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Up North Part 9 – Riding with Ray
There was a nice long ramp with a guard rail for sitting on the 75 South on-ramp. It was an easy curve so traffic was moving by quicker than I liked and yet not as quick as well. I was uneasy hanging out where pedestrians don’t really go with a big bag pack in sight of the bridge. Bomb threats and all, a newly uncertain world. Not wholly new but far more intense. I did not feel confident under the steely gaze of the guys in white pickups with Bridge Authority emblazoned on the door when they drove by.
Before I have even filled in all the letters on the Grayling Please sign a big rig pulls to the side and hits his breaks and stops about 20 feet behind me. There is a giant cross done in blue lights across the grill of the rig, there are 8 or 10 extra lights across the top, and it is flying too many flags to count. As I stash the sign (another hiker might find it useful) grab my pack and hoof it towards the door. I was taking in all of the WWJDs, including How Would Jesus Drive?, Praise The Lord and all manner of similar such things. I did not have time to take them all in. I knew what I was likely getting myself into and was grateful nonetheless.
I also took in the driver, an older red headed guy in a mesh cap. He was grinning and moving shit out of the passenger seat. The lanes were narrow and there was a lot of traffic and the threat of terrorism response coming down kept me hurrying. I opened the door, stepped up on the first step and poked my head in. “Here pass that in and I’ll stow it in back” and I handed him my pack and he tossed it in the sleeper.
I stood awkwardly on the step as the driver finished clearing off the last of his gear. It seems he was using it as more of an office but eventually I sat down and he pulled out on to the ramp. He said, “Ray” and I said “Michael” as we shook hands between him grabbing gears. Ray asked me where I was heading and to cover my bases in case he was going down 27 or 75, I said “Lansing or Monroe.”
“Well which is it?” Ray responded. As I thought about the best way to respond Ray said, “Well, I’m heading to Chicago out 10 so I can get you to Claire.
“Sounds great. I’d rather go to Lansing anyway. That’s where I live.” I started to warm up in the heat of the cab and started to unzip my jacket until i realized i had picked up a powerful odor and decided to leave it on. Ray then turned up the volume of the previously inaudible cassette player in his rig and I heard Carman of all people. The cheesiest, Las Vegas lounge lizard turned crooner for Christ that I’d ever heard. It was one I hadn’t heard, a patriotic number with God Bless America swelling in the background and Carman is doing some kind of stilted spoken word number about patriotism and such. “We need to stop handing out condoms in schools and start handing out Bibles.”
When Ray first turned up the tape he just looked at me and grinned. I didn’t noticeably wince, I don’t think, and tried to put on a face of bemused appreciation, although it was more for starting to ride down the Mackinac Bridge and at worst get preached at a little instead of sitting in fear waiting to get shook down as a potential terrorist. Carman could be OK if you can appreciate the utter ridiculousness of it. He could on occasion at least be clever in his word play.
Ray then turned down the music and opened up a conversation about how beautiful it all is. We talked about what it must have been like for the Indians crossing the straights by canoe. We talked about where we were from and Ray told me about his job a bit. He then said, “Let me show you this,” and pulled out a vinyl cassette holder with a capacity of twelve or so. Every cassette is Carman. “I’ve got them all” Ray grinned proudly. He went on with a disclaimer, a couple that were missing or only out on CD and he went on to tell me about his efforts to track down Carman cassettes.
I casually mentioned that I saw Carman in concert once and that I had a lot of respect for the fact that he does his shows for free. Ray was blown away and I could see an innocent jealousy slide across his face. “He has a powerful message for the young,” Ray told me.
I nodded and smiled and remembered my falling out with Carman. I had actually been a pretty big fan in my teen years. I had a keen appreciation for fundamentalist novelty music and Carman walked tall in that little niche. As I grew up though I came to challenge the ethnocentrism of my native fundamentalism and ultimately had embraced a larger view of truth. I had seen Carman as a penniless high schooler and gotten on a mailing list and had sent him a few bucks on occasion. Until I read in one his flyers that “nine out of ten missing children end up sacrificed on a ‘satanic altar’. My brother is a cop so I know.”
