Dear Claude: An Epistle #2
To Sir with Love
Dear Claude:
Today is Wednesday, December 7th. It is about 10pm, as I begin to write this second letter. As before, I am sitting on the floor now that my body has become with my practice of yoga and aperigraha light enough to be mostly comfortable with being in what was once a position of torture.
You are dead. Your body is dead, anyway. The Mexicanos in general believe that your spirit lives on for as long as the living remember the names of their dead ancestors. (Did you listen to Laurie Anderson? Here is “Speak my Language”.) So, by that standard, you are still alive in a some kind of way. I wonder, now, if the power of that remembrance to keep your spirit alive is restricted to days of special significance?
Previous epistle, the first:
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Does my and your daughters’ infrequent reminiscences, good and bad, count as adequate spiritual vivification? Ah, such are the questions of the idea of Life, and I do remember that you loved the ideas associated with thinking about life more than being grounded in actual dirty, pimply smelly Life.
I smile, now, at our shared experience of your failed gardening effort in Quesnel. I became your surrogate gardener when the gardener you imagined yourself to be, likely in some kind of garden utopia that didn’t include weeds, bugs and hail, was a bit too real. Well, that is what I imagine you were thinking, based on my being the apple not far from your tree and like you I was almost completely head-spaced out and away from my body for many years. And, OMG!, I spent my garden time in a hell where each minute was an eternity. My being was totally engulfed by rage at being trapped in the garden. That poor garden. It really didn’t stand a chance. As if I had the power to destroy nature. Such is the folly of the youthful ego. Well, I did go out and split wood with a huge amount of rage, and broke axe handles from time-to-time.
In my previous epistle I elaborated on your insignificance as having been a kind of significance in my life. The prototypical absent father, in some respects. Yesterday, you popped up into my awareness in an unusual way. Hence this epistle.
While eating a low sugar ‘healthy-ish’ organic oat flour waffle in a nice Oaxaca restaurant, a 1970s song came into our ears. I’ve now forgotten it. We live in an amazing time of music because a few songs earlier they played Nina Simone. (It wasn’t ‘See Line Woman’.)
Anyway, the song they played instantly brought to mind the early Sidney Poitier movie, ‘To Sir, With Love’.
More specifically, the song I heard may have been in the soundtrack. At the very least, it brought to mind the song ‘To Sir, With Love’, the movie’s title song, by Lulu.
And then I asked Yoshiko if she had seen that movie. (She is a bit of a movie person. Or at least was. Like me, movie watching has for her fallen off to almost nothing.) She didn’t remember the title, because the Japanese translators at that time, gave very Japanese titles that were not simply transliterations of the English. To help her remember I went and found the title song.
As the song and video played something remarkable happened: my eyes began to tear up and, with a kind of tremor of memory, I knew that that father and son drive into Quesnel that I talked about in the first letter to you included the viewing of this movie! That remembrance did not complete or unify the fragmentation of that disjointed experience. Nor do I actual remember the theatre details. I don’t remember the smell of the theatre’s popcorn, the feel of the velvet seats, or even the actual act of watching the film. It is a completely disembodied experience, a memory of a fragment disconnected from my life and yet somehow within it too. I think that the treat and the big glass window with bright lights was after the movie. And yet, they could very well have been on different occasions, the split between the experiences is so complete. The only association I have is that some how I have the feeling of knowing that the two disparate events occurred on the same night.
Is this in any way meaningful? My tearing up is rare. Although not as rare in these last few years as it was once. Did that memory fragment pop up in part because I had a few weeks ago taken a focused look at my anger towards you? Perhaps. I don’t really know, beyond the time association. And my desire to lighten my load, empty the trash bin of my ‘artefacts’, as Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len of the Hawaiian healing practice of Ho’oponopo calls the unconscious memory shards, destructive ‘truths’ and other self-hurting beliefs and habits we hang on to as if we can turn our trash into gold by unconsciously squeezing them between our calloused butt cheeks hard enough.
