Ask Me Again Tomorrow (15 page)

Then I went to school. I read everything I could find. I’d read one book, check the bibliography, and find other authors to read. Esther Harding’s
Women’s Mysteries
, Barbara G. Walker’s
Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets
and her
Woman’s Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects
. And on and on. I began to understand that there was a time when the feminine was celebrated. When men and women worshiped a Goddess who was revered as the wise creator and the source for universal order and harmony. It wasn’t until the ascension of Greek male-oriented culture, when the Goddess began to be perceived as threatening, that these matri-focal cultures were dismantled and even erased from the historical record. I became a sponge for any information I could find about the Goddess and prehistorical culture. I felt I had found something of incalculable value that I had somehow lost or misplaced. I kept reading.

Then something inexplicable happened to me. I was lying on a massage table, and while the masseuse was working on me, I slowly became aware that there was someone—something?—else in the room. I opened my eyes and there was nothing there. When I closed them the sensation came back. I sensed a large, androgynous presence in the room. From the back of my head I heard a voice say, “Celebrate Her. Celebrate Her.”

I got frightened and started to cry. The masseuse asked what was the matter with me. I was very reluctant to admit what I just experienced. I was afraid she’d think I had lost it—
I
was wondering if I had lost it—but I finally told her about the presence and the voice. She said, “Well, say something back.” I started to cry even harder. “I don’t know how. I don’t know how to celebrate Her. I know how to suffer, but not how to celebrate.” Then the voice spoke again. “You are of Her. You will know how to celebrate Her.”

I asked the masseuse never to tell anyone what had happened. On the way home, I decided it was some aural hallucination brought on by stress. I kept it completely to myself.

The next time it happened, I’d just gotten off the N train at Forty-second Street and was angrily pushing my way through the rush-hour crowd on the ramp, trying to make the five-thirty bus. I was late as usual. Everyone was moving so slowly, my patience was at an end. I couldn’t bear the thought of having to wait another thirty minutes if I missed this bus. I had to get home and make dinner for the kids.

Then I heard a voice, as if it were coming through a loudspeaker, saying, “Turn around, turn around.” This time I wasn’t scared, I just turned around. Below me on the ramp and the platform was a sea of people. I heard the voice say, “She loves everyone.”

Call it aural hallucination. Call it inner perception. Or even a spiritual experience. Whether it comes from a female essence or a male essence, the message is, we are loved.

It would be nice to think that that experience altered my perceptions completely, but the truth is, I was still so overwhelmed by work and responsibilities that I was blind to things I should have seen.

On one front, good things were happening. Louie relearned to walk and slowly began to pick up the threads of his work life. This was hard and often demoralizing. It must have been incredibly difficult, but I watched Louie continue his “long march” without complaint. Christina, on the other hand, was not doing so well.

One day I got a call from Christina’s school telling me that we should come in for a parent-teacher conference, where we were told that Christina, who had always been an excellent student, had lately been no student at all: she had cut almost seventy-five days that year. If she wanted to graduate the next year, she would have to make up the credits.

She had wanted to go to Martha’s Vineyard that summer to waitress, but I insisted she stay home and not only make up the lost credits but see a therapist. After she’d been seeing the therapist for a few weeks, he asked if Louie and I would join her for a few sessions, which we did. One day, he asked to see me alone. After talking with me a bit, he said, “Louie’s okay. Christina’s okay. You’re the one in trouble. Unless you do something for yourself, I’m going to ask you not to come to the sessions anymore.”

I had to let go of the high alert mode I’d been operating on for the years since Louie’s accident. I had no idea how to do this, but I knew that it was time—and that I didn’t have a choice.

I
T HAD BEEN
a long five years since Louie’s accident and the therapist was right. I was now the one in trouble. Everyone thought it was a great idea for me to finally do something for myself. I thought about going to a spa or visiting the Jersey Shore, where we’d taken some family vacations, but then a friend told me about a place she’d just come back from, the Omega Institute in upstate New York. The mission statement in their literature puts it succinctly: “To create inspiring learning environments that awaken the best in the human spirit.” How bad could that be?

