“Synchronicity” means things that happen at the same time but have no clear relationship to each other. While I’d been working on this month’s column, I heard from Nathasha asking that “memories” be the general topic for the coming issue of Audacity.

What I’d been writing about was the way memories affect can affect me today. That’s synchronicity. No clear relationship, but more than coincidence.

February’s been a frustrating month. Four months have passed since my leg got broken. It seemed like four years as I was going through that time. My doctor finally—three weeks ago—gave me the OK to toss the complicated knee brace and to get around without crutches as much as possible.

Earlier this month, we went down and visited a funky hot spring down in Oregon’s cow-boy country. Central Oregon is divided into cappuccino country and cowboy country: I like both. The pool at the hot spring was about 100 degrees. After dark, there were coyotes singing and thousands and thousands of stars.

I entered the pool very cautiously, but within five minutes I was walking from one end of the pool to the other, back and forth. My joints felt a little stiff, but fine. No pain in zero-gravity water. It was very therapeutic.

We came back to town after a couple of days and I was fired up to return to the pool where I fell and broke my leg. But my emotional reality stepped in—as it often does.

The first morning we planned on going, I “overslept.” I did that the second morning, too. I gave myself some serious pep talks. The physical therapist stopped by and encouraged me.

She also suggested I use the walker the first couple of visits. OK: even though my ego takes a hit whenever I use the walker, it did seem like a good idea—just for a little extra margin of security. We got that resolved.

And then my partner, Beth, got sick with sinusitis. It took a week to get into the doctor to make sure she didn’t have strep. Then it took another week to where she felt like doing anything. It was frustrating for her and for me.

So, now, she’s well.

I’m regularly walking around the house without even using a cane. On the second of March we’re going up to Anacortes, Washington to visit friends and go sightseeing, eat really fresh seafood and reminisce about the odd old days.

I’m looking forward to the trip. Each day of the week has plenty of stuff to do, too much to fit in visits to the pool.

But I have trouble believing in coincidences. Sure, I can psychoanalyze about myself from now until next Thursday without trying. In fact, I try not to, but I do.

It’s very easy for self-awareness to turn into self-abuse; R.D. Laing, a British psychoanalyst some years back said that certain personality types end up being downright mean to them-selves because they set impossibly high standards for their behaviors and thoughts.

Exactly. This becomes a pattern that’s very difficult to break. I can come close to being mean to myself.

These kinds of questions come barreling through my mind: Why am I resisting going back to the pool? Am I actually resisting, and, if I am, what am I afraid of? Why can’t I just go and do it?

Old memories: old childhood memories—again.

As a child, what I learned to do, and what I came to believe about myself and the world, are still semi-operating rules, waiting on stand-by, until I investigate, question, and change them.

If I don’t, every time I break one of those rules, I sabotage my self-esteem. Those old memories are like emotional crabgrass: they keep sprouting up.

I inherited impossibly high standards from my family, as they no doubt did during their own childhoods, as well and I still can get into criticizing myself for not meeting those standards. That can get to be a downward spiral pretty fast. The habit of constantly hammering myself for not meeting those standards, without gaining any “improvement,” creates a steady state of self-criticism and self-disgust. I’m so useless. I can’t do any-thing right…I’m never good enough. Yetta yetta.

And if I’m never good enough, all that anger and frustration fermenting in my soul is go-ing to find an outlet. There has to be a safety valve, because if there isn’t I’d explode, self-destruct. Other people function as the safety valve. I can get utterly outraged at what they do actually, at what I perceive them doing if I’m angry with myself.

And when I’m in that critical mode, I’m angry at myself. Then, not only am I, a failure, but so are they.

How this works is very logical. I certainly heard a lot of stuff about my faults and short-comings while I was a kid. A lot. Because a child is utterly dependent on her or his par-ents or caregivers, it’s really important for that child’s survival to do as much as possible to please these important adults.

I’m trying to be in a don’t-push-the-river mode. Whatever dynamics have been at work, they’ll pass. I’ll have a week of vacation, see old friends, and come back refreshed.

My internal conflicts about getting back to the pool will have eased off—the energy I spent dealing with them will have gone elsewhere. Then we’ll see what happens.
Progress, not perfection.

Peter wants to hear from you. Email him at nathasha@audacitymagazine.com . ]]> http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2007/03/02/synchronicity/feed/ 0 http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2007/02/25/a-journey-through-reading/ http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2007/02/25/a-journey-through-reading/#comments Sun, 25 Feb 2007 15:17:03 +0000 Peter Webster http://www.audacitymagazine.com/?p=349

The spoiler on this month’s column is this: it’s about some books I recently read and, well, loved. Perfect for Valentine’s Day, sort of.

Being rather immobilized the last three months, I’ve been reading on a daily basis. I spend the mornings reading news stories. Afternoons, I write, and read in the evenings.

I’m clearly addicted to information. Information is power, at least political power. Political means in terms of ourselves and the matrix— the world—we live in. The more I know about the nature of brittle bones, the more I can relate to the orthopedic surgeon as an equal.
The more I know about Medicare and so forth: otherwise I’m caught on a sort of magical mystery tour—with no idea who’s driving the tour bus. That’s not good.

So I read, both on the internet and stuff that’s been printed. Ethnology and history. Spirituality. Memoirs. Story-telling—fiction— is nice, if there’s something underneath the story.

