3 | Where is He Coming From?

 

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

“Where is he coming from?”

My guess is that people have asked some version of that question about me, more than a few times. After a typical dad joke, or when I was being serious as a leader when it was part of my job to communicate vision regularly, and clearly, but I know at times I left people scratching their heads…We tend to ask it sarcastically when we are confused by something someone did or said.

Right now, though, literally…where am I coming from?

 

Quantum Origins

In the last episode I said I wanted to get more personal about all this…about being raised in Bakersfield, CA, memories of early childhood in Granada Hills, CA, birth in Arcadia, CA, going back to where I was conceived: Phoenix, AZ. 

When I imagine the implications of quantum thinking and our physical make-up, I find myself more and more convinced that the things that make us who we are are drawn from much more than our genetic history or early family environment. We are also made up of the soil, the air, the water, and the generations of people who touched that soil, and breathed that air, and drank the water in those places…the people before us who came from, and came to, and lived in, the places of our history.

Entanglement and connection is everywhere. And that’s why I am going back to Phoenix.

 

Entangled in Phoenix

My “Caldwell people” originally migrated to Phoenix from Alabama, specifically from Caldwell, Alabama not far outside Birmingham. On my mother’s side, my “Morris and McKnight people” came to Arizona from Illinois, Indiana, and Kansas. I am entangled with those places and other people from there too, and so on all the way back through history. But I have to draw a line somewhere. For me, it’s Phoenix.

For reasons I have not been able to discover, my ancestors found their way to Arizona, and although my ancestors would have lined up on opposite sides in the Civil War, in Phoenix they met, married, and began families.

By the way, my maternal grandmother, Edrie Morris, is the one who painted the Cow Behind the Barn picture. But I am going to talk about my birth father’s mother, Leona Caldwell. 

She was an artist and a businesswoman, and became a sing;e mother of two when my grandfather died of alcohol related heart disease in his 40’s. In fact, he died on the front porch one night trying to get from his car to the house. She and my dad, a teenager at the time, found him there in the morning.

Leona Caldwell’s distinctive designs applied to lines of clothing and ceramics and jewelry are well known in certain circles (a search online using her name and Phoenix will turn up a lot of the story). Her designs were inspired by themes from the Hohokam people, the indigenous inhabitants over many centuries in what is now Phoenix (and far beyond). My guess is that today she may have been accused of appropriation, and I am holding that in my heart as I probe this aspect of my entanglement with her, and with the indigenous peoples of the area.

The Hohokam built the most sophisticated network of canals in the pre-contact Western Hemisphere…which makes it ironic, painful, evil in fact, that the US government built dams to redirect water, blocking rivers upstream, and even took over the canal systems themselves; typical of the injustices and oppression experienced by the original inhabitants over generations of encounters with the Spanish and with white Americans throughout the land.

Descending from the Hohokam were the Akimel O'odham ("River People"). Central their way of life was the river, which they considered holy. Which makes a lot of sense when one considers the environment of the people!

This is the place to which my people migrated, joining a long line of migrations into Hohokam and Akimel territory, including the Spanish, the earliest white settlers, as well other indigenous peoples such as the Apache, with whom the Akimel and others held long standing and bitter conflict.

All of this got me thinking about my entanglement with Phoenix in a different way…what I call the psychic history of a place. I want to touch on three aspects of what I mean by that.

 

Psychic Histories

Places share a Psychic History of Pain and Loss, a Psychic History of the Holy and the Haunted, and the Psychic History of Individuals are a sort of microcosm of it all. Like a core sample.

Psychic History of Pain and Loss

It is becoming common in the USA and elsewhere to begin a meeting with, or issues statements referring to, some sort of Land Acknowledgement…which is a way of declaring who originally dwelt there, and their unique relationship to the land, stating the obvious reality that others now occupy and make use of it.  

Such a gesture can become an empty gesture, or worse a type of “virtue signaling”. Whether intended or not, it can be paternalistic and tone deaf. 

So, I want to be sensitive about how I do what I am about to do here. Yet the fact is that I was conceived in a place with a history. So were you. I will focus on Phoenix, but I spent my early years in Granada Hills , on the land of the Tongva people, and on the land of the Tejon in Bakersfield. As wrote a first draft of this paragraph, I was in Rohnert Park, on the land of the Southern Pomos.

