Detangling the Web of Core Relationships

As we proceed with building a corpus of MyStory tales, our most memorable and thematic life stories, I am reminded of Carl Jung’s significant record of his own ‘depth’ MyStory explorations in The Red Book.  Jung used active imagination (contemplation) techniques to sink deeply into his personal unconscious realm, to explore and interact with his internal archetypal personae.  After engaging with each archetype long enough to glean its message for Jung’s emerging, more fully integrated Self, he artistically created a colorful Mandala image and wrote in his Red Book (journal) about what he had learned. Jung recommended that anyone likewise interested in actively promoting their own individuation and integration of Self would do well to create their own ‘red book’: their own journal about their archetypal parts of Self, their own exploration of the Life Themes and character shards of their ever-emerging Self.

So that is what your MyStory is intended to be: your compilation of meaningful life stories that reveals the deep character of your dynamic Self.

For my part I find myself moving forward with my MyStory reflections to the Life Theme of personal relationships, which is a key theme for me, as it is for many.  My most significant Relationship theme stories are rather too personal to write much about in a public blog, but some of the most transformative of these are fodder for deep excavation and I can share at least some shards here which I will explore more deeply in my private MyStory journal.  In the process of exploring Life Theme lessons and insights, it is vital to detangle the curious web of relationships that have emerged and developed over a lifetime (at least!), to date.

Donna/ Don

To know me at all deeply is to know something of my relationship with Donna (pseudonym here).  This relationship has evolved since I was 17 and continues even after this dear friend’s passing around six months ago.  I will share some of what I can here, embellishing further in my private MyStory logs, seeking to unravel through layers of import to better glean kernel messages from this relationship for my Soul journey going forward.

I met Donna when I was 17.   A good high-school friend, Larry, himself a budding poet and close comrade in our drama club (the actor who played the soldier dying under a tree in Viet Nam as recalled in the previous post), approached me in the hall one day at school, and with his signature panache said:

“Say Yes!”

“Yes,” I responded faithfully. “What did I just agree to?”
“Fencing!”

Thus began a journey that has woven through my life ever since, both in terms of wonderful adventures with fencing throughout my college years and into my life overall, and through my relationship with a dynamic, uniquely gifted lifelong friend, Donna.  She was the instructor for a ten-week class in fencing at an arts center in my home-town (where I have returned to live recently, in part for the sake of reflecting on this deep relation).

So, Donna, and fencing (the latter a theme I will explore separately down the road).  Donna is one of the most dynamic persons I have ever known. I feel most fortunate that after the ten weeks of our fencing class, she invited the students to order some equipment and I ventured to her apartment one Thursday after school to pick up a mask, glove and foil that would launch my later fencing career (on a college fencing squad), and that would initiate one of my most influential friendships. We began a conversation that afternoon that developed and evolved such that even in my current active contemplations and dreams, I still visit with this dear Soul friend.

Donna became a mentor and friend over several years throughout my last two years of high-school and through my college years in Buffalo, continuing by phone and letters after that.   She took interest in helping me explore and develop my own creative and spiritual awareness.  I shared my journals with her and she gave me lists of books to read and discuss, as we met weekly for the next two years, every Thursday after school.  As Avatar portrays for a close connection, Donna “saw me,” and in turn, I now realize, I saw her, as Soul, too.

Some shards of memory from those initial several years of my connection with Donna

• Books and poetry, including:  Camus’ notebooks and The Stranger; Schopenhauer’s Either/ Or; Yeats’ Selected Poetry of W. B. Yeats (much of which I memorized) and The Vision; Nightwood by Djuna Barnes (whom Donna knew in NYC while an actress there); The Moveable Feast by Hemingway; Anais Nin’s diaries and Seduction of the Minotaur; The Chalk Garden play (the first work we discussed); and The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell (the second). (These and others set me up very well for my English major studies to come in college.)
• “Who is the real LW?”
• Fencing: Donna’s visit to my fencing club, where my early coach was also one of her friends; Our team’s (and my own) placing 9^th (by 2 pts from 7^th) of 125 or so university fencing teams in intercollegiate nationals, 1975
• Visits to Donna over college breaks and over summers
• Visiting Donna at a hospital’s mental health ward when she was in for ‘nervous breakdown’ and MPD was diagnosed (see below)
• My own poetry about our friendship through the years; her mentorship continuing through my undergraduate and Masters study college years

