INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST NINE

Cattle Chute

THE LOADING CHUTE
(All photos April 12, 2015)

     The loading chute always for some reason catches my attention as I zoom by it on my way to the North Fork of the Kings River, perhaps because it resembles a door to nowhere, or perhaps because I can imagine for a second that it is an invisible door that opens upon some dream-like, legendary land in the realm of childhood or the spirit. I might have witnessed its last use over forty years ago on a trip to the Kings River when I was eleven or twelve--Now, if it is a doorway, it is only a doorway to a few nearly forgotten childhood memories. Even forty years ago the chute looked like it would collapse if a cow weighed a little too much or stomped on it a little too hard. 

Ithuriel's Spears

     Last weekend, I finally stopped the car by the side of the road and ambled over to see if it would fall over if I mercifully gave it a little push. Even though the posts are slanting and slowly rotting, and humus and moss have gathered on top of the ramp, I was surprised to find that the chute didn’t wobble at all when I shook it. The chute, which no doubt was built decades before I was born, would in all likelihood outlast me even though it long ago outlasted its own purpose. 
     For me, the chute hints at freedom. It resembles a door frame without a door with a ramp that leads away from the road into the natural world where nothing has ever been expected of me, where I can remember a time when I had no expectations. The ramp provides a way into a world where I don’t have to fit in, where I am forever free of shame, a route to freedom from all but my most basic needs.        
     I could make up a story about how the loading chute is a mysterious portal to some fantastic realm, I suppose, but I would have to ignore that it was used in the process of rounding up cattle for slaughter. I think, somewhere in the back of my mind, the chute reminds me of those nightmares I had as a child of dying in a jungle during some inscrutable global conflict. Like my father and his brothers, I was no doubt  meant to fight in some distant war, but for some reason, American wars in distant lands remained “covert” and there was no draft when my turn came to serve, so unlike the cattle, I avoided the slaughter. 

Indian Pinks, Pretty Face

     If you don’t mind, I’m going to pretend for a little while that you, gentle reader, are my psychiatrist because the loading chute obviously brings up strange, conflicting thoughts. 
     I was not conscious then, as my brother and I were scrambling up and down those hills, that our parents had expectations of us. They, for instance, expected us to serve our country if we were to be called during some future conflict. Their expectations for us remained nebulous, but as I grew older I realized that they imagined us succeeding in some significant way. In truth, I don’t think my father wanted anything spectacular from us, but he showed by example that he at least hoped that both of us would be upwardly mobile, by hook or by crook, getting a better job and moving into a better house every few years. More and more as I grew older, I felt that my mother tacitly demanded something spectacular of us, such as making tons of money, dying heroically for our country, or revealing to the world some kind of remarkable genius. I just knew as a teenager that I would need to make Herculean efforts and huge sacrifices to succeed gloriously in some noteworthy way. I knew even then that I would never be able to live up to their expectations because of chronic illness and because I am artistically and spiritually inclined.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

     In terms of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, my father focused on needs one and two and indulged in three whenever possible. After having fought in the great war and struggling for years to make a living, my father knew that satisfying biological and safety needs was about all you can realistically ask of a person. A person who satisfies needs one and two might be lucky enough to satisfy need number three. He did his best in his own way to teach me this lesson.
     For all their faults, I don’t blame my parents. They were just as screwed up by their parents.  Because I am facing my own mortality due to celiac disease, I am simply trying to figure out why Blackmore continues to try to murder me, why the settlers of European descent continued to murder the Native Americans, and why in this country we spend trillions of dollars every year to ensure that we can destroy the planet hundreds of times over at a moment’s notice.  

Chinese Purple Houses

     My inability to fit in has given me a unique perspective on the above topics. I am not claiming to be an expert or even totally right. (At this point I believe that any insistence on being right is dangerous.)
     As my father knew, and as most of us soon realize, we are motivated to a large extent by the fear that we will not be able to satisfy basic physiological and safety needs.  In order to fit in, we need to think and act like those in power. This applies as much to a young cowboy who must learn to round up cattle and take them to the slaughterhouse, a guard at a concentration camp, a teacher, a politician, or a corporate manager. The kind of groupthink orthodoxy that my father had to accept during his lifetime in order to succeed, which he tried to pass on to me by example and through impromptu lectures, went something like this:

• White men are superior to men and women of color.
• White men are superior to white women.
• Heterosexual white men are superior to gay white men.
• White men with power, property and money are superior to anyone without power, property and money.
• A white man succeeds in a democratic, capitalistic society. Anyone who doesn’t believe in capitalism or democracy is a threat to society.
• A white man succeeds in a Christian society. Anyone who doesn’t believe in Christianity is potentially a threat.
• Bohemians, artists, psychics, and philosophers are basically wacko and are like anyone above who doesn’t believe in democracy, capitalism, or Christianity.

     My father, in order to teach me and my brother these unwritten rules, lectured us on several occasions. Blacks and Native Americans were “mud people,” not real people. Communists, socialists, and anarchists were always trying to destroy the American way of life and the world in general and had to be fought on every front. Women should stay home and take care of children. People who could not make a decent living were weak or lazy, even if they had psychological or physical problems.
     I developed a love for art at an early age. At age twelve, I started painting pictures with acrylics and watercolors. One time, when I was sixteen, my father brought out several of my paintings to show the neighbors. Several of them were nudes and the rest were surreal. They all had a good laugh. When he was done, my father gave me the dirtiest look I’ve ever experienced, before or since. In retrospect, I understand that he was just trying to help me fit in so that I would succeed in satisfying needs one, two, and three.
     After working as a supply sergeant during World War Two, my father survived as a used car salesman, a foreman at a chemical plant, and an investigator for the ATF, among other things. My father succeeded by finding his niche, acknowledging and following the unwritten rules of his group. Even though he was only a high school graduate, he climbed the ladder of success until he was able to buy a good car and a house in the suburbs and could provide a comfortable life for himself and a wife and two children. He died at age fifty-six from a heart attack.

