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Treesong's BioPhoto Courtesy Neighborhood CoopClick Here for Full-Size Version |
Story
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I was born on May 19, 1978, in Melrose Park, Illinois, an inner suburb of the city of Chicago. I lived with my mother, Maureen, my father, Errol, and my brother, named Errol after my father.
At an early age, my parents divorced. I lived with my mother and brother for several years. We had a hard time making ends meet, but my mother worked difficult jobs, put our needs first, and did her best to put on a brave face for us ang give us a good childhood. I didn't see my father much during this period of my life.
Then, my mother met Don Goldman, who would become my stepfather. At first, my brother and I were unsure of what to think of this new person in our lives. But in the years since the marriage, Don has shown us a kindness and concern that goes beyond what many other step-parents share with their stepchildren. He has never tried to replace or take over the role of our father; just done his best to show us that we're all one big happy family.
On January 29, 1986, my sister Valerie was born. Since she's the daughter of my mother and Don, she's technically my half sister, but my brother and I have always known and loved her as a sister. It took me years to figure out what exactly to think of this strange little visitor from another world, but eventually I've come to welcome her into the family. I feel honored that I've had the opportunity to watch her grow from a tiny crying poop machine into an intelligent and empowered young woman who I see as a peer in my creative writing, my activism, and my spiritual studies.
As time went on, my father also started playing a much larger role in my life. My brother and I began visiting him on a regular basis, almost every weekend. Once Valerie was a bit older, she would come along too. My father certainly knew how to endear himself to children - one of our biggest activities together was Saturday night pizza and Nickeloden, along with playing computer and video games together. In particular, we played a computer game series that my brother discovered called Ultima. This unique and epic role-playing saga gave us years of family enjoyment (and shared frustration!) as we took turns playing and sometimes played together. Our time with my father also introduced us to the Internet - which I literally became addicted to for a while, but now have come to see as a valuable tool when used in moderation.
Over the years, a very remarkable situation developed. My mother, my stepfather, and my father all managed to get along with one another. I would spend the week at my mother and stepfather's house, spend the weekend at my father's house, and feel at home in both places. I also felt at home going between the two. Understandably, it took a long time for this reconciliation to occur. But once it did, my brother and I had an uncommonly good parental situation for children of a divorce.
Alas, in spite of improving economic and familial circumstances, all was not well in the life of young Justin O'Neill. For as far back as I can remember, I had emotional difficulties: anxiety, fear of not fitting in, etc., even back through to kindergarten. It was there, and it gradually increased over the years. But it was never debilitating, and I was still a child, so I just tried to cope with it in silence as best as possible.
Then, puberty came.
Right when I was at this most sensitive stage of my life - between sixth and seventh grade, going through the first stirrings of puberty - my family moved from the city out into the suburbs. I didn't fit in well at all at Lincoln Elementary School in our new suburban home of Brookfield, Illinois. I'd been teased and harassed from time to time at my previous schools, but something here was different. I was an outsider from the get-go. I was at a sensitive time in my life, and those few people who were kind enough to reach out to me or defend me [thank you, Dave Malec and Joe S. and any others I'm forgetting] weren't enough to prevent the perception that the world was not a safe place to be in.
My pre-existing tendency toward anxiety exploded into a condition that I can only describe as "persistent mortal terror." I consciously chose to shut down my emotions and become a "robot" or android. I set an unshakeable intention to become invisible (and therefore safe from harm). I withdrew ever-deeper into realms of fantasy, centering my whole identity around the mythological archetype of the Avatar presented in the Ultima series. My entire body became constantly tense and inflexible, like muscular armor trying to protect me from a hostile world. Of course, there were moments when the defenses loosened up a bit - watching television and movies, eating pizza and chocolate, playing games, enjoying my precious few conversations with my precious few friends - but more often than not, I was in a state of extreme defense.
The teasing and active rejection from others diminished as I entered into high school, but the snowball was already set in motion down the hill, and it was gaining momentum at an incredible rate. I became plagued by suicide ideation, constant thoughts of leaping out the window just to end it all.
But something held me back. Some may say that there was a part of me that wanted to live, and that may very well be - but at the time, it certainly wasn't a conscious or articulate part of me. The only conscious reason that I had for not doing myself in was fear - fear of the pain of death, fear of a botched suicide attempt that would leave me handicapped for life.