The one week I could free up on my calendar coincided with what Omega called “Spirituality Week.” I told Louie it sounded like a camp for precocious adults. But the brochures listed the vegetarian food, the beautiful nature walks, and a pond for swimming and, best of all, it was cheaper than any spa I could find.

The program for the week centered on a core faculty of leaders from different religious and spiritual traditions. We were instructed to focus on one leader for the week and attend all their workshops. I had read some books about shamanism, so I decided to sign on for the sessions led by an American shaman, a woman, who had swum with the whales. I figured anyone who had the chutzpah to swim with the biggest mammal on earth must have something to offer me.

The first evening began with a reception where all of the spiritual leaders were introduced. As I sat in the audience, I was struck by the presentation of a small Indian woman dressed in saffron robes who was introduced as the Reverend Mother Gayatri Devi. “Ma,” as she was called, had an almost visible aura of well-being about her.

The next morning, I got up and dutifully went off to the shaman’s first workshop. There were about twenty of us, and the shaman began by “clearing” the space with sage smoke. Then she passed around instruments and people started beating drums, and, as I recall, we did a lot of chanting. I began to wonder what was supposed to happen here and what would be expected of me. This was all very foreign to me but everyone else looked comfortable. I started to imitate what people were doing. I didn’t do it well, or with any confidence, but I was participating.

The next day, the group had tripled in size and now there were about sixty of us. When I got there, the sage had already been burned and the drums were going and people were shouting, crying, raging, singing, and emoting—I felt like I’d wandered into a first-year acting class. Then the shaman asked, “Why are you here?” While she went around the room and people answered, I found myself panicking and thinking, “I can’t say I’m here because our therapist told me he’d stop seeing me if I didn’t do something for myself.” I had no idea how I would answer the question. I found myself getting choked up, and when it was my turn I blurted out, “I came here to open my heart,” and then we all went back to drumming and chanting. During a break, I escaped.

All of this demonstrativeness was uninteresting to me. I decided to just walk around—the gardens, especially the vegetable gardens, were lovely and restful. I continued to wander around; I walked by a little house, peeked through the window, and saw about a half dozen people, men and women, sitting on cushions—in front of the elderly Indian woman I’d seen the first evening. I slipped into the house and took a seat in the back of the room. I soon realized this woman was talking about the Great Mother. I knew I’d found my place.

Gayatri Devi had been born and raised in India, in the Vedanta religious tradition. She told us that Vedanta “teaches the oneness of our existence, and the harmony of all religions.” “There is one God,” she said, “and many paths to that God. That is why Vedanta reveres the prophets and teachers of all religions and worships the divinity of the soul.”

She went on to tell us there are four paths to divinity: knowledge, work, meditation, and devotion. She had dedicated herself to the path of devotion; devotion to the Great Mother.

As she talked, I cried. I felt totally receptive to her and everything she was saying and the tears streamed down my face. When the session was over, I approached her assistant and asked if I could speak to Ma. “No, no,” Sudha told me. “Ma spends four days a week in solitude and during the three days that she’s available to the community, she has many obligations.” Ten minutes later, I was still hanging around and Sudha approached me. When she said Ma wanted to see me, I panicked. “No, no, that’s all right, I know she’s busy.” Sudah pointed to where Ma was sitting, under a tree, facing an empty chair. As I walked up to see her, I felt I was floating. I sat down at her feet and Ma said she had seen my tears. Did I want to talk? And then I told her what I had yet to speak of to anyone. I told her about the two times I thought I heard voices. She put her hand on the back of her head and asked me if the voices came from there. I nodded. “Yes, yes,” she said, and then asked, “What are you afraid of?” all the while looking at me as though she had X-ray vision and could see right into my heart. I thought about what the voice said: “She loves everyone.” I told Ma, “I’m afraid of all this love, I’m afraid I will be lost.” She nodded and said, “You’re afraid of drowning in the sea of her love.” She sounded positively joyful as she said this. She then told me, “You’ll be all right.” As we parted, I asked Ma if I would ever see her again. “Yes,” she said, “we will see each other again.”

