The Whistling Fire

I grew up attending the Catholic Church. The traditions and architecture of Catholicism are seated deep within me, and although I no longer attend the Catholic Church, I am sure what I experienced as a child lives within me still.

One of the traditional Catholic celebrations that I participated in as a child was the May Crowning of the Virgin Mary. Spring was regal during May in Indiana. The tulips had come and gone and the earth worms were back, covering the sidewalks and drives after the soaking warm rains of the season. The earth was wet and ripe, prepared to receive the seeds of life that she would carry through the year. Heavy winter jackets were replaced by raincoats. Gloves were happily stowed away. Galoshes were slipped over shoes and umbrellas popped up across the community. The May Crowning in the sanctuary was the highlight of spring, preceded by days of gathering lilacs and bachelor’s buttons to adorn the small shrine to the Virgin Mary placed in the classroom. There were processional practices in the afternoons. The girls were released to line up for the processional, while the boys restlessly waited in the rows of wooden pews.

May crownings occur in many Roman Catholic parishes and homes with the crowning of a statue of the Virgin Mary. The ceremony traditionally takes place with young girls wearing dresses and carrying flowers, traditionally hawthorn, to adorn the statue. One of the girls, often the youngest, carries a crown of flowers or an actual golden crown on a cushion for placement by the May Queen, often the oldest girl, on the statue. The flowers are replaced throughout the month to keep them fresh.

It was an eighth grade girl who was always selected to climb the wooden ladder up to the Virgin Mary and place the floral crown on her head. My sister, Candy – Cassandra Renee – had the honor when she was in the eighth grade. As I watched her I wanted to do that, too; to be like her.

When Candy was in high school, she dated the local drug dealer. He was a national debate champion and a druggie. Doesn’t seem to fit, but at the time it was manageable for him. Things got out of control for him when he went to college and the police caught up with him and my sister. It was a first offense for my sister, who was along for the ride one too many times. A good attorney and all of my parent’s savings cleaned things up for Candy. For my parents things weren’t as cleared up. It was the end of their relationship with Candy. She moved in with her boyfriend and he refused to allow her to see us – any of us. The last time we were together was the day before my sister Fran’s wedding. I went to her home to ask her to come to the wedding; to come celebrate with us. We got stoned together and listened to Michael rant about government policy. My sister gave me an “isn’t he wonderful” look and I was too stoned to argue, even though I wanted to tell her to run away as fast as she could. She didn’t come to the wedding.

The procession for the May crowning started at the back of the sanctuary and moved up the aisle toward the altar. The Virgin Mary had her place to the right of the altar, mounted on the wall behind a candelabrum, which was moved for the placement of the processional ladder. Classrooms of girls wearing pastel spring dresses and polished white shoes proceeded down the aisle, organized by grade and height to file into the front row pews. The eight grade girls entered the sanctuary, the chosen one following the pillowed crown of flowers. I’m sure there was music, but I don’t recall what it was. The sunlight flowed in from the windows over the altar and the pungent smells of wood and incense were strong. We each carried flowers. I either carried a clutch of bachelor’s buttons or lilacs. I do not recall.

Bachelor’s buttons grow wild in Indiana. They are a weed; Cornflower – Centaurea cyanus. They grew rampant in the field by the pond in our neighborhood and would bloom in shades of blue and purple. Their blooms lasted what seemed like forever. My sisters and I would clip them for our Mother and for the Virgin. I didn’t know they were a weed until one day when I took them for the classroom Virgin Mary shrine. My classmates laughed at my offering.

My Mom had a lilac bush in our yard and she allowed us to cut clippings from her bush to take to the shrine. She stopped going to church when Candy started dating Michael. We weren’t allowed to clip lilacs for the Virgin Shrine after that.

I never got to be the girl to crown the Virgin Mary, the May Queen. After the sixth grade I transferred to the local public school, said good-bye to daily mass and Nuns and turned my attention to boys and my own search for truth. My sister ran away from Terre Haute to find her truth. We heard that she was in Washington State and then Arizona. When I became a mother and started to understand my own mother’s heart, I hired a private detective to find her. She was in Hawaii, still with her Michael. We wrote for a while and I forwarded her address to my Mom and Dad. My mother wrote her and she wrote back. She also wrote to our Grandmothers who have passes away and with their passing, a loss of being in touch with Candy. My mother keeps Candy’s yearbooks, her first communion dress and a box of memorabilia for her in the coat closet in her home. The things wait for her return, but the reality of such an event is unlikely. My parents are selling their house and candy’s things will have to go. Candy sent flowers for my parent’s fiftieth anniversary but could not make the trip. Michael needed her. I sat in my mother’s bedroom this last summer and read the postcards that she sent from Hawaii to my Grandmother Miller. I read about her portrayal of an idyllic world with Michael and her three cats in her high rise condo with the view of Diamondhead. After I finished reading, I sat there for a while on my mother’s bed then got up, smoothed out the comforter and went outside to smell the lilacs.

Years after I found Candy my mother stopped me in the middle of the hustle and bustle of a family Christmas celebration and thanked me. Her eyes welled up with tears and she said she wanted me to know that she was grateful for what I had done. He said that without my efforts she still wouldn’t know where Candy was.

My Mom has a jar shaped like a snail in her china cabinet. It is an icon of my childhood, having been hanging around the house for as long as I can remember. It has wiggly antennae and looks at you with big eyelashed eyes. On its side is scrolled the word “candy.” She has had it for over fifty years. Inside it is a note reminding the curious visitor that the snail jar belongs to her oldest daughter, the YWCA national representative, prom queen, choir soloist, award winning pianist, salutatorian daughter who lives in Hawaii. Someday, after my mother dies, I will take that jar from her possessions, board a plane to the island and give it to Candy. It may not be the climb up a wooden ladder to adorn the Virgin Mary that I had always dreamed of doing, but maybe, if you will, a small act given to honor the sacrifice of a devoted mother.

