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stars-forever-dwell-blog1 · 8 years ago

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Blinded by the Light: Part Eight

“It was the beach, you understand? The beach? It was too beautiful, too much input, too much sensation. I tried to keep it under control, but it just keeps spilling out and spilling out and spilling out. You see, she’s on an island, and that island is – is perfect. I mean real perfection, you know? I’m not just talking about, ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ It’s the real fucking deal, okay? Perfect. It’s just like a – a lagoon, you know. A tidal lagoon that’s sealed in by cliffs, totally fucking secret, totally fucking. . .forbidden. And nobody can ever, ever, ever, ever go there. Ever. But a few people went, once upon a time – men and women with ideals, you understand? I’m not just talking about the usual traveling fucking wanks. Do you believe in that place?”

“No. But I guess you’re going to tell me that I should, right?”

“It doesn’t even fucking matter what I think anymore. It’s up to you. Ideals, eh? We were just fucking parasites! See, I was the one that was trying to find the cure. Procurer of the cure. And I said to them, ‘You’ve got to leave. You’ve got to leave this place.’ But they wouldn’t listen.”

-The Beach

* * *

So there I was, suddenly, in the upper-middle class suburbs of Calgary, living with my friend Caitlin, her brothers Joe and Rory, and her mom, Janice. It was September. There was running water for showers and teeth brushing and hand washing, lights that turned on for reading, electricity for listening to music and emailing people, a fridge full of food, and no hippies. People were normal. They went to work. They listened. They could carry on conversations. Their clothes actually fit them and they weren’t tie-dyed. They were honest. They weren’t on drugs or lost or trying to manipulate one thing or another out of you.

Looking back, I can honestly say that I don’t know where I’d be today if it weren’t for the endless generosity, warmth, caring, compassion and understanding of Caitlin and her family.

I stayed there for a month, and in that time, Caitlin and I talked for hours on end ‘til the wee hours of the morn almost every night (Gemini and Virgo), at first mostly about Arael and what an idiot he was, but then as time went on we talked about him less, and more about everything else under the sun. She would leave me little notes telling me how beautiful I was; once she made a list of “Ten Things I Love About You,” and left it for me when she went to work. Another time she compiled a list of nice things people we mutually knew said about me and wrote them all down. She was endlessly supportive of me, and constantly telling me how beautiful, smart, worthy and generally awesome I was. And in her love, I bloomed like I hadn’t in longer than I could remember. She was a true friend. There’s this song by Dar Williams I started listening to around this time called The Ocean, and parts of it still make me think of Caitlin and smile. It spoke to me of chasing after Arael to his town on the shores of the ocean, how I tried and tried to make him smile, how I thought he and I were soul mates who would get married someday, but the anger and hurt he carried went deeper than I could ever touch, and were, really, provoked by me, because for a short time I filled the role of the woman in his life – and nothing I did could change that. It was his issue that I never learned the origins of.

I remember when I was living in Marcia’s house of madness, she had this certain book on one of her shelves that for some reason called out to me to pick it up. I did, and read the intro and a bit of it until I knew the premise of it. It was called Away, and it was about a woman named Mary who is walking along the shore one day, and sees a beautiful man lying unconscious in the waves. She rushes out to save him, but once she returns to shore, she is. . .away. She, Mary, is gone, which is a more common occurrence than you might think if you know anything about the Faerie folk. In her place is someone else. I don’t know why, but this story haunted me. I even dreamed about it, and looking back, I wonder if Mary and I were so different.

But over time, the song’s meaning changed for me. It became about Caitlin, moving away from the ocean, the ocean being a metaphor for the watery, unstable, wishy-washy beliefs and reality I had been living with and in for the past year and a half. how I was always bringing my brain to the ocean, trying to find some grounding/earth (Virgo again) but never achieving any, never being able to admit that maybe what I was seeking wasn’t to be found amid the waves or in the sand. I had yet to learn I am an earth-bound mountain spirit, not an ocean dweller. Eventually, gradually, as my heart healed, this song became a cry out to Caitlin, from my heart to hers, wanting her to see the deep beauty, kindness and generosity I saw in her, but she could never see in herself. She was never enough for herself, no matter what she did. I don’t know if she ever knew how much she changed my life.

