© El Collie 2000
Chapter 2
BACKTRACKING
Beginnings haven't been easy for me. I was dragged into the world by forceps after my mother had been in hard,
climb-the-wall labor for three solid days. Afterwards, doctors told her it was a miracle either of us survived.
I was a highly creative, intense, sensitive, vigorously active child. Being several years older than my brother
and sister, I fell early into the role of nurturer and mentor which has characterized my life. I was forever involved
in enterprising creative projects of my own design. One of the earliest I recall was playing a proxy "Santa
Claus" to my little brother and sister. While they took their afternoon naps, I would work in frantic enthusiasm
to hand craft clothespin dolls and box-and-spool toy cars as surprise gifts. While constraints on my time, skills
and raw materials rendered these offerings quite primitive, my siblings were young enough to be nonetheless delighted
by them.
I enjoyed playing with other kids, but I stood out from them in my equal love of solitude. My most cherished childhood
refuge was the woods, but that was wrenched away from me in our endless moves from place to place. My father's
traveling salesman job pushed us into what journalists were calling the "new mobility." Like all children
who grow up rootless, the only constant in my life was loss. My parents were ordinary hard working people who took
pride in my intelligence and enjoyed praise from teachers and neighbors for my display of emotional maturity beyond
my years. The "maturity" seemed to me mostly a matter of dutiful compliance and adaptability to adult
rules and expectations.
I made friends easily until adolescence. Teens were less tolerant than younger kids had been of my outsider status
as the perpetual new girl, but the wedge went deeper than this. Despite the rebellious flailings of youth, my peers
were developing what seemed to me a mental arteriosclerosis, constricting around superficial and callous social
values. The standard caste system rewarding privilege, wealth and physical perfection always struck me as mean-spirited
and needlessly divisive. When I was younger, I'd hated it when teachers made us choose teammates for gym class
or spelling matches for the same reason. Although I usually got picked for a team early, I ached for the kids suffering
the humiliation of being called last. (At home, when I played team games with the neighborhood kids, I introduced
an alternative system in which the weakest and youngest kids were paired off with the strongest, so nobody wound
up a "reject.") I was demoralized to discover that the same cruel hierarchies prevailed throughout the
version of history we were taught in school, and were apparently ubiquitous in every social group in nature --
with the exception of ants and bees. (It wasn't until my late forties that I would find record of egalitarian communities
based on cooperative interdependence of members in the ancient Goddess cultures -- and their natural equivalent
among the gentle bonobos monkeys.) For as long as I can remember, I've been in love with life and mad at the world.
My family had its share of painful dysfunction. The survivor thing has reached such cult proportions I hate to
mention it, but it has been a formative slice of my life. Carmen Boulter, a feminist therapist and teacher, has
postulated correspondences between mythological archetypes and patterns, which shape the female psyche. She identifies
the fate of victimization and recovery with Persephone, the goddess who was abducted into the underworld by the
god Hades. The Persephone archetype is often lived out by the most emotionally and psychically sensitive child
in the family, says Boulter. A girl in this situation becomes the family scapegoat. Members project their shadow
qualities on her "perhaps out of her willingness to carry the family burdens." Typically, the Persephone
type becomes a perfectionist and "too good," while being disconnected from her own needs. She feels lost
and alone, since her true identity is hidden beneath the judgments others heap upon her. "Because no one else
can see her, she loses her ability to see herself," says Boulter. "Such is the curse that springs from
the original trauma of abduction." Boulter calls this archetype a psychological orphan for whom healing lies
in becoming conscious of what is illusory and what is real.
She hits the bullseye describing my family dynamic. Whether due to karma, destiny or the darkness inherent in the
times, I was subjected to abuses, physical and emotional. I won't go into sordid details; it would serve no purpose.
I've spent too much of my life buffeted between anger, resentment and guilt -- the anger mostly turned inward,
the guilt a reaction to my resentment. I tried telling myself it hadn't really been that bad. Wrong. It was bad.
There are things you never get over, but after a healing occurs, you carry your scars differently. They are no
longer simply memories of woundings, but spiritual brandings of lessons never to be forgotten. Being on the receiving
end of assault, domination, coercion, neglect, injustice, betrayal, violation, disrespect and dismissal teaches
the soul the utter ruthlessness of these tactics. When transmuted through self-love, this culminates in a resolve
not to go there in one's dealings with life.
