Searching for Answers In Some of the Wrong Places - #8

Becoming untethered in order to find myself

SPRING BLOSSOMS

Where does the creative live?

Nothing to do with the skyscraper view

However appealing, worn gargoyles at eye level

And silver slivers of slow rivers on either side

Arched with geometries of gray steel.

The messages seem strong now

But also unfamiliar and confusing.

Eternally old friends nag me

To leave my corporate aerie.

Now new voices join theirs

Suggesting unfamiliar destinations.

Drama! Film! says one.

Utah! says another. Publishing!

These have never been in my dreams.

I quiet my defenses and listen.

It's only been ten days since

I was asked to Remember

My Beautiful Dream.

Wendy is stamping a tiny foot

Impatiently imploring, "Don’t you remember?”

Don't follow any man, one said.

But do I follow any God?

Who is Spirit?

So many claim to know you so differently

And any other way to be dishonor.

Tinkerbell Merlin

I have always dreamt of magic

And wise Magicians

And girls who talked to wild horses.

Ravens lit on their shoulders to speak in their ears

And foxes sat trustingly at their feet.

An Arctic wolf sat on my lap once

And that was no dream.

The Apache knew my thoughts

We decided to drum anyway.

Yesterday I was given red roses

And ruffled tulips to match

Fresia smudge the room with sweetness

Will I bloom like them this year?

---

The picture I’ve painted of my adventures in 1992 makes it seem like I had it all together at age 36. A young, fit woman who was finally confident enough to ditch the gray John T Malloy Dress for Success business suit for a more feminine style, enjoying professional success, exotic travel, supportive friendships, a profound spiritual journey, and a fresh chance at romance.

Right. Let’s get real. My actual life, especially my inner life, was pretty much a pathetic mess. Or at least that’s how it felt much of the time. Today with 20/20 hindsight I have compassion for myself, knowing our path to wholeness requires us to fall apart, over and over again. The best thing I could have done for myself at the time would have been to find a good therapist. I could have used skilled help to process the dissolution of my marriage followed by the traumatic break up of my transitional relationship, and to make sense of the calling I felt towards spiritual growth and social justice and the increasing dissonance between that call and the demands of my career.

It's not that I didn’t believe in the value of therapy. My father was a brilliant psychotherapist. I had heard stories from family friends and former students of his who felt his insight and support had actually saved their lives. Precocious child that I was, as a teenager I read my way through his bookshelf, including the complete works of Freud and the psychosocial perspectives of Erik Erikson. I had briefly availed myself of campus counseling during my senior year of college. In two sessions, I diagnosed the reasons I felt overwhelmed and designed a solution. Two $2 co-pays and I was out of there.

In my arrogance, having come of age at the start of the personal growth movement, the era of Esalen, women’s groups, and self-help books, I thought I could workshop my way to a new me. I was that stereotypical privileged white woman buying all the latest bestsellers by New Age authors and paying for endless workshops as I dabbled in indigenous and Buddhist teachings.

The first impulse driving me in 1991 and 1992 was the emotional turmoil and heartache you can hear in my poems. I did not doubt my desirability, nor my ability to find love again. The healthy part of me knew I needed to find out who I wanted to be apart from a partner, in order to find my way to a partner who shared my dreams. That’s why the Four Things I Always Wanted to Do were so fundamental.

My spiritual yearnings were not shared by either of my ex’s, and in fact my time in Izzy’s circle helped me understand that. Then that pillar of support fell apart, as I mentioned in More of What Happened Before Tibet Happened. Surprisingly, I did not feel particularly betrayed, nor did I feel ashamed to have been taken in. Instead, I just kept moving, searching for new teachers and teachings. My journals for 1991 and 1992 are full of notes from those travels and workshops. Several of the women with whom I had shared the experiences with Izzy were my usual companions on these new adventures.

Some of the teachers we studied with were legitimate, acknowledged carriers of their traditions. Seneca elder Grandmother Twylah Nitsch comes to mind as one of those. Hers was the Wolf Clan, and the wolf in the poem with which I began this entry was hers. When I first met with Vijali about accompanying her to Tibet, I learned that she and Grandmother Twylah were friends, and the second World Wheel site was in fact the carved stone in front of Twylah’s teaching lodge.

On the other hand, the teacher who became the biggest part of my life during this period may or may not have even been native American. Most likely not. Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf passed away in early 2022, and her official obituary does not describe her as such, although she described herself as Apache-Mohawk, and that was repeated in books and articles throughout the time I knew her – the laudatory ones as well as the ones accusing her of being a New Age fraud and appropriator of indigenous culture. Since 1992 ends with my buying a house with Oh Shinnah, the time has come to tell that story.

Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf, seemingly unconvinced by my argument, at our house in Manitou Springs.

My saga with Oh Shinnah begins with one more loss. My beloved maternal grandmother Anna Sydorick Lubinetsky Chimka passed away in February 1992. The grandmother who in 1988 knew I was not on Pan Am 103. The grandmother who taught me how to cook, how to grow vegetables and can them, how to remember and interpret my dreams. The grandmother who in her late 80’s invited in the Jehovah’s Witnesses who came to the door while my parents were at work, and took up with them because in addition to Bible study they went to lunch and to the movies. She loved to have conversations with me that began, “So the Jehovah’s believe this but we (Ukrainian Orthodox ‘we’) always believed something else about that.” Then my 90-year-old grandmother would launch into a theological debate.

