September 26, 2002

• Honeymooning with the Old Fart, part three

  Edited, revised, expanded and updated on Thursday, November 10, 2005, in response to a Featured_Grownups challenge.

  Where was I…?  Oh, yes, Greyfox and I were on our
  honeymoon.  Only, in a very real sense, the honeymoon was
  over.  I was feeling frustrated at never knowing from moment to
  moment what nasty surprise he might have in store for me, and I was
  growing increasingly angry at being jerked around.  I’ve had years
  to get used to his behavior patterns now, and it has been an important
  facet in my personal growth.  I no longer react so negatively when
  promises are broken or my expectations are disappointed.  I’ve
  been learning how to live in the NOW without
  expectations.  That is how I feel now.  At the time, we
  were both unhappy with each other and our choices.

  I had suspected even before I consented to marry him that it was a
  mistake.  I did it for love, for love of him because he said he
  wanted it so much.  Then, driving back to Harrisburg from Virginia
  the day after the wedding, he said he wished he hadn’t married
  me.  I don’t know, didn’t know at the time, what changed his mind
  and he wouldn’t tell me.  Then, when he went to renew his car
  insurance in New Mexico, he learned that it would cost him about a
  hundred dollars more because of my not having had insurance a few years
  previously, when a drunk driver made an illegal left turn and wrecked
  my car (wracked me up pretty badly, too–having my license suspended
  for being uninsured was insult added to injury).  That extra
  expense prompted him to tell me, “Marrying you was the worst mistake
  I’ve ever made.”  That led to my first request for the promised
  divorce.  I haven’t counted how many times I’ve asked since then.

  We did get mad at each other, often.  But we didn’t stay
  mad.  I simply don’t stay mad.  By then I had learned that I
  had a choice whether to hold a grudge or let it go and lighten my
  burden, and in most instances I chose to let things pass without
  ruining my day.  It was much easier to maintain that attitude
  before I had Greyfox piling on the verbal abuse and betrayal all the
  time.  His dysfunctional psycho-social programming has been
  instrumental in strengthening my wa, my social harmony and
  inner peace.  Just like muscles and courage, inner peace grows
  stronger with exercise.  [edit, 11/10/05:  "...dysfunctional
  psycho-social programming..."  That's how I saw it and spoke of it
  at the time I'm writing about, and when I was writing this entry. 
  It was not until the summer of 2003, after Greyfox stopped using
  alcohol, tobacco, marijuana and various other drugs, all on the same
  day (May 23 -- 5/23/2003) and then took an online personality test and
  diagnosed his own NPD:  narcissistic personality disorder, that I
  had a convenient label for his psychopathology and a better
  understanding of where it came from and all the ways he manifests
  it.  He's getting better now; really he is.]

  Greyfox’s ideas about love changed through his association with
  me.  Before he knew me, he didn’t think you could get “mad at”
  (angry with) someone you love.  In his previous paradigm, if you
  got angry, you stopped loving.  I managed to convince him on our
  honeymoon that I was indeed extremely angry at him, and I also loved
  him.   Many times, from the honeymoon onward, he has looked
  at me lovingly, shaken his head and said in wonder, “I can’t stay
  mad at you.”  If that’s because of a talent I have, I’m really
  glad I have it.

  He had also believed that loving someone meant that you needed
  to stay with him/her.  I knew, just by reflecting on all the
  people I love with whom I have no perceived need for constant contact,
  that this was not true for me.  I think he believed me when I said
  I loved him but I really didn’t want to stay with him because he kept
  lying and breaking promises and jerking me around.  But he kept
  insisting that he had burned his bridges, had no place to go but here
  with me.

  When I would remind him of his own statements of regret at marrying
  me and wishing he’d never met me, etc., he would say he didn’t mean it,
  he was just upset.  I urged him to say what he meant, and only
  what he meant.  He thought that was a novel concept, and he
  laughed at me.  For both of us, there were things binding us
  together while other things drove us apart.  We are still
  together, so it’s sort of obvious which urge has prevailed thus far.