Oddly enough, my anxiety itself played a role in keeping me here. Every time I would resolve to do myself in, my anxious chattering mind would go over all of the things that could go wrong.
In high school, it was jumping out windows. My mind would obsessively fly back to Physics class - from what height would I need to jump to attain sufficient velocity to insure a clean kill?
I had similar thoughts in college. Every day I would cross a certain bridge to go to class, and every day I would contemplate the physics involved. Surely if I jumped head first, it would be guaranteed?
But there was always that doubt, that anxious voice telling me that I wouldn't do it right - and the only thing that I feared more than life was the pain of death, quite possibly sustained for decades if I survived the fall.
I suppose that my lust for jumping off of high places grew out of the semi-conscious symbolism that it had for me: the fall from grace, the tumbling of an angel down into the pavement below with a sickening smack of splattered flesh and shattered bone. I never even gave serious consideration to any other method. I was deathly afraid of pills, and even more afraid of guns. I thought about razor blades from time to time, but that was awfully messy and I didn't trust that it would be as painless as it was in the movies. No, my method of choice was falling from a great height. If I took that fall, it would prove that I was an angel; it would prove that the world was a place of death, because my very contact with the earth would kill me; and even in the height of my atheism, there was a feeling that this release from mortal pain would be akin to the rise of the angel above this veil of tears.
There I stood at the greatest crossroad of my life: too frightened to live, too anxious to die, driven by the pernicious endurance of physical reality to make a choice between the two.
This was the start of my first and most pivotal adventure in this life. Which of these two paths would I choose, and why? Would I find a way out of the cold and thorny grave that I was dying in? Or would I continue to lay myself down in the silent agony of anxious indecision, allowing my mortal terror to gnaw deeper into my flesh, down into my bones, until Death itself made the choice for me?
That was the question - and the answer wasn't what I expected.
Since before I went to college, before I even went to high school, I've been experiencing fits and starts of what you might call a spiritual awakening. Some people take find their first cautious steps down such a path in their local church or other religious institutions. Some find it through their artwork, through a sudden epiphany, or through the pains of deepest tragedy.
I found mine in a computer role-playing game.
Yes, you read that right: a computer role-playing game. The name of the game was Ultima, and without it I don't know where I'd be today.
At the time when Ultima first entered into my life, I must have been fourteen or so - a child becoming an adult, experiencing the troubled puberty that I mentioned earlier. As a person of Christian upbringing, this lead me to contemplate the Problem of Evil. If God is all-powerful and all-loving, then how is it that Evil can exist in the world?
This was some very heart-wrenching philosophical musing for an adolsecent. No matter how I spun the wheels in my head, no matter how many numbers I crunched, I couldn't make sense of it - not with the freewill argument, not with anything. All I knew is that I could perceive a lot of pain and suffering in the world - enough to make my all-important teen angst pale in comparison.
This cast my entire simplistic worldview into doubt. Jesus didn't descend from the clouds to comfort and heal the wounded; my mother, stepfather, and father were all powerless to stop the onset of the Gulf War and other human tragedies; the good guys didn't always win; America was not, indeed, the land of the free and the home of the brave. In other words, something was very wrong.
Enter Ultima.
I didn't understand this at the time, but Ultima provided me with two things - an escape from my fears of the world, and the seeds of my future spiritual studies.
With its rich storylines and compelling gameplay, Ultima provided me with a whole new interactive universe in which I could spend endless hours becoming a great hero - a savior of an entire world - simply by persevering in problem-solving and struggle against monsters. I couldn't even calculate the number of hours that I spent in front of a computer lost in Ultima's land of Britannia - hundreds upon hundreds, enough to complete just about every game in the series. It gave me something to do with my time that was fun, interactive, exciting, and largely under my control. Needless to say, I craved it like another person might crave the drug of their choice.
This was primarily a negative role that Ultima played in my life. It's lead to a good deal of inspiration for my writing career, but it also contributed to my choice to spend whole years of my life in computer-generated reality rather than physical reality. The far more positive role that Ultima played in my life was the way that it introduced me to spirituality and philosophy.
