Kenton and I both stress about money. We never have enough to get out of debt, to give as much as we could imagine to family, friends and those we would like to support in their work, or to work and play exactly as we please. We have our own business and work comes, or it doesn’t. Some seasons have been far more stressful than others; some give us a breather, but we are not independent of money worries. We both recognize a definite karmic theme in our attitudes toward abundance or lack of it.
Driving through the West and Southwest, to visit family, to visit networks, or to visit, period, we have some of our deepest and most reflective conversations, the kind that make a sudden difference in our world. Heading west a few weeks ago on I-40 near Laguna Pueblo, Kenton was speculating on our financial karma once again. We had been in ceremony in Santa Fe a day earlier and were musing on the subtle lessons we learned. A story came into my mind in that moment, on the surface unrelated to what Kenton was talking about, but I knew it connected.
Years ago through my loose artist network, I met Jack, and later, his ex-wife Kathleen. During the birth of their first and only child, the umbilical cord wrapped around the baby’s neck in Kathleen’s womb and he was strangled. His brain was deprived of oxygen and he was not able to move or speak. When I met eight-year-old Bobby, he lived strapped in a complex wheelchair, neck at an angle and head oddly flailing as he tried to communicate. Jack assured people meeting him for the first time that he was a happy kid, and I could see from his crooked but frequent smiles that this was true, though I was unnerved in his presence. Most of his energy was spent in his strenuous efforts to communicate, and I could not understand the words and thoughts in his insistent noises and motions. Jack and Kathleen, and others who knew Bobby better than I did, could.
The story I always told myself about them came back to me as Kenton and I drove through springtime New Mexico more than thirty years later. Although they were divorced, Kathleen and Jack fully shared Bobby’s care between them. He lived with Kathleen. I was always curious about her. She seemed stressed and sad. This is my version, not hers, because I do not know the facts. But in my projection, Kathleen felt the inescapable guilt that parents feel who have given birth to a damaged child. In motion in the car, with the red-rock high-desert landscape sliding by, on the edge of the Malpais, the volcanic badlands of central New Mexico, the story suddenly came alive again and projected itself forward. I realized Kathleen represented an archetype for me, of the human suffering from karma.
As a child of my culture, I expect so much of my life. I expect attainment, success, recognition–and money. All these things will make me feel I am making good. At the same time I do believe that I’m working out themes I incarnated with–in fact my theory of reincarnation can be very simply stated: if I were to consider reincarnation in order to work out something that took three weeks–why bother? 70, 80, 90 years, or multiple lifetimes is more like it.
The real-life Kathleen I met a few times years ago now presented herself to my imagination as an archetypal mother suffering from terrible guilt. Although real-life Bobby was and is wonderfully intelligent–the last time I saw Jack he told me Bobby had graduated law school and was in practice–it was for some reason the karma of my “Kathleen” archetype to give birth to this difficult child, and to spend a great deal of her life devoted to the Herculean effort of caring for him, feeling both terrible guilt and terrible, biting frustration and unhappiness.
Now, I thought, what if my imaginal Kathleen had been able to understand it was precisely her karma to do what she did, caring for ths bright child encased in a problematic and painful body, and little or nothing else? She didn’t need to be an artist, she didn’t need to be a writer, she didn’t need to be anything in particular for a large part of her life other than to meet the conditions life presented to her in order to be a karmically fulfilled being. I wondered, if Kathleen had had this idea, would she not have felt much more peace of mind instead of the mental torture she seemed to be suffering? I can imagine her feeling peaceful now, doing art. Would it have been possible for her to feel peace then?
None of this is to comment on real-life Kathleen, whose real story I don’t know. In those moments in the desert, her recurrence in my memory was suddenly a powerful projection speaking to me about some mystery having to do with acceptance and peace of mind. What if I could view my “problems” with money as part of my karma, and the real work is to get to peace of mind while I take my 70, 80, 90 years working it out?
So, I told Kenton this story. He says it deeply shifted something for him about how he thinks about himself and money worries. This all happened in the aura of the ceremonial work we had done, which, apparently, was not over yet. He says his story shifted from “What do I need to do to make more money?” to “What do I need to do to live through this karmic issue?” Suddenly, the focus had pulled out to be as large as the desert sky.