When I went to your town on the wide open shore

I must confess I was drawn, I was drawn to the ocean

I thought it spoke to me

It said, “Look at us, we’re not churches, not schools, not skating ponds, swimming pools,

But we have lost people, haven’t we, though?”

Oh, that’s what the ocean can know of a body

And that’s when I came back to town

This town is a song about you

You don’t know how lucky you are

You don’t know how much I adore you

You are a welcoming back from the ocean

I went back to the ocean today

With my books and my papers, I went to the rocks by the ocean

But the weather changed quickly

The ocean said, “What are you trying to find?

I don’t care, I’m not kind, I have bludgeoned your sailors

I’ve spat out their keepsakes.”

Oh, it’s ashes to ashes, but always the ocean

But the ocean can’t come to this town

This town is a song about you

You don’t know how lucky you are

You don’t know how much I adore you

You are a welcoming back from the ocean

And the ones that can know you so well

Are the ones that can swallow you whole

I have a good, and I have an evil

I thought the ocean, the ocean thought nothing

You are a welcoming back from the ocean

I didn’t go back today

I wanted to show you that I was more land than water

I went to pick flowers

I brought them to you, “Look at me! Look at them!

With their salt up the stem”

But you frowned when I smiled

And I tried to arrange them

You said, “Let me tell you the song of this town”

You said, “Everything closes at five

After that, well you’ve just got the bars”

You don’t know how precious you are

Walking around with your little shoes dangling

I am the one who lives with the ocean

It’s where we came from, you know

And sometimes I just want to go back

After a day, we drink til we’re drowning

Walk to the ocean, wade in our work boots

Wade in our work boots, try to finish the job

You don’t know how precious you are

I am the one who lives with the ocean

You don’t know how I am the one.

And at the end, the song became a question. Would I go back? Back to the ocean, or stay in the mountains? Would I cling to what I knew now had been the wrong thing for me, or would I step out into the new, the next chapter?

I spent a lot of my time emailing people and talking about the past year and a half, and the future. This one girl I had met who called herself Nej (her name, Jen, spelled backwards) or Neige, and I sent volumes of emails back and forth. She called me Gem, because my legal name is Megan, or Meg, and also in reference to the Lauryn Hill lyrics, “Don’t be a hard rock when you really are a gem, baby girl.” We had met and connected because we both wrote poetry and relished words on our tongues like the finest wine. She was this funky, petite, fiery and watery Chinese girl with a major wanderlust and this writer’s passionate flame burning that drew in me in like a moth. The last time we emailed, she said she was catching a ride to the southern U.S. for the winter. I have no idea what happened to her after that. I still think about her sometimes, but I never learned her last name, so finding her would be next to impossible, I think.

I remember the immense feelings of peace and relief I felt staying there. I would sit for hours in a chair by the bay window in our bedroom and look outside, a mug of chamomile tea in hand. First watching the leaves falling, then the first snowfall. My heart began to stir inside my chest for the first time in over a year. I began to feel again, and it was beautiful. I spent tons of time thinking – just thinking, writing in my journal and just relishing the feelings of safety and warmth that I hadn’t had in forever. Asking important questions of myself: Is it possible to live a life free of the negative influences of greed, indifference and ignorance that are so prevalent in our society – while still living in society? Can I walk that fine line between the grid what lies beyond it, for all my life? Can I not be consumed? Can I retain my individuality, my purity of soul, my ethics and beliefs? Is true freedom possible while choosing consciously to live in a culture that is so mentally enslaved? Can I do it if I get a job, rent an apartment, pay my phone bill? Can I be, as Buddha (or was it Jesus?) said, in the world but not of the world? What is real freedom, anyway?

I met Caitlin’s friends, who wore bright scarves and had a clarity in their eyes that I had sorely missed, went to funky cafes and galleries, and explored the city. With rest comes clarity of thought. Calgary is beautiful in the fall, and it was such a magical, cozy, happy, deeply beautiful month. Even now, it’s the only city I would ever consider living in, and I always have a blast whenever I go there.