This ridiculous hyperbole, this incredible bald faced lie, so offended my sense of truth I had severed my relationship and never played his stuff. I didn’t even think about sharing this with Ray under anything but a direct question because hitchhikers are agreeable by nature and practice.
Then of course it came. “So since you’re a Carman fan I assume you’re born again?”
I told him “yes” more because I didn’t want to fend off Ray’s clumsy attempts to win me to The Lord though the actual answer to that question really requires more than a one word answer. I had in fact made that long walk to the altar on the seventh verse of a five verse song and asked Jesus to forgive my sins at the Monroe First Church of the Nazarene back in 1981. I still believe that “except one become like a little child one shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven”, I just think it may mean something more. So I took the easy way out and did not elaborate my conflictions on the term, besides in the moment I was kind of feeling it pretty heavy too. It had been a long week of thoughtful wonder in the wilderness and the unknown guarded over by wonder and naive enthusiasm.
Ray of course was delighted with yes. “I knew it all along. You see the Lord told me to pick you up. You may not believe it but I have been driving over the road for seven years and you’re the third hitchhiker I’ve ever picked up. Every one of them a Christian. I’m not supposed to have passengers in the rig, but my boss is a Christian too and he’d have to understand. When God tells me to do something I listen.”
I nodded agreeably wondering if I was going to get the follow up questions. “So where do you go to church ?” or try to pin you down on doctrine “so you must believe that Jesus is the only way to Heaven?” Instead Ray just started talking and told me his story, his testimony if you will.
It was the sixties and Ray was in high school and he had a sweetheart. This was all in Oxford Ohio and Ray was hoping to get a job at Miami University like his father and his grandfather before him. He wanted to marry his sweetheart but she wanted to wait until he was settled with the University. Before Ray got settled he got drafted.
He reported to his physical but failed the exam. It seemed that Ray’s mom had been doing his homework for a good long time. Safe with his classification of “too dumb to fight” he got his dream job driving truck for Miami U. and plans for the wedding move forward. Than this bucolic scene was rudely interrupted when Ray was drafted anyway.
Ray was classified as infantry material and shipped off to Germany where he was assigned to a tank battalion. Ray struggled through his tank training and was two instructional hours away from testing for tanker status he was reassigned to Vietnam.
Ray halted his narrative and pulled off at an exit to stop at his favorite truck stop. He bought us coffee and chatted up the woman at the counter. He looked at lights and bought two based more on his budget than what he wanted, which was all of them. I just followed, orbiting his energy and intensity and waiting to get back in the truck and hear the rest of the story, which he did, picking it up without a pause.
While home on leave he tried to marry his sweetheart but there was not enough time. They decided to marry after Ray returned from Vietnam. He was shipped to Vietnam and faithfully wrote, daily. After six months the letters from his sweetheart stopped. His mother then wrote that she had married another guy.
Ray took this badly and so became a machine gunner volunteering for every dangerous mission. “Whoo I kept my guardian angel busy Michael. When I arrive at the pearly gates my guardian angel is going to say, ‘boy you kept me busy’, yes sir.” Miraculously Ray made it back to civilian life, was pursued by a friend’s wife and married unhappily, but maintained it for the sake of the children, in spite of her infidelity.
Eight years later Ray ran into his sweetheart, divorced for four years now. Ray quickly followed suit and at last was with the only true love of his life. Four years later he lost her to cancer. “She’s with the Lord now dancing on streets of gold.”
It was really a sweet story and I didn’t add much beyond taking it all in as the miles flew by on our journey south. As we drove Ray pointed to a squirrel, dead on the side of the road. “Can I tell you a secret Mike? If I could ask the Lord for one gift it would be to raise those poor critters from the dead. They don’t know any better. They can’t read or nothing. Isn’t that foolish?”
“I don’t think that’s foolish at all Ray. Jesus himself tells us that ‘the Lord knows when even a sparrow falls’. I can’t help but think that he feels the loss. It’s refreshing really. Not enough Christians care about the critters and the rest of the natural world. Have you ever read Psalms 104 Ray?”