Fiesta Flowers, Ithuriel Spears

     Many social movements have become popular during the course of my lifetime, and I have discovered that groupthink is pretty much the same whether a person is a democrat, a republican, a green, a feminist, a capitalist, a communist, an anarchist, a neo-Nazi, a Christian, a Muslim, a Druid, or a Religious Scientist. In order to succeed in a group, you have to accept the core beliefs. If you question the beliefs or the practices, you are a potential threat, whether or not the others in the group publicly complain about you. 
    As someone who has never fit in for long in any social situation, I know that the shame of not fitting in can be extremely difficult to bear. Worse, the inability to fit in affects whether or not you are able to satisfy basic needs. My father, no matter what you think about his beliefs, was trying to help me by telling me and showing me the unwritten rules so that I could fit in. 
     But fear and shame can make a person do horrible things on behalf of a group or a society, such as killing people for their religious beliefs, their culture, their skin color. A sense of inadequacy or shame can make one person secretly target another for characteristics they possess or don’t possess.
     If I were to write a story about the loading chute, I would make it a doorway to a world without social fear or shame, which is what I find in nature, where all things are fields of energy that are no better or worse than any other.
     A few seconds before midnight, I am simply trying to figure out a reasonable way of avoiding more ecocide and genocide and the total annihilation of the planet, so I did something I wouldn’t normally do. 
     I had become more and more excited about the possibility of reincarnation, and even though I had always considered myself a rational man, priding myself on my levelheadedness, I decided to go to a hypnotist for a past life regression. The experience of being hypnotized at first struck me as more than a little awkward and perhaps even a little dangerous since I would be giving another person absolute control over my psyche, but I couldn't resist seeking out the truth, so I made an appointment with a hypnotist, a Dr. Browning, who had a reputation for helping people quit smoking. 

Fairy Lanterns, Chinese Houses

     I drove to a house surrounded by tall pine trees, the natural setting as inviting as a forest. I was ushered into the house by a woman in her late fifties, who stared at me coldly for a moment and then led me upstairs to a loft above the garage with a view of the midsection of a pine tree. 
     "Have a seat on the couch," she commanded. "My husband will be here shortly."
     I wondered if making the client wait was standard procedure. In my case it wasn't working; I had the urge to fly back down the stairs and out the door. Instead, I looked around the office. It was clean, decorated in a Southwestern style with paintings of Native Americans curled up next to big clay pots, a room devoid of any paraphanelia intended to mesmerize, as far as I could tell. Suddenly Dr. Browning rushed in, apologizing for being late.
     He was an older gentleman, with bulging white eyebrows. "I just have a couple of questions before we get started," he said. "Have you ever been hypnotized before?"
     "No," I replied.
     "What do you expect to learn from this experience?"
     "You'll probably think this is silly, or maybe not--I don't know. Recently, I've had feelings that I've lived before, and I was hoping that you might be able to regress me back to that time, if that's possible."
     "Do you believe in reincarnation?"
     "I'm not sure."
     "Are you religious?"
     "I'm not sure what that means."
     "Do you consider yourself a Christian or a Buddhist or a Muslim?"
     "No. Really, I don't believe in any particular religion. Usually, I find my spiritual strength in the 'church of nature,' so to speak. In fact, that's where I first had these feelings. I was near a creek and I felt like I'd been there before. I felt like a Native American woman who had lost someone she deeply loved. And I have never wanted to be a woman, if that's what you're thinking," I grinned.
     "I appreciate your frankness. What you're asking is not easy, and if we are successful you might not like what you find. Every life contains a certain amount of pain, as I'm sure you know."
     "I'm willing to risk it."
     "As long as you understand that there is an element of risk, or at least the possibility of some unpleasantness, I'm going to go ahead and start the process of hypnotizing you. You realize that I'm going to record this session. Is that all right?"
     "Yes."
     Apparently, I am a receptive subject. Listening to the tape afterward, I found out everything that had transpired during the session. After regressing me back to my birth experience, the hypnotist asked me to walk on the trail next to the creek again, but this time in my previous life. He asked me to describe what I saw. I described the huts on the ridge and women at the pounding stone gossiping and laughing. One man was making a spear, another a trap, while others appeared to be gambling.
     "Tell me what happened to you," the hypnotist said.
     I saw the village on the ridge, noticing a hut near a small pounding stone by a trail where before I had not noticed anything. A few people were huddled around fires but almost everyone else in the village was still asleep. I gazed far off into the valley, where I thought I saw herds of animals moving. Rain was beginning to fall. I had the feeling that something terrible was about to happen, but I was thirsty, so I decided to walk down the hillside to the creek for a drink of water. When I crouched down to cup water in my hands, I looked up to the hillside and saw white settlers attacking the village. I screamed, realizing at that moment that I was the woman in that past life.

Larkspur, Chinese Houses

     Then I remembered what had happened to the woman. After she had been knocked unconscious by the rifle butt, the white settlers, most in uniform, had burned the village and the winter stores. When she came to her senses, she discovered that her hands were tied tightly behind her back. A few members of the tribe were wailing over the dead strewn across the ridge. They dragged her over to a group of men who were being whipped into line. A white man with a long beard and dressed in skins was arguing with a man in uniform and pointing at her angrily. Suddenly the bearded man stomped over to her and pulled her aside, just before a line of soldiers marched in front of the prisoners, lifted their rifles on command and shot them dead. 
     The white man tied a leather strap around her waist and dragged her along behind him with her hands still tied behind her back. She could see her aunt wailing over the body of her uncle. She wanted to scream but could only grimace and weep, falling to her knees as she was dragged along and then pulled face down onto the ground. The white man turned around and whipped her hard across the neck and back until she got on her feet again. After that, every time she slowed, the white man whipped her until she moved at a pace more to his liking as they hiked up a trail that led to her old village, finally making camp on a ridge overlooking the great valley in the west and the foothill valley in the east where her tribe was still encamped.
     The white man used her like a wife that evening and then tied her up tightly to an oak tree. She sat with her back to the tree, gazing at the constellations, seeing fires like tiny stars in the valley on land that no longer belonged to her people, as though part of the great sky had also been taken from them. In the morning, she stared, unable to move, as men in uniform marched past her over the ridge into the foothill valley. Later that morning, she heard gunshots far off in the distance.
     They remained camped on the ridge several days, occasionally hearing gunfire. 
     After a few days she heard only birds and squirrels and frogs and crickets. The white man dragged her behind him on the trail into the foothill valley down to the creek near her village. They hiked along the hill above the creek, but even hundreds of yards above the village, she could smell smoke. The white man whipped her when she paused, so she trudged along behind him with tears streaming silently down her cheeks.

