him and told him to get up and sit with her on the horse.  He did and then she rode off with him.  He interpreted his vision as a prophecy, that he was to pursue a heterosexual relationship, which was coming his way.  I was happy for him that he had found his inner feminine which had rescued him from his confusion.  Had he stayed connected to me in the days to come, I think I could have adjusted to what the Medicine was teaching me, but he didn’t.  He hid from me just like he would hide from his father.  It drove me crazy!  Here was the pattern of intimacy, feeling loved and appreciated, and then abandoned.  All those severed relationships hurt:  my brother, my wife and children, Wolf, Elk, Turtle, even the Wolverine (who called me Dad) got me caring about him before he broke away into the silence which becomes an invisible barrier. 

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.