Lillooet Christmas Day, 2021
Dear people whom I will encounter going forward:
One thing I know is that everything alive will strive to heal. The physical body as well as the mercurial mind and the ethereal spirit. All these modes have their own intelligence and thus will follow the universal protocol of life that dictates balance and efficiency. The result is that when the winds blow long and cold or the sun and sand blasts hot, things can look grim indeed and some wounds heal incompletely, slowly, or not at all. In trees and rocks we appreciate the unique beauty of these deformations, such as in bonsai. When it comes to our fellow humans, we generally have a much different attitude and a set of totally different expectations. We want “normal” as defined by nothing more refined than herd sickness.
This spits in the face of the fact that in our human sojourns out from Africa, various groups of us met with very different stresses and adapted, [read; “mutated or were wounded genetically”] in very different ways. Larger populations out bred smaller populations and more aggressive populations dominated less aggressive populations and the results we are still sorting out. The Roman aggression against the British Isles is, in my opinion still operating throughout the world as I write albeit with an Oxford education and an Eaton accent.
The smaller groups are in my opinion, the pinnacle of human organization in keeping with sanity, health and concert with the Earth, the Mother of all. It is not their skin tone or language or location that makes this so, it is the provable mathematical and abundantly evident spiritual fact that in smaller groupings we can thrive in healthy, happy ways in every climate on Earth. I make this statement against the backdrop of our global corporate entity driven civilization and say that if we kept the best of our technology, gave up money and political bureaucracy, small groups could again thrive free from many previous pains and with extended lifespans.
In day to day life, we are confronted with our own scars, the scars of those around us and the scars left upon our landscapes and nations, racial groupings, genders, sexual orientations and political stripes as well as religious identities. As I said earlier, the knee jerk reaction of the majority when confronted by those who are scarred or wounded is to admonish them to just get over it, shape the fuck up and get with the program. The wounded themselves, will also often have this reaction by way of intuiting the desire of the herd that fears being spooked by anything “odd.” This is also a very real fear. The fear of a stampede. I interject here, that in my opinion, the human being is not, contrary to the evidence of civilized life, a herd animal.
In recent times in New Zealand, in Australia and in Canada, the sad, disgusting, horrifying and deservedly hated Residential School System operations conducted against aboriginal populations have come to mainstream awareness as little bodies are being dug up and counted, identified where possible and repatriated to their home ground and their spirits finally laid to rest by relatives in orange tee shirts on national news programs to the extent that anyone who is unaware of the genocide is “unaware” by conscious choice, choosing amnesia over sanity, dignity and love. The deeds were done with the cooperation of the church and the police and were in fact, a well thought out government program. As the crimes and the criminals are exposed, none alive are facing punishment or incarceration. Instead, flags are dipped, holidays are created and new statues are put up and old ones are taken down.
Here in British Columbia, Canada, I have noticed a change. A fresh wind that I have been hoping that I would live long enough to breathe has started ever so subtly and is quickly gaining traction. It is the healing of the aboriginal survivors of a cultural genocide. A healing much spoken of by both sides but never really accomplished, in my reckoning. I have pondered long on why this should be so and why I am noticing now, here and across the world, as far as my technology can reach, a healing breeze.
The short answer is that I am sure that I am witness to a quickening of the closing of long festering wounds. This is only now occurring because only now have many people come forward and written or spoken publicly to a mass audience about the most vile tortures perpetrated by folks that the majority have been groomed to accept as infallible authorities over us all temporally and spiritually. Things done in places our footsteps cross on the way to and from the most mundane suburban activities. It is the naming of the beast, it is the undoing of bad magic, it is the righting of wrong, it is the opening of hearts to once again be able to give and receive that which we humans call love.
I also have a difficult truth telling that I now see is a necessary step to finally lay to rest my own beasts and to heal up my own long festering psychological wounds. I am sixty-four years old and a newly made grandfather. I now see that healing will not, cannot, occur without first assembling the fragments of pain I have often buried piecemeal in my speech, prose, stories, poems and my relationships in a concise fashion, unadorned. It must be done in the sunshine. I will always bear the scars but they need not remain unhealed. All will be purified by exposure and my own lingering, stifled, sad and angry child soul will be put to rest.