Meeting Ma validated so much of my own reading and inquiry, but it also validated what was going on inside of my own heart. And I was no longer alone with my secret.

Not long after my week at Omega, my eighty-four-year-old mother was a passenger in a senior citizens’ van that was hit by a car. I couldn’t believe this was happening again. Though she suffered no broken bones, the muscles in her leg were seriously damaged and the pain was severe. Painkillers were prescribed. By the time she came home to Apollo’s house, she was a changed woman. At first we thought it was the painkillers that caused her to withdraw into herself. Soon, she no longer listened to the music, which for so long had sustained her. She took to keeping the curtains in her apartment drawn and almost stopped eating. She became pale and thin—and terribly tired. She wasn’t doing any of the things she used to do. We no longer sang Greek songs together and she refused to play our usual card games. She played endless games of solitaire.

One day I finally convinced her to play a card game I knew she loved, casino. She’d grown up playing it with her sisters and was the family champion. We played game after game and she lost each one. I could see that she couldn’t stand it any longer and started to really pay attention. When she lost
that
game, she came back like a demon and started to win. Alec was back.

Now all that was left was to get her out of the house.

I had a flash of inspiration. I knew what to do. I said to her, “Alec, I’m ashamed of you.” She reared back, she was astonished—I’d never spoken like this to her before. I could see it was going to work.

I went on. “I’ve never seen you back away from anything. I’ve never seen you frightened.” She said, “Get your coat,” and we walked out the door.

She only made it to the corner the first day, but pretty soon we were walking around the block. She never thanked me, of course, but I knew she finally thought I’d been a good daughter.

Slowly we started to change with each other. The tenor of our relationship moved more toward being sisters than the antagonists we had been. Sometimes she would run through all of her sisters’ names before getting to mine. And she seemed to need my emotional support.

One day we were at her kitchen table, talking about our lives back in Arlington, when I was finishing high school. Those were the days when my father “worked late” and she would wait up, gazing out the kitchen window, weeping, while she waited for him. The days when he would say, “Shut up, Alec. You don’t know what you’re talking about,” or criticize her for what she was wearing. My feelings came flooding back to me and I started to cry. I said things to her I never thought I’d say. “Why didn’t you speak up for yourself? Why did you insist that we respect him when he didn’t deserve it? Why did you let him treat you with such disrespect?” By then I was shouting. “Why didn’t you leave him?” Now I was sobbing. She didn’t defend or explain herself. Instead, she looked at me and said, “All right now, darling, stop crying. You’ve cried enough.” She spoke with such tenderness, trying to soothe and comfort me. I saw her heart, her love for me. Her mother’s living heart. In the end, she only cared that I no longer carry these painful memories.

It seemed the more frail and less active she became, the more her heart opened. If I admired a piece of jewelry, she’d flick her hand and say, “Take it. I have no use for it.” She started to neglect her plants and spent less and less time with her friends and neighbors. Apollo and his wife, Maggie, had always wanted to move to Los Angeles and it seemed the time had come. I talked to Louie and we agreed my mother would come live with us—the Zorichs. She would never be able to manage stairs, so we moved her favorite things into our dining room and converted it into a beautiful room for her. From now on, she would live only steps away from her favorite room in the house—the kitchen.

