The mermaid came from "money" originally, or at least from the "appearance" of money and therefore was imbued with an overwhelming sense of entitlement. The real world slapped her in the face like a cold salt water wave. It went up her nose and almost drowned her. She came from a place of total chaos and confusion, to which she had "checked out" and into a world of her own where she either dominated or was painfully shy. She had spent much of her life just clearing her head from that formidable misunderstanding.
She was a late bloomer. The current "stage" she was going through had been set by the 2008 crash where she had lost her professorship and had been unemployed and had lost her home and had couch-surfing for 6 years. She had finally gotten moved out of the city and, like a piece of driftwood which had been lodged in a tide pool, she was suddenly in the open sea.
Teaching college freshmen wasn't really "her thing" anyway so she didn't really care so much about that - it was the desire to find her place that drove her, and the fear of financial insecurity, which made her a constant self-seeker, even when trying to be kind.
She had found that life went best when her pursuits came from the Universe, originally. Unfortunately, it was way late when she made that discovery due to the entitlement-thing - long after she had missed many wonderful opportunities.
The result was - she was as lost as she had always been, but now there were no jobs. She had always been able to get a job - but she was never able to keep them for long. A friend offered to pay for her return to the east. She decided to west. She had a feeling that she was supposed to go.
What she found when she got there was unexpected. The Ocean she remembered from childhood had dried up... it was gone, or it had never existed. Perhaps it had been a mirage in a futile desert. She had to find the deep vast wide bottomless Source within herself instead. She had to say farewell to her clan once and for all. She had pulled the Tower card. The tie was severed. The real reason for her journey west was yet to be revealed.''
The yeti was a scary creature. He was terrifying ... but in his heart of hearts he wanted to be loved. He wanted to be different but he did not know how. No one would go near him. He was shunned. He was kicked out of places that say "all are welcome". He had his facade - he had chosen "Crazy-with-a-Capital-C" (CwaCC) as his method of functioning because it had worked. When in trouble or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout - create a diversion.
The dark and the light are part of the Whole - to Unify them requires Listening to the Source...
The mermaid met the yeti in the street. She first saw him ranting to himself one night in the cold dark air. He slept on the pavement. Made his shelter on the boulevard. Laid his head on the highway. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him as a statesman; making a formal address; commanding a large audience of admirers...
She had a flash of recognition. She knew - that was the purpose of her journey - to help him find his way. She offered him her time, since that was her most valuable gift and all she really had. She could not understand him through her logic, so she listened to him with her Heart, and she heard him. He was looking for the Ocean too. He was really a Marlin. He had emerged in this life as a boy-child, and had quickly become a yeti to disguise himself due to his chaotic surroundings. Now he was lost and could not find his way home ... just like her in a certain way. The difference, she thought, was that she knew she was a mermaid. It was much later she realized that she was wrong. The yeti actually thought he was a yeti when he was really a small-boy child with a marlin spirit. He was far into the woods of self-deception. He had a long walk ahead of him. Helping him made her own journey out of the woods bearable.
The yeti kept people at arms length and it also endeared him to certain other CwaCC people - plus he got free cigarettes and the occasional bud and free food. He didn't have to "work" a normal schedule and since he's an "artist" and a "scientist" he is too smart to live a normal life - CwaCC works, sort-of. The only problem with CwaCC is that he can't really live indoors because he would have to actually deal sanely with neighbors and bills and regular meals and of course there is the loneliness which leads him to do stupid things like light fires in the living room... the other downside to CwaCC is the occasional run-in with the cops which lands him in hand-cuffs and the eventual four-point restraints in the psych ward, shot up with major tranquilizers... But he's used to it - it' been going on like this since the 70s.
In the 70s sometime, the yeti was a semi-normal guy, working a 9-5 job. He had recently been honorably discharged from basic training in the Army for a physical ailment and he was not yet 21. He got a job as a chemist for a place that was a subcontractor of the DOD and the work they were doing was ultimately to support the war machine, so when he ended up dosed on 12 hits of Owsley's purple ohm domes at a seemingly innocent after-work dinner party where he was schtuping the doctor's wife, no one questioned it. It was not the first time he had done LSD, but never that much at once.
Soonafter, he was taken by his parents to the local nuthouse. No thought of MK Ultra programming came to mind. It seemed innocent enough that he was now doing the Thorazine shuffle and living in a half-way house for a year, where he celebrated his coming of age, with serious brain damage and taking big medications that would block the part of his brain that is still tripping. His polysomes are forever disaggregated.