Kings River

     They finally made camp close to a place where some of her tribe had settled long ago, east of the creek where she had grown up. He used her practically every night whether or not she cried and then tied her to a tree. At times she could hear animals trampling through the brush, and one night awoke to a bear sniffing her. She remained perfectly still until the bear grunted and wandered off. The next day the white man dragged her down to the creek, untying her hands, and then tied a string around her finger and slapped a bush with his whip to let her know what would happen if she tried to escape. He showed her large flat rocks and where to carry them, above the river bed in the clearing where he began stacking them as evenly as possible on top of each other. By the end of the day they had four walls, all several feet high. In a few days they had built a solid house with planks and branches for a roof.
     Soon other white men made camp nearby in the clearing. They all had large pans and shovels and picks and spent most of the day by the creek. Her companion also spent a lot of time by the creek, showing the nuggets of gold that he occasionally found, but he would usually go hunting in the hills, leaving her untied but whipping the bush before he left. All the while, he had fed her well, deer and rabbit and squirrel and quail. After a little while, she realized she was pregnant. She had nowhere else to go, so she spent her days gathering acorns and making mush at the pounding stones by the creek just like her people had done for countless years. He refrained from whipping her, and they began to work more as partners.

Larkspur

     After she had the baby, she spent most of her time near the house while her companion went off hunting, sometimes for days. He even had a mule that he had bought from one of the other miners. He would sell some of the meat he brought back for gold to the other miners if he had any left over. She took care of the baby and did what her companion wanted.
     She was always the first one to rise, just before dawn. The baby was usually asleep at that time, which gave her a little time to prepare herself for the day. One morning while she was at the creek at sunrise, the camp was attacked by several men from her tribe, who shot the sleeping miners in their tents and then either crushed their skulls with clubs or slit their throats. She started running toward her house just as her companion was coming out. A gun went off close by, and he looked at her, surprised and pained, before he fell flat on his face. As she screamed, one of the attackers crushed his skull. Her baby, who had been screaming, suddenly stopped, and one of the men stepped out of the house with blood covering his knife. She tried to run into the house but was stopped by one of the men. She fell to her knees, wailing.
     The men took all the mules and the gold and whatever else they decided they could use and left her alone with the dead. First, she buried her baby under the house and then tore down the stones from the walls, one by one, to lay on top of her companion's shallow grave, the way she had seen the other miners bury an old man who had died of fever. She buried them all the same way, six in all, before she headed back up the creek to her old village. She found two more bodies near a stone house by the creek and buried them as well, side by side.
     Her companion had once shown her how to load and shoot a rifle, so she took a rifle and powder and bullets that had been left behind and made camp where her old village once stood. She built a small hut on the ridge and stayed alive by hunting and grinding acorns. I understood why I had found only one pestle in the mortar under the oak tree on the ridge.

Lupine, Goldfields

     All of this passed before my eyes fairly quickly. Some parts seemed to move in fast forward. I saw clearly only the most significant aspects of the experience. 
     The hypnotist woke me gently from my trance. "Do you remember what you just told me?" he asked.
     "Yes, I do," I replied. "I can't believe it. This is incredible. Why don't more people know about this?"
     "'This' meaning reincarnation?" the hypnotist asked.
     "Yeah. Imagine if everyone knew they had lived before and would live again. Wouldn't that knowledge eliminate a lot of horrible social problems?"
     "I doubt that everyone is ready for this. You weren't ready until now, and how old are you?"
     "Forty-one."
     "I doubt that we could force anyone to do this. They have to be ready for it, like you. Anyway, realizing that you have an eternal soul doesn't necessarily mean that you will be a good person."
     "Yes, but don't you realize what power you have to do good? The white racist would realize that he could have once been black. The sexist would realize that he was at least once a woman. The homophobic would realize that he might once have been gay, or might be in a future life."
     "Yes, but prejudice is a type of power that very few people are willing to give up."
     "But what if this became an accepted practice. Children could be regressed before they could become prejudiced!"
     "You mean they would go to their hypnotist like they go to their dentist?" he laughed.
     "Why not?"
     "You are not only a receptive subject but extremely brave! Unfortunately I don't have time to change the entire world right now. I have another appointment," he said with a warm smile.
     I thanked him and left the office, pondering the significance of reincarnation for many days afterward, without telling anyone.
     I suspected that I was tapping into something huge, something that connected me to everything else in the world. All of experience must be imprinted in the subconscious mind, I thought, or maybe the subconscious can somehow tap into a record of experience somewhere in the "mind" of the universe. That was the only way I could view the woman’s experiences at times from her perspective and other times from a different perspective. That raised a question: What is identity? Was I the woman in a past life or was I simply reliving someone else’s experiences? If the latter, does that mean that I am one pair of eyes for the collective mind, even though for most of my life I have believed that I am a unique, separate individual?
     Insanity is the denial of reality. If I were to deny that I have celiac disease, foods that everyone else can eat would poison me until I eventually die. If I were to deny that Blackmore is attempting to murder me, I would sooner or later fall victim to his homicidal plans. In fact, I have only remained alive due to my intuitions about his intentions, intuitions that many other people would view as incredible or insane. Why should an intuition be considered any more or less insane than reliving a past life or having visions of spiritual symbols or encountering spiritual entities? I have at key points in my life ended up adjusting my thinking and changing radically for unexpected, strange reasons. Why should I do anything differently now?

INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST EIGHT

Poppies, Miniature Lupine, Fiddleneck

THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE 

AND THE POUNDING STONE

If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

     I returned to Sycamore Creek to see if I could experience more memories of a past life.  After I parked the car on the edge of the hill, I scrambled down the slope through Chinese purple houses and Ithuriel's spears and baby blue eyes and fiddleneck, the unseasonably warm temperatures stimulating a few of the late flowers to bloom with the early spring flowers. As I stood enveloped by the breath of the plants and trees, I felt revived, the sun heating my skin even as the breeze chilled me. I had spent most of the past three weeks house bound, so the contrast was almost shocking. As I paused to catch my breath, I sensed the life-force flowing into my aura until it penetrated my core.  Everything was energy: the plants, the trees, the clouds, the purling air. Every part of me was pure energy: body, emotions, intellect, and spirit. In my mind’s eye, each invisible form of energy seemed to have a position in space, as if my feelings and thoughts were things made of some of subtle substance. At the same time, I sensed that if those vibrations suddenly dissolved, I would experience my essence in some dimension beyond space and time.

Ithuriel's Spears and Fiddleneck

     A dream I had just before I woke up suddenly made sense. The dream, which resembled the many symbolic visions I have had associated with the Tree of Life, contained three pure white flowers, resembling lilies, against a pure black background.  Every part of these flowers was white, even the stamen and the stems, and the petals formed a perfect circle at the apex of each flower. They seemed, as I stood on the slope feeling the life-force penetrating my essence, to represent the three supernal centers of my core, a unified triad containing the primal polarity containing the potential for manifestation.  The supernal spheres of the Tree of Life exist beyond manifestation, on the other side of what the Qabalists call the Abyss. The flowers were white to suggest the unity of all the colors and the purity of remaining untouched by the influences of the manifested cosmos. 
     I, of course, have been preoccupied by the thought of death due to Blackmore’s attempts to murder me and my struggles with celiac disease. My subconscious mind was revealing a symbol of my essence beyond death. Did this symbol mean that everything besides my essence would at some point fall away into pure blackness? Was the transient material universe like my body also headed for the abyss, leaving only the supernal essence? If so, did that mean that everything I was experiencing in this place and time, including the flowers and trees and memories of a past life, would slip into oblivion, leaving only the supernal essence? Or is the material universe the abyss itself? On the Tree of Life, the dominant color associated with the physical universe is black.
     As I pondered these questions, I realized that I had become hyper-sensitive to the life-force, not just due to being housebound, but also because of a long process of spiritual self-purification. In Western societies, the idea of a “life-force" remains in limbo even though every culture I know of has developed some concept of it, which means that my experience remains in the realm of fiction as well--even though the life-force is tangible to me. I can feel it flowing into the deepest part of every living thing open to it. Western science cannot explain how or why consciousness exists either, but here we are, I thought, as I followed an ancient path down to the creek and found the ancient Native American village site once again. 

Pounding Stone on Ridge

      As I lounged on a pounding stone, I heard something crashing through the brush in the distance. When I turned, I glimpsed someone pushing through the branches of a fallen tree, the shoulder strap of his rifle caught on a twig. Since I was near the unfenced and therefore ambiguous border between public and private land, and he had a gun, I dropped immediately to the ground. No predator in the wild terrifies me more than a human being with a weapon, so I peered at him through a crack in the stone. He was far enough away that I could not make out his features. I could see that he wore a stocking cap and long-sleeved shirt, both black, which seemed strange in the warm weather. Most hunters would be wearing some type of camouflage. 
     Blackmore, I thought to myself. As he approached, I scrambled down a steep slope and crouched behind a buckeye tree whose roots were breaking a rock in two. Suddenly I remembered the map of my location that I had drawn and pinned to the frig, against my better judgment. After I had left on my excursion, Blackmore must have visited my wife and noticed the map. He wouldn’t be able to resist hunting me down. After examining the map, he had no doubt made some excuses to my wife, jumped into his white truck, and drove like a cowboy out to Sycamore Creek. It wasn’t like him to make noise, but everyone in the woods sooner or later ends up struggling through the brush. 
     Hunting is normally a social enterprise, I thought, with two or more people involved. In fact, I have never encountered a hunter alone in the wilderness, nor have I encountered any hunters dressed in black. Blackmore wears a black t-shirt and black blue jeans all the time. As I hid in the tree roots, I began to wonder if I was just being paranoid. Could I be experiencing some form of PTSD due to Blackmore’s attempts on my life?  

Pounding Stone with  View of Another Village Site across the Creek

     In the most tranquil of places, I have found pounding stones. Near the creek, graves covered by stones and deserted Native American village sites reveal that some tragic drama once occurred there--a tragedy that just might be about to replay itself, I thought, as if places steeped in violence continue to attract it.  

Nine of Swords

     I wasn’t even sure Blackmore was the hunter. Why was I afraid? Was the survival instinct kicking in? When I have met people in the wild, I’ve always instinctively distrusted them, as though for them and me it is understood that the rules of civilization no longer apply. Then, I thought, there is always the general fear that weapons of mass destruction might wipe out the planet at any moment, a collective fear that we project onto other peoples and nations. Had I lived in denial of the horrors of the modern world so long that I was instinctively personifying my subconscious fear, personal and collective, in the form of one person, John Blackmore, the way someone might personify his repressed fear in the form of a monster or a demon? 
     I didn’t plan to hang around long enough to find out. I watched the hunter in black hurry down an ancient path toward the creek, so I headed in the other direction. Despite my fear, I felt the tranquility of the life-force in the sycamores and oaks and buckeyes and manzanitas next to the gurgling stream. Even though I always feel at peace in the wild, I am also always alert, feeling a slight tension at the back of my mind, because I know that any second I might encounter a snake or a mountain lion and end up slipping into the blackness. 