As a result of the ways I've been mistreated, I'm careful in how I treat others. I would have preferred the kinder
tutelage of being raised among people who could model rightful relationship. Possibly, I would have learned the
same things from this opposite, easier direction. Yet I would have missed the blood-knowledge of what it is to
be bereft of such blessings, as most people in our ravaged world have been...
From a tender age, I was shouldering the weight of the world. I've long known there are multitudes whose suffering
makes mine pale in comparison. I was six years old when the polio epidemic hit, taking hostages of my baby brother,
my cousin, and a sizable portion of our stricken town.
By the time I was ten, I knew too well the meaning of atrocity. I had already read dozens of my father's book collection
of WWII stories, including a harrowing survivors' account of the bombing of Hiroshima. The author told of people
who had looked up at the light of the blast: their eyeballs melted down their cheeks. It was analogous to the way
I felt, my inner child eyes charred with the knowledge of terrible things that no one spoke of. (Yet it was through
reading that I discovered books gave me access to much that the world tried to hide.) More immediately, I knew,
though little was said about him, that my mother's brother had been killed in the war, and my airforce captain
father had won his purple heart after his plane was shot down on four separate missions. Each time he was miraculously
rescued at sea. I seemed to have inherited his phoenix-like penchant for courting disaster yet escaping relatively
intact. Security is a foreign word to me. As I write this I am sitting in our little bungalow house precariously
straddling the Hayward fault, which seismologists consider the most dangerous earthquake zone in northern California.
Just about every year they issue a warning that the "Big One" is ready to rip.
I've spent anxious hours in a basement with my family, waiting out tornado watches. I've ridden out blizzards,
a hurricane, several massive urban fires and a major earthquake. I've lived without a car or telephone in slums
so dangerous cab drivers would not risk picking up a fare in the area. I've gone desperately hungry, and I've been
homeless long enough to know it is hell. These crises have left their mark on me. At the time of the Oakland firestorm,
I later learned that most people evacuating their homes rescued their photo albums. When the smoke got thick, my
son came by to drive me out of the area. Pathetically, I grabbed clothing, blankets, food... I was a Rwandan, a
Bosnian, a Jew in the holocaust running for my life. Photo albums are the luxury of people who cannot conceive
of what it is to have nothing. I've been stalked by a crazed ex-boyfriend and raped by an amphetamine-deranged
stranger who lunged into my apartment when I was alone with my five-month-old baby son. In three separate locations,
thieves broke in and ransacked my home. I've had my life threatened by a gun-wielding psychopath. The list goes
on... I dealt with everything on my own. I never reported these crimes to the police and never turned to a therapist
to help me regain my bearings after the trauma. I learned early to be emotionally self-reliant. The one person
I was close to while growing up was my sister. Being six years younger than I, she was unable to be much of a confidant,
but I took her under my overextended wing and did what I could to protect her from the world. My most dramatic
feat of survival was in the wake of a suicide attempt in my eighteenth summer. I had been quietly and earnestly
suicidal from age fourteen
Going to college had lightened up my attitude, especially after I fell in love with a sophomore folksinger named
Larry who, at nineteen, was a cherubic double of Gerard Depardieu. Being with Larry had temporarily suspended all
thoughts of doing myself in. Despite his disdain for me, Larry opened me to vistas I had not known possible. My
own artistic talents had been put largely on hold since elementary school; they were unwelcome in a world that
demanded I fill a more conventional niche. (I'd entered college with the idea of earning a degree in special education,
thinking I would teach the blind.)
Through Larry, I sensed there might be a lifestyle more suited to my flamboyant, wildly creative temperament. His
abrupt departure from school to join the navy (which took even his closest friends by surprise) broke my heart
and threw me back into hopelessness. When I returned home for summer break I was so mired in gloom, my mother,
who had never been sympathetic to my feelings, noticed it. She asked if I would like to see a psychiatrist. I couldn't
imagine what a psychiatrist, or anyone else for that matter, could do to make a difference. Then again, what did
I have to lose? I agreed to an appointment.
