Good morning Relatives
for you today I have a chapter perhaps the last chapter we will see out of the book that I have been writing about Lame Deer
I always go through what I think of as a season of madness beginning with April first. I never know how long it will last, but every year since the death of my sister April Fool’s day begins with madness. People may think that buildings or places are haunted, but I am haunted inside by the loss of my sister. As the New Year dawns in January I make a resolution to not be buckled by grief, or to brush my head against the echoey cobwebs of suicide as is it lingers over me like a shroud over spring. Ever since I looked into her face that day, noticed immediately as only a veterinary or human orofacial surgeon and dentist might all the minute changes that the bullet she put through the roof of her palate made in the spacing of her teeth, the the cant of her smile, in the quietness of her skin as it stretched over her bones, trying to hold together the face of what she had been while still containing inside of its center the complete destruction of the concussive force of that bullet. How loyal that skin was, like me, trying to maintain the outer presentation of life as we both committed to when we were first made no matter how ripped or crushed or emotionally and physically unable to go on our insides are. Why do we continue to love those who have abandoned us or turned their backs on us as if we were as disposable as the wrapper from a cheeseburger blowing out of an unforgotten toss into the wastebasket?
Why do our hearts not fail us when others do? Every year when the leaves let go in the fall, I think that I am done with my grief over losing her. Every year I think that when the spring comes I will not falter or have to feel the loss of her as fresh as the first snow on green grass, as bright and sharp as the glint of the early morning spring sun reflecting off of the too early, now dead songbirds beak covered in frost by a late killing hard freeze.
Suicide nags at the survivors like a Hungry Ghost eating away at their resolve to live. It seeps through the floors of their resolve and moves like slippery oil underneath a leather sole as it pools in a drowning pit that may only be an fleck to the naked eye but is as deep and endless as eternity itself.
Long before my sister took her own life I contemplated taking mine. I was young and exhausted by this world. By what appeared to me to be my own as well as the surrounding inescapable ability to create the harm that greed and selfishness can cause. I was unable to extract myself from my own ineptness to remember or conceive how not to make it worse. For me for others for anyone or any thing I could not stand one more moment of loss or action that culminated from a selfish or inexperienced intent. All life appeared to be to me was an endless opportunity for failure at love. “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends,” John 15:13. Given the gender issues with this verse I simply always translated it to mean, “Greater love hath no Being than this, that such Being lay down its life for other beings.”
If I could not find the place to stand, to walk, to be between harm and no harm then. To me my life was harmful and to me that meant that if I truly loved all other life which I do, then the greater love would be to take my own away from any opportunity of doing harm to those I love. Even if we are Eternal Beings here on this temporal plane for only a short breath in the millennia of everlasting eternity, one breath of harm to my fellow beings for me was too many.
I remember when I was in junior high school the first time I stole something. I was with my mother in the local M.E. Moses store. I had on a army coat which was popular for kids to wear in those days. It was baggy, and full of pockets, and back then I was thin and there was plenty of arbitrary space in which something that was stolen could be hidden. I remember the thought of stealing entering my head like a worm that was subtle but persistent in its expansion through my attention. That worm of an idea seemed to make its way from interest point to point in my brain and being as I tasted the idea of stealing in my consciousness. What was immediately present beneath the crushing weight of the guilt that hovered over the hollowness left by the worms track was my innocence, terrified by my thought, by my own ability to crush my own soul under the heel of my own actions. What caught me was not the hollowness left by the worm, or the promise of the thing which was I knew, no matter what it was that it was just a thing that held nothing but a temporary pleasure that would never last as long as the damage taking it would do to my soul. What caught me was the creativity that it would take to steal it.
Like my father before me I am a master problem solver. When one is young, the chi or impetus of our nature is so strong, so vibrant like that spring light on the snow that it melt. Our creativity leaks out of us like the force of the lotus seeking its path trough the mud. The only creativity that I seem to have been born with was that of seeing what is wrong or out of place in the world around me and seeing how it all could go back so easily if we would just be willing to move our pieces towards unity, towards balance towards the beautiful picture that we were born to be. My life with my family, with the world stifled that creativity. Caged it like an animal that was trapped in a cage of ever impending destruction that my captors and companions could not visualize. Like my mother before me I was also born with the seed of greediness. Of wanting what I wanted no matter what the cost to any who were in my way.
In the store that day when I was young, I slipped the object into my pocket, crushed my soul and then suffered the consequences as the manager who could read me like an open book confronted me with my mother as we stood at the checkout counter with undisclosed contraband that was as deadly as any terrorist bomb trying to get through customs at an airport security check. The manager exposed my action but not my intent as he stopped me from leaving. My mother was astounded at the embarrassment. My father livid later and non-sparing in his punishment of my actions.
