An Unction to Depart
Once you no longer live in the mundane world, things require an ability to listen to that small, still voice for you to ever get anywhere. That same small, still voice is what nudged me to make the night journey to an empty field in the middle of Tagnall Georgia where the Monks were scheduled to rest that night. One of the last nights they would be Walking for Peace in the backroads of my home state. There were no plans ahead of time. No calculated routes to arrive at any precise place at any exact time. Just a nudge from the other side to get in the car and go thatta way and do it now. Which is exactly what I did.
Along with me on the quest or adventure, as it were, was of course my earthly sidekick & emotional support pup, Archer the Space Schnoodle. Though, I am sure if it were Archer’s prose, he would indicate that it is I who serves as sidekick. He might be right. Stealing his seat for the ride was friend & local reiki practitioner Mona Lucia (monalucia.com) who while having long dabbled in the world of the unseen, was not as intimate with Buddhism as Your Humble Author, Narrator & Fictional Character. The three of us drove nearly 3 hours with nothing but the unction to guide us into a direct interception with the marching Monks, somewhere in the vicinity of the late, great Georgia Guidestones, at exactly the right time. While winding through the snakelike streets on the backwoods of the south in the dark of night to a place I had never been, I knew the odds of meeting with the Monks was very low. Yet, that unseen unction from another place bent the rules of space & time again to have us join in the procession of headlights just behind the Venerable Monks themselves.
With the radio playing a Thom Yorke playlist quite low & with the window cracked enough to hear the wind whistle, otherwise there was silence. I don’t just mean the silence you hear. I mean another type of silence. A silence that you rest in with all your distinct bodies. A silence that feels like a room full of oxygen from a mind drowning in so much noise for so very long. This was a silence I remembered. The silence I sought after my Father’s death that only the initiation into Zen was able to guide me into.
It is a specific location within the catacombs of the ego where a seeker may actually find the spark of life again, if only they were bold enough to heed the hero’s call when it came. That specific location where one must go can be discussed ad nauseum amongst those with head knowledge, having read a mountain of metaphysical books, but it can be felt by those who have found it through personal & experiential Gnosis. That place is silent. Like the silence permeating around that back, pitch black, country road we were guided to.
With a long caravan of travelers who all converged with us to be apart of this moment crawling at 5 miles per hour, the Monks thought it best to stop at the side and allow all of us to travel ahead to the field where Venerable Bhikkhu Pannakara would address the crowd. Mona & Archer were out at the entrance to procure a spot for us to sit, which left the task of finding a place to park solely in my lap. By the time I accomplished that feat, I made a quick inventory of my magick satchel, threw it over my shoulder & cut through the thick of the green lit fog to find my companions. It was just a matter of listening for the generators and heading in that direction before you could see the lights they were powering at the staging area. After reuniting with Archer & Mona around the staked off perimeter the Monks would assemble within, I observed the crowd eagerly looking down into the night awaiting their arrival while basking in that silence Buddhism allows.
Provided discretion by the enamored crowd fixated on Buddhist Monks (as most of this southern bunch had probably never actually seen a monk in person prior) I was allowed the privacy to begin my own ritual on these grounds which would be deemed holy before this night was over. The shoes come off. The bare feet touch 48-degree earth. A stick of incense is lit and lodged in the dirt & my prayers, intentions, & incantations for my part of this mission to Walk for Peace ascend upward with the smoke. A Mason jar of charged moon water is emptied on the soil, then the air of the jar is refilled with the grass of the field. This would be taken back with me to eventually sit on an altar until such time it’s to be used. A little anointing oil on this and that and with a casual spin up from a kneel, the circle was open. Then the Venerable Monks pushed through the last blanket of fog from the darkened, cold road they had been walking and came into the light.
The Battle in the Attic
Bhikkhu Pannakara stood in the center as the other Venerable Monks found their place on the ground behind him and waited for the appropriate level of quiet before leading all of us into a silent meditation. Though everyone who had ventured to that field this night was shivering from the cold, dipping into that silence was like slipping into a warm bath. The warm bath of silence I longed for but did not have after my Father’s death. The farthest from it actually.
What PTSD gave me was the sound of apocalypse in my head, the bombs exploding just behind the eyes somewhere in the midst of the skull. All the time. Noise. Noise. Noise. Unrelenting, unforgiving & unyielding sirens of the nervous system constantly instructing you to find a desk to climb beneath as your 4-minute warning before the final blast you perpetually anticipated was going to be the very next second. Though I knew the very night of my Dad’s death that both my Mother and I had PTSD, as upon trying to rest from the toil of the day we both were suddenly assaulted by involuntary jerks before drifting into sleep; it wasn’t until later that week the severity of the situation became apparent.
