Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness throughout the world.

Special Treat – Peggy Ann Doak

September 8, 2007

Peggy Ann presents a strange and rather unique tale leading to self discovery.

What Got Me Looking For a Different Way Of Lookin’

Peggy Ann Doak

  I need to add this foreword before anymore people read this piece.  I said that this brought me to a place of seeking.  But to seek light is to attract the dark.  And I chose to walk through Hell in order that I may find light.  This was all later and not what I want to talk about.  I made this light because it was.  What followed was something that still haunts me today.  I am not talking about being a flower child or taking a little trip.  I experienced something wonderful.  But as I moved away from where I was, I experienced other things also.  My life has been far from a walk in the damned park. I knew I shouldn't have written this.  But it is out.  And the one other piece that goes with this, like it or not, believe it or not, I was born with a gift.  A flipping two edged sword of being able to know things not directly told to me.  I chose at one point to let go of that.  I am not crazy.  It took a long time and some great people with the same dilemma to help me.  So when I hear someone say, 'been there, done that." I want to scream.  NO YOU HAVEN'T or you wouldn't be so flippant about it.  And yes, everything I have written about myself is true.  Everything.

  After my Dad died, gradually I began to have resentment against God.  By the time I had hit my teens, all inclusive with hormonal integrity, I would stand in the street near evangelists trying to save my soul and yell, "I hate you God."   I realized even as I did it that I'd wished someone would come along and love me.  Oil the squeaky wheel, maybe.

     However I spent nearly ten years drinking and drugging with the pure intention of obliterating my feelings.  I nearly succeeded.  Along the way, there was marriage and children, and thank the universe that I left before I did more damage than I had already done; breaking my husband’s heart, neglecting my children.  I didn't even know where I was half the time.

     I don't know why, but I moved over to Mt. Desert Island and started working at the Bar Harbor Motel on route 3.  Just across from the motel and restaurant there stood a huge green mansion believed to have belonged to John Deere, the Tractor Tycoon.  The house was in a state of hefty disrepair.  The owner of the Bar Harbor Motel and Restaurant owned that property and house also.  Those of us who worked for him paid fifteen dollars a week to stay in the mansion.  I was fortunate that I found a perfect bed site, on the third floor nestled into a set of three bay windows.  It was almost like a window seat, my twin bed was.  I had total view of the harbour.  The Blue Nose Ferry, not the CAT, ported just two properties over.  We could set our clocks to when she left and when she returned.

        I was still drinking quite a bit and smoking pot, but not nearly as much as I had been when I was married and a bit after that.  Again I don't know why.   But I was still just as belligerent.  One day on a late afternoon I came swinging down over the hill to my home and I could hear a sound like a flute playing.  As I got closer I saw a man dressed in South American Shepard clothing standing on the door step playing a wooden flute like instrument.  The person I am today would have welcomed such a cool invasion.  But not then.

      "Whaddya doing here?"

       "Waiting for my friend."

       "Where is your friend."

       "She is on the second floor."

        "Does she know you are here."

         "Perhaps."

        "Did you yell up to her from the back o' the house?"

         "No." He looked at me and smiled. "She will come down soon enough."

         Weirdoes, I thought.  Just what Bar Harbour needs more of.  Weirdos.  The house was always locked, and I always lost my key, so I would crawl through the cellar window next to the front porch to let myself in.  But I didn't want this character see me do that, thus I went around to the back of the house and yelled up.  "Anybody up there!  There is some kinda Shepard on the front porch waiting for his friend."  I through my hands up in the air in a, I am clueless and not responsible stance.  Someone came out on the second floor balcony.  "I'll be right down."  She was toweling her hair.  "He belong to you?"  I asked.  She laughed and went back into her room. 

         Both of us were let in the front door and I headed up to my room; my sanctuary.  I had a roommate who was a student at the University of Maine in Orono.   We could not have been more different.  In fact, we were comically different.  She did not drink, smoke pot or cigarettes, swear, mess with boys or dress provocatively.  Her side of the room was spotless and her bed was covered with stuffed animals.  I wasn't sure if she was really prepared to leave home, but I kept that thought to myself.  A perfect boundary line sorta curved back and forth from onside of the room to the other.   My side was wall to wall clothing and junk.  Her's as I said, was quite nice.  For her.  She even had flannel pjs.  You had to love it.

         I lit up a bowl of pot, and was talking to her about my day, and she was telling me about hers, when I noticed a presence in the doorway.  The Shepard and he had a male companion. The companion was also a Shepard and both were smiling.  The part that really caught their eye was the border line and distinct countries that coexisted quite nicely.

          "What?"

           "This is quite an interesting set up," one man said.

            The young woman in the other bed looked bemused. I do not remember her name, but I do remember that soft round face and shortish curly dark hair.  She had one of those complexions that blushed easily.

             "You looking for pot?"  I took a deep hit and nearly choked on it.

              "Do you need that to travel?"  They both looked at me with a rather serious intent.

             "Travel?  As in what?  Outa body type thing."  I was grinning and also quite high by then.

              "Yes."

               "Are you saying that you travel like that?  Kinda flit around the universe.  Maybe hang out in some woman's bedroom and she doesn't know about you, type thing?"

               "Never without permission."  One of the fellows came forward and picked up one of my books, Carlos Castenada.  "He writes about traveling.  Of course he uses peyote."