Ithuriel's Spears, Fiesta Flowers

     Again, I found myself near the confluence of Sycamore Creek and Dry Creek, where before I had experienced an inexplicable rage. That day I had felt like I had stepped into a current of cold air floating by the creek that contained an intense emotion, a subtle emanated substance.
     I was not experiencing the cold current of energy again, but I suddenly experienced impressions of the past as though the very air were charged with information. I don't know how else to explain it, and I of course have no way of proving what I suddenly knew. In my mind’s eye, I envisioned a meeting place on the ridge above me. With rocks that formed a natural semi-circle where people could sit, the meeting place had often instilled fear in the tribe members because terrible judgments were made there, often at night when the fire gave an unearthly glow to the faces of the elders.

Poppies by the Creek

     After climbing the slope on the other side of the creek, I found the stone semicircle and experienced another impression: The tribe was discussing some woman, judging her, deciding what to do with her. Suddenly shifting consciousness, I became part of the scene, and I gathered that her young husband had been killed by white settlers as he was attempting to steal horses from a farm that had once been part of the tribe's hunting grounds, and she had not been able to overcome her grief, avoiding or becoming angry at the other members of the tribe who tried to help her. She refused to believe that her husband was gone. She was slowly starving, weeping if she ate anything, and wandering off into the woods for days by herself, which was terribly risky because of predators. It was problematic for the tribe to keep sending men out looking for her.
     She refused to speak when the elders talked to her. She just stood with her head down, tears welling in her eyes. They talked to her sympathetically, and in the end decided that she should be taken to the clan nearby so that she could recover in different surroundings, away from her husband's grave where she had spent so many hours, completely inconsolable. Relatives in that clan would take care of her as long as she didn't run away. If she disappeared again, they would have to let her go.

Redbud

     As if time could be fast-forwarded, I could see that she followed her brothers down the trail toward the valley to a large village at the base of a hill, next to a stream. Her brothers left her with two kindly old people who made her feel at home. At first she worked away from the tribe at a pounding stone with one mortar on a ridge overlooking the village. Soon, however, she was grinding acorns with the other women. 
     As though I was recalling a dream, I saw on the screen of my mind how she got up early to get water from the creek one morning and noticed white settlers crawling up the ridge. Her screams awakened the village just before white men began firing their guns into the huts. A few members of the tribe were able to arm themselves and attack from hiding places in outcroppings of rock on the hillside. She ran toward the battle and grabbed the rifle of a fallen white man and shot another one in the face before she was hit with a rifle butt and lost consciousness.

Shooting Stars

     Suddenly I couldn’t see any more; the impressions of the past had vanished. I didn’t know whether or not the woman had been killed. The strange vision had left me only with more questions.
     I suddenly felt uncomfortable. I had not heard the black hunter firing his weapon in the distance, or had I? What if he had returned to the road and was waiting near my car to ambush me? I instantly regretted not rushing immediately back to my car and heading home the second I had first glimpsed the black hunter. I decided to take a less-traveled path and soon found myself surrounded by poison oak. Taking a detour, I came upon a rivulet cutting a small ravine in the slope and followed a faint path that led to a waterfall, the small pond below it surrounded by flowers. I paused, unable to move, as though I had discovered a small Eden. Suddenly I no longer cared about the black hunter. He could lie in wait by my car all day if he wanted to. I remembered an old saying: When trapped on a cliffside with  a mountain lion above and a bear below, reach for the blackberry in the brambles. I was going to hang out by the waterfall for the rest of the day, pondering my essence, my visions, the flowers.

INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST SEVEN

Fivespot, Baby Blue Eyes, Fiddleneck

(Note: I feel the need to apologize. I claimed that I was telling the truth ninety-five percent of the time while remaining unsure about the other five percent. 
     I confess that I lied about finding the Tree of Life matrix. Since I know that you consider me a fiction, I couldn’t help creating a fiction, one that symbolically reveals the existence of the power of the Tree of Life. 
     Forgive my lame attempt at deception. I swear I was doing it for a good reason: The forces represented by the Tree of Life remain invisible and latent inside of each one of us. Religions throughout history have used gods and symbols to represent spiritual principle, and unfortunately people sometimes confuse the symbol for the reality instead of understanding the invisible reality of the spirit. 
     Sorry--I just got caught up in literary bullshit. It was a mistake, not that you ever trusted me. I’ll try not to do it again....)

SIGHT

   I stood peering beyond the clouds, glimpsing the shadow of a surfacing turtle, then turned and reached into the cracks between rocks sprouting star moss, the pounding stone always at the center, the mortars filling with leaves and bugs and creek water and pounded only by rain for over a century, the smooth cups in the stone my only evidence. A slightly haunted satisfaction washed over me even though I found nothing but dirt or slime under my fingernails, even though merely sitting by the creek as the breeze stirred my hair, the leaves, the languid water.
   I have experienced, in this life and another, the two signs of the final terror.

Four of Cups

   (As often as I can I go to the creek, where nothing blocks the freshness and power of the life force emanating from the sun, the plants, the trees, the singing birds. It’s that power of the life force that my soul feeds upon, the way my body feeds upon energy originating from the sun within plants and animals. The whole person needs sustenance from the spiritual, mental, emotional levels, not just the physical level. By the creek, those needs are satisfied. On the spiritual level, I feel the harmony permeating the ecosystem and envision a golden, equal-armed cross. On the mental level, I see how all the species of plants and animals are inter-related, maintaining a balance throughout all the days and seasons of the year. On the emotional level, I am ravished by the beauty of the flowers and trees, the purling water, the breath of all the species flowing around me.)
   Once, I had driven toward the obscured mountains, straight on an avenue past orchards where a snow of blossoms revealed budding leaves, the road suddenly straying from the grid and veering northeast into the grasslands at the base of the foothills, across a canal that contained in concrete most of the San Joaquin River heading south now instead of north in its natural course to the delta, the road winding over a ridge into a small foothill valley. I knew they would pursue me until I paid, but I kept accelerating into the curves, suddenly noticing a slightly opened gate.

