I have been circling a place in me that I have not wanted to look into, a place of absolute refusal. I have circled it with trepidation because I have not wanted to really see what it is.
I have felt that it is connected to something I carry in me - a fear that I am mean, that my presence in someone’s life will cause great pain, great suffering. Just my presence or something that I will do or say. It is a lesson I learned in part from my father who believes his children are better off without him. He has spent half his life refusing his love for us, refusing to even want to see us, to see his grandchildren. He says, “You are better off without me. Better off not really knowing your Italian heritage.” His shame is palpable. His suffering.
I have circled a place in me, round and round. The dreams circling, too. Round and round. It is deeper than what I learned from my father though they are connected. I have feared that it is deeper because the refusal is so deep. My refusal. I have not wanted to look directly at the refusal, at my refusal, because I have believed it is at the core of who I am.
I have not wanted to get down to the core of who I am because I have been afraid that at the core, I am mean, venomous, a lying woman who betrays others, who abandons the ones she loves, who throws hurtful swords at every opportunity.
The fear comes when I step into the place of my passion. When I step into my passion, too far into my passion, my excitement, everything just stops. It does not feel violent on the inside; it does not even feel strange. It feels quiet, as if I am entering a normal place, a place that is familiar. Safe even. The stopping has not felt like stopping, it has just felt quiet.
Quiet and still. Everything coming to stillness.
Then the excitement is gone, the passion is moved somewhere else, it disappears. The quiet place is a comfortable place, unlike the passion, unlike the excitement that has an edge of fear, a large edge of fear. The passion, the excitement, the fear are all uncomfortable. When I am moving toward the excitement, when I am moving in the excitement, I move into a feeling of deep sensuality, my whole body engaging with the movement.
It is uncomfortable because I do not know what will happen. It is exciting because I do not know what will happen. As I move inside the passion, the fear, I am uncomfortable.
The quiet takes away the discomfort. Brings my body back into a place that is familiar and quiet.
It never occurred to me that the familiar and quiet were numbness.
I have been circling and circling, my dreams circling.
My dreams have circled me down into my trauma, into my wound. Into the place of violation with my brother. The place of innocence that turned to violation. I have circled that wound and plunged into it, my dreams taking me in and through.
The dreams have plunged me into the wound with my brother and through it, deeper still, deeper to the wound that was underneath it. The wound with my mother. Circling around the wound, circling again until I was ready to be plunged into it. Then plunging me in.
The dreams circled me and plunged me in and through. I plunged into and through the wounds that kept me from knowing myself, that kept me from feeling. Into the hurt and the grief, releasing the feelings, releasing core pain of the little girl who just wanted her mother, just wanted her brother, just wanted her father, just wanted someone to look after her.
The dreams circled me and plunged me in so that I could reach the other side. Reach the other side where I am His, where I remember that I have always been His. The dreams have circled me around this knowing, circled me around remembering, showing me, showing me how He sees me, showing me how I feel about Him.
Dream:
I am sitting in a small theater with some friends. Onstage, a girl performs an act where she wraps herself up in a piece of red silk that hangs from the ceiling. She wraps herself up, wrapping herself up to the ceiling, in graceful movements. When she reaches the ceiling where she is completely wrapped up, she lets go and unrolls back down, stopping just inches from the stage. The movement full of grace and danger, taking my breath away.
The dream shows me how He sees me, how He sees my willingness to unwrap myself, showing me that my unwrapping is an act of grace and courage.
He has been circling me around my remembering, ever circling. Helping me to remember that I am His, that I have always belonged to Him, even when I did not remember. He has been circling me, bringing me back to my girl self, my soul self, so that I can remember. Circling me around what I remember and what I do not want to remember, do not want to look at.
I have been circling a refusal in me that I do not want to look at. Underneath the trauma, underneath the wounds of my childhood, there is a place in me that I have not wanted to look into. He has been circling this place in me, preparing me so that I can plunge into it. I feel dread in the circling, resistant to the plunging. I do not want to go because it will reveal the horror at the core of me, the horror of my refusal, the core of who I am that I am nothing but refusal. Nothing but an absolute no because there is something deeply wrong with me.
I have been circling and when I get close to being plunged, I have plunged into the quiet instead. Into the quiet, numb place where I do not have to feel the discomfort, where I do not have to feel the longing, the yearning, the passion, the excitement. It is uncomfortable. I have always believed that I am uncomfortable, that others are uncomfortable with me. I have always believed that the place where I stand in my passion is uncomfortable for me and for others.
I have believed that I am scary. I have been scared of myself and I have projected that others are scared of me, too. And when others have been scared of me, I felt justified in my own fear. He has been circling me around my fear of my passion, my discomfort. He has been trying to show me about my passion.
