Bottom

The Queen was overwhelmed by the demon Black Mold. It all seemed so hopeless to go up against it. It was down there in the basement. The darkness now has eyes, and the creature has now been awakened. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with it, just sitting down there underneath the stairs. It’s eyes open and glowing. But at least its presence was made known. Now she can get to the bottom of things. She just might be able to deal with it.

But the demon Black Mold is very powerful. It tells the Queen to go back to sleep. Ignore it. It’s too powerful for her to deal with at this time. The Queen feels sleepy, she fights to stay with the demon, even though she feels overwhelmed.


I was driving down the road this morning when I realized that I had forgotten my yoga mat for Bikram class. I came back to the house, and accidentally left the door open and Sargeant Pepe ran out. “Oh, drat! Now I’ll be late,” I thought, because it's hard to lure him back in. The kids joke that the only thing I trained Pepe to do is to run outside in order to get a treat. So that’s what I had to do. Go all the way back in, get to the fridge and get a treat, lure him in, and dash myself back out again.

I observed the frustration brewing. I had to fight to focus on the out-breaths and get present and not fall into the old trapping of negative emotions. Those old feelings are too painful to indulge in anymore. A gift of about to turn 43. I’m like the rat who finally realized that those shocks hurt, and you need to give some things up if you’re going to survive or evolve and if your children are going to survive and evolve. Wisdom is the gift of age and the gift to the world.

I think it’s old trauma, old patterns related to stress that start to wear on you. It's post traumatic stress. I think about Frank's death. I think about my father. I feel so sorry for all the soldiers returning from Iraq. I’ve witnessed it in my father all my childhood, all my adulthood. How we children of concentration camp and war survivors are affected. How all children are horribly, horribly affected.

Finally back in my car, I was backing out and I had a flash of insight. It was the same kind of insight I had, incidentally, when I was backing out of a driveway when I was on the way to be with my mother dying in the hospital. I had just dropped my infant daughter off with a friend, and backing out I saw an image before me of her as a young woman. I got a call from my younger sister not long after that with the news that mom had passed.

Backing out on the way to yoga, I had the impression of powerlessness. The brutal stamping out of hope. My father as a 9 to 12-year-old imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp for Dutch colonialists on Java during World War II. That experience of horrible atrocities during the formative years, it scars so deep one gives up on affecting the outer world and there is only anger turned inward, its oppression total.

My father told me a story once about the war. That he was at camp Ambarawa 7, which had a monastery and nuns. One of my father’s few possessions was a towel his mother, my Oma, monogrammed for him. One day it was missing from his bed in the barracks. He climbed up high in the rafters one day and watched the nun come in and he witnessed her removing the threads from his towel.

He climbed down and confronted the nun. “That’s my towel,” he said. She just glared at him and said, “No it’s not,” and went back to work. He mustered up the courage to complain again, “It’s mine!” “You’re going to hell when you die and you’re not going to need it,” she said of his protestant soul.
My father wanted to hit her, he told me. “What could I do? Me, a little boy, up against the nun? That’s when I started to get angry.”


That’s what I carry of my father's onto my experience of reality. I react to it with his unconscious pain. That powerlessness I felt against my mother and her illness. It’s my mother, yet she’s raging at me, terrifying me and hurting me and my brother and sisters and my father. You try to take care of them, you feel guilty for their suffering. Because you love her too. She's still in my body. She's in my shoulders and psoas. She’s the blackness.

My father’s migraines, the rock-hard muscles in his shoulders and neck. I’d massage them, give him a head massage just like the nurse Babu did for him on Java. After yoga I can see still where my tension is in my arms, the collapsed chest, the shallow breath. How trauma and powerlessness shut you down. Unable to escape my mother’s prison as a child. Now able to finally be aware and get present rather than dwell in the past. Snake is a good friend.

The Black Mold is just a reminder, an opportunity to wake up. To look here and check this out. My mother's healing too, just like the dream, she's helping cleaning. We're searching every corner of our energy bodies for leftover stories. What powerlessness and discouragement do we feel when stress arrives? What hopelessness? That depression that renders us without courage to face life. We find the courage again and this time its grounded in being.

Shall I move forward on my desire to clean out and fix up my father’s house? Now that I’ve hit the basement and found the snake and the mold and the rot, discovered the rat that gnaws at the tree and the toad that blocks the well. Now that I know the facts and what needs to be dealt with, I can summon the community to help me deal with it. Now the castle can be rebuilt again. The samskaras have been removed from the layers of being and now I am free to create anew with the power of the present. And the community makes all the difference. Something I didn't have as a child, isolated here on Kilkenny Street East of Boulder out in the country with the cows and the corn.

I wrote Dad a letter. I said I could not live there. And that he should consider living with my brother for his health. Today he said he was down there with some bleach working with the mold. Gads! Julia was supposed to be over there today. I hope she convinces him that a Haz Mat unit needs to be consulted!