Sexual Sanctity: A Memoir of My Burning Times and Learning Times

PART TWO: The Learning Times: Chapter One

Chapter One

The Wild Horses of Heom

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure, it is our light not our darkness that most frightens us." ~ A Course in Miracles

Section One: Jungle Woman

It would take me years before I'd learn to live with the “Wild Horses of Heom.” But from that point forward, no matter how crazy, or terrifying things got for me, that Soulful leap down the mountainside changed everything. Certain posses of tormentors, both within and without, including people and situations that were not exactly aggressive, but were nonetheless stagnant, and neglectful to their own lives and communities, knew they could not follow me now. I had entered an era of my life where, although I still didn't know it fully yet, I would become a person that most people would run screaming from. Intra-psychically, and they knew it, I looked like the female Mowgli, from Rudyard Kipling's original “Jungle Book.” I temporarily forgot the language of "civilized" people. I know that, on an energetic level, although I was saying words in English, I was rapidly losing the ability to relate to, and communicate with the people around me. I look back, and I see spiritually, a dark, tan, half-naked woman, in a loincloth, bare breasts and wild, unruly hair. She's carrying a spear she'd fashioned herself, and she's totally focused on one thing, and one thing only: Listening for the Wild Horses of Heom.

I've heard there are still people from those days who speak about me as if I'd been this wild animal they escaped from, by the skin of their teeth. They are sure, I'm still out there, scaring the pants off “normal people,” and someone ought to do the right thing for everyone's safety and lock me up. The thing is, in a lot of ways, they were, and are absolutely right; except only in the sense that I was and still am, filled with a Force to be reckoned with. A Force that is Wild, and terrifying to those who have not challenged their own “posses,” and who have not learned to trust their own Essential Instincts.

I wouldn't have hurt anyone on purpose; I was, and still am, very gentle of heart. The plunge into Heom, and the constant focus, and tracking of the Wild Horses of Heom was turning me into the Jungle Woman, who is strong, like the wild animals, but will accidentally knock a civilized member of society over, when I meant to just help them avoid a pothole they didn't seem to see on time. I'd send civilized people sprawling left and right, pushing them out of harm's way; but it didn't seem to do them any good, because they would be so terrified, or pissed about having been pushed, they wouldn't even see that they just nearly fell into an old well. Instead, they'd get up, usually swearing and seething and run as far as they could, away from me. I would, in most cases, shrug, and continue on listening for the Wild Horses, as the Jungle Woman that had rapidly taken over inside, didn't understand civilized humans at all.

My family, especially one of my sisters and my mother noticed the change in me. I remember my Force-Field becoming something I could see, sense, and experience in my day to day life. The fundamental wounds and challenges of my life up until that point were far from over, but I was learning on a moment to moment basis, that I could decide, just through moment to moment prayer, in different forms, whether my circumstances either internally, or externally would distract me from my most Central Soul Work; to listen for, and follow the Wild Horses of Heom.

I didn't call myself Jungle Woman, or the Force I was following Wild Horses, or Heom at the time. It was all so very new to me. I just knew that if I wanted to be, I could be in control of how I responded to my inner and outer environment. The Wild Horses of Heom led me to several life-changing pieces of literature that would be pivotal to the beginnings of my deep self-discovery; as a Woman, Healer, and Mother.

One of the first pieces of literature was, "A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles," by Marianne Williamson.

I look back now, and I see clearly that Jungle Woman thought that the book was too civilized, too domesticated for her taste. However, she was after all, working with huge areas of my psyche that were extremely domesticated, and she needed to start somewhere. At the time, I consciously thought the book was brilliant, and it did help to open and heal channels to my Soul, that if I hadn't come across that book, I perhaps would have had a much harder time healing in the long term.

The book is the Author's reflections on an even bigger work called "A Course in Miracles." "The Course" explains that focusing on "The Crucifixion" as a means to Salvation, can be likened to a parent, beating, and abusing their child, and saying that it's "for their own good." The Course is unwavering in its explanation and teaching that it is in "The Resurrection," in which we find the Course, Teaching and Path to Inner Peace. The Course states that, "Nothing real can be threatened, nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the Peace of God."