Dream:
I am a little girl, standing on a high desert mesa looking out toward mountains where a violent storm is approaching. There are many others, some of whom are dear to me. They are all panicking about the storm, trying to get everyone, including me, into cars so that we can flee from the storm. I feel scared, too, because the storm seems really big. I can hear it behind me as I am being pushed into a car. But then I turn and look at the storm. My fear vanishes. I take a few steps toward the storm and I forget about all of the people. I step closer to the storm which is approaching me. It is more than just a lightning storm - the lightning is actually columns of flames shooting down from thick black clouds. I am fascinated and keep moving toward it.
He has been trying to show me that I am not afraid. I let other people’s fear scare me, but I am not really afraid. Circling me around, circling me around my fear. I have been circling, afraid of my fear. He has been showing me my true nature around fear.
Dream:
I am outside a huge hotel that has many swimming pools all around it. I am swimming in one of the pools even though there is a storm screaming all around me and tornadoes touching down everywhere. People in the hotel are scared. Then I get out of the pool and begin to walk up the long walkway to the entrance of the hotel. As I walk, two tornadoes touch down next to me and they form at the top, almost making the bottom torso of a person. It is as if I am walking with the tornado. I feel completely happy to be with the tornado, walking. It moves with me as I walk.
And I still circle. Still I circle my fear even though He is showing me that I do not have fear. I circle, convinced that there is something to fear, something in me, something that is in the very fabric of my being that is dangerous, that is venomous, that is evil. My refusal.
The refusal to acknowledge Him, to acknowledge that I remember Him. My refusal the same as Simon Peter’s refusal of Christ when the cock crowed. My refusal to acknowledge that I know Him, that I remember, that I am His.
I circle, the dreams circle. I am afraid to be plunged in. It was easier to be plunged into the trauma with my brother, the trauma with my mother. Easy to plunge in, a relief really, to enter into that remembering. The remembering of things of the outer world.
Things I could feel into and through, let go.
But I circle this because it has nothing to do with anything that happened. It is, I believe, the very core of who I am. That I am just refusal, absolute refusal.
I am circling
When I circle close or when the dreams circle me close, I feel scared. I have plunged into the refuge of the numbness, the refuge of the quiet, the violence of the silence instead. But I have kept circling, the dreams snapping me back.
I circle like an animal. I circle because I have to, because I do not know how to enter into what I circle. Do I circle like an animal circling prey or am I turning in a circling, round and round and round to drop into sleep, making a nest of silence to lie down in.
The quiet place has begun to feel violent. A place of absolute violence. I have not associated the silence with violence, with anything like rage. I have not felt myself as an angry person, as someone who carries rage in me. But the silence feels like violence now. Feels as if I am throwing myself into some kind of jarring state - from moving in the flow with Him to screeching to a halt.
It has felt like the only safe place to go. The place I could enter when I went into my room as a girl and closed the door, locking it. The place I could enter when I opened a book and fell into the story so that I could fall out of my reality. I have spent a great deal of energy looking and longing for that quiet space. Where I do not have to feel anything, where I can just skate on the surface, where I can fill time by doing anything but my work, my writing.
I loved having my own room when I was a girl. I remember closing the door at night, stuffing a towel under the bottom so that light would not shine through and reading voraciously any book I could find in the house. I read all of the novels my mother read - from Stephen King’s stories about evil coming through vampires and dogs and cars to The Exorcist to VC Andrew books. When I discovered the library at school, I read Jack London.
I closed the door and entered the silence, closed the door on the confusion of my family, the confusion of my own self and dropped into the quiet. It never felt crushing then.
It is crushing now. It is the silence that crushes me. In the silence I stop, screeching to a halt.
It has never felt like violence to me, never felt like rage, but it has for others. The rage of withdrawal. How I have withdrawn and refused to be engaged with others. When I was a girl, going into my room and closing the door felt like such a quiet act, an act of slipping into my room to hide. But it was not quiet. It was a closed door, it was my silence, it was a wall. It protected me, my refusal in the silence. It was all I felt I had.
Others feel it now, in my adult life. When I go into silence, my partners have felt it. My ex-husband hated the long silences, my refusal to tell him what was happening in me, my desire to not talk, to not engage, when I got scared or when I felt I had a need.
My partner now feels it, too. I have entered into my fear and then my silence with him.
I am lying on the bed with Bill, rocking back and forth, feeling scared and edgy. He holds me and asks what is happening. I do not speak. I rock and squirm, but I do not speak. He asks and holds me and is patient for a long time. Still I do not speak. Even when I can speak, I do not speak. Voices screeching in my ears about keeping silent. Wanting to have the silence anger him.
When I am not feeling my refusal, my anger, I cannot acknowledge the violence of my refusal to speak.