In Ultima IV, the creator of the series, Richard Garriott, decided that he may as well put something more meaningful than evil wizards into the games that he was designing. Being somewhat of a philosopher, he designed a spiritual philosophy that was to become the centerpiece of all subsequent Ultimas. This Way of the Avatar, as some called it, was based on the Principles of Truth, Love, and Courage, combined to form Eight Virtues that must be cultivated in order to win the game. This required everything from giving money to beggars to showing bravery in battle to meditating at the Shrines of Virtue.
The effect that this philosophy had on me was profound beyond measure. For a long while, it became the centerpiece of my personal identity. I obsessed over this philosophy as it pertained to the Ultima games, but I also took it into my non-Ultima. I printed a page about the Virtues to put on the cover of my high school binder; I titled one of my journals "Journal of an Avatar" and often wrote about the Virtues; I even organized an informal online network of people who swore to uphold the Virtues as a "real world" philosophy, not just part of a game. In other words, I dubbed myself to be Earth's answer to the Avatar of Legend and began to live my life accordingly.
For a few years, this deeply held spiritual devotion of mine had very little outward manifestation. I played the Ultima games, I talked and wrote about Virtue, and I'm sure I even dreamed about Virtue. But as much as I longed to be the Avatar, I was still a ninty-eight pound weakling, unable to find a place for any of this high and mighty idealism in the physical world.
Then, I discovered activism.
The first stirrings of my activist tendencies began in high school. I was still on the down swing in my personal anxiety and depression, so I didn't actually do much in the service of any of my causes. But I began to form strong opinions - on animal rights, on abortion, and on politics and economics. Following the example of my brother, I became a vegetarian and an avid student of socialism. I also became a passionate pro-lifer and very timidly circulated a few letters and flyers about the cause. [I have since become pro-choice!] In retrospect, there was very little outward energy devoted to these causes, but the passion ran deep. It was no longer enough for me to hold my beliefs in fear and isolation from the world; I knew that by taking action, I could make a difference.
As with many other points in my life, my brother played a unique role in influencing the development of my activism. When I graduated from high school, I went to college at the university that my brother was attending - Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. During my first year, we were roommates and spent a good deal of our time together. One day, he invited me along to a speech being given by Howard Lymann about the down sides of the meat industry.
For the life of me, I can barely even remember that speech at all. But for many reasons, it was a pivotal point in my life. Most importantly, it introduced me to the Student Environmental Center, the first activist organization that I had ever encountered.
I would end up spending the next several years involved in SEC, first as a very passive participant, then as the organization's Coordinator trying to keep a struggling twenty-some year old student activist group from dying on my watch. By introducing me to environmental activism, SEC was a gateway into many of the lasting influences in my life: the Interfaith Center; ecological consciousness; radicalism and revolutionary thought; Social Ecology; and ultimately the Earth spirituality that has given me my new name and renewed direction in life. And all of that followed from attending a single SEC event! It's enough to make one trust in meaningful coincidences and listen carefully when a whisper in your ear invites you somewhere.
Sometime around 1997, my father was diagnosed with cancer.
After almost 40 years of smoking Camel cigarettes and over 50 years of living on a polluted planet, he developed cancer of the mouth and throat. He quit smoking for good as he underwent his first operation, but by that point it was too late.
This was my first real experience of the realities of cancer and the current approaches to treatment used by mainstream Western medicine. Operations, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, all made valiant efforts to kill the cancer, but they had about the same effect on my father's vitality. Subsequent treatment left him unable to speak, using a writing pad to communicate with us.
If I had known then what I know now, I may have been able to help my father recover. I could have referred him to a Brennan Healing Science practitioner; I could have offered nutritional advice and referred him to living and raw foods nutritionist; I could have recommended other methods of 'complimentary' care to him before he even underwent the first operation. But for whatever reasons, it wasn't meant to be.
In any case, this experience drove home the reality of terminal illness for me in a way that isn't possible by watching it happen to strangers. Every holiday weekend that I spent at home, I continued to visit my father as I had always done. When there was a sudden change in his condition toward the end, I came up to visit him again. I have many memories of the two years of his illness that are a mix of fond recollections and distress at the declining state of his health.
While my father's health was declining, my life took a series of unexpected turns. Not the least of these was my relationship with a woman named Shelby.