Flash forward: to my early doctoral study times in Arizona, some ten years or so into our friendship.  One night I felt a clear inner call to communicate with Donna.  We had long shared an unusually ‘psychic’ connection. The next morning I dialed her number (she by then living in Florida) from a pay phone at the Anthropology building at ASU:

LW: “Hello. Is Donna there?” (her housemate/ partner had answered)

K: “Who is this? Yes, Just a minute…”

D: “Hello?” (a deep voice at the other end of the line;

 was this a friend who was to tell me

of Donna’s recent passing?)

LW: “This is Linda…”

D: “Yes, hello!” (It was Donna; as I listened more closely

I recognized my Friend)

D: “I have changed my name, Linda.”

LW: “Okay.” (I took out pen and paper, ready to write down

Donna’s new married name.)

D: “It is Donald. You have called on the very day

before I am going for my final operation.”

I had not communicated with Donna for nearly a year, so this conversation brought quite a surprising revelation about my dear mentor and friend.  Lots had developed that I have mostly not recorded above that led Donna to this transformational choice.  She had experienced several years of eventually successful therapy after a diagnosis of Multiple Personality Syndrome.  A highly talented actress and theater director, Donna had developed a panoply of at least eleven distinct personalities since around the time of my sophomore year in college.  She had first been diagnosed with ‘nervous breakdown’ episodes, then her MPD condition fully emerged. She underwent a successful hypnotherapy program, but it revealed that Donna’s core personality was actually, at least after the integrational therapy, Donald.  So, after the requisite year of transgender living and hormone therapy–during which it was discovered Donna had had a blue bracelet applied after birth, with a surgical “correction” such as more babies than most of us realize still receive—doctors unanimously approved Gender Congruence Surgery, and Donna transitioned ‘in place’ in Florida, to Donald. This baby then, raised as Donna, had never been fully comfortable in that persona. Donald was central to this Soul’s outlook and personal consciousness.

Okay, so the first time I met Donald in person was the summer after that revelatory phone call.  When I saw him (as him) for the first time, at the airport when He came to greet me, inwardly I felt myself stating over and over: “That’s it!”  There had always been a sense of something mysterious and unusual about Donna’s persona—like there was always something hidden, something so unique that other than her amazing intelligence and creative virtuosity, I could never pinpoint. But seeing Donna as Donald ‘made sense’ of some of that mysterious quality.

My connection with Donald continued though not at the level of closeness I had shared with Donna.  Yet I found through the many years to follow something unexpected in my own internal, spiritual life: dreams of visiting Donna, as Donna, developed into a frequent feature of my very active dream life. (I have long felt there should be a clinical interest in such dreams of the friends and allies of ‘sex-change’ cases.)

The first dream: I go to a house and knock on the door. A man opens the door, and I ask if I can visit with Donna. He says no, but I can see her if I go to the patio. I am then on a patio that reminds me of a classical Greek villa (a courtyard surrounded on at least three sides by its house).  Looking up to the top of a small knoll just beyond the house, I see Donna standing there, and she sees me. She sends like a girl scout down to give me a message. (Later I realized the other residents of the house included Donald—who had answered the door—and Donna’s other MPD personae. She had been sort of expelled from the assemblage.)