In my view of entanglement, I am not only entangled by DNA with my own ancestors, and thus with whatever they did, good and bad, ugly and beautiful, in and to these places and to people there, I am just as entangled with the Spanish and the early whites and all that they did.

And so I am entangled with colonial oppression, and with my grandmother’s appropriation of the material culture of people (unintentional, yes, but that is how privilege and appropriation often work…we don’t even realize it when we do it…to name the reality is not necessarily to blame an individual who unknowingly exhibits it)…).

And yet I am also entangled with the original inhabitants and their histories (good. bad, ugly, beautiful, painful, joyous…things done by them and to them…)

I believe that as humans we share in the psychic history of pain and loss of all humanity…and I believe that this shared psychic history offers a means of healing…past present and future. 

The question of reparation is more and more on the agenda in political discourse these days:  reparations to indigenous peoples and the descendants of enslaved peoples, as the Avett Brothers put it in their song, We Americans, those of us with European ancestry live on “stolen land built with stolen people.” 

A shared psychic history suggests to me that a powerful place to begin the reparation process, the repair process, would be to start from our interconnection, our entanglement, our shared psychic history…to feel it, as if it is ours, mine, for it truly is. 

As I say, I see this as a place to begin. It is not the end point, not a replacement for very tangible forms of reparation. Those could be undertaken however without ever healing the deeper psychic wound.

For that healing, that repair, my admittedly tiny part includes feeling it all, taking it in. And to be honest, this can overwhelm me. Just my genetic line is overwhelming, leave alone the psychic line of connection with the peoples of Phoenix, leave alone ALL people, all humanity, the cosmos!

There are two ways I metabolize such things, both involve paying attention. One is in meditation, in which I try to just be aware, awake to the reality of it all to the extent that my knowledge at any given point in time point allows. Because attentiveness is a way of seeing and observing, which in my approach to quantum theory can create a psychic butterfly effect far beyond myself, including back in time (the question of time is waiting in line for some episodes in the future, whatever that is!)

A second way is in my poetry and music, for art is a way of paying attention, of being aware and awake, and as such is another way of sending the flicker of butterfly wings …art can heal just by existing.

One morning while riding my bike in Pasadena I saw a familiar sight: 4 or 5 coyotes running together down the streets and in between houses. For some reason that morning I saw it differently. In my imagination I saw them following ancient trails of the indigenous people of the area, the Tongva. The trails are covered by pavement and houses now. But I wondered: can you see and hear the Tongva people? Are they out there? Here?

The result of those wonderings was my song, “Dream Catcher.” 

 

Dream Catcher

I see coyotes out my window

They’re running through the yards

They’re sniffing out the trails of the People

Beneath the pavement and the cars

They know the People are their

They hear their voices in the wind

And I wonder if the coyotes are howling

Because they see them coming back again.

In my dream I’m on a mountain looking down upon the plains,

I see the People run in terror, blue coats coming down like rain.

 

I see Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull

Turn history into a show

They don’t mention the lies the white men told

Or the People dying in the snow.

I see the ghost of Crazy Horse

Drifting slowly above the ground

He floats above the plains and the rivers

And through the smoke of settler towns.

When I open up my eyes again I see fences across the land

I see the People trapped inside by men with the long rifles in their hands.

 

I see the People disappearing

One by one the drift away

I don’t hear them say the words

The Great Spirit taught them how to pray

I see them turn and walk away from me

Fading slowly into the shade

Of the Great Spirit who I see weeping

Over all the souls He could not save.

I see the coyotes are there running still over trails on this land

I hear the People say the words again, dreamcatchers in their hands.

 

Before moving on: not all the art I share here is released or available outside the podcast, but that song, Dream Catcher, is, should you want to listen to that again without searching in the podcast.

We share in the entangled psychic history of pain and loss carried by the places where we live our lives.

The Psychic History of the Holy and the Haunted

I mentioned the sacredness of rivers for the original inhabitants around Phoenix…a river as a holy thing, a holy place. 

