Shaman and Shadow

That night in bed before we turned to sleep, we sat down with book and with app and we read. I was rereading my copy of Joseph Campbell's Pathways to Bliss. I was only in the introduction but already fading. I'd drag in a sentence at a time in between eye-lid collapses, and the scuddering of the book through my fingers would jolt me back awake. Many times the sentences were gibberish by the time they got to my brain, scrambled in my sleep-mired senses. But I managed to digest a few choice statements:

“In primitive societies, the shaman provides a living conduit between the local and the transcendent. The shaman is one who has actually gone through a psychological crack-up and recovery. The young boy or girl approaching adolescence either has a vision or hears a song. This vision or song amounts to a call. The person experiences a shivering, neurotic sickness.

“I recently read the story of a woman who grew up in a mining town in West Virginia. When she was a little girl, she went walking in the woods and heard marvelous music. And she didn't know what to do with it, or anything about it. The years passed her by, and, in her sixties, she came to a psychiatrist with the feeling that she had missed a life. It was in deep, hypnotic memories she recalled the song. You recognized it, of course: it's the shaman's song.”

The shaman's song: the last tune going through my head as I dropped the book onto my nightstand and turned out the light.

I'm in a house. I had been escorting C through, I think, but I don't recall her in the dream by this point. The house is entirely dark. The dark of shut closets. I have a flashlight, but it fuzzes out in a fading fog perhaps 15 feet out and beyond that there is nothing. I'm walking down a hallway—all I see are hallways. Something is in the hallway behind me. Something drawn to me but that doesn't love me. It won't enter the light. I turn the flashlight behind as I walk. But there's something ahead of me that feels the same way as does the thing that's following me. The hallway I'm in comes to an L and it turns right. I back into the crook of the L and I shine the light down each branch of the hall. Every time I move the light from one branch, whatever it is in the dark of the other branch moves closer.

I was flashing the light back and forth when I woke to the feeling of my flashlight hand's wrist flopping spasmodic against the edge of the bed. What awakened me was the horror of realization that my hand was dangling over the abyss in the dark room, in full view of whatever might lurk in the shadows underneath my bed.

I lay in bed with dread slowly overtaking me. I recalled another dream I had when I was thirteen. Thirteen was a bad year. I felt shattered and unsalvageable. One night, I got up to use the bathroom and get a drink of water. When I returned to my room the book light on my bedpost was on, as was the stereo but softly. There was someone sitting on the corner of my bed under the book light, hunched over something with his back to me. I called out to him in confusion and alarm. I got as far as “Hey—“ before he stood and turned towards me. He was me. My height, my face and hair, my anger. But not my eyes. His were all whites and were so much brighter than his darkening face. He raised an arm and a finger at me in accusation and he screamed the most terrifying sound I'd ever heard. I'd just watched Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and Donald Sutherland's scream at the end had unsettled me. This was like that but it came from inside me, so it was much worse. I woke actually screaming.

Sitting in bed this more recent night, the two dreams circling in my head, I heard and felt a stuttering thump in the bed. In my fear it was not a good sound or feeling, but after a moment of fright, I realized it was C shifting in her sleep. Even in sleep she arches and bends towards me. As someone who has slept alone all of his life, I've found it claustrophobia-inducing, but even more reassuring. It is perhaps most comforting when I'm most stuck in that feeling of claustrophobia, as it often shakes me from that spell. She often puts her knees up in a tent and over time, the tent leans over—always towards me—and as her heels catch and lurch over the sheets it makes that creaking thump. I nudged her knees and she settled straight legged again. I looked over at her face, but in the grain-eyes of night and the horror that still stretched over me, it looked like she was in pain, her eyes squeezed in a moon-pale grimace. They weren't but I couldn't shake the sensation.

I touched her knee again and she opened her eyes. We talked a bit and she asked how I was. I haltingly told her about the dream I had. I told her I realized the haunted house was my grandparents' house. A house I've dreamed about often over the years but under the disguises of circuses, castles, hotels, amusement parks, and zoos. I loved that house in my youth. But in every dream it has a definite axis, where one side of the house is “good” and one side is “bad”. In the haunted house dream that night, the L shaped hallway was down at the end of the house that is always “bad”.

