Something Isn't Right

One day, when I was about 15 or 16, my dad got a phone call. Afterward he turned a strange shade of pale gray, went in the room he shared with our mom, and lay down on the bed, face up, eyes closed, barely breathing. I think we stood around outside the bedroom looking in. My siblings and I thought he was never going to get up again. We thought that he was simply going to choose to die. We actually felt he had that power. And all because he had gotten the news that someone in our family was in the hospital after a violent incident.

Now, many, many years later, I’m not sure what happened. There may have been violence of some kind, and the consequences of that violence. What I do know was that there was violence in our family—and it wasn’t talked about. I grew up attempting to protect the youngest sibling in a myriad of ways — and regularly woke up screaming from nightmares where I wasn’t successful.

I don’t think I could reconcile this continuing fear of violence—and our dad’s complete lack of interest in addressing it— with the fact that our dad was the pillar of our family. There were many reasons for this: he was handsome and strong and authoritative. He had a quiet integrity; he brooked no argument. He was who we went to when we were sick: he had been the pharmacist’s mate on board a ship in World War II. For us, he was close to an actual doctor. He would feel the glands below our neck, declare them swollen, and leave us with the satisfying feeling that we were, indeed, sick. He was probably considered a saint in our Catholic parish because of us, his seven children. And he silently took charge when our mother took to the same bed, turned her face away from us, and refused to get up. In all our experience our father had never himself taken to that bed during the day. It was our mother who did that—before going to the hospital for what we were told was “back trouble.”

So when our dad turned pale and lay down in the middle of the day, and the house became unusually quiet, we were afraid. The violence that sometimes threatened our family had finally gotten through to our father but, for all we knew, it would kill him. Our mother was certainly not going to take charge.
Our dad got up again and that day was never spoken of openly but even now, many, many years later, these memories and more have been coming to my mind lately as the country is overrun with an unpredictable and sometimes deadly virus, hate-inspired violence, no one adequately putting a stop to bullying and cruelty, no one seeming to recognize the threat posed by years of neglect and unrestrained abuse of power toward people of color. No one adequately addressing a betrayal of our troops, voter suppression, and electoral interference from foreign agents — all in a country founded on the concept of equality and fair political representation.

And no one in charge. There is confusion among governors and local leaders regarding even minimal precautions. No one in high office modeling even a modicum of the behaviors one would implement in a public health crisis, no one standing up to speak and act in ways that would create calm and understanding, no one instituting manufacturing requirements for PPE, no one championing legislation that would address the needs of a fractured nation.
No one in charge.

The feeling I grew up with, of mounting threats and a continuing lack of leadership to address it, reminds me of another situation I found myself in more than twenty years ago.
I went to a spiritual retreat lead by a woman named Gangagi whose teachings an acquaintance followed. Needing a change, for once having the money to attend something just because it seemed like a good idea, I signed up. It was to be a week long, held in an arid region in southern Colorado in late summer. I was given a list of supplies: I should bring a water bottle, sun screen and insect repellant, long sleeve shirts, long pants, several bandanas and a hat.

I got to the small town in a remote area and was given a room at a large, sprawling, mostly empty, run-down hotel, with a parking lot with sumac trees growing through the cracked and crumbling asphalt and a lobby decorated with lava rock walls and plastic, tropical flowers and greenery. My room was large, with dark, furniture I remembered from the 70s described as Spanish Modern or Mediterranean but was, in my opinion, simply ugly. I left my things in my room and was told to wait for a school bus that would take me to an auditorium for a meeting with the local Fire Marshal.

The Fire Marshal told us there was a terrible drought and an ongoing heat wave that had caused a severe fire danger. There was a long list of what we couldn’t do that included:
· No jars of sun tea as they could concentrate a beam of light and set dry weeds on fire
· No trash in black plastic trash bags as they could combust in the sun.
· No parking where dry weeds touched the chrome on a car as that could spark a fire so therefore we could no longer drive our own vehicles.

I don’t know if he said that we should be prepared to evacuate in case of fire or if I realized that myself but over the next few days I thought over and over again about how I had gotten to my destination on two tanks of gas and needed to get gas before I left because there were no gas stations for many miles. The town had one gas station with one gas pump. There was a two-lane road out of town. There were perhaps 150 people attending this retreat, more who were staff. If we needed to get out of town, how would we all do it?

We were to be bussed into the desert each day for what I learned was called satsang, where we gathered under a large canvas awning to hear Gangagi speak. We were assigned a schedule depending upon our age and relative health. There were three one-hour shifts: the very young and those who were oldest went into the desert last each morning, were bussed out first before lunch, bussed in last again for a gathering later in the day and bussed out first so that they spent the least amount of time in the heat. The rest of us were assigned one of two other shifts. I was bussed in first each morning and afternoon, last out at each of those times. I was to sit in the desert, reeking of Skin-so-Soft, a pine-scented bath oil that Avon used to make that turned out to be an excellent bug repellant, until Gangagi was driven to the site in a dusty Honda. Despite the heat I was told to wear long sleeves and long pants and a hat, to protect me from the sun. It turned out that the bandanas were to put around my wrists and my neck to block the entry of tiny, black, biting insects that used any opportunity to come up my sleeves and under my collar.

