I want to pluck out the metaphorical thorn that’s been embedded in my psyche for years and then see if I can’t find my way back to a happy place. Laksha’s question about where I am on my own spiritual journey has lingered in my mind, and I’ve been thinking about it—there was a rebuke there, and a well-deserved one. It put me in mind of Whitman’s rhetorical question about judgment in I Sing the Body Electric: Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
Nope. I certainly do not. And the primary problem is that I do not know enough of myself. I have old wounds that have never fully healed, and I need to address them before I can move to help others. And in truth there is no balance that I can achieve but my own.
I have long delayed seeking that balance, in favor of more-pressing business, but I feel that it’s finally time to take care of it. Being able to take care of it was one of the primary reasons I became a Druid, but I have purposely waited since becoming bound to Gaia, to ensure that I would not act rashly. Instead, I have coolly planned a course of action that will serve Gaia and also serve my personal need to give my stepfather the finger.
As a child, when I came to live at his place in Kansas—the slightly smaller one, not the sprawling monstrosity he bought my senior year—I quickly saw that my mother was a prize instead of a person to him, and I was a burden he had to tolerate if he wanted the prize. He never laid a finger on me—I’m more fortunate than so many others in that regard—but the most love I was able to ever wring out of his face was a look of mild disgust. Never a kind word. Maybe it was because I was a tangible reminder that he had not always possessed my mother. Any interest he gave me was feigned, and that was only in the presence of others. I know my mom must have seen something good in him besides his bank account; her regard for him, at least, wasn’t feigned. I think she admires single-minded determination. My real dad had it and so does Beau—and I suppose I possess a fair measure of it myself.
The only time I think I ever saw him smile at me was when he was waving goodbye as I left Kansas for Arizona State.
So, yes: I have hurt feelings, which I probably should have sought to address long ago. His aggressive disdain, heaped on my real father’s distracted abandonment, did nothing good for my psyche. It’s why I took to playing alone outside as much as possible, enjoying an area that wasn’t so firmly under Beau’s control. Later it wasn’t playing but reading in a tree house that my mother had hired someone to build for me—Beau certainly wouldn’t do it. I stayed out past dark and burned through a whole lot of batteries for my flashlight. I felt more at home there than in the bedroom he allowed me to sleep in.
But there again, Beau Thatcher found a way to be hurtful. He has long regarded the whole world, including the people on it, as resources that exist for him and his cronies to exploit so that they may have their sprawling estates and luxury cars and congressmen in their pockets. His moral compass always points to himself; he is his own true north. He helped fund three or four corrupt scientists who denied the reality of climate change, giving his company a thin shield of shady science to protect his short-term profits.
And now that the world is racked by freakish storms, convulsing from drought and floods and rising sea levels, with massive die-offs in the oceans and extinctions continuing on land, he still refuses to own up to his share of the responsibility for it, and his money gives him the privilege to ignore the troubles that most people face. The world will never make him pay for his company’s oil spills and carbon pollution, because American laws are written to protect men like him. But Druidic law allows the punishment of despoilers, and I’m a Druid. The application of those laws is up to me.
Atticus feels that pursuing despoilers of the earth is futile, since there are so many of them and so few Druids, and when I look at cold numbers on paper I see the sense of that. But my heart cannot meekly accept criminal pollution as inevitable. That would mean accepting that Beau Thatcher is a force of nature instead of a single shitty human being. And I suppose that is where Atticus and I disagree.
“Ready for a bunch of running around, Orlaith?” I ask my hound.
<Sure! Run where? Trees?>
“Probably not so many trees. Lots of plains with prairie dogs.”
<Name for those things is so strange. They aren’t really dogs.>
“Human language is funny that way. What kind of beef jerky should we pack?” I ask. I need lots of protein to aid in rebuilding my torn tissues. “What’s your favorite flavor?”
<Any beef flavor is good. Except no horseradish or mustard.>