Still, despite all this goodness, it hurt that I left B.C., the place where I thought I would find utopia. I still wanted things to work out there, though I somehow knew that going back to Salt Spring wasn’t going to happen. That time was over.

So as the month was drawing to a close, Caitlin and I started discussing what I was going to do. She had offered for me to live at her family’s place, get a job, that whole thing, and a part of me really wanted to. She was going back to B.C. for a month to travel around a bit, then stay with some family in Vancouver. Her family was still struggling through her parents being separated and trying to work things out, and she just wanted to be away, I think.

I was torn; being a shy, awkward person, I really didn’t feel very comfortable with the idea of living in her house if she wasn’t there, despite how awesome her family was, and how comfortable they had made me feel, despite said shyness and awkwardness. But going back to BC obviously made me really wary. Looking back, I think I really wanted to stay in Calgary, but I caved and went back to BC with Caitlin, mostly because of my shyness. And it was a mistake. Big surprise.

We went back to Duncan, which was the town Arael was from, on Vancouver Island. I think that was mostly Caitlin’s idea, though I wasn’t really sure why she wanted to go back. Maybe for closure, maybe she still liked him, I don’t know. She and I had made other friends there as well, so that was the surface-reason why we went, I guess.

I ended up dating a guy there named Mika, who was totally bad for me, and the pseudo-relationship died pretty fast. He was still a virgin and I told him I’d recently had sex for the first time. He really wanted to have sex, and at that time I honestly had zero interest in it. I think I was still processing the experience of my first time, and I made it clear to him that I didn’t want to, at least not yet. But he wouldn’t leave the subject alone, and it got really annoying really fast. Seriously, some guys. If a girl says Stop and you give her some lame excuse like, “But I can’t control myself around you!” you’re just being sleazy and disrespectful. Just so’s you know.

Anyway, Mika had anger issues. His father had anger issues, and his father’s father had had anger issues too. His grandfather had abused his father, and his father had never hit Mika or his siblings, but he was always on the verge of it, as Mika described it. And I could see that in Mika too, and it scared me. His father was a long-distance trucker, so he was gone for the whole time I lived at Mika’s place. One day, Mika told me that if his dad came home unexpectedly and found me there, he would throw me and all my stuff out the front door. Kinda glad I never met him, i must say. So when things ended, after my weird co-dependent all-consuming sadness stopped being an issue, I was actually relieved and over it pretty fast.

Caitlin only stayed in Duncan for a week or so, then she headed off to Vancouver to stay with her aunt and uncle. She became her cousins’ nanny for awhile, and stayed there for a few months. Her parents ended up getting back together, which I know made her and Joe and Rory really happy.

In the meantime, I had ended up crashing at my friend Jai’s place with his brother Kailo and their dad, a really nice guy. Jai had a crush on me, but I didn’t feel that for him, so it was a bit awkward. He took it really well though, and we stayed friends. Again, I was feeling lost and confused. I talked a lot with Jai and Kailo’s dad, and he suggested that I try to go on welfare if I didn’t want to work, and get my own place. That was my tentative plan, but something in me was not cool with going on welfare for no good reason. I was young, healthy, and capable – not a sponge, thank you very much. I really wanted to stay in Duncan because there was this farm there called Sungoma; I’m not sure if it still exists, but it was so cool. Whoever owned it had built a bunch of random small outbuildings scattered around the property. Some of them were on stilts, some were treehouses, and you could rent them out by the month and live in them. There was a communal kitchen and showers. I wanted to live in a treehouse – again. But there were no vacancies, and they didn’t often come up, not surprisingly. My dream was to live in a treehouse and work at Coffee on the Moon, the local funky coffee shop, but they weren’t hiring. So my options were limited.

I don’t remember the exact moment I decided to leave BC and the dream, but I remember calling my dad from a payphone on a cold, rainy late November day and telling him I wanted to come back to Winnipeg, and asking if he would buy me a plane ticket home, one way. I think I was just tired. The dream lay scattered in bloody shards around my feet, and I was too far gone to even be heartbroken or sad about it.

