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Power and Transparency by Zoë Landale Equally we are most ourselves, most potent and individual, when we stop being conscious of ourselves as separated from the infinite sustaining power that created—is creating—the universe. Click to read Essay Profile of Author Bio of Author from ETG Essay, Late-breaking Developments Author's Comment on the ETG Experience Updated Bio Click to Purchase Send email to the author (The copyright on this essay is held by the author.  For permission to duplicate: copyright@cunepress.com)

Power and Transparency
"I’m interested in working with power," I say to my father.

He shifts on the high-backed green couch across from me. The lamp on the wall behind him throws his face into shadow. "Don’t say that to anyone but me," he says vehemently. "You might be misunderstood."

"Well, I am."

We are talking about spiritual power, the upwelling of sweetness and strength that, once felt, can never be forgotten.

"Why do you think," I ask, "that so many people have left the conventional churches? It’s because they found their prayers didn’t do anything. They didn’t work. I can understand that. But I’ve found something that does work."

"For you," Dad says.

The tip of his cigarette is orange. Shadows beat at us from corners of the room. Everyone else is asleep. We are sleepy but the need to talk is stronger than tiredness. Every three years we see one another, or so it seems; a long, expensive plane trip across the country separates us. We are in a cottage a hundred miles north of Ottawa. Everything in the cottage clashes: the curtains with the rug, the two couches with the curtains and each other. It’s a wild blend of stark polyester turquoises, olive greens, worn autumn-colored prints, and sizzling blue carpet. The blue’s so artificial it hurts.

There is something curiously freeing about the jumble. We are here for two weeks. Most of our time is spent at the beach. It is only occasionally, like now, at midnight, that the colors poke long spikes of unease at me. The effect is like the fast food restaurants (Denny’s is one) who decorate so the customer will not feel too comfortable and will move on in a short time. Deliberate dissonance. It’s very effective in restaurants. "One more cigarette," Dad keeps saying tonight. "Just one more and we’ll go to bed."

"So why shouldn’t I say that about working with power?" I ask.

"It just isn’t a good thing to talk about," Dad says. He hunches his shoulders.

The extraordinary thing about spiritual power is that it doesn’t belong to us. I have felt it rising up in waves around me, thick and strong, the sense of rightness becoming so solid I could let myself be carried along as if in the grasp of a benign tsunami. And yet it was not mine. It came from nothing I had called up; it was the undiluted reality of being, which, just for a moment, I could glimpse. When I pray or meditate, or study with the intent of healing, I spend my time trying to reach through the mystification of the senses, to get back to what is primordially true. I try to become translucent, to admit light through my interstices.

It is perfectly clear to me why Jesus, the greatest healer in recorded history, said, "I can of mine own self do nothing."

I remember my ex-in-laws, a few years back, concerned because a neighbor’s house had been broken into and vandalized. My relatives are elderly. They live in the country, down a long driveway and behind a scrub of pine, hollies, chestnuts, and lilacs. They felt vulnerable. I had just finished a course on healing, as it happened, and I thought for one grand moment: I will protect you. I will know what is true for you with such astonishing clarity it will hang in the ether like glowing runes of protection. You will never be troubled. It is not right that you or anyone should have to accept this unjust notion of victimization.

Then I came to my senses. Just who did I think I was? A wizard in a child’s story book, taking out my staff and setting to work? Magic stories are appealing because they contain the notion of acquired power, of making ourselves greater and greater, shellacking on layers of knowledge. Study hard and you too can grow out of being the apprentice and become the sorcerer.

There was nothing wrong with my idea of trying to protect my in-laws. But I was not the representative of a cosmic security service. Nor could I, if I really wanted to bring peace to the situation, afford to look at my relatives as if they were in danger. In order to bring them that sense of safety I wanted for them, I had to allow my jumbled thought to be soothed by that spiritual force Dad was so reluctant to have me name.