Another significant early dream: I see Donna at an intersection, a crossroads. I could tell she was in some pain; that something had been ripped out from her right shoulder. Around the same time a dream of seeing Donna at another crossroads, where two pathways were to diverge. Her path was binary, one person (Donald) moving off to the right, and Donna herself to the left. She held up a placard (like in a a Brecht play I had recently read, Mother Courage), with one word: Eternellement. (I felt she showed me this as a sign of our enduring spiritual connection.)

images aare from pixabay.com

Then over decades, similar dreams of Visiting Donna:  I would visit her at an apartment overlooking a pond with a walkway around it.  We would talk as we had in our earlier year visits. We would sometimes play Scrabble or some sort of game while overlooking the pond. (I felt that this apartment setting was like a “purgatory” sort of existence that Donna had to endure so long as Donald continued in his occupation of their erst shared body; that Donna would not be able to “move on” until Donald’s passing.

NOW: I maintained a connection with Donald through nearly forty years, visiting with him twice and more regularly (though not so deeply) after he invited me to play Words with Friends with him, where we sometimes would Chat, for around 15 years.

Donald had an excellent life experience, as a behavioral health liaison and eventually a director there, still active as an actor and director in local theater productions, and with a long-term partner for over twenty years.  He experienced a lot of physical health hardships, as do many on long-term hormonal treatment. He dealt with joint problems then also cancer over a long duration until finally he transpired, some six months or so ago.

Yet my dreams of visiting with Donna continue. Only once so far, shortly after his passing, Donald communicated. He said there was something he had wanted to tell me. (I hope that would have been that he had always remembered the depth of our friendship.)  I went to visit Donna recently at another apartment setting, but she was in a car in a garage with several people attending to her (it felt like she was in distress because she was still not being allowed yet to move on.) And last week, a sweet though brief visitation with Donna in the dream state, to suggest we will continue to be in touch…eternellement.

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And you? What have been some of the deepest, most transformative relatioonships in your life? I invite you to write in your MyStory journal, to explore and plumb the depths of your core relations.

And Gladly Teche: A Mentor’s Guidance

Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,

And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.

The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387-1400AD

Teaching has been my career and remains my passion along with writing, for over 47 years.  In my youth I was fortunate to have several excellent role models for teaching that led me to choose to become an educator.  Certainly Education, with its personal subtheme of Mentors, has been a primary Life Theme for me as it is for many. So allow me to share a couple of MyStory tales in relation to the educator theme.

Professor G was one of my English profs in Buffalo at my undergraduate college. He was the consummate Teacher, as he had begun teaching at 18 in a one-room schoolhouse before teaching certificates were required, and he had taught some fifty years to when I took his course in Chaucer as an English Literature major. In fact, the semester I took his class was the last one before he would be required by law to retire. 

Prof G related the tale of how once while he was undergoing an operation, I think having to do with removing a section of his intestines, the anesthetic wore off and he awoke. Rather than asking for more anesthetic, he began reciting the entire Prologue to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and he continued this recitation through the remainder of his surgery!

So, when Professor G passed away shortly after the end of his final semester teaching, his colleagues made sure that etched into his tombstone was the Middle English line shown above (and below), from the Clerk’s tale in the Canterbury Tales Prologue. I have always remembered this line and hope to be living up to its inspiration with my own lifelong teaching career.

And gladly wolde (s)he lerne and gladly teche.

Then also Mr. S., still a much respected resident here in the high-school hometown to which I have recently returned, was a primary mentor as my tenth-grade English teacher and as the talented Director of our high-school theater program.  I gained excellent experience as Student Director and then as Stage Manager under his guidance in my final two years of high-school. In my eleventh grade we put on a play (in 1971) called Summertree, about a young soldier dying under a tree in Viet Nam while his brief life passed before his eyes, in three acts. For this I was Student Director.   Our cast and crew became such a closely bonded unit, so dedicated collectively to communicating the anti-war sentiment to our audience, that on the final performance, after Act II opened on the stage, I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I cried openly backstage, shaking uncontrollably in tears, for the entirety of the rest of the play.

