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This article originally appeared on Larry Pesavento's CHRISTOS MEN'S CENTER web-site.
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Guest Article... |
The Haunted Forest: A Spiritwalk
Part 1
By Donald Walker © 2003
I have walked through a haunted forest, a beautiful forest of birch. When I am in the forest, it is always the high days of middle autumn, the autumn of memory, when nights are chill and days warm with slanting sunlight. The white bark shimmers where, here and there, the canopy of leaves breaks. It is silent in the forest-no bird sings. Most of the leaves are still green, but in tiny prides that dance in the light, some are bright gold. A few, exhausted by summer and the autumn dance, flutter to the ground. That ground is carpeted with last year's leaves, now brown, and clumps of brilliant emerald moss creep out from rocks and fallen trees onto the forest floor. A stream bed winds along the forest floor, the thinnest trickle of water meandering through the very center of the bed. Here and there the roots of trees are undercut, forming shallow grottos where the stream bends.
If I follow the stream I will come one such grotto that is well known to me. I have visited it in dreams and visions. It has appeared in my writing and I have tried to paint it more than once. In the shadows, if I look closely, I will see the shape of bones, moss covered and mouldering, resting in this grotto for I don't know how long. I wondered about these bones for many years and it was only a couple of years ago that I realized for the first time that they are the bones of a sixteen-year-old boy. They are my bones.
I was raised in a household devoid of spirit. Both my parents were alcoholics who, as the years passed, became increasingly dysfunctional. My father fled from job to job, assisted by a good-ole-boy network that sought to prop up one of their own while ensuring that he screwed up as far as possible from their own backyards. My mother took secretarial jobs to shore up income during my father's increasing periods of unemployed. She was bitter angry with the world and slipped from bitterness into insanity. My father was equally bitter and also terrified. I never knew what was at the roots of that fear-only that he stank of it, as he stank of cigarettes and cheap wine.
And fear ruled me with an iron grip as well. Every night-EVERY DAMNED NIGHT-my parents would drink themselves into oblivion in their room at the top of the house. My sisters fell asleep to the sound of my father drunkenly bemoaning the growing list of those "out to get him," my mother screaming at him to shut up or to listen to her complaints for a change. These were my sisters' lullabys. I didn't sleep. I stayed awake each night until the raving stopped then snuck up the stairs to make certain they were asleep. Only then would I shut my eyes. Once I carried a loaded gun with me when I went up to check on them. While my father had never offered us violence, I had no faith that this would continue-his ravings became increasingly strident-the list of his "enemies" grew rapidly. They clung to a doggedly material view of the world that offered them no joy or comfort, no purpose beyond existence.
When I was thirteen, however, my own spiritual hunger became sharp, as it often does in adolescence. But I had no guide. My grandmother, responsible for most of the upkeep of my sisters and myself as the family disintegrated professed a dreary Methodism that gave her little joy. She ultimately left it behind some years later. Other relatives were wishy-washy Catholics, a couple of Jehovah's witnesses, and a smattering of communists, agnostics, and at least one follower of Dianetics. Neighbors were no help-the outside world is the enemy is situations like ours.
But I found at least the scrap of a roadmap in two books. In seventh grade I was reading Lives of a Bengal Lancer by Francis Yeats-Brown. In a chapter about his time as prisoner of the Turks during the First World War, he described Yoga breathing exercises that he used to help control his fears. I studied the techniques, however sketchy his description, and practiced the exercises as he set them forth-and they worked. I could relax, even step outside myself for brief periods. It made the nightly wait for silence endurable.
And a few months later, I bought a paperback copy of T. Lobsang Rampa's The Third Eye. This book, first published in 1956, purports to be the autobiography of a Tibetan monk. It created something of a stir in the nascent eastern religions movement born of the late beats. To this day there are conflicting stories about Rampa's real identity. Some claim he is an Irish plumber out to make a quick pound, others say Rampa was a pseudonym of a genuine lama (I've even heard it was the Dalai Lama!) but it scarcely matters. The descriptions of Tantric rituals and exercises were informative enough to emulate. About the time Tim Leary left Harvard and started on his electric quest, I began experimenting with meditation and trance induced ecstasy (not the drug-the state.)
For about three years I regularly induced a trance state through a combination of breathing, mantras and individual exercises I developed on my own. I had no idea of what I was doing, really, except escaping. If there is any one thing I remember about these journeys, it was the incredible sense of freedom I felt-not physical freedom, although there was an element of that, but freedom of the soul. I was not bounded by the grim materialism that formed my parents' prison. They could not follow me into the Otherworld. Here walls were illusions, the earth a stepping stone. Here I was free from fear.
It was during this period that I first began to write and first looked at a painting that had hung in our house for years-done by my uncle when he was still in his teens-and realized how marvelous it was to capture so much feeling on canvas with paint. I began my life as an artist during these times.
But this was a perilous refuge, although I didn't know it. When you embrace ecstasy and travel in the Otherworld, you journey in the world of spirit. And without a guide, without some sort of preparation, this can be a frightening journey.
When I was sixteen, I stopped. Until recently, I was uncertain as to why. I only knew that something happened and I'd left the otherworld-not to return until middle age.
With two years, my parents demons had staked me out as fresh meat. My senior year in high school, I couldn't start the day without a shot of scotch (and another to get through fifth period math class.) I still made art, but I was locked in a cycle that haunted me for decades-periods of intense creativity and periods of oblivion.
I am telling this because you must know my history to understand what comes next. This is not a "poor me" confessional. I have dealt with much of it, that which I haven't dealt with is finding it harder and harder to hide from my probes. And a couple years ago, as I started to take charge of the demons that haunted me all those years, I embarked upon a renewed spiritual journey. That journey is on-going. In my next installment I will share my thoughts on spirit and the spiritual journey. It is this journey that gave me insight into why those lonely bones rest in the forest; insight to what so traumatized that boy into trying on his father's demons as his own.
Donald Walker
Copyright 2003 Donald Walker, all rights reserved
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