Bloodline Ceremony

I’ve been taken down to the bone. I spent the day with a Lakota Medicine woman who spent hours walking in other realms to rid me of darkness and the karma stored in my family bloodline. Hers is powerful medicine, which has left me open, raw and renewed.

I have always been the one to heal others, while longing to find someone who could do the same for me. Many people claim to have spirit medicine, but few are authentic and free of ego. This gift has been a long time coming. 

Part of me still journeys in that other realm, while the physical side sits in silence in my quiet retreat of a house. Stepping into the world again was especially hard, like having a split-screen open on the computer. Lucky for me, a friend was there to drive me home or I may have ended up in Idaho. 

Loved ones ask about the experience but there are no words. The details and mechanics defy description, because they are sacred and not of this time and place. I can only say that the work went deep and until I integrate I am left feeling like a visitor in my own life, and a little uncomfortable in my skin. 

June has been a month of pulling back. My worldly self is resting and what little writing I do comes in drips instead of the stream I am accustomed to. I welcome the day when words move through me like a river. I see them waiting and hold out my arms, knowing they will land again when the time is right.

Days at the ocean preceded my ceremony. I spent hours outside, slept in the sun, walked barefoot in the sand and was nurtured by the loving presence of a friend. I found bones, the exact size and shape I was seeking, and feathers, lots of feathers. My essence feels more bird than human, so these things comfort me. 

I am always surprised when people choose not to work on themselves, and to live in their fears and patterns of limitation. That is a choice I could never imagine making, because releasing darkness and making room for more light is such an exquisite thing. It is painful, as any birth is painful, but the other side is worth every second, because everything around you reorganizes to create a flow of ease and love that makes life so much more inviting and welcome. Today I sit with my labor pains and raw open feelings, but soon I’ll soar again with even greater freedom than before. I am humbled in gratitude.

Passion

My husband is in love with tennis. Maybe love is the wrong word. He has passion for tennis, passion for the experience, passion for the way his body moves and feels playing the game. It is his fountain of youth and his catnip.  He thinks about it, reads about it, and talks about it. He coaches tennis, goes away to tennis camps and hires teachers to show him how to become a better player.

I am not tennis. I am a woman he cares for and loves, but there is no passion. In the evenings we sit at our computers, reading or watching DVD’s to avoid what is not happening between us, the big white elephant in the room.

Yesterday we floated down the river ~ together and apart, not speaking. I was having fantasies of going up to fishermen standing on the shore and saying, would one of you make love to me please? I would like to have sex with a stranger. I want to cuddle up to the masculine and feel held, but I don’t want any part of what comes after. I don’t want to know the person, or see beneath the masculine exterior. I simply crave the beginning times when love is a warm inviting sensual bath and I’m not dealing with family, coffee spilled on the couch, or the ‘Why didn’t you call if you were going to be late,’ conversations.

I hoped our marriage would bring us closer together, not farther apart. But, instead of developing the trust that leads to more openness and touching, I have been learning to do without him, to let him go, to live my life alone, as I did before.

Last week, moments before he walked out the door on a camping trip, he came into the bathroom. I was combing my hair as he slipped his arms around me and said, You are so beautiful, I am a lucky boy, I mean man, and he was a man in that moment. In that instant, I was with the man that found me beautiful and desirable, the man I fell in love with, the man I married. I was with my husband. I felt stirrings of intimate feelings, the first I’d known in a very long time. I wanted to go to bed with him and love him and hold him. I wanted to remember us as we used to be. Then it was over, time for him to leave to go camping with his son.

This man used to grab me by the hand and say, come with me, come out into the world. We are 60. We can do whatever we want. But now his spirit has dampened and his desires have disappeared; now he is compliant, I don’t care. Whatever you want. What do you want to do?

He is willing to go where I choose, but his mind is too busy with tennis, running a pallet company and making time for his family to think of ‘us.’ The time that we need is seen as a distraction, a diversion from things that are important. ‘We’ can always wait, as in the unspoken, Are we done yet, cause I have to leave?

