Between The Eyes of The Great Turtle.
By Andy Jordan, Berkeley, CA
I’d like to tell a story. It’s a story I’ve never told anyone. It’s a story I’m just now coming to know, myself. Turns out, I’ve been waiting to write it for thirty years, I just didn’t know it, until being confined, through circumstances of my life, alone, in my house in Berkeley Hills for the past month, under shelter-in-place orders to help slow the spread of COVID-19. Most humans on Earth right now are in the same boat. Locked in our homes, with the Earth quiet, the skies clear, and clean waters flowing.
It’s a love story. But not like any other. We didn’t meet, fall in love, and live happily ever after. But it’s a love story, nonetheless.
Recently, in a moment of anxiety and fear, I started to marvel at the wonderful aspect of how we are coming together as a human race, not as specifically Americans, Koreans, Chinese, Syrians. As humans. We are all human, and all suffering, and all experiencing the same fears and worries and challenges. But there is something else that brings us together, something I would argue we don’t typically see, and that is where my love story begins.
I’ve been nostalgic and taking stock of the life I’ve lived. It’s been a life of abundance, joy, richness, and adventure. I’m beyond grateful for my life. I’ve seen the world, worked for some of the most successful tech companies and news organizations, and have started my own purpose-driven documentary agency that tells stories of urgent optimism and defiant joy. I’m full of gratitude. But what now? Like many of you, I don’t know what comes next. This moment is unlike any of us have ever experienced, and none of us will ever be the same. The world will never be the same. But maybe that’s the point.
I’ve gone inward and as part of this introspection, I pulled out a dusty box from high up on a shelf in my office, and found hundreds of actual physical photographs, some from my ancestors, many of me in my teens and twenties, most of which I haven’t seen in decades. I have always been the photographer in the family.
Among the baby photos, the prom photos, and the glamour of my former life as a reporter and anchor, I stumbled across a single, old faded photograph. It is a picture I don’t believe I’ve seen in probably 25 or 30 years.
I saw this photo, crinkled and smudged by time, and my heart stopped.
And I immediately wept. I didn’t immediately understand why.
I stared at this photo probably for a good hour, cuddled with my cats on the couch, and deep listened to Pink Floyd’s “Division Bell” and “High Hopes” in particular, as I often did in another point in my life where I was deeply isolated and alone, while living in rural South Korea for a year, going months at a time without encountering another native English speaker. And I started to remember things.
The man in this photo is named Chris. He was my first boyfriend. We were 19. We were only together, as I recall, for a few months, but I’ve thought of him so often in the 30 years since we knew each other, and have never been able to find him. It’s like he literally dropped off the face of the Earth. No trace of him.
I took this photo. It was very early in the morning when I woke up in our tent. Chris always liked to wake up early and watch the sun rise. I remember wanting to capture the moment, because he seemed so at peace. We would camp and hike a lot. This photo was taken at one of our favorite spots, Mount Yonah, in the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest in far north Georgia, where we had hiked and camped one weekend.
Yonah would end up being one of several sacred mountains that have girded my life. I was born near Mount Takao in Japan, a holy mountain that in Japanese folklore is associated with the concept of tengu, a folklore figure that often takes the form of a bird-of-prey, but has over time come to be known as protective spirit of mountains and forests.
Here’s a rendering of a tengu to the left. My older brother is a shaman, and informs me that in traditional shamanic and many indigenous cultures, mountains represent the beings that exist closest to the spirit realm. There’s the celestial, higher realm of stars and spirit, the middle realm of the here and now, and the shadow world which is where we store our trauma, where many of us are going during this dark time. Mountains on Earth are closest to the stars, and each corresponds with a star. That star being is the primary mediator between the spirit realm and the physical realm. Mountains are where you go to meet the spirit, as is very important in many indigenous and shamanic peoples’ beliefs. It’s where folk magic happens.