Creek with Path (on right side)

   I felt an uncharacteristic desire to trespass, so I turned around, parked the car, opened the loosely chained gate, and dashed down a short trail, over a berm with large boulders meant to hide a once-oiled road, now cracked, eroded, and quilted by cow droppings that sprouted red maids and miniature lupine. After hiking down the hill about half a mile, I wandered off the road onto a path next to the creek. At dusk alone in the foothills, the woods breathing peacefully as the air darkened and cooled, the bats looping soundlessly overhead and crickets chirping in the still-warm grass, I saw a flock of wild turkeys, resembling small dinosaurs, scurrying along the bank about fifty feet away. In the quiet, my chest heaved slightly from an inexplicable rage.

Path by Creek

   It wasn't just that I was trespassing, which I was considering an act of civil disobedience, or that I was six months out of work. I had walked straight to a pounding stone, the mortars in the rock black with slime and decaying leaves. I suddenly knew without a doubt that I would find a path leading to another pounding stone. I stumbled a few feet and found the path right away and followed it. Soon I found another pounding stone about two hundred yards away on a ridge overlooking the creek.
   The two pounding stones were close but blocked from view by a slope on the north side where the creek bends. I went back to the first pounding stone I had encontered and sat near a shallow mortar, which someone had not had time to deepen. Feeling the coolness of the rock and trying to empty my mind, I closed my eyes and felt the breeze and in spite of myself heard the laughter of women. I opened my eyes to the stone that had not changed in over a century, only now there were no people.

Ancient Path Leading to Pounding Stone

   Picking up an oak branch to use as a walking stick, I was suddenly seeing through the eyes of someone else who was bent and dizzy and deeply troubled, ready to lie down forever. The walking stick was in my hand which was also someone else's hand. I had someone else's face or no face at all. I held the stick away from my body, imagining myself stretching out on the earth many years before as the trees turned, everything passing away except the stone and the sun, and then my arrival.
   Listening to long, almost human groans of utter despair, possibly from a bullfrog being swallowed by an eight-foot garter snake that ruled the evaporating creek, I returned to the pounding stone with the feeling that I was on the verge of remembering something. All that surfaced was the overwhelming urge to find my way to the top of the opposite ridge. I hopped over the rocks without getting my feet wet and climbed up the slope, avoiding poison oak, seeing nothing at first but dry grass and gray pines and a few bare spots with a little rosinweed. I strolled back and forth on the ridge several times, sure I was missing something, until, sweaty and tired, I surrendured to the shade. 

The Pounding Stone with Pestles

   I looked first to my right at a large stone under an old oak tree, and then to my left, seeing poison oak near a stone that the earth had nearly submerged. Looking down I realized that I was practically sitting on a shallow mortar. Suddenly drawn to the oak tree, I discovered in the stone beneath it that a large pestle was plugging a mortar. With oak leaves needling my fingers, I cleared the pounding stone, finding ten other mortars. Looking back, I decided to check out the other stone and discovered that it also contained mortars, filled with earth and grass. I was in the middle of another ancient village site, the round hollows of the house pits still faintly etched in the earth.
   I suddenly felt like a woman. Before I could begin to cope with that feeling, a terrible sorrow overcame me, as if I had lost someone I had deeply loved. Even though I had suffered many times from loss, this grief was different, right on the surface. I felt the emotional surges of a teenager coupled with the maturity of an adult. Then I found a trail down to the creek, and suddenly imagined that I was in some procession, and that I was about to say goodbye to someone for the last time. The grief was different from any I had experienced, nearly unbearable, impossible to suppress. I felt compelled to go on, as though it were out of the question to stop, crossing the dry creek and snaking up a trail to a level stretch of land where I found more round hollows in the earth.

Close-up: Pestles on Pounding Stone

   I knew right away that the round hollows were house pits, which confused me at first, until I remembered that the Yokuts often buried the dead under their houses. I felt an absurd desire to keep anyone from being buried there. The woman in that other time must have fought with all her strength to stop the burial. I imagined that others, overcome by their own grief, did what they could to comfort her. Somehow I knew that she had remained inconsolable, and I had no rational explanation for how I knew this or why I had found my way to those house pits.

INSANE IS THE NEW NORMAL: POST SIX

Ithuriel's Spears, Lupine, Poppies

CLEANSING RAIN

   Rain out of nowhere smacked the windshield. After I switched from low beams to brights, the drops seemed to shoot out from an invisible shower nozzel floating about five feet above my improperly angled left headlight. No matter how fast I sped down the rural highway--sixty, seventy, eighty--the nozzel remained suspended in front of my car. All the while I could also see myriad drops exploding on the asphalt, the black orchards sliding into shadows of vineyards or voids of pastureland.
   Suddenly I glimpsed in the headlights a bullfrog that resembled a malformed infant crawling across the wet pavement, its right foreleg stretching out to drag the rest of its bulky form directly into the path of my car. I swerved a little to the right; I will never know whether or not my car crushed it, whether or not other tires would soon be smashing it into a ratty, quickly graying mush.

Path 11

   Suspended in the eternal moment, able, within limits, to choose the quality of that moment, you might decide in complete innocence to explore a road and suddenly find yourself a bloody mush on the asphalt. I shuddered a little but refused to imagine my own body lying mangled in the black rain because I believe that thought forms infused with emotion tend to manifest. Instead I imagined the ritual that I would perform when I got home. I would put on a CD of the music that I’d composed and recorded on the computer, and after clearing my ritual space, would send energy into my symbolic offerings for Thoth, Osiris, and Isis, each hieroglyphic symbol turning golden on the alter in the energy of my ka. Then I would send the energy to the pictures of the Gods that I had painted. The Gods, if they favored me, would ensoul those forms on the astral plane, sending their potent energy back into my sphere of sensation, which would be strengthened in ways that would only become apparent later--perhaps even years later.
   Desiring control of the cosmic energies within myself, I recently, for three days in a row, had implored Thoth, Isis, and Osiris to look favorably upon my longing to live in my higher self, and finally in the middle of the night, I had awakened. After an hour of painfully mulling over in my mind all of my points of vulnerability, I suddenly realized that I had to peer beyond appearances to the divine spark, the part of myself that recognizes the divinity within all things. The next day, the idea of "the divine spark" resonated in whatever I was doing. Even when I was washing dishes or taking out the trash, I sensed a divine intelligence permeating everything. During my next ritual, I envisioned an invisible sun that I immediately associated with Osiris and the crown chakra, Osiris torn into pieces and restored by Isis and Thoth, Osiris slain and risen into the higher life, a spiritual sun. I was surprised by joy and peace as if Osiris had somehow reached into the physical plane and touched my soul.

