trojan horse

he came, a child,

not quite innocent,

and left, no more a man.

monstrous—dark heart.

war dog. hound of hell.

suffering sorrows,

anguished agony, 

scorched death—his own

not allowed

but inflicted.

he would carry it long

and live its agony

in dumpsters and shadowed doorways

stinking with old beer and piss,

and nights of terror 

and hollow black emptiness.

shattered.

lost.

The year he was 18, his draft lottery number was 7. If he had been 19 that year he would have been drafted into the Viet Nam War in January. It was a wakeup call.

He was a gentle soul from a family of gentle souls. No one ever argued in his family. It was not spiritual or mature to fight, and his parents did not tolerate it. He had assimilated the calm and gentleness of his family into his being from an early age, and the very possibility of combat duty in the most horrific and publicly examined war of his time was more terrifying than any possibility he could fathom.   

The next year, his lottery number was 137. Estimates were that the draft would roll around to his number sometime in the early Fall. But a miracle happened. The Nixon administration began to pull troops out of Viet Nam, and within the year, extricated the United States from the conflict entirely. Regardless of whatever stains may have darkened the record of Richard Nixon’s presidency, he always would love the man for this act of sanity that had been so illusive to his predecessors in both parties. The draft never reached his number that year.

But having escaped the draft, he still could not escape the specter of Viet Nam. Many of his friends had gone. The luckiest ones seemed to be the ones who came back in coffins. America spent the rest of his generation wrestling with the horror that little war unleashed on her children. He often wondered why he had been spared. He was truly certain that to go would have utterly destroyed him, and suspected providence. But why had providence smiled on him but not on so many others he knew? He could not feel guilt for being spared, but was uneasy with it anyway. It lurked in his heart unchallenged and unhealed for almost 30 years.

After a few years, movies about Viet Nam began to surface. He never went to see any of them. The chaotic senselessness of the war still disturbed him too much. There was something in it that he could not identify—something that tore him apart inside even though he had not personally experienced the war first hand.

As the years passed, he never examined this overpowering aversion and terror. It seemed to crop up whenever he heard explicit accounts of violent, horrible abuse of groups or individuals at the hands of others. Holocaust stories and genocide and serial killings all seemed to stir the same dark brooding aversion. He avoided movies that depicted such events, and consciously practiced diversion from thinking about such things. He had always taken a measure of comfort in how repulsive such things were to him. It seemed to anchor his goodness and moral strength.

One day he made an emphatic comment to the Moon’s little sister about never watching Viet Nam movies. Her eyes lit up—his aversion was too strong. There must be some dark thing beneath it that she could explore.  

She prodded him to explain it and for weeks they discussed it. Then one day, it came clear to them both. The problem of Viet Nam was not that violence had been done. There were accounts of violence every day in the news. There were instances of violence everywhere in the entertainment media. These were deplorable to him, but most of them didn’t evoke anything of the revulsion that they were examining now. 

The problem of Viet Nam was that it forced America’s sons to confront their darkest, most horrifying potential for inhumanity, and then it abandoned them to the hell that boiled up from their hearts. Viet Nam moved and tore him so deeply because he knew that the monsters forced to the surface so violently and out of time for the veterans who had gone there were no less present in his own heart and in the hearts of human beings everywhere. Viet Nam had been a window into the dark shadows that lurk deep and unmolested in all of us. He had read essays to this effect over the years, and had intellectually assented to their theses. But this was different. Those essays had not touched the shadow in his own heart. They had been ideas to him. This was his own shadow. 

Now he saw that his aversion to deeds of inhumane evil was not so much an indication of his own moral strength but rather a deep dread of his own capacity to move in such dark places himself. What would it take to push a gentle, peaceful man like him into an unthinkable act? He knew that the world he lived in was capable of such a push. The things that were so repulsive to him were examples of just such a push—examples of people much like him who found themselves in circumstances that left no moral high ground; no clean way out. Or people who had been pushed over the edge into pain that deadened their hearts to their own humanity.  

The fact that his life had not pushed him so far was little comfort. He was clearly aware for the first time in his life that the darkest, most diabolical evil he could imagine was within his capacity. He had after all, been the one who imagined it. And he began to see how his upbringing had loaded the shadow with moral urgency. It had not just been good to be calm and peaceful and full of gentleness in his family—it had been mandatory. The struggle to overcome evil had depended on it. He had carried the banner. He had fought the good fight. And yet he had always been beset with this nagging undefined horror within. He was a Trojan Horse, and so, could never risk a moment to rest.

 He began to grow a deepening sense that he must come face to face with this black potential and learn from it. This would be the only hope to overcome its terror. Only by knowing it well, measuring its reach, testing its energy, could he trust his ability to live with it in balance and peace. This was perhaps, the greatest challenge he had encountered thus far in his life. It entailed walking into utter darkness to encounter monsters made of shadow. He must feel his way along, and trust his heart in darkness as well as he had learned to trust it in light.

the center point of love

For over a month he did not write. A tiny wisp of white cloud had been drifting quietly, far off on the horizon of his heart for many months, and now suddenly it began to grow and spread and darken across the expanse of his sky. There was fear and danger and foreboding in it. The cloud spread rapidly and grew black with a reddish churning intensity and fury. It blotted out the late summer Sun. It hung low and heavy with pain and torment welling up in its breast. It was the raging storm of lost love, and he knew it had come for him now. He knew it would not be denied. He knew he could not hide, or run, or argue or trick it out of the prize it had come to claim.