I also grew up mere steps from Stone Mountain, in Georgia, also a sacred mountain. Here’s the thing. Mountains typically in shamanic and indigenous traditions, represent masculine spirits. It’s perhaps helpful here to understand masculine in this shamanic sense represents spirit and mind. Feminine is associated with the heart and emotions and the body, the Earth, Mother Earth, indeed. So, simply, most mountains are men.
Mt, Takao, where I was born, and Stone Mountain, where I grew up, are two of the very few mountains in the world that are held by feminine star beings. The Cherokee name for Stone Mountain is the “Crystal Princess”. Stone Mountain is the regional Apu, in the Incan language Quechua, or “Lord”. It is the powerhouse mountain of the south, and the spine of the Appalachian range, the oldest mountain range on the planet.
Mount Yonah, where Chris and I used to camp, is ultimately part of Stone Mountain, part of the same volcanic event.
Feminine mountains like Takao, Stone Mountain, and Yonah have different medicinal and power potential than most mountains. Feminine spirit mountains nurture the body and heart. Mother Earth. Womb of life. You can think of it in medical terms. The masculine promotes “cure-oriented” drugs. The feminine encourages a homeopathic “wholeness.”
For so long, masculine energy and mountains have ruled the world. Now we, over the last few years, have started to see a reversal of that. We are guided by notions that are far more feminine than masculine. This is as it should be, I believe.
Yonah is the Cherokee name for Bear. Many indigenous people believe the bear is the carrier of medicine. You don’t fuck with a Mama bear. Bears, like all of us are doing right now, go inward. They hibernate in dens beneath the surface of the Earth. They go to the shadow world. Shamanic healing takes place in the shadow world… the lower world, where our trauma is stored.
I know now this to be true: Chris was my medicine man, my “bear”.
He taught me how to love, and be loved at a time of my life when I didn’t know how to do either. He was also my tengu, a protective bird, who I think took flight off that mountain. I think he came to me now, with this photo, to protect me and allow me to love and be loved fully, by the mountains that surround my lifeline, and to help me through the deep isolation of this time, and prepare me for the next phase of my life. Instead of being a bird-of-prey, as many tengu are, I believe he’s a bird-of-prayer and protection.
There’s a native-American legend about Mount Yonah. A Cherokee maiden named Nacoochee was in love with a Chickasaw warrior Sautee, but they were from different tribes, and when they eloped, a war party of men, the tribal elders, found them, and threw Sautee off of Yonah Mountain. Nacoochee subsequently jumped off Yonah, dying in a lover’s leap.
I believe Chris and I were from different tribes. I was raised fundamentally Christian, and because of that didn’t know how to love or receive his love, so I abruptly left him out of fear.
It was a moment in my life, when I was just 19, when I was first learning to touch, to have sex. To be intimate. Growing up in Georgia, fundamentalist Christianity terrorized me. I worked for a Gospel radio station through high school, WAEC, and a few of the DJs there conspired to send me to reparative therapy to pray the gay away. It was horrific. And it has destroyed almost every relationship I’ve ever tried to be in. Shame is a deep muscle, one you hope atrophies, but stubbornly stays firm.
I had spent my teenage years never touching, never hugging, never kissing, never experiencing puppy love and school dances and prom dates.The fact is, growing up never hugging or touching the people you feel called to, makes learning intimacy rough, and this time with Chris was when I was struggling with that learning curve of touch. He never questioned. Only comforted. Even in my confusion and clumsiness.
As I looked at this photo, memories of Chris flooded back. He was salt-of-the-earth. He smoked a pipe. He spent most of his time hiking and in nature. He drove a big truck, and instantly introduced me to his family. I always got the impression I was the guy he always wanted, at that time at least.
We used to hike and camp a lot. I’ve often wondered where my affinity for camping and hiking came from. Where my call to the mountains originated. I camped all through my 20s with my family, with boyfriends, with friends. I hiked the John Muir Trail this last summer with my boyfriend at the time, through the High Sierras. When I looked at this photo, I cried when it dawned on me, my love of nature has always come from Chris. He introduced me to, and bestowed that gift. And I will always be grateful to him.