I have circled this place, circled and veered off, circled and not wanted to look, circled and felt sickened by it. My silence comes to crush me when I feel my passion, when I feel my need. It screeches to STOP. It screeches - DO NOT RISK AGAIN.
When I seek out the salve of my silence, when I seek to be crushed by it, everything in me is silenced. Everything. I forget that I am His, I forget that I remember Him, I forget who I am. Instead, I allow myself to be pinned under the weight of my silence.
I have tried to jump away from the subject for this is a blind spot. Me? Angry? What do you mean? I did not understand.
I circled.
Then I remembered a dream from when I was eight:
I am lying in my bed in my room. An old hag appears at the end of my bed, then crawls up under the covers. The minute she touches me, I freeze in terror. I cannot move. She crawls up between my legs, spreading them, then licks my clitoris. I feel complete horror but I also feel aroused.
When I feel aroused, I feel horror and sickened. I feel as if she can crawl inside of me and that somehow she does crawl inside of me.
This was the moment when I accepted the hag into me. Crushed by the weight of the silence I was gathering myself into, I accepted the hag into my bed. Crushed by the rage and hate of my mother, crushed by the confusion of my brother, crushed by the absence of my father, crushed by my own silence, I accepted the hag.
The dream came right around the time where my memory begins. My memory before this age, the age when I discovered reading, when I discovered the closed door, when I discovered the silence, is blurry, only a feeling memory really. What I remember before being eight years old is just fear.
I was afraid of thunderstorms because I was sure they were coming for me, sure that the lightning that flashed outside my attic window was coming for me. That it would burn the house down. I remember being afraid of the attic. I remember being afraid of everything. There are only a few pictures of me from my young childhood but in most of them I look terrified.
The dream of the hag came at a time when other things were happening in me. I had another terrifying dream around the same time that recurred every night for weeks:
I am standing in the front yard of our house. I can hear my two brothers who are closest in age to me playing pool - I hear the sounds of the balls hitting each other and the sounds of their voices. Then I hear nothing and I know they are dead. I am filled with wrenching grief. Then I notice that at the bottom of the street is a huge hearse with about ten open and empty coffins in the back. Many people are running down the street toward the open hearse to get into the coffins. I run too, desperate to get inside of one. I jump and manage to get into a coffin, flooded with relief. But then the back of the hearse closes and the car begins to drive away. I wake up screaming.
When I was eight years old, I ran to bury myself in silence. I felt the silence of my brothers, the silence of their souls, and I ran to silence myself, too. I ran to get into that coffin, I wanted that silence of the door swinging closed, I was relieved to bury myself alive.
The crushing silence.
There were other dreams then, too. It is strange how I remember the dreams, how I remember the books, but I remember very little of my day to day life. The other dreams were terrifying too, but for a different reason. They were sexual:
I am on a beach with Meathead from the television show All in the Family. He kisses me and we embrace. I feel scared because he is a grown man, but I also feel very excited. I have no idea what is happening, why I am feeling what I am feeling. He lays me on the sand and we roll around in the water. Then I feel as if my body is exploding from the inside with intense waves. I wake up to the waves in my body.
I did not understand that I was experiencing orgasms, I did not understand what was happening in my body. I did not remember the trauma with my brother; it was buried in the lost years of my young childhood. I only knew that my body kept exploding and that I had this experience in my body when I was awake.
I discovered that if I touched myself that I could approximate what happened in the dreams because I wanted that explosion. I also discovered my brother’s hidden pornography and discovered that this was sexuality, that it was about this weird thing called sex.
In the dream, He is trying to find me, He is trying to enter back into me through sexuality because it was through sexuality, in part, that I got lost. He tried, but I was already lost. The arising sexuality, my arousal, the masturbation; all confusing and filling me with shame. I could not get to the place of the dreams, I only felt dirty. But I could not stop until I was older; I was compulsive about masturbating. Compulsive and repulsed. I had fantasies where I imagined I was forced to have sex so that I did not have to be responsible for my desire.
There was a fire in it. A fire echoed in my dreams. I wanted the fire. And I did not want the fire. The fire felt dangerous. Too dangerous. I associated the fire with my sexuality. I associated the fire with my shame.
Because I had been so full of desire to bury myself, because I was scared, because I was so hungry for the crushing silence, the hag could enter my bed. I was forgetting Him, I was forgetting that I was His, that I had always been His. Even in my fear of Him, I was His. I was like the girl in The Exorcist - I believed that I was empty and that I could be possessed. I believed the hag possessed me.
My fear of the storms was somewhat true - I knew that He was there, that He was coming for me. I projected that fear onto the storms in my child mind. The fire I so wanted and was so afraid of. The fire in me that I imagined caused everything bad to happen for me and for others.