I do this with the full knowledge that I am but one of a multitude of wounded souls, not unique in suffering, but unique in my circumstances. It is a process, not a contest. I have been raped and violated but by powers less resilient than what I carry in my blood. I have forgiven the perpetrator of my own torture. I am still in the process of learning to love myself. The main lesson I have been given, is as simple as it is profound. Namely, gentleness is strength and power. Think of water.... Think of St. Melangell.
With that preamble, I will tell you my childhood story. May the wind, the sun, the stars, the rocks, the trees, the animals and the rain scour it clean of any residual evil. I tell this now with no motive or agenda other than I am dog tired of carrying the ill effects and self-defeating, unhealed wounds around for another day. I am done as the saying goes. I seek no sympathy, I seek freedom and a clear, clean spirit with which to embrace my new grandchild and growing family. Hu!
My tormentor was my father. Behind him was the Catholic Church and things that were never talked about by his family or by him. He was a violent, mercurial person and was emotionally unavailable. His family was estranged and I only met some few members briefly. He had left home at the age of fifteen and had become a sailor. We never played together, hugged or had any father/son activity. I was taken to a pool hall in Louisiana once to play a single game of pool. I was taken to an empty field in Louisiana one Christmas to fire a German Luger pistol into a Styrofoam cup on the frosty ground. I was taken to Mexico at fourteen years old for a week and pressured to have sex with young prostitutes at our hotel and smoke marijuana. I refused and so my father ordered me to leave each day after breakfast and not return until seven PM each night where we would dine together. He said he didn’t want me to “cramp his style.” That was the total of my fathering.
When we lived in a place called Cypress, Texas (at that time a rural location) we had a three acre property. My father had a huge tomato patch planted by labourers and this disturbed the rattlesnake residents of the brush that was there before. It was Texas hot and Gulf Coast humid. My father put me and my sister outside many days as a rule and this included not being allowed in to go to the bathroom or get shade or water, which we sucked from a hose. I was given a cardboard box when still in diapers and shown by my father how to pull weeds with stickers and was told to fill the box. The sun made me feel things I had no words for and my little hands accepted the sting of the prickles over time. I have no memories of my mother from that house except of her pushing me away from a rattlesnake I was trying to pick up.
When I was about three, my sister and I rode our tricycles around our recently poured white concrete driveway. My sister ran over a diamond back rattler, luckily just behind the neck, killing it instantly. Her bare feet were only a few inches away from the fangs. My father came home and threw the snake into the tall grass and asked who had made all the mud tracks on the driveway. I proudly said I was the one who did that decorative artwork by running my wheels through some mud and driving Celtic patterns on the light background. I was told to wait in my room, take my clothes off and to ponder what I had done.
I did this mostly in a bemused, curious way, until the beating came. I had no pain reference for what it felt like and I remember it first as ice (familiar) and then as fire (also familiar). I wondered where my Mom was. My sister brought me fresh hot cookies, later which I couldn’t choke down in my state of confusion, pain, fear and mostly, deep desire to understand why this was happening.
The beatings continued with the same shaming of awaiting naked and having to “think about what I had done.” This proved to be the mechanism by which I was literally taught to not only indict myself but to pass sentence as well. That training in a pain-reinforced intentional mind fucking pattern has plagued me throughout my entire life and I am only now being shown some meditative techniques to help me to re-wire that erroneous and self defeating behaviour.
The next indignity was the repeated phrase that, “This is going to hurt me more than it is going to hurt you.” The beatings were always preceded with this utterance after my “confession” and a doubling of his black leather belt and snapping the two halves together about three times. A sound that together with the click of metal heel savers on his shoes on the driveway every evening would cause a curious feeling to occur in my kidney area that I later realized was very likely my adrenals starting to prepare me for the coming pain fest.
I became very inventive with my indictments to shorten the waiting time before the beating. A separate species of torture with separate wounds but just as exquisitely evil. Logic running backwards into fire and away from safety. The final insult was being trained not to cry out or struggle. Crying out loud resulted in more lashes and I soon learned so well that I went through life until my second son was born, physically unable to make tears. I got that fixed, by the way.
All this time I wondered why this was happening and the only subconscious conclusion I could draw was that I must be bad and worthless. Simple. I only consciously entertained the thought of suicide once, as a toddler and my idea was from a cartoon I had seen where the character placed his head over the rim of a garbage can and slammed down the lid on his own neck. I went out into the back yard and lifted the lid and quickly realized it wouldn’t actually work.