I met Shelby in the #philosophy channel on Undernet, an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network. Our friendship quickly blossomed into an online romance. The only problem was that she lived in California and I lived in Illinois! Being the impetuous young lad that I was, I came up with the perfect solution: move to California.
After a preliminary visit, I made all of the arrangements to move in with Shelby. My family was concerned to say the least, considering the fact that I almost exclusively knew this woman from online conversations and would be moving thousands of miles away to live with her. This was also during the early stages of my father's illness, so they and I both were concerned about my ability to visit him in the event of changes to his condition. But I was confident that airplanes would allow me to visit just as frequently as I always had, and did my best to assure them that I was making the right decision [or at least avoid talking about it!].
My time in California was quite an adventure. I attended a fascinating upper class party at the J. Paul Getty museum, visited a few parks, slept through a few very minor earthquakes, and got to see the Pacific Ocean. Most of all, I spent time with Shelby! But after a month, she told me with tears in her eyes that the relationship wasn't working out. I don't know if it was the fact that I hadn't found a job yet, the fact that I spent too much time on the computer, the fact that she had some serious relationship issues, or all of the above, but my residency in California was suddenly cut short. Dazed and confused, I returned to my life in Illinois just in time for the fall semester.
Even though I found it quite disturbing at the time, I definitely think that it turned out for the best that she dumped me. I had so much more to do and learn back in Carbondale, and she did me a wonderful favor by kicking me out of Los Angeles! Aside from the temptation of the raw foods movement there, L.A. is definitely not my style.
After the break-up of my relationship with Shelby, I moved back to Carbondale to continue my studies at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. But my studies were the least of my concerns as my commitment to activism deepened more than I had ever imagined possible. Before California, my involvement in SEC had been almost a hobby - a growing passion, but one that resembled an extra-curricular activity more than anything. At some point in the fall of '97, activism became a defining part of my identity.
After several unexpected trips back and forth to the Chicago area to visit my father in the hospital, he passed away quietly in the VA hospital while we were away.
In the final days and weeks, he had been phasing in and out of coherency, but for our last visit with him, he was quite coherent. We talked for a while (he could only write at that point due to the throat cancer) and we said goodbye to each other for one last time. I didn't fully understand it at the time, but somehow I think that he knew that it was his last visit with us. He had been given the opportunity to say goodbye before passing on from this world. Even though the goodbye seemed fairly simple in the moment, it's a gift that not all families receive, and I am very grateful to have it.
I had never had anyone this closely related to me pass away before. My grandfather had just died the previous fall, and that had quite an impact on me. I'd known him for all of my life. For a while, my brother and I even used to visit Grandma and Grandpa every weekend. But now my father, who I had been visiting every weekend for years and gradually grown closer to, had passed away.
My feelings at my father's passing are hard to describe. Part of it was that I wasn't too keen on feelings at that time in my life to begin with. I was anxious to the point of numbness even when nothing was happening. The loss of a loved one didn't do much to make me feel any more comfortable in my emotions. I was mostly just numb, uncertain of how to take such an event.
Part of it, though, was my spiritual perspective on life and death at the time of his passing. I was still very lost and confused at this point in my life, but despite all of my rational mind's fears and doubts, I knew that death was a doorway to the next life, whatever that may be. After years of suffering through cancer and chemotherapy, my father was released from this incarnation to "rest in peace."
As I attended the wake, I found it to be quite morbid and inappropriate - filling his dead body with embalming fluid and dressing it up to look like he was sleeping. I couldn't even go up to the casket to look at it. My father had moved on from this body of his. Why shouldn't we do the same? To me, dressing his body up in that way was an unnecessary desacration. Deep in my spirit I knew that he had moved on in peace; I didn't need an artificially preserved body dressed in a lifelike pose to comfort me. It was what the rest of his family wanted though, so I did my best to defer to their cultural and religious practices during the ceremony and take the time on my own to process my father's passing in my own way.
I never did get as close with my father as I could have, but at least we had a good number of years together before his passing. Last Samhain [Fall '02] I did a ritual honoring him, and I think of him often whenever our common interests and experiences such as computer games come up. I'm sure that for the rest of my life, I'll remember him and keep him with me in my journey.