He was kind, and accepted me as broken as I was, and built me up. I remember sleeping on his top bunk with him in his dorm room, the first person in my life who held me tight, and made me feel safe. It was the first time I fell asleep holding a man, and woke up in the same position the next morning, feeling connected and safe and loved. Our sex was natural and unplanned, unscripted and an expression of deep wonder and exploration.
Christianity, a tribe, taught me that I could only be loved if I worshipped a specific God. Otherwise, I was worthless. It’s taken a lifetime to reverse that terrorism on my soul.
But at that time when I was with Chris, I was trying to reconcile the good parts of Christianity, the rituals of the Eucharist which still resonate with me today, with the physical expression of love. But I wasn’t ready. To be loved. Nor to know how precious and special Chris was. The struggle to accept love has haunted every relationship I’ve ever had. And Chris has always been my baseline. I didn’t know until much later that I loved him, for that sliver of time in my life.
I believe this moment in the world, where we are all inside, and the Earth sits still, where coyotes run through the streets of San Francisco, monkeys run through the streets of Thailand, and the skies above China are clear, that it might be wise to understand the Earthly reset that nobody alive today has ever experienced, on this scale. Our beautiful Earth was not meant to sustain 8 billion people. We are meant to rise up as one species, one human race, not tribes or Koreans or Christian or Muslim or Jewish, and honor the Earth, of which we are guests. The beauty of the Earth is what binds us, as humans.
My brother David reminded me of a scene in the Matrix, one of my favorite movies, when Agent Smith sits in front of Morpheus, and says that humans are essentially a virus. We share the same qualities. We consume, and destroy until our host (the Earth) is dead, and there is no resource left to sustain. That’s how COVID-19 wants to behave, and why it’s so important we control it, as best we can, to save our loved ones. But the similarities to what COVID-19 is doing, and what humans have done to the Earth provides me great pause.
I believe modern living has become too complicated. We are constantly “doing”, in triage, on our phones, watching movies, worshipping and overpaying celebrities and people who hit balls around. These are all distractions, from the point of living: to revere the beauty that surrounds us, and honor our host, our divine feminine, the Earth.
It is said in shamanic and indigenous traditions that the mountain near you “claims” you. Alone in my house every day now, I sit on my balcony, and watch the sun set over Mt. Tamalpais, Marin’s holy mountain, also of feminine spirit.
In Lakota Sioux tradition, Mt. Tamalpais is the Holy Right Eye of the Great Turtle. Many Native American tribes believe North Americans live on the back of a Great Turtle which forms our continent. The tail of the Great Turtle is Florida (insert jokes here), the mouth is the San Francisco Bay. The “holy” right eye is Mt. Tamalpais. The left eye is the mountain to my southeast, Mt. Diablo, originally called “Monte del Diablo”, or “Devil’s Thicket” by Spanish (male) soldiers as they thought the Native Americans evaded capture with the help of evil spirits. Ironic, then, that COVID-19 is helping endangered sea turtles hatch.
I, alone in my house, sit perfectly between the eyes of the Turtle Head, The Great Turtle, trying to make sense of this time. Mt. Tam (as we call it in the Bay) was also the sight of a holy “harmonic convergence” once. According to the Sausalito Historical Society, “people gathered from around the West to meditate in its woods and held ceremonies for the healing of the earth.”
The year was 1989…
…the same year I camped on a mountain with my first love, Chris, and took that picture. Thank you, Chris. I love you.
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There’s a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we’ve been so many timesThe grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless riverForever and ever
Pink Floyd, “Division Bell” discography, “High Hopes” excerpt
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For the second in this series, go here.
To read the other chapters in this series, go here. (Read from the bottom up, if you want to read in order). Bottoms up!