I was stopping, coming to a screeching halt in my confusion. Burying myself. When I buried my self, when I buried my soul self in my terror and confusion, I plunged into the silence. And in that silence, the hag came to me and took away the center of passion in me. When she came into my bed and licked me, it was as if she was taking away my clitoris.
She did take it because I gave it away. I felt the pleasure in the horror of her taking it from me, in the middle of the horror and the confusion of my young girl self, I gave it away.
I also remember during this time suddenly thinking to myself, “Oh. He’s gone.” I realized that the presence that had always been there was no longer there.
Or I could not feel Him anymore.
He tried to come to me in my dreams, but I was confused in the terror of my sexuality, of my experiences, of growing up.
The hag came into my bed, came into my life, without even trying to hide herself. I learned from her. I learned to not feel that passion, to certainly not show it. I wanted to be buried, to be dead, and she came and showed me how to do it.
When I plunged into my silence, I could no longer hear Him either. When I plunged into the quiet to escape the terror I felt in my family and in the world, I plunged into full separation from Him. I could not hear Him anymore.
When I plunged into the silence, I plunged away from my passion, my fire, my desire, my needs. I plunged away from Him, away from knowing myself. I plunged away fearing that like the girl who was possessed in The Exorcist, there was something deeply wrong with me, something that drew unwanted attention, something that I needed to kill in me.
I have circled my passion, circled the fire, feeling ashamed of it. Feeling sure that I have a deep refusal, a deep darkness in me. When the hag came into my bed, I lost Him and I lost my capacity to trust myself. I stopped trusting myself, stop trusting my fear, stop trusting my instincts. I just stopped.
When the dreams started to circle me around my trauma, when they started to circle me around my passion, my fire, my fear, they showed me how much I stopped, how much I believed the crushing silence:
I believe I have killed my oldest brother - there is a bloody bag in the sink and I think that his head is in the bag and that I have chopped it off. So, I take an axe in my right hand and chop off my left hand at the wrist. Then, I anchor the axe somehow on the floor so that the blade is sticking up. I throw my right wrist onto the blade over and over again, trying to chop off my right hand. I have never considered the quiet as violence, but this is what it looked like to my psyche. After the hag came into my bed, it was not a far leap into believing I had caused everything. It was not a far leap into cutting off my own hands.
I forgot Him, I let the hag into my bed and I spent most of my life living in that silence. I lived in the silence and reacted to everything in a way that confirmed my suspicions about myself - that I was bad, that I had a deep refusal in me.
I have circled the place in me of the deep refusal. I have known the refusal as my refusal.
Dream:
I am a girl, house sitting a very wealthy old woman’s house in a big city. I hear that she is coming back to the house in order to die. I realize that it is time for me to leave. As I leave, a young man tells me that Martin Luther King is coming to speak and that maybe I could stay to hear him. I decide to go back into the house, thinking, “I can be in the back and no one will notice I am there.”
Switch
I am in a courtyard of the mansion with the young man. He walks towards me but trips over a butcher block full of knives. They fly straight up in the air in a slapstick way, then come down and land directly in my head. We both laugh hilariously and I am amazed that I am not dead. I have believed that I have been living in the hag’s house my whole life. That when she crawled up under the covers of my childhood bed that I moved in with her, that she entered my body. I do not know in this dream that the mansion where I live is not the hag’s mansion, but the mansion of my Father, my true Father. The young man, the Animus, tricks me to come back to the mansion. Tricks me back in, I always love a good lecture, especially about freedom and then shows me what part of me needs to die.
My mind needs to die. My mind that is tricked by the hag that it is her house. I am in His house; I have always lived in His house.
I have spent my life as if I lived in the hag’s house, living out what I have believed about myself. I have believed I am an abandoner, so I have abandoned people I love. I have believed that I could not hear Him, but then followed my gut instincts and allowed Him to lead me. I have believed that the hag entered my body when I was eight years old and that I entered into servitude in her house. I entered into servitude, but I never left His house. It was her greatest trick, her greatest sleight of hand.
Dream:
I am a little girl, watching Voldemort, the evil wizard from Harry Potter, enter people’s bodies all around me and I am completely horrified. He enters easily and quickly, the people not really even noticing. I realize that he cannot enter me, but I do not know why he cannot enter me.
The demon cannot enter me because I do not belong to the demon. The trick was that I believed the hag entered me. The hag never entered me. She did not really take my clitoris away. She attached herself to it like a parasite, a leech, and has been living there ever since. Feeding off my passion when I plunge into my silence, feeding off my passion to fill her unending rage.
I have circled this place in me, circled with dread and resistance, because I believed that at the center, I am refusal.