When I finished, she was drifting between snores and responses, but when I finished she began to share a dream she had. I was in a bad place however, and my dream was growing more connected even as it faded. Another dream came to me as I tried to listen to her. Like my grandparents' house, it's something that I dreamed often over the years. I'm at a door, trying to hold it shut. The house is dark. Something big and ungentle is on the other side of the door and ramming against it trying to get in. I hold it shut with my whole body.

My flashlit vigil at the hall's end and my defense of the door seemed to be the same thing that night. I pictured the hallway again and down both passages in the hall, I saw a ball of some sort of energy barrel down upon me. My skin crawled enough that I began to feel fuzzed out at my edges. I couldn't keep hold of what C was saying. I needed to growl at whatever was menacing me.

Most of my adult life, I've felt cut off from myself. That room where the white-eyed screamer accused me, was also the room I barricaded myself within in my early teens, away from my family. And when as an adult I tried to picture that cut off feeling, it was of me being outside that room, the door closed. If I tried to enter, within was waiting that screamer and I would buckle before it. But a couple of years ago, I started to integrate a number of my cut off emotional states and one thing I began to work with was a sort of bear energy. I would picture a bear standing on his hind legs and unleashing a roar at me, or at whatever I aimed him. If I aimed him at the dark, he'd roar it light. If I aimed him at fear, he'd put the fear to flight. When I aimed him at the screamer, the screamer would scream back, louder. They'd escalate until the bear would roar the blind white right out of the boy's eyes.

Pictured as an exercise in reintegration, it was fulfilling. I grew stronger; bolder. But in the midst of that new strength, when I last had the door holding dream a couple of years back, I failed to keep it closed, for the first time. It was also the first time it was a door that wasn't in my childhood home. It was the door in the room I was sleeping in that night, my bedroom in my apartment in Santa Fe. I fell back, and the door flew open. Two men stormed in, my father and my uncle and I shot awake in fear. Nothing would shake that fear, until I lept from bed, strode over to the door and threw it open. I'd growled, loud—my own nod to the bear's roar. I gave a speech then. “Come in. I refuse to hold this door closed anymore. I demand that you come in. But you had best know that I will not flee you anymore. I'm waiting for you. And if you show yourself, I will tear you to shreds and I will devour those shreds and make them mine again. Know this: I am the person, you are just a sliver of persona and you WILL dissolve back into me. I own you and will not cower before you.”

So, in bed after the dream of the haunted hallway, C half-asleep but piecing together her dream for us, instead I started growling very low at my own ghosts. And it shook that fear off. But then what I'd read came back to me, about the sense of losing the life one is meant to have by refusing the call of the shaman's song. And it chimed within me. In conversations I'd had in the past, talking about the deep sense that the life I was meant to live was diverted somewhere and I had no idea how to get it back. And suddenly my dream of the white-eyed screamer came back again and my more recent image of the bear roaring fear and white eyes out of the room and out of the boy. And I wondered if I wasn't just using the bear to continue for yet another decade to refuse the Call.

 It was a terrifying idea, and I had no sense of how I was supposed to healthily face that fear without a surge of the fighting urge coursing through me. How does one face down danger and the need to flee, without girding oneself in aggression? My father never taught me and I had no clue.

I got up to write down everything that had occurred and had occurred to me, before it was lost in the dawn.

When I finished writing and went to go back to bed, C was reading, sprawled part way across where I slept. We curled up again and I was grateful to have her in my space. But right before I embarked fully into sleep, I was again in the hallway's crook. Down both passages there came that menace. I straightened out in bed and said in my mind's voice, “Come, whatever you are. I will not hold closed the door. I will not flee. I will not hide. But more than that, I will not fight you and I will not flinch. I still dare you to come. I still demand that you come. But I will not tear you to pieces. I demand you come and I will not raise a finger to stop you.”

I recalled reading accounts of shamans recounting how they'd heard the call. Several stories were of spirits coming at the onset of puberty, tearing the prospective shaman apart, dismantling them, then putting them back together, but using different materials. No longer flesh and bone. Stones, gems, in some cases. Magical items of some variety.

I recalled earlier dreams, of an enormous wolf who would nightly tell me he was going to eat me before he would chase me down again and again. And I recalled how years later my father suggested that sometimes the guide we need is the one that as a child causes us the most terror, because the path offered is so right it's too terrifying to be considered.

