In 1970, when I was a high school sophomore in Stamford, Connecticut, a senior named George spotted me during a fire drill. He had the wildest hair in the school and was an artist. He appeared out of a sea of students and told me he liked my nose. I was glad someone liked it because I sure didn’t. I told him I liked his hair.
George was magnificently real and funny, insightful and sarcastic. I ended up dating his friend Russ and the three of us had many an adventure together. Like the time Russ borrowed his friend’s father’s Monza without asking. Notorious for splitting in half upon impact, at least this Monza didn’t do that. But the brakes failed and we literally hit a traffic jam on I-95 while returning from Port Chester, N.Y. with a bag full of wine. Ourselves, our ill-gotten jugs and another more worrisome substance required immediate evacuation from Russ’s friend’s dad’s car with newly the smashed-in front. The instant we got out of the Monza it received a matching smashed-in back.
George encouraged my art ability. Both of us Libras. we talked easily and often. But if big swaths of time went by, that was fine too. George was a built-in part of my heart and the first friend I’d learned that, well after the fact, he’d died of a sudden asthma attack in a hotel room. I am wondering if, when I see him on the Other Side, he’ll say it was his stylish grand exit. But meanwhile, it remains a tragedy for everyone on This Side.
The other day I happened to be in a graveyard, parked next to a big headstone engraved with the same last name George had, “Tilton.” Just in case just thinking about someone calls in their spirit, I told the Tilton marker that I missed him and loved him and that I was thankful for him. Did he know I had recently found his letter and a sketch of him? Is it OK if I share part of it? As I got back in my car I noticed a similar big headstone engraved with same font, “Johnson,” my old last name. Typical George.
He modeled for my high school Studio art drawing class. This is my drawing of him from that day and below it is an excerpt of a letter he wrote me when I was 17.
1988: On the night before my new job was to start I decided to clean up my art studio and clear out some old vibrations. It was a nice, clear night in Miami Beach and I was upstairs. During a quiet moment uninterrupted by my two young daughters, I realized I could hear music. It was terrific bluegrass fiddle and it sounded live. In fact it sounded like it was coming from the apartment house behind me. They played one hit after another – tight vocal harmonies and tasty guitar playing wafted in. Good Vibrations.
Suddenly I had to hear where it was coming from. I put on my flip flops and tip toed out of the house and into the night. Now I was part of the night. In the darkness I could imagine not having a body, an invisible part of the big dark outdoors. I was anxious to hear this music closer and anxious about the way I had left the door open and my kids upstairs. But this won’t take long. Stayin’ Alive.
As I walked, I noticed how life on the common sidewalk is so different, so public, but connected to our very personal, private home worlds, where walls and roofs divide up the space psychologically as well as physically. Maybe this urge is some sort of metaphor for some needed unfoldment. As I got closer to the street behind us, I realized that this music was coming from very far away, maybe across the creek, maybe from the Fountainbleau Hotel or another beach resort. It really sounded good but as I got closer to the sound it seemed to almost totally fade. When I got about 2 streets away I knew for sure the music was coming from the beach. Mac the Knife.
By now they’d gone through about 6 styles of music. I turned on my heels and headed back. I could feel my metaphor coming closer as I walked away from the music which got louder and clearer. My metaphors usually have to do with my life’s path. I worried how easily I was drawn to the music like a someone who could suddenly drop everything for a vision that becomes illusive, harder to grasp, and much farther away than expected. As I turned my attention to my present state, me walking home and my life there and then, the music was perfectly clear. Beatles Medley. Back in my studio, the acoustics were the best.
There is a universal language we all speak fluently regardless of time, place, identity, religion, regardless of everything. We all speak and understand the universal language of dreams, intuition, creative thought and psychic connection. In this state we create our own worlds, gain insight, inspiration, and receive messages from what I call our Higher Selves. It is where we can work out our issues and find answers. These subtle, quickly forgotten experiences have an effect on our actual lives because the dreamworld, where a huge portion of our experience plays out, seeps into our waking one.
People throughout history have grappled with interpreting the language of their dreams and of collective consciousnesses. The dark netherworld of wordless vision has tantalized and inspired creative thoughtful people to keep reaching for answers and meaning. Every culture has recognized and categorized these aspects of life through religion, mythology, art, music, literature and dance, created and sustained by beliefs in their own unique systems. Taking a closer look at these, a beautiful, golden thread of truth emerges. People, and probably all creatures on earth, share our life experiences in ways that are undeniable, not just in a physical sense like breathing, eating, sleeping, etc., but in aspects that far exceed our shared physical existences.
Some societies have emphasized these commonalities more than others. Cultures that once flourished, whose treasures now fill our museums, seem to have celebrated this part of life more than we now do. This modern age is one that examines the subconscious in scientific terms rather than in spiritual or psychic, esoteric terms. There have been some notable developments in hybridizing the scientific approach to these ancient mysteries by researchers such as Rupert Sheldrake, Sir Oliver Sachs and Depak Chopra and lesser known visualization pioneer named Dr. Steve Gallegos. Dr. Gallegos’s work, stemming from the study of aboriginal animal totems, allows us to directly reach into our own subconsciousness through relaxing our minds enough to access and narrate our own waking dreams. There one can meet many inner guides, often in the form of symbolic animals. Together these form a council that address and heal and inform in a deeply profound way.
When I lived in Boston in the ‘80s, I met Dr. Gallegos. A friend from my Tai Chi class invited me to a dinner party the Gallegos home. A visualization therapist, Steve Gallegos has written several books on this subject. A form of self-hypnosis, visualization is nothing new. It is used in therapy to recognize problems within the self in an objective manner. Elements in the subconscious are given form and character which are part of an unfolding dreamlike story, self-narrated and recorded over the course of about two hours.