How do I use power? I give up the notion of myself as separated from good; open myself to the slow pulse of the world beneath. I have spent whole nights, not awake really, but waking with every other breath while I uncurl the clenched fist of self and reach through circumstances—the problem—to hold onto good. And I ask the intelligence behind the beauty of spiral galaxies, the great whirling arms of rose and blue and white, to show me what is true. I am willing to leave old ideas and accept new ones. Gratefully.

I met a man last week who is a witch, probably the most public one in Canada. He is a good witch, a white witch, but still, to me he was scary. We met at a small party. I’ve seen the witch before at public gatherings and avoided him. Long white hair, a rumpled white beard, a very tall man dressed in black with rings on each finger, including thumbs; I didn’t feel I could deal with him. What could I say? What could we possibly have in common?

Across the room I listened to him talk about nursing his mother-in-law, who is ninety-one and has just had a stroke. She needs round-the-clock attention. This witch and his wife look after her mother at home. They are in their seventies. Both were suffering from lack of sleep. What could we have in common?

Well, tenderness, perhaps. A few minutes later he and I talked about a mutual friend who had feuded, nastily, with someone. The witch leaned forward in his chair. "We tried to stop it," he said sadly to me. "Oh my yes, we did. All of us who cared about them did."

I met his soft brown eyes and knew I had made a mistake. I had allowed all the talk about "occult" to frighten me, but this witch and I were on the same side. What side? Healing.

We are always choosing who or what we will serve. In each tiny conflict with a family member, what side do we come down on? It’s so easy to go for being right, for the quick incisive remark to prove it—but will that bring healing to the situation? Will it make us feel secure, loved, respected? Can we extend that to others?

Last weekend my almost-nine-year-old daughter was scolding me: "You had to have that permission slip back to the teacher right away. Now I won’t be able to go on any walks or outings and it’s all your fault. I told you to get it in." And I was exhausted after a week of deadlines, protested feebly I had filled it out, sent it back the very next day in fact. It would be ok; I’d write a note to the teacher. Still my daughter would not be mollified, waved the white paper in my face—I was lying down, I had been reading—"See?"

I feel I spend my whole life trying to be a good mom. The paper in my face was too much. The one I had sent back to school had been blue, I remembered cutting it on the dotted line with the kitchen scissors, their handles spattered with red paint. I leapt to my feet, grabbed the beaded Indian moccasins from my feet and hurled them to the floor. Even in my rage I was glad I was not tempted to spank my daughter. "Get out," I yelled. "Out."

She left my room, crying.

Guilt seized and shook me. I knew better. I had bitten hard, hard on that hook of irritation.

I fell asleep even though it was morning, and I never nap then. I could hear my child being comforted by her father. In half an hour I would get up and apologize.

So where was the power then when I needed it? Right where it’s always been. It’s the central fact of the universe, it doesn’t go anywhere. But I forgot to check in. I allowed anger to make me opaque.

The woman who owns the cottages where my father and I talked bought them years ago. She furnishes them from the thrift store. The resort does not exist to make money, it’s for the benefit of her son, who has Down’s Syndrome. Many people with Down’s Syndrome die young. This woman didn’t want this fate for her son, she wanted him to grow up strong. So, during the summer, her son brings wood for the cottages, wheels away garbage, rakes the sand and gravel beach, goes swimming. She has done, my father says, a marvelous job. Those who stay at the resort are expected to behave lovingly, acceptingly toward the young man, now in his mid-twenties.

Rather than acquiring power, I view my role in life as more of becoming something. Someone, really, the person I was meant to be. Am, in an absolute sense. A zebra is always a zebra. It may grow up thinking itself a horse, the same as a wolf cub can be raised as a dog. But the animal’s essential nature is zebra, is wolf. That is where they will operate at their area of greatest strength. My essential nature is spiritual. Until I grow into that, accept it, acknowledge it, I haven’t a hope of being able to understand and to use what’s out there for us all, the underlying goodness.