  From Canyon de Chelly, it was a long drive to Silver City, the
  closest big dot on the map to the Mimbres Valley.  I was headed
  for the Mimbres, but since it wasn’t a town, it didn’t constitute a
  valid destination for Greyfox.  I mention this to illustrate some
  of the differences in our views of the world.  For me, the world
  is a big place full of smaller  places, but for him if
  it’s not a city or a park or a point on the map, it’s not a real
  place.  A river or a valley is just too diffuse a concept for
  him.  For me, traveling means taking the scenic route and stopping
  when I see something interesting.  For him, before coming here
  where there are no big highways, a cross-country trip meant entering an
  Interstate highway as if it were a tunnel, and getting out at the
  ultimate destination.

  A lot of that trip to Silver City was on Highway 666 and I was
  reminded of many times my mother and I had crossed Arizona and New
  Mexico on Route 66.  I have always loved the US Southwest. 
  On our honeymoon, I began to understand why I’ve had that lifelong
  affinity for the area.  At Gila Cliff Dwellings, I had a vision of
  watching a straggling bunch of refugees climb the canyon toward the
  hidden gully where they later built their pueblo.  At several
  places along the Mimbres River, the skyline: the hogbacks and mesas of
  that basin and range country, was eerily familiar though I had never in
  this lifetime been anywhere near there before.

  Greyfox was spending a lot of time in shamanic trance and came back
  on several occasions with stories about our past lives in the 4 Corners
  area.  We both gravitated toward the ceramics displays in the
  archaeological museums.  When he came out of trance one day with a
  story about a time in which we had been creative partners, we started
  trying to track that experience down, locate our village and set a time
  period on it.   At first it seemed a fruitless quest. 
  His shamanic journey had revealed a time of raiding and warfare, of
  defensive settlement patterns at odds with what the archaeological
  mainstream believed.  Eventually, we found published sources that
  disagreed with the mainstream’s view of the prehistoric pueblo culture
  as peaceful, and supported our memories of the lives we spent in that
  culture with warfare and extreme violence.

  I got goose bumps every time we drove the winding road up from
  Silver City through Piños Altos to the Gila Cliff Dwellings. 
  Until our first ride up there together, I had never been to the little
  town of Piños
  Altos, but I knew the place.  It was like going through my old
  hometown and seeing how it had changed over the years I was gone.

  By him driving around with me riding shotgun in trance, we’d get a
  direction, but there were often not roads going that way.  We
  found a few back roads, and we made friends with people who could tell
  us where some lesser-known ruins were located.  In a sheltered
  location high on a slope facing the Mimbres River, we found a ruin we
  both recognized, called the Swartz Ruin because it was found on the
  Swartz Ranch.  In that place, around eight centuries ago (we have
  yet to positively date it) he was called something that meant,
  “Coiler”.  He built the pots of clay and I, “Storm” (so named
  because I’d been born during a thunderstorm), painted the sacred
  designs on the pots he made.  Our people were destroyed, our
  village depopulated by traders from the south who sold us grain in a
  time of drought and hunger.  The grain was poisoned, and from
  Coiler’s description of the way the people went mad from it, it sounds
  a lot like ergot.  I, Storm, clawed my own eyes out.  Coiler
  had been out of the village and didn’t eat any of the bad grain. 
  When  he came back and found us all dead or mad and dying, he
  tracked the trading party down and out across the desert toward Casas
  Grandes.  His last memory was approaching the traders at a run and
  being struck down from behind as he overtook them and tried to tell
  them of what had happened in our pueblo.

  Later on, in the Doña Ana museum, I recognized a bowl as my own work
  (as Storm’s design).  I stood transfixed in the display of pottery
  and couldn’t explain to Greyfox, at first couldn’t speak at all. 
  At the time, all that past life stuff was new enough to me that the
  daily revelations were blowing me away. 

  There was one geographical area that exerted a strong pull on both
  of us.  Each time we passed a certain highway exit between Bayard
  and the long stretch of flat desert where the Mimbres runs underground
  before reaching the subterranean “tanks” at Deming, we both turned our
  heads north toward the mountains.  Each time we drove up that road
  and past the “Kneeling Nun” rock formation, we would feel we were
  getting near someplace important, but we never found it.  What we
  found was the Santa Rita Pit, where a strip mine destroyed the old
  Spanish village of Santa Rita that had grown up around ancient copper
  mines dug by the natives.

  There’s more .  It was a long honeymoon.

  • 6:17 pm
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