A Truth, a Pact, and the Dawn

When I was 20 years old, my father recommended to me that I go to listen to an old shaman from the Picuris Pueblo talk about manhood. But first he demanded I promise I would not leave before the talk was over. I was annoyed but finally I relented and promised to stay. I'm glad he made me promise.

Beautiful Painted Arrow (Tslew-teh-koyeh), Joseph Rael spoke like a lunatic. Nothing that came from his mouth made a damn ounce of sense. With no preamble he launched into one incomprehensible concept after another. He spoke of the sound a wall makes when your hand brushes over it. He spoke of a seed falling into the soil. He spoke of running into a post as hard as you could with your face and knocking out your teeth. And every time you started to contextualize what he was talking about--not make sense of it, not understand it, just start to feel familiar with the constellation of images he was using in a given instant, he'd drop that topic entirely and launch into a different concept entirely unrelated and just as incomprehensible.

People began to get up and leave. By the end of the talk there were fewer than 1/5 of us left in the room. I wanted to leave myself, but I'd promised to stay. My head felt like it was going to split open, it was throbbing so painfully. Trying to wrap my brain around his talk was giving me the worst headache I'd ever had.

The talk ended without resolution. He just...stopped. I shook my head. I remember being too disoriented to be properly angry, but that's the direction was going: anger. I stumbled out of the room, grabbed stuff off the table on my way out. I met up with my father.

He beamed at me like someone enjoying a joke at my expense. Or...no, more like someone who was trying to share an initiatory experience with someone else who'd been through it. Trying to wink to someone else who understood. The fact that I didn't understand made me angrier.

"So?" he asked conspiratorially. "How was it?"

"I have NO idea, Dad. It made no sense!"

"No? What did he say?"

"That's just it! I don't KNOW! It was...it was gibberish!"

"Why? What sort of things did he talk about?"

"DAD! I. DON'T. KNOW. He went on and on about stuff that made no sense."

"...like what?"

"Shit, Dad. It was...well, he said..." And BOOM. I opened my mouth and I vomited up a beautiful, succinct encapsulation of the theme, the message BEHIND what he'd said. Everything he'd said all of a sudden fell into a beautiful, small, perfect little message. And it wasn't a message I even realized I'd heard. It just...got into me. And as soon as it left my lips, I was dumbstruck. My eyes shot open, my jaw hung slack. My father nodded and grinned even wider. "Uh huh. See?"

The message was one of the most sublime understandings I've had in my life. It's still with me. I can no longer put it into words, but it's still there. And in the hardest parts of my life, it's been there to get me through.

That afternoon, I went back to my room and fell ill. I threw up literally a few times, ran a fever. The shock was way too much. Once I came down off that shock, I finally looked at the papers I'd picked up on the way out of the talk. One was a sign up for an initiation into manhood Rael was offering on the 5th, 6th and 7th of March. The 8th of March was my 21st birthday. I felt like a plucked guitar string. I knew I had to go, so I did.

The first day of the ceremony, his talks pushed me towards more illness, but less so. The second day was a moderate struggle. By the third day, everything he said hit me instantly and easily. I felt like one bad-ass zen mofo. I carried that zen feeling for a year. You could not shake me that year.

That 21st birthday, there was a full moon. And it was the closet lunar perigee in something like 75 years, if I recall correctly now. I recall feeling very connected to everything, and looking up and thinking how BIG the moon looked. But more than big, it felt present. Like it was the eye of the universe, looking back down on me with attentive care. I looked up and it looked down and I felt intensely bonded with it.

That bond hasn't left me, even after the zen feeling of oneness has drifted off some, the bond with the moon is still immediate. I felt like we made a pact that day and even now, that covenant is strong.

The holiday season is hard for me. I don't like our modern notions of community or what constitutes a "community" holiday. I don't like what our holidays say about us. And struggling with depression, I've had trouble connecting with people at all as the holidays roll around, leaving me isolated at the worst times to be isolated. I've managed what feels to me like a very successful, very active year, but the holiday's still knocking me around.

But this solstice, there was the full moon again, and this time, a total lunar eclipse, leave the moon's umbra a red ember in the sky. I lay out in the cold and watched the whole thing. I had a nice long conversation with the moon, and felt like the covenant was renewed. Most of that is too private and too intense to share. But I woke up the next morning feeling as if the entire difficult season was largely behind me. The season marks the death of the old, the Saturnalia, and the birth of the new, the glorious child (to continue in the Roman ethos, the birth of Zeus). I felt reborn the next day. I'm ready for the rest of winter and the coming spring.

On the Solstice, and the full moon, and the eclipse

The dying fire that is the opal of her eye is shaded from the sun by shadow of our silhouette, so that for this instant, in this midday that is our night, she can see us clearly.