                "Of course," I said.  I didn't mention that I hadn't read the book because I found it too orbital for me.  "What are you here for, in this room?"

                  "Looking for you." 

                  I burst out laughing and raised an eyebrow toward my room mate.  "I see. Well you have found us, you can go now."

                   "Are you aware that there is a spiritual awakening happening. That there is a movement coming up from where I am from?"

                    I must have been staring at him with my mouth open, which I do to this day, have a habit of when I am stumped.  My roommate started giggling and that brought me out of it before I started to drool.  "What does this have to do with me?"

                    "Oh, everything.  I just came by to tell you."  And they were gone.

                     "Did that just happen?" and my room mate, while hugging one of her many teddy bears said, "I was a witness.  I saw it too."  

                      ******

                   I forgot about the Shepard soon enough until one day while I was combing my hair in front the mirror in my room, I began to see faces other than mine.  At the same time, the back ground behind the faces and I suppose me, though it was in the afternoon, was the dark night sky full of stars.  Several different people, none who I knew, came and left to be replaced by another.  I remember most the Indians.  American Indians.  Both male and female.  There were also other colours and ages, children, old women, old men.  My body started to feel as though it was extremely light and that I was zooming, watching people and stars go by.  I pulled back from the mirror in fear.  It stopped.  I don't think I used any mirror for weeks after that.

                Then one day I met a young man from New York City.  We got to talking downtown, and he told me that he had some peyote, that he'd never tried it, would I like to do some.  "Sure." I remembered the word peyote from the Shepard’s reference to Carlos Costinada.  This fellow showed me what to do, using the instructions that someone else had told him.  He showed me these ugly brown flat circles, sorta, and told me to look for white fuzz and pull it off.  It is arsenic.  "What?!"

          "All hallucinogens have a certain amount of poison in them or they wouldn't work."

           "Oh,"  So I started plucking fuzzies with any thought to what he had just said.  It seemed normal to me.

            "This is the hard part.  They are supposed to taste worst than anything in the world.  The Native Americans said that it depended upon how pure a person was.  The purer, the better the taste, and well," he took a bite and blanched.  "I guess I am not so pure."  We both started laughing.  It did taste extradinarily bad.  Very difficult to get down without wanting to upchuck.  I don't remember how much we had to eat.  Not a lot, but any amount was torture.  We finished our allotted amount and sat on the hill outside the green mansion.

            "So how do we know when it is working?"  I was getting nervous.  I didn't even know this guy and it just hit me then that I was entrusting myself to a stranger in the night.

           "You've taken acid before."  I nodded and he said, "Well, how did you know when that was working?"

           "I attempted to swallow my hand while watching Easy Rider at the theatre. It felt great!"

           But then we both looked nervous, and he was beginning to look like he was sorta evil or something.  I was feeling really nauseous.  When I said that, he said, "You are supposed to be sick"

           Well that scared the bedevil out of me.  I am supposed to be sick.  Am I here with a murderer?  You’re supposed to be sick.  You’re supposed to be sick.  I kept hearing that like a mantra and then I was sick.  I threw up til there was nothing left to give.  He was over in the other direction doing the same.  And then it happened.

            I will attempt to describe what happened.  However it is an experience that only the one experiencing it can feel and see.   Nothing changed.  Still the mansion, still green. Still trees around us and a big lawn.   The ocean behind the house hadn't been flushed away.  No.  It was what was already there.  I saw God.  I saw God, or Jah, or the Great Spirit....in everything.  I picked up a leaf and realized that it told our whole story.  That everything we are or needed was always with us. And I felt love.  Oh man I felt love.  There was an overwhelming feeling of being held, and for the first time I knew that I was not to blame for anything.  That human kind isn't judged by God because how can we possibly know what we don't know.  I felt the Great Spirit's sadness over what had happened to me in the past.  I was overjoyed with the knowledge that I was known.  Right down to how many white blood cells I had.  And I was loved completely.  That this world was loved and all that is.  I also learned that God is all there is.  There was no separation.  I looked at the fellow with me and he looked beautiful.  I asked him, "Can you feel it?"

                    "Yeh" he said in a tone that was reverent.  "It's always been here."

                    "It is our perspective that chooses what we see.  Yet we are being communicated with be everything that surrounds us."  And we sat there in awe, all night.  Sometimes we talked but we didn't really need to.  We already knew what we were going to say.

                   The next morning I felt the same when I went to work cleaning cottages.  There was a young boy, perhaps twelve, who was having a miserable time being on vacation with his parents.  I asked if I could take him down to the mansion.  The parents were overjoyed and the boys were pretty happy himself.   We sat on the lawn, right were we had sat the night before, well, where me and the fellow from NYC.  He was gone back to the city.  This youngster began talking to me and I don't remember the topic.  And I don't remember what I said to him, though I know it was from the connectedness to the spirit that was initiating my responses.  We were there for a couple of so hours.  Again, I don't know what I said, but I think God had a hand in that family's life that day.  Then next morning, in their room that I cleaned, there was a note of thanks from the parents and a big tip.

                 The connection faded as they do when we take a short cut.  But that experience told me that I was defining my life by how I had grown up, and that fall I headed out on the road with just my back pack. No ID.  No nothing.  I left Maine thru Dyserts Truck Stop and didn't come back for a year.  I had begun to seek.

Peggy Ann Doak

 pdoak333@peoplepc.com