Most of the great religious traditions have places and objects that are experienced as holy, blessed, in some cases divine…there are also places and objects that are experienced as haunted, cursed, in some cases demonic.

Inspired by the psychic history of Phoenix and sacred rivers, I will focus on rivers and water.

 

Religious Views

In the Hindu world…

For many adherents of what westerners inaccurately call Hinduism (as if it were one thing) every inch of the Ganges River is the embodiment of sacredness. The faithful bathe in its waters and carry small quantities with them for use in rituals back home.

The river is the form in which the  “shakti”, the moving, rolling energy, of Shiva appears on earth…and can be  felt, tasted, and absorbed….

In the Buddhist world…

The idea of "blessed water" is found in virtually all Buddhist traditions. In the Theravada tradition, water for cleansing, and purification can be created in a ceremony involving a candle and symbols of the other elements: earth, air, fire. Most Mahayana Buddhists typically recite sutras or various mantras numerous times over the water, which is then either consumed or is used to bless homes afterwards.

In the Christian world

In the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions blessed water is used in repelling and exorcizing evil, and in providing a means of grace for both body and soul.

In the Muslim world

The well of Zamzam in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is just under 70 feet away from the Ka’aba, the holiest place in Islam.

The well is considered a miraculously generated source of water, which opened up thousands of years ago when the son of Ibrahim (Abraham), Ismaʿil (Ishmael), was left with his mother Hajar (Hagar) in the desert. 

Officially, Islamic teaching would not suggest the water is holy in the sense of having special powers, but in the lives of many Muslims it does and like the water of the Ganges the faithful take it home from their pilgrimage

In the Sikh world

One of the holiest sites for the Sikh people is Harmandir Sahib which is surrounded by a pool of water called Amritsar. Bathing in the pool is believed by many Sikhs to have restorative powers, purifying one's karma. Some carry bottles of the pool water home particularly for sick friends and relatives. 

 

Magic or Reality?

I can imagine the question, isn’t this all just magic, superstition?

I now think that entanglement, and quantum theories of the universe, might offer a way to understand holy and haunted places and things.

If quantum theory is right, if the cosmos is entangled, if humans are entangled, then might there be places and objects which have become entangled to a greater degree than others with “good” effects…with the effects of people and events in a place which left what we might call “blessing”? 

And conversely, might there be places and objects that have been entangled in the effects of pain, hurt, evil, injustice, brutality…evil…which occurred in those places, or through those objects?

I believe in holy and haunted things and places, in part because I believe in the psychic histories that render them so.

And I see no reason to limit such entanglement to only that of the shared psychic history of humans…leaving aside any particular teaching about unseen beings (angels, demons, jinn, ghosts, aliens, etc) I see nothing to suggest that there cannot be other sentient beings, unseen by us…there is more to our world than meets the eye …nor do I see any reason to assume such beings can be divided into classes: “these are all good”, “those are all evil”…the same individually (if that word applies to other beings the way we think it does to us…which I also question by the way!) I do not assume any individual human is all good or all evil, why would I assume so of any other sentient being?

A psychic history of places….which can be holy or haunted…brings me to…

The Psychic History of Individuals

The effects of places on people, and people on places, and the entanglements of the holy and the haunted, all makes me see myself and my origins in a new light. I am made up of such entanglements, of the psychic history of Phoenix, of all the peoples of Phoenix.

In my poem, “Battles, Seeds and Suitcases” I have tried to relate particularly to the entanglement between myself and my birth parents. I wrote the poem before I had done any of my digging into the history of Phoenix, so I had not really considered the entanglement of PLACE in the way I have been doing here. I really just thought the poem was about me and my parents and my shared psychic history with them. Period.

Then I recorded myself reading the poem for this project, and then I listened to my voice reading it. But let me come back to that. For now, here is the poem.

Battles, Seeds, and Suitcases 

1. Battles

Two nervous peelers of secrets 

Hot adolescent Arizona

Groping tentative fingers 

Finding feeling fearing

(I learned later 

The disputed territory between them

The anger in the lust kindled fires)

Clutching, sweating, swelling, clinging, 

Two no’s fading

Cresting a downward slope,

Force of gravity

Crescendo

Groins and loins embattled at the front lines,

Gasping explosion 

Flaming fearful wargasm

(Or plural? I assume there were times before I came? 