So lying in bed last night, I added, “I will not roar. I was the bear, but tonight I will be silent as a wolf.” But then I knew that the wolf was what was coming, not what waited in me for its arrival. I'd threatened to tear whatever came for me to pieces. But it occurred to me that what I was waiting for was the reverse, to be dismantled and reassembled by the wolf whenever he chose to finally make his appearance again.

I got up again to write down my newer recollections and realizations. I looked at the clock. It was four am by now. Out in the enormous maple in the yard, a crow was shrieking over and over. I stood watching for a minute, squinting into the dark. There in the crook of the tree, was a moving shadow—a raccoon trying to scramble up to the higher nesting branches that the crow sought to scream back down to the ground.

I went back to bed and lay down. C was no longer awake but in her sleep she reached out in the dark to put her hand on my hip as I nodded off.

Out of Frame

Has it been over half a year? Wow. I'd meant to post before this, but it's been hard.

I spent the better part of a decade grappling with darkness. A darkness complete enough that I noticed people shying away from me if I talked about it. When I was in the midst of that stuff, and I lost sight of the end of it and no longer entirely believed there was an end, I spoke without hope. When I talked about it, I talked about irrevocable grief, insoluble mystery. I was a jumble of story arcs that had crashed, been crushed, and there was no sense of completion or respite. Enigmas were menacing; potentials threatening. The pessimism borne of that can sour the sweetest friend. After a while I felt people shutting down when they realized they had to talk to me. So I began to fall silent. To spare those I loved, but also to save for myself those I still had left.

So, much of the time ended up being time spent in hiding.

I took to blogging as an exercise in hope and empowerment. Making myself heard and tearing away any sense of being able to hide. And hope's a process of reframing, which is also empowering. I'd begun to realize the difference between hope and despair isn't anything in the situations I faced; it was found in how I faced those dire situations. Last I'd read, science suggests that depressed people have a greater connection to reality than do optimists. The world is depressing. Unless you decide that reality's less important than happiness. Then you take to yourself the task of reframing everything you see. Never to blind yourself, but to find how each dire portent of doom holds a kernel of success.And then you learn that those kernels are more important than the rest of reality. All the rest of that jazz is filler. So it's not a lie, not selective vision, but selective focus.

Blogging held for me a chance to reframe whatever I was facing, where my initial reaction was to sit in dread of it. And as such, it was an outreach as well. For as I retook every mystery for myself and resolved all those enigmas so that they said whatever was most significant and supportive for them say, as I reframed I put it into words that at once deepened the truth of it for me, and gave the people who cared about me a narrative that didn't grind them down to hear me speak it.

Which is great, but only up to a point. Isn't that always the way?

There's a double edge in such reframing. I found myself waiting. I wouldn't post until I'd found a way to find the light in something. And I'd manage that best when I had worked out what place in the narrative each incident held. So I wouldn't post until I had nicely bundled packages. Whole. Crystalline. But sometimes pat and too nice by half.

A little over a year ago, I started messaging with S. We found such a wonderful connection. Messages gave way to IMs, and then to voice chat, then video chat. Hours every day, then a trip, then we were both moving, her between continents, to be together. We have an apartment together and my life is full and filling.

And really, what pat little packages can I even hope to wrap any of that into? I didn't want to jinx it, too, sure. I still don't. I felt I ought to speak about it. But also felt it was no one's business. I wanted it to grow away from such clean platitudes.

Also, in moving, and in moving IN, my context fell away. I've never done anything like this. I had no narrative in which to put everything. That's not just a narrative shortcoming; it's left me disoriented every day. Which is to say, it sits in the back of things beyond any necessity to care much about it, behind the sea of instant, profound joy she and I fall into together, but it comes out maybe three random days a month and then I'm stunned by how vertiginously disoriented I am. Wow-we're-building-a-life-together disorientation, sure. But also, where-is-this? and I-miss-my-old-dance-classes and all-the-comforting-crutches-I've-been-leaning-on-are-gone varieties of disorientation. All pointy things that time wears the edges off.

Without prim little boxes of triumphs to share however, I had nothing much to report. So my blog's fallen silent for months.

But I haven't. Entirely the opposite. And I'd like to see if I can't bleed the edges a bit here, take a few of these posts out of their nice packages. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. Let's let those edges bleed a bit, as well.

Hi.