Dr. Malowski, my shrink, was a tall, gangling man who wore a look of engraved enui. He asked what was troubling
me. The question was too large for me to answer, even had I been able to articulate to myself the reasons for my
depression. I tried to say something about Larry, but Malowski's glassy stare did not invite the baring of my soul.
He abruptly cut to the chase and asked if I was suicidal. Surprised to be asked so directly, I told him yes. The
look of contempt that flickered across his face made me instantly regret my honesty. His thoughts were audible:
"Why do parents send me their spoiled brats? These kids wouldn't know a real problem if it smacked them in
the face."
He scribbled out a prescription for tranquilizers. So much for the hope he might be able to help me. I politely
thanked him. I took the sedatives for a few days and felt as terrible as ever. Then I realized I could pretend
to take them while hoarding them instead. I did this for several months until I had acquired three full bottles
of the pills.
The final straw came when my parents informed me I would not be permitted to return to college. With that decree,
the pinpoint of light at the end of my tunnel was extinquished. Hostilities had run so thick and long on the home
front, I sincerely believed my death would have little impact on anyone in the family.
One evening, after everyone was asleep, I downed the pills. I thought I was erasing myself from existence. I had
no sense at the time that some part of me might extend beyond death. I expected the pills to knock me out, neat
and clean. After forty minutes, I was disconcerted to find myself still very much awake and subject to mounting
violent muscle spasms. A previously unconsidered possibility sucked the air out of my lungs: What if the pills
didn't kill me, but left me in a permanently damaged vegetative state?
Change of plans! I immediately awakened my parents with the news that I needed to go to the hospital posthaste.
My father drove us the twenty-minute ride to the closest emergency room. Revealingly, my mother sat stone-faced
in the passenger seat while I lay huddled alone in the back of the car. She refused to believe me and repeatedly
described how painful it would be to have my stomach pumped... I was already floating in and out of consciousness
by the time of the stomach pumping. As it turned out, I'd downed enough sedatives to kill a whale. From a comatose
state, I heard an alarmed voice (a nurse?) say "We can't get a blood pressure," followed by a male voice
ordering an IV of some medication.
In a disembodied state of utter calm, I realized that my actions might meet with success after all. I was afloat
in the most wondrous sea of tranquillity I've ever felt, before or since. From this etherial refuge, I earnestly
asked myself if I still wanted to die. The answer was an unequivocal yes. Not satisfied to leave it at this, I
rephrased my question: "Do I want to live?" To my astonishment, the answer was an equally firm "That
would be fine."
From this side of the veil, it hasn't always seemed so fine.
Cutting Loose
After securing my promise to take a newly prescribed, allegedly non-lethal medication, my parents relented and
allowed me to return to school. The meds gave me amnesia. Large chunks of my daily life fell into the Burmuda triangle.
I found a picture in my wallet of a boy I'd never met; to this day I have no idea what our relationship might have
been that led him to give me his photo. When my roommate -- distraught over problems with her boyfriend -- borrowed
one of my pills, she went into a catatonic state for five hours. I took the stuff three times a day! It's amazing
I was able to function at all. Before I realized how disorienting they were, I once convinced my father to take
one of the pills when he was in a particularly foul mood. My brother later said the medication came on while they
were driving to the barbershop. My father had frozen with his foot on the gas pedal with the car at a dead standstill
in the middle of the street. He remained this way for ten minutes or more, unresponsive to my brother's pleas.
I don't recall how they managed to get home...
As it turned out, I cut my formal education short anyway by dropping out of college at nineteen to marry Tim, a
woolly haired young musician my parents tried to warn me against. As I was partly marrying him to escape my parents,
I didn't listen. His parents warned him against me for essentially the same reasons: my budding bohemian demeanor
was not exactly what his Midwest Christian fundamentalist family had in mind as a helpmate for their wayward son.
Adrift and penniless, we moved from a tiny student apartment that we'd subletted in Kalamazoo for the summer, to
a cheap hovel in downtown Detroit. Tim had grown up in the Detroit suburbs not far from where I had spent the last
two of my high school years. The original plan was that I would work to support us while he continued school at
Wayne State, as there was no way we could come up with enough money to pay tuition for both of us. I'd put up a
weak argument against this arrangement, but Tim talked me into it. (This was in 1967, when husbands were considered
the real breadwinners whose educations were thus worth far more than their wives'.) As it turned out, life was
writing an altogether different script for us both.