The next day I invited the witch and his wife to come home and have a meal with us. I could feel that repeated coming down on the side of good in him. These things leave their marks. His way is not my way—but I will honor the clasp of our eyes across the room, the recognition I felt then. We have not talked about the shadow play of the universe, the flick-flicker of images and allurements past our eyes, but it stands there, potent in the background of things unsaid.

I wonder if it wasn’t fear that was behind my father’s reluctance to talk that night. Fear on behalf of all the women throughout the centuries who were burned as witches. The wisewomen, the healers. Identification with church didn’t save them. "I have observed countless men and women in AA develop extraordinary relationship with the gods," my father said, "as they understand them, absolutely sure every move, every new insight, every benefit received is the direct result of divine intervention into the world of their mundane existence. It’s a chimera, of course. Some make it back, others don’t."

I see again my father bending forward, the lamp behind him against the paneled wall of the cottage. His face is dark from where I sit on the opposite couch, but I see the skin around his eyes crinkle when he smiles anxiously, lovingly. "You might be misunderstood."

Those of us who take spirituality seriously put ourselves in the camp of holy fools. The usual notions of layer-by-layer acquisition—education, material possessions, prestigious jobs—not only don’t apply anymore, they become irrelevant. They don’t transmit light.

The Father in me, he doeth the works.

The Mother in me, she doeth the works.

How clearly abdication of a personal sense of power radiates through those words.

I read once that we are most ourselves when we are least self-conscious. Much as I like having friends, I dread the process of making new ones. I dislike watching myself laugh, drink tea, be conscious of trying to act as I always do. I always know when a friend has finally become one, because I am suddenly at ease. No longer aware of my feeling of separation from that person, I can enjoy her company and, as my sister says, "Feel comfortable in my own skin."

Equally we are most ourselves, most potent and individual, when we stop being conscious of ourselves as separated from the infinite sustaining power that created—is creating—the universe. I am not a zebra pretending to be a horse, nor a wolf trying desperately to Wt into the tame, constrained world of dog. I am a spiritual dab of light. I may forget this, I may deny it for a time, but when I do I will be less than I really am, will believe I am dull and powerless. I don’t want to accept this. For one thing, I don’t believe it; for another, what a boring, reduced world it is when all a person looks at is materiality. When all I see, for instance, is the moon face and slurred diction of Down’s syndrome instead of a spiritual idea worthy of respect.

I want to acknowledge the illumination of a much greater reality shining through others and through me. I want to do my laundry, bake chocolate chip cookies for my daughter’s party at school in the knowledge that here, too, I can let the great actuality of the spiritual—the Mother, the Father—glow through. I want to side with joy, weigh in on the side of healing, of transparency, however domestic, however small.

Profile
I met Zoë Landale on a blustery March evening in Bellingham, the old part of town, on a hillside above the blue-black sea. I found Zoë in the cafe of Village Books, this town’s most widely known bookstore. She had come with her husband to read from her new volume of poetry, Burning Stone. If the book had been mine, I’d have called it Hot Rock—which is one reason that Landale is one of Canada’s finest writers, whereas I have chosen to retire from versifying altogether. Those death threats I kept receiving had something to do with it too.

Landale’s husband is a building contractor—I can sympathize—and as I fitted my mouth around a mass of bean sprouts, he talked about construction work on their side of the border. Landale and her husband are designing and building their own house on Vancouver Island, and are raising a daughter. Zoë is hard at work on a new book of essays which she says involve "family and place."

—Scott C. Davis

Bio
Zoë Landale
Place of residence: Courtenay, B.C., Canada.
Birthplace: Toronto, Canada.
Day jobs: Partner in construction company. Parent. Freelance writer.
Education: M.F.A., University of British Columbia.
Books: Burning Stone, Ronsdale Press (1995). Colour of Winter Air, Sono Nis Press (1991). Harvest of Salmon, Hancock House (1976).
Awards: National Magazine Gold (1994). Stony Brook University Short Fiction Competition (1993). Event Magazine Creative Nonfiction Award (1992).
Current project: Book of star poems.
Belief: Christian Science.
Craving: More time in my garden.

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