Wounded healer
I came of age in the 1980s in suburban Connecticut. Ronald Reagan was president. Capitalism was king, and people aspired to be yuppies—young urban professionals. Nobody talked about rites of passage, or the soul, or energy. My friends and I grooved to Duran Duran, Simple Minds, and Madonna at high school dances. We went on dates to movies like War Games and The Breakfast Club, and our parties really were like John Hughes’ movies. Prom, homecoming, sports, SATS, graduation, getting into college, and losing one’s virginity, were the ceremonies that marked our transition into adulthood. Not much changed when I got to college, where the goal was a high GPA that would culminate in a high-paying job.
There was a dark side.
Binge drinking and eating, drugs, reckless sexual encounters. The kinds of ceremonies your soul draws you into when you and your society can’t hear its voice, drawing you down into the Underworld without protectors or guides.
I survived.
All through those years I had a secret best friend. Depression. Every now and then someone saw her and suggested medication. I declined. I knew I had to go down all the way, even if I had no idea for years, what was happening to me.
My soul was calling me..
The Fool
Fool’s take leaps. I already told you how I moved to Paris at age 18, unable to speak French, with hardly any money, and no connections before the internet. One of my clearest memories of that time is walking to the tabac on the corner my first morning to buy a map and finding myself on it by looking up at the street signs.
The next decade of my life involved a lot of journeys without a map. It seemed like every time I did try to plot a course, the wind blew the map right out of my hands. I did go to college and studied English literature, was on my way to grad school, when some voice inside told me, “Don’t do it.”
That was my last chance at a professional, well-regarded career for years.
For the next decade I bounced around the US, living in Washington, DC, Rhode Island, Hawai’i, New Mexico, New Orleans, New York City, San Francisco, and Vermont. I worked minimum wage jobs I usually hated, scraped by. I wanted to be a writer, but barely wrote anything.
It wasn’t all bad. I met incredible people from all walks of life. I learned to shapeshift, became adaptable. With little money, I became resourceful and resilient. I gained some humility and self-esteem at the same time, realized work was not the measure of a man. Having no goals, I stepped outside of time and learned how to enjoy the day-to-day. I made deep connections with friends I still have today.
The Hermit
Everything changed when I made my first real commitment, though I have to admit I didn’t know I was making one. At age 29, with my bags packed to go move in with a friend in Providence, Rhode Island for the winter, I didn’t get on the ferry. I decided to stay on Block Island, my summer home base for years, for the winter.
For the first seven years of year-round island life, I still had no idea what I was doing, and there are many more detours in this story, but living on Block Island is where my soul was finally able to speak loud enough for me to hear it. I began to write, filling notebooks that became two novels. I published two books of poetry.
I still didn’t have teachers or guides I could recognize. I thought I was just lazy, laying belly-down on the beach all day, getting up to body-surf some waves. I got high on inhaling salt roses, biked into the wind, watched the same birds return year after year, foraged bladderwrack and cattails and chickweed; eye-gazed with deer I’d come across in stripped winter fields. I walked miles on a small island, circling. I never tired of it. The more I walked, the more the path deepened. I had found a way. I thought I would never leave.
Strength
In the Tarot, the Strength card shows a woman holding open a lion’s mouth with her bare hands. That’s how my thirties felt. I began to repair myself.
People were beginning to speak of energy around this time. 9/11 brought me into a modern medicine woman’s sphere. She was an energy worker, something I’d never heard of, and as we began to repair my energy body, she helped me reframe my perspective on everything that happened to me in life, especially the traumas.
This process was very mental. I did a lot of spiritual bypassing, but honestly, it was all I could handle. I had experienced some devastating violations. I needed to make my mind a safe space by believing my soul had chosen these painful experiences so that I could evolve. Once my mind was strong enough, I could move down into the body, but not yet, I needed first to gain some belief in myself.
In my late 30s, a kind of miracle happened. A friend of mine who was also a poet and owned an inn on Block Island, decided to start a yearly poetry festival for four weeks in April, during the off-season. For ten years, I got to study, literally at the feet, because my favorite spot was the living room floor, of some of the great contemporary masters of American poetry. People like Robert Bly, Mary Oliver, Marie Howe, Li-Young Lee, Tony Hoagland, Coleman Barks, Fran Quinn, and Carolyn Forché.