Came? Why that word? There it is on the page, arriving unbidden. 

Like myself)

 

I rephrase:

I was not beginner’s luck. 

 

After, the battle smoke clears.

They agree to a wordless truce, 

An awkward silence.

 

They draw apart,

The same uncertain fingers reassemble the peeled layers.

Brief looks in rear view mirrors, 

Each diverting contact away from their own eyes.

They become presentable for the end of the parental curfew.

 

1. Seeds

Alive in the silence between the combatants

A shared unspoken lump in the back of the throat, 

Sits the unmentionable rain of seed that has fallen, 

Into soil that after every battle they fear will be fertile,

Hoping there will be no fruit.

 

It will not be long before they discover

A single seed in a clod of mud has taken root.

 

I am already growing there between them on the drive home,

Formed by the air and wind and weeds and mineral and stone,

In the brutal blessed broken twisted beauty of entwined ancestral lines,

Tissue and bone, 

Archetypal dreams, stored tribal pride, sorrow, shame, legend, 

Oiled curls of thick hair, dimples, chins.

 

Me, spoil of war.

Feared, conceived, regretted,

 

III. Suitcases

I arrive like a piece of luggage already packed,

Full of things pulled from shelves and drawers,

Hand me down X’s and Y’s, 

Skeltered asunder, stuffed in, unfolded, the edge of a shirt hanging limp from the lid.

The sum of what I can choose to wear against the weather out there.

 

I carried and battered that trunk

House to house through the years.

Now I am in the season when my skin is thin,

Easily bruised and bloodied

Just by brushing touches against 

Unseen edges of a door, a box.

 

Tossed askew on my bed,

My suitcase lid is open.

There is nothing to give away.

I am not sorting or sifting. 

Not discarding for sale. 

I’ve never been good at folding,

So, there it sits.

Shirts shorts trousers

The odd sock

All a ramble, tangled, still.

 

I linger indecisive.

Though there is something I can do.

Touch, smell, see, take in hand each random thing.

The jumbled assemblage of myself, laid bare, waiting,

Airing in the quiet room.

 

As I said a moment ago, I did not consciously touch the psychic history of Phoenix  when I wrote the poem, because I did not know any of the history of the peoples who dwelt there long before my physical ancestors migrated. But reading it as I prepared for this? 

Battles…a long history…Atimel, Apache, Spanish, whites…

Seeds: and water and fertility and life…

Suitcases: moving, transitory…

And these lines: 

“Formed by the air and wind and weeds and mineral and stone”

“..stored tribal pride…”

“Me, spoil of war…”

 

I see in a new way how entangled I am: the psychic history of pain and loss, and the holy and the haunted history of Phoenix, and my individual psychic history related to my parents, and their histories, and their parents, and the Christianity of my mother, and the shame, isolation, alone-ness, anxieties, and fears my parents must have felt when I was conceived and the mutual accusing and blaming when they found themselves with an unexpected unwanted child  in late 1950’s Arizona.

I carry all of that…inside of me, entangled in my soul, and so it became entangled in the poem in ways I was not consciously doing..

The poem ends with the lines:

“I linger indecisive.

Though there is something I can do.

Touch, smell, see, take in hand each random thing.

The jumbled assemblage of myself, laid bare, waiting,

Airing in the quiet room.”

 

Now What

That suggests a way for me, for anyone, for you perhaps, to face our entanglements…the psychic histories of places and of the haunted and the holy of all of life, and to face our own individual psychic history.

Pay attention. Touch, smell, see, take in hand all the (apparently) random jumbled bits of ourselves…allow them to be laid bare and airing in a quiet room.

In doing so, we send ourselves butterfly wings, because when we do, we cause butterfly effects to reverberate all through the synapses and webs of our shared psychic histories…adding a little to the healing of it all, of us all. 

And next? I am headed to Granada Hills, where an unseen friend awaits all dressed in black…and a row boat….and some towels stuffed into a child’s pockets….and a yellow room in a gray house.