So I took the ferry to Vancouver and stayed with Caitlin for the night before my flight left, feeling completely in a daze, not believing that I was willingly returning to the city I had sworn a year and a half earlier that I would never move back to again. But I think something deeper in me, wiser, more self-preserving said, “You need to rest.” And I heeded it – so I guess I wasn’t as completely stupid as I thought.

That night with Caitlin was awkward, and at the time I was too distracted to analyze why, but later I figured out that she was changing too – she wasn’t satisfied with the flaky hippie life either – and at that point, she saw me as still fully immersed in it. But I was changing too, though it would take me awhile to sort out the dichotomy in my mind and my heart.

So I was at the Vancouver International Airport the following morning, and I remember looking down at my feet and thinking, This is the last time my feet will be on BC soil; the soil of what I thought of as my homeland. It was a heartbreaking, eyes-look-your-last moment, full of confusion, bewilderment and exhausted pain. I spent some time looking at the mountains of Whistler in the distance, drinking in the sight, quenching my soul for the long, mountainless, prairie-filled months ahead. My sketchy plan was to go back to Winnipeg, get a job, stay with my mother, make some money, then go overseas and live happily ever after – or something.

* * *

So what remains to be said? I think I’ve shed it all; I haven’t talked about absolutely everything that happened. Some of it is just too personal or special for me to share. And a couple things that are downright embarrassing. . .But I feel good about what I’ve shared. So how to end it?

There’s a book and a movie based on the life of Christopher McCandless called Into the Wild. It’s an incredibly sad story. To sum it up, Chris was an intelligent guy who, after he graduated college, secretly sold his car and donated all his money and savings for law school to Oxfam International, and disappeared. His family had no idea where he went. He changed his name to Alexander Supertramp and worked odd jobs around the States, saving up to live his dream: to disappear into the Alaskan wilderness and live off the land. Away from the things of man. He made it to Alaska, and did walk into the wilderness, alone. He had barely any supplies with him. He found an abandoned school bus and, using a few books he had on wilderness survival and edible plants, lived there in total isolation for three months, then decided he was ready to go back to civilization. But upon walking out, he discovered that the route he had taken to come into the woods was now impassable; the river had swollen and was running too fast for him to swim out. So he returned to the bus for another month or so, and in the end he died of starvation. He was found two weeks later by a hunter, curled up inside his sleeping bag, weighing only 67 pounds.

The school bus is still there, and Chris’ parents have turned it into a monument to him. They keep it stocked with supplies and food for other travelers who might want to walk into the wild, like their son did.

This story really haunted me when I first read it, and later when I watched the movie. Maybe because I’ve been closer than the average person to doing what Chris did. Because I have tasted that feeling, but I lived through it to move on with my life, to tell that part of my story.

I think people maybe find it romantic what he did, but I personally wasn’t overly impressed. I found him to be hypocritical in his beliefs; he was so adamant about leaving behind everything to do with society, yet he had no qualms about living in an abandoned school bus. And yet on the other hand, he refused many people along the way who wanted to give him money and supplies, even leaving behind winter boots and hunting gear in some cases, because he wanted to be entirely self sufficient. I personally find that incredibly stupid. You’re going into the Alaskan wilderness, man. Why not accept the help you’re offered, and work your way up to living completely off the land? Why not be smart about it? I guess I just have no patience for flaky people who don’t really know what they want or what they’re doing. I dealt with them every day for a year and a half in BC when I was a neo-hippie, and I’m not impressed by any of it. Someone who goes into the woods to live, and is truly clear-headed, capable, conscious, conscientious and mature about it? That would impress me.

Now for some random last-minute stuff.

Hitchhiking

I would never do it now, today. Not for any reason. And I don’t recommend it. On Salt Spring during the protest, one of my friends was hitching one night, and she got picked up by two loggers. They figured out she was one of the protestors, and they drove out into the middle of nowhere and raped her. She never went to the police because she didn’t want it to interfere with the protesting. Seriously. I would have let those guys burn. But back then, I believed that everything my sister did was perfection, foolproof. She told me to send out positive vibes into the universe, and you would always get good rides. And nothing bad ever happened, I have to admit – but I don’t think it was necessarily for the reasons I believed it was then.