“Well I can’t say that I have off the top of my head.”
“Some call it the environmental psalm Ray. Its really cool and you should check it out. It says there” that the mountains belong to the wild goats”. We like to think it was all given to us to use as we please but that is not so. God made all of the species we are driving to extinction and the wild places that hold them for a reason and we are thoughtlessly and methodically killing off God’s creation for a profit.”
Ray perked up when I started rolling, giving my mini-sermon. I realized I hadn’t said more than a handful of words on our hours long journey and we had bonded in the telling of Ray’s story but I was a tabula rosa that Ray for the first time realized could talk. Ray asked again for the name of the psalm and he wrote it in his little steno pad he kept in his shirt pocket.
Ray then gave me a really searching look, paused, and said, “It says in the Good Book you never know when you ‘may be hosting angels unaware’”. He looked at me conspiratorially and I just nodded.
“Angel is just the Greek word for messenger Ray”. All too soon we were at the fork in the road where Ray went to Chicago and I continued south towards Lansing. Ray let me out on the side of the road ahead of where he was splitting off on 10. As Ray pulled away I walked away from the highway into the grass and sat down. It was another abrupt shift in environment and I wasn’t quite ready to deal. I sat in the grass and smoked a cigarette.
My thoughts turned to when I was in junior high and Cindy Ball who was the mother of a couple of my church buddies and would frequently give me a ride picked up a vagrant. She left us in the car while they had pie and coffee in a diner late one night, perhaps after church. She had quoted the same verse and was convinced of a miraculous encounter. I believed what I had said to Ray, anyone can carry a message. I tried to write a bit of verse as I stowed my stuff for walking to bolster my trepidation about being stranded on the junction of two highways and having to walk some up the interstate:
If you wanna be an angel
You don’t tell them your last name
That we’re all the same
Lost and confused
You give a few tricks for the game
Tell them they’re not to blame
When they’ve been abused
You listen more than you talk
Then show you’ve walked the walk
And have something to say
This bit came easy as I shouldered my pack and began making the difficult trek along the slope of the ditch, not yet wanting to dare the interstate.
Up North part 1: getting started
On Thursday morning I had Amee drop me off on what I thought was 27 North, just north of the I-69 loop. Turned out it was Old/Business 27. I found out at the Marathon Station 27 was a mile East of there up 69. I stood by the on ramp for about half an hour watching the commuters tear by with looks of disdain on their faces. The gas station attendant had said Old 27 rejoins 27 about 2o miles north so I started walking.
About 11:00 I was getting pretty tired and hungry when I spied the Knob Hill tavern. They were just opening up for the day and the smell of bleach was strong in the air. I ordered a Coke, lit a smoke and looked at the menu. I had been a vegetarian again for a couple of years but I ordered the half pound Olive Burger with some fries, as a grilled cheese was not going to cut it, and honestly I was a little mad at the world.
I was the only customer and management was cleaning and putting things out so I turned my attention to The Price is Right, my eyes drawn to the light gleaming from Bob Barker’s feaux leather shoes. The hand woven rug I nailed at $1,400 and knew I was in the zone, had found the flow. Hitchhiking can do that, even when you haven’t gotten a ride. There’s a spirit to it, a survival focus, a different way of looking at the world, of looking at life.
I turned my attention to the second customer of the day who entered large. He ordered “liquor” as a beer would not warm him up as he had already tried that. As the barmaid poured a shot I set aside the fact that the gentleman was on his second drink, at least, at 11:15 and struck up a conversation in hopes of humanizing myself enough to be offered a ride. I said I’d been walking and worked up a sweat and now I was freezing. A hustler I am not but I have come to terms with putting myself in a position to be offered things I would like to have.
He didn’t offer me a ride but he mentioned he’d seen 14 deer that morning and I reflected on my long morning walk through deer country without spying nary a one. I did see two big dogs about half an hour later. You see what you’re looking for mostly and my gaze was mostly within. I also spied a sign St. Johns 5 Miles. That meant I had walked nine miles and impressing a passer by with my diligent walking was not going to catch me a ride on Old 27 so I headed off down a country road the sign said led to US 27. In a couple of miles it did.