I recall being on the phone under my carport within the week of his passing getting the news that his primary physician would not be signing off on an autopsy. Something he easily could’ve done to spare a grieving family from unanswered questions & out-of-pocket expenses in their time of need. But for some reason or another the son of a bitch wouldn’t do it. I remember the sensation of palpable rage swelling up inside my spinal column in a manner that had never run through me before. Sure, in times past throughout my life my temper had been lost. But those times were far & few between with the longest fuses before getting to the powder keg.
I was never much for violence, rage or malice before as my temperament had always been more lighthearted, tender hearted & generally a cheerful disposition through my 30 odd years. Yet when I was told there would be no closure for my mother & I because some doctor refused to scribble his ink on a piece of paper or three; had I gotten the flesh of my fingers around the man himself in that moment I would have ripped the entirety of his form in two. Salivating through viciously clenched teeth.
As if being consumed by cold mercury or a symbiote suit, the anger vibrating throughout me became physical & for the first time in my existence I can say that all control of my motor skills were gone, gone, gone, gone. I still see flashes, as if watching a rerun from some etheric studio audience of myself, or person suit I should say, in the third person yanking the attic’s staircase down and marching up into the darkness. From visible to invisible as I disappeared up those stairs with nothing but rabid rage and a loaded 40 caliber Walther P99 with me. And that was all I remember before the pressure in my pineal gland overloaded my senses & Your Humble Author, Narrator, & Fictional Character was no more, having blinked out of existence.
A PTSD blackout is not like blacking out on a drunk. Blacking out on a drunk is kinda like watching a VHS tape that gets crinkled up in the heads at some point just before snapping. You can kinda see flickers here and there before everything goes black. Not so much in a PTSD blackout. In a PTSD blackout it is very much like clicking the off button on the remote to an old Curtis Matthis Television cabinet from the 80’s. The black perimeter of the screen swiftly collapses from the corners to the center in a tiny, white dot. There are a few seconds of buzzing and then poof! The light is no more. The final pinprick of conscious light is gone altogether. That is what I experienced when I went up into that attic that day. I was just…gone. The feelings of a destructive rage are all I can pull up from the memories around that day, but the images or events that transpired for several hours after I waged some war in the attic are unretrievable to me. And that was horrifying.
Expectations Cost
To make matters even more like trying to figure skate on broken & shifting ice, these battles waging inside of me were not to be communicated with a majority of the “Corporate Christian” friends or family that had been cast as bit players in the story of my life. This was an absolute no-no. The people surrounding me at the time were hanging their eternal soul on an imaginary friend, from a book they had not or did not read because in the “bible belt” you just let some guy behind a pulpit read it for you. Then twice a week he gives you the cliff notes before you toss a tithe in the plate & you’re instructed to keep having faith because “God Said it. I believe it. That settles it.”
Which is good enough for spiritually slothful hillbillies to put a check mark on that going to heaven box of their religious resume. People who believe that mental illness is demon possession are not the crowd you wanna go opening up to in regard to the symptoms you are suffering due to trauma. You’ll be off to the funny farm in record time once they get a signature from an equally unread, and byebull believin’ judge. Ask me how I know.
With these facts in mind, my coping mechanisms were becoming more and more limited as the condition progressed. And progressing the condition most certainly was. Yet for some time prior to my Dad crossing over, Yours Truly having been the most literate in terms of the Bible with demonstrations in my lifestyle that I actually took the text seriously as a person; my peer group esteemed me as a spiritual head. I was the one that explained difficult passages. I was the one that led the others in prayer. I was the one teaching Sunday school classes & Apologetics courses. I was the one who had personally walked the majority of the people around me through the Roman’s Road to begin with & when your walk with the good lord has been lauded upon a pedestal of such great heights, any mental or spiritual failing simply would not do. More was expected of the family’s private preacher boy.
I was able to maintain the illusion of the dynamic they held, that Jesus Christ™ was lifting me up from the loss of my Father & his holy spirit was comforting me every day since, without a scratch on my soul for nearly a month. With a smile painted on my face every day before stepping onto their stage. Then by the end of those 30-some-odd days, the grandmother of the bunch I was bound to via the squeeze at my side pulled her ticket with the guy holding the scythe in a terminal cancer case that was about to be closed.
“Mee-maw Betty” was about to be boots up to heaven from some po-dunk place near Savannah Georgia, having been on hospice to await the inevitable for some time. Naturally I was expected to be there for the “night watch of death” to do all the preacher stuff that is done when someone is dying on a hospital bed in a suburban den somewhere in the Georgia sticks. Praying. Reading Psalms. Smearing anointing oil on the forehead of a woman whose body was still moving, as it had yet to catch up to the death of her mind.
