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| Toy Camel |
My father spent much
of his adult life gripped by the desire for a better life, so he
kept getting slightly better jobs, and we kept moving every few years
to a slightly larger tract house. When I was eleven, my family
escaped the racial tensions that pervaded Los Angeles after the
assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy by relocating
to a small town in the San Joaquin Valley. The day after we moved in
to our new home in Fresno, I was unpacking boxes on the plush orange
carpet of our family room and discovered a zipper bag stuffed with
miniature plastic toy figures, soldiers from different wars mixed
with exotic people and animals from different continents. All were
smaller than the average toy figure, which made me feel godlike as I
positioned them on the furniture or the floor in some dramatic scene,
such as an ambush or a battle.
When I opened the
bag, tempted to play with the toy figures again, I found a tiny
camel, pale lemon yellow, which came with a flat plastic stand
resembling a puddle of desert sand. As I searched through the bag, I
experienced a premonition that the camel would have great
significance for me in the distant future. Flustered, I searched the
new house for someone to talk to about it, knowing that I might not
be able to find the right words. I couldn't find my father or mother
or grandparents but eventually discovered my brother in the garage.
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| Path 28 |
“You're full of
it,” he sneered after I told him. I wanted to explain that I was
simply trying to understand a bizarre premonition but then realized
that I was once again suffering the fate of a younger sibling,
irritating my brother merely by my presence.
Forty-four years
later, my brother and I had to sell the house to pay for my mother's
long-term care. While living alone in the house, she had experienced
bouts of dizziness but didn't complain about them to anyone. She
eventually fell face down on concrete and ended up undergoing a
craniotomy for a subdural hematoma with a mid-line shift (in other
words, serious bleeding in the brain). After the surgery, she lived
with me and my wife for almost two years. Then she fell and broke her
hip and spent two months in rehabilitation.
Two weeks after she
came back to live with us, she suffered a severe stomach flu, which
led to dehydration and infection and a serious spike in blood
pressure when she attempted to sit up. She could no longer get out of
bed, and I, believing that she would recover like she always had
before, hesitated to take her again to the emergency room. I soon
realized that she needed someone more qualified to care for her. I
had, despite my best intentions, made an error in judgment could have led to tragedy.
While she was living
with me and my wife, her house was, for all intents and purposes,
abandoned. I checked on it every other day and did what I could to
maintain it, taking care of termites and filing an insurance claim
for mold and fungus. I also had to file several insurance claims for
burglary and vandalism. Because burglars shattered a window pane in
her front door as well as her back sliding glass door, she ended up
with new carpet for the front room, family room and hallways, but
enough was enough.
When my brother and I
were clearing out the house, getting it ready to sell, my brother
found the tiny toy camel on a shelf in the garage and smiled as he
handed it to me. For a second, I hoped that we would find the sack
full of other toy figures, but then I recalled, as though suddenly
recalling a vivid dream, the baffling premonition that this camel
would at some point have great significance for me. I don't think
that my brother remembered what I had told him, and I didn't want to
remind him of it because I knew that I would probably just irritate
him like I did forty-four years earlier.
When I pulled the
camel out of the bag so many years ago, I foresaw the future. I can
recall at least four other times in childhood when this happened to
me. In each case, I either heard a voice tell me about the future or
felt a premonition—I didn't just suspect or imagine that something
was going to happen, in other words—I knew with unshakable
certainty. In each case, I only remembered when the event came to
pass many years later, as if each premonition were meant to be
forgotten and unexpectedly recalled so that I could place the
experience in perspective. I doubt that anyone can provide an
adequate scientific explanation for these experiences, but I suspect
that in the physical dimension, the five senses limit us so much that
we can only experience linear time, but in some other dimension all
time exists at once, and a higher or deeper aspect of the self, a
daimon that transcends space and time, can access knowledge about
what we in our dimension can only know as the future. If true, this
would make the already knotty issue of free will even harder to
untangle.
Since I foresaw the
future at least five times while I was growing up, I must conclude
that these premonitions are more than mere coincidence.
These episodes of precognition tie the future and the past together for me in a way that most
memories do not, suggesting that I am meant to place
the experiences into a larger perspective.
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| Path 13, the Path of Gimel |
About fifteen
years or so ago, I became obsessed with the modern Qabalah after a
series of visions during meditation introduced me to the symbol
system known as the Tree of Life, and I immediately associated the
camel with the Path of Gimel, the thirteenth path on the Tree, which
connects Tiphareth, the Christ center, with Kether, the Crown of
creation. (See previous posts.) The Path of Gimel is the central path
that travels across the Abyss between the planes of manifestation and
the spiritual planes (from which comes intuition). This is the path
of the mystic who escapes the wheel of birth and death to live in the
spirit. The Hebrew letter Gimel means “camel,” suggesting that
something other than intellect or conscious determination is
necessary to travel across the Abyss, the way a camel, through
sheer primal strength and willpower, crosses a desert.