I want to tell you about a few books I’ve recently read, and how they affected me.

I just read Louise Erdrich, a regional writer from North Dakota. North Dakota does not seem like a location for insightful writing, and neither is northern Minnesota. Her “Islands and Books in Ojibwe Country” is a travel book about a trip she and her eighteen month- old daughter took to the boundary lakes between Minnesota and
Ontario: Ojibwe Country.

She brings that stretch of border alive with sun-dancers, tradition, history, bibliophiles, mother-anxieties, and just average people. Everything she writes about is all alive—everything:—lakes, rocks, books, all of it. I liked the book so much I read it twice.

Our town has a good library, but it hasn’t been particularly accessible to me lately. I discovered web sites for used books by mail order. Every title I typed in came up with new and used copies.
Some of them were books I remembered from years ago—I’d had copies and lost them (more likely: loaned them out and never got them back).

“Fools Crow: Wisdom and Power,” was the first one I ordered. Then I ordered books about the Oglala Lakota holy man, Black Elk. Both Black Elik and Fools Crow were the real thing. There’re dozens of fraudulent medicine men and women who claim to have “the medicine,” in order to exploit people for money. Black Elk and Fools Crow helped people without asking for money. I wish I’d known them.

I also stumbled across Kenneth Rexroth’s “Communitarianism”, a book I hadn’t read in twenty-five years.

Rexroth wrote about communal movements in American history—Brooke Farm, the Amana Colony, Mormons, Shakers, Hutterites, and countless failed experiments in alternative communities. There are still some around, leftovers from the ‘Sixties. I know of two here in Oregon.
Very few communal situations (“intentional communities” many of them are now called) have been successful. The Mormons, Hutterites and a scattering of others have been endured: the majority of them are religious and structured.

In an increasingly fragmented society, living in small co-operative communities is very appealing. Utah originally was a cooperative commonwealth, under the usually benign hand of Brigham Young.

I’m fascinated by the Mormons; one line of my ancestors were LDS pioneers, and as a result, I have distant cousins—”shirt-tail relations”— all over the state.

Communalism isn’t about Lenin or Marx or the 20th Century mistake called “Communism.” Rexroth quotes a story about this confusion:
“…when the Communist International was formed, a delegate objected to the name. Referring to all these groups he said: “But there are already communists.” Lenin answered: “Nobody ever heard of them, and when we get through with them nobody ever will.”

This confusion of the two names is still with us. Non-Marxist communism exists, but on a very small scale. Too bad, because parts of it like communal housing, are viable and practical. I’ve lived communally many times and liked it.

Another old friend of a book I found was Jerry Kamstra’s “Weed: the Autobiography of a Dope Smuggler.” Jerry Kamstra is, at last report, still around in northern California, reminiscing about the old days, Mexican cops, and trying to sneak past U.S. Customs. Kamstra’s book has some scary and some funny moments.

His book rings true—I knew a couple of smugglers back then; they were adventurous and did it for small profits and the hell of it. Times have changed, and Mexico is no longer the pothead’s dream it was thirty-five years ago.

But, those days are part of cultural history and Kamstra’s book is both a good documentary and a good read. It carried me back thirty-five years into a scene that had been intense, scary, and fun all at the same time. I’m glad I’m not there any more.

So, there’re some books I’ve been doing archeology in, looking at my past and the world I lived in, and finding parallels to my life today in Ms Erdrich’s books. It took a broken leg to remind me how much I love books and reading.

Email your comments and questions to nathasha@audacitymagazine.com . ]]> http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2007/02/25/a-journey-through-reading/feed/ 0 http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/12/11/my-health-cracks-me-up/ http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/12/11/my-health-cracks-me-up/#comments Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:21:16 +0000 Peter Webster http://www.audacitymagazine.com/?p=352

Where have I been, what day is it, and why do I have this silly- looking velcro and nylon brace on my leg? Maybe it has something to do with these interesting pills I’ve been taking…

At the end of October, I took a fall and broke my right tibia and fibula. I was over at the local pool, getting out of the hot tub; I usually go there three times a week for the arthritis water exercise classes, and afterward I sit in the hot tub for ten or fifteen minutes.

I got out of the hot tub, started down the steps on my way back to the dressing room, and the next minute I was laying on my side on the steps and I knew what had happened.

I hadn’t broken a long bone in decades, but by the time I realized I was down, I also knew what had happened. It was a feeling I’d had many times.

Those neural pathways from the past were half-forgotten and overgrown with time, but not lost.

What a sick feeling: knowing what’s wrong, that there’s really no way to change it, and it’s going to hurt a whole lot.

Within a few minutes the staff had blankets around me, ice on my leg, and the ambulance was on it’s way. The shocky-numbness didn’t last long. My leg began feeling as if there was something in it the size of a baseball bat and it was pushing a lot of things into places they shouldn’t be.

It took fifteen minutes for the EMTs to arrive. They gave me some morphine and I began feeling better…or just feeling less.

One of the lifeguards got my stuff out of my locker. I had all my medications written down, and a card identifying my insurance, my doctor, blah blah, don’t ask me questions, just let me drift as far way as I can…After the EMTs got my leg splinted and I was on the gurney, things seemed a bit better.

