Finding Oz

When I was 17, I went to Europe to find myself.  It worked.  I found myself lying in a gutter outside the Hofbrau Haus in Munich.  After draining three liters of beer, I had tried to smuggle out one of those world famous beer steins, and upon my escape, got busted by burly bar bouncers who launched me into the street like a bag of dirty laundry.

That marked the beginning, more or less, of a twenty year quest to find myself at the bottom of a beer bottle or the end of a joint.  I was disgusted with the self I found there:  jittery and sick, remorseful and afraid, and pushing relationships to the brink.  It's impossible to find yourself when the road you're on is the wrong road, a dark one-way tunnel with no exit, with the days passing with ever increasing momentum and dry-mouthed cravings for more.  As they say, I had self-will run riot.

When the whole mess finally came crashing down, the other self, my real self, surrendered to higher powers the abused and abusing impostor who had hijacked my life.  No more blackouts, no more puddles of vomit next to my bed.  No more public humiliations.  No more bouncing off the cobblestones of a foreign street.  One evening in my early recovery, I explained to my six-year-old son that I was going to meetings so that I wouldn't drink beer any more.  To which he responded, "Oh, back when you were mean to us?"  Yes, that's right, son.  No more.

That was twenty five years ago.  And, by the grace of the Source, there has been no more.  

Years ago also, the great spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, landed at his bottom.  A spiraling depression left him believing there was no escape -- he was about to commit suicide.  Eckhart said aloud to no one:  "I can't live with myself."  But this statement resonated within his true self, and proved to be revelation and his salvation.  The dualism in those words could not be denied:  Who was the "I" and who was the "myself"?  They were different selves.  He saw that his "I" could no longer co-exist with his false "self", his ego, that great fabricator of pride and emotional pain.  From that day forward, Eckhart let dissolve the slings and arrows of the false self by immersing his true self into the present moment and thus the flowering of consciousness.

About twenty years ago on an afternoon like any other, I was driving down the highway after doing some errands, alone and lost in thought as always.  Everything was quite ordinary when something quite extraordinary happened.  All thoughts in my mental churn ceased and all worries and concerns dissolved.  I landed like a feather into a state of simple observation.  No more expectancy, no more rehashing, no more grind.  As each moment unfolded I became a serene passenger in that unfolding, instead of bouncing mentally between future and past as I always had.  I felt as Dorothy must have felt when opening her door into the wonder of Oz.  I had long stopped using mind-altering chemicals, this was not a flashback, and without any external stimulus, and without even trying, I lived in the golden present for what must have been a full two hours.  I did not resist but moved through this enchanted time with calm intention.  I felt loved and loving.   My false self must have gotten locked in a closet with a sock in its mouth.  The ego, after all, abhors the present moment.

It doesn't really matter why or how this happened.  All I know is that my life of quiet desperation was given a brief reprieve from the voice in my head, the voice that insists I have serious things to worry about or harsh judgements to make.  Thoreau's famous line should be amended to:  "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation because they can't stop talking to themselves."

There were thousands of moments in my drinking and drugging years when The Buzz opened me to a golden place like Oz.  Moments free of fear, regret, and confusion.  Just me and The Buzz in a kind of holy matrimony.   This is the promise and, simultaneously, the great deception of addiction:  that it would render harmless and null the pain of the false self.  With a few drinks I became Somebody, ten feet tall and confident, a smooth dancer, a lover, a man among men.

But golden moments only lasted for precious minutes, of course, and withered to expose the fraud.  I couldn't live with my sober self, so would try to drink and drug my way back to that Oz of precious golden moments.  Snared in the addict's trap, I drank and drugged to erase the suffering caused by my drinking and drugging.

But here's the thing: sobriety by itself doesn't bring peace, although it now makes peace possible.  Whether I was high as a kite in my former life, or stone-cold sober in the present one, my mind becomes lost in thought and quick to judge.  Like every other person, there's a true me and a phony me.  The sin of the true me is the failure to make the distinction, of being blind to the fact that the highs and lows of fortune and misfortune are creations of ego.  The first step is to expose the impostor which comes with simple awareness.  And there are short stretches when I feel I'm in that Oz-like place, not lost in thought, but where each moment reveals itself in a kind of beholding.  

Sometimes I look back at that drunk teenager licking cobblestones and licking his wounds in Munich, and am grateful for the road he was about to take.  He was a thief for one blurry night, but also became a victim of his own robbery for more than twenty years.  And now, twenty five years since that last drink, I am no longer trying to find myself in all the wrong places.  You can’t find by searching.  You find by freeing.






  

Three Stones for Darla

We buried Darla, our devoted dog, at the back of our yard where the trail into the woods begins.  Daily our dog started an adventure there after spinning in excited circles at the question, "Go for a walk?" There are three stones that comprise the gravesite, three small slabs of flagstone which my daughter Betsy, home from Austin, and her best friend, Sarah, painted to commemorate our dog's life.   

Darla was the sweetest animal I have ever known.  She lived solely to be with us, partly, I suppose, because we let her lick our after-dinner plates.  My wife Sue remarked that this loss has hit her the hardest of the losses of our hounds.  I think it's because Darla became human, became one of us -- we understood her, and she understood us.  She is locked forever in our hearts where she found a home on Day One.

