Of Stink Bugs and Shamanism

As a pre-script to the below text written yesterday when I was riding the train, I want to add that the fears I discuss below are now completely gone and I feel amazingly good, strong and calm if a bit travel-sick…However, in honor of the spirit of this blog, as I’m trying to allow it to happen, I want the process I go through to be as raw as possible and not tied up in little: see what happened, how I solved it and so aren’t I cool type bows….However, it should also be noted yesterday there was a tornado out of nowhere apparently in a place where there are usually no tornadoes…

How do these two things you relate, you may well ask. Well in the state I was just in (literal that is though you could draw metaphorical conclusions too…), which is below the Mason-Dixon line and includes a lot of trees and heat, there are stinky bugs. These are bugs that apparently are imports from China that are not dangerous to humans, but eat crops, have no natural predators and when you try to kill them, they make a huge stink. They invade the house and look kinda creepy. We kill them by vacuuming them up which smells bad but is effective until the next lot shows up, the cockroaches of the south….

OK, so that was the bad part of seeing my oldest best friend in the world. On the flip side, she is a modern day shaman, which when I first heard this made me want to run screaming into the hills. My father, who died this year, fashioned himself to be a Toltec wizard and smoked a lot of pot, as did his partner, who said that’s how she connected with her ancestors (she is half-Native American) but to this outside (and enforced) observer seemed to do nothing more than add to her bi-polar disorder and recovery from other forms of addiction. My father had been aphasic from a stroke and apparently found a way to demand pot every day for years before the massive heart attack that killed him in January. His partner was afraid she had turned him to a pothead. I assured here that train had left the station years earlier, which relieved her no end. I was not sure if that was a good or bad thing but couldn’t stand watching her take the blame for Everything.

My father also worked for a self-styled New Age prophet type, who had spirit guides and the works, and the whole thing just frankly – especially uncut and when it involves websites, cassettes and expensive workshops - gave me the creeps.

But here was this friend of mine, who I was reconnecting with over 30 years later, believing in something like this stuff (thought a seemingly more grounded and less evangelical version), not trying to make me believe what she said and also grounded in 12-step recovery, which made me want to trust her. Eventually, after much discussion, I asked her to take me on one of her journeys, both expectant and scared shitless and skeptical…and hopeful.

My experience, which would be incredibly hard to describe in a blog, was quite powerful and gave me a sense of freedom from some old ghosts or ‘attachments’ as she called them. The people that came up were mostly abusers from the deep dark past and feeling where they had ‘attached’ to my body and expelling them was both scary and a huge relief. The sacred space I described for us was a place we shared in childhood, but one in which I had created a kind of church out of moss and lichen on top of ancient rock beneath old pine trees even before I met her, maybe, I thought afterward, in anticipation of this moment?

This is added on today: the images from this journey I’ve decided are important to share: large snakes coming out of my body from all orifices and digestive tracts – this was my first step-father who sexually abused me, a massive spider detached from the front of me with great effort and fear – this was the attachment of my mother who turned into a smaller spider and had to be shooed away many time. Other vaguer similar images to do with my father and sexual abuse and many ropes around me from the babysitter who thought I was evil, held me hostage and almost killed me. Cutting those ropes once and for all and having to shoo her away too, my friend seeing her like a cartoon witch from Bugs Bunny, which made us both laugh. Finding a shield to protect me after like blue energy and an internal warrior like Arjuna. This has shifted to dancing women inside and out, quite beautiful really. I’m saying all this because it happened and I believe I am beginning to feel a profound feeling of freedom and release. My friend predicts digestive issues may vanish, and before she said that I began to suspect the same thing. Will see…

And then, after all this when I woke up in the middle of the night, and probably because of my nascent fear of this kind of thing, I felt Total Fear. I am still now battling between believing this was one of the best things I ever did and fear about what it means. I have a highly developed if low-concept sense of a power greater than myself and this is sacred to me so the idea that anything could supplant that is terrifying to me. On the other hand, so is taking care of myself, for real and in some ways that’s what this offers, a way to do that. But because I allowed Someone Else to help guide me to this place (places I asked to go I must add), I fear it, like what if now I can be manipulated in horrible ways, etc.?

My instinct is that this fear is old patterning from my childhood as this friend does not give me a sense of creepiness even if she, like me, is imperfect. On the other hand, my fear is an old one: did I trust too much too quickly?

On the other other hand, when I was first in AA an Al-Anon I thought ‘what if this is a cult’? And the fear came in…but the revolving leadership and lack of money involved, etc., etc. let me go through this fear and reach the other side. This is trickier because it involves one other person and her belief system, some of which I totally get and some of which frankly I don’t. I know her motivation is loving and our connection is deep and heart-felt even after all these years - that I feel deeply, but some part of me remains fearful. On the other hand, I had amazing dreams, after I let myself sleep, and a lovely talk with my friend before I left.