The last hours of a person’s fight with cancer are never a pretty experience. It doesn’t matter who they are, all dignity is lost and your senses will be haunted by the sounds, sights & scents you’re exposed to in such situations. This wasn’t my first rodeo on that bull, so I knew the horror to expect, and given those expectations, I was growing more & more worried for the entire 3 hour drive down I-16 that day. Free foot tapping and fingers squeezing the steering wheel like a vice grip as I assessed my ability to keep up the “a-okay charade” just long enough to “perform”. Nothing against “Mee-Maw Betty” or anything; she was always pretty hip with me, but I should not have been there. I was not okay to be there.
My Dad died in my arms just a month prior which acted as the dinosaur-extinction-asteroid of my psyche & nervous system. The dust of that impact was far from settling to the degree that it was a wise move to be exposing myself to more dead or dying bodies. Upon arrival to the gathering of family, friends, & the obligatory beneficiaries of something or other patiently waiting for the scraps of whatever’s left; Your Humble Author, Narrator & Fictional Character was the perfect, active description of what it means to tremble.
Yet as fortune would have it, the gatherers were mostly huddled inside, and to my great benefit the first person that approached me before anyone else could was a dear cousin, Trey.
Silence on the Battlefield
I met Trey when he was just a little kid & the two of us hit it off right from the beginning. He was the closest thing to a little brother I ever had & it was a privilege to watch him grow from a good kid to a good man. He always stood apart from the crowd, holding his own values, distinct from his siblings or peers, and he was willing to stand alone on them. This strength of character had not come easy by Trey, you see a few years prior to this, he barely survived a horrible car accident that was not as accommodating to the friend that was with him in the passenger seat. From memory, he died the moment the semi slammed into their car. Trey had barely made it to the hospital alive, and the sheer amount of damage that had been done to his body made it clear that his survival was nothing short of miraculous.
Waking up in a broken body, Trey would then begin the long and foreboding journey of recovery for all the physical wounds he had acquired. When he had accomplished that, it was assumed by those around him that once physical recovery was attained, the matter was over. Yet he had also, prior to me, found himself on an island surrounded by a sea of people who simply could not fathom the wounds on the inside that were still bleeding. The unseen trauma that would not be so easy to recuperate from once the doctors discharged him. For some time afterward, the whispers and rumors from “concerned” acquaintances that “the boy wasn’t quite right in the head” would oft find there way to me through the grapevine. And at the moment when he met me near my car, I knew he was probably the only person on the planet that could understand one iota of what was happening to me.
Trey & I discretely left to the corner store after I implored to speak to him in private & while standing outside the cup of coffee shook and shivered in my hands as I was reduced to uncontrollable tears confessing as if to a priest, that I was struggling more than anyone could imagine. Through the taste of salt flowing from my eyes, I attempted to articulate the night terrors, the hypervigilance, the sudden anger and the overwhelming sensation that I was a prisoner of my body beating against the bars of my skin attempting to get my mind out of all of it. I don’t remember much of what came out of my mouth, but I do remember the convulsions of sorrow that came out in guttural moans desperately trying to describe to someone else the hellscape I was in.
He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. He did what only those who have endured PTSD can do for one another. He wrapped his arms around me, holding me in safety, then upon pulling back locked eyes with me and simply whispered “I know.”
Just hearing those two small words released an unbearable pressure valve inside of me. Etheric fumes of containment, isolation, restriction, & the pain of not being understood billowed out of me until I was, for the first time since developing PTSD, empty of suffering. The war in my head had gone silent. I was not alone. Trey understood through his own experience that words are too insufficient to describe the nightmare or to relay comprehension of the nightmare back. Though what he could provide was far more powerful in that he could certainly empathize. His genuine empathy was the first deep gasp of air in my new life of learning to live with my condition. It would be the first step in a long series of steps towards recovery; admitting to someone that I was not okay. Dropping the mask of invincibility and the charade of invulnerability.
This first step is exactly what Bhikkhu Pannakara and the Venerable Monks have made space for with America. By making their trek on foot from Fort Worth, spreading the awareness that humanity itself is at this time, in immense suffering, they are locking eyes with this country to whisper “I know.”
As that moment of understanding & empathy is felt by those on their path, a country that has been captured by collective trauma is being given an opportunity to breathe. To take the first step toward recovery, as I did, with the map of mindfulness selflessly supplied. While Mona, Archer & myself bathed in the silence with the gathered crowd in that field for mass meditation, the idea of America being initiated silently into a similar path I was to take crept up to tickle my pineal. For if my prophetic abilities of pattern recognition are as good as they say, then Yours Truly is very much excited & optimistic where this story is ultimately going to go.
To get a glimpse of what that may be, you dear reader, will simply have to wait until the third installment of this scribble is released from the Mistress of the blank, white page.
To Be Continued in Part III…
A SONG TO PLAY US OUT…
About the Author
