1. The Prelude

“Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.”  John Muir ^[i]

My first dog was named Lucky Merriweather. He was a liver-colored Springer Spaniel with scraggly hair that stuck like fur potholders to the furniture. When I was a young boy, he was a solid, steady force for me. We were puppies together for a time, and, with some chagrin, I admit that I’m the one who abandoned him.

Though I’m not claiming he was smarter than other canines, he had one very notable talent. He was a keen observer, with a sharp eye ever mindful of the front door. An enthusiastic opportunist, whenever he sensed an opening, he raced toward freedom with the flailing of his paws against the linoleum floor to break out with one nudge of his nose against the screen door. Running free, leash-less, was his drug of choice.

Several times a week, because he was “my dog,” I was assigned the ritual task of returning him and sobering him up, but he was a swift antagonist. He also relished this hunter/hunted game, excitedly waiting for me in the front yard, letting me come close, less than an outreached leash from him, before pivoting, jumping with all four legs, and dashing off, leading a chase around the dog berry bush and down the road, out of the neighborhood and into the far fields to the Big Pine.

I stalked him relentlessly. Hide and seek. He taught me, if you can’t find Luck one place, then you will find Luck somewhere else. And he’d wag his tail when discovered in the most unlikely spots, as if wondering what had taken me so long.

If that can be called the Lucky Principle, over the years, I’ve learned some version of it operates in affairs of the heart. The Seeking part of us wants to—needs to—stop plodding the worn familiar streets. We can’t afford to be trapped by our Pain and Self-deception. We cannot afford to bemoan the loss. We have work to do. Open our eyes! Think like a playful animal that has been too long forgotten, but still has hope. Spend time with a presence within that demands for us to be free, to seize at the crack in the door.

In my work as a therapist, I’ve found that Heart-dramas can be that crack in the door if we have the courage to push at the barriers that keep us housebound. When we do this, it’s not Luck that we chase. What we Seek from the depths is healing…a mending of the hidden woundings we carry, so the veil can finally drop, and we can recognize what is True and Beautiful.

If I Knew Then . . .

            I hold that if I knew then what I know now, I’d have been a companion worthy of my childhood dog. Maybe if my parents had done their own emotional work, attempted their own Heart-dramas, then the end of this Luck’s story wouldn’t have been so predictable.

But we were all dysfunctional and unable to comprehend it, and just too focused on Self-deception and protective avoidance. So, what happened to Luck? My older sister became pregnant at fifteen, and soon after relocated to Germany to be with her new husband who was just old enough to join the military. My father was having an affair with a coworker, and was “working a lot,” while my mother was stuck in bouts of depression, with fears she was losing her mind because her husband frequently told her so in those exact words.

I was left to my own devices. My mother used that phrase frequently, “Okay, I’ll leave you to your own devices.” The phrase might mean something different today, but this was a time before our present-day vast array of technology. She had a tone that sounded loving, pleasing, with a bit of acquiescence, as if she was allowing me my need for personal time. Like she was inviting me to take a road less traveled. “Go and self-actualize, young man!” Or something. In real time, it was confusing. Looking back, I see she was dissociated and was just making an empty awkward comment, unable to say, “I’m out of here,” since it always preceded her locking herself in the bedroom.

By eighth grade I did find some of my own devices, stealing bottles of whiskey from a local tavern and drinking to black-out with a few fellow delinquents. No adults seemed to notice.

Of course, I had lost track of Lucky, leaving him to old age without much awareness on my part. When he escaped one evening, and no one went to look for him, he was killed on a distant highway under the wheels of a tractor-trailer.

             Lord Lucky Merriweather

Long dead, my dog, Lucky, chased rocks

I threw, even down into the beaver pond.

He would pluck those balls clenched in his teeth

Off the muddy bottom and come up gagging.

He had a furious commitment to the game,

As if the Joy was worth drowning himself.

He carried sticks the size of small trees

Tripping over his front legs, with such serious

Devotion to the ridiculous.

He bounced on his hind legs through the tallest brush,

Full on shivering, reckless and lacking grace

As if the greatest prize was scattering birds,

The shock of beating wings flung skyward like angels.

I wondered if he even had one well-reasoned

Thought in his flop-eared head.

            But some nights I dream of him still. I am, again,  

A child. As we are rising over moonlit fields together,

Flying, impossible limbic companions,

And my heart remembers how he belonged to me

And I to him, as if the best love could be delivered

With bad breath, on a coarse tongue.

 

What I Learned

Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up

Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.

             William Wordsworth, The Prelude ^[ii]

A dose of shame can sometimes soften the defended Heart, make our weaknesses stark and unavoidable, remind us of our shared humanity. But it appeared that was not something anyone in my childhood understood. Perhaps this explains why getting beneath the surface, beyond what is apparent, has become my life-long quest. Though I didn’t always understand what drove it, my Heart knew I was seeking healing from the depths. And the child, the artist, the lover and visionary within desperately needed to be seen.