Path 12

   As I drove, I envisioned The Magician, the Tarot card representing the path on the Tree of Life between Kether, the crown, and Binah, the root of form. I pictured a man in a robe holding up a wand with his right hand, his left hand pointing to the ground. The magician stands behind a table on which rests a wand, a cup, a sword, and a pentacle, symbols of the astrological triplicities and the four elements of the wise. The magician knows how to use all of the cosmic energies, and above his head floats a gray figure eight, symbol of the knowledge of the infinitude within, a symbol that I, in the first of many synchronicities, had seen in a vision during meditation two days before I purchased a pack of Tarot cards. The Hebrew letter beth, the first letter of the bible (but the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet), is associated with the card. Thoth also is associated with the archetype of the Magician in his Roman form as Mercury, “Thoth, the tongue of Ra, the Logos who speaks the Word that manifests the divine Will,” I thought as I swerved a little to avoid crushing another frog. I planned to place that card on the altar in front of my painting of Thoth for my next ritual.
    Rays of water kept shooting out from the invisible shower nozzel above my car, and as I swerved again to avoid smashing another lump on the road, I realized that just as the hearts of many people do not resonate with the beauty of nature, or with the concepts of truth and justice or with music or poetry or paintings, their hearts would not resonate with the concept of the higher self. In fact, I would be even more separated from the herd because of my desire to live in the higher self and even more vulnerable because of the ferocity of the group mind, which had the uncanny ability to identify and villify anyone who is different, like the aliens in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Three of Cups:
Mercury in Cancer

   A jackrabbit suddenly shot in front of my car. I heard a sharp crack followed quickly by a thud in the undercarriage. I winced, remembering when my wife and daughter had left me alone for a weekend. I remembered hearing, late at night, a thud somewhere in the house. Soon after, I heard what sounded like the cocking of a gun in front of my tiny room where my wife had banished me due to my snoring. A few minutes later I heard a window being unlocked in another room. 
     I shuddered as I gazed at the rays of water; if it hadn't been for my intuition that something terrible might happen that night, I wouldn't have slept in a locked room, and my wife would have found me the next day, a lifeless, bloody lump on the couch. What kind of guilt, I wondered angrily, would my wife feel now if I died in suspicious circumstances?
   Suddenly I felt the car wobble a little. God, not now in this rain, I thought, as I pulled over next to an orchard. I flicked the hood of my jacket over my head, grabbed a flashlight from the trunk, and inspected the tire. The head of a nail glinted in a vulnerable slit between the treads. Slow leak. At that instant, a white Ford pickup truck flew by, splashing water from a large puddle all the way over the roof of my car and onto my face and jacket.
   My landlord, John Blackmore, owned a white Ford pickup truck. Every man with any money in the San Joaquin Valley owned a white Ford pickup truck. The truck in the distance appeared to be turning around; I thought I glimpsed the headlights far off sliding over trees and then slowly growing larger on the wet pavement. Blackmore might have his gun. Blackmore could kill me and bury me deep in one of these orchards, and nobody would ever know. In a panic, I clicked off my flashlight and hustled over to the first row of trees, hiding behind a thin trunk. Sure enough, the white Ford pickup swung around and parked behind my car.
   A man with a flashlight, about Blackmore's height--it was hard to tell due to the hood of the raincoat--bent over to inspect the tire. Then the man stood up and gazed down the road. Soon the shadow turned the flashlight on the orchard, and I dropped down to the roots of an almond tree. The man got back in his truck and drove off slowly down the road. Shaking slightly, I swore bitterly to myself as I watched the red tail lights growing smaller. But then the truck, far off in the distance, turned around again.

Ten of Pentacles:
Mercury in Virgo

   Only three people would do that: my wife, a landowner searching for trespassers, or John Blackmore. My wife had no reason to suspect that I was having car problems, and a landowner would be crazy to search for trespassers on such a dreary night, unless he were totally psycho about private property rights. The man got out of the pickup and began walking directly over to the orchard without a light to guide him. I panicked again, but knew that if I ran, I would probably make too much noise, so I tiptoed three rows deeper into the orchard before the shadow reached the trees. Suddenly a flashlight flowed slowly over the trunks, casting eerie shadows, and I slumped down as close to the roots as possible. The shadow carrying the light suddenly stopped and waited.
   A veteran trespasser, I knew that I would have to remain completely still until the man became distracted or wandered away; remaining calm, I decided that I would then move as quietly away from my adversary as possible. I could not escape in my car, obviously, due to the flat tire, but I might circle around and try to see the license plate number of the pickup, to prove once and for all to my wife that Blackmore was a homicidal maniac who would stick a nail in one of my tires and then follow me to work on a wet, dreary night. I decided instead to disappear farther into the orchard and wait until the truck left for good.
   I leaned against the tree, suddenly remembering a moment which had occurred over twenty years before. I, my second wife Karen, and my eight year old son from a previous marriage were all standing in the badly lit kitchen of our apartment. Karen, who for five years had rarely gotten along with my son, out of nowhere called the boy a “bastard and a mother f--ker.” She had attacked me vociferously many times before in front of the boy, often without what I would consider provocation, but she had never before, to my knowledge, verbally assaulted the boy. Karen would sometimes harangue me for hours, becoming more and more furious as I tried to smooth things over or end the argument by going into another room; she would follow me wherever I went, still screaming. I remembered the moment clearly, possibly because it was the beginning of the end of the relationship: she had carefully enunciated the explosive words and then simply stepped back, waiting, as if she had just dropped a grenade between me and my son. My hand shot out, slapping her hard across the cheek. Furious, I then stomped into the bedroom, shoved open her closet door, grabbed as much of her clothing as I could and ran to the door, throwing the clothes in a heap on the front step.
   I had already imbibed several beers. I sat down on the couch, watched TV and finished off the six-pack as Karen made a phone call. Soon, my former lover, Anne, showed up on the doorstep where my wife's clothing still remained in a heap. That was meant to make me cringe: I had met Karen after she had become Anne's roommate in college. Anne had mercilessly teased me several times before and after going to bed with me, and since Anne had decided to marry another man, I decided to pursue other interests, in other words, the new roommate.