All the people at the pool waved good-by and wished me luck as I was hauled off. I waved back to them and said, “Thank God for Opiates!” as I went out the door.

Beth met us at the ER. Just before I was unloaded from the ambulance, the EMTs gave me another shot. I knew I’d be there for a long time before the ER staff would do much for me.

The staff remembered me from my visit back in August. We made bad jokes. Ha ha ha: gallows humor—laughing or crying, same release. I was too fur-brained to be angry.

After seven hours in the ER they sent me home. We stopped at the fire station and got the EMTs to come up and help me into the apartment and bed.

I was miserably stoned for the next week. A heavy fog. No attention span. Vicodin every few hours. I’d forgotten just how much something like that hurts. There was a chewing, medium-level ongoing pain that just wore me down, interrupted every few hours by some intense earthquake spasms.

The pain pills took care of that, once I got in the habit of medicating myself by the clock, rather than waiting to really hurt before I did anything about it.

Unfortunately, that low-intensity stoned state left me whacked. I had neither motivation nor focus to do anything serious—like write more than a few sentences at a time.

I’d also forgotten that the pain doesn’t decrease in a linear manner: it goes down a descending see-saw, zig and zag. The pain keeps diminishing, but it still has some bad moments.

It’s been four weeks now; another eight weeks to go before I can put weight on my leg. No surgery, which is probably a very good thing: I think just breaking my leg was enough trauma for this season…

Thank God for my iBook and wireless internet. I understand that the world has kept on going without my attention. The politicians still behave like politicians; the meat grinder in the Middle East grinds on, the crises that seemed so important and threatening a month ago are still there—not much has really changed.

That’s probably the big lesson: the world goes on with or without my permission and engagement. Darn it!

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been up to, lately.

Email Peter at nathasha@audacitymagazine.com . ]]> http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/12/11/my-health-cracks-me-up/feed/ 0 http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/10/31/facing-the-monsters/ http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/10/31/facing-the-monsters/#comments Tue, 31 Oct 2006 15:23:25 +0000 Peter Webster http://www.audacitymagazine.com/?p=354 “Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.” – Bertrand Russell

We live in fearful times. Besides the usual—everyday—fears of not being liked or getting old, we’re also afraid of being attacked by terrorists and blown up. Statistically, this isn’t likely, but it is presented as a possibility every time we watch the news. It tends to wear us down, like water eventually wears away rock. For those of us who are disabled there’re other possibilities. Not necessarily probabilities—but possibilities. What if we lose our incomes or health care? As those fears pile up, we get more fearful.

Yet there are people who seem to be unafraid—or at least they do things that are brave. People who willingly get arrested for their beliefs—Martin Luther King, Jr., the signers of our Declaration of Independence, the thousands who risked their lives and sometimes lost them doing what they thought was right. They may have been afraid, but they weren’t terrified and they didn’t panic.

Facing up to fear is hard, no matter what anyone says. Sometimes fear is a very realistic response to a situation. It was realistic for civil rights marchers to be afraid of getting beat. Most of us know what the “flight or flight” response is; it’s triggered by fear.
Adrenaline pumps throughout our bodies, our vascular system closes down; our breathing becomes shallow: we’re ready—we hope—to stand up for ourselves or to get away as quickly as possible. This is a response that’s been with us forever—probably since our first ancestors had to figure out what to do when a big carnivore began walking toward them, licking its chops. Fear has great value.

Fear also can lead us to great rewards. It can show us who we are, what we can do. It can bring us gifts.

Some of the Indian people of the Northwest Coast have a story about a horrible sea monster named Sisiutl. When you walk along the beach and see the stone cliffs, you can often see faces in the stone. These faces, they say, are the remains of people who saw Sisiutl and tried to run away; their souls were eaten by the monster and they were turned to stone. Nobody can outrun Sisiutl. You see trees that are broken off or twisted into terrible shapes; the trees saw Sisiutl coming and tried to run but they couldn’t.

Some people claim Sisiutl has three heads: the two outside heads are of ghastly monsters; the inside head is that of a human being. Other people say the monster only has two horrible heads, one at each end of its huge snake-like body. But they all agree that when humans, or trees, or anything, sees Sisiutl and try to run away, they always get caught and turned to stone or twisted into terrible shapes. So, if you see Sisiutl and Sisiutl see you, there’s great danger. But—

—Sisiutl’s heads (no matter if there’re two or three heads) cannot see each other. Sisiutl doesn’t know what it looks like. If someone doesn’t run from the monster, but stands and faces the it, the heads will look at that person. When that happens, Sisiutl will see all of its heads. This pleases the monster so much, it will give the person a wonderful gift: the Vision People will come and live inside him or her and the person will be able to see Truth. Fear will no longer rule her or his life: Truth will. It won’t always be easy, but once someone realizes she or he faced Sisiutl and survived, that person can face anything.

That’s what I believe happens when I face my own fears and act with courage. Courage, someone once said, is the greatest of all virtues, because without courage, none of the other virtues are possible.