There was a sign, Sleepy Hollow State Park 6 Miles, with an arrow to the East so I figured I’d give it a couple more hours and then hoof it down to Sleepy Hollow. I was hitchhiking Up North to camp and if I only made it 15 miles, and walked all of that, so what. I sat down on a guard rail near the sleepy on ramp and decided to jazz up my hastily drawn sign I’d whipped out at the Marathon Station back in Lansing. I drew thick black lines around UP North and I squeezed in a small please at the bottom.
As I filled in, a wild eyed but gentle young man walked up. I had just come to terms with never getting a ride and saw my chances plummet as it is more than twice as hard for two gents to get a ride than one, especially for we of the wild eyed sort. Then I remembered I didn’t need to get a ride and no cars were coming to this dead exit without services anyway. He asked me for a cigarette and said he was out walking picking up butts off the side of the road. My heart softened as I thought about this young madman isolated in the country without even the dubious comfort of a cigarette.
I said, “in that case you’d better take two.”
He asked me where I was headed and I told him I was hiking north to camp and write poetry. He told me he liked riddles and puns and word games on account of his name being Dan. Not following I asked him to explain.
“You know in Yankee Doodle Dandy, he calls a feather a macaroni”. He went on to say Daniel was a hard name to live up to meaning blessed by God. And then there was Daniel the prophet who gone and got himself thrown in the lion’s den and all that. In the pause as we drew on our smokes I told him I had been reading Daniel chapter 7 the night before last and it was some pretty heavy stuff.
“You see Daniel has this dream of four ‘great beasts’ that are really empires with iron teeth who eat their victims, crushes them, and tramples the remains underfoot.” I quoted: “The fourth beast is to be a fourth kingdom on earth, different from all other kingdoms. It will devour the whole world, trample it underfoot and crush it…. He will plan to alter the seasons and the Law.”“And that’s what we’ve done Daniel, altered the seasons, we’ve broken the weather”. He sagely agreed but it appeared neither of us felt much a part of it, though we talked freely of living in a great beast. There is a separation that comes with madness, much akin with the disengagement Buddhists seek, I believe. The conversation moved on to the meanings of our names by our second smoke, until it was interrupted by a late model sedan pulling over to be my first ride of the day, and I said goodbye to Daniel Thomas Faivor, truly believing he was blessed by God and praying this increasingly cruel world would be gentle with him.
WET Zero
Since i got a compliment on my post on the Western Esoteric Tradition i decided to post another. The core of wet is numbers as fundamental bases on which everything else is built on. The WET built their system on the Hebrew Tree of Life. It is fairly complex to explain and i can’t claim to know all of its intricacies but i pretty much know how it works. Everything begins with what is normally depicted as three arcs representing nothingness, the nothingness of nothingness, and the nothingness of nothingness of nothingness. There are prettier names for it the light, the limitless light, and the mirror of limitless light, i believe. We might want to think of say a gas tank, it could be empty – containing nothingness, or non-existent and not just non-present, or it could even be impossible a deeper state of empty. I put this in for the sake of completion not claiming to be able to fully appreciate it in any practical way.
You can also think about things starting with zero. An interesting number mathematically and philosophically having more in common with infinity than any number imaginable. It helps us to imagine the infinite. It is the nothingness of freedom from desire, akin with Nirvana. In Tarot, or The Book of Thoth which i prefer, it is represented by The Fool. Traditionally depicted as a hermaphroditic youth dressed as a jester preparing to step off a clif with a little dog barking in the background. In Haiku form:
Fool walks towards the cliff
not hearing the warning cry
Fool does not need to
We think of nothingness as the potentiality of everything. This works on a practical level as a point of meditation. There is an emptiness that comes with meditation. If you have ever felt it, it is akin to being one with everything. An experience i can’t hope to describe. Which is why archetypes have power. Recognizing the Fool as Parsifal from the Grail legend helps us see the zero as innocence rather than ignorance and a lack of self consciousness to freely do the next right thing naturally and without effort.
