ARCHIVE

Dick Prosapio aka, Coyote is a member of the TMC Advisory Council, ceremonialist, psycho-
therapist (ret.), author, leader of men's experiential workshops, & Co-founder of The Foundation for Common Sense. He lives with his wife and daughter in Stanley, NM

For more info about Dick Prosapio, visit his web-site:
Spirit/ Earth Path
 

Cognitive Dissonance

by
Dick Prosapio  © 2002

In everyday English that term describes a state of mental confusion and it is exactly what I felt as I hung up the phone after a conversation with an old friend of mine.

What had happened was this, about two years ago I signed up with a web service called "Classmates" and through it had, just a few weeks ago, come back into contact with a high school buddy with whom I lost total contact over fifty years ago. We had, in fact, attended both eight years of "grammar" school and all four of high school together.

I remembered him over the years as he was when I last saw him. I have his face and voice imbedded in my memory as clearly as if I had just left him yesterday, and suddenly, just a few nights ago, I heard his voice for the first time in over half a century.

I use that phrase "half a century", not only as a true measure of actual time, but mostly to convey just how far our paths have diverged over the years. I struggled with the clear picture of him held in my memory as we talked because I couldn't connect up the older mans voice I was hearing on the phone with what I had stored about him in my brain. "Yes," I had to keep saying to myself, "this is my buddy Dick, the same guy I remember." And yet, the voice and the internal picture didn't fit together, and I knew, at the same moment, that he must be having the same experience of me.and neither of us knew that about ourselves..that we had aged beyond, well beyond, that old memory we kept inside.

And there was something else; Dick had stayed in Chicago, stayed and built a life surrounded by some of the same sights and sounds we had grown up with. I had left, returning only for weeklong visits about once a year, and most of my continued growing had been spent in environments very different from the South Side of Chicago. And now, I am involved in "sweat lodges" and "vision quests". In creating ceremonial dances and rites of passage and reading Tarot at psychic fairs for individuals. While Dick is an electrical contractor running a business in which he has become responsible for the employment of ten people, ten families. He is, in a sense, the leader of a tribe of people and is deeply involved in their welfare.

And, having left all possibilities of that life behind and taken this very different road, I suddenly found myself confused about how I got here from that same grounding we both had shared all those years ago.

Right after the phone call I went immediately into my men's group and felt, for the first half-hour or so, completely disconnected from the process. Everything seemed alien to me, the opening pipe ceremony, the drumming, the sharing, all of it. I seemed not to really be there. Somewhere inside of me I was asking, "Where am I and who have I become?"

I kept picturing a book which I had opened from the back and, thumbing toward the front through hundreds of blank pages, I had finally come to the first fourth of it where I had left off reading. It was there that I had left him and that life we knew together. I had to embark upon a kind of internal time travel, a race back at "warp speed" through my life to find the original forks in the road which had led me to this moment, to this whole other book I had written since then.

That night I had a dream. I was in San Francisco and traveling through a neighborhood of magnificent homes. Every one of them different, every one of them beautifully designed and built. Oddly, for this is what I might have felt otherwise, I experienced no envy, only appreciation for the creativity and good fortune of those who lived thereand that phrase from the Bible came to me, "In my Father's house are many mansions."

The next morning I knew what had happened. When I was a kid I felt different from and less-than every other guy around me. I thought they pretty much had it together and that I was just pretending I had it together in order to keep up. When I told my condensed life story to Dick and then he told me his, I finally got it that we had both lived, and continue to live, lives that, though very different, have had equal value. I heard no judgement from him about my choices nor did I have any about his. We each valued one another's experience and life creation equally. This is so amazing to me that it has emotional impact. It has filled in some kind of hole inside of me that I didn't even know I had.

Often, reunions are a nightmare based as they are on futile attempts to reconstruct the past. That's when, "You can't go home again." comes to bear. But this one doesn't have that thread of yearning running though it, this is creating a kind of re-ordering of my internal realities. I don't even know if I can fully explain what's happening but all of a sudden my dreams have taken on a whole different flavor. I don't think I've experienced much really pleasant dreamtime in my life. Not that I have nightmares, but my dreams have never been the restful kind. There always has seemed to be some sort of dilemma to be solved. But I feel something has changed inside me because of this little re-connect with the past and this old friend with whom I shared a lot of important early life. I don't know the full value of it as yet, but I do know that this reunion feels like a very important gift.

It's not everyday the past makes the present more pleasant.