Chapter 5 - The Search for Meaning

Chapter 5

By the time I got to the part about leaving Thomas on the mountain behind the tree, Ms. Franklin, the counselor, was already crying hard. I stopped talking, clearly this was not useful. Pity for me abounded and didn’t really help. I ended up trying to make other people feel better because my story was so sad. Then she surprised me, “Have you ever been to a physic?” A what? Then I actually remembered a conversation I had with my elderly grandmother years before in which she declared that all the woman in our family were very physic. She told me she consulted a pendulum when she wanted to know things, and she showed me how she swung this little bead on a string back and forth over her open palm. I was young and thought she was weird. “No, what’s a physic?” I asked. She said that she knew a woman in town who gave personal physic readings and she thought that she might be able to help me. She gave me Maggie’s card; it read Maggie Price, Automatic Writing. I was intrigued and made an appointment.

I was surprised to find that Maggie lived in a normal looking house. I was even more surprised when an elderly thin woman in her bathrobe answered the door. Come in, she said. She sat down in what was obviously her chair, surrounded by stacks of books and papers, lit up a cigarette and said pleased to meet you. We chatted for a minute then she said, let’s get to work. She closed her eyes, breathed slow and regular and then started to write. She wrote incredibly fast. That first writing was 5 pages. Essentially what I remember from that reading was; what a huge ego you have, to think that you have anything to do with your son’s life or death. Wow, it was like a slap in the face, just what I needed. The writing stressed that Thomas had come into this world knowing this was his path and that he had chosen his death. She looked right at me, her eyes bore into mine. “This was all meant to be.” I look back now and see that meeting Maggie saved my life.

I just reread that first writing Maggie did for me. I see that it was actually much kinder and much more spiritual than I have remembered. Here are some beautiful thoughts from that first reading that I want to share with you.

The feeling of grief she carries is keeping her from accepting happiness and in that way, she is punishing herself – perhaps if she could imagine her son speaking with her – she would surely know if would be in love – that his wish for his mother would be to release herself from what has past – to tell her it was not she who was responsible for his departure, but his own spirit.

In order to find Peace, it is necessary to Love and until one finds Love for himself, Peace remains elusive. The hope of the Universe is that Love which must be present in all who embrace the New Age with any degree of awareness. It is time for this person to make peace with herself, to give in to the Spirit and to accept that Divine Order has everything to do with all events in life.

I saw Maggie pretty regular over the next 10 years. I cleaned her house and traded for readings. I can’t remember ever seeing her outside of her home. I hardly remember her out of her chair, or out of her bathrobe and she was always chain smoking. But make no mistake, Maggie was powerful. She taught me to hypnotize myself. That was amazing, under her tutelage that winter she taught me to get to a state of awareness with hypnotism that had taken me 10 years to get to with meditation.

Maggie said I was a mentor to her too. She taught me hypnotism in those months after Thomas’s death when I was very pregnant with my daughter. She had never worked with anyone pregnant and so she was very tentative and expanding her boundaries at the same time. Maggie always let it be known that the power was not hers but a gift that passed through her and she was always mindful to be grateful.

To suck something out of yourself, you had to have put something there. All the things I professed to believe before anything bad happened came under the harsh light of reality. Right away I realized that some ideas and beliefs meant nothing and did not work to support me in my time of need. It is like you have built this bridge across a chasm and called it understanding. When you get out on it over the abyss, you see several of the boards are rotten, too small or not there at all. How can you cross? Hopefully you have put down enough good and solid boards to carry you past the ones that will not support you.

My best boards were laid down from reading Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan books, my readings of Stephen Gaskin, from Monday Night Class out of San Francisco and my study of the work of George Gurdjieff and my years with a Gurdjieff Group in San Francisco just prior to the accident. These were the things that sustained me, some combination of the work of these three men. Why there are no women, I don’t know. There are definitely great woman who have inspired me, Elizabeth I, Georgia O’Keefe, Frida Kahlo, just to name a few, but there really was no cosmology created and led by an enlightened woman. These and other enlightened men weren’t concerned with the woman/man issue, they were talking to humans. The language of the day was masculine; I had no problem with that. They spoke to my inner life, who cares about pronouns. While my religious friends liked to keep saying, “Thomas was with God.” That didn’t work for me. I wanted answers. Who are we and why are we here? And where do we go? I have always wondered about these things, now I had to know.