In my tenth grade (1970) class, Mr. S. introduced our class to Harlem Renaissance authors for at least a full half of the semester.  This was somewhat radical in our hometown that had very little ethnic or racial diversity at the time. We read Black Voices, an excellent anthology of poetry and fiction, along with Richard Wright’s Native Son; and we each selected a favorite Black author about which to write a term paper. (I chose the ‘mulatto’/mixed race author Jean Toomer, who preferred his Black identity because of its closer sense of community.)  This exposure to the African American experience in the 1970’s, just two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., was life changing for me as it increased my awareness of the benefits as well as the challenges of diversity.

images are from pixabay.com

One day in my senior year as I was contemplating my soon to come college adventure, Mr. S saw me in the high-school hallway and walked with me and asked about what my college major would be.  I told him I wanted to be an English teacher, like him. He coached me wisely.  He advised me that, if I could see myself being satisfied in my life when after some thirty years I might overhear a former student repeating some fragment of insight s/he might have gleaned from some material I had exposed them to in class, whether or not they even remembered where that insight or line had come from, then I should indeed become a Teacher. Otherwise, if I were seeking a more wealth or ego-boosting sort of career, then perhaps I should choose otherwise in going forward with my college ambitions.

I did begin college as a secondary education major then shifted to English Comparative Literature for my BA, then I earned my MA in Linguistics and my Ph.D. was in cultural and linguistic anthropology, after which I served as a university professor for 25 years and still continue post-retirement teaching part-time online.   Mr’ S’s wise words during that hallway conversation confirmed my natural passion for a teaching career. I have often remembered his wisdom and have repeated it to several of my own mentees and students through the years.

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And you, dear reader?  What was the inspiration for your career?  I invite you to write in your MyStory Journal your own memorable tales about your Education or mentorship theme.  MyStory tales are memoirs which you find yourself often thinking about and sharing with others, embellishing their narrative force through the years. These stories embody the lessons of your lifetime.  Collectively they encapsulate the mythic narrative legacy of your own heroic adventure!

Who Are You Really? Gifts of a Mentor

In composing MyStory memoirs, we are looking at particularly meaningful events, relationships, and themes that have deeply impacted and shaped the person you have become. These are situations or events that we tend to tell ‘our stories’ about, again and again, refining and embellishing these signature tales to bring out their messages as life lessons or as highlight adventures that have come to define us. We each have these stories in us that we have shared time and again.  I believe it is helpful and illuminating to collect these tales, to assemble them in a volume or journal that you can rightly title MyStory.

MyStory tales are usually about transformational moments or relationships in our lives, so recording these stories allows you to uncover and reveal the mystery of your MyStory: to unravel the interwoven key lessons and insights of a lifetime or of a meaningful chapter of your own mythic Life Story.

This week I will focus on my own Life Theme of Mentors.  If you recognize a similar meaningful theme, or maybe a larger umbrella theme such as Relationships or Education, I invite you to reflect and journal your own stories around this theme this week. (Please feel free to share your story with me and I would be happy to reblog it, or you can refer to your journaling insights in Comments.)

To exemplify what I mean by a transformational MyStory tale, I will focus on one of three hugely influential mentors from my life: Dr. Antoinette (Toni) Mann Paterson, whom her Philosophy students sometimes referred to as “Tone-the-Bone” Paterson.

My Life Mentor, Toni P.

               I have so many significant memories of Toni P that it is difficult to select just one or two; cumulatively her mentorship and moreover her friendship changed me entirely.  From her I learned to contemplate the majesty of the smallest details of life and to expand my own potentials accordingly. I also learned that one can be a learned scholar in academia without sacrificing one’s creativity and spiritual practice.  So, I will assemble a few of the most memorable insights and stories I have acquired from the blessing of this great mentor in my life.

