Sculpture at Burning Man, 2015

Back in 1987, during the Harmonic Convergence, I was twirling like a Sufi with others in a giant ceremonial yurt in the Tetons when I received an inner directive, via a loud booming voice: YOU MUST FINISH YOUR PERSONAL KARMA BY THE END OF THE YEAR. I knew what this meant. In order to get together with my children again, I would have to first make peace with their estranged father.

During the next three months I did the work required in order to do that. Hard, continuous, subliminal work.

I had already worked, for seven years, to first excavate, and then allow full expression, to my own inner child. (This was years before “inner child work” had entered the culture; I have been cursed/blessed to be one of culture’s pioneers.)

In order to meet fruitfully with Patrick, I would have to first find and allow full expression to his inner child. Since I had already moved through this process within myself, the internal template for this kind of work had already been created; thus it only took three months of inner work with his suffering child for me to actually meet with his damaged adult self in the flesh.

Though he didn’t know what happened that day, I did. I released him, and the karma that had sprung up between us, by fully feeling his suffering, the suffering of abandonment when he was five years old and his father died and his mother had to go to work; the same age our younger son happened to be when I left him and his brother in the care of Patrick and abandoned them all.

And all of this inner work, for those seven years with “Orphan Annie” and for those three months with “little Patrick,” occurred under the direction of the unconscious which knows WAY more than “I” do.