Tim and I immediately became active in Detroit's antiwar movement. We marched in small rallies where getting bludgeoned
by the police was understood to be a necessary risk and sacrifice. Fortunately, Tim and I were never targetted
as martyrs for the cause. I surreptitiously planted copies of a magazine with full color, wrenching photos of napalmed
Vietnamese children in the Detroit Public Library where I then worked as a clerk. The text of the magazine was
written by the famous pediatrition/author, Dr. Benjamin Spock. When I took a copy of the magazine home to my parents,
my father shouted that I was a "card carrying Communist."
I snapped back something to the effect that if Communists were the only people who cared about babies being burned
alive, I'd be glad to become one.
"Wars always have casualties," he spat back. Then, with a look of angst that made my chest hurt, he threw
out his arms, palms thrust at me, and cried, "I have blood on my hands!"
I was stunned into silence, realizing for the first time that this was the real issue. Behind the right wing bluster,
my father was torn between proud patriotism and bitter grief. WWII had left shrapnel in his body and slashes in
his heart. (Sadly, we were never able to talk about this on equal footing, leaving my father with the lasting impression
that I had spit on his service to his country...)
Tim had been gung-ho about having kids immediately, and I thought I owed it to him to oblige. I had always dreamed
of having children, but I didn't feel emotionally or financially ready. In fact, by late adolescence, I was having
serious misgivings about bringing children into so horrible a world. I couldn't imagine starting a family with
no money or decent job prospects for either of us.
Tim convinced me that I was being morbidly pessimistic. He insisted that even if we were poor, our kids would be
happy and everything would work out fine. I wanted to believe him. I wanted to be wrong. I wish I had been. It
broke my heart raising them in chaos and poverty. As Tim revealed to me years later, it wasn't really that he longed
for the patter of little feet in our squalid one-room apartments. Rather, he had a cockeyed pre-feminist era notion
that children would cement our marriage and do me a world of good. When we met, I'd been less than the poster girl
for domestic felicity, having spent my previous summer in a locked psychiatric ward for my near-successful suicide
attempt. God only knows how he could have added this up to conclude I made a good candidate for motherhood. Amidst
everything else, the Detroit riots broke out. Tim and I lived in the center of the combat zone. As tanks drove
by on the streets and deafening artillery fire could be heard blasting away throughout the city, we spent our sleepless
nights belly to the floor in our totally darkened third story slum apartment. We could not risk throwing a shadow;
the snipers had the cops shooting randomly at any suspicious movement in tenement windows.
At the same time, rioters (and rumor had it, police provocateurs) were ruthlessly torching buildings everywhere.
The air was a blanket of smoke, rage and fear. Some of the elderly white tenants in the rooms downstairs from us
posted a handwritten sign declaring "Soul Brother" like a cross in lamb's blood on the front porch. It
was sheer grace we all didn't go up in blazes. A year after we had moved, we learned that our death-trap tinder
box of an apartment building had been condemned by the fire department (bringing it up to code would have been
so expensive that the owners instead had the place demolished).
In the wake of the riots, a fellow W.M.U. dropout visiting from California stopped by to enthrall us with tales
of the new mecca in San Francisco. Within three months, Tim and I were off to the famous Haight-Ashbury. We were
told that several weeks before our arrival, the throngs the media called "flower children" (among ourselves,
in self-parody we referred to each other as "freaks") had ceremoniously performed a mock public funeral
declaring the death of the Hippie. But like Elvis, the Hippie lived on.
In contrast to Hollywood portrayals of us as moronic dope fiends, in its best years an infectious passion infused
the Haight, creating a sense of community which, as historian Barney Hoskyns has noted, "may never have been
equaled anywhere in the Western world." We had come together not merely to thumb our noses at authority, but
to live a Dionysian alternative to the repressive, stupefied, "plastic" ethos of America. The term "hippie"
was a derrogative form of "hip," which was imported by black musicians from the West African Wolof "hipi,"
which means "to be aware." We were impossibly idealistic, reckless and naive. The truth, of who we were
as a group, lays somewhere between a saturnalia of utopian revolutionaries and clueless refugees. Admittedly, among
us were the runaways and renegades drowning in a self-destructive frenzy of sex, drugs and rock n' roll, plus the
more degenerate element of hustlers, criminals and outright psychopaths.