Day One occurred twelve years ago in Onekema when my wife Sue, 17 year-old Betsy, and I followed an ad for Labrador retriever puppies.  When we arrived, there was only one pup, eight weeks old, the last of eleven left unclaimed: a big-bellied yellow playing under the owner's mobile home.  She was the offspring of the owner's constant companion, a black female, and the father who was in a pen across the yard.  He was a muscular and intense fox-red Labrador (also referred to as a yellow), and when I walked up to his small pen, his eyes became crazed, his muscles twitched, and he sprang repeatedly straight up in the air, his paws four feet above the ground, like a canine pogo stick.  Our little prospect, meanwhile, was playing with a nearby litter of week-old beagles, chomping them at their necks and tossing them into the air like flipped pancakes. 

With her protruded belly, I worried that the little Lab had worms, but the owner assured us that she had just eaten a robust lunch.  After negotiating twenty five dollars off the asking price, we headed home to Beulah, when the owner's claim held true.  En route, little Darla let fly a massive eruption of mashed corn and, just like that, she lost half her weight and became streamlined.

A squirrel is painted on the top stone of Darla's gravesite.  Like most dogs and
all Labradors, she was an avid anti-squirrelist whose mission it was to eradicate said rodents from our yard and the world at large.  As we live in Michigan woods with succulent acorns, and dangle bird feeders from our deck, Darla was on constant alert.  I kept track of her squirrel conquests over the years as she would bolt out of the back door many times a day in hot pursuit.  According to my records, the final tally between the pursued and the pursuer is:  Squirrels - 4,361.5, Dog - 0.5.  Darla never conquered her adversary.  It was only once that I witnessed her catch a squirrel and hold it her mouth.  But she seemed so dumbfounded by this actual success that in a second she released the squirrel to its fellows.  This explains the .5 credited to each side.  These days, squirrels freely run amock in our back yard and seem to carry with them a new-found cockiness.  And a new population of skittering chipmunks has suddenly emerged across the yard and under the deck.

The bottom stone renders a landscape painting of the Empire Bluff as viewed from the Lake Michigan beach at the outlet of Otter Creek.  Darla loved going there, or to any body of water for that matter.  A retriever through and through, she would leap into the water to fetch a thrown stick or a tennis ball that bobbed twenty or thirty yards out.  She followed the standard drill of fetching, swimming it back to me, dropping the prize at my feet, and shaking out her coat before waiting for the next launch.  She could go on for hours like this. One summer afternoon there, a strong westerly wind drove great breakers into the shore.  Darla's game of fetch then became an acrobatic thing.  I will always treasure the mental video of this intrepid canine as she crashed through a tsunami and dog paddled through the froth, driven by a mysterious instinct and full devotion to recapture a stick.

During winter walks down our country road, Darla always wanted to play stick on the trek home.  She explored the low branches of pine trees, selected an impossibly long branch, and would yank and yank and yank the limb until it gave way.  She would then drag the thing over snowbanks, through drifts, and out into the street where she would prance the branch over to me.  I would then crack the limb over my knee several times until it was short enough to throw.

The middle stone is painted with the multicolored letters D-A-R-L-A, done up in psychedelic style for a one-of-a-kind personality.  Sometimes when getting home from work, Darla would blow her enthusiasm gasket and race in manic circles around the yard like a dog possessed.  When anyone came through the door, she would greet them with great squirms of hospitality, then ease between their legs so that they might provide a scratch above the tail.  This routine became known as the "butt dance", for as the scratcher scrubbed the butt of the scratchee, Darla would jump in rhythm from foot to foot, twitching and groaning in ecstasy.  When I sat in the living room, Darla would sit at my feet and face me, still as the Sphinx, patient as a predator.  We provided everything, of course, and she just stood there, for fifteen minutes if need be, waiting and waiting for the next thing to happen, whatever it might be.  It was hard to relax under that penetrating stare.

How did dogs become so sweet-natured and affectionate over the millennia of domestication?  Of course, there are owners who don't give a dog lick whether their animals love them, so long as they tear the flesh of intruders.  But most of us engender and cherish our reciprocal affections so that eye-to-eye and fur-to-skin moments matter most.  There was nothing unique about Darla in her canine ways or shenanigans among the masses of people-loving dogs.  Like most Labs, Darla, all seventy pounds of her, would gently climb aboard a couch that already seated three large humans, and somehow find a space to rest her head on a shoulder.  She was always welcomed because she was so irresistibly sweet.

In August, Betsy planned a visit from Texas, but when she learned that Darla only had days to live, she came early.  Darla's lung cancer had depleted her physically and she had no energy for squirrels or long walks.  She lost her appetite. But when long-lost Betsy walked through the door, Darla's love adrenalin kicked in, and she spun in excited circles, saturated Betsy's face with her tongue, and went through Betsy's legs for a sustained butt dance, groaning with ecstasy. Betsy was amazed and wondered if our dog was sick at all.

But in a week, Darla met her last day listless and panting.  Dog owners know when the time has come -- we just know.  At the vet's office, the techs shaved a front lower leg and inserted an IV port for inserting an overdose of anesthetics that would take her life.  The three of us -- Sue, Betsy, and I -- were given time alone with Darla in her last minutes.  She rested on a large pillow on a deck in a small courtyard outside.  We stroked her and rubbed our cheeks on her muzzle wet with our tears.  After a long while, the kind veterinarian arrived with the syringe. But in spite of her suffering, lying among our arms and as her final act, Darla gave this stranger a weak wag of her tail.