Here’s a story from the other side of the world:
Lions love gazelles—at least gazelle meat. But the little antelopes are very fast and can easily outrun lions. So what the lions do is cooperate. A group of young fast lions will start stalking a herd of gazelles; the gazelles will move away from the lions. But the lions are actually moving the gazelles in a certain direction, toward tall grass. In that grass there are older slower lions—big lions. They can hardly run, but they can stand up and roar. When the herd is moved close to the old lions, that’s just what they do. The gazelles are frightened and turn and run toward the young lions…

If the gazelles had continued toward the roaring but decrepit lions, they could have easily escaped, but they didn’t. They didn’t know that their own fears were unrealistic. They sealed their own fates by running the other direction.

I’ve had a lot of unrealistic fears in my own life, of course. A big one, that still pops up, is that by being really honest about what’s going on with me, I’ll seem—to others (to me, actually)—to be petty or silly or childish. Sometimes I am petty, silly, childish; we all are from time to time; those feelings are within the range of normal human emotions. When I try to hide them, I usually become even more petty, silly, and childish. But, if I’m honest and take the risk of saying what I really feel, the other stuff—the defenses—go away. They aren’t important any more. The people who like me for who I am still like me; the people who don’t like me when I’m being honest…life’s too short to put up with them. False Expectations Appearing Real:
F.E.A.R.—Someone, one time, told me that; I like it, because a lot of my what-if fears are: utterly unreal. False expectations.

So that’s what, for me, facing my fears is all about. It isn’t about not being afraid, it’s about not being overcome by them. Facing the awful monsters, going toward the roar.

Email us at nathasha@audacitymagazine.com and share your fears with us. Did you overcome them?

It’s been a rigorous month and I’m glad it’s over. I’m glad it happened the way it did. But it was intense.

I got back from the Sundance on Tuesday afternoon. That night, I was in the ER at our local hospital. I couldn’t breathe. The oxygen level in my blood was down to 89%. The doctor dictated “…frail, 68-yr- old male…” It was bad enough being there without that.

“I-am-not-frail,” I said, between inhalations.

The doctor, a young woman just back from Iraq, looked closely at me.

“You are sixty-eight years old, you weigh 125 pounds, you have Type One Osteogenesis Imperfecta—O.I., kyphosis, bronchitis, and hypoxia— and you are trying to convince me you aren’t frail.”

Beth put her hand on my shoulder. “Peter, you are frail. Face it. It was absolutely crazy for you to go to that Sundance and drag the buffalo skulls.”

I couldn’t think of a comeback. I wanted one very badly, but every time I tried to think of something, I felt the oxygen going into my lungs and that was enough to keep me quiet. It was my second visit for the evening. The first time I’d been short of breath but all the doctor then on duty had me do was breathe oxygen for half an hour.

About the closest examination he did was say, “I’ve read about blue sclera in patients with O.I., but I’ve never seen them. May I look?”
Shortly after that, he sent me home.

The second time, I was scared and in panic. I was suffocating. Beth called 911 and I rode in the ambulance.

I had to explain the raw places on my back from the wood pins that had been inserted for pulling the skulls. Several of the staff knew what a Sundance was, but from movies like “A Man Called Horse.” None of them seemed to think I was nuts (later on, several staff members asked me reasonable questions about the ceremony, like “So, it’s about sacrifice for the people, is it? Are you Indian? Did you have a vision?”).

My hospital visit lasted three and a half days. I’ve spent worse times in hospitals. I had a room with a view: fifth floor, looking west at the Cascade Mountains: forests, rocks, glaciers. A view like that from a hotel room would be very expensive (we’ll see what happens when the bills come in).

I was able to use the bathroom, I could sit up and eat, and I wasn’t in any particular pain—except when I’d cough and that felt like my diaphragm muscles were being sawn through. By the end of the 2nd day I was able to take a shower by myself. The next morning I was off of the oxygen.

It got boring. I know they charge for boxes of tissue paper: I wonder if they charge for the number of times I pushed the remote on the TV.

On the second day, Beth brought my laptop, but I was so disoriented between where I’d been and where I was, I couldn’t focus on what to do with it. I had the attention span of a squirrel. Too many experiences at the Sundance, too much panic when I got home, too many people around, my nice old man’s schedules and love of peace and quiet were shredded.

The Sundance is simply a time to pray; not that praying is simple, but that’s the ceremony’s focus. All I could pray was two or three minutes at a time, even by defining prayer as sort of silent openness. Still, like Zen meditation or Yoga, it’s coming back to the focus point no matter how many times I wander off it. Having others around trying to do the same thing helped me.

Since so much of my experience at the ceremony pivoted around spirituality, instead of concepts and systems as with religion, and because it’s intensely personal, it can’t be fully described by words. It’s like trying to logically describe grief or love, dynamic processes of the entire organism. Words can hint at it, dance around the center, but not give the experience life or depth.

I was both a participant and an observer—of my own life. When they pierced me—pinched up the skin over my clavicles, and inserted the scalpel, it hurt—right there where they did it. That was all. Once on the left and once on the right. I felt the cherry-wood pins; about four inches long and tapered at both ends, slide in. Then it was done. It stung but that was about all. No spasms of pain like with a fracture. The helpers—people who had already done something similar for four years or more—led me over to the line of roped-together buffalo skulls. I’d looked at those skulls for several days. They stood me in front of the skulls, and hooked loops of rope to the pins in my back.

One of the helpers said, “When you’re ready, my brother.”