I stared at the camel
for a few seconds, suspecting that some greater significance related
to the Path of Gimel would soon unfold. The camel, I realized, was
like a symbol in a dream. Coincidentally the Path of Gimel is
associated with the moon and dreams. The reappearance of the toy
camel suggested to me that sometimes symbols are embedded in events
as they unfold in linear time to help us understand their
significance the way that symbols are embedded within dreams.
As I stared at the
camel, I realized that I was as old as I had imagined I would be when
I foresaw the future, my beard gray and my head bald, but I felt
pretty much the same as I always have. Most of the people in the
neighborhood had died or moved away while the camel had waited alone
on that shelf. My mother was eighty-nine years old and getting
frailer even as we emptied her house, but she seemed pretty much the
same as she had been when I was a child. At that moment, I believed
that people feel pretty much the same their whole life, which
comforted me, but I was saddened by the inexorable black hole, never
visible but always near, that kept sucking everything, like my other
toys, into it.
And at that moment,
in the house that I had not lived in for thirty-seven years, the only
thing that held much significance for me was the toy camel, as if
the rest of my childhood was irrevocably lost due to a lack of
anything tangible that I could touch, but oddly, at that
moment, I was happy. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but I
sensed that the camel confirmed everything I secretly believed.
I placed the toy
camel on the dashboard of my car, and in the Valley heat three of the
brittle plastic legs broke off one by one, leaving little stubs. If I
were to speculate about the symbolic significance of the one-legged
camel, I would interpret it to mean that on the spiritual journey
across the Abyss, legs don't matter, only the spiritual will to
continue, against all odds, on the journey.
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| Ithuriel's Spears |
It took me a few days
to figure out why at that moment I was happy, but I wasn't always in an upbeat frame
of mind during that time. I felt that I was slowly emptying all memories of
my family from the house as items departed to the dumpster or storage
or the Salvation Army. My grandparents and my uncle, my father and
mother, and my brother and I had comprised the whole of the family
that settled in Fresno in 1971. By the mid seventies, my grandparents
had both passed away. Then, in 1977, three days before his
fifty-sixth birthday, my father died of a heart attack. I moved out
when I was eighteen and my brother moved to a different state soon
after. My mother remained alone in the house. My brother and I became
busy with college and jobs and families of our own and didn't stay in
touch, and I didn't see my mother that often even though I lived down
the street. By the time my uncle died in the early eighties, what was
once a family unit seemed more like a mirage.
After a week of
helping me clear out the house, my brother and his wife had to return
home to resume their daily lives. During the process of dealing with
my mother's house and belongings after they left, I dropped her car
off at the repair shop and took a shuttle bus to my mother's house. I asked the
driver to let me off at a corner so I could stroll through my old
neighborhood, past the house near my mother's that I had rented for
twelve years.
Strolling by my
neighbor's house, I remembered that several of my cats had
disappeared. One cat showed up after a few
days and came tearing through the house with a pellet from a gun
lodged in his throat after we let him in. While my son and I were
playing electric guitars one day, our neighbor, uninvited, barged
into the house, dashed to the back bedroom and started
screaming at us. His sister said he died a drunk, and he died alone,
his body discovered several days later surrounded by cages, in which,
I suspect, he imprisoned neighborhood cats and tortured them.
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| Six of Swords |
I ambled by the house
of my daughter's friend, Jenny. At one point when Jenny had just
turned eighteen, the police found her in suspicious circumstances.
She had somehow suffered damage to the frontal lobe that would make it
difficult for her to function the rest of her life. She woke up
handcuffed to a bed in a hospital and could not remember what had
happened—the police initially believed she had stolen a truck, only
to discover that a man who owned the truck had drugged her and kidnapped her. A few years
earlier, Jenny's brother had also suffered a similar type of brain
damage in an automobile accident and had fallen victim to a child
molester.
Steve Watson had
lived across the street for awhile. I was a year older that Steve. He
had been in my fourth-fifth combination class when I first moved to
Fresno. We were also on the same little league team during middle
school, at a time when I was losing all interest in sports. He had
turned into an amazing athlete who could throw the most mind-boggling
pitches, one of which, I remember, always wove unpredictably past my bat. He ended up in the minor leagues on his way to a
career in professional baseball, but health issues interfered. I had just recently encountered Steve on a gurney in the hospital
around the corner from my mother during her bout with the stomach
flu. He had driven a bright red corvette when he had lived across the
street from me, but in the hospital he was shaggy and dirty as though
he had been living on the street for quite some time. As I passed
him on my way out of the hospital, he asked if I remembered him.
