There is nothing outside, though I have often thought
otherwise, that another existence peeked through,
every now and again, and I had glimpsed an extraordinary
nexus between worlds, or between this world and the next,
or between what is seen and what is unseen. But finally,
I understood that what is hidden stays hidden, and
only what you and me agree is there is there. Alone,
I have stood as a juggernaut serving as a conduit between
astral planes, but the immensity of me was not so much
when someone just sat down with me, and said hello.
Strawberry
1:39pm monday, 28th march
Myself given to myself
on that tree
Whose roots
No one knows....
Into the depths I peered,
I grasped the runes,
Screaming I grasped them,
And then fell back.
-Crossley-Holland,K., "The Norse Myths", 1980
It concerns me that the sentiment on Good Friday is not violent enough. Easter is all about horror and hope, Easter is all about the nexus between worlds and that is a place where logic ends and faith begins. Or logic ends and knowing begins.
I have an Easter story for you. It is true. I can't say that I understand a crucifixtion, but there are other things properly cruel and sad that I can tell you about instead. Easter is about hope and transformation after agony......
My mother is a 65 year old woman who runs a bed and breakfast inn. To explain what that is, in our county a person can bring into their home visitors for the night and charge a fee. Usually to attract the public the home has something special about it.....my mother's estate is very old and it has in it very old antiques. In the morning she provides breakfast for her guests at a large common table and so strangers meet and sit together and have conversations while there is a fire in the fire place. My mother has become very social and she has created such a home of warmth and peace that many people return again and again.
Long ago my mother and father divorced. My mother's bed and breakfast is foremost a business to support her, and most of the rooms on her estate are not private, they are all to be rented out at night. Visitors can come to the door until 10 o'clock at night. Next to the office space is my mother's one private room, her bedroom.
Two months ago a man came to my mother's office at 8 in the evening and asked about a room to rent. He was given a brief tour of the grounds and then declined the invitation to say and went away. Twenty minutes later he came back, walked into the office with a knife, and told my mother to take off her clothes. He was a clean shaven, young man who looked to be a college student or someone in the military. His skill with the large hunting knife was evident, the way he flicked it around with his hands, and it became clear to my mother that he was offering her the choice to be raped or be killed.
The man went with my mother into her private bedroom and locked the door. Then he gave her orders about positions on the bed to take and if she hesitated at all he made dangerous motions with the knife. There came to be a cut across her chin so I suppose that sometimes the knife was pressed against her throat.
It was obvious to my mother that this man had raped before. She told him he was a good man, that he had nothing to be ashamed of, and that it was obvious that he was very angry. She said that there was no need to be so angry. At times she said, "put away the knife, you don't need it" and three times he listened to her and put the knife in his coat pocket. Three times before and during the rape he wished to blind-fold my mother with cloth he had brough with him and then with her own blouse but my mother said that there was no need, he was not doing anything wrong, and she was calm and kind and willing to do as he wished. After the rape she asked him if he would like to come to her office and take some money. He then thought that money would be a good idea.
While the two were in the office my mother got hold of a can of mace spray that was kept in the drawer next to the money. Trouble was, she did not have her glasses on and she could not see if the spray nosel was pointed toward or away from her. The rapist noticed her hesitant decite, and he picked up her body and slamed it down against the floor, breaking my mother's shoulder. Having hurt her so, he then ignored her and worked to eject a video survailence tape. My mother looked up and saw a cell phone on the office desk. She stood with a broken shoulder and useless arm and dialed the police. Physically it should have been impossible, but her eye had been guided to the phone and her body found the strenth it needed. Mom said that when you are fighting for your life time changes. You see, the rape was not yet over. Once the numbers were dialed the rapist fled.
I was called at two in the morning by my sister in California (far, far away). She said that mother had been robbed and was in the hospital with a broken shoulder. Could I call about locally and determine the phone number of the hospital that was treating her? That was all they thought to ask of me because I am schizophrenic and I have never been to my mother's bed and breakfast business. It is a travel time of 90 minutes from my home, too far for me to ever drive. And since I am tormented by the illness it is safest that I not sleep in strange places, it is easiest on my mind to go no place new.
That night my mother only told her children that she had been robbed. All her children have lives with jobs and commitments and there was no one available to drive in the middle of the night to her. Which I did. I said to myself, "I can do anything". It was not a feeling of what could be done every day, it was just that my mother needed me and I would permit myself no weakness. My mother and sister were shocked at what I offered. But I had no doubt.
I drove very slowly. I drank coffee but I was also drugged by the anti-psychotic medication I take before bed. It took mevseveral hours to arive at my mother's bed and breakfast. The door was open. I looked in her bedroom and saw the bed had been stripped down to a bare matress. The doors and office desk were dirty with finger print powder. I sat for several hours in a chair and then got a call from the hospital. My mother was delayed because her heart kept slowing and dying every time they tried to move her. She wanted to come home so that she could take care of her sick daughter and her guests in the morning. "Trauma" the nurses said. "Ah" I thought, "she is old".
It amazed me how kind the police were when they escorted her home from the hospital. A detective came and walked around the estate and when he asked me for permission had the most gentle voice and eyes.