And that you took me to that movie, about a real teacher. The movie is, I believe, the biography of a man who reluctantly found his true calling as a teacher. That has, with hindsight, a strange resonance with what became my eventually lived life as an unofficial teacher. In one way or the other I have taught people various things my entire life. One of my earliest memories of that was helping my sisters with their math homework assignments. I distinctly, even bodily, remember telling your eldest daughter one time that her math teacher and text were teaching the subject incorrectly by making it unnecessarily difficult. I showed her the easier way. In grade nine I was asked by the real shop teacher to teach sand casting to his shop class. Later I helped several klutzes get through the class by showing them how to use the lathe and how to fix engines. As an adult I would teach people how to use and optimise software. I wrote and taught ‘Economics Debunked’ and ‘Banks Skanks’. And…
And now I laugh at an odd irony: I am actually officially a teacher within the Art of Living Foundation. I have not actually ever fully taught the course and likely my certification has lapsed due to inactivity. During the course there was a subtle test to determine the so-called ‘true’ teachers versus those who were ‘just’ students. I was one of three of the fifteen that made the ‘real’ teacher grade.
Someone commented on my last letter that she felt my anger come through the words. And this time, I think that I feel–is that even a real sentence?! LoL! So much headspace living that I write ‘I think that I feel’ and not ‘I feel that I think’.
Well, the feeling I have this time is much lighter. Perhaps not yet free.
Yoshiko, my yogic and spiritual partner, is sitting across from me listening to a Japanese woman who lives in Hawaii talking about Ho’oponopono. This is a rather magical art, and I’ve begun to practice it with sincerity and regularity to clear out my crap and my crap’s trash can too. A wonderful complement to the yogic practices of pranayama, asana and meditation as cleansing tools. Yoshiko came to Ho’oponopono most recently with a lovely synchronicity in Japan that in turn aligned with my independent discovery of Simon Borg-Olivier’s “5 Dimensional Flow” practice of moving good energy and loving information in the body to clear out the psycho-somatic blockages and cellular constipation. The two fit together like butter and dates, garbage can and Marjory the trash heap.
Well, for some reason, perhaps in part because of Ho’oponopono’s emphasis on gratitude and love, acceptance of personal responsibility and on apologising for my hurtful participation in all the relationships in my life, I begin the next bit with thanking you for your participation in the remarkable experience I had when I took full responsibility for being a pre-teen thief. Specifically for how you spanked me with calmness and, I suspect, the love you were able to give me at that time. Your spanking me then was perhaps the most loving experience I have of you in my life.
I shake my head at the day I got caught. I peed my pants in terror. I was taken home to Terry, (mother), on the one day you and she had arranged to surprise us with taking the family to a special dinner at the Billy Barker Inn. I don’t know the occasion and that was the only time I remember that kind of thing happening. Going to Mr. Mikes for a burger was not in the same league. That one day was the day I got caught as a thief, and I wanted to enjoy the food while dreading the punishment that had been threatened. Terry’s quiet and expanded rage, or perhaps my imagined existence of the extra rage, hung over the dinner like poisoned air, the smog of impending doom. Now that was an early synchronicity!
When it became clear that two of your daughters were accomplices in some way–did I confess that, squeal on them or rat them out, I do not remember.
I remember the police officer walking me to the door and some vague Terry image and nothing else until I was eating devilled eggs at the restaurant. That is about all I remember of that experience, except for the toxic ‘air.’ Later we were all given a choice: be put into a serious full lockdown grounding or a spanking by you. That would be the first time, because all other violence against us was by Terry and was mostly words and emotional manipulation cuffs across the back of the head that were sometimes was reinforced with a wooden spoon and occasionally with a hair brush.
Initially I took the soft way and opted for the grounding. Later that evening, I realised that getting out of the house was more important to me than the short term discomfort of a ‘serious’ spanking. That is an odd synchronicity with my just having written about being in joy during our covid called
And so I took what looked to be the harder path, and discovered with that that the more difficult path, or at least the one that requires action and courage and not laziness, is more often than not the one that achieves an expansion of freedom.
For many years I realised that my making that choice gave me, or perhaps was an affirmation of, courage that has served me well as I stumbled through a troubled life filled with toxic co-dependency, debilitating shame and disconnection from me and life around me. That’s another story.
And so, with that, I’ll close this missive with the Ho’oponopono mantra: Hello Claude. I apologise for all the ways that I hurt you, even if that was unconsciously done or even done in different incarnations or circumstances. I am sorry.
Please forgive me. Thank you for listening to me. I love you.
Sincerely,
Your son, now a refugee from Canadian covid tyranny, resting comfortably in a tiny Mexican colony on the side of mountain surrounded by fresh cool air, the sound of dogs howling and barking, fireworks and insects, under the light of the nearly full moon.
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((♥️))