Yule Letter 2011

A few years ago the fields on either side of Green Road here in Madison were both rippling waves of brownish green hay. Come fall, Mr. Green would plow the hay into squat mammoth cylinders and the same red tailed hawk could be seen perched on a hay stack every evening as the sun set out over the tree line. He always picked the same hay stack to sit on, on the right side of the road. Driving down Green Road at that time had felt like driving up the center pillar of a balance scale, with wheat on either side of me. Each hay stack acted as a sample weight, holding steady the torque on the arm of the other side. The only seeming imbalance was my little friend perched on his hay stack providing just the right amount of pictorial asymmetry as to make the whole scene a perfect allegory of life: the only way to achieve perfect balance is to be willing to live life teetering back and forth, thus always existing slightly off kilter. Then Mr. Green sold the acreage on the right side of the road to Walmart. I haven’t seen the red tailed hawk since then.

But as I was driving home from the chiropractor’s office this past September, a red tailed hawk flew past my windshield, coming close enough for me to count the feathers on his wings. I stomped hard on the breaks, and was grateful I had gone to the bathroom before driving home. Mr. Green’s hawk had always seemed so small atop his hay stack. This stunning new perspective made me realize how large hawks are up close. I literally began to view them differently. Since then I have been seeing red tailed hawks everywhere and I‘ve come to accept the hawk as my new totem. Think about a hawk’s perspective for a minute: flying overhead, they see the big picture. Hawk medicine heals the spirit and enables us to open our higher chakras so that we too may hear and receive the messages from Father Sky. Hawk medicine helps us when we need to look at life from a new perspective. It helps us see the big picture.

Last March Mike finally received his long awaited knee replacement. We were elated. Although there were some set-backs and complications, both he and I pinned all our prayers on this surgery in the hope that it would be the solution to all our problems. It wasn’t. Everything was going gang-busters. He was going to physical therapy. He was getting stronger. And then a customer at the dealership almost fell off a bike on the showroom floor. Mike instinctively went to break the customer’s fall and catch the bike, but the combined weight of the customer and the bike was too much for his brand new knee and something has been clinking and rattling around inside it ever since,(to say nothing of the pain he is once again constantly in). Mike has always walked with a limp because of this knee. He has always been a little off balance. But the proverbial counterweight that has held steady the torque on his other side has consistently been his love for hunting. As long as he could make time to go sit in a tree stand and commune with nature, the limp and the pain didn’t matter. The knee replacement was supposed to put an end to the pain. It was supposed to give him back his balance. Instead it has succeeded only in frustrating him further by making his dreams feel that much more out of reach. Pain, frustration and its subsequent depression does that to people.

I have only been able to look on helplessly at my husband and partner, largely because moving here cost me my massage therapy career and I have been floundering about grasping at quick fixes ever since. It has been six years since I first received my Bi-Polar diagnoses. Facing that truth about myself has wrought upon me a cascade of myriad emotions: from feelings of fury and fear, to bewilderment that I have to deal with this for the rest of my life, to serenity that at least now I know what was wrong for all those years. I can now move forward and try to reconstruct my life without having to worry about when the next manic episode will take place. I will no longer completely unravel every time I lose my ability to be emotionally dependent on someone else, because now my brain chemistry is in balance. That means I can now learn how to live my life emotionally dependent on myself. That’s huge, and actually difficult to explain. I never realized that I was mistaking emotional dependence for love before I was diagnosed. It has only been with time that I have been able to look back and see the difference in how I now conduct myself in relationships.

Marriages are by their very nature a balancing act. If you flip through a tarot deck, one of the first things you’ll notice is how similar the Devil card and the Lovers card are. The Lovers card depicts a couple holding hands willingly. Above them is the archangel Raphael, his hands outstretched in an offering of healing to the couple below. This is the picture we all hope to obtain in our married lives. This is the vision of two autonomous people who can exist satisfactorily on their own, making the well informed decision to unite their lives together. But that’s not always what happens. Often time’s we end up more closely resembling the Devil card, in which a couple is chained together with the Christian Devil lauding over their lives. One person might be experiencing difficulty in finding happiness and meaning in their own lives. They mistakenly fall for the misconception that sharing their life with another person will fill this empty space they feel within them. When they find someone they are compatible with, they believe they have fallen in love, when in reality what they have found is a body to lean on. Inevitably that hollow feeling returns after the honeymoon period wears off and the relationship fizzles. The person who mistook emotional dependence for love then unravels and spins out of control because they have lost their balance. They end up a big fat emotional mess. That was me at the end of every relationship before my diagnosis.

But the more distance I put between my life today and my previous life of mental imbalance, the more I look at life from a broader perspective. I can now see the big picture. Mike could very legitimately file for disability and for that matter so could I. It’s been an option that has been floating around in my head during the last year as I weighed my dream of becoming a writer alongside the periphery financial minutia of day to day life. In looking at disability as an option I have looked long and hard at my life partner and wondered why he hasn’t opted for this seemingly easier path. It’s simply not who he is. He plows forward, even if that means walking through brick walls. I would love to think I have something to do with this, but the truth is that I have leaned far more heavily on Mike since we’ve been married than he has on me. While Mike curses a blue streak of blistering profanity that could make a street-walker blush, forcibly looking for solutions to his problems, I tend to follow the advice of the poet Rilke and live out each question patiently until I live my way into the answer. In this respect, we complement one another. It’s how our marriage finds its balance. By the end of next year, I will have completed enough schooling to obtain a teaching position. I won’t be done with school, as maintaining my recovery dictates that I only attend school part-time. (People with Bi-Polar Disorder need to live their lives in small bite-sized increments so as not to trigger any manic episodes) But I will be in a position to make my love of words and my passion for the English language help pay the bills. That will set the financial scales of the household totally off balance as Mike has always been the breadwinner. Somehow though, given the economic constraints we all find ourselves living within these past few years, I don’t think he’ll mind the help.

Mike and I have experienced quite a few losses in the short time that we have been married. We lost our dream of becoming parents. I lost my career. And our dream of buying a larger home has been temporarily thwarted by the soulless misers on Wall Street who have successfully crushed the dreams of much of Middle America with their compassionless zeal for the religion of greed.

The loss of dreams can cripple a marriage. One person doing all the work can upset the balance and cause the union to come tumbling down, especially in an economic downturn. But Hawk teaches us that life is initiation. The magic that is created when a couple is emotionally balanced can infuse that couple with the power to overcome the worst confusion and the most crippling adversity. Rather than one person leaning too heavily upon the other, each stands up straight of their own volition and leans in slightly to greet the other. Yet by stepping back, being willing to be honest with yourself and taking in the bigger picture as individuals, you identify those hidden talents you haven’t been using and make your way back onto the healthy path. It’s been a long hard eight directionless years, but I finally feel like I can stand toe to toe with my partner as an equal.

There is a hawk’s nest down on the beach where I walk the dogs in Perry. It’s a couple who had hatchlings this past summer. Mike’s spotted a nest by one of his tree stands this fall as well. May we all follow the Hawk in perfect trust this year as we find our way back toward balance and may the coming of the light bring peace to our hearts this holiday season. Blessings and love to you all.