I have circled and circled because I believed that the violence of the refusal was the center of my soul. I did not want to see that at the center of my soul. Did not want to see the violence, the rage, the anger, the pleasure at rage that lived there.
I have circled. The dreams have circled me. The dreams plunge me in.
I plunge in and plunge in and what I find is the hag. That the refusal at the center of me, that is somehow connected to my pleasure, is not me. I am not rage, not refusal, not violence, not silence.
The dreams plunge me, He plunges me in and what I find is that the hag has been feeding off my passion to feed the rage, the refusal, the violence that is her. She has tricked me into believing that I am her, that I am refusal. I have circled; she has kept me circling because she has not wanted me to see that it is her.
He has plunged me in, has plunged deeper into me. She cannot enter me because I am His. I have always been His. She had me chop off my hands because it is through my hands that I can receive Him, receive the gift of Him. She had me offer myself to my mother, to my brother so that I would be separated from Him.
I have circled because she had me circling around her. I have used my fear that I was the hag as my plumb line, circling, circling. He has plunged me in and I am His. Have always been His. He is inside me, has always been inside me. I am remembering Him.
I am remembering that the rage is not my rage, but the rage of the hag, the rage of the demon, the rage of the pathology that wants to feed off of me, wants to feed off of my passion.
I am not rage, not hate, not venomous, not betrayal.
The hag rages at Him, rages at God, rages betrayal and venom and hate. The hag hates Him. The hag hates me. The hag hates the girl I am that she cannot enter. It was not my mother’s hand that held the saw to my vagina, it was the hand of the hag, full of rage.
I sit across the room from Bill, in my refusal, sit in a chair while he waits on the bed for me to speak or to do something. I sit and do not look at him. I sit and listen to her screeching in me. Listen to her screeching her silence. I can feel her silence crashing down on me. And then I hear Him. Hear Him say that all I need to do is get up and walk across the room. It is only a few steps. I only need to get up out of the chair.
It was the first time I heard Him and heard the hag in me at the same time. The first time I clearly felt that it was not me, that I could listen to Him even in the place of being crushed by the silence. All I had to do was get out of the chair. It was easy then. Those few steps were easy to take.
When I slip under her rage, under her hate, under her venom, I am slipping into the place of what is true about the core of me. That I am not Simon Peter, refusing my knowing of Him, that I am not hate, not rage, not silence.
When He plunges me into the core of me, when He plunges deeper into me, I feel what is true, feel my devotion. I remember His voice, I remember the plumb line of His voice, His love, in me. I remember that I am trustworthy, that I can trust myself.
When He plunges me in, plunges me past the rage that is the hag, He plunges me into my devotion that has always been at the core of me. Plunges me in, plunges deeper into me. When He plunges me in, plunges deeper into me, I have no questions. It is grace and movement, a dance of feeling in me with Him. An explosion of desire and passion and fear.
When I plunge in with Him, I am the girl again, I am myself, the girl who cannot be entered because I am already filled with Him:
Dream:
I am a young girl at a crowded train station waiting for the one and only train. Feels a little like waiting for the Hogwarts Express from Harry Potter. The train arrives and I fight the crowd, leaving my baggage behind, to get to it. But by the time I reach it, a woman has waved the train on. I feel upset that I have missed the train. The woman says, “There are buses that go there, too.” I feel exasperated. Then, someone tells me that I can walk there - it is not very far. So, I set off and discover that the way is up a mountain. I am happily running up the mountain. Then I look down and realize I am wearing capri pants, a tank shirt and no shoes and that I am walking on snow. Of course, I think, this is a mountain, there is bound to be snow. But I do not feel cold. I wonder if I should go back and get some gear, but when I turn and look back to the station, I realize I do not want to go back. I turn to continue up the mountain.
I cannot go on the train because my way is not to go with the crowd. It is time for me to get off the train. The way for me is to go up the mountain, alone. I can go up the mountain, unafraid and completely unprepared because I am filled up by Him. I have always been filled up with Him.
Underneath the rage of the hag is my knowing of Him. Is my being filled with Him, filled with my passion and desire for Him, filled with His passion and desire for me. Underneath the rage that is the hag, that is not me, I am the One with Him. I am the One on the one path that is mine with Him, the one journey that is mine with Him. Completely unprepared because there is no way to prepare for it.
I do not need to be prepared because I am filled with Him. I am not filled with rage, with self-directed rage, with rage directed at others, though I have acted that out in my belief in the lie of the hag. I am not filled with rage, for the rage is the hag. I am filled with Him.
* * * *
The first time I really encountered and experienced the rage that lived in me, the rage of the demon, the rage of the hag that entered me through my wound with my brother and my mother, I was completely terrified. I had felt angry before but it was always when reacting to and projecting it onto something or someone in the world. The first time I encountered it where I could not hang it on someone or something else, I was well into my thirties.