By then my younger sister was about to leave her teaching position at the Air Force Academy to study to become a Methodist minister. Her friend and mentor Brenda officiated at our grandmother’s service. Brenda enumerated the gifts from Grams that lived on in each of us. For me, it was the gift of spirituality. I had lost my spiritual anchor. When I saw a flyer for a workshop on Dreaming and Dying two months later, it seemed like where I needed to be to process my grandmother’s death. That was my first workshop with Oh Shinnah Fast Wolf. She was the one who asked “What is your beautiful dream?” and suggested that we try to dream it, and write some poetry or stream of consciousness journaling upon awakening.

The poem with which I began these memories came from that prompt.

Oh Shinnah gave good workshops. I learned a lot and the work I did in those workshops was helpful to me. By the end of the Dreaming and Dying workshop I wrote a very clear version of My Beautiful Dream, and it is a dream the course of my life from there fulfilled and fulfills:

In my childhood dreams, I am loved by family and friends. As I grow up, I create a family of friends.

In my childhood dreams, I can talk to animals; they can talk to me.

In my childhood dreams, I travel everywhere, see the beauty of the planet and her people.

In my childhood dreams, I am strong and agile and skillful physically and mentally.

In my childhood dreams, I have allies.

I have pages and pages of notes from the workshop, including detailed instructions for ceremonies for helping one to cross, and elaborate protocols to follow for resolution of relationships and even for karmic release.

During the workshop I overheard Oh Shinnah talking at lunch with some of her “accomplices” or longtime students. She had an opportunity to buy the home she rented in Manitou Springs, Colorado. One student in San Francisco wanted to help but they needed a third partner with stronger credit. My ears pricked up. I was renting my apartment in NYC as that was always intended as a temporary move; the real estate we owned in Colorado went with my ex in the divorce. I liked the idea of having a place in Colorado, near my aging parents in Denver. A house to retreat to in the foothills outside of Colorado Springs, in the shadow of Pikes Peak, near the beauty of the Garden of the Gods.

And that is how I came to be meeting with Cynthia Chang in the San Francisco airport on my way to Tibet, already drawing up an agreement to partner with her and Oh Shinnah in the purchase of the house. Ever the business person, I was at least savvy enough to insist we have a lawyer draw up a partnership agreement, including provisions for how to dissolve the partnership and sell the house if and when it came to that. Which, down the road, it did. But before then, there will be other stories of Oh Shinnah and of the house in Manitou Springs.

I have no regrets about my decision.

Today my decision would be different. I might have taken that first workshop with Oh Shinnah, but would not have spent years in her company. I understand now the importance of lineage, of the genealogy of a spiritual tradition or cultural practice. The information and contrast was available to me in 1992, but whether my blindness was willful or just pure ignorance, this was not yet a lesson I was ready to learn.

When I traveled with Vijali and learned from her, she described the lineage of each teaching. I knew who her teachers were and that they had authorized her to teach. Vijali is also an artist and mystic, and in those areas her authority comes directly from Source.

Oh Shinnah never credited her teachers. Whomever they might have been, there was no chance of meeting them, no community that claimed her other than the one she built around herself. When I run across individuals like this today, I turn and run the other direction.

Just to be clear, I am not talking about race or ethnicity specifically, although that sometimes matters. There is no controversy around Lama Tsultrim among Tibetan Buddhists; she was properly acknowledged, by those with authority to do so, as a teacher, then as an emanation and finally as a lama. And, on the other side of the coin, the call I received from South Dakota, from a respected medicine man asking me to play a role in shutting down Izzy’s scene, illustrates that ethnicity alone, not even ethnicity plus some real knowledge and spiritual juice, necessarily qualifies an individual to pass teachings on to others.

And so I end 1992 with this, my trip to Manitou Springs to close on the house. It closed on November 12th, which also happened to be my transitional ex’s birthday. And with this final poem, I closed a chapter and opened a new one.

NOVEMBER 12

The power of a Name

How we choose to indicate connection

To signify relationships of importance.

Husband's name

Mother’s name

Maiden’s name.

This twelfth day of November

I sign dozens of pages

Three times each.

One name a link

To generations of Apache, Mobawks, Scots.

One name a link

To generations of Chinese, Hawaiians.

One name the mystery

Of whoever I am.

Why this date for consecrating relationships

And securing a home?

Never to forget

Or to replace

With fresh associations

My mother repeats to me

(Really asking with unconvinced eyes)

You bought the house and

Then you went to see it?

I did, driving as if drawn

By the massive Peak

Capped with yesterday's snow

And the rising red spires

They call Garden of the Gods.

The man met me at the door

Leaving his soup and TV western

Sister emerged to explain

Each family photo on our wall.

Thinking to digest

Enchiladas and experience

I enter the cantina in town.

Sounds of samba

The words o meu coraçao

Hit my core, throwing me back.

The waitress asks me my drink order

But I can only stammer

Brasilan music?

Yes. Julio Iglesias.

But he sings in Spanish …

Yes. And Portuguese, Italian,

English and French.

Home is where the heart is

And my heart is in many places.

That night we opened presents

lt is someone’s birthday after all.