Sat 10 May 2008
Posted by admin under Chapter 2
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I got up this morning and found Wyn, my husband, on the sofa. He looked like he was meditating. Then he grunted and I knew he wasn’t seriously meditating. I had awakened hours before and found he was not in bed. There was a light on somewhere in the house. He had been reading his novel.
Usually it is I creeping around the house at all hours. Two days ago, though, we had been to the oncologist to see if all this raw food Wyn had been eating for the past eighteen months had had any affect on his prostate tumor. No it hadn’t. The blood flow to that region was so great the doctor took a biopsy. We are waiting.
“What are you thinking?” I asked
“About the bank,” he said.
“What about the possibility that you have cancer?”
“No, I’m waiting to think about that until after we get the results of the biopsy next week.”
“What if he says you need radiation, or to freeze it, or to remove it?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I want to discus what to do,” I said.
“How can we know what to do until we know what the biopsy says?” he said.
“We can decide whether to go the medical route or the spiritual route,” I said. “If we go the medical route then you need to get a job that will give you insurance so that you can pay for your treatment. If you go the spiritual route, we probably need to leave the country.”
We have recently lost our beautiful house on the hill, over-looking everything. It went into foreclosure and nothing we could do reversed that down ward spiral. I know I blame Wyn for losing the house on Signal Street. He had the capacity to get a job that could have saved it. But there was the possibility that the remission of his cancer was over and he didn’t want to go back to corporate life.
I loved that house. There was beauty from every window over looking the Ojai Valley and the mountains beyond. The sky’s always changing nature thrilled me. Sometimes, walking through the rooms at Signal Street I looked out the window at the sky and gasped. The dawn has made me weep from the view through those windows and from the deck. The glory of God was in my living room in the form of sky, clouds and color. The Truth of God was present in the wind. The sun coming up and the pink moon rising, storms, and bright cumulus cloud days, rolled in and out of my living room, bedroom, and dining room. How can I live without them? I felt at home there with the sky, the reflection of the pure and vibrant, ever present and ever changing God.
Being close to nature brought out the wildness in me. That wild land connected to the part of me that has been longing to go wild since I can remember. It began with my first love, a cat named Smoky.
Smoky came into our family when my parents took me to a home where there was a new litter of kittens. I was told I could pick one out. I picked out Smoky. Mom said they tried to interest me in prettier kittens but at first sight, Smoky won my heart. Smoky slept with me at night. I took off my pajama top just to feel his soft fur on my bare skin.
After about four years Smoky began spraying my room. I was told he was marking his territory. It was a sign to outsiders that I was his. My parents were not amused. They decided to give Smoky to relatives in the country where he could be himself without being a problem.
Nothing I said, no amount of pleading, threatening, or begging would change their minds. Smoky must go. Uncle Jim and Aunt Edna came for him. Smoky and I hid in my playhouse but they found us. Smoky fought with all his might. but they overpowered him, put him in a gunnysack and threw him in the trunk of their car and drove off.
That night we called Aunt Edna and she said they put Smoky in an abandoned chicken house so he would get used to it there. I went to bed alone and thought of Smoky. I missed him desperately. It was not the same without his purring. I imagined Smoky in the dark, bewildered, not knowing why he had been banished. I imagined him sad and lonely, missing me and our warm bed. I imagined Aunt Edna pushing his food under the door of his prison without a kind word or pat.
Three days later, Aunt Edna called to say Smoky had escaped. I could not imagine anything more heartbreaking happening. And for the first time, I did not forgive my parents. I was furious. I hated them. I would never smile again. I marked my mother’s best dresses with color crayons and hid her finger nail file. I stole candy at Sprouse Ritz, a near-by all-purpose store, and didn’t share it with anyone.
I lay in bed at night and imagined Smoky coming to me. I tried to smell him. I could see his nose and whiskers clearly. I had the idea that if I thought of him hard enough, it would send out a signal for him to come towards. I thought of his feet walking, the little soft pads bringing him closer and closer. To concentrate I imagined him walking towards my breath. With each inhale I imagined him being pulled across the space towards me. After all, if Jesus was invisible and God was invisible and they could send us help, I could help Smoky on the same invisible plane.