Next I stripped the insulation off an electric cord and plugged it into the wall while holding it. Something I had also seen on television and the character had fluctuated from being a skeleton and a person as the juice went through him. The shock wave knocked me hard enough to pull the wires from my convulsed grip. I was not aware of wanting to “harm” myself, at least not consciously. Lastly, I poured every liquid I could find in the house into a plastic cup, put on a towel cape with a clothes pin and raised the elixir it to my lips, just as my Mother happened to appear. I told her I was going to fly as she took it away from me. She also stopped me once when I was trying with all my toddler might to pick up a big rattler on our back porch.
I was sent to Vacation Bible School in Texas before starting kindergarten. I was told the story of Jesus. I went to a Unitarian Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana where my mother taught a group of kids about the story of Jesus. Adults put a plaster picture of praying hands on the wall of my bedroom and an oil painting of Jesus with his heart showing and his head wrapped in bloody thorns. My Swedish Grandpa had made me a traditional Nordic wooden rocking crib and I can still see my father smashing it to kindling and setting it on fire in our front yard in Cypress, Texas. I was told my father had been a Catholic alter boy back in Toronto where he was born. My father always maintained that he was an atheist.
When I was growing up I had my own bedroom, a desk, a bookshelf, clothes, food and all the things a boy could want. Until we moved to Canada and had to abandon it all. I began to be very envious of kids I knew that had less dramatic parents and I tried to spend all my time with other people’s families. My comings and goings were strictly controlled and nothing was done without permission. My elder half-sister was placed in power over me and had the backing of my father, so that was just the way it was. As I grew older, my friends teased me about it and couldn’t understand my obedience to someone only two years older than me. The snap of the belt, the shame of waiting naked while he ate supper and relaxed before coming to the room, I never mentioned.
I was taught to read at about four years old by my elder sister. My nature is to share information and knowledge. My reasoning is that if we all shared the wonderful fruits of all the knowledge in all the books we would all become smarter and make a better world. My “stim” or “quirk” or “coping mechanism” for being autistic in a “neuro-normal” dominated world structure is to talk. It always was and always will be, as anyone who knows me for even ten minutes can attest. I don’t talk bull-shit, however, I tell true stories. People either love it or hate it like wet leprosy.
I suffered from “migraines” and re-current nightmares as a child and had three day long headaches that prevented me from eating or sleeping. My mother let me lay my head on her stomach and I remember it gurgled a lot. I was anemic and had to take iron tonic. My grandma had a jar of sarsaparilla root from which she made tea for me when I was at her house in Beaumont, Texas. I later learned that it has plant based testosterone hormone mimickers. Cherokee grandmas rock!
During my primary school years in Louisiana, I was the recipient of nearly straight A report cards (which were expected by my parents) and very “bad” Conduct grades, which I was often punished for at home. Once, I was sent home with a note informing my parents I had disrupted the class by talking and my mother slapped me silly and then beat the tar out of my naked ass with a belt. When my father got home, he doubled-down on the beating. I had to sit my welts on a pillow at school the next day and the teacher nearly cried and never “told on me” again.
My father branched out into making me copy lines such as “I won’t talk in class anymore.” and fill a two hundred page spiral notebook before being allowed out to play with friends. If the “penmanship” was sloppy, I had to do it over. And over. And over. To this day, I can hardly read my own tortured scrawl and I hold my breath and grind my dental work while operating a pen. Yay, keyboards! The schools I attended down South all had the Strap, Paddle and Jesus. The Canadian schools had paddles, “dunce caps” and sarcasm. My accent didn’t help me much.
In Louisiana my parents had a big bookcase built on the living room wall. It was full of books ranging from philosophers such as Bertrand Russell to Nietzsche and historians such as H. G. Wells. There were I. F. Stone Weekly’s, Chet Atkins albums, poetry books, a Treasury of Ribaldry by Louis Untermeyer, an entire shelf of Soviet Russian Short Stories, Khalil Gibran, Omar Khayyam, books about Jesus, an album of Hitler’s speeches and a book by the Marquis de Sade with drawings that would make a granite lion cry. The lower rack had Playboys. Most kids fathers had those but they were considered evil for boys. Except for my Canadian Yugoslavian friend, who’s mother encouraged him look at them. I read all the bookcase before the age of twelve. Some of it rattled me to the marrow. I once asked my mother where all those books had come from and if her and my father had actually read them all. Her answer was so vague that I cannot recall what she said.