I must end this post and come back later this day. But I will tell you before I go the great mystery of this rape. My mother said it had happened for a reason. And then she said that only good things were going to come out of this rape.
Strawberry
5:49pm monday, 28th march
As I helped my mother out of the police car I told her that she had no sheets on her bed. She said yes, it was because she had been raped. I said, "Then do you want to rest in another room, not on that bed because of what happened there." And she said, "That is my bed. There is nothing that the rapist can take from me. He got my body and he bruised it, but I won't give him anything else. He will have no power over my life."
For the next two days I was either at her side on the bed or I slept on a cot mattress at the foot of her bed. I got a pail for when she had to vomit from nerves and I supported her back and stroked her hair while it happened. When she slept her face had the deepest frown on it I have ever seen in my life and she sweat and tears leaked out of her eyes. The hospital had provided Percoset, a powerful pain killer and I made her take the pills and stay drugged for as long as she would allow. When my sister called from California I told her the truth of what happened and she began to wail loudly, so loud that her voice filled the bedroom. It made my mom restless in her stupor and I had to tell my sister to shut-up, she must control herself for the sake of my mother. Secretly I wish that I could have made such an immediate, natural and painful sound too, but because I have been schizophrenic for so long I am used to emotional agony and I do not permit myself such vocalization. I bet a good psychiatrist has just as much control over their feelings as a good schizophrenic.
My mother would not shut down her business. I was amazed. I said that if I was raped I would lie curled in bed for a week feeling that I deserved the rest. And then if someone came into my room, and told me that this rape had happened for a reason, that it was written in the stars to serve a higher purpose, I would scream for the idot to leave my room immediately. How dare anyone suggest that a loving God was behind a random act of violence! Madness!
My mother's three children all eventually gathered at her estate and we made this pack between us. If she wished the rape to serve a purpose then we would make it so. She would feel the support and love of her children like never before and that love would never rest. We took shifts being by her side. The stress of my sister leaving her fellow in California put stress on their relationship, and it cracked, probably never to be mended. The rape did have this effect; likely she will return to the town where she was born and live in the same house as my mother. Likely she will resume a relationship with a high school sweetheart and marry him and have her first child. This is the new direction we are all watching her take.
I now drive every week to the bed and breakfast and stay there for three evenings in the middle of the week when business is slow, the memory is the worst, and the danger of a repeat attack is the greatest. I have discovered that when I drive at night there is little visual stimuli, and the schizophrenia stays at bay. Like the invalid I am, most of the day I stay the whole time in one room and then in the evenings I spend time by my mother's side. She has tried to coach me how to socialize with her guests but I told her it was a lie, I cannot behave in a fake mannor, and she understands. I take breakfast with her chatty guests and am mostly silent but I am faithful, and this fact is there for my mother to see.
Before the rape I was very angry at my mother. She is a landlord of several properties and she would not help my new marriage with a co-sign on a morgage. She would take no business risk with us. Cruel words she had spoken insulted me and my fiance and had made me cry in private. But that first night when I drove to her aid my anger dropped away and it was like I was a child again who simply loved her mother. The rapist dirtied my mother who was a Queen and Lady and head of the household, how dare he! As my mother's body healed she seemed to need me less, and the temptation was there to pick up my old anger and return to old grudges. But I chose not to. I asked for nothing from my mother and put her needs first. My fellow came over and installed in her estate a series of radio connected voice boxes, so that all the doors can stay locked, and new visitors cannot walk in off the street without a reservation. My fellow then glued together the weakened joints in many of the old wooden chairs that my mother feared were on the verge of collapse. He was happy to work, smart and innovative, and my mother sent him the kindest letter of thanks. Now she says happily that he will fix anything she asks, and she is right, and now she says that he and I are good for each other. Then, last week, she offered us a barn. It is an unused old barn on a piece of rental property but if we fix it ourselves into an apartment then we can live there the rest of our lives rent free. We can make it as rustic and elegant as any Ralph Lauren creation. My fellow has wet machular eye degeneration, drusins, and he may well have only several years of eyesight left. He is 45 but he has the eyes of a 75 year old man. The barn is an enormus gift, it was a place we had all forgotten about. If it is fixable, it will be an enormus blessing to us after we marry.
My mother sees strange forces behind the event of her rape. She sees that my grandmother has talked about her being robbed and raped so often that it feels that the old woman willed it into being. "I could not let my mother touch me in high school" my own mother recently admitted, "it felt wrong". There are old earth religions that believe in spell work. My grandmother is a powerful old crone who may have been long jealous of her own daughter. And then my mother might say that it was her love for her children that spelled the rape. She sees that I discovered a strength I did not know I possessed and that I lost an anger that was poisening our relationship. I have grown calm and on my weekly visits we talk about many, many things.
Anonymous
1:21am thursday, 31st march
once again I had to look up juggaurnat.Like I've ever looked it up before. Keep it simple Stand. More powers will come.
Reflection
11:44am thursday, 31st march
I'm going to call myself reflection from now on.You are so true Stand. Sometimes I think the powers that be are jealous of just simple communication.
king
6:22am wednesday, 27th april
Oh how i wish everything to be revealed. I've watched the stars; seen reflections of my life even at a distance But to see it in anothers' eye it stirs my heart--shakes me from my shadows sight.
Strawberry