Besides, she smelled good. She had that fragrance of saltwater and seaweed that reminded him of something before. He remembered that he once felt better than being a strange boy, and he longed to be free, so he followed the mermaid. He had the stubborn personality of a goat and she had the firey personality of a comet. She burned his hooves and he trampled on her fins, but they stuck together because they recognized their vulnerability, in a world where most people were asleep.
The yeti has quite a tale to tell. He grew up bi-coastal. His dad worked for the DOD as an undercover agent and he is the oldest of 6. He was the smartest and therefore was treated differently - and not in a good way - it's a typical dilemma when dealing with pure Evil. He had been offered a not entirely free ride through Princeton as a PhD candidate in math, but Dad said no because he did not want to pay for it.
Dad, the secret agent man - Mom, the abandoned wife - pissed-off that Dad is always gone, abuses the kids while Dad is absent and then is remorseful later - the kids grow up in this weird, other-worldly, unstable environment - which they learn to believe is "normal" and they recreate it for themselves as adults - and they hate each other because they remind each other of the horrid feelings of childhood - instead of caring for one another as a family unit, the kids create one obvious scapegoat to compare themselves to and live their separate lonely lives... the scapegoat in this case, was the yeti.
He is an awkward boy, super brainiac and very tall and gawky, and the son of a high-ranking government official; so he is above the law - and never has consequences for his actions. The cops run his plates and drive off before ever pulling him over. Living without consequences as a youngster leads to nothing good later - an inability to fit in to society may start out as unconventionally cool but ends up just plain homeless, due to having "gotten away with it" all those years.
At heart, the yeti desired love. He longed to be indoors and for a companion, a family, a community - he's getting old. The lure of the catch-as-catch-can swindle is no longer of interest to him. Every day at about 4 o'clock he would have an existential crisis when he realized he was going to be sleeping outside again. He is trying to clean up his act - but Crazy does not bode well for him, and Crazy is all he knows... as he goes to various community groups trying to find a way out. He is like the steer who jumps the slaughterhouse fence and runs headlong into traffic - free at last!. The problem is - he is still a steer - and steers just don't know how to behave in the City.
His hooves slip on the pavement. He becomes more afraid - now not only of the life he leaves, but of what awaits him - there is no love in sight - fear looks like aggression - an enormous 1500 pound animal barreling through the residential neighborhood might be shot by "authorities" in this day of conformity - and in some ways it is safer for the steer standing in it's own excrement in the feed lot yard - the inevitable death guarantees peace. It is a dilemma we face in our world today. The Age of Submission to the Materialistic God has made humans complacent to an oddball... they kill it and then find out what it is.
When it came to helping the yeti, the mermaid had to call on all her special friends for help - the faeries & the butterflies, the Holy Spirit & the Ocean itself. She called & prayed & cast spells because even though the yeti followed her around, he was gruff & tough & a little wild. He lived outside, so he could never let his guard down & just be the man that he was. She needed help from all of her family, her elders & her sisters & brothers and she needed help from her cohorts. She needed help from her community like she had never needed it before.
The trade-off seems to be that she now attracts others like her who are seeking this kind of Closeness. Those others are usually on the fringe. She must remain humble and follow behind the Flame, and It leads her along her path. She must stand by the door. She must never go all the way in. She must stand there and show others how to get through the door to God.
The yeti has been cast out of society. He is very ill emotionally. He is splintered into many personalities and he can be very mean to the mermaid. She tried very hard not to take it personally most of the time - she tried to remember being that way herself as a child...in addition she thinks of her mentors and what they have done, the stories they have relayed, and she draws on their strength and experience.
It seemed that the mermaid was criticized by her family-of-origin and was rejected by her immediate kinfolk in the Land of Set, for taking a liking to the yeti and since she had tuned in to his "frequency", life without him became gray and flat. Once again she was forced to choose the hard path - to turn away from family and "friends" and reach out to the yeti.
Her first task was to bring him out of the First Dimension. He was just a point in space. A mind that doesn't work right and a body that won't die. She started to feed him - he was emaciated from living on the street. He had to walk for miles for each meal. Breakfast at the northeast church. Lunch at the middle church. Dinner at the southwest church. Mickey-Ds in between.
This west coast town where they both grew up used to be a place of considerable compassion and freedom.
Over the years it had become Babylon. It is a place where people do not take care of each other but instead neglect and despise the weaker ones. They just seem to stand and watch people die - They have some rationalization that seems to work for them. - watch TV - turn a blind eye - it's all cliche, but it's startlingly real.