I have never been terribly religious in the Christian sense. I became disillusioned with organized religion when I was a child. It couldn’t have been any clearer in the innocent eyes of a child that though many people professed to be Christian, there was very little actual Christian behavior. If fact some of the scariet people I met as a young adult were Christians trying to save my soul. I could not get past the hypocrisy. I had and still do have many problems with organized religion. More horrible things have been done in the name of the church than not. It is unconscionable to me that evil is done in the name of God. I searched elsewhere for answers.

I had read Carlos Castaneda’s books in college and found them very interesting. I remembered a few things from them. They were the first books that gave voice to a search as to why we are here; they spoke to my inner life. When I was in Guatemala the winter before I got pregnant with Thomas, I was having a miscarriage. The doctor said to stay in bed for a week. On the way back to my room from the doctors I passed a bookstore. I knew the only way to stay in bed for me would be to read and how sweet that there was a bookstore right there on the way home. It seemed like one of those wonderful gifts from the universe. The only books in English in the whole store were the first four books of Carlos Castaneda. I guessed I was meant to read them again. I bought them all.

I had just spent months traveling down through Mexico and into Guatemala. Rereading those books in that context, made an incredible impression on me. I was in the land of the ancient Toltec warriors. I had walked through the chaparral and seen the barren mountains in the distance. I had my reality stretched the minute I arrived in Mexico. I remembered something from my first reading that Don Juan had said;

“For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly.”

Don Juan stressed that to become a man of knowledge one must be a warrior. Be impeccable in your actions and have unbending intent. I had tried to live my life like a warrior before the accident, studying and struggling to be a “man” of knowledge. Now I was more like a whimpering baby. I tried to remember the things I had learned from those books. They were full of strong and positive ideas on how to live. He told how the greatest Toltec Shaman were cut down in their prime by the Spanish who slashed and burned their way across Mexico. He had a direct connection with those ancient shamans; his linage had kept their knowledge alive for 500 years. He talked about erasing self-pity, self importance and to use “death as an advisor.” That was easy to say when death was not a part of my world. Now I felt death was my enemy, I hated that death was a part of my life. I never wanted a dead child. But death had been my advisor, whether I liked it or not. I knew I wasn’t sure if I had kissed Thomas and told him I loved him the night before I died. Well I made sure I kissed Cameron and later Elizabeth every night after that in case it might be their last. When I say good night, I love you, now, I am conscious, I mean it. Death taught me that.

Don Juan said that to become a man of knowledge you must defeat four natural enemies of man. The first enemy is fear. When we begun to learn that the world is not what we expect we begin to fear. If we give into fear we will never conquer it and so would end the quest to becoming a man of knowledge right there.

The second enemy of man is Clarity. It is a joyful moment when we over come fear with clarity, though just as clarity dispels it also blinds. It is not power and must just be used to see. When you understand that clarity is only a point you overcome you second enemy and have real power.

But then Power is the next enemy of man. Most men, if they haven’t given in to fear or clarity, fail here. Power is the strongest of all enemies. Men who give into this enemy become cruel and capricious, though they retain their clarity and never regain their fear. If a man can see that if he does not have control of himself, his power and clarity bring mistakes. When he learns how to wisely use his power only then has he defeated his third enemy.

Just when a man has matured and conquered power with out warning comes his forth and last enemy – Old Age. Old age is the cruelest enemy of all and can’t be overcome completely; one can only fend it off for as long as one can. With old age comes the desire to rest, to lie down, to be finished. But if a man does this then he will have lost the last round. His enemy wins and cuts him down to a helpless old man. A man must live his fate, throw off sleepiness, and continue to rise to the challenges of life. Then a man may be called a man of knowledge, if only for a short time, as death is a hunter and may tap you at any moment. He said that your death is always on your left, just a tapping length away so really you have no time for “crappy thoughts” or moods. That just makes me smile.

