THAT YEAR

That summer I finally escaped my batterer, Kay. But not whole. Emaciated, in a lot of pain. And I looked too sick to convince anyone to hire me, so I was broke, too. The only healing I could afford was a hippie psychodrama/encounter group run by an old friend of Ken Kesey. Learned a lot, but as I watched those, well, drama queens with their nice healthy bodies play at love & jealousy, stepping around sickly me, I felt like I was in a bell jar. Unloved, unlovable, alone. Kinda made things worse. I tried to write it out one night, and this just poured out. I published it in the poetry section of the little community newsletter--anonymously. But I'm sure they all knew.

I found Fly-Paradise as I combed old journals for 1970s dreams to enrich the World Dream Bank--that decade's always been thin. It isn't a dream... exactly. But I wrote it in a trance close to automatic writing; and saw it as a lesson from my unconscious, as if it HAD been a dream. Also, like a dream, this undream urged behavior change. Flies that cling to the window, looking in at the privileged (in person or not) can't escape. Nor do those who fly into the dark. Successful escapees wait for light IN the darkness--a door opening! Both patience and judgment.

I obeyed the undream. I stayed on the fringes of the group, I didn't fall for any of the psychodrama actors, struggled to find health not find love (and lose and find and lose and... it was that kinda theater group), I lived cheap & saved up fanatically, and when a sudden chance came along to invest and escape wage slavery... I did.