The Mighty Acorn

I mother-sat for Toni P’s mom, Mary Mann, around three days a week for 2-4 hours a day over several years, at Toni’s old Victorian home in Buffalo, New York.  Dr. P was a full Professor of Philosophy at Buffalo State (SUNY) College, where I met her while an undergraduate student. Mother-sitting provided a wonderful opportunity to spend quality time with both her mother Mary and with Toni herself.  One day over lunch, while we were discoursing about religion and whether she believed in (a) God, Toni shared with me about an interaction she had with her son in Delaware Park when he was young. 

Toni found an acorn on the ground beneath a giant Oak Tree. She held the acorn in her hand, studying its magnificence.  Then she handed the Acorn to her son as a special gift.

“This,” Toni said to her son, “is God!”

The small acorn carries, in seed form, the grand design of a majestic, mighty oak.  TP shared this story also to explain why all the furniture in her beloved Victorian Buffalo home was made of Oak. Most of her furniture she had acquired from Salvation Army stores.  She loved finding gems where others might see only used, disposable objects; this too was a lesson for me.

Who Are You, Really?

Shortly after I first met Toni P (another tale worth telling!), after a Creative Studies–my Minor–class that she had visited to talk with us about ‘the philosophy of creativity,’ She asked me point-blank:

“What is your name?”

“Linda,” I answered.

“No, I mean what is your REAL name?”

I was flummoxed. “What do you mean?,” I asked her. Then I told her of how when I was around six or seven my brother had told me I was adopted, which I could not disprove because my mother had lost my birth certificate. I had created a fictional name for myself: April Thornton.

                                              “April.”  Toni repeated the name. “Yes, I will call you April.”

What was this about, in retrospect? I think she was asking me if I had yet discovered my IDENTITY. Truly at that point in time, I had not. I was whom others saw in me; I had no mature, core sense of self. I carried this question with me for many years and in fact underwent several periods of psychotherapy to explore and gradually to discover and express Who I Am.  I am grateful to TP for this quest.

So What? Whan!

To complete this ensemble of MyStory tales about my dear mentor, Toni P, let me describe her a bit further and tell a classic story of how she taught me to probe deeply into the meaning of life.

Toni published a book called THE INFINITE WORLDS OF GIORDANO BRUNO, and she was a supporter (and colleague) of Immanuel Velikovsky–who, like Bruno (burned at the stake in the 1400s for the heresy of telling people to seek truth experientially Within instead of through priests), was vilified in mainstream academia for his WORLDS IN COLLISION book, where he explored historical truth via studying cultural myths.

Also, while not religious, Toni P was one of the most spiritually aware persons I have ever known. She would stand before students in her Philosophy classes lecturing with her eyes closed, and then she would open her eyes and stare directly at a particular student to ask a bold question. E.G. That first day I had met her at the Creative Studies class, she arrived early and was sitting at a round table with students to whom she had not yet been introduced. She picked up and examined a papier mache art project of a student who had come from an art class, of a human dancer, I think. “HOW THE HELL DID YOU DO THIS!?” Toni asked the astounded student. “I mean, how the Hell can you do this, when I can hardly draw a stick figure?” Then as class opened and she was introduced, Dr. Paterson discoursed about a philosophy of creativity. 

When I mother-sat, one day over lunch Toni explained how every day she “dived into the Ocean,” meaning she took a contemplative ‘nap’ (what Jung would call active imagination) on the little cot she slept on in her bedroom.

Now then, one day I was depressed. I came into her office for my Independent Study on a topic we had agreed to: ”a philosophy of, not Science, but Silence.

“So, what?” I asked my mentor.

She responded: “Take out a piece of paper and a pencil and write two words: So, What, question-mark.” For your assignment this week, answer that question. Bring me your answer next Wednesday.”

So, all that next week I searched the library for literary and philosophical clues to the question I had posed of “So, What?” I abstracted readings and wrote in my journal.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, wrote an essay on “The Transparent Eyeball” that I found useful to the probe. Again I found this was about personal identity, whether “I” had any distinct meaning or purpose as an individual.

I arrived at Toni P’s office for our class session that next Wednesday. I told her about some of the thoughts I had arrived at but admitted I had not really answered the question.