No reason to mess around: I made a cry of strength and stepped forward. The pins popped out: one, two. I think they made a noise, but I don’t know for sure. No pain: a bit of stinging, but no suffering. It happened to a part of me, but not all of me. My self, my existence, was a lot more than the physical feeling. Someone later described it as what runners feel when they hit the wall and keep going. Sort of breaking the pain barrier. I think that’s what the nature of spiritual experience is all about: going way beyond one’s personal and immediate existence. We are more than our bodies. And it’s possible to bring that awareness back to day-to-day life.

It’s been quite a month—but like I said, I’m glad it’s over.

The Kootenays are a series of steep, narrow and winding north-south valleys, scooped and scoured out of granite mountains, westerly reaches of the Rockies by ancient glaciers. The valleys have long fjord-like lakes—you can see across them, but not from one end to the other; the mountains rise sharp and timbered, and the higher peaks have year-around ice-caps.

People live tucked into the narrow bottom lands in small towns and snug little farms. It’s very green. Up until the mid Twentieth Century, travel was by railroad between the lakes, and by stern-wheel steamboats on the lakes. It was very isolated.

Miners were the first settlers. Mines need wood: loggers and sawmills came next. Being Canada, though, meant it wasn’t like the lawless mining camps in the States, though; things were relatively calm and peaceful. The mines, of course, failed after a while.

Early in the last century, a groups known as Dukhobors arrived. The Dukhobors came from Tzarist Russia; they’re a pacifist, vegetarian sect. Canada offered them a home. Dukhobors established farming communities in the fertile valleys.

I like them: their gardening skills and earthy cooking are legendary. They’re hospitable and friendly. Many of their old log cabins and barns are still in use and well-kept.

We visited with friends—Canadians, ex-English, ex-Americans, even ex-South African and German, and toured.

One drive was very special. My son was conceived while his mom and I lived in a little Dukhobor cabin up on Sproule Creek about six miles from the main town of Nelson. There was a little orchard by the cabin and in late summer bears and deer would come for apples (that’s the only time I’ve ever seen a wild bear).

Beth and I drove to the cabin; it’s still in use. I had some of my son’s ashes and, with a prayer, returned the ashes to creek, near to where he’d begun. Great Spirit, thank you for what you’ve given, and thank you for what you’ve taken…

During World War Two, both America and Canada rounded up tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestery (as little as 1/16th Japanese ancestry) and interned them in interior “relocation camps.”

Whenever I hear of some of the outlandish solutions to the “immigration invasion,” I remember those camps. The governments viewed them as untrustworthy: spies and saboteurs. They lost everything.

Interesting: not a single case of Japanese espionage or sabotage was documented in North America.

In America, 120,000 people—women, men, the young, the old—were stuffed into hastily-built camps in remote desert locations, and guarded by soldiers and barbed wire. We’d call it “ethnic cleansing,” today.

Twelve thousand Canadian-Japanese families along the west coast were forcibly packed up and relocated. Many were sent to the Kootenays. Fifteen hundred went to the decrepit mining and logging town of New Denver, alongside Slocan Lake. New Denver wasn’t quite a ghost town, but the boom days were long past.

The location was remote enough that guarding them was minimal. The families moved into abandoned cabins, tents, and hastily-built shacks made of green lumber. They lived alongside Euro-Canadians. Friendships developed. At the end of the war some of the relocated families remained.

Today, New Denver is rejuvenated, but several of the old Japanese cabins have been preserved as part of a memorial commemorating that shabby period. The way the two communities learned to live together is a monument to commonalities rather than differences. Even during the animosities of war-time, people learned to respect and care for each other.

During the Viet Nam War, the Kootenays attracted hundreds of U.S. draft resisters. Many are still there. That area has a history of accepting and integrating refugees. There’s something special and calming about the region. It was emotionally healthy for me to be in that atmosphere, because I need reminders of similarities instead of differences.

It’s always good to get across the border and realize that other people lead very similar lives but without hysteria and fear. Crime is lower. People aren’t as likely to lock their doors or their cars. Canadians escaped the gun slinging, winner-take-all-myths of the U.S., and see the world differently.

Everything is very familiar, like language and brands, cars, clothes, conversational references, but it’s also different enough, so the effect is to slightly tweak our perceptions, shift us from one angle to another. Light falls at a different angle: colors shift, shades and highlights change, planes and depths become different. We see the world—our world—from another point of view.

In the case of visiting Canada, this means seeing America and American society from outside. It isn’t always comfortable to do this, because things get shaken up.

We’re constantly made aware of differences between “us” and “them,” Christians and Muslims, good guys and bad guys, white skin and black skin. There’s nothing like an enemy or enemies, out there somewhere, to get a nation to take it’s mind off of domestic problems.

It’s as if America is under siege. It’s been like that throughout my entire life-time. But what I see when I go to Canada is a country very similar to this one—only they don’t believe anyone is out to get them. That means people behave in a more relaxed and open manner.

Every time I go to British Columbia, I wonder why America can’t be—more like Canada. It’s not just a good place to visit, it’s a lesson in humility.

The Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, we’re driving up to see our friends, Carolyn and Bob—and their daughter, Thea— in Anacortes, Washington. Monday or Tuesday, we’ll drive to Vancouver. We’re going to goof off. It’s time for a break from the routine, not a fracture!