It was at this time I heard the operetta, “Carmen Jones”. When I heard the music from Carmen it was a turning point in my life. I felt rushes all over my body. The passion, desire, suffering and anger of that music and those songs was like a mirror in which I recognized all the feelings I previously had no words for. The haughtiness Carmen expressed to the prison guard and to José was my model for a way to treat my parents for taking Smoky. I memorized the whole operetta from start to finish. I came home from school and sat by our hifi, booklet in hand, singing along. My favorite song was, “The Harbeniara”. These were the words:
Love’s a baby that grows up wild
And he won’t do what you want him to.
Love ain’t nobody’s angel child,
And he won’t pay any mind to you.
One man gives me a diamond stud
And I won’t give him a cigarette,
One man treats me like I was mud,
And what I got that man can get.
That’s love, that’s love, that’s love
One Sunday afternoon, a year after he was banished, Smoky walked into our backyard. I was hanging upside down on my trapeze and Dad was pruning the peach tree. I ran to tell Mom. She was in the kitchen cooking. I said, all out of breath, “Mom, come look, Smoky came home.” She said, “No, it isn’t possible,” but she rushed out all the same.
Mom and Dad weren’t sure it was Smoky until he walked to the place he usually got fed, ate everything he was given of our chicken dinner, then walked to my bedroom and sprayed it thoroughly.
Even my parent’s strong sense of tidiness could not banish Smoky again. He was our hero. Something truly remarkable had happened in our family. We told the story to everyone. Mom even became willing to take him with us to the mountains on our vacation.
At first, the mountains scared Smoky and he was miserable. He spent the first three days under the bed. Then he began venturing out. It wasn’t long before he stayed out all night, then he was gone three days. We were certain something had eaten him.
One night there was a sound of scratching at the door of our cabin that woke us up. It was Smoky. He came in all wild eyed, jumped on my bed, licked my face all over and demanded out. We never saw him again.
If your love bird decides to fly
There ain’t no door that you can close
She just pecks you a quick good-bye
And flicks the salt from her tail and goes.
That’s love, that’s love, that’s love.
Dad said Smoky went wild. What does that mean to go wild? I imagined all sorts of things; something taking over his body, something he came to love more than me. I imagined him turning into a bobcat or a mountain lion, but Dad said he’d look just the same but something changed inside him.
When Dad left us a few years later for another woman, I asked Mom, “Did Daddy go wild?”
Many years later during a writing class I took with Deena Metzger we were given the assignment of writing about an animal as if we were the animals. Everyone chose wild animals; bears, wolfs, coyotes. I choose a house cat. When I read my silly piece about this spoiled creature I was embarrassed. But on my way home I remembered Smoky. I was almost forty. It had been over thirty years since he left. I hadn’t thought of Smoky for at least twenty years. I had to pull the car over to the side of the road and sob. I could not see for my tears.
That night I wrote a letter to Smoky. I told him what his leaving had done to my life. How I had found one man after another who abandoned me in one way or another.
He wrote back, “When I found the mountain stream I could no longer drink water from a bowl. After I had caught a mouse and crunched his skull and ate it all I could not eat Puss ‘n Boots. I had to go wild. I had started to change on my way to you from your Aunt’s house but my love for you kept calling me. When I got to the mountains the thrill of the wild was more than I could resist. Even though I was cold and often hungry, it was better than being in a lifeless house. I had to follow my own true nature. Use this as a teaching. Find your true nature and go wild yourself. Untame every bit of you.”
At sixty-one, though I have touched the wild many times, my love of safety, the known, comfort, security, all the human thoughts that hold me to this plane of existence through fear and desire still has me in its grasp. I drink coffee to drown out unwanted feelings and to force myself to do social activities I am too tired to do. I play solitaire on the computer to numb my mind.
There are moments, though, late at night, I stand outside and feel my whole body at once, without words, feeling the nameless presence of the Universe. I feel my soul reaching out with love towards the all-Loving presence of God. At that moment I feel fully alive. In that moment I long to let go of this body, this mortal mind, everything I know, and walk into the unknown. I would leave that Carmen, siren song, leave the shelter of my house with its hot water and pantry, but something stops me. I turn, when I get too cold, and head back to my warm, cozy bed.
How would a person go wild? How does a person leave the human world and join forces with the enlightened ones? In my study of spiritual teachers I have read that it doesn’t help to make a better human condition – just know God. Walk in the awareness that we are all The One, the great I AM. Let your life happen from that place. Breathing in and out with great awareness – walk the dogs, water the garden.
Perhaps by losing every material thing, all my money, my house, my “stuff,” life is gently pushing me out towards the forest, towards that mountain stream.