Toni had set up a card table with a large, blank roll of sketch paper draped over it, and she called me to sit down at the table. With a large felt pen she wrote  the following words at the compass points of the paper:

WHO

WHAT

WHERE

WHEN

WHAT

She placed each of these WH- words strategically in a circle on the paper, like compass points, and then drew lines to connect them to one another. She intersected them all at the center of the page, where she wrote one more word:

W H A N

“There is the answer to ‘So What?’,” Toni said. “It is WHAN.”

This solution was totally understandable and made total sense. Yes, of course. At the intersection of all the WH- questions, is WHAN.  What is the meaning of Life? WHAN. The purpose? WHAN.

In other words, questions are meaningless in themselves. Life IS what it IS, and that is not only OK; It is GOOD; It is WHAN, and that is enough.

“It Just Is!”, I soon after discovered independently, is a profound spiritual Truth. Try sometime just chanting the word IS, over and over as a mantra. (I did that for several hours one day, and arrived at a remarkable inner awareness!)

There are more stories about Toni P that I will include in my MyStory logs. But this is enough to share here!

images are from pixabay.com
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What of your greatest Teachers or Mentors? What life lessons have they helped you to learn? I invite you to write your own MyStory memoirs, to probe your own mystery: Who are you, really? Why are you Here?

Your Mystory Table of Contents

To build at least a workingTable of Contents for your MyStory tales, after identifying your recurring, dominant Life Themes, you can make a list, for each of your key themes, of Shaping Events that you associate with that Theme.

I repeat below from the last post a simple, tried and true way to identify and name your dominant Life Themes:

1. Reflect and compose a list of significant events that have “shaped you as the person you have become.” You can include a phrase or sentence about each event to remind you of its significance. Please note: This does not have to be a “complete” list, and the events or situations on your list do not need to have been earth shattering, just significant.
   
2. After you have composed your list of significant “shaping” events or situations, read back through this list several times, and SORT these events into KINDS of events or situations. (For example: Family, Travel, Work, Education, Spirituality, etcetera).
   
3. Reflect on the TYPES of events you have identified, and assign your own personally meaningful NAMES to each of these recurring these Kinds of Events. (E.G.: Disappointments, Relationship Matters; also you can still include standard sorts of names like Family, Relationships, Romance, Work, etcetera).

So now, for each of your Life Themes, you can reflect and identify (list) some key ‘shaping’ events or situations that you associate with that theme. This will likely include several of the events you used to identify the Theme, but you can also include other events or situations that come to mind when you reflect on that Theme in your life. Consider providing meaningful titles for these events that you will be writing about.

images are from pixabay.com

In developing your MyStory Table of Contents with some of the most meaningful events related to your recurring Themes, remember that a Shaping Event is any event or situation “that has influenced the person you have become.” Some shaping events are so monumental as to be Critical Events, events or situations that have been so impactful in your life that you feel you were a different person before and after that event occurred.

A sampling of topics to represent this second step from my own MyStory Themes (but, of course, use your own) would include:

FAMILY

• My Mother, a Hero (two tales)
• Orphaned?

BIG MOVES

• Using Big Moves to Change Up (Finding Myself)
• Crossing the Great Waters

PETS

• Yellow Eyes
• My Mother, the Cat!
• The Running Dog (Losing Elly)
• Sophie’s Diet
• Sophie’s Dogwalking Song Lyrics
• Ariel Pegasus

TURNING POINTS

• B.E. and A.E.: The Bus Ride “Home”
• Acceptance of Change
• Fencing Lessons
• Zuni

Your Turn

Using the steps outlined above, go ahead and begin to develop your own MyStory Table of Contents. This is only a start, a working Table of Contents that you can add to and build on as you begin composing your MyStory tales.  Next, we will start moving through some common Life Themes and you can begin to write out your stories. As you do so, the focus will be on the lessons and most vital memories each of these events or situations have added in value to your unique, mythic MyStory legacy.