The news is as grim as ever: civilians die by the dozens in Iraq; the government continues to set record levels of mendacity and spying on citizens; a woman here in Bend has been arrested and charged with murdering a child left in her care; logging companies are gearing up for an assault on the remaining old-growth trees; and on it goes, a hundred run-away trains running down a hundred converging tracks.

Time for some mental health time: museums, ethnic cuisine, a cosmopolitan city, and close friends to hang out with. And then over into the western Rockies, glacier-scooped valleys and spectacular lakes. Friends there, too.

Close friends are really my family—extended family—but there’s the love and acceptance that I certainly never got from my birth family. It’s a lot easier to see that now, reflecting back, than it was back then, trying to get what I wanted; a “normal” family. It wasn’t there.

But what I have are the warm relationships I thought only came from some “Ozzie and Harriet” or “Father Knows Best” kind of family. (Reminds me of the Rolling Stones’ “You don’t always get what you
want…but you get what you need.”)

Someone once said “Normal is a setting on a clothes dryer, no more.” One of the perks of our time is that we have so many examples of that truth. It doesn’t matter if Dick or Jane has one mother and one father, or two mothers or two fathers, an auntie and an uncle—what matters is that we have people who love us and accept us as we are, no ifs, ands, or buts: just who and what we are.

Around those kinds of loving people we are absolutely safe and free. I’ve never outgrown that need; nobody does! So a group of us, who are close, emotionally honest and intimate with each other, are going to go sight-seeing.

Along the way, we’ll giggle and laugh, eat and wander, take pictures, probably remember those who have gone before and who aren’t with us any more, and be grateful for what we have.

My sister has a prayer: “Great Spirit, thank you for what you have given and what you have taken away.”

My family offered one authority: follow our directions and you will turn out good. If you don’t, look out!

The thing was, I could see that the family system wasn’t all that hot. What was said and what was done weren’t the same. There were feuds and hurts. I was taught to be honest but I saw lots of dishonesties.

Business deals, tax arrangements, even how people were treated and then talked about afterward didn’t have much to do with honesty. It was pretty easy to decide that those authorities weren’t all that great. A voice inside me said, “Something’s wrong here.”

I got older and found other authorities: out of books, mostly, but also friends. I tried those. The little voice inside said, “Hmm, this isn’t quite right, either,” but at that age, youth, late adolescence, it was very important to belong. I paid more attention to the voices around me than to the one inside me. I tried to follow those directions.

They were like clothes that didn’t fit, but they were supposed to, so I stuffed myself into them. About then I pretty much stopped listening to myself.

After years and years of careening through life I reached the point where it became clear to me: my life wasn’t working. I started waking up. It was a surrender to reality. What I believed I should be doing and how I should be doing it just didn’t work.

I’d rejected one set of outside authorities for another set. The reverse image, only with a 1960s spin. I’d taken on, wholesale, other values than those I’d been raised with and already rejected. But I’d never checked out the new ones in terms of their functionality in my life.

My life was a bloody awful mess. Total wreckage. It was easy to not take responsibility for that—a million different riffs on “if only” were available.

“If only I wasn’t so far in debt, if the job paid more, if only the this that or the other was different.” You know.

Eventually, things evolved. Reality was still reality, however. What became different was that my perceptions of things changed. It was a bloody hard process to go through. I’d hammered my head against a brick wall because everything I chose to believe, what I’d ingested but not digested, required me to get through that particular wall. There was no way I could get through it.

Finally, I gave up and stumbled away from it. The world didn’t end. I wandered—or was led, depending on how you look at it—into 12-step recovery and my wounds began to heal.

There’s no way to describe how difficult it was: I went through periods of being scared stupid, of utter confusion, total dislocation. But even all that was better than crashing my head against that wall. It was as if I could see things I couldn’t before see.

For a while, there was the authority of the book of Alcoholics Anonymous and the experiences of the people in the meetings. I was lucky: the book and the people kept everything in the realm of their experiences and suggestions—it was, well, since nothing else has worked, why not try this?. See how it goes.

There was just enough improvement that I kept it up. It was all based on checking back on my experience: did things get better? Yes: increment by increment.

I gained a home, reunited with my family, and a small income. There were still problems, however.

The 12-step meetings didn’t satisfy my essential loneliness and an ongoing feeling of being incomplete. But I knew I wasn’t going to become whole through someone or something else…. The authority offered by the book and the meetings offered a recycled rap about religion; like if I just turned myself over to God and got spiritual, everything would be cool.

I went to church; I got told a lot about what I should do. Not suggestions, this time, just commands. It was back to not looking to my own life for information about what to do next, instead, just follow a higher authority, because I was, basically, a sinner and couldn’t trust myself. That didn’t ring true.

Therapy, counseling, was the next step.

That was when I started liking myself the way I was and quit assuming I was all wrong. 12-Step Recovery had brought me to an acceptance of the world and of my own responsibilities; counseling took me to self-acceptance. The beginnings of self-acceptance—that part couldn’t come from the outside; it has to be done on the inside.

A couple of things that kept me on track: “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” and, “if God knows all about you and loves you, why don’t you?”

I can’t love my neighbor, or anyone else, if I don’t love myself. That means eating right, sleeping enough, not poisoning myself with crap, forgiving myself for being human and doing what humans do. For not being perfect.