What I Learned from My Father

My father was better at manipulating the world than understanding it. He told me to work hard. What does that look like in real life? It looks like digging a hole large enough for an inground swimming pool. This is not a metaphor. My father wouldn’t have understood metaphor; and he never really explained why he was driven to do this grueling work of putting in a pool in the backyard. I was in elementary school, and still a soldier in his army, conscripted into his fantasy that floating in chlorinated water would bring him happiness. We spent an entire summer shoveling. At a certain depth, the hole filled up with ground water. Thick oozy slop weighed down each scoop and throw.

He got pissed off because my throws were not on point. There’s a way to use a shovel. You should know that!

Of course, there were backhoes available, but hard work never killed anybody. It was late in that summer of 1965, just as school was about to start again, when he broke down and rented a sump pump and backhoe. He always used that phrase, breaking down, meaning giving up reluctantly, doing something that you just never want to do or admit to having done. I don’t know if it was common for people of his Greatest Generation to speak in such terms, passing along “knowledge” in repetitive phrases. Much later, I learned from Robert Bly that unless your father has done his own work, then he can only teach you his temperament, not his wisdom.^[ii]

More recently, I learned from Dr. Lain Mc Gilchrist, that my father’s expressions are a sign of a left hemisphere dominance. Left is the division of the brain that’s better as the “emissary” not the “master.” It specializes in cliched and paranoid references. This part of us is “almost a tool” to pin down fragments rather than utilizing the power of language to convey “a spark of the heart.” ^[iii]Even without ever knowing this science, as a boy it didn’t take me long to realize, breaking down to the fact, that my father’s words were shallow and ill-informed.

I had stopped idealizing him much earlier than that summer we dug a hole in the ground. I stopped when I kept getting hurt, certainly by the restraints and by his belt. But it was not because of the physical pain (well, it was that too) but because he was so dismissive or outright angry about my pleadings for mercy. If you think I’m being unfair, I assure you I’ve tried not to hold on to these things. My mother taught me that. You can’t hold on to stuff because it’ll drive you crazy. She practiced what she preached. She never held on to anything, including herself.

Constructive Criticism

But to give credit where credit was due, another one of my mother’s favorite phrases, my father did show me how to keep my head down. If you didn’t, then you were sure to get pummeled sooner or later.  Getting pummeled. I recall a visceral memory. Stepping off the school bus in seventh grade, surrounded by a group of older boys. Ricky wanted to fight me, they said. Of course, men fight when they are challenged. Don’t show weakness. Man up.

Ricky was learning boxing, and he must have thought I was a somewhat large and soft object to practice on. I barely knew this kid until he left my face all bruised and swollen. I didn’t even try to punch back.

You need to keep your head down. You look like a punching bag, my father said. He next described some unlikely physical move I was supposed to use in a fight, to throw off the opponent. A wrestling move. Like using a shovel, this was something I should know!

When he learned that Ricky was physically smaller than me, he lost interest. I was a lost cause.

            Following this experience, I practiced tightening my body and walking more manly, projecting that I was ready for a fight, shoulders raised, burying my fear and stripping away any movements that could appear weak or compassionate, god-forbid feminine, and prey-like.

And More Advice

You need to get a good job with a salary that will allow you to buy a house, not just any house, but the place of your dreams.

Some houses, of course, are deal breakers because the countertops aren’t granite. If there’s carpet in the living room, then you can’t live with that. It needs to have some resale value and location, location, location. A million-dollar view.

Of course, if you’re handy like my father, then you can fix or renovate anything, probably with tools that you find around your house already. You don’t want to break down and go buy something new, especially if you’re just going to remove a couple walls for an open concept. Hard work never hurt anybody. Sweat makes the man.

After the house of your dreams, you need a boat, a fishing boat, or a speed boat. With a lake house, or something on the beach, so close to the ocean that the tides carry the surf right up to the deck where you sip on your beers. In the driveway you’re going to need a large truck, like a Ford 150, with a cab big enough to entertain guests.

You’ve probably heard all of this or something similar: if you work hard, you get the things you want, then you can go on trips, like real vacations. That’s why you put up with demeaning and soul-flattening stuff at work because management is always out to get us.

Organizations screw everyone over.

Workplaces are all like that.

The union isn’t much better with all its ridiculous rules.

Everybody is in it for themselves—end of story.

My father again, of course. At one point, he was a union buster, while his father (my grandfather whom I never met) was up there in the union in Providence Rhode Island. Up there as a boss was a location you wanted to get to, but my father didn’t trust that place nor the people in it.

I’m not sure what I was supposed to learn from all that.

Maybe you’ve not been contaminated by parental temperaments, perhaps parental phrases are not quite so intrusive in your mind. But there’s one thing we probably have in common. You have Work to do, and so have I, and likely (of course, I’m just guessing), your father didn’t inform you—maybe no one, not one man or one woman in your life has shown you—how to do the Work. Even how to recognize what work you need to do in order to feel a little less crazy. But we all need to do it, dig into the dramas that have been chiseled into our bones. You might get pummeled, but we can’t afford to keep our heads down.