In trance it’s always mid-summer in the meadow where I meet the circle of my previous selves, the girls, my muses. The meadow encircles a pond whose mud shores decline gradually into blood-warm water. A circle of pine trees interspersed with a few hardwoods—birch, maple, oak—encompasses the area. Usually the girls are lounging, perhaps brushing each other’s hair, indulging the younger ones with stories or games and hugs, but sometimes they splash in the shallows of the pond, and occasionally they enact rituals of forgiveness, cleansing, or celebration. The circles enclosing circles in this setting duplicate the ripple effect the past has on my present; everything that happened to one of my former selves affects who and what I am today. A truism? I have not always thought so; I believed denial could eliminate—or at least alter—the past. What I failed to realize before beginning hypnotherapy in the hands of a skilled therapist was that in denying the validity of some of my selves, I also deprived myself full access to my creativity.

But perhaps I’m ahead of myself. What exactly is parts hypnosis? In trance with my therapist or in self-hypnosis, I contact different versions of myself at various ages, behind various personas—multi-layered, multi-voiced me. This process has been at turns joyful and sorrowful, peaceful and agonizing, celebratory and humiliating, reassuring and frightening, but always revelatory. I have persisted because I have come to believe that knowing myself, whatever its cost, is better than not knowing.

What effect has having access to my previous selves had on my creativity? These former selves have become my muses, as powerful for me as any ancient muse. Before hypnotherapy my creative life could best be described as diffuse and dilatory, even with writing which I loved. Early childhood attempts at art and music were effectively squelched by critical teachers more interested in product than process. As I grew older, I tried dancing, gardening, cooking, ceramics, needlework, home and self-decorating, amateur theater, and games and fantasies with our sons—some of which I found pleasurable but none as soul-satisfying as writing.

I’d scribbled forever—poems, letters, essays—but until I started therapy, I’d not taken myself seriously as a writer of anything but the academic writing necessary for my job as a community college English instructor (convention presentations, essays, academic journal articles, and textbooks). Except for sporadic journaling, I wrote for myself only when everything else was finished (which was almost never) and when the urge to write was overwhelming (which didn’t occur often).

Having finally achieved some leisure almost ten years ago, I took a creative writing course through the continuing education program at a local university; I loved it and wrote poetry, biographical sketches, part of a play, short stories, and monologues. The instructor thought some work publishable, but once the class was over, I stuffed the pieces away in a file cabinet—writing them had been a pleasant interlude but nothing more.

Besides, if I did occasionally pull something out of the file to re-examine, perhaps as a prelude to polishing for publication, the editor self/critic/censor/judge intervened, whispering: “Are you sure you know what you think about that subject? What makes you think anybody else would want to read what you write? What if your mother read it? Isn’t there something more important that needs doing?” Time after time, that insidious little voice defeated me.

But then through parts hypnosis I grew familiar with that voice; I learned her genesis, I knew her strengths, I learned when I needed her and when I did not. When she marched in, trampling seedling thoughts with her muddy boots, I could say, “Relax, we’re not going for the Pulitzer today, we’re just doodling. When I’m ready to submit, I’ll let you handle all the grammar and style questions, but right now I’d like the feeling self, please; I want to write my emotional body today.” She sulked, but she subsided, placated because I acknowledged her role. Then I was free to write what I felt without fear of interior contradiction.

And that’s important because hypnotherapy taught me that speaking or writing my truth is more important than worrying about whether a work will sell or even whether it will be affirmed by anyone else. Trance accorded me the freedom to be myself since it is for myself (and my muses) I write, yet paradoxically, the more personal, the more individual, the more specific I am, it seems the more universal the appeal of what I write. Similarly, trance gives me the courage to contradict myself, to write today’s truth today and tomorrow’s truth tomorrow whether they agree or not. It grants me the courage to write about everything and anything—the first time I publicly read something I had written about sexual abuse, my hands and voice quavered, but the next time it was easier, and the next time easier still. I learned that if I could write that taboo, I could write anything.

I write more now because trance provides access to the storehouse of the unconscious. I can enter a hypnotic state and ask my muses who has a story to tell today or who can tell me what direction the poem I started yesterday wants to take. Because my dream life has intensified, and my dream recall has improved, dreams have also become a writing resource. Daily journaling provides yet more source material for writing.

What else has changed in my writing life? When we lived in Houston, I was active in a large organization for women writers and artists. I belonged to three writing support groups there and I’m trying to start one in my new community. I take creative writing classes by e-mail.

A dream I had not long after starting therapy perhaps best symbolizes the influence of hypnosis on my creativity. In the dream I’m responsible for a baby who plays a minor part in a movie, so minor that only the baby’s head will be seen on screen. So that’s all the baby is—just a head. But it acts as though it were embodied; it looks questions, smiles, grimaces. Just now it cries, and I try to console it with cuddling. It turns hungrily toward my breast, and I am touched by its confidence but saddened because I have no milk. But surprisingly, I feel the familiar tingle, the slight erection of nipples that signals milk coming in, and I let the head nurse until it is satiated and still. Then I notice the baby now has a torso as well as a head. I seem to know that if I continue to nurse the baby, it will grow limbs, fingers, and toes; it will be more valued by the movie crew.

Later, I understood that infant as my creativity before parts hypnosis—deformed by self-censorship, stunted, limited to headwork, analysis, reasoning. When I joined my muses in the meadow, permitting my conscious self to play and explore with them, listen to, question, and above all, trust them, I became capable of nourishing my creativity with the mother’s milk of emotion; I enabled the baby to thrive.