I signed up to go on a vision quest with an outdoor adventure organization for women. I was looking for something. Direction? Clarity? I had just left a long term relationship, knowing it was the right thing to do, and I was feeling that there was something missing. That I needed something, but I did not know what. Maybe a few days in the desert with a group of women, culminating in a three days solo fast would be helpful.
I was excited about the trip, excited to be camping in the desert for the first time. I had never done anything like it before. It felt like it would be fun, a time to step into something that was newly emerging in me. I planned on doing a lot of writing during my three days alone.
After spending several days getting ready with the group, I headed for my solo campsite, with the simple intention of being open. I wanted to be more open.
I camped on a ridge overlooking a valley and mountains in the distance. Nothing but sage and hard earth and scrub pines. I set up my tarp, fighting the screaming wind. For three days, I sat in the heat of the days and for three nights, I curled in my sleeping bag against the cold of the desert nights. What happened took me completely by surprise.
In the Great Basin Desert Near Mono Lake
Day One
I can tell you it was hot,
the kind of heat that burns salt
out of every pore then hardens it
on your skin at the same time.
I can tell you it was cold,
the kind that starts deep
in the bone, radiating.
I tell you it was loud
on that ridge perched
over a valley
with no name. The wind
screamed through tarp,
the cluster of scrubby pines
I tried to secure it to,
the sage bushes that crowded
down the hill, across the valley
and as far as I could see.
And the pine cones, the birds
landing for them. I saw them land.
Small. Birds before the moon.
Then moon, wind,
different screams pitched
from direction, tarp, trees.
Curled against howl
scratch circle grit.
Dark, I tell you.
Day Two
What the hell what the hell what the hell
do you want I don’t want
clearly to give what I want
unknowable
do you want I do not know
who what are you anyway
why unknowable
I want don’t understand you me
what am I anyway
why can’t I understand
won’t understand want
you are are you trying
why can’t I understand I
is want it
do you need trying
what use you of me
is it want
I want to know a little
what use me of you
I don’t want wanted
I just want little to know
do I take all I have to
maybe I don’t want wanted
I only ask little
do I have to take
what the hell what the hell what the hell
ask I am only little and
you want to give everything
Day Three
After trying to drink water again.
Then vomiting again.
After fantasies of food stopped.
The morning after.
After another pine cone under
my palm when I tried to stand.
After picking at individual cones,
taking scales off cores
and flicking them over the ridge.
Counting. Thirty-three scales.
Forty-two. Fifty-Eight. Twenty-five.
After pitching whole ones
over that ridge. Not far, far
enough. I wanted some
away. Those pine cones,
those hundreds from these trees.
Pitching not enough.
After the sun went down.
Last, the last thing.
I smashed pine cones.
Jumping up then down leaving
not one not one not one
intact.
For three days, I raged. I raged at God, I raged at myself, I raged at the pines, I raged at the sage, I raged at the birds, I raged at the sky the way it was clear and I was not. I raged and raged and raged. At night, I curled in my sleeping bag and felt fear curling through my body. The terror when I heard coyotes, when I listened to the wind. The terror of the rage that curled like a monster in me. A rage I had never felt before. The fear and rage mixing in me, blurring day and night, blurring reality.
Stumbling off the ridge, back to the base camp; coming out of the desert and back to the city; coming back from going into the rage and terror. It took a few days before I could really take in any substantial food again. Days before I could make my way to work, sit in the office, make my way home again without having to lie down on the floor every few hours.
Something happened in those three days and I knew that the something I needed was more than just “being open.” The rage frightened me.
Two days after my return, I spoke with my brother Steve on the phone. He could hear the difference in my voice. I told him of what happened, my voice getting shakier as I spoke, more quiet. I told him of the rage, how it scared me, how I did not know it was in me. I told him I had raged at God, that I did not understand any of it. In the telling, I felt something drop from underneath me, felt something shift inside and then I heard myself say, “Oh, I need a teacher.”
I felt I was entering into a place where I needed guidance even though I had no idea what that meant, what it looked like. I knew that it was not a journey I could take on my own.
I had been telling myself that I had been on the journey alone, that I had become adept at doing it on my own, doing everything on my own.
During this time, I was discovering the writer in me. I was discovering writing and poetry, discovering my excitement for it. Something happened in me at times when I wrote, something moved. I felt God sometimes when I wrote, felt His presence in the writing, felt the heat of the words when I felt Him. It was exciting and scary.
In this discovery, I was also beginning to cling to the belief, the myth, that writing was the destination, was the way. Poetry was becoming how I identified myself in the world, the way I had value.