"Nothing real can be threatened." I was blown away by the simplicity, and deep, existential power of that statement. It has its literary, and religious origins in the Holy Bible,

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds…" Philippians Chapter 4, Verses 6 - 7.

I was waking up to the truth, that all my life, it was as if my religious community was trying, feverishly to keep God hung on a torture stake, like the Christians they were so proud to supposedly have surpassed in truth, and spiritual understanding. All the while proclaiming from the pulpit that "God is Unconditional Love."

I've always known, deep in my core, psychic catacombs, that God is Unconditional Love. I had to begin to ask myself, "why are people so obsessed with gore, and control? Why was my mother, for example, so hell-bent on keeping God in an impossibly unreachable place in her life?"

She talked about her "faith" in God all the time, but in the same breath, she'd always share how impossible Unconditional Love was to even get close to embodying, and fathoming. Reflecting deeply now, I see more clearly what Jungle Woman was beginning to teach me then.

When people get closer to finding God in themselves, they inevitably come to those places deep within that require a letting go, a surrendering of control. Many, on the path to Spiritual Enlightenment, will be able to get to a place where they can begin to surrender many things that, at that point in their spiritual journey, seem like huge sacrifices. But most will eventually become distracted, in one form or another. The distractions come in two basic categories; as some manifestation of pain, or pleasure.

Section Two: Cradle of Life, Death and Rebirth

“The Principle of Heom” can be likened to a pendulum swing. As the pendulum swings back and forth, back and forth, the path of its swing is in the shape of a curved line, like the smile on a smiley face. The pendulum's chain, string or rod, that is attached to a weight at the end of it, is attached at its other end, to a fixed point.

The Wild Horses of Heom are totally unpredictable, but they have one constant; they follow the timing of the pendulum swing with deadly precision.

The anchor point of the pendulum is where the "vertical axis" and the "horizontal plane" meet. That place, that Narrow Pass, that Strategic Point, that Dangerous Force, is the meeting place between Soul and Body, between Life and Death, between Light and Dark, between Heaven and Earth, between Pain and Pleasure. It is the Fertile Meeting Place of Yin and Yang, of Positive Charge and Negative Charge, of Masculine and Feminine, of Female and Male, it is the Cosmic Core, it is Absolute Sex.

"What hurts you, blesses you,

Darkness is your candle." ~ Rumi

"God's gonna trouble the water…"

The Cosmic Pendulum never stops. But our personal pendulums, and cultural pendulums, especially in our modern, Burning Culture, not only stop, they stop so frequently, and so chronically; the flooding, accidents, and cave-ins on our main intra-psychic roads, have become so severe, the hacking, and jerry-rigging, and splintering of incessant detouring, has become a cultural psychosis.

We hope to God, if there is a God, there's escape, exit, from this extraordinarily massive amount of confusion. But we hope to the same, now vague, and long forgotten, until this desperate moment God; that there is a way out that does not require having to stop our car, get out, bypass that maddening, yet now commonplace detour, and wade in the water.

I think that many modern people in the last forty to sixty years or so have gotten to a place of desperation, or darkness in their lives that has driven them to this point; where the stagnant, flooding on the now forgotten Main Road, grabs their attention. How? They could never tell you how exactly; it's so evasive, that sound, or is it just a vibration? No, just a feeling…

But the problem with prosperity, and relative comfort,

that has no basis, or anchor in Origin, is that it has a way of keeping us distracted for long enough to get us back on the terrible, even destructive detours, we've constructed ourselves, or by others; internally or outwardly.

"Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake, will find it." Matthew Chapter 10, Verse 39

The Cradle of Life, Death and Rebirth is between the wide, volcanic hips of the Goddess, the Sacred, Original Feminine. The Wild Horses, moving as one powerful body, is the Magma; the Core, Creative Energy of All things. All things of the Earthly World, the Realm of Soul, and the Realm of Essential Existence, that is cradled in between, and kept in constant motion, by the relentless Pulse, or Pendulum of Unconditional Love, Heart, or "Shimjung." (Korean Translation)

Section Three: Tennessee

Another piece of literature that I read when I was sixteen, and have referenced again, and again over the last almost twenty years, is a book called "Mr. God, this is Anna," by Fynn

It is a true story about a little "Jungle Woman" by the name of Anna, who is found on the streets by a very tall man of broad stature, named Fynn. Fynn would come to find out that The Wild Horses of Heom, so-to-speak, run strong in this four-year-old urchin, who had run away from her abusive home; and consequently, came to live with him and his mother, at her own declaration.

Little Anna has an extraordinary relationship with God, whom she calls "Mr. God." In her other-worldly, yet totally earthly-child-way, Anna is able to not just explain to Fynn, but rigorously instruct Fynn; in hundreds of lessons concerning the Meaning of Life, the Nature of God, and the Depths of Love. There's even a whole chapter, where Anna, in her own way, explains the cosmic concept, of Absolute Sex. Or as Fynn describes it, "Capital SEX, versus, just commonplace lowercase, sex."

Anna, since I read her story, has been like an Eternal Mother-Flame to my own Soul-Flame. When my Soul-Flame, throughout my teenage years, early twenties, and the last twelve years as a wife and mother; would be experiencing a toxic dowsing of some kind, Anna's Mother-Flame would huddle close to mine, and keep the waves of destruction from consuming, or later, undoing healing on my Soul's connection to this earth.

Hands-down the most catalytic journey I would take after my awakening, following the Wild Horses of Heom, would be to Nashville, Tennessee.

The commonplace, civilized person in modern culture, is entirely too susceptible, and often totally conditioned in, thinking that is too literal. When I knew that I was going to Nashville Tennessee to write and sing music, I was nineteen years old, and ready to stretch my newly healed, and more powerful wings. Most of those I was close to, thought I was nuts, and even wrangled my mother a bit for "letting me" do this crazy thing, rather than go to college. Let's just say at this juncture in my memoirs, my mother's "support" of me throughout the years has been extremely fraught with conflict.

I do remember there being a couple of supportive voices, who even donated some funds for the sojourn. I got a summer job, and scrimped and saved, and followed my instincts concerning a place to live for the first couple of months. I had about $1,500 by the end of the summer, and a place to live with family connections, right in downtown Nashville.

Painful Clarity

There was a member of the church community who also became close friends with my family. Even years after his death, the deep, unanswered questions about his connection and dysfunction, surrounding his relationship to our family, specifically my mother, I truly feel keeps our family from healing completely. However, I don't wish to go into what would be considered speculative commentary about those unanswered questions here. I do, however, feel compelled to share some experiences surrounding this person that I feel are fundamental to how I began to develop Heom Sight and Instincts.

The family friend could be really disrespectful, belligerent, and toxic. I had known him since I was about two years old. Looking back, I can see now with much more clarity, how unacceptable his behavior was to me, and my father especially, and the both of us, including everyone else, were more than strictly obliged to excuse it. Any complaint about this person, seemed to send my mother into an exceptionally irrational flurry of defensiveness and many times, toxic, abusive behavior. This trained us children to just simply overlook our friend's behavior, and even in varying degrees of coping, transform this person in our minds, into someone to look up to and trust.

Our friend became my ride to my summer job in Massachusetts, that year I went to Tennessee. I remember one afternoon heading home from work, clearly, how he did his usual, chronic instigating, gaslighting, and stubborn behavior. At the time he was probably in his sixties. I was, as I said, nineteen, and I was becoming more and more aware that I didn't have to just take what lifelong, abusive adults would say, and/or do to me. Or, more aptly, understanding that, what they were and had been doing is in fact, abusive. In other words, I wasn't backing down. Our friend became extremely disgruntled and heavily silent, as we met my mother halfway home.

I knew better than to bring up our friend's abusive behavior, but I couldn't drown out the Heom in my Heart. Jungle Woman just jumped out and began stomping her feet, and waving her spear. She wasn't going to hurt anyone with it, she just wanted to let my mother know she was serious about what she meant. As expected, my mother escalated, and that abusive red mist I'd come to know so well was surrounding her.