Did I mention that it was a silent retreat? I was unable to talk with anyone about these conditions, whether it was wise to subject people to this. I had never done such a large retreat before, with such a high spiritual teacher. I guess I figured deprivation might do me good.

I had brought along a small meditation bench. I set myself up to meditate in the tent for the hours that passed before Gangagi arrived, after she left, and partially meditate when she was present. One water bottle was not enough but I don’t think water in individual bottles was as available commercially as it is now and I hadn’t thought to bring large amounts of water. I think water was supplied but I don’t remember it being in abundance. Maybe it was saved for the very young and those who were older.
Those of us in the third group, who were bussed in first and left last, waited silently in the desert when we thought the bus was going to come, shifting from one foot to the other, sweating and uncomfortable, waiting for a bus that, in my recollection, came later and later each day.

Not having ever been to a retreat given by a popular spiritual teacher, I really had no idea what to expect. But what I encountered was beyond strange.

Because the content of the retreat was, to my recollection, either Gangagi, a beautiful woman who might have been in her late forties or early fifties, or a member of her staff, reading love letters written to her by one of her male followers. She beamed at the descriptions they had written of her and of their love for her. The idea was that loving her was actually loving the Beloved, the Divine, and that her delight in these letters and our supposed delight in hearing them, was a form of devotion and spiritual upliftment.
As I was new to spiritual upliftment, I tried to look for signs of it there in the desert.

Group meals, held in a restaurant-turned cafeteria, were a high point, although the silence kept me from getting to know anyone. I spent my evenings alone in that ugly room. I called my husband and kids once or twice, in spite of the fact that such a thing was forbidden.

I don’t know how many days I participated, maybe three, when I suddenly realized I was beginning to feel depressed. My thoughts were slow and somehow thick and unclear, as if taking a long time to surface, a long time to actually make any kind of sense. I couldn’t follow the thread of my thoughts and arrive at any conclusions. My meditations were flat, somehow restricted, when I meditated under the canvas awning each day before Gangagi arrived. When she was there, others in the group who were also meditating would suddenly scream or fall over and neither Gangagi nor a member of the staff seemed to react. It seemed to be considered a normal reaction to a spiritual teacher’s presence.

And then I realized that the situation was either abusive or it was triggering me to feel abused, neglected, without proper care or consideration, without proper leadership. I didn’t know anything about what we now call triggers — I just thought something was terribly wrong — and no one was doing anything about it.
I thought of the years it took for me to recognize the chaos and fear I experienced in my childhood. Not long after my oldest son began to walk, I received training as a volunteer at a center for mothers and children where I went to group discussions about issues concerning mothers. Our children played in another room, supervised by an older woman who seemed far more competent than any of us. I realized that the training we were receiving, called peer counseling, wasn’t adequate for the women who attended groups there — and it certainly wasn’t adequate for me. I asked the therapist who conducted the training if she would see me privately. She agreed and I saw her twice a week for almost three-and-a-half years, designing my entire life around making those visits the most important part of my week, the most important part of my life. And it took that long to recognize abuse. It took that long to recognize the neglect that I and my siblings experienced.
Back in the run-down hotel, I woke from a troubled sleep and realized I had had enough. I packed my stuff. They had told us that we must let someone know if we weren’t coming to satsang because otherwise they would have to initiate a search and rescue effort on our behalf. We were surrounded by desert, after all. Outside, it was a cloudy morning. I drove my forbidden car to the restaurant-turned-cafeteria and met with a member of Gangagi’s staff. I spoke: I told him I was leaving. I was shaking — I felt as if I were breaking the rules right and left.

I think I tried to explain that I felt abused and neglected, unsafe, because of the conditions we were experiencing. That I had felt that way in my childhood and wasn’t going to participate in feeling that way now. I felt odd saying that out loud. Now such a declaration would easily make sense to many people. Back then, I don’t recall very many people linking childhood trauma to present day circumstances quite so boldly. But he said he understood. I was shocked. But he went on to beg me to stay, that Gangagi and the organizers had recently realized that the situation was not workable, the rules and arrangements were to change, that I should stick around because there was to be an announcement at breakfast.
I said no. I got in my car and drove to the little gas station, got gas from the single gas pump, and drove away.
The feeling that I had then, after spending hours in the desert, hot and dusty and tired, thinking that surely this was a lot to ask of me, of others, the feeling I had in my childhood, worrying about what violence was being done to or could be done to my siblings, and the feeling that I have now, is that something isn’t right. That someone who should be taking responsibility — who should have taken responsibility all along — is absenting himself in a scary dereliction of duty that has resulted in many lives lost and more than likely, many, many more.

Something isn’t right. We need real leadership. We need someone who doesn’t lie down — or worse, walk away to golf or have rallies that endanger the lives of participants — when things are going wrong; we need someone who isn’t afraid to speak about what is happening in a calming, rational way; we need someone who can actually recognize what is going on and intelligently, and in a scientifically informed way, respond.
I’m going to have to live with this feeling for six more months just as I lived with this feeling off and on throughout my childhood. But my strongest hope is that we will have real leadership in 2021. I hope it’s soon enough.