Eight of Wands:
Mercury in Sagittarius

   Blackmore must have heard me splashing through the orchard, and might still be waiting for me, so I decided not to try to find my way back for a while. I realized also at that moment that, to be a spiritual master, I would have to remain focused even in the worst circumstances, to control the cosmic energies within myself even if my lover was about to poke my eye out with a red-hot wire or my best friend was attempting to blow my head off. 
     Before my spiritual transformation, I had been an agnostic. I had started meditating, however, and during meditation and ritual had touched the hem of eternity, envisioning archetypes and sensing intelligences that transcend anything humans could ever consciously understand. A human was little more than an amoeba compared to them. Those great intelligences remained ineffable due to the limited brain capacity of the species. Oddly, however, their presence could be felt if one exalted consciousness, and for some reason, the Gods would elevate the human soul--as if the evolution of humanity were somehow significant to them. Their energy exalted me and made me stronger emotionally and mentally than I ever before believed possible.
   I tried to black everything out of my mind and, failing that, I focused on the image of Thoth. In my painting, the figure of Thoth stood against a yellow background and contained flashing colors--in other words, complementary colors of purple and yellow that vibrated if one stared at them long enough, the intense colors helping the mind tune to a higher vibration, so that the worshipper could more easily tune to the higher energies of the spiritual plane. I tried to hold the image in my mind, but instead, I remembered the argument that had occurred decades before.

Six of Swords:
Mercury in Aquarius

   As the rain dropped from the branches like tiny liquid fruit in the darkness, I cringed again. When Karen left the apartment with Anne the day of the argument, I had been so angry, not to mention drunk, that I couldn't think of a thing to say as they left. I didn't even ask where they were going. Karen was gone three days before she phoned me to let me know that she was staying at the battered women's shelter. I threatened, in front of my son, to commit suicide when Karen refused to come home. "Oh," she stated. "They told me you might say that." She also mentioned that she felt foolish when she saw the other women at the shelter, some of whom, unlike her, had been brutally beaten, but she still refused to come home.
   Stop tormenting yourself, I thought. Since then, I had purified myself over and over, physically and emotionally and mentally and spiritually, forgiving everyone who had harmed me. I had not seen or talked to Karen or Anne in two decades. The torment, of course, had continued. Karen, through her fiction writing in college, had become the darling of a popular feminist writer, so I was not rehired as a teaching assistant or as a tutor at the English writing lab the following semester. I wrote a shrill letter of complaint to the feminist professor, who asked me over the phone if I was going to sue her for sexual misconduct. Dumbfounded again, I could only give a weak reply in the negative, sensing that my eight years of grueling work at the university was all for nothing. After that, if I ever submitted a resume which mentioned that I had worked as a TA or a tutor at the university, I wouldn't get hired.
   Old wounds were opening, and I suddenly knew why. When I had graduated from college, I had become an environmental activist instead of going into a doctoral program or becoming a teacher, encountering John Blackmore at numerous political meetings. Suddenly I shivered. I was getting soaked as big drops plopped from the branches above onto my jacket and pants. When I closed my eyes, I imagined Blackmore, after completing the perfect murder, taking my wife out on a date. 
     I suddenly envisioned Blackmore's torso enveloped in blackness from which the snarling heads of wolves protruded. Blackmore was clever enough to hide his homicidal tendencies, and those wolves in his black heart kept anyone from getting too close to him. At some point in his life, Blackmore had chosen to channel dark, ferocious energy, which presented itself to my psychic vision as astral wolves demanding blood.
   In my imagination, I created a mirror around myself, which would send any negative thought-forms back to whomever was sending them to me. The soul, or higher self, thought of simplistically as the conscience, was like a mirror; my enemies would see themselves for what they were if they gazed into it. I realized then that the higher self does not care about social status or money or what kind of job you have or even if you are harmed by following its dictates. I had never regretted sending the letter to the feminist professor or being an environmental activist. The higher self is a magic mirror, I thought--and life would be intolerable without magic, without a belief in something higher.

Eight of Pentacles
Tree of Life: Mercury in Hod 

   The rain and wind were dying down. I closed my eyes again and imagined the ritual that I had planned earlier. Even though Isis, Osiris, and Thoth were on my alter, I could only imagine Osiris clearly at that moment. In my imagination, I sent out golden energy from my heart to the hieroglyphic symbol of the Eye of Horus, which at home was positioned in front of the painting of Osiris. Suddenly, in my mind's eye, the symbol was no longer in black ink on paper but was the purest gold. I imagined then that the golden energy from my ka was infusing the astral form of Osiris until the form glowed. I felt the energy flow back into my heart and the intense circuit of energy brought tears to my eyes. "Osiris, slain and risen, perfected by suffering, thank you for restoring the fragments of my soul. I am resurrected," I whispered, imagining green, torn apart pieces of my soul put back together again. At that moment, I saw the spiritual sun at my crown. Whoever was trying to destroy me was so far away now, in some other galaxy. Nothing could harm my essence.
     I opened my eyes. I could see the trees more clearly now. Perhaps the moon had broken through the clouds. I slowly stood up, groaning, and tip-toed down a row of trees, careful to avoid startling any wild animals. After what seemed like hours, I came to the edge of the orchard and ambled along a muddy road. I saw headlights moving far away. I picked up the pace, hearing another muffled howl. Finally, to my great relief, I saw a parked car in the distance, and I trotted along in the mud, howling, in my mind, for joy. 
     I quickly changed the tire and brushed my hands off as I stood up with a groan. A smudge of gold glinted just above far-away mountain peaks as one light on the road suddenly split into two, far off in the distance, rapidly growing larger.