Only a month or two after my father's passing, I read a small ad in the back of the Earth First! Journal:
"Cove/Mallard Spring Action Training Camp, May 26-31
Come join us at our beautiful base camp for an action training. Our tentative list of workshops includes: blockade how tos, tree sits, map and compass, field monitoring of timber sales, stream survey techniques, tracking wildlife, edible and medicinal wild plants, nonviolence training, legal realities, base camp and backcountry logistics, and video work for actions and monitoring. We will also have great free food, late night howls around the campfire and the company of your favorite wing-nuts. This event will kick off another Summer and Fall of resistance in Otter-Wing. Contact us at ..."
I don't know how, but I just knew that this was the way for me to go - one of many remarkable decisions that I would call intuitive in retrospect, even examples of the presence of spiritual guidance in my life. With only a month or two to prepare, and without knowing a single soul in the area, I took a 40 hour bus ride to Idaho to spend a summer with the Cove Mallard Coalition.
What a summer!
There was a moment there at the end of the summer when I honestly wasn't certain which path to choose in life. Should I drop out of school and stay with these Earth First!ers as a nomadic ecodefender, or should I return to my life and studies in Carbondale?
Once again, intuition set in. I was very involved in and excited about the struggle in Idaho, but somehow I knew that it was time for me to return home to Carbondale. I only had a year of school left, and I had a forest of my own over there in Southern Illinois. I said my goodbyes to my treasured nomadic ecodefender friends and took the bus home.
In the spring of 2000, I received my Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. Seeing as the notion of a "philosophy factory" was just a one-liner from "That 70s Show," I was faced with an important decision: what would I do with my life now that my studies were over?
With the help of my Environmental Ethics class and a catalog from a friend, my guidance once again lead me to the next step - a summer in Vermont in the Ecology and Community program of the Institute for Social Ecology.
After my first summer in Vermont, I returned to my half-trailer home in Carbondale to begin my job at the Interfaith Center.
I couldn't tell you when exactly I first heard about raw foods, but I can tell you who I heard it from - Ethan Baker. At the time, Ethan was in a transitional period in his diet. He was suffering from the onset of symptoms of lactose intolerance, food allergies, and general ill health. I hardly even knew him back then, but I can remember my impression of him - a very heavyset body, an obsessively negative mind, and not much drawing me into being his acquaintence.
Then came the raw foods transformation. By the next time I saw him, Ethan was thin, more energized, and free of all his former dietary woes. He still had much of his characteristic biting anger, but it was more lively and sharp now than the stewing, oozing malaise of Cooked Ethan. Health had transformed rage into passion.
Since he and I both were better off than before, we somehow ended up in a series of conversations about raw foods. Going 100% raw had been the source of Ethan's dramatic weight loss and health improvements. I wasn't quite clear on just how far gone my own health was, but once again my instinctive curiosity guided me into further exploration of raw foods.
At first, my explorations were simple. From the summer of 2000 onward, I simply ate more raw foods - sandwiches with avocado and tomato, a melon or three shared by Ethan, more fresh fruit and vegetables, and so on. But I was still a cooked foodist; I still ate massive amounts of pizza, chips, chocolate, and other less than excellent foods.
Then, on January 1, 2001, I had my first truly unpleasant experience with alcohol. I'd tried alcohol before, but very infrequently and mostly with pleasant results - some cheap wine in Idaho, a few pints of Guinness with friends in Carbondale, all social drinking that left me buzzed and without a significant hangover. But my curious nature lead me to drink several tall glasses of wine quite quickly at a New Year's Eve celebration and Labyrinth ritual at the Interfaith Center. Once I got home, I vomitted in the toilet, vomitted on the floor, and passed out on the couch a foot away from my own stinky puke.
The next morning, as I was cleaning up my own vomit from the carpet through the haze of a hangover, I had an awakening. "So THIS is what it means to be toxic." Much of my behavior in life had been toxic and antithetical to my health, but here I had a clear physical illustration of the results of this toxic consciousness. I was faced with a fundamental decision similar to my suicide crossroads a few years earlier: should I continue to choose toxicity and death consciousness as a means of avoiding my own suffering, or should I choose nutrition and life consciousness in the hope that they will one day bring me health and peace?