But in that moment, after those three terrifying days in the desert, on the phone with my brother, my oldest brother, I felt for the first time how desperately I needed some kind of guidance that I had never had, that the writing was not giving me. Maybe I could feel the need because I could feel the lack of the guidance.
On the phone with my brother, I almost whispered it, maybe I even repeated it. I remember in my body what it felt like to say it, to know it. I remember how everything shook inside, that the voice that came out of me that knew what I needed was a voice that was under the rage. Vulnerable, shaky, wanting to come into the light.
I had felt that kind of desire before. Felt it my entire life. Wanting someone to tell me, to lead me. Wanting to be a student. Yes. I had always wanted to be a student. In this moment, though, I felt the depth of the desire, the depth of how much I not only wanted it, but really needed it in a way that I did not understand. After three days alone with nothing but the rage inside me, I felt how much I needed the guidance.
On the phone with my brother, there was a pause. I felt ripped open and clear. Then Steve said, “Sue. I am your teacher.”
* * * *
Underneath the rage, underneath the wound, is my desire. In the dream where my clitoris is severed from my body and I do not even feel it, what is being severed is my desire. I gladly gave it away, gladly allowed the hag to latch onto my clitoris, to claim it for her own, to let her siphon off all of the heat that is mine.
I gladly allowed this because I was so frightened of my desire.
I gladly allowed the hag to siphon off my passion into her rage, into her raging at God, at the world, at everything because I have been terrified of my desire.
When I was a girl in that attic, terrified of lightning storms, I was terrified of the passion I felt in the storms, the passion that mirrored something in me. I felt sure there was something wrong with it, the fire I felt inside, the grief I also felt.
When I was a girl with all of my passion, all of my yearning, I did not know I was yearning for God. I only knew that no one around me seemed to have that fire. I only knew that there was something wrong. I only knew that I needed help, I needed a grownup or somebody bigger than me.
The yearning I felt for a teacher after my three days in the desert was the same yearning that I had as a little girl. The same yearning that I felt that had me turn toward my brother Steve in the first place.
It was my desire that had me turn to my brother. When the storms came at night, the ones I thought were coming for me, I would sneak out of my room and slip into one of my older brother’s beds. I could not go to my parents, but my two oldest brothers were upstairs in the other attic bedroom. I knew I needed to go to someone. I knew I needed.
It was my desire that had me turn to my brother. I adored my brothers, looking up to them, following them around. I turned to my brothers because I needed them. It is normal for a girl to do this, to turn to her older brothers, her father, with adoration. It is normal for a girl to project the Animus onto the men in her young life.
It was normal for me to do this. I turned with all the adoration in me, I turned with all the fire and the heat of my desire, my desire for God, my desire that scared me, I turned with all my fear, I turned with all of this to my brother.
In my turning, my brother accepted the projection onto him.
I do not know what happened to my desire when the line was crossed with my brother. I do not know what happened to the terror. What I remember from after this time is silence. A deep silence until I was older, until the dream of the hag. Until the dream where I threw myself willingly into the coffin to be buried.
With all of the intensive work I have done, I have also continued to project my brother onto every man in my life and even many of the women in my life. When a man loves me either as a lover or as a dear friend, I immediately project my brother. I project him onto my partner, Bill, by feeling that there is no space for me, that I am not important, that I have to look to his needs first.
I have not wanted to let go of what I have believed about Steve. I have been feeling protective of him, not wanting to look past the story of our childhood relationship.
I have not wanted to look at how, when Steve went into the Peace Corp after he graduated from college and went overseas into the Middle East, how he wrote long letters to me, describing his life, what it was like to be a tall blond American in the Middle East, the danger. What it was like to be on a great adventure. His excitement and his loneliness. He wrote about spirituality, about what he was learning. He told me he was a seeker. I felt he was teaching me. I wanted to be taught. I wanted to be a seeker, too.
I wanted to feel loved by somebody, anybody, in my family. How I ate the letters up like candy. How special I felt, that he picked me out of everyone he could have picked to share his intimate experiences. He wrote and I wrote back. I felt loved and seen. I felt important.
I ate up the attention. It did not occur to me that he ate up the attention from me, too.
I have not wanted to face into how, in my late twenties, when I fell in love with Eric, a musician who mirrored the artist in me, I turned away from him and turned to Steve instead. I told everyone that I had found the one for me, that this was the man I was going to spend the rest of my life with. We fell in love in the fall and by early winter, we were planning to move to San Francisco from my hometown of Cincinnati in the summer. It was an exciting time, new love, the prospect of moving to a city I had always wanted to move to, being with a man who was living in his art, who was encouraging me to explore my writing. A man who loved me.