Oddly, his name popped out of my mouth even though his face was almost
unrecognizable under long gray hair and a beard, and we had a short chat.
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| Path 24 |
I past the house of a
portly man whom my wife and I had called “The Mayor.” He had
retired many years before and often stood in his garage monitoring
the neighborhood. Once he nailed yellow ribbons to all of the liquid
ambers on the public easements along the street in support of the
troops in the Persian Gulf. He died soon after we moved away.
Many of the people of
my parent's generation who had lived in that neighborhood had also
died, and I recalled their names as I strolled by their old haunts.
Two houses down from
my mother's house a shy girl named Shayla grew up. After her father
died and her mother was moved to the memory care
unit of a nursing home, Shayla continued living in her parent's house. Shayla
once had a crush on my brother, someone told me, and I had spread the
rumor throughout the neighborhood. She later raised two children in
that house and died in her early forties from breast cancer. I had no
idea where my other neighborhood friends were now.
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| Seven of Cups |
When I reached my
mother's house, I felt alone. Each of the people in the neighborhood
who had passed away, I mused, had lived only a little while to clothe
their dreams in flesh. When I stepped into the house, I pulled two
heavy key chains out of my pocket to place them on the kitchen
counter, and the toy camel fell out of my pocket onto the floor. The
camel could only have great significance for me now: As a child I
could not possibly have known such a heightened sense of flux
and impermanence. I should just let go, I thought, as I gazed
mournfully at the camel, just let go of all of it. Strangely I did not need to try: I felt no
desire to keep the camel or anything else that was once in the
house.
As I entered my
mother's empty kitchen, I remembered my first day of
school after our first night in Fresno. Early in the morning, my mother took my
brother to sign him up at middle school and left me alone for at
least a half an hour before she came back and drove me to my new
elementary school. When they left, I was free, I realized; I had
never been left alone in a house before. Strange
noises terrified me though. Forty-four years later, I felt almost the
same, aware that I am free, not lonely but alone, aware of all the
pops and creaks in the house but not afraid. I had the strange
feeling that I was eleven again even though I am now the same age my
father was when he died of a heart attack.
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| Eight of Swords |
Her empty house made
me unexpectedly happy because I felt free of anyone else's
expectations, free of social conditioning. All of the relatives who
had gathered with us over the years were gone or had lost touch. My
eighty-nine year old mother now barely remembered any of those
gatherings that were once so important to my father, who spent his
life getting a better job every few years and buying a better house
and bigger car, finally settling in a neighborhood at the northern
edge of Fresno, CA, not far from one of the first malls in the
Central Valley. Soon all the fields and orchards north of Shaw Ave.
would be plowed under; the northern edge of town now is miles away,
bordering the San Joaquin River. A town of one hundred thousand has
grown to half a million since my father passed away thirty-eight
years ago.
The camel in the
carpet, even more diminutive after the loss of its legs, was so small
that I hardly noticed it as I surveyed the empty room even though I
knew where it was. It would no doubt be overlooked by most of the
people who came to view the house if I left it there. The camel,
alone in a vast desert of brown carpet, was free.
For many years, I
lived my life as others expected, afraid that losing all sense of
social conditioning through rebelliousness or cognitive dissonance or
separation from the herd or trauma might lead to insanity or
bestiality or dissolution or worse. I know several people who crossed that invisible line at some point in their lives; they
kept up appearances while secretly plotting and carrying out heinous
acts. (See previous posts.) It struck me as I stood in the empty room, rememberng the time I was eleven, that I have always had the spirit of the camel in me. I have had enough premonitions and intuitions to develop faith and enough challenges to understand the value of it. I have never been a great success at anything, but I at least developed a deep love of nature and the
arts, experiencing an exaltation of consciousness that has led to the
Vision of Harmony, associated in the Qabalah with the state of being
known as Tiphareth, which instilled in me a sympathy for all things,
a connection that some people would no doubt consider naive or
insane.
The camel in the carpet was signifying that I could
proceed now on the Path of Gimel. As I stared at the
camel, I knew that I at some point had crossed a line and couldn't
turn back. The Path of Gimel leads from Tiphareth across the Abyss to
the first swirlings of the Source, the Crown of Creation. I must
travel across the Abyss alone, with only my sense of adventure and
exaltation and connection with divinity to goad me on despite everything.
Instead of the dinner
table under the small chandelier, where I had gathered so many times with
aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins and friends, there was
only a tiny one-legged camel in the sand-colored carpet. I imagined
it still plodding away on a journey into the unknown,
drawn only by a powerful, invisible force. All desire to remove
myself from divinity for the sake of appearances or to expend energy accumulating the stuff of the tribe had
vanished, as though blown away by desert winds. I softly shut my mother's front door, and with only a faint
moon path to guide me, stepped into my next
adventure.
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