On the Borderline

Remember when I said that I had entered the shamanic version of basic training? Boot camp for the woo-woo set, I called it. Well today I came close to losing everything I’ve worked for. Actually my fuck up was Tuesday, during the nighttime hours of the Scorpio full moon, and it was a doozy. Today I confessed my wrong doing to the shaman and took my punishment like a good soldier. It was painful but not permanent. Afterward, the shaman said that he had decided he wouldn’t drop me. I did not know I’d done something for which I could be dismissed.

The shock of the true nature of my offense was much worse than the pain of my punishment.

I am a natural iconoclast, it’s true. Daily you can find me kicking down barriers, dancing around the rules, and flirting with disaster, but I’m a good kid. I am. I’m the four-point honors student, not the fuck up. I have friends who are fuck-ups. I love them. But as for me? While I love a good mess and I love my messed up friends and I will make messes with them if they want me to, I have never had an intractable fuck-up on my record. Ever. It’s not my style. I was shocked when I heard the shaman’s words. I have never done anything that would cause me to get kicked out of a place where I wanted to stay. I have never made a wrong so intractable or inalterable that I could not backtrack, apologize, make amends.

Today I learned what my father meant when he said that kindness could often be the best punishment. My father didn’t raise me, but in addition to a second family, he did raise and care for many messed up foster kids. I’ll never forget when he told me that showing kindness when the swift kick of punishment was expected often brought contrite tears to an otherwise unreachable child. Today I was surprised to realize: I am that child.

There has been no writing nor any editing of The Movie Lovers this week. Shamanic work has been all. Plus many, many fuck-ups. . . . So, with apologies to my enthusiastic readers, here’s tonight’s teaser from Chapter 6.
One Easy Thing:

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In college I earned money as an art model, dropping my fuzzy yellow bathrobe (a favorite cast-off of my auntie’s) to pose on a dais. One artist, a quiet man in his forties who worked in pen and ink on toothy white paper, invited me to the opening of his show. “I drew you as Caesar,” he said. It wasn't the androgynous cast of my face that occasioned his portrait. It was what he saw behind my face, behind my every nude pose. “It's the purpose in your gaze,” he said, “your ferocious will.”

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