The Block Island Poetry Project led me to the Great Mother Conference, founded 50 years ago by Robert Bly. This was a multigenerational community that came together once a year to explore the life of the soul, as individuals and as a culture, through ecstatic poetry, music, dance, archetypal psychology, and the visual arts. But most importantly, it’s where I discovered the power of storytelling and rites of passage work. .
Disciple
I was unbelievably blessed to be along for the ride as Martin Shaw began his storytelling career in America. After Bly, slipped into the twilight, Martin became the Great Mother Conference leader, and we on Block Island were blessed to have him come to the island for the Poetry Project many times. Working with Martin, I began to see what I’d been doing for the past twenty years where it seemed like I was doing nothing.
I’d been forming a relationship with the land, letting rocks, waves, willow, and mallow; hawks, owls, wrens, and gulls; hurricanes and zephyrs, whitecaps and calm marsh inlets, initiate me in the old ways. Now, conscious of what was happening, I began to devote myself to these rites of passage with will and intent. I started to come out of fairyland, strong enough mentally and emotionally, to be an advocate for magic in the real world of late-stage capitalism. My soul was not crushed. My voice got more refined and louder.
The Lover and the Tower
In my lmid 30s, I experienced a great love. A Tristan and Isolde kind of union. The kind of love you know is doomed from the start, but you both leap in anway.
I’d been in and out of relationships for twenty years, but this was different. My whole being was consumed by it. It was like pressing my bare chest to a sword tip knowing my heart was going to be destroyed, but not caring.
And that’s what happened. Deprived of him, my soul exploded like a tsunami into my body. I finally understood, beyond the mind, that everything I’d ever experienced, especially the traumas and the losses, had been leading me to this point so I could know the greatest truth of all, unconditional love. Not for my lover, for myself. I had created it all. There was no one to blame any more.
It took me four years to come back to life after we parted. During that time I gained a new ally, the autoimmune disease ulcerative colitis. Over the next ten years I was hospitalized close to physical death five times. Every time I left the hospital, I felt more alive.
The Star
Have you seen the Star card? A beautiful, naked woman bends toward water, holding a clay jug in each hand. Eight stars dance in the sky above her, Water pours from each vessel, some onto the ground, some back into the pool. She is filled with divine inspiration. Her emotions are being cleansed by her heart. Her thoughts are aligning with her actions.
This woman was my guide in my 40s, and this time I was aware of her help. Following the water, I journeyed to the Yucátan peninsula in Mexico, and immersed myself in the laguna and cenotes of the Sian Ka’an for a few years. In Mayan, Sian Ka’an means “the place where heaven is born.” Although I still had flares of ulcerative colitis, and went through another devastating romantic loss, in the place where the sun was born, my body and soul merged. I encountered janzu and aguahara, went through deep healing that spanned centuries into the past and future; became part of the international aquatic community, and started to offer aquatic healing to others.
I published another poetry book, Breaking Up With The Moon. It’s not that I didn’t still love the moon, but I was done with being someone’s reflection. .
the magician
The first card of the Tarot (after 0, the Fool), is the Magician, the alchemist. The last, number 21, is the World. When we reach the world, we’ve completed a cycle, which doesn’t mean we’re complete. After we reach the end, we start all over again, circling with the wheel back to the liminal realm of the Fool. Each time we become the Magician, we get the opportunity to make different choices on our way to the next completion. The orbits become wider. We become more aware of what’s happening as it’s happening to us. Ultimately, we understand the only true way of navigating is love. Anything else dims our light, diminishes our awareness, sends us back into the dark to be reborn. That’s all right. The cycle goes on. My story merges with yours as you read these words, the path becomes more clear, and disappears in a moment. Flash floods come when they’re needed.
I live now on Moku o Keawe. Hawai’i Island. I swim with dolphins, mantas, and sharks. When I dive down deep enough, I hear whale songs. There are countless more stories of how I got here, but I’m not going to share them here, because the truest thing I can say of them is that none of them matter. They carried me on great waves across an ocean, and flow through me now like a river I don’t try to hold on.
My story is an unending river. It flows through water back to the stars. I don’t have children, but I have a legacy. Not the events of my life, or any of my achievements. They won’t be remembered, and that’s ok. Eventually memory itself will dissipate when we no longer need time.
When that happens, no one will be there to record it, but that’s ok, too.
My story is made from light, which is made from stars. No matter what else happens in the rest of my allotted years, my life is a triumph. In this time and space, I am no one’s reflection. I have become the magician who recreates my life however I’m called to serve.