That day I stepped out onto a path that years later culminated with me standing in a bathroom of my girlfriends house, faced with the knowledge that I was once again alone in my heart. Exposed to the stark realization that what I had thought was a commitment of love to me by her was false. Betrayed once again by greed, selfishness, the promise of letting one go for the hollow promise of pleasure by another, I stood in that bathroom and slit my four inches of wrist with a blade, through the skin down to the bone of my left forearm choosing with that action to end my own suffering, as well as the suffering I was causing others through my own engagement in this world in the way that I thought would be effective.
As I stood there in the bathroom looking at my arm, listening to my betrayal focused girlfriend call the police as a result of my actions, I was astounded by what I saw in myself. When someone tries to take their life using deadly force, the police respond with equally deadly force in an attempt to stop them. The vibrations and wavelike consequences that ripple out from the in your face action that knocked my girlfriend into the only action she knew to take, thus setting in motion the equal and opposite reaction by the authorities that she called, never noticed that I had in the moments after slitting my wrist realized that I was not allowed this choice and had forever more ceased in myself any thought that I could achieve death by my own hand.
By the time the police arrived I was downstairs in the kitchen getting something to drink. I was silent, refusing to speak to my ex or the police as they backed me into a corner demanding that I cooperate. What they did not know was that I was already cooperating. I was standing still. Trying to reason out why when I slit open my wrist, as expertly and with the perfect confidence and conviction that would later serve me as a veterinary surgeon, not one drop of blood came out.
The authorities must have interpreted my silence as a threat to not only my well being but to others because they verbally and physically pushed me until I finally looked up and pushed back. Once I did I found myself very quickly face down on the floor in handcuffs and then in an ambulance being taken to the hospital under arrest. I was locked in a secure room for twenty four hours. The doctor that came in to see me looked at my arm and then at me and said “Well, I still have to sew it up.” He and I looked at each other and at my forearm and for some reason he accepted as odd as it appeared to be that my wound was unlike any he had encountered. I could tell looking in to his eyes, and through the carefulness of his actions and words that he had no intention of fighting against or trying to redefine the reality of my body's unwillingness to give me up. It was the one comforting thing that happened to me in that hospital.
The next day when I was released, there were three people there to greet me. One was a friend that I rode horses with, one was my ex, and the other was the friend that I had confirmed the day before that she was seeing behind my back. Each had a different response when they saw me. The one that was there in support of her lover, my cheating girlfriend asked me what drugs they had given me. She was as I knew interested in drugs, a dealer of marijuana who had for a short time as my friend given up the use of that and other drugs in order to be my friend, yet now was one of the pair who had taken from me the love and security of my home and heart. I ignored her.
The second, my ex was there to tell me that I would not be allowed to come back to our house. I could see that she was fearful that I would harm her rather than myself in the now full revelation of her actions in our life. I looked at her knowing that she had never seen me if she could ever imagine that I would do something to her rather than myself to stop any suffering or opportunity to damage her in any way. I also ignored her.
The third woman, came forward and embraced me. She did not ask anything or say much that I remember. She took me to her home and made sure not only that I was safe and cared for that day, but helped me over the next few weeks to find and reestablish a home in which I could live and maintain.
The doctor had given me the name of a counselor that he recommended that I see and one of the conditions of my release back into society, was that I see a counselor so that I could address what had brought me to my actions. I met with the counselor and told him that all my life I could see what was wrong. All my life I could remember and tell anyone the steps, the choices, the words, and the intentions that always culminated in everything going so horribly wrong in our lives. But I couldn’t see, I told him how to choose what would make it right. I did not have the skills to imagine and then create what would bring about less destructive consequence between myself and those around me. If I could, I told him, then I would willingly, happily take that path every time. But I just couldn’t see it.
He told me that I had really poor social skills, and that I needed to learn to choose better friends. He also told me that he could teach me the skill to see the Light in a situation and make different choices than the ones that I had been surrounded by my whole life. Choices that opened up what ever I touched or engaged in to a consequence that brought life rather than destroyed it. I believed him. I could see that finally in front of me was a teacher that was willing to listen and assess myself and my difficulty and help me with skills that would enable me to escape the trap that I was born into. It was as simple, as my father had taught me, as changing my perspective and then committing myself to the implementation of a different course of action. I had to be willing to hold that perspective against all pressure or thought no matter what immediate temptation was presented me by any other in that moment and the ones that followed it. As simple as this ah-ha moment may sound, both myself and that counselor knew that it was and would be anything but simple as it would mean two lifelong things. I would first have to choose to stay here, no matter what, to stay in this life until the end of my days.
The second was that, like every other being who is caught in a disarrayed puzzle, I would have to find my way, replace the pieces of my life one at a time. Contemplating action, inaction, skill and skill-lessness, all the while doing my best not to wreak havoc on the lives around me, until I could find and replace enough of my shattered life that it would begin to make sense, until it would reflect as a completed picture the beauty that I knew was present in myself and all others. It would mean that despite not wanting to do damage, that I would until the day came that I did not.