The fact that our patchwork vision surpassed our reach did not negate its power. The reverberations can still be
felt today.
Between the birth of our first child and my second pregnancy (our kids were born 15 months apart), Tim notified
me that he was no longer interested in monogamy. In the spirit of the times, we agreed to an "open" marriage.
For Tim, this seemed to entail some kind of sexual triathlon in which he tried to score with as many women as possible.
I couldn't emotionally separate sex from love, while most of the men I attracted didn't know how to combine them,
making for turmoil all around. In theory, "free love" sounded viable to me, fitting into my philosophy
of inclusiveness and liberty for all. In practice, even in the pre-AIDS era, I never met anyone who was able to
make it work. Jealousies, murky emotional undercurrents, ingrained notions of inequity between the sexes, and a
lack of mutual understanding and affection turned multiple partners into a losing proposition where somebody always
got hurt. After a year in the Haight, Tim and I and progeny moved from San Francisco (I was afraid of earthquakes)
to languid Santa Fe, where we lived for six months until Tim's job at a gallery (and my unofficial position ghostwriting
brochures for showings under his name) fell through. We turned back to California, this time to San Diego where
a friend stationed in the Navy helped us get an apartment. A journalist friend-of-the-family who heard we were
heading there tried to warn us: "Are you crazy? That's John Birch territory."
If we weren't crazy when we went there, we were by the time we left. It took us two years to scrape and claw our
way back to the Bay Area, where no one wanted to kill us for our lifestyle (nevermind the earthquakes).
While we didn't make much of a living from art, we lived art. With a raucous passion, I crafted everything from
our clothing to our furniture until every nook and cranny spilled over with my creative excesses. A writer who
walked into our Berkeley house for the first time gasped and exclaimed to me, "You can turn a square room
round!" To me, art was a means of play, of protest, of meditation and communion. (During these years I thought
of myself as an artist; later, as my work matured and I grew more conscious of what I'd been doing, I amended it
to "shamanic artist." This would have been considered a redundancy in primal cultures for which art and
the sacred were inseparable.
In a playful act of counterculture boundary breaking, for a short while Tim and I produced a zany series of small
paintings, drawings and collages with our coined signature term "XART." The tacit XART premise was a
gallery sans walls, sans money exchange and sans personality cults. We placed the XART pieces on public display
throughout Berkeley, stapling them at random to telephone poles already encrusted with layers of advertising flyers
for every event, rally and political cause in town. We were curious to see if XART would catch on. It didn't, but
someone (or more likely, more than one someone) either coveted or detested our aesthetics; our XART works disappeared
as fast as we could produce them. In the early 70's, Tim and I were among the West Coast originators of performance
poetry, incorporating costumes, music, stage props and experimental theater. Along with a poet-musician friend,
we put together an amateur/anarchist (though mostly apolitical) mixed-media troupe. With a revolving door crew
that varied in number from three to twenty-five, we called ourselves the Expoetry Express. Our primarily coffee
house and cabaret performances were group collaborations -- neo-Dada/Surrealist self-satirizing affairs that followed
the dictum: "Art is anything you can get away with." With titles like "Son of Hamlet" (an ostensible
biker's operetta), our shows were presented free of charge. The only time we passed the hat, it was with a twist
calculated to be a hit with the audience: we had secretly filled the hat with five dollars worth of pennies, which
we showered by the handful into the crowd. Tim and I footed the bill for each production, which even at our micro-budgets
were a squeeze on our always anemic purse. We occasionally crossed paths with more acclaimed writers and artists
who were, if not in it for the money, more serious than we were about making the right connections in the direction
of fame and fortune.