Coming to live with us seemed to restore my mother some: she began to cook and showed some interest in the garden. She even taught me how to make some of my favorite Greek dishes. She also appeared in a couple of productions at the Whole Theatre; she was such a scene-stealer. She was in one play where she was supposed to sit at a table, eating spaghetti, while the other actors were engaged in dialogue. She made such a bit of business out of eating the spaghetti that the audiences began to ignore the play just to watch her and laugh. I told her she couldn’t do it anymore. She said, “Why not, they love me. They think I’m funny.” I said the other actors didn’t like it. “Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

I had been working all that year, between projects at the theater, compiling material, hoping to create something related to the Goddess culture for the stage. I met with Scott McVay from the Dodge Foundation. Scott had long supported us at the Whole Theatre, and during this annual meeting he happened to ask me what I was reading these days. I thought,
Do I tell him? Run the risk of alienating him?
Then, trusting that he was indeed a man of vision, I told him about my research into prehistory cultures. I told him I was uncertain how to synthesize this material and present it in a way that would have meaning for people today. On the spot, he offered financial support if I came up with a way of putting it on the stage. I found a writer and continued working, now with her on board. I traveled to her summerhouse on the Cape, where I realized I would be only a few miles from Ma’s East Coast ashram in Cohasset. Also nearby was a place where you could swim with the dolphins, an idea that had great appeal to me.

On my way to Ma’s, I went to the dolphin swim. There was a group of people preparing to go in the water with the dolphin. We watched a video to learn some basics about dolphins and were told we should not assume there would be any interaction. There was one old, enormous white dolphin that lived there, but they told us he might not respond to our presence. We put on snorkels, masks, and wet suits. When I got in the water, I suddenly lost my enthusiasm. I was
hoping
the dolphin would ignore me. I felt vulnerable and unprotected. I floated there, on the surface, unable to move, and then slowly, a long white form passed by me, turned and hung in the water in front of me. I felt that the dolphin sensed my fear and was trying to communicate that I was safe. He then swam away and I spent the rest of the time looking for him. When we were called back to shore, everyone left the water except one man and me. At that moment, the dolphin broke the water and started swimming back and forth in front of us. We both started shouting, with delight, “You’re great! Oh my god, you’re great!” The dolphin, in a smooth white streak, disappeared beneath the surface.

When I got to the ashram, I realized Ma was not going to be as forthcoming and involved with me as she had been at Omega. I was expected to be on my own. I ate delicious food, read, talked with other visitors, walked the grounds, attended services, and listened to Ma’s Sunday talk. Hearing her speak continued to move and inspire me.

Back home,
The Goddess Project
moved forward. I elected a director, and together with the writer we structured an evening in two parts. Part One was “Women’s Passages,” about the three stages of a woman’s life central to Goddess worship and culture: Virgin, Mother, and Crone. In Part Two, we dramatized a version of the Sumerian myth of Inanna. In this story, the goddess Inanna, who reigns supreme in the world above, descends into the underworld to visit her exiled sister, Ereshkigal, who reigns over the world below.

One interpretation of the Sumerian myth is that Inanna and Ereshkigal represent two aspects of the female essence, one that is “acceptable” and therefore can live aboveground, and one that is “unacceptable” and must reside belowground. For me, Ereshkigal exemplifies that aspect of woman that is “buried in oblivion and covered in silence.” As we enact it, the two sisters are given an opportunity to see and know each other, becoming a tale of rebirth and regeneration. Our first performance was at the Whole Theatre; it was a physical, exhausting, exhilarating evening. At the end, the audience jumped to their feet and I went to find my mother. She looked at me in wonder and said, “I never thought I’d live to see anything like this.” My satisfaction in making this happen for her was profound.

In 1989, I went to Los Angeles to make the movie
Dad
with Jack Lemmon and Ted Danson. We had a week off, so I went to Ma’s West Coast ashram in La Crescenta, California. Again I was told to do what I would.

I remember one woman in her eighties who had spent a long career as a nurse, specializing in schizophrenia. She had elected to clear the leaves from the walkway by the shrine. I wanted to contribute but had no idea how. Then, during a long walk, I came upon a grove of trees and discovered some overgrown stone steps, leading to a small glade. I found a dirty marble bench covered with leaves and decided to clean it. I then noticed something covered by overgrowth directly in front of the bench. I cleared away vines and branches and uncovered a statue of the Virgin and Child. I realized I had found my job. It was to tend to this little grotto, to weed it and keep it clean so that others could come and sit with the Virgin mother.