the western esoteric tradition
Usually I say something else when someone asks my spiritual tradition but of them all this one most resonates with me though i see powerful truths in all traditions. The Western Esoteric Tradition (WET) encompasses a number of other traditions, and potentially all of them. In its most advanced form Aleister Crowley put together a table of correspondence that includes 20 or so different faiths, systematized according to the kabalistic tree of life. It identifies a meta-thought to see the same universal truths conveyed in each traditions variety. I’ve hardly met anyone who also looks at the world this way and those i have i’ve largely thought had a cartoonish and slightly silly hold on it. For me its more of a philosophy, a lens through which to view the universe, something to be felt mystically and powerfully, but perhaps not ritualistically.
Moving to the specific might clarify some of this. The WET is heavily tied into the jewish mystical tradition. The Hebrews believed the name of God was divine and could not be spoken and was used in a number of different ways. That name in english is YHVH, in Hebrew Yod He Vau He, or Window Hand Knife Hand. Some WET practices involve a lot of this and one I got from Israel Regardie has been especially meaningful to me. It involves vibrating each of the letters of the name, feeling them in you as you silently project them out and visualize them going to the end of the universe and feeling the echo as it bounces back empowered by the vibrations of the godhood. He also recommends a specific posture that i think of as Pharoahnic standing stiffly right arm at your side left arm bent with your left finger in front of your lips like your shushing someone. In Garden of Pomegranits, i think, he writes what to do after this: “Standing quietly in this sign (the finger over the lips posture) I meditate upon the spiritual value, involved in the nature of The Name I have used, and it dawns upon my mind, by direct perception, an understanding and a wide wide sympathy, for that spiritual power”. This to me is a spiritual exercise type of prayer. One of a vast mosaic of practical prayer techniques. I have found it immensely profound on an experiential level. I write about this because when i talk to people about prayer and i do it seems 99% of what people talk about are just one sided conversations asking for stuff in words and sometime being thankful, again words, laundry lists, with or without feeling. Nothing wrong with that, i do that to, but “to pray without ceasing” seems to be a laudatory goal. Connections are what make us human, conscious. Mostly i think “cut wood and carry water” prayer of living and working in the Tao. But there are times when more seems in order.
I largely feel, not misunderstood, but certainly ununderstood. This blog is largely my attempt to remedy that. If anyone is interested i will post more on WET. I am happy to address any questions, critiques, or topics of interest.
Ephesians 5:22
This is something i wrote for my batterers group after one of the guys brought up that whole wives should be subject to their husbands thing.
Ephesians 5:22 “wives should be subject to their husbands” in context
Ephesians 5:21-33 (emphasis added)
Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord, since as Christ is head of the Church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the Church is subject to Christ, so should wives be to their husbands, in everything. Husbands should love their wives, just as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed himself for her to make her holy by washing her in cleansing water with a form of words, so that when he took the Church to himself she would be glorious, with no speck or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless. In the same way, husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself. A man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it; and that is the way Christ treats the Church, because we are parts of his Body. This is why a man leaves his father and mother and becomes attached to his wife, and the two become one flesh. This mystery has great significance, but I am applying it to Christ and the Church. To sum up: you also, each one of you, must love his wife as he loves himself; and let every wife respect her husband.
– NJV
Some commentary:
There is a saying, “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” or too put it more bluntly “Drink deep from the well of knowledge or don’t drink at all”. Wives should be subject to their husbands is the most quoted thing out of the Bible I have ever heard but it is obvious from the context that is not at all what it means. Did you know in the Bible it says “there is no God”? Of course the whole context of the text is “The fool says in his heart that there is no God”. Taking that one verse out of context is the exact same thing. Paul clearly states he is talking about Christ and the Church using the traditional view of marriage as an analogy. He is explaining a religious mystery that I am not going to go into and is not talking about marriage at all. When he sums up he restates the commandment telling men to love their wives as themselves and merely telling women to respect (not obey, not subject themselves) to their husbands. This verse is so popular because it appears to say what we want it to say, what leads to our own benefit. In fact its meaning is just the opposite.
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