Symbolic animals and mandela-like symbols appear during the sessions, just as they do in dreams. These symbols have been in the mythologies of all races and are not difficult to interpret.
I am a visual artist. Psychology, theology, mythology, and many other ologies inform my art and sparked growth in my own intuitive, psychic ability. When it was my turn to introduce myself at Dr. Gallegos’ table that evening, I mentioned that as an artist, I have to visualize all the time in order to create. Dr. Gallegos asked if I would be interested in trying his hypnotherapy, and of course I accepted.
The result was a fascinating and insightful reading (I consider it a psychic reading) about my whole life. I aways thought it was, but now that I am 65 and can look back 30 years, I see this clearly. One of the basic principals of psychic work is that you can’t read for yourself. It is impossible to objectively interpret the information. Under hypnosis, however, I was outside of myself.
The story that unraveled is my inner treasure, truly valuable and meaningful to me. I borrowed some of the scenes from my hypnosis to write my novel Tree of Lives. What I wanted to share with you is one of the later tableaus that was not in the book.
“A bat comes along and lands in front of me. It’s here to tell me something. It says its from the ‘night world’, which is part of life and that its fine, nothing bad about it. We go into the night world together. We fly over the rooftops of houses in the night sky. It is beautiful and monochromatic….”
In terms of the Covid-19 virus that has been attributed to an infection from bats, I find this scene both interesting and worrisome. Will I contract the virus and die? I met this animal towards the end of the narrative, though a bit more of the story unfolded where I met a few more animals. In the final scene of my inner journey, I had crossed a big desert and entered a strange city, a new place entirely in black and white.
We never truly know our entire story until the end. I don’t know if the bat represented Covid-19. Maybe it represented my subconscious, my night world. Maybe a new city in black and white implies I’ll be doing more writing, rather than painting which is what I have been doing lately. Maybe the night world is the Other Side, and maybe the Other Side is in black and white, and this world is in color, which wouldn’t surprise me.
My remaining time on earth will determine the meaning behind that bat symbol, but I do know that we continue to exist after life and guidance is right under our own eyelids. And I also know we are much wiser than we realize.
Elizabeth Garden is an artist who uses her imagination to overcome major life obstacles including trauma and child abuse.
When I searched the Facebook Groups page for the term ‘estranged parent,’ there were so many private groups that no matter how much I scrolled, the list grew and grew and grew. I stopped at 1,674 groups. Memberships to these support groups ranged from a few dozen people to thousands of them, with most groups averaging about 1K members. It is a terrible club to belong to, and, like terminal cancer, it seems to be spreading worldwide in an insidiously cruel way.
My experience with parental estrangement is from both sides of the brick wall, from watching my parent’s bewildered anguish at my older sister’s estrangement of them, to being involuntarily estranged from both of my adult daughters for years now. Having grown up under the same but actually more acute reign of abuse and neglect as my sister the psychologist, I decided to never fully cut off our clearly toxic parents like millions of trendy kids seem to be doing these days. It seemed like the merciful thing to do. After all, I recognized them as typical unenlightened old school types who had too many children. So I managed to keep them at a safe arm’s length and several states away.
My family of origin was so bad that I wrote a book about it, (Tree of Lives) but politely waited until they were safely dead to share my tale of woe, abuse and neglect. I even used a pen name so the innocent and the guilty wouldn’t be exposed in an ugly spotlight. But they know who they are and what they did and how they failed me. In the book, I traced what I believe was the cause of my violent father’s crazy behavior back to a massive trauma he experienced as a youth — his uncle murdered his entire family of six (his wife, four children under 10, and finally himself) in front of thousands of horrified onlookers. Understanding this crucial element, which I didn’t learn about until I was in my 50s, put my father’s undiagnosed mental illness into perspective for me. His entire extended family was wiped out and he was forced to never mention it again. No wonder he was a mess.
Not every parent is a narcissist. Its rare. The millions of members of my terrible club are sharing their stories and guess what? The estrangees are all reporting the same thing! The cookie cutter techniques these NC adult children use is the same scripted pop-psychology terminology (we are toxic, controlling, narcissistic transactional, etc.), imposing identical, harsh character judgements resulting in life sentences of emotional jail. It is a culling of the herd-of-origin.
So what’s behind this excruciating phenomenon? I think its a very appropriate question that begs some sunlight. Why would so many 40- and 30- and 20-somethings not only break their parents’ hearts, but also short circuit their own and their children’s foundational inheritances, not to mention elder love, wisdom and support — all this in exchange for false, social media-driven pseudo-principals.
I’m guessing that my oldest daughter ditched me at the urging of her angry ex-step father. Why my other daughter, who has two wonderful sons pulled the plug on me is a complete mystery since she and her sister fell out a decade ago and she has no truck with my ex. In a truth vacuum, there’s no way to know anything for sure. To me, not facing the one person who cares about your more than anyone in the world, and tell them they are being fired is an act of cowardice. This ‘ambiguous loss’ is one of the most searingly brutal effects of going ‘NC’ (No Contact). It’s very much a death, but not something one is likely to discuss with anyone who has normal relationships with their children. And most people do have normal relationships with their kids, making every holiday, vacation story and talk of life’s daily interactions an excruciating and lonely gloss-over. It is the reason why these support groups are so important and ultimately revealing that there is something sinister going on.
As for me, I am an artist, so I paint about this pain. Dealing with the whole scenario is such a head trip that every day I can feel myself looking over a cliff’s edge into a chasm of deep depression. But because I have a loving husband, wonderful friends and a medical marijuana card, I can express my pain onto canvas or a keyboard. But this never ceasing, solid pain casts a shadow over everything which takes all of my mental muscle to ignore. I also worry about what my daughter is modeling for her sons – the art of erasure.
