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The Magic of Wild Places
Introduction
In his introduction to my book, Kafka's Uncle and Other Strange Tales, Brian Herbert said, "Joseph Campbell once said that the quest for one's father is a hero's journey, and I know from personal experience that it can be an arduous, painful pursuit, but one that can lead to incredible enlightenment."
In another book, Mountains of the Night,, I explore, in part, this theme, coming to grips with the impact of a badly dysfunctional family, coming from parents where love between my mother and father turned to profound bitterness and aching disappointment. And the message was clear: love equals pain and disappointment. And because love was pain between them, and given the time in the culture in which their opinions and beliefs were formed, divorce, while always looming in the background, while never actualized, might as well have been for it was a de facto reality. Yet needs needed to be met and unconsciously, they turned to my brother and myself for needs they couldn't meet with one another. In this sense, Carl Jung was so right when he stated, "Nothing does more damage to a child than the unlived life of the parents."
And so I grew up identifying with the pain of my mother and my father, as their lives turned out. And probably the greater pain was the identification with my father: identification with grief, with disappointment, with anger and disgust, shame and guilt for oneself.
His mother, abusive as she was, both physically and emotionally, had a crushing influence in those early years of how my father saw himself. Imagine waking up in the morning when you're three or four, being whipped by your mothing for something that your brother did but blamed you instead? Imagine witnessing your mother throwing a knife, stabbing your father in the cheek? Imagine unending verbal abuse. That was just some of what he said happened but he always spoke as though he had never let go of it, the memories always right there; always reliving the memories, re-feeling the pain, the injustice and was unable, it seemed to let go of the victim role. What was truly happening with him was what I learned by working as a counselor at Harborview Medical Center on the inpatient psychiatric floor for some years - for so many people who came there had backgrounds not dissimilar to that of my father: abusive backgrounds that, if it happens early enough does so much damage to a child in that they come to believe they are the cause of their own abuse. Again, as Carl Jung theorized, a child introjects (or "pulls into" oneself, or, like a sponge, "soaks in")the identity of the (usually, the same sex) parent in order to figure out who they are. If the model is healthy, that's what gets introjected, and if the model is abusive - it's not a tough leap to understand how a child then ends up being abusive to himself as he was abused as he saw the model abusing himself/herself as they were abused and this goes on back, back through generations. So much of what was happening to my father was based in guilt and shame and it was not an awful lot different than what I saw going on the people identified as patients on the inpatient psychiatric floor.
As described in The Mountains of the Night, one week before my father died, his sister-in-law, told us that he had been, in fact, incarcerated in Western State Hospital for a year, in the early thirties, after trying to kill his mother. Only then, a short time later after he was released, he accidentally hit and killed a pedestrian while he was driving.
Shame and guilt. Never will there be enough Thorazine, Ambutol, Serenquil, Paxil, Valium, Prozac to ever, ever deal with all the shame and guilt and how those feelings equate to self-hatred, self-loathing, fear, anxiety, dread, depression and all the behaviors that can result from such powerful feelings based on the terrible misconception that feelings equal who you are as a person. And you don't dare look inside yourself, lest your worst fear is that it will be true: that those "bad feelings" really do mean that you are a "bad person." Not only that, but you are a "bad person" for having those "bad feelings" in the first place, and that means - oh, yes - you're not worth loving. (Or worse, not worthy of life itself.)
After all, if one wasn't loved, how does one learn to love oneself? And if one doesn't love oneself, how can one be worthy of love from another? And if someone tries to love someone who doesn't love themselves, then there must be something wrong with that person for trying to love you, so what do they want from you? Shame and Guilt. Shame and guilt. The legacy of abuse. Abuse that can be so severe and so early in life, that the stress hormones resulting from such trauma actually physiologically prevents or greatly alters certain areas of the brain from not only developing correctly, but functioning, as they should*.. Abuse so severe that it is like a never ending state of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Because my father, according to my aunt, told a woman he loved about his past and his stay at Western State, she took his engagement ring and threw it back in his face and my father vowed to never tell anyone that secret again and swore my aunt to secrecy. When the marriage between him and my mother failed and she left him when I was two - (she came back a week later, "for the sake of the kids"), the damage was done, to myself, to my brother, and certainly to my father. Shame and guilt. Never ending, deepening, going down a dark tunnel where there was no light, dying, dying long before his death, letting go of his creativity, letting go of his writing, moving into a grinding, deepening despair, anger and depression and never able to talk about it except in terms of being a victim. Powerless, held at bay, held hostage by his past and his inability to overcome it; past through which he always saw present circumstances and as such, became his present companion unto the moment of his death.
And my mother? Of course she was in pain. And that certainly influenced how I saw relationships with women, her anger, her frustration and the message was not lost on me from year zero: love equals pain. Seeing that, my decision at age three: If I get married, I'll end up in a relationship where I'll be as miserable as my father. A belief and a fear that has taken years and so much therapy to modify and has cost me dearly and ruined so many potentially good, positive, healthy and loving relationships.
More often than not, as I got older, I wondered, why did these two people stay married if they were so unhappy. But somehow, they gave each other something, even if perhaps a large part of it had to do with enmeshment. But through their mutual unhappiness, I could see something, an essence of them, that wasn't meant to be so tarnished as to turn out the way it did. My father did enjoy getting out to go fishing. Later, he took me hiking and for him, this was solace and I got a glimpse of the power that the Magic of Wild Places held for him. Some part of him forgot the pain and being out in the Cascades, or when he talked of hikes he took, it was as if he saw and could see an ethereal beauty transcend the pain. I saw another part of him which I saw nowhere else. I saw a part of him come alive, and truly, relish life as if Nature was a spiritual intimate with whom he found great solace, connection, beauty, mystery and - wonder.
It's no wonder hiking and being on the trail is such a part of my life, not only for my health but for my spiritual connection, perhaps of emulating and expanding on that rare joy my father exuded when he was out in Nature or talked of it. This was a place where, had his wife not had asthma and were physically robust and enjoyed the rigors of Nature as much as he did, there might have been a deeper, spiritual connection that may have healed so much.
But this was his world. And he shared it with me. And though intimidated by him not only because of his physical size but because of that latent pain and rage, here, in The Magic of Wild Places, those painful feelings lessened, was tempered, pushed back by the joy of that connection found in Snow Lake, Sauk Mountain, Waptus Lake, Monte Cristo, Big Four Glacier, Mt. Rainier, the Olympic Peninsula; and so many other places. My father, drawn to The Magic of Wild Places, loving of the Magic of Wild Places, for a while, just a little while, the rage, the despair in my father lessened, and for a while, just--for a little while, it was as though he could, in his heart, his soul, lie down in the pink and white heather with the white Bear Grass gently waving in the breeze nearby, look up at the sky and for a moment, for a moment, just - for a moment, wonder at the beauty of being alive and knowing that (as he frequently said), lifting his eyes unto the hills, help would come to him. This was when I saw that other side of him - the true spirit as it was intended to manifest, that spirit in him that while for the most part was crushed, could still, at these times, remember -- remember what he was here for. So ultimately I had a choice with whom I could identify, but for so long and so early in life, it was the pain I identified with. Until - until that dream in April, 2004 - until I had that dream . . .
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