Thankfully, I chose life!
That day, I ate nothing but water and leftover raw veggies from the Interfaith party until dinnertime. Then, I indulged in one last cooked meal - a raw vegan pizza from Quattro's Pizza, my all-time favorite food. From January 2nd, 2001 onward, I haven't eaten a single cooked meal! There were a few ingredients that turned out to be processed, and one time that I decided to eat a small piece of cheese in a salad just for kicks, but I've never eaten a cooked meal again and never intend to.
How do I feel? Great! Ever since going raw, I have more energy, more optimism, and more health generally speaking than I did before. I'm still not a raw athlete, but that has more to do with my consciousness and lifestyle than my diet. Relative to all of the sickness and anxiety and depression that I used to experience back when I was cooked, I'm becoming a raw foods superstar!
I'll always remember Ethan for the information and enticement that he offered me way back then. Sure, I may have ended up getting it from some other source, but who knows when that would have happened or what my life would be like today with out it - if I would even be here at all! I recommend that everyone at least try eating a higher percentage of raw foods and see what effects it has on their system and their life.
After several years of finding my meaning in life through activism, I finally turned my attention inward. I can't put my finger on an exact time, place, or event in this period in my life. Between my difficult experiences surrounding September 11, my drained and directionless personal life, the faultering interest in my style of activism in my community, and who knows what else, I simply felt a call to turn inward. I had exhausted my options, and exhausted myself in the process. It was time to return to the source.
This is when I first began embracing my spirituality with open arms. I had been curious about topics such as Paganism, spiritual healing, and psychic phenomena for years before this, but somehow I new that it was time to begin pursuing these topics more fully. I performed a self-initiation ceremony into my ongoing studies of WitchCraft, and I began reading and thinking more about the role of Spirit in my life.
Little by little, the course of my entire life became clearer. My fascination with fantasy had been with me since childhood. Now it was maturing into a desire to make my visions of peace, justice, democracy, freedom, health, and ecology manifest in the physical world, starting with myself and expanding outward from there.
All of those bitter life experiences that had haunted my consciousness for so long began to seem much less intimidating. My external experiences hadn't been so bad; most of that anxiety and anguish was centered around internal sources, spiritual lessons that I had been teacing myself in order to prepare myself for the journey unfolding ahead of me. These same circumstances were also laying the groundwork for something new, something exciting yet to come - a career that would unite the lessons of my ecodefense, my political activism, my personal struggles, and other experiences that were only just beginning.
My longing for activism was still strong, but somehow I knew that it was time for an extended vacation - a sabbatical, if you will, from my activist career. I felt tremendous guilt about this at first, but as time went on, I understood more and more that I really did need the rest, and that it really was providing me with a critical period of reflection that would serve as a foundation for the work on the horizon.
After spending my first summer in Carbondale, it was time for a series of conferences: the Peace Training Institute, Renewing the Anarchist Tradition, the AFADD founding conference, and the Hearthwood spiritual conference.
First came the PTI - a 10 day intensive training in nonviolence held right here in Carbondale, Illinois.
Then, there was the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition (RAT) conference.
After that, many of my old ISE friends and I got together with some newer faces for the founding conference of the Alliance for Freedom and Direct Democracy (AFADD).
Finally, I came home to Carbondale and went with friends to the Hearthwood conference - a three-day weekend spiritual retreat at an outdoor location down here in the Shawnee. I didn't have any profound or earth-shaking spiritual experiences here, but the conference did a good job of grounding me back in my earth spirituality after the anti-spiritual intellectualism that was predominant among the majority of RAT attendees and AFADD founders.
In a way, this series of summer conferences was a microcosm of the past several years - exposing me for one last time to the energies of nonviolence, social anarchism, and earth spirituality, so that I would be prepared to synthesize them all as I entered into the pivotal stage of my current journey: the study of spiritual healing.
I suspect that for the rest of this life, if I'm asked to choose a single most important turning point in my life, the answer will always be the same: my entrance into the BBSH Professional Studies program. The choice to stay in this life and the choice to support my health laid the groundwork for this all-important choice to be a healer.
I've started a blog [weblog] with regular postings on what's going on in my life and the world. Major events may still be chronicled on this page, but you'll read about them first in my blog.