One dream was of a watch with a tiny bird next to it that was smaller than the watch – time flies I wondered when I woke up…another of two young women being resuscitated back to life by two men, both of whom I knew and me feeling moved to tears because somehow I knew I had taught the men how to do that and these young women would live.

A large crow circled the train station where we waited for my train to take me back to the Big City from the rural areas…Please don’t run screaming when I tell you that I was told my ‘power animal’ is a crow and so was my father’s. My friend tells me crows speak between the spirit world and our world. I never know what to make of these ideas but I did feel: nice crow, cool. And a kind of connection.

Love love me do…you know I love you…I’ll always be true so ple-e-ease, love me do…

So, the question is: do I trust my best friend from childhood or inchoate fear, some of which feels like it might be coming from the very old ghosts we cut the chords with in the journey we did together?

I believe I will know the answer to this question as time goes on and have time to feel through the results of this incredibly powerful work. Do I feel more or less fearful in general? Does the idea of an ‘inner warrior’ and the experience of it - so strong last night - last? In other words, as I judged AA in the end, does it work? Yes. Good.

Speaking of which, walking into an AA meeting that looks like you walked into the Wrong Bar is such a trip. I walked into one such meeting with an African-American friend and as we opened the doors into the usual fluorescent-lit church basement I saw a sea of older white male faces that looked like they might still have a grudge against the North for the Civil War, I doubted my sanity. But as usual, the old ‘hillbilly’ (not my term but the locals own I hasten to add lest I seem horrifically un-PC God fucking forbid) who told his story sounded just like me, got sober a month after I did in 1987 and had an amazing sense of humor, grace plus lilting Southern accent. This was followed by an older black guy sharing back, who had few teeth but whose heart and brain were in tact, and another large man about the kind of raw pain that you only hear in AA meetings – and sometimes SIA (survivors of incest anonymous for you who are not the People of the Acronym) – but only in AA is the person definitely going through this pain without the anesthesia - and then there I am with a bunch of people (in my PC way I had defined not as hillbillies but as ‘old coots’ – so much better don’t you think??) who if I’d walked into their bar to have a drink (esp. with African American friend in tow) would have been, let us say charitably – rude, are embracing, loving, amazing and ask me to speak – the city slicker with the PBS accent. And then swarm around my friend and I afterward saying how great it was to hear us and chatting our common Recovery Language…which, yes, can be unbelievably cliché ridden, almost unbearably so, with the weird uncomfortable-if-you-have-a-fancy-education fact that the clichés are 99% of the time True.

So there I was a foreigner in most ways welcomed in every way and grateful once again to be part of a fellowship that is so embracing to everyone who stumbles (and usually the first entrance is a stumble if not an incredibly haughty attempt to slink into the back clinking rings and heels thinking I am not like these people, these people Are Losers….etc….whilst puking and/or shaking so much the coffee in styrofoam cup ends up on floor as you smile tightly at the person next to you hoping they won’t give you their fucking phone number and by the way why does everyone look so psychotically Happy???) in the door having tried everything on earth before this sorry church basement where you have the best (if not only) chance you’ll ever have to find a Power Greater than Yourself that can help you stop killing yourself.

But hey, we’re just a bunch of losers, so ignore me…

I’m on the train again whilst writing this and looking out the window seeing large bodies of water always makes me happy as where I live normally in a Foreign Country is land-locked and the only place that I feel entirely safe like ever is near large bodies of water and the occasional stupid church basement (not all as not all meetings are safe or seem safe). However, outside it’s raining and raining and raining…but from inside of a train, it feels safe except now we are driving by those horrendous industrial sites that do God Only Knows What that allows us to Eat Chemicals, Breathe Shit, Buy Crap and Feel ‘Good’ because ‘You Deserve It’….but once again I digress…

Oh and by the way, I can’t figure out how to comment on my own blog, as ‘Blogger’ is being really weird about that so please know I love reading your comments, they are moving to me and I hope this can be a safe space for anyone and everyone to allow in the dark to scare away the dark…or simply bring in sunshine if that’s where you are that day. I am pleased with the affirmation already received and hope these musings, in whatever form they take can be healing not only for me, but others as well…and once again, I am happy for you to use the comments section to share your own thoughts, feelings, demons, angels, ghosts, dreams and nightmares…as they all make us human…

Finally a Sufi poem, which moves me and relates to stink bugs, shaman and the whole human life thing in between:

This being human is a guest
house. Every morning
a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and attend them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture, still,
treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
- Rumi



Be well my Friends….