She pulled into a grocery store parking lot to pick up some things for home. She got out and slammed the car door. I just faced forward, trying to center myself, when I noticed out of the corner of my eye my mother was coming up to my open passenger window. I turned to see what she wanted, and before I could think, she reached through the window, and backhanded me across the face. Her knuckles hit the tender skin next to my eye, and left a shiner.

Looking back, I know, a more connected, and integrated Jungle Woman would have driven me to get out of the car and give my mother a verbal warning, (publicity be damned), that she'd never forget. I wasn't a child any longer, and if I were further in my development with Heom, I would have been able to do that. But as it was, the assault triggered ingrained coping, and survival mechanisms, and I absorbed the shock as best I could, while deep inside, an old, and very infected sorrow threatened to try and drown me once more.

When Fynn brought Anna home, and his mother helped him undress the four-year-old girl to bathe her, Fynn describes how he had felt so overcome with sorrow, turned to anger, when he saw Anna's little body, covered in bruises. Unconsciously, Anna was for me, like a holding place for myself, so I wouldn't slip away from the horror of the inhumanity my own mother displayed so many times since I was a small child. The fact that Anna had been able to find protection in the very short, but powerful life she lived, was spiritually like tending to a little, warm, and cozy place by the fire deep inside my heart. The body's response to that kind of terrible sorrow is like the marrow in the bones freezing. It's like the breast bone cracking down the middle, and the pain is so wretched you just hold your breath…and you dare not let it out…so living a life without breathing, suffocation, becomes your normal.

Later, when a family member asked me what had happened to my eye, honestly, I can not remember what I said, but it wasn't the truth. My mother was in the next room, and heard the whole exchange. When the family member left, and I walked into the room where my mother was sitting, my mother had a look on her face I'll never forget, but I can only now articulate: The look on her face, starting with her eyes, was that of having had a decades old mask, temporarily ripped off. The mask my mother wore since I could remember, did little more than to simply mask everything underneath. I remember starting from when I was child, I noticed how her face often had little to no expression. I couldn't tell how she was feeling, about anything, except, or in another sense, especially, when she was in a rage.

The person behind the mask was so spiritually emaciated looking, consumed by terror, and justifications, and piteous, piteous self-torment. That person said something to me, that although in the long run would do further, deeper damage to our relationship, it would also force me to fully wake up to what was fundamentally wrong with everything in my life. She said, "thank you for lying for me."

"Ever since the days of old

Men would search for wealth untold

They'd dig for silver and for gold

And leave the empty holes

And way down south in the Everglades

Where the black water rolls and the sawgrass waves

The eagles fly and the otters play

In the land of the Seminole

So blow, blow Seminole wind

Blow like you're never gonna blow again

I'm calling to you like a long-lost friend

But I know who you are

And blow, blow from the Okeechobee

All the way up to Micanopy

Blow across the home of the Seminole

The alligator and the gar

Progress came and took its toll

And in the name of flood control

They made their plans and they drained the land

Now the Glades are goin' dry

And the last time I walked in the swamp

I stood up on a Cypress stump

I listened close and I heard the ghost

Of Osceola cry

So blow, blow Seminole wind

Blow like you're never gonna blow again

I'm calling to you like a long-lost friend

But I know who you are

And blow, blow from the Okeechobee

All the way up to Micanopy

Blow across the home of the Seminole

The alligator and the gar"

"This was written and recorded by country singer John Anderson, who was born in Florida. 'Seminole Wind' is about the Native Americans (Seminoles) in Florida. The lyrics reference the Seminole war chief Osceola, whose ghost cries out over the destruction of natural resources for financial gain.