Most of the people are medicated. The mermaid had never met so many people on "medication". They were either smoking weed or are on antidepressants or both. It is an epidemic.
The mermaid wondered why it was so obvious to her and not to others that they are depressed because they have cut themselves off from Love. There was also a strange vibe in the air there. Oppressive, like HAARP mind-control might feel. The mermaid found that she herself had no energy to explore or venture out to meet new people or follow her usual interests. She could not understand this except that she felt as though there were strange frequencies of ultra-sound introduced in the atmosphere that were preventing her normal brain functioning. She felt weighed down as if by an invisible anvil. Others did not seem to feel the same way particularly. The people who lived there, who had always been active, still seemed to be active, but the majority were stuck in the muck.
It seemed obvious to the mermaid: they are despondent because they had no principles. They are unhappy because they sold out to convenience rather than standing up - caring for their brothers and sisters, cherishing the earth. What is apathy but suppressed fear and anger eating away at the lining of the stomach, brain, nerves... causing disease.
The yeti is an elder now. He gets a monthly check, but fearing that he will spend it unwisely he gave it all away in the first week and then lived on nothing eating nothing for the rest of the month. He was skin and bones. His brain would not function well without nutrition.
When she met him, the yeti was staying in the Catholic Church rectory at night. It was a st-joseph-worker church so the priests took in the poor. They slept among the pews on the floor, but at least they were indoors. The homeless shelters were maxed out and you had to follow too many rules and there was no housing anyway so you would end up back on the street, so why bother? The yeti could not follow all the rules anyway so he just stayed in the rectory and called himself a Catholic. He had to go to Mass before they fed them breakfast daily.
The mermaid herself lived out of town about half an hour northeast of Cooltown in a more ethnic neighborhood where there were no obvious homeless people, just a poor Hispanic 'hood. She was renting a room from an old friend who had been able to buy a small house there and was now renting out all his rooms to pay the mortgage.
It's the whites that abandon their family members to the street and the non-whites that give their disabled uncle a room in the house.
After a few weeks, the yeti moved to the 'hood and set up camp next to a church 2 houses away from the mermaid. The mermaid's landlord friend was pretty unhappy to hear this and the mermaid feared that her living situation was threatened, but she could not convince the yeti to move back to Cooltown. The mermaid begged the yeti to move back to the Catholic worker church but the yeti said that this guy named Pete jerked off every night in the pews and he could not sleep with all the noise.
Once the yeti set up camp inland, the cops immediately rolled him and took him to the nut farm 50 mi away. The mermaid got a call that he was lost and wandering around in wealthy neighborhoods disturbing the peace with no way to get home. He had been shot up with Halidol and dumped in a park with a bus pass and no map. The mermaid drove an hour and a half to find him and bring him back.
At that point she made him a little card to keep in his wallet to show the cops that he "belonged" to her, asking them to call her before they took him in again. It was a periodic thing, she was told, that the cops would make him dump his pockets on the ground looking for a reason to arrest him so they could move him out of the residential neighborhood. The yeti had a complex filing system for all his important papers and cards and money. The cops could care less about this and it would take the yeti 4 hours to reorganize his pockets after a roll.
The mermaid began to take the yeti to the food pantry every week, getting rice and beans which she cooked with vegetables to bulk him up.
She began to touch him - reaching out her hand to hold his. It had been so many years since he has felt human contact - sometimes he loved it and sometimes he lashed out at her. Sometimes they held each other for a long time.
She gave him a set of watercolors and a pad of paper so he could begin to paint again. He began to write stories. He bought a Scrabble set and they begin to play.
She snuck him into her house and let him shower when the roommates were out, several times a week. He had a planet fitness membership himself, but it took a bus ride to get there so he was only able to use it once a week. He had mite-bites on his skin, maybe from a soup-kitchen or clothes from the freebox.
The roommates did not like the yeti. The roommates seemed to sacrifice people who are not like them, and keep them in a portion of their minds where they are separate and need to be caged or scorned. This seemed to make the roommates feel better about themselves. One of them had an eating disorder. Another went to detox every month. Another was cooking meth in his room. They needed to make the yeti worse than them to justify their behavior.
Even though the yeti was attempting to become a member of society again and give up his wild ways, the roommates did not offer much help. They told the mermaid that the yeti could only be near the house 10 minutes before she was planning to leave - because "what would the neighbors think?" Really? Yes, they really said that.