For as long as he had known her, he had loved her. For nearly as long, he had known that she loved him too. But with all this knowing, there had always been a distinct difference in the nature of their feelings toward each other. They had danced around the awkwardness of it. They both cherished the connection they had, and were not willing to harm it. But always, the little cloud lingered on the horizon. Occasionally it drifted across the Sun, dropping the temperature perceptibly.

Now suddenly the cloud had a life of its own. He was aware that he must answer to the dark thing, and now was the appointed time. He knew that the love he had envisioned and nurtured toward the Moon’s little sister was not to be fulfilled. At first, his heart caved in under the stifling force of this bleak oppression. How could he live without the hope of their love? What substitute could he ever hope to find that could rival the power and beauty and joy and sweetness they shared? He was utterly undone, and spent days lost in despair.

But as usual, she remained clear since it was not her heart that was breaking. She knew the strength and nature of her love for him, and was steadfast, though not certain that he would be able to continue their sweet friendship in the face of his horrid, heart wrenching loss. He had hoped for romance to flower between them. She had never been moved clearly in this direction, and to his bitter comfort, had not pretended for his benefit.

Now, after nine months of deep, close intimacy, he came face to face with reality. What they had shared had not stirred romantic passion in her heart, and it was not reasonable to expect that anything further that could happen between them would do so. She was the trusted friend of his deepest heart, but would never be his lover.

The thick smothering sorrow and heart wrenching loss of this fact settled over his world on Friday afternoon. It was more than he could bear. He agonized and thrashed his way through a long sleepless night and into the empty lifeless light of a crisp clear Saturday morning. They talked that Saturday. It was torture for him, but in spite of his agony, he could not turn his back and sulk away. He must engage his sorrow. He must not allow it to swallow up their friendship. As always, she seemed strong and clear and able to weather his storm.

As Saturday wore on into Sunday, he began to embrace the feelings of sadness and longing and fear and anger that washed over him in wave after wave after wave of unrelenting anguish. He found that as he opened himself fully to the feelings—as he devoted his entire force of being to them—they were transformed from oppression and constriction into open expansive energy. There was a miracle in the works. There was a transformation taking over his heart that he could never have dreamed possible out of such bitter, crushing sorrow.

As Sunday wore on into afternoon, he began to realize that he had never embraced his grief for any relationship loss he had ever experienced. He had always doggedly pushed back against the feelings for weeks and months and even years, until the pain eventually gave up the bruising battle against time. But this time was different, and he was discovering a new sweetness and power in these wrenching hard miseries. First, he turned his attention to his divorce, and then to the loves he had known and lost long ago in his youth. He let waves of heartache swell up out of each of these broken dreams. And as they flooded up from forgotten places, he embraced each of their sorrows with tender enthusiasm.

Anguish was transformed. Now he began to wash and drift in a rising flood of joy and peace and acceptance. The hurt and sorrow and brokenness of four lost loves welled up and flooded his heart before sunset. Feelings of sorrow and grief from each of them had risen to the surface, and all were still present with intense depth and richness in his heart. He had embraced them one by one. He had received them passionately and with tenderness. Now, they could not harm him. Now, these horrible monster feelings that he had run so desperately away from throughout his whole life were becoming his most cherished prizes.

He spoke to her again. Now, his sense of loss and longing were tempered and sweet. There was a strength in him that he had not known before. He still loved her just as he always had. But he had found the center point of his love. It did not rest in her, as he had always assumed that it did. It was somewhere deep down inside his own heart. He had discovered his own joy. He had discovered his own capacity to live and love and embrace even the darkest experiences of loss and rejection and loneliness. Now he could love her without concern for her response—regardless of whether or not romance ever bloomed. Now he could hold the full body of that love in his heart and move on, strong and sure in his own balance and rest. Now, for the first time in his life, He drew love from deep within himself rather than tapping into the heart of another. The transformation could not be expressed in words. The field of energy and peace and comfort emanating from within him was new and uncharted. Sorrow and longing were still present. In fact, they were magnified in this new life bubbling up within him, but they were strangely comfortable and welcome. Love had found its core.

He did not know what tomorrow would bring. He knew that his friendship with the little sister of the Moon would endure and thrive outside the quest for romance. He knew that she had been the catalyst for the most powerful experience of his life thus far. He had found that all his past loves still lived within him waiting for this transformation. And so, he knew that she too would always hold her sacred place in his heart He also knew that he was still eager to reach out to share his love. He would enter into love with a clear, strong, open heart, as he had never done before in his life. Now he would focus for a time on nurturing and cultivating that strength and clarity and openness as he ventured out into his big wide new world.