This kind of strong belief system had always suited me. It fits with the suck it out of yourself philosophy. Don Juan said that it does not take much to die. To seek death is to seek nothing. I struggled to remember the best of what he had said and what I had learned to incorporate into my life. I had to buck up, have courage, take heart, have hope, and live. The art of the warrior is to balance the terror of being human with the wonder of being human. Well said Don Juan.

This was California in the seventies. There were numerous gurus, teachers, mystics and weirdoes that I could have been attracted to in my search for myself. I didn’t realize this at the time. I was shown a book by Stephen Gaskin, called Monday Night Class. He had lectured in San Francisco on a regular basis, every Monday night, the friend who had shown me the book had heard him. Just before I got to the west coast, Stephen and his followers had loaded up several school buses with their families and caravanned east looking for land to start a communal farm. Later on the land they bought and called “The Farm”, Stephen’s partner Ena May wrote Spiritual Midwifery. This book was to inspire me to have children and gave me courage and hope through all my pregnancies and gave me courage and hope in the face of Thomas’s death. Not all of them make it, Ena said simply.

Stephen also said things very simply and they made sense. A couple things he said really changed my life. They sound trite to repeat, but sometimes when you are in the right mind to hear truth, it comes in and lights you up for a moment and you get it. It is one thing to hear something and to understand it intellectually with your mind and quite another level to understand it with your being.

One thing Stepnen said, was that people can and will say anything they want, but “what is true is true and what is not true is not true”. I know that sounds so corny but I heard it on a deep level and it has rung my bell ever since.

Something else I got from him, and this may be easier to explain, was the idea that we need protect ourselves energetically from others and at the same time to be responsible to others. He said to pretend you are in a glass bell and on the outside is a small door with a guard. Some one comes up to you and calls you a jerk. Now, the guard asks itself honestly, has it been a jerk? If the answer is no, then the guard throws it out right there, before it comes in and messes with your energy. If the real answer is yes and you have treated this person bad, then you must take it inside yourself and decide how you will atone for this. This would save a lot of emotional energy being wasted on things that aren’t true. And on the other hand, it encourages personal responsibility, like the impeccability Don Juan talks about.

The major framework of my bridge of understanding across the abyss at the time of my son’s death came from studying the work of George Gurdjieff. I was introduced to the writings of this man and the writings of others who studied with him when I first arrived in southern California. I was fascinated, I had never heard of these things before, I read everything I could find and later I worked for several years with a Gurdjieff group in San Francisco. These ideas not only sustained me, they gave me proof that something more was possible for humans and these ideas continue to whorl in my inner life even to this day.

I remember being in Zenia that first early spring by myself. I was staying in the dirt floored shack by Dry Creek. I had a nice old easy chair by the wood stove, plenty of firewood and I spent my first week of spring rains inside reading tales of life with a man named Gurdjieff. First, I read Undiscovered Country by Kathryn Hume, and then Our life with Mr. Gurdjieff, by Thomas and Olga de Hartmann. These were nonfiction stories about a remarkable man. I have never thought of the world in the same way since. I then read Meetings with Remarkable Men, a book by Gurdjieff himself, which gave me another reality.

This is not the place to explain who Gurdjieff was, or what his work was about, that would be a whole other book and one I am not qualified to write. I can hear the sighs of relief of my early Gurdjieff teachers as I say that. Though I do want to give you some idea of the enormous effect his work had on me and show you how it worked in my life to promote health, hope and finally moments of peace.