I spent a couple of weeks talking with him about this choice that I had to make. During that time I sat outside with the trees and the sky and the earth and the wind listening and wondering about the commitment that was in front of me. I knew that I would have to decide to stay here. I would have to not just exist, but to live, if I was going to stay here. I knew that I would over and over again face the choice of taking my life for the rest of my life. I knew that I had to choose, once and for all if I would accept life as it was, as it came at me, no matter what. In those two weeks I believe that if I had chosen not to be here, that my life could have been released, given back as easily as it had been given to me years before.
I remember facing this world one morning with one final question for the counselor whose job it was to offer me a choice to learn the skills that it would take, the principles that like my life once given could not be taken back except by my choices. Since then I have come to see that all of us take our own lives every day in our hands and we either spill them out on the ground in as temporal and meaningless choices as I made in that store the day I decided to take something for its pleasure for myself rather than the effect of my action on all that was around me. Like I did that day, we weigh our choices and finding each other wanting, finding our lives and the interactions that we should hold dear or sacred, unsatisfactory we choose ourselves rather than what might be less attractive in the moment yet have a much more damaging consequence on the fabric of the world that we are weaving. We are weaving our world, the fabric of our choices changes everything around us. We create and destroy on a daily basis not only the opportunity of our own lives with our choices, but that of every living thing that is a part of the great picture of life on this planet as well as the universe that surrounds it.
How did we become so insignificant in our own eyes? How did we learn to choose an acceptance of the destruction of ourselves and each other? How did we end up a race that with the simplest or most complex choices end life as surely, abruptly, and completely as that bullet did in my sisters brain?
I don’t know how we did it. I remember some if not all of my path, which has in no way been free of choices that robbed others of the freedom of a life that is more concerned with protecting itself from the choices others made before us than in fully having the opportunity to enjoy the beauty that was given in the original creation of this planet and all the opportunities for love that it was born with. That day in the store, I created a public menace that had to be guarded against. I robbed my parents of a child that could be sent out into the world with complete trust. I stole so much more from others and myself than that small piece of candy I placed in my pocket.
This is the overwhelming negativity that hangs over my soul every spring. This is the weight that my sister could not bear to balance any longer. This is the question that every spring presents itself to the earth, the sky, the water, the wind, the fire that could choose either to consume us and eliminate this crushing burden from its life, or to hold one more year for the opportunity to choose differently amongst ourselves. To replace the hollowness that was left by the worm as it travels through our minds, our senses, and our hearts asking us to choose now or forever. Now or never.
What was lost inside of us when that worm ate its way through our lives? Innocence? Naivety? Belief in the efforts of the one for the good of the many? Trust that all others around us also are acting in good faith? Lack of free will is part of it. Like any wind up toy, human beings are mindless until they are not. Once the space is created inside of us, and I am sure that it had been there in my life prior to that day in the store, where we actually see that we can choose our own destiny and thus that of others, it is then that we begin to exercise and feel the power of our choices. It is then that the seductiveness of temporal satisfaction becomes a player under our skin and in our minds and hearts. Why is it that we choose death over life?
There is no simple answer or magical bean that will recreate the world that we live in overnight. Except within ourselves. Within ourselves we can choose to change our perspective from one of negativity, of fear, of greed, of selfishness, of protection to one of love, trust, and respect. We can choose to hold the fire within ourselves in each and every breath and action no matter what is presented to us in a day. In twenty-four hours we can change our own lives, in an hour we can, in a minute, in a moment, we can change everything about ourselves and thus the world around us. We can acknowledge that space that the gentle worm creates as it works to represent the opportunity to us that we were born with. Our free will, our value, the essence of why choice is given, so that it can be made freely. So that we can live or die in each day freely at our own hand.
We have to as I did that day in the park, decide for ourselves that it is worth it. We have to decide to believe that we are worth it and in doing so, so is everything else in this living place. I went back to the counselor and told him that I would accept his offer to teach me a different perspective on one condition. He asked me what that condition was, and I said to him that if he taught me, he did not get to decide for me what I did with it.
He agreed.
I cannot tell any of you what to do with your lives, and I don't want to any longer, I gave that up I hope long ago, but I can share with you as I have done and do with this blog and will when the book about Lame Deer is finished and published that it matters to me that you exist, that you have free will, and the freedom to live your lives in the expression of that will, no one can teach morality or consequence of action although many have tried. we all face our own morality and mortality every day in the mirror of our soul as it reflects the thoughts and actions of our day
I do hope even though I hate hope for it implies hopelessness that you know that you matter to me, that your being ness that your lives matter that to the wind the sky, the grass, the earth, the trees, the ever present so far oxygen and life that sustains the minuscule presence of the human being on this planet you are worth showing up for that we love you as you are
as we all live and die together