I’d like to go to Europe and live for awhile in Italy, France, Spain or Greece. I’d like to let my artist soar and the healer in me rest. I’d like to ride along the Italian Rivera on a motor scooter and settle into a little villa where sunlight greets me each morning and I am inspired to create. I want to escape to a better version of myself.

I fear this marriage side of me comes from a conservative out-moded value system, one I mistakenly ingested like bad pasta. I have tried over and over and over again to make it work, but in the end it becomes nothing more than a settling, while specialness and delights are found away from one another in the company of other people.

Pieces of Monday

I had a very large arrangement of edible flowers delivered to my door this afternoon from my daughter in law, Khrystyne and my son, Clayton. The card said: We Love you so much. Hugs and kisses. Clay’s name was first on the card, but he’s a guy. He loves me, I know, but his mind goes to carburetors and computers before floral arrangments, so thank you Khrystyne for making that happen. I was so touched, I had to hold back tears, so I could continue seeing clients. 

My first client settled in for her session. We did some catching up, then I wanted to focus our purpose.

So dear, what exactly do you want today, what do you need?

Oh Karen, if only you were an ice cream truck, I would know exactly how to answer that question!  

Perfectly stated.

I am allergic to chocolate but ate 6 chocolate covered strawberries anyway. They were worth all the itching that will arrive any second. 

I am in touch with my cousin, Bobby, whom I’ve not seen since childhood. He is giving me news and sending me pictures of his life in Florida. It’s vibrant and alive compared to gloomy June in Oregon. Writing to him has retrieved a sense of family I believed was extinct. 

I bought presents for Caleb, my niece Ingrid’s new baby, painted the boxes purple and put gold stickers on them. I enjoyed having purple fingers and the mess of it all.  I worked outside with the sun warming my shoulders and flamenco music shouting from the door. 

I watered this morning while the gardeners pulled up morning glory vines. I built a trellis for wax beans and pushed flimsy metal cages over cucumbers. My stunning pink rose bush is getting ready to bloom, but it’s all an exercise in non-attachment, because the deer will level my garden in their hunger and greed - and I’m going to let them. 

The bees did not sting me as I made my way through fields of wild strawberries in bare feet.

The dirt-covered cat did not jump into my clients lap when she sat outside to admire the day.

The library did not close before I could leave an old book and grab a new one. 

That’s a lot to feel good about for a Monday.

Ram Dass

 

I first saw Ram Dass in the late 70’s, when he came to Ohio State University to speak about his trip to India and the ways it transformed his consciousness and character. He spoke about his time as a Harvard Professor, his friendship with Timothy Leary and finding his Hindu teacher.

Everyone is a manisfestation of God, he said, and every moment is of infinite significance.

I had no idea who Ram Dass was and had no expectations. He walked to the center of the stage in flowing robes, closed his eyes and sat quietly for a very long time. It amazed me. How could anyone begin a presentation by sitting down and being quiet?

I was at Ohio State studying dance, theater and women’s literature. I had just finished touring with Hello Dolly and had been well-schooled. Being on stage was about dynamic presentation, articulation, entertainment and projection. How could this guy sit center stage, take a long drink of water and willfully exclude his audience? I was baffled.

He began to talk about consciousness and the freedom in allowing yourself simply to be without doing.

We are human beings, he said, not human doings.

Wow, what would that be like? I was a single mom and the pressures of it made me feel like jumping off the nearest bridge. I got up early each morning; put my son in the child seat on my bike and my daughter on the grown-up seat, while I pedaled standing up. I stopped first at the day care center and later the university. We came home the same way. I worked as a waitress from three until nine, gave all my tips to the babysitter and stayed up past midnight finishing assignments. The next day I did it all again. Easy for him to talk about being and not doing, I thought.

But there was something wonderfully appealing about his gentle spirit, colorful robes and the tranquil glow in his eyes that made me pay attention and want to read his books. A few years later I moved from Ohio to Oregon and decided to try a ten day meditation. I had never done a formal meditation in my life - starting with ten days was not enlightenment, it was pure hell. But I was curious to know who I was beneath my story, history and ingrained beliefs, so I began searching for another way, a way that made sense to me.

What I settled on was sending my kids to their father’s house, while I closed the door to the world and imposed a kind of solitary confinement. I sat and noticed and observed.