She did give me some practical advice as well. Talk, she said. Talk a lot. Make yourself a human being, a person, in the driver’s eyes. They will have a harder time thinking about hurting you if they see you as a person, not just a body, an object. Ask them questions about themselves. And, when all else fails, and you’re in the car alone with a guy who seems creepy – ask him about his mother. I always carried a knife up my sleeve as well, even though it’s been proven statistically that if a “normal” person like me (who has no idea how to fight with a knife) carries one, that person is more likely to get hurt than the person they might be trying to fight off. And seriously, if I stabbed the driver, what would happen? We would end up in the ditch, which would also obviously suck. But my knife served more of a psychological purpose for me: it made me feel badass and tough, and that shows on a person.

There was one time when I truly believe that the driver who picked me up wanted to do something horrible to me.

I was on Vancouver Island; I don’t remember where I was going, but it was a long journey, which 99% of the time means getting several different rides, because most people are only going a short distance. So there I was, in the middle of nowhere, and a guy pulls over to pick me up.

I always would do an intuitive scan of every person who stopped for me; a few times I turned down rides. I would always make very direct eye contact as well, which serves two purposes. One: it tells them that you see them, and you’re not a timid person. Two: you get a feel for a person by looking in their eyes.

So this guy seemed okay, maybe a little stiff and awkward, so I got in the passenger seat, and off we went.

I started my usual banter, asking him where he lives, where he’s going, how his day is, all that small-talk crap. He answered everything I said in short, curt monosyllabic replies. He wasn’t being rude or antisocial; I got the distinct impression he was nervous as hell. He would look over at me every so often with a jerky motion, eyes wide behind his glasses. He didn’t blink much, and he was starting to creep me out. I got the sense that he was having an internal debate with himself about whether he wanted to do something to me or not. Of course I could have been totally reading it wrong; for all I know he was high on acid or just really, really socially awkward.

So after about fifteen exhausting minutes of me babbling on and on in my one sided conversation, I pulled out the big guns. I asked him if his mother lived on the island.

Again, a one syllable reply and a wide-eyed, jerky look.

At this point I was trying to figure out a way to ask him to let me out, since there was nothing around; we were in the middle of nowhere, so there was no tactful way of asking him to let me out. I couldn’t very well say, “Oh look, here’s my stop!” when there’s nothing but grass on either side endlessly in every direction. And I instinctively knew that to throw tact to the wind could be dangerous.

All of a sudden, he pulled the car onto the shoulder of the highway and said abruptly, “I’m going to let you out here.” That was it. There was no driveway, nothing. No reason for him to stop. But he wanted me out of his car for whatever reason, and I was more than happy to oblige him.

As he drove away, I thought to myself that he had chosen not to do whatever it was he had been wanting to do, and had removed the temptation by getting me out of his car. Before I stuck my thumb out again, I sent a silent thank you to the universe.

Mushrooms

I’ve done mushrooms three times. The first time was when I was in high school, with my sister in Whistler, and it was perfect. Magical.

The last time I did them was on Hallowe’en night in Victoria in 1999, when I was a sort-of street kid. I was on the beach in Beacon Hill Park, Mile O, with a group of people, only a few of whom I knew, and none of them very well. It was pitch black, minus our driftwood fire, and there are some parts of Victoria that are really creepy. Hallowe’en. Samhain. All Souls Night. When the veil between the living and the dead is thin. Communication is open. The energy is crackling and otherworldly.

So all of these components added up to create a really bad trip for me. I got so deep, so lost inside myself, I couldn’t even talk. Paranoid. It was horrible. I never did them again. But I learned a few important things from that experience.

Don’t do hallucinogenics unless you’re with someone you trust – someone you can talk to about anything, in case you start getting stuck in your head.

Don’t do hallucinogenics unless you’re somewhere where you feel safe – and somewhere where you are safe.

Be aware of when you do them. Mushroom trips vary depending on whether it’s daytime or nighttime.

Don’t try and do “normal daily activities” while on hallucinogenics. It will just stress you out and probably make you paranoid.