We made everything up as we went along: our rehearsals were creative jam sessions where we made never ending last
minute changes to the piecemeal scripts. In lieu of our general lack of discipline and structure, something invariably
went askew with every performance. From the beginning we'd followed the cardinal rule: Whatever happens is part
of the show. Ad-lib around it! On one occasion a guy from the audience unknown to any of us wandered onto the stage
and became an impromptu cast member. In another performance in a San Francisco diner, one of our male stars decided
-- without bothering to inform any of us -- to end the last act by stripping on stage and streaking naked out of
the building. These little surprises kept things as lively for the troupe as for our fans. Tim's and my creative
co-adventures fared better than our private relationship. After ten bumpy years, the marriage ended as amicably
as we could manage, and my life was recast in the shaky role of impoverished single mother...
Down But Not Out
I'm a ragged individualist.
-- Jane Ace
In a culture that understands only money, anyone whose passions lay elsewhere is apt to be regarded as an enigma
or a loser. If you don't get paid for what you do, it's generally assumed that you're either no good at it or it's
not worth much to anyone. Sometimes this is true. Sometimes it's a matter of economic disparity. And often it is
a way of excommunicating those who do not properly worship the almighty dollar.
I have held all kinds of jobs in my life, most of them of the service variety and all of which have paid in peanuts.
I recently received formal government notice that since my life earnings had been so low, I qualify for zero social
security payments in the advent of disability or retirement... unless, of course, I manage to strike it rich in
the next decade. I've worked the minimum wage circuit since I was sixteen: waitressing, cashiering, typing, filing,
being an attendant for the disabled, scrubbing floors, toting barges and lifting bales... When I quit my last full
time position as a University clerical worker assigned to tasks no one else would or could handle, I later learned
that management couldn't find anyone to fill my position at my salary level. They wound up having to triple the
pay by hiring three separate workers to take on a third each of what I'd accomplished solo. Aside from the need
to secure my children's and my survival, I indentured myself to lousy jobs because I don't drive and had to find
work within walking or bus route distance from where I lived, which narrowed the prospects considerably. Despite
my performance record, my lack of credentials and absence of entrepreneurial ambition locked me into third world
pay scales. I never could scrape up the funds to go back to school and complete a degree, which was only half my
problem. During my twenties and thirties, I would sometimes leaf through college brochures in search of a course
of study for a profession I might squeeze myself into without losing my soul in the process. I'm not suggesting
that formal education can't lead to honorable professions, or that anyone with a degree has made a pact with the
devil. I'm talking here of my unique predicament of having talents which can't be developed through standard avenues.
A friend of mine in a similar predicament nevertheless returned to college to earn a MFCC so he could legitimately
practice his innate counseling skills. He spent the entire four years infuriated by the hidebound theories and
training techniques he had to learn to pass his classes. All of it was incompatible with his far more successful
empathic and sympathetic style of relating to his clients.
If my primary calling was as a therapist or doctor, I would have done well to follow his example, beg a student
loan, and grit my teeth until I received a license to do my work. My problem is that my work is of a nature that
can't be transferred to some other slot. Even in cultures where shamans are tutored by a master -- which is a faster
way to learn -- this process takes long years of hard work. One of the most difficult tasks of the shaman is breaking
through inculcated ways of seeing and responding to life. This is best accomplished by removing oneself from the
sphere of ordinary human activities through solitary vision quests or ritual initiations. My responsibilities and
circumstances did not permit this degree of withdrawal from the world. Instead, my spirit-eye was opened in the
course of my everyday experiences.
It's unlikely this would have happened if I had not had the relative freedom of my persona non grata identity.
I've never had to worry about what my colleagues might think of me (nor of jeopardizing my nonexistent career),
and I haven't had any social standing to protect. I needed time and relative seclusion to incubate a yet indecipherable
something which was inexorably germinating from within.
I labored under the guilty impression that had I managed to earn the right credentials, my children's and my circumstances
would have been less wrenching. I am grateful to Thomas Moore, who confessed in his introductory notes to The Book
of Job that despite his doctorate in religion (with degrees in philosophy, theology and musicology), his life had
been a series of frustrations filled with economic, personal and relationship failures until he turned fifty. I
was confronted, in my own way, with doors slamming in my face for some of the same reasons they slammed on Moore:
my approach to life simply didn't mesh with the social gears.