In the second verse, Anderson uses the draining of the Florida Everglades as an example of human greed. Native American tribes took refuge there under Osceola's leadership during the Second Seminole War in the mid-1800s. By the end of the century, developers began making plans to drain the vast swampland, covering nearly 4,000 square miles, and convert it to farmland. The continuous drainage projects, for development and flood-control purposes, wreaked havoc on the Everglades' delicate ecosystem and, despite efforts to restore the wetlands, it was named the most critically endangered site in the US in 2017." ~ songfacts.com

"They'd dig for silver and for gold, and they'd leave the empty holes…And in the name of flood control

They made their plans and they drained the land

Now the Glades are goin' dry…"

Jungle Woman was going back to the empty holes. She was going to stop the draining. The Wild Horses of Heom were taking off, and more consciously now, I was waking up to the fact that my mother's and my family's problems were the product of some terrible sickness in the culture. A sickness that began not so long ago, but was never addressed properly. A terrible fever, a burning, that makes its host dig, and dig to find hacks to avoid the truth, and drain and drain to try and destroy the moisture, the "rolling black water," that is life itself, to push narratives that are ultimately self-serving. The rolling black water, that would cool the sickness, unearth the source of torment, and nourish our Soul's connection to this earth.

Mined and Drained

To this day, I know there are people from that time I went to Tennessee, who have held preconceived notions that I took off with a pipedream to Tennessee, couch-surfed, and came back when I was done "dinkin' around,'' to begin a "real life." To put it simply, they are in many respects, consumed by burning fever; a mining and draining of their own Soulful Resources, because if they woke up to their intra-psychic feverish toiling, they would see that nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Wild Horses of Heom are the "rolling black water." Like the magma core of the earth, the rolling black water is the essential element that builds a home for, and engenders life for all.

I look back and I see how still frightened I was of Heom. I see how for many years, my family's, community's, and society's conditioning by feverish toiling, left many places deep inside where the rocks and everglades of my psyche had been left to manage, gutted, and siphoned. One of my main reasons for realizing this, is because for years, the destructive mining and domesticating attempted to permanently overlay that sojourn to Tennessee with dry, haunted, and lifeless narrations inside my own mind and heart. Those narrations ironically enough tried to bring me down by pinning me with the crimes that they were committing to the Soul: "You keep chasing things that don't exist, draining resources from others to feed your empty attempts at success."

I see now how long it took to heal, and to see the endlessly deep and beautiful, internal resource that first sojourn to Tennessee is, in large part because I was for years, still connected to miners and drainers.

The Music

Just recently, I was in a BBQ restaurant in Tennessee with a young man whom I consider like my little brother. He is the youngest child of one of my best friends I would come to meet, and live with the majority of the time during that first sojourn to Music City. When I was nineteen he was about five or six, and on the weekends I was off work, I remember playing in the yard with that sweet, sweet boy.

The hum of Heom struck my thoughts and I felt to say something to him. I felt to say basically, what I wrote just now in the previous paragraphs: "I know a lot of people think that I just came to Tennessee, couch surfed, and basically bummed around on Music Row, and didn't meet anyone of influence, or accomplish anything of significance musically, but that's actually not true at all. I know you were really young, so for some reason I want to let you know that although the first Tennessee trip wasn't just about writing and singing music fundamentally, the music work I did accomplish was with pretty influential people in the music industry. I worked with songwriters who had had a lot of success with getting their work on the radio, and a voice coach whose claim to fame was having coached many stars in their budding years. I was able to meet, learn from, and work with these people through an Artist Developer who had dozens of pictures in her office of her, and huge names in the industry, especially country singing legends, and we became pretty good friends. You may remember I did record a professional, studio demo with her of songs that I had co-written."

He listened in his sweet, understanding way; that old Soul, and that was that. Nothing more needed to be said. I knew at the time he was on the threshold of crossing the boundaries of his own inward and outward life influences, who were terrified of his Soul wading into the rolling black water; willing him, harping at him to stay on the "safe," "dry," land. But he knows deep down, like I do, that that land isn't safe, or dry; it's mined and siphoned to death, and to avoid further damage to Souls called to heal the burning affliction, he needs to break free, and take that leap, over the posse, and down the cliff after the Wild Horses of Heom.

There are many folktales that tell of trees, or other plants, and even bodies of water/wetlands, and wildlife like the Everglades, that speak, sing and whisper to people who, usually as the stories tell it, stumble into their territory.