At some point when I was a certain height, the beatings stopped and gave way to the occasional punch or hair pulling. I was constantly asked how old I was by my father and he would always tell me that he “wanted me gone by seventeen at the latest.” I ran away on a freight train in Houston, Texas when I was about fourteen but jumped back off after a few miles as my mind anticipated worse devils down the tracks than the one I already knew. It was headed to North-East Texas.
My mother left my Dad and took us to Texas to her mother’s house from North Vancouver where my father had brought us all in a sudden unexplained move only six months before. My mother told us that my father would try to kidnap and kill us and not to get in the car with him. I believed her. Three days later, I arrived “home” from school and he was there asleep in the bed. We all moved out of my grandma’s place together again and eventually returned to Canada. I never slept too well after that.
When I was a teen, I was seduced by an older landlady, who belonged to some Christian cult fringe denomination out of Spokane and she almost convinced me to marry her and move to Ecuador, where she was born. I announced the blessed news to my friends and family at a Thanksgiving dinner at my basement suite and was told by my family that if I did I would be disowned. I couldn’t imagine Jesus minding it. My mother got married as a teenager, Mary did it with an angel and Solomon had a warehouse full of wives. I apologized to the lady and all the guests but was determined to marry her to make holy our sin until she said her idea was to abandon her three children. That broke the spell.
My mother left my father again and next came an alcoholic step father while I was still a school boy. He used to swear at us in three or four languages and pee on the couch. I had to help him in his gas-fitter trade against his will and my talents. My mother told me when I was twenty and newly married that my (by that time estranged) father had sexually abused my elder half-sister all her childhood. The news sent me into a tornado of rage. I had recurrent dreams of ripping him apart with my bare hands. He phoned around this time and said he was coming from Alberta for a visit and to meet my wife. A day before the much dreaded meeting, my mother phoned with the news that he had committed suicide. I instantly, subconsciously, condemned myself for causing it by having a “bad” dream about hurting him and thus I spent the next few decades punishing myself in as many ways as a finely tuned, autistic mind can find.
Through all this, the one person that was a rock for me was my maternal Texas Cherokee grandma. She wasn’t for my mother but she was for me. She told me of my heritage and I spent my life researching the actual story. This is what solidified my desire to continue to live. To cherish the flame I now carry that had been carried through worse things than I have endured, so that I may be born to take my turn. The Texas Cherokee story is another true tale of horror, disgust, treachery and genocide. Those wounds also haven’t healed for many people. Definitely not in East Texas where that story happened. They will heal eventually and I have been telling that story to folks ever since I uncovered it. Part of my message is that genocide has a long pedigree.
Many survivors, like those of the Texas Cherokee, went underground, so to speak. Ladies protected their offspring in places like Texas and only told certain chosen youngsters to keep the story. I am one of those kids. I am telling this above story about my upbringing and my father for no other purpose than to illustrate the fact that all of us cannot know what things anyone passing by us has suffered. This is precisely the reason for universal compassion and diligence when looking after our own mental health and cultivating a balanced presence. Do I feel like a “privileged” Male White German Irish Swedish Welsh Texas Cherokee Louisiana Boy Scout Canadian? No. No, I don’t. Never have. Do I feel bitter or worthless? No. No, I don’t. But I once did. I felt lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut.
I had to learn about all my DNA the hard way and in every case, I found true stories of people being displaced out of their homes, tortured, raped, warred upon, persecuted and always moving away from the pain. White and red, Celt, Teuton and post Viking era Scandinavian suffering war, famine, political intrigue, being conquered, taxed and subjugated, persecuted religiously or just worn thin from hunger.
The battle is now in the territory of the mind. It is here we humans, all of us, must take the best teachings and tools and stop running away to find peace. We won’t “find” peace outside. We can, will and must make peace and we must do this first in our minds and our hearts will then follow. In the case of my Cherokee ancestors, I have had the necessity of being guided by dreams, books and occasional meetings with people and animals. Rolling Thunder and a big black timber wolf, to name only two. This is a very powerful way to learn and has been a blessing I am openly grateful for. I wouldn’t change it if I could.
It is a fact that when you rightly desire to know something, it will be shown to you. My desire for truth, dignity, knowledge and celebration of the gifts of my mixed blood knows no limits and my born nature is to share. I do this through the typewriter, computer and verbally. I carry stories, I always have and I always will. I wear my orange tee shirt with both empathy and compassion in solidarity with all people who believe in a sane future. Flowers return after trampling hooves.
fin