Steve was living in Washington, D.C., by then. Shortly after I told him of our plans, he called me. He said that he and his partner had moved into a new house just outside of DC and it had a separate apartment in the basement. He wondered if I would want to come and live with him for the six months before Eric and I moved to San Francisco.
Unbelievably to me now, I said yes. I moved out from my new lover and moved 500 miles away to live with my brother. I turned away from my lover and toward my brother. Even when Eric became ill, I did not move back. It was only when he was so sick that he could barely function that I moved back to be with him.
Unbelievable to me now that it did not even seem odd at the time that I moved, that I did not return when Eric became sick.
Instead, I stayed in DC and was my brother’s little sister. After I arrived, it became clear that his relationship was falling apart. So I spent six months going out with him to clubs, going out with him to parties, going out with him where he wanted me to go. I was his sidekick while my lover became sick. He wanted to be the one and I turned to him to be the one so I could be the one with him.
When I did leave to be with Eric, Steve got angry, saying I was leaving him in a lurch with the apartment, saying that I was being irresponsible. He was not there the day I left.
I have not wanted to feel into how when Steve declared himself my teacher five years later, I felt completely repulsed. On the phone, ripped open, when he said that he was my teacher, I felt as if something was being ripped out of me. It felt wrong.
For the first time, I felt that something was wrong with my relationship with Steve. And yet, when he wanted to move out to San Francisco shortly thereafter, I invited him to move in with me. We became roommates again.
I do not want to remember how angry he was with me in that year we lived together. How when I did not become his sidekick again, he felt betrayed. He moved out after a year, moved out saying that he was disappointed in me for not going to clubs with him, for not doing all of his things with him. For not being his little sister.
It is hard to face into how he was at my first wedding. How he got drunk and followed me around with a camera, having me model for him. Just me and him, me modeling, him taking pictures. And how, as I was leaving with my new husband, he hugged me hard and said, “I do not want to let you go.” How he would not let me go in that moment. How scared I felt in that embrace of his.
It is hard to face into how I have been protecting him, how I have not wanted to let him go.
Dream:
I am tied up and hanging upside down. My brother Steve is underneath me. He has been torturing me. He says, “If you do not sleep with me, I am going to kill you.” I feel scared. I can hear my mother singing a happy song.
I have not wanted to face into how my brother fed off my radiance, how he was drawn to what is special in me and fed off of that. How he wanted and needed me to be his student. I have not wanted to face into it because I have held tightly to needing to believe that he saw me, that he loved me.
When I faced into the childhood trauma, I wrote to Steve, asking if he remembered anything. In my letter, I told him how I probably came to him, that we were young, how it was a set up. I wrote to him because I wanted to face into it together, into our wound that we share. I wanted to believe that it was a wound that we shared.
He responded that nothing had happened. That he remembers everything, unlike me, and that nothing had happened. One of the things he wrote was that he had felt like I was the only close tie with family that he had and now I had cut that off.
I have not wanted to face into this because I had felt the same way with Steve. That he was the only one who saw me, who could teach me. Even after I began to feel that something was wrong, I felt unable to face it.
I have been unable to let go of knowing that my brother did not see me. That he did not love me. That he was feeding off my radiance. That when I was not being his little sister, being his student, things were not okay between us.
Hard to face into how I went to him again and again, offering my radiance up to be fed off of.
I have projected my brother onto everyone and every situation. Most importantly, I have projected him onto God, onto the Animus. Believing that to be with God, I had to offer myself up like a sacrifice, offer up who I am, to be an empty shell. That to get the love, I had to be an empty shell just receiving him.
I have not wanted to step into my desire, my deep devotion, for God because I projected that onto my brother and he took it.
Dream:
I am leaning over a pile of papers, working. He is leaning over me, watching, like we are working together. I feel excited, my body alive and full of the work we are doing and full of our partnership. I feel him at my back, feeling His uwavering love, and lean back into him, asking if it is okay. He is reassuring to me, “Yes,” He tells me, “it is okay.”
I have been afraid to lean into my desire, my devotion, my vulnerability, because when I was vulnerable, when I was full of fear, when I was the little girl full of my desire for Him, projecting Him onto my older brother the way little girls do, there was no one at my back.
It is hard to return to this place of my core desire for what arises in me is the force of my desire. The force of my desire and the love that I had in me. How scared I was, have been and still am of the desire, of the love.
It is hard to return because it brings up the depth of my love for my brother, for all my brothers, the innocent and sweet love I carried for them and the desperation I also carried to be the special one, to be the one. I wanted to be the one with someone, I did not know I wanted to be the one with Him.
I have been circling, He has been circling me. I have circled the other thing I have not wanted to let go of, the fairy tale with my brother. I have circled my brother for my entire life. I have circled my mother. I have circled the terror of my desire, the terror of God. I am being led out of that circle by being led to the center.