Would I ever do them again? Maybe. If the right circumstances presented themselves.

The Home Underground and My Drum

I love Peter Pan. I love the idea of never growing up. Of, yes, becoming an adult, in that one is responsible and not denying what is – but not losing the childlike part of oneself. To be childlike, not childish. My sister and I both have “Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning” tattooed on our upper left arms. So I must say that I am drawn to people with a certain twinkle in their eye, the smell of wild woods on their skin and skeleton leaves in their hair. To big trees with vines, pirates and cutlasses, mermaid song and the Neverbird.

During my second summer in BC, I landed in Tofino for a couple weeks, and I loved it. It’s strange that I would love it, because it really is very hippyish in a way. But there’s something about it that drew me in. I felt very at home, very comfortable. Something about it felt right, and I still feel that way now, which is really weird.

I had driven there with a couple cool girls, and we became a little traveling family. That’s the thing with traveling; the people you go with become your people. You bond quickly. And we met some boys there on our first day; they told us they were building a home underground, a house in the woods. I thought to myself, Yeah, they’re just going to string a tarp between some trees and lay down their sleeping bags. Whatever. And I more or less forgot about it. A few days later, when they saw us in town and exuberantly told us that the Home Underground was finished and they wanted us to come stay with them, I wasn’t excited at first. So we all drove out there and hiked to the beach, then into the woods. And I must say I was blown away.

They had found an ancient dead tree with a massive trunk – ten people holding hands could barely reach around it kind of thing – and hollowed it out. They built a huge wooden bed frame and a table inside with driftwood from the beach. They made a mattress and piled sleeping bags on it. They gathered mushrooms and berries from the woods and made epic meals for us all. It was seriously amazing. I stayed there for about two weeks, living in a tree in an ancient rainforest with the ocean and the beach just steps from our “front door.” I am one of the luckiest people alive.

Since there were a bunch of us girls and guys, there was, of course, sexual tension and some minor drama. One guy got a crush on me, but I wasn’t interested. He had a small drum, not a djembe, and it was beautiful in its own way. He had decorated the skin with tribal patterns, and when I was leaving town, he gave it to me. I was overwhelmed with gratitude. He gave me his drum. I still have it, and I plan to reskin it. For a long time it sat at my mom’s place with one of her plants sitting on it, but I have it again now. I needed time away from it. I needed to break from the person I was back then. I needed to change.

My Journals

I have always written in journals, and I keep all my old ones in a Rubbermaid. And it’s full. It was sitting in my sister’s loft for a couple years, but recently I brought it home. Looking through them is always emotional. The thing I’ve noticed most about the ones I kept during my time in BC is that they’re not honest. It’s like I’m trying to convince myself of something. I would always show up at the page wanting to vent, to spill, to overflow, but as soon as my pen hit the page, that glazed we-are-one crap would take over, and it’s just all a bunch of fakeness. There is some beauty and honesty in there, but I think it snuck in in the moments when I wasn’t paying enough attention to smother it, like a tiny shard of crystal or a beam of sun.

Epilogue

In the movie The Beach, near the end when all the hippies run from their island home, shattered and heartbroken amid gunfire, the narrator / main character Richard has this to say of Sal, the founder of the hippie commune in Thailand:

“Game over. But she was never gonna leave. She believed in it all way too much to ever change. So that’s exactly where we left her.”

I have learned a thing or two about “happily ever after”; that in the movies, in that scene where someone rides off into the sunset and the credits roll, their struggles and questioning and pain aren’t over – it’s just that the audience’s time of watching it all unfold has ended. That character’s life goes on. You know that expression “Wherever you go, there you are”? Though I still have some serious beefs with Buddhism, that saying often pops into my head when I look back on my time in BC. Wherever you go, there you are. My problems, my anxiety, my depression, my low self-esteem and self-doubt followed me across the country and across the ocean, and I knew it would all follow me back to the prairies too. And I was finally done trying to outrun it.

It was winter. The stage was set. Running and being fake had failed me. There was nowhere else to turn but within. For the descent.

Inanna was ready to face Ereshkigal.

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