Freeing Father

After the mother process there was a silent break. Art didn’t bum a cigarette but thought how his mother, born a preemie at 6 months spent 2 months in a cigar box. Art thought that probably explains why she smoked for more than 50 years and was always in a rush. She was in a rush to get born. He had a mental picture of her standing by the kitchen door, coat on, purse in hand, ready. Always ready to go.

IAM spoke in a quietly solemn tone, “You’re half way through the process. Some will find father more intense than mother. Those who may have been raised in a fatherless home trust your imagination. Take the first answer that comes up. You just made it up anyway, so stay in your gut and in the process.”

To Art the Father process was as different as a Presbyterian Church service was to the Acid Tests with the Merry Pranksters and the Grateful Dead. He knew he had stuff about his dad. The way they rarely spoke. Dad’s condescending tone. The way he poked fun at him, teasing for what Art was never sure. Art was a good student, an excellent athlete, made friends easily. He wasn’t a good fisherman like his dad, and he had no interest in mechanical things. He just concluded that they were very different beings. He respected him, even talked well about him, but never really felt their was love between them.

Or so he thought.

But creating a clay image of dad and stepping into his body was emotional, revelatory and downright shocking. Stepping into anyone else’s space was shocking. The nonsense of ‘they are different’, ‘he is not like me’ or ‘I’m better that that’ melted in the first moments. Art’s tears and Kleenex consumption created a pile higher than his statue of dad.

His old man felt joy, and sorrow and compassion. He had great love for his mother and for Art’s mother. Art sensed how he thought deeply on God, and money and how caring for his family was so important. He did the best he could with what he had, and growing up as second oldest with four sister he developed charm and wit and a nature as a tease. He loved his sisters and was unsure of what to do with the baby Art. He became the family provider, a role his father had never fully accepted.

This was more than a parent process it was an ancestor process. Art saw how generations had been drug down the rut of beliefs that were not their own. Beliefs passed down generations. Beliefs that no longer served, that had lost validity. It was how the middle eastern wars continued. How revenge and sexism flourished, and their offspring’s assumed the parents beliefs and perpetuated fears and limits all the while believing these were their own beliefs. It felt like he was part of some mechanical entity that was ruled by the habits of others ad infinium.

That he had finally, as IAM had intimated, come to the point to break the pattern. To end the pain and useless suffering mankind had instilled in itself.

Wow! Art felt massively alive after mother, but after father he was brand new.