If God, however one defines God, if God does love me, then God wouldn’t have brought me this far just to say, “Hah-hah, April Fool!”

I’ve been told there’s a contradiction in insisting on self-authority and then talking about God or Creator. The people who say that offer to be authorities for me. Thanks, I’ll trust to find my own authority.

On a daily basis, I check with myself: am I honest about what I’m going? Am I kind to myself and others? Do I try to help myself and others rather than hinder? That brings me to consider responsibility to the rest of creation.

Five hundred years ago, John Donne, the English poet and divine, wrote: “No man is an island, entire of himself.”

That’s the way it works for me.

Thinking back on my mother is kind of like…my family is history is like a wood-pile I once sorted and stacked up. It’s fallen down over the last dozen years. Writing about Mom is an attempt at trying to stack it back up. Every time I turn over a piece of wood, I wonder what I’ll find under it: maybe just more wood, maybe spiders. Writing this is an adventure. There’s always old unfinished business — everywhere.

What can I say about my mother? This: she did the best she could, for as long as she could.

She did an “assisted suicide,” about fifteen years ago. Terminal cancer, congestive heart failure, emphysema, and no desire to stay alive. “All I want to do is be with your father,” she said to me a week before she died. Dad had died three years before.

***

Mom didn’t raise me, but she was always around my life. Her parents,
Nana and Arch, raised me. There are a couple of things I remember about the early times: one was that when she did come to visit, my dad was rarely along, since he and my grandfather didn’t get along (my grandfather thought Dad had ruined Mom’s career), and she never stayed long; “I’ve got to get back to pick up your father after work.”

She talked to Nana every day on the phone. Sometimes I’d call her. When I hadn’t talked to Mom for a while, Nana always told me to call her. But before noon—”Before she gets…tired.” That meant before she’d started the day’s drinking.

It took me a long time to see Mom in the context of her life; the way she grew up, the pressures she lived with, and the times she lived in. It wasn’t a good scene. Her father came out of a poverty-twisted Mormon family in Salt Lake; Nana’s family had moved to Salt Lake from Illinois—they also were poor and thought they could get ahead in Utah; they were non-Mormon and they couldn’t get anywhere.

Arch went to work when he was eleven, sweeping out the first Cadillac agency in Salt Lake. He became a mechanic and a salesman as a teenager. He was a hustler—today he would be called an entrepeneur. Nana was working her way through business school; her family lived in a dirt-floored adobe. They both were turn of the 20th-Century poor.

Mom was born while they still lived in Salt Lake City. Soon after, though, they moved to Los Angeles; this was right after World War I, Los Angeles was beginning its roll; people could make money there. Mom was pretty and extremely graceful. Arch decided she would be a movie star. They got her dance lessons. At home, she practiced for hours.

She was very good. By seventeen, she was a chorus girl at Paramount Studios. The photos from back then show her high cheekbones and vaguely Asian eyes…she was a beautiful young woman. Arch was her agent. He knew she was star material. My mom told me she didn’t want to be a star.

“The story was, to get good parts you got under a casting director and worked your way up,” she said. That didn’t seem to bother Arch. Paramount thought she had talent and produced dozens of publicity photos. She worked as a dancing stand-in for some actresses who couldn’t dance. The publicity machine got her dates with celebrities. She dated Cary Grant, once. “Oh god, he was as queer as a three-dollar bill. Awfully nice, though.”

Arch had Mom on the career track—until she met my dad at a party. He was handsome, dark, and intense. Mom believed in love at first sight. Dad was getting a divorce; back then, there was a year’s wait between the filing and the final decree. In that year, Mom got pregnant with me. I was born two months before they got married. I was born with brittle bones. That indicated just how bad my father really was.

He’d ruined Mom’s career—which also meant Arch’s chance to be the father of a movie star, and my brittle bones were the punishment…I know: it’s absolutely crazy. But that was the way things were back in 1938.

I stayed with Nana and Arch when Mom and Dad got married. I’m not sure why—and never will be, really. I know they liked to party; Dad’s father came back from the Alaska mines with a sack of gold, and had invested it well. Dad played football at USC and run track. He became a sort of mid-level playboy.

Eventually, one of his fraternity brothers got him a job as an apprentice film cutter at MGM Studios. That was the start of Dad’s career. Mom didn’t have to work; she stayed home. She was utterly and totally wrapped up in Dad. They went to polo matches, played golf, hunted together; they were in the Blue Book. Dad ended up a superb film editor and got jobs with good directors.

They had two more kids, but raised them, Sharon (who died of weed, valium, and cancer twenty-odd years ago), and Tina (who joined AA and Al-Anon before she was twenty-one—and has gone on to be a functional painter-teacher).

For the last few years of her life, Mom and I got close. She lived with Tina and my brother-in-law; we were all clean and sober—Mom was taking Xanax by then, but it was better than the vodka. I was able to be with what was left of my family. She was a good-hearted woman, who had been married to a good-hearted man.

Tina and her husband had a little girl and Mom was just delighted with her.

***

But we’re an alcoholic family and the disease ravaged us all. Tina has stories about Mom and Dad screwing in the same hotel room where the girls were sleeping; about Mom flipping out whenever he got sick; dragging him in out of the car when he came home passed-out-drunk.