The winter after T was born, I decided to not just read about Gurdjieff, but to try and find a group. The work stressed that you needed a group, direct contact between teacher and student, and conditions with others that were necessary for this inner work. I was five hours from San Francisco where I knew there was a group working under Lord Pentland, who had been a student of Gurdjieff himself. Students of Gurdjieff have always been very secretive. The meetings are not talked about outside the group and are definitely not advertised. I had no way to get a hold of a group, but I had an idea. I drove down to San Francisco and headed for City Lights, the independent bookstore started by poet/painter Lawrence Ferlinghetti, down on Broadway. I hung out for a while and finally asked a likely young woman if she knew of a Gurdjieff Group. To my and her amazement, she said yes. I didn’t know then that if a student was asked directly by someone interested, they had to lead you to the group. She took my name and number and said that she would contact her teacher and call me soon. When she called back to tell me where to come for the first meeting, she also put me in touch with Mrs. Yates, a teacher in the group who rented rooms. I moved into Mrs. Yates laundry room with Thomas and began going to weekly Friday night meetings at Clement Street in San Francisco. I noticed right away that the teachers/leaders had a quality of energy not often found in others. They had a presence, an awareness that was penetrating and noticeable. Later I came to realize they had a greater “being” than other people. It was tangible, I could feel it, and just being near their energy brought my energy level up too.

We met once a week. They gave us assignments on Friday and we reported back to the group our efforts and experiences the next week. That sounds straight forward, but it was any thing but that. The energy in the meetings was enormous. I could never say anything; every thing I had to say was so trivial in the light of the energy in the room. Mrs. Baker my teacher even made fun of me. She said when she met me I was a big talker and she was counting on me to contribute at the meetings. I had always been an amazing talker, but for some reason in the meetings I was totally tongue tied, I don’t mean I didn’t have anything to contribute, I couldn’t talk. That was a totally new experience for me. When talking about my outer life I always had a lot to say but my inner world had no experience at expressing itself out loud in words.

Gurdjieff spoke about being. Not doing, being. The state of I am. A state of presence, of being here now. He described how we humans are asleep and need to wake up. We need to struggle with ourselves to wake up. My favorite memory of really realizing what he meant began with one of these assignments. For the upcoming week, I was told to work on opening doors with my left hand and report back the following Friday what my results were. I thought that was so clever of them, to know that I am right handed and that to open a door with my left had would be breaking my routine and not doing as I am use to. I always open the door with my right hand, I am thinking. When I leave, I am determined to gather data on myself. Wednesday, I “wake up” and realize that I hadn’t even remembered my task since I left on Friday night. Wow. Not only that, I must have gone through tons of doors since then. I was amazed. This waking up thing was harder than I thought. Then Friday during the day, I remember again that I am supposed to try opening the door with my left hand. Oh despair, I can’t even remember when I go through a door, let alone remember to use the other hand. Sigh. I am way more asleep than I thought. Later that night, while going through the door to the meeting at Clement Street – I wake up. I mean wake up. I see everything, myself included in a clarity I don’t recognize, it is if someone turned the bright lights on, everything is in Technicolor and highlighted and I see that I am in the act of opening the door - with my left hand. I was blown away, there I was using my left hand, I really believed I only used my right. I knew right then and there that I was deep asleep in life and that this was what waking felt like. I was astonished at the taste of that moment, the sensation, and how alive I felt. I can still remember it like it was yesterday.

I spent the following winters in Marin County continuing my work with the group. They did not like the fact that I came in the winter and went back to my mountains in the summer. They felt I was not one hundred percent committed. They wanted me to move to the city, get a new car, make money, look nice and be successful, in other words to become part of the movers and shakers of the new spiritual culture. I just couldn’t do it. I am a county girl. I love the rivers and the forests. I admired those who stayed in the work, I honored them, I just couldn’t do it. I remember when my decision became very clear. One day, I was talking with Mrs. Yates, the woman I was staying with. She was in the upper, upper group. I asked her how long it took. What took? The group work, how long it took before one can take the knowledge they have gained here and put it to work in ordinary life. That is when she told me she had been in the group 30 years. A light came on. There was no other life for her. Finally they forced me to make a decision, to stay for ever or leave for ever, I left.

When Thomas died the next summer I wrote them. I was hoping that they would have some magical balm, say some perfect thing. As I reread their letters now, some twenty years later, I am struck by the ordinariness of them. They were out of their element too. That was a big event, even for them, and they had no real answers. It was very sweet of them to write, they cared and they tried. I realize now how alone I really was.

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