This was so unusual to the mermaid that she shuddered to hear it. In the Aquamarine City, where the mermaid used to live before she stumbled "back home", people she knew play the Good Samaritan everyday if need be. With all her difficulties, the mermaid never went without a roof over her head, and she was used to seeing her spiritual family going out of their way to help those who ask for help and really meant it. She had never seen such cold hearts.
One day, the mermaid awakened to buckets of rain pouring out of the sky. She ran outside and put the yeti in her car which is parked just past the house. That was the day that the mermaid decided that God would place the Cloak of Invisibility on him so that he would be safe and not be seen by the roommates.
It rained hard and steadily for 5 hours while the roommates watched a PBS Special about helping people who were less fortunate. The roommates never asked the mermaid, that day, how the yeti was faring in the rain.
After that day, the mermaid no longer cared what people thought or about whether her roommates would kick her out. The similarity to "no room at the inn" was too close to this situation. She could not allow the yeti to sleep outside anymore. She prayed for an answer.
An intuitive thought came that she could park her car over by where the 18-wheeler trucks park overnight and she could let the yeti sleep in her car. She would have to give him her extra set of car keys and trust that he would not get behind the wheel. She was worried about this a little, but she decided to trust him. She could walk back to her house to sleep and get up in the morning and bring him coffee and oatmeal. Then at least, he would not be outside on the ground and susceptible to the dangers of the streets in the unfriendly city.
After months of work: sleepless nights. great interference with what she would rather be doing, interruptions to her work, the jangling wee hour phone calls, driving on dark roads with the scary guy, innumerable dealings with the police & sanitariums, sharing food, money, & home and car...finally the yeti's hard exterior began to crack open.
He told the mermaid that he loved her & that he trusted her to lead him to the Ocean where he knew that he could remember how to be himself again.
The mermaid went with the yeti to his shrink to find out his diagnosis. She helped him get back on his medication. She knew this might be only a temporary solution - that with a sufficient spiritual experience, all his selves could Unite under one Guardian, and he could drop that man-made answer that just takes the edge off...
She talked to his brother about his rantings and ravings and found out that everything he said is actually true. His family has decided that he is "happier" on the street. That's just "family-speak" for "we are unwilling to go to the lengths necessary to find him what he really needs". His siblings are all wealthy and many have empty houses, but would not give the yeti a place to live. The mermaid sees this happening in her own family.
The yeti needed someone to live with him. He is Up and Down and All Around, but not in the ordinary sense. In the Aquamarine City, the mermaid knows people who have come back around the corner from that which the yeti suffers. She knew that she must get him back there to find someone who could help him.
A friend showed up unexpectedly from the Aquamarine City. He is a veteran, and he tells stories of how many services there are there for veterans. The yeti is a veteran.
They had looked into that option already there from a craigslist ad but to no avail. Services were tapped out and the VA in this Abaddon seemed to be run by money-hungry corrupt non-profits which would pop up whenever the feds made money available for vets. The money would magically disappear when it came to actually getting the veteran's services. Housing was so sought-after that not even the VA could make an inroad. After many weeks, a lady from a small non-profit had called the mermaid to offer the yeti a seedy SRO. The mermaid had not even considered the VA a viable option.
The friend promised to help the mermaid and the yeti get hooked up with services in the Aquamarine City. That settled it. They started making plans to leave. The yeti spent his check that month on getting the mermaid's car ready for travel. He wanted to go.
It did not matter. She had to try for the sake of the yeti because she alone could not provide him what he needed. She prayed a prayer that works when she does not know what to do: "Bless it or Block it" As the time to leave drew nearer, it continued to seem right.
She had lost her tiny little job making $100 per week helping her cousin with dementia make art. Her cousin had had a stroke so she was let go. She paid her last month's rent with barter, her room had been given to another, she was about to have no home herself - so it seemed appropriate that she get in the car with the yeti and drive 1200 miles east to the Aquamarine City. The yeti was in a combination of terrible fear and excitement about the trip himself. He pondered and flip-flopped as they both wait for the day to arrive.
The day to leave finally came, and the yeti & the mermaid got in the car to drive to the Aquamarine City. It was to take them 3 days to get there. They had planned to sleep in rest areas along the route. The trip itself was ghastly. The yeti had told the mermaid before they left that he knew how to tie their belongings to the roof-rack of the car. The mermaid at this point had only begun to learn that the yeti really knew how to do nothing besides wash dishes and roll cigarettes make pretty drawings and write stories about spies.