When I wanted to bust out of the room, I noticed the feelings, thoughts and sensations around the desire but remained still.

When I wanted to eat food I was not hungry for, I stopped and noticed the desire for comfort, my need to fill my emotional emptiness and soothe the frightened child within.

I spent nearly a month peeling back the layers of my identity, sitting, laughing, crying and writing, looking for and finding the me that was capable of being and not doing. I wanted the personality to ease its fearful grip and allow a glimpse of the divine. I wanted access to the wise woman at my center and was not disappointed.

I saw Ram Dass last night in a documentary called Fierce Grace. He looked vulnerable, frail and broken. He talked about his stroke and what a worthy teacher it was. He cried openly and laughed the same way. The ability to mask his emotions had dissolved; the flow of his language was restricted and withheld. My husband wondered if it hurt his credibility to weep without restraint, but I saw it as one more protective human wall that had collapsed, to further reveal the compassionate spirit within.

Life is a strange and unyielding teacher. Willing or unwilling, we are all her pupils.

New York City

 

Every few years my parents treated us to a cultural week-end in NYC.  We drove four hours through vineyards and rolling acres of farmland to the heart of a cosmopolitan environment that was as different from our barefoot childhood as I could imagine. 

We stayed at the Hotel Astor, which in 1955 was the finest hotel in the city. The Astor embodied old world elegance, sat in the heart of the theater district and towered over Time Square. The Brooklyn Dodgers had just won their first world series and the city was alive with excitement. Cab Calloway and Fats Waller were hot stuff and the Cotton Club was birthing a new musical sound. But it was the Broadway shows that interested my folks.

Evenings found us in our finest clothes with fresh gardenias from a street vendor pinned to our coats. The smell of that delicate white flower can still bring back vivid memories of Julie Andrews and Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, sinking into red velvet theater seats, watching chandeliers dim against a ceiling of gold and holding our breath as plush curtains whooshed back to reveal a magical world of song and dance. We sat spellbound by every theatrical gesture and perfected vocal score. Those performances began my admiration and love for the theater, and also spoiled me for anything less professional. 

I was ten years old when I watched long rows of women called the Rockettes, high kick in unison at Radio City Music Hall. They were wholesome family entertainment, while a trip to the Latin Quarter opened our eyes to the exotic. Women on flower-covered trapezes, descended from the ceiling wearing high heeled shoes, seamed stockings and little else. The undeniable points of attention were their breasts, where long tassels adhered to each nipple, leaving their fullness bare and exposed. The tassels were smaller versions of the fabric ends that held back the drapes in our living room. I was stunned! I could not take my young eyes off them – grown women who amused themselves by swinging naked from the ceiling of a darkened theater. Was that really okay? Was that what women did when they got older? Apparently it was not only approved of but applause worthy.  I began to wonder about stringing ropes in the hayloft and doing some undercover surgery on my mother’s drapes.

When the performance finished, my sister Kristen and I had to use the bathroom, but the lines were too long, so mother encouraged us to wait. We’ll be home soon, she promised. We hopped in a taxi, which vigorously whisked us through busy streets and hairpin corners. When we screeched to a halt, my father’s angry face matched the burgundy coat worn by the doorman. He was complaining about the driver as my sister and I pushed through revolving glass doors, past walls of glossy walnut, expensive paintings and potted palms. We jumped up and down in the elevator in our urgent need, reaching our fourth floor room before the white gloves of the elevator man disappeared behind us. Doors were never bolted at home, so we were stunned to find we’d been locked out.

I’m peeing my pants, Kristen told me. What should we do?

I had pushed my winter coat aside and was dancing up and down in a desperate attempt to wait.

We can’t pee right here, I said, it will make wet puddles right outside our door. We’ll surely get caught and get in big trouble. I have an idea. You run that way, and pee as you go. Run all the way to the window drapes. I’ll run to the marble statue. We’ll spread it out in long lines, that way nobody will be able to figure out what we did.

And so, on that eventful Saturday night, in one of the cities grand hotels, two little girls were pushing aside their fancy lace dresses to leave a bit of themselves in the lavish carpet at the Hotel Astor.