An astrologer who looked at my packed sixth house with Mars (ability to act independently and be self-sufficient)
squashed between the rock of Saturn (hard lessons, severity, deprivation) and the hard place of Pluto (power and
annihilation), said it looked like the chart of a slave. He didn't know anything about shamans. If you check my
whole chart for signs of that, they leap out all over the place. A shaman is foremost a servant, not of elite or
tyrannical humans, but of the community (which includes the natural world) and of the Divine. But it can take quite
a while to get clear what and how one is supposed to serve. The clues were scattered throughout my life, waiting
to be put into perspective. On summer break from college (before my suicide attempt), my mother, an RN, got me
a job as a junior nurse's aide at the hospital where she worked. The only thing "junior" about the job
was the pay. I carried the same workload as the other aides, with the added boon to the hospital that I didn't
require training. This was the pre-HMO era, when a hospital stay meant hands-on human care. Thanks to my mother,
I already knew how to take a pulse, give an old-fashioned bed bath and a welcome back rub.
From my first day on the job I was at odds with the staff because I committed the sin of emotionally identifying
with the patients. I tried to cooperate, but the other aides' cavalier attitude toward their work was unfathomable
to me. I was appalled by the way they routinely ignored a light for help over a ward door to go on a half-hour
break, leaving a helpless, needy patient unattended. I was constantly being called to the mat for bringing water
or a bedpan to patients not assigned to me.
I got into trouble several times for breaking ironclad hospital rules, like the policy that all bedding must be
changed once a day, no less, no more. When a young man (not my patient) whose surgical wound had bled into his
bed cover, plaintively asked me if he might have a fresh blanket before his family came in for a visit, I said,
"Sure." When my supervisor learned I'd given him the blanket she hit the roof. According to her, what
I thought of as an act of simple kindness had been in fact a dire error which might spell financial ruin for the
hospital. "We must keep down our laundry bills!" she gravely alerted me. One of my assigned patients
was an emaciated elderly woman in the end stage of terminal cancer. She was indigent, and never had a visitor.
Her suffering was etched into her face, and the slightest movement caused her to shriek in pain. When she begged
me to forego the daily bed change routine, I figured once every other day was close enough. After my supervisor
caught wind of this act of insubordination, I was given a lecture on my inferior mental status and threatened with
dismissal. (I understood that hospitals need to maintain sanitation standards, but I still think there could be
room made for merciful rule bending on occasion.)
For some reason, I have strange karma with blankets and authority figures. When I was in my thirties, there was
an accident outside our apartment building; a car had hit a young woman. My nine-year-old daughter came running
to tell me. I looked out the window to see a small crowd had gathered to gape at the injured woman lying in the
street. Not knowing how long it would take for the ambulance to arrive, I grabbed a blanket. It was old and tattered
but it was clean. I rushed out and gently covered the woman, who looked up at me in bewilderment. The bystanders
stared at me as if I had done something bizarre, but I didn't care. If I had been hit by a car and was lying hurt
and alone in the street, I would have been grateful if someone brought me a blanket.
The first medic on the scene eyed the blanket and asked in disgust, "What's this?" He plucked it up as
if it were filthy and cast it into the gutter. Now I felt stabbed. I didn't care what the medic thought of me;
what hurt was the look of shame on my daughter's face. She was being informed that her mother had done an ugly
thing. Gawking at someone in pain was okay. Minding your own business and staying inside the house was okay. But
owning secondhand things was definitely not okay, and doing what no one else thought to do was not okay, no matter
how much comfort it might give to someone in need.
My instinct to give solace has often run afoul of the world of cold bureaucracies and hard line procedures. I may
have been a fly in the ointment, but most people on the receiving end of my ministrations have been glad to have
me around.
When I worked at the hospital as a junior nurse's aid, the patients adored me. It was this -- plus the fact that
at dirt wages, I worked harder and more conscientiously than the other aides -- that kept me onboard despite my
repeated "mistakes." Another of my patients was Mrs. Peterson, an eighty-year-old diabetic whose leg
had turned black from gangrene. She was admitted to the hospital several days prior to her scheduled surgery. During
that time, she kept calling me "Mary." I repeatedly corrected her, thinking at first she must be confused.