He has no idea how to tie luggage to a car using rope. Somewhere between here and there in an incredible wind storm, bags flew off the car roof. The mermaid lost a bunch of stuff that was near to her heart. They slept in a rest area where it was cold and raining. The yeti was ranting and arguing with the neighbors all night.
Next morning, the mermaid crawled up on the car-roof to retie her belongings. She has brought everything back with her. Much more than she came with. She has been gone from the Aquamarine City for 8 months, and she had been prolifically creative in that time.
The following day of driving was worse than the one before. The mermaid was baffled. She had thought the trip was going to be fun! Instead it was a dark night of the soul. They slept in a rest area just outside Las Vegas. Once again, the yeti made enemies all night with gambler youth that drove in and out of the rest area. They were making fun of him because his ass was hanging out of his jeans.
They started driving at dawn, and the mermaid prayed a lot, and had periods of mental rest followed by hours of turmoil in which they were incredibly cruel to one-another. The mermaid did not know how to deal with the depth of her despair and his. In addition, she has forgotten that the weather at that time of year is still cold as they get closer to the Aquamarine City. At some point, the yeti opened the car door as they sped down the highway, threatening to jump. In retrospect, the mermaid guessed the yeti would almost rather die physically than face the unknown.
When she was 8 hours from her destination, she realized that it would be too cold to stop. She had already been driving for 16 hours and it was the middle of the night, but realized that she must continue to avoid the freezing temperatures. She had drank a Redbull a few hours prior and then had a 2nd one thinking that would help her stay awake.
Instead, on her sensitive system, it activated her "crazy". Just outside of a wealthy resort area, she had a meltdown and the yeti took the keys out of the ignition threatening to throw them into the woods. Somehow she convinced him to give them back. She begged and pleaded. This is one of the only times that the mermaid wondered if the yeti was going to kill her and dump her body. There was one other time when she feared this was going to happen, but he had always joked about killing her and plugging her body into the wall. Was it a joke? She knew she was delirious and had to just keep going. If ever there was a time to trust God, that was it. She trusted God even if she did not trust the yeti.
Finally, in early May they arrived at her girlfriend's house in the Aquamarine City and they are greeted with the answer - Yes - it was the Right Thing. Amazing Grace...the mermaid's friend, the butterfly girl began to help the mermaid heal the yeti. A long process was still before them, but the mermaid was no longer alone.
And how did she know it was the Right Thing? Because there was a group to help her. It was not just her working tirelessly for the yeti - there are others - people who help. There are people who were friendly. There were human beings who reached out and offered friendship and understanding.
In the end, which is the beginning, the yeti & the mermaid found the Ocean & they are living, happily ever after, as people, in veteran's supported housing in the Aquamarine City. There names are Eloise and George.
The veteran friend, Bob, and Eloise, took George to the VA Hospital the next day and got his services activated. Next, they got him a VA Supported Housing counselor and he was given 2 options - wait for housing to open up in the VA Domiciliary or go back to the street and wait. Eloise was going to sleep on Bob's couch at his Airstream Trailer, without plumbing.
George had been acting weird ever since they arrived in Cheyenne. He was acting out. He was on his meds but he was stomping his and having tantrums. He did not want Eloise to stay with Bob. He accused her of secretly having an affair with Bob - even though he was not her boyfriend. He threatened to take his next check and buy a ticket to Dulles. He claimed he had high school friends in Virginia and he was just going to GO! Eloise did not really think he could pull it off but it still worried her - but there was nothing she could do - she had no where else to go but Bob's.
George spent a few more weeks out on the street in Cheyenne, and it changed him for the better. Hail storms drove George indoors to the Cheyenne Shelter for several weeks and then to calling his VASH counselor and surrendering his freedom to the VA Dom. He lived there for 6 months, getting socialized and fed, sleeping allot and taking his meds while Eloise lived at Bob's without plumbing and worked at Safeway.
This 6 months was good for both Eloise and George and that , the Cheyenne Housing Authority awarded George a Section 8 voucher which included Eloise as his unofficial caretaker. They were given an enormous 2 bedroom apartment on the edge of the wealthiest old neighborhood in Cheyenne. Eloise got a much better job at a hardware store and George is still on the mend, but they have many friends helping them who they also help. They have community - a family of their own creation, and they are especially blessed because they helped each other.
George is amazing. He reads a lot of books and listens to classical music on the radio. Last October, they adopted an older dog from the pound and now George and Eloise allow the wonders of the soulsweetness of doglove into their hearts. Recently, George got his driver's permit and he helps Eloise with driving. Every time friends come to town they comment on the amazing transformation they see in George, and in Eloise, too!