Sharon ran off at eighteen and got married; before she died at 39, she’d been married more than a half-dozen times. We were all nuts.

So, it’s really hard to know what to say about my mother. It worked out the way it worked out, and I really have nothing to compare it to. I’m here, and if things had been different, I’d probably be somebody else, you know? I’m OK with the way my life is and that’s what matters.

But it’s been really difficult for me to go out to the wood-pile of my family history and re-stack it.
Do you have unfinished business with your parents? Share your story. Email us at nathasha@audacitymagazine.com . ]]> http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/05/25/mom-and-some-unfinished-business/feed/ 0 http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/04/25/what-do-they-know/ http://www.audacitymagazine.com/2006/04/25/what-do-they-know/#comments Tue, 25 Apr 2006 15:32:24 +0000 Peter Webster http://www.audacitymagazine.com/?p=364 For years, my most unforgettable moments were ones where I made errors — blunders, screw-ups, super embarrassing moments.

Actions that provoked major shame attacks, either then or later. Sort of like going out in public with my fly open, or getting into a particularly stupid argument with someone I really cared about.

If I sit down and sift through my memory, I can find, still, a few times I really wish hadn’t happened. Not too many: when I find one that still gives me a shame-shudder, I try to rectify the past. It isn’t always possible, but I can try.

In AA or other 12-step groups, people are instructed—well, it’s “suggested,” but it’s closer to a requirement—to take a “fearless moral inventory” of themselves. This is a good thing to do. But, it almost always focuses on the negative side of the personality.

Things like siphoned gas, stolen money, illicit affairs, lies told to important people, bad scenes that have been engaged in, cheating. Once the group member has finished writing the inventory it’s then shared “with God and another human being,” and the person then asks that God remove the character faults that caused the behavior.

Confession really is good for the soul. When I did it, a big chunk of shameful memories lifted off my shoulders.

Unfortunately, it also provided me with a chance to dig back into all that dark stuff, and remind myself what a schmuck I’d been and might still be. I’ve seen people get into loops, where they just kept digging up all that past history.

I asked a local pastor to listen to my inventory. She told me to also provide a list of my strengths and good things I’d done.

Good things? There were a few—but I had to work to remember them.

Later, a friend in AA suggested I make a list of all the good things people had told me about myself. As I made the list I was to visualize the person actually speaking to me.

“Listen,” my friend said, “If you’re anything like me, you remember most all of the bad stuff about yourself, but forget the good stuff people see in you.”

He was right. I had—and yet have, but to a lesser degree—incredible skills at dissing myself. I’ve written about how it’s still a struggle to do affirmations.

Affirmations go against the way I was raised. I was taught we’re basically sinners before anything else.

There was some reason, on some level, that I deserved to be born with brittle bones and later get polio. It was a variant of the concept of Original Sin.

I was “tarred with the same brush” as my father, “penny- wise, pound-foolish,” and dozens of other things. Thinking about my good points would lead to self-pride. I had to always be on guard against my dark side. I would need to constantly practice self-
criticism.

The problem was this: the more energy I put into guarding against my dark side, the stronger that squashed-down part got. And it always broke through: always.

Talking with people, I learned a lot of us heard—and believed—this sort of junk. Maybe thinking good of oneself does cause self-pride in some people, but considering I started from deep down in a pit of self-loathing, anything that got my head up to ground-level was a major help.

Why smash an ego— which is really self-confidence—that only half-exists?

By seeing myself as a very flawed person, I needed outside help. Authorities. That, in my family, was D. Arch, my maternal grandfather. He had the answers I needed. In truth, though, he had the answers he wanted me to need, because it would be to his greater glory.

My situation wasn’t unique. Like I said I’ve talked to dozens of people who had childhoods that were a long long way from what’s considered “normal.” They also had the same kind of messed-up bossy parent figures. And after growing up they found a lot of replacement authority figures.

When we think of ourselves as seriously flawed people, we can’t trust ourselves: we have to rely on outside authorities. You can see it on a daily basis: TV is stuffed with stuffed-up experts and psychological gurus overflowing with solutions for other people.

Preachers hand us old-time stories as laws on how everybody should think and act. In dictatorships, Big Bosses tell the people how they should view reality, behave, and, again, what they should think.

Almost none of the authorities tell us the truth about themselves.

The last thing they want to do is reveal their own fears and flaws, problems, unanswered questions. If they did, then we might not trust them as all-knowing. Experts are supposed to know everything about their field of knowledge.

Here I am, though, not too many years from
turning seventy, and I’m still learning about so many things: relationships, politics, spirituality, history, even myself.

Every day is one of discovery. What I thought I knew five years ago isn’t necessarily what I know today. If I depended on authorities, I wouldn’t have to worry: they’d tell me if I was right or wrong. Don’t worry and just follow directions.

Living, though, is such an on-going education that the lessons—for me, anyhow—have never stopped. Neither have the questions, right. I’m never absolutely certain, so there are always questions. I have to make choices about the questions: are they worth asking? Are they important? And what seem to be the answers—do they match or resonate with my experiences and knowledge?

I have to trust myself, and I have to look back on my own life in order to discern the answers. There are always more questions than answers. That’s what the journey is all about, when I get right down to it: trusting in my self.

Not authorities or books or other people laying down who I am or should be.