It slowly dawned on me that she was seeing me as the Virgin Mary. It seemed she needed to see me as Mary, so thereafter,
I allowed her what I assumed to be an illusion. After her leg had been amputated, Mrs. Peterson would not let anyone
but me come near her. When her doctor came to check her stump, she started screaming bloody murder and declared
that no one was going to touch her but Mary. A conglomerate of nurses, aides and curious onlookers amassed outside
her room, while my supervisor charged up and down the halls, hoarsely calling, "Who is Mary?"
She was less than pleased when I meekly came forward. "She calls me Mary," I volunteered. "Well,
get in there and make her shut up! She must let the doctor examine her."
I was escorted forthwith to the room, where a frantic nurse was trying to restrain a hysterical Mrs. Peterson.
She stopped yelling the moment she saw me. "Mary!" I approached her bedside, where she lay looking up
at me with more trust and reverence than I had ever seen in the eyes of another human being. Tears streamed down
my face in reaction both to her suffering and to the realization that I was being given invitation to stand in,
not just as an angel of mercy, but as the Holy Mother of God.
Feeling woefully inadequate to the role, I took her frail, withered hand in both of mine, and told her, "I'm
here. It's okay." She fixed her gaze upon me and did not so much as wince while a doctor and nurse inspected
her horrible wound. If they had hurt her, I was ready to kill them both. (You can bet I didn't look like Mary to
them!) I'd once before been cast in this larger-than-life role when the teacher informed my fourth grade class
that we would be presenting a Christmas nativity play. Cast members would be selected according to classroom vote.
As the perennial new girl who nobody knew, I did not expect to be included. As fate would have it, over the weekend
while performing gymnastic stunts in our tile-floored bathroom, I slipped from a towel bar and landed squarely
on my head, earning myself a whopping concussion and a month's absence from school. I missed the cast nominations
and the performance of the Christmas play.
It was not until I returned to school, after Christmas break, that I learned the class had chosen me to play Mary.
When my mother told the teacher I would not be returning to school in time to attend play rehearsals, another girl
was selected for the part.
I recall being overwhelmed when told of all this. I told myself the only reason I'd been chosen was because I had
dark hair (not allowing myself to note that half the girls in the class had dark hair too). I'd done the same with
Mrs. Peterson, unable to fathom that she had not been wholly projecting the Holy Mother on me. Incredible as it
was to me then and now, the Goddess of compassion -- Mary, Quan Yin -- at times uses me as Her vehicle. This is
not my doing. I'm not Mary, but eyes that are pure and innocent see Her through those who serve life with compassion.
I am talking here of a literal apparition of a deity. I have witnessed a similar metamorphosis in a precocious
young poet/artist who seemed at the time unaware that he was being possessed by a god. His appearance suddenly
altered, and I found myself facing the radiant countenance of Orpheus. There was no doubt on my part as the onlooker
that I was no longer regarding a human being, but an Archetype. I was enraptured. This experience lasted for several
minutes, five at the most. I had no idea at the time it happened what it meant. Now I realize my poet friend had
received the summons too. This is the essence of the shaman: to make the Divine visible to the world.
From the time when I was the merest fledgling on the path, the Spirit was making use of me to touch people in certain
ways, to open their minds to something they hadn't noticed before. I've had people thank me for having said or
done something that turned them around and catalyzed beneficial changes in their lives, while often I haven't the
slightest recollection of the things they tell me I'd said to them. These were times when the Spirit was talking
through me, using me as its vehicle...
Being a shaman is a bit like being a unicorn in a herd of horses... one gets judged as a defective horse. The Muskogee
shaman Bear Heart said his teacher warned him that shamans -- which Native Americans call medicine people -- are
always somewhat out of synch with others: "No one really will ever truly understand you. They think they know
you, but they don't know what you're thinking about, they don't know the feelings that you have... That's why,
in a social situation it's very uncomfortable for you just to sit down and pass the time: `Oh Yes, this and all
that. Oh, isn't it wonderful, and, my, I saw a beautiful chair in the store window the other day. And, gosh, the
way they were dressed.' These aren't things you can relate to when you carry medicine. So it's sort of a lonely
road, but in the end, it's worthwhile..."
Although Bear Heart is miles out of my league, his teacher's words ring true. This is why the shamanic life is
hard both on shamans and their families, who wonder why they can't seem to get with the program. Few understand
that life engages us on an altogether different level.