Visible Hope

August 6, 2024August 6, 2024 / Hermionejh / 2 Comments

Belonging matters.

When I was a child, I once felt a part of something bigger than all of us within the group – but I really felt it. I really believed it. It mattered to me in a deep way.

My psyche had been fractured when I got there. I didn’t know this then. It wasn’t something I would come to realize until much later. Then I had to delve into my emotional and mental world to survive – and it was, and sometimes still is – brutal, raw, and exhausting.

I spent nine years growing up in a commune/cult. That’s not how it started out. It was a hippy commune in the wilds of Western Massachusetts. A commune that began out of the tumult of Vietnam – out of resistance to the powerful planet brokers who saw young people as fodder for their wars. It was also a natural defiance against societal norms – it’s what every generation discovers as those young people come into their adolescence and early adulthood. They strive to find their way in this world and not be confined by what was before – especially when they’ve been abused or otherwise oppressed by those raising them as children.

I was a sponge taking in the message that I heard in the Beatles records my older brother played. All you need is love. It was hope.

It primed me to believe and want to live what the adults in the commune were saying. Their tactics didn’t loosen the shackles of what went before, and love became coercion to get in line, follow the leader, and practice the edicts sent down from the charismatic one who believed he was ordained by spirit. He followed the heroes journey by rejecting the message to lead a flock – only he was listening to another flawed messenger who allegedly channeled spirit, and our leader chose to increase his power rather than humble himself within the group.

But I adored so many of these people who really did want to live in harmony and peace, and learn to honor the Earth and its peoples. I belonged.

If that were the end of the story, we could walk away feeling content and keep our hope, but it got dark. And then it got darker.

I became cynical, and the anger of all my life came out of my pores and my mouth and my psyche was filled with hate and contempt.

Good therapists helped me deprogram from the twisted spiritualism, neglect, and other abuse at the commune/cult, and my early childhood trauma.

We’re back to another point in history where a cult leader emerged for those whom hate, fear and resentment give purpose to. Non-inducted people are puzzled in that leader’s hold over those people. How can they elevate such a twisted person?

It’s easy. He made them feel like they mattered, like they belong. Only it’s more insidious. He is no troubled hero who wanted to create something good and miserably failed; he spoke directly to their worst selves knowing that their allegiance would give him the power he sought.

Hope, though, doesn’t belong to any one or any thing. Hope is the spiritual world made visible. Hope doesn’t promise anything. It remains whether we give it up or hang onto it. No one can claim it as their own, and everyone can claim it as their own.

It was the last thing in Pandora’s Box, and it is love’s best offering in this world.

In The Beginning

June 16, 2023June 16, 2023 / Hermionejh / 4 Comments

I am about eight or nine years old. My family is at my Grandpa’s house in Rehoboth, Massachusetts. My uncle Louis, and my aunt Cathy are living there with their father. My Grandma had died nearly a decade before.

Many of my nearly dozen aunts and uncles are gathered here in their family home, the occasion is a cross-country relocation of my cousin Karen and her new husband. Karen is the oldest daughter of my beautiful and sophisticated Aunt Francis and my handsome, Clark Gable-esque, Uncle Frank.

Karen is tall and beautiful like her mother, but she didn’t inherit Aunt Frannie’s red hair. She is about ten years older than me, and she tells us all that their relocation is due to a job that her husband got, or that they both found, out in Colorado.

Karen has always been kind to me, and I wished I could be around her all the time. She goes outside to put something in their car, and I follow her out. She gives me a hug goodbye and I start crying and beg her to take me with her. She hugs me tighter, then looks at me and says “I’m so sorry, I can’t, but wish I could.” It was one of the few moments in my young life that I saw that a better, or different, life was possible.

I couldn’t bear to watch them drive away.

Later that year, or the next, I am in a dim, low-ceiling, exposed beam dining room at the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune in Warwick, Massachusetts. That detail isn’t really important except to note that a few years ago I went to a house built by one of my writer friend’s and her husband out in the woods of Wendell, and their layout was so similar to that of the commune dining area that I felt stunned, and my whole body shivered as I was momentarily transported forty years into the past – a small, bewildered girl absorbing my new surroundings like the dark wood absorbed the light.

“We’re all family now,” said Larry, one of the Brotherhood members. “We all look out for each other,” he had said to my mother and me standing outside the day we arrived.

What I heard was that I was safe. We were safe. I wouldn’t be hurt anymore.

Now we had to settle in.

There are so many people around us. Some sitting, some standing – the room abuzz with conversation, laughter, eating, working, or resting. These people seemed happy, purposeful, sincere – and full of love and kindness.

We noticed the bright, fantastical rainbow art painted on the outside of the front building as we pulled up into the driveway, and more art on the rule boards declaring “no alcohol, no drugs, and no smoking”.

The flowing, colorful artwork contrasted starkly with the spiritual principles and laws painted in black on large white boards nailed up for all to see when entering the dining area.

I’m with my mother and my younger brother. I don’t know where my two oldest sisters are, but I’m not worried about them.

The leader of the Brotherhood Of The Spirit, Michael Metelica, is away in California we were also told earlier that day. He’d be back next week, someone said, and we would meet him then. He and all the other full members would decide if our family could stay there permanently.

My mother doesn’t seem worried. I think I’m a little worried.