I love singing and songwriting, and I dare say, at a safe distance from jealous, and siphoned persons, who would label me self-centered or snooty, I'm pretty darn good at it. However, it was through music, the Wild Horses of Heom were leading me on to abandoned graveyards within myself, that although old, crumbled, and almost unrecognizable as burial sites, have even older trees. Trees whose roots go deeper than the graves.

Being in Music City, where millions have congregated over the decades to make music, and chase dreams, I look back, and inward now, and I see how fertile that place is. Indeed, although I wouldn't find out until more than half a decade later, after I returned from that first trip, it is the womb in which I came to be, in my mother's womb. Yes, I was born in Cambridge Massachusetts, but I was conceived in Tennessee.

Being with my absolutely wonderful, and spiritually devout music developer, was like being in the resurrected, and restored Everglades, or more aptly, driving through the Smoky Mountains of Appalachia; where the natural life, especially the grandmother trees, sing. She is Mormon, and from what I remember and experienced, she and her husband have such a beautiful family. It is one of my great hopes I will work with her again one day.

The siphoned, and hollow world of "development," and "progress," starting from within people's psyches, now looking at it from a more healed, and whole place inside myself; is truly, one very important thing to come to understand how to dismantle, disconnect, and disengage from: Self-Involved.

The church sector of Nashville Tennessee, that is part of the American church organization I grew up in, was naturally the first place I looked for a place to stay after my two months were up at my first host's apartment. To this day, smatterings of relatively small, but vicious lashings-out from that community, about my stay there, will surface from time to time.

The church organization, which is different especially now, from the world-wide inter-faith movement, was in the beginning stages fifteen years ago, of realizing that Heom, through the founder's leadership, was calling it back to wade in the deep, deep ancient water, that had birthed it in the first place. The church, had become so self-involved concerning its "progress," and "formula course" for "God's Will," the membership, all across America, from what I'd seen and experienced traveling, and being involved; was rapidly becoming so wretchedly siphoned of the natural inspiration, and the perpetual deepening of religious faith through devotion to Spirit; that Jungle Woman's presence, even at that time, was immediately declared indecent, crazy, irresponsible and even dangerous.

As I mentioned earlier, I was recently in Nashville, and from what I've learned, none of the younger generation in the community wish to be involved in the community. What makes it even more tragically astounding to me, is that the members don't seem to think that this is a problem. Like so many church communities across America; their empty church halls, with a few graying heads, and next to no young blood, as in legacy, doesn't seem to bother them. But I know it not only bothers them, the sorrow that they've entombed in their hearts, is coming out in ways that for those who haven't faced the rolling black waters, or dared to leap into the canyon after the Wild Horses of Heom, shudder, and dip out of, like they just saw an abandoned rotting corpse.

Because in many, profound ways intra-psychically they have; their own neglected, and siphoned lives.

While in Nashville recently, I saw a man, who is a church member, and fifteen years ago I remember what he looked like; he had been a bit portly, but sturdy, with a big, broad smile. They had a church service during my last visit, and this man attended with his wife. He was fighting cancer, and looked like vampires had come for a siphon on him. It was in his eyes I saw what broke my heart; a sorrow so deep, like a dried up well, I couldn't see the bottom of.

The service was also a potluck, and afterwards we set up for supping together. For reasons I can only guess at, this man sat in a separate room, by himself, with only his wife attending to his needs. I went into the room where he was eating alone, and I asked him if he would like some coffee. He looked me straight in the eyes, and I looked straight into his. I let Heom channel through me, and spiritually, without physical touch, She went deep into his heart.

Next time you're standing somewhere there are trees, listen. She's singing, calling you, hoping you'll come near, go looking. The Grandmother Tree is pointing you in the direction of Heom; where freedom lies, just beyond what might be most painful to you at this moment, but one day will bless you in deep gratitude. For you bothered to listen, you bothered to look, you bothered to see, you allowed yourself to feel, even when the pain was more than you thought you could handle at the time.