If You Catch a Sasquatch, Let Her Go!

I have no idea where I got this book from, but it was written six years ago and has probably been on my shelf that long. I had never heard of Barbara Ehrenreich before picking it up, and I was so delighted by her acerbic, voraciously intellectually curious, no- nonsense voice that I thought for my birthday (still five months away!) I should get a Charis Books and More wish list that just has the other twenty books she has written on it.

She is an essayist and cultural critic who has written about everything from witches to the dangers of positive thinking. She is an activist who spent much of her adult life as an organizer for various social justice movements, and she is an avowed cradle atheist so I am guessing it was a lot for her to write a book with God in the title.

When she was fourteen years old, coming back from a skiing trip with her brother and a high school possible date who turns out to be a jerk, they end up spending the night in the car in Lone Pine, CA.

In the morning, Barbara wakes up, leaves the car for a morning walk and has a nonlinear experience that she struggles for the rest of her life to understand. It is definitely not the only one she has in her adolescence and adulthood but it is perhaps the longest, most intense one. She describes it in the following paragraph, “Nothing could contain (the onrush). Everywhere,”inside” and out, the only condition was overflow. “Ecstasy” would be a word for this, but only if you are willing to acknowledge that ecstasy does not occupy the same spectrum as happiness or euphoria, that it participates in the anguish of loss and can resemble an outbreak of violence.” (116)

This memoir is Barbara using her saved journals from her adolescence to try and investigate what happened to her now that she is older and has had a busy writing and activist career, raised twins and done a lot of other things that have kept her not focused on the question of the nature of mystical experience.

I like the book. She writes about her parents who had a hard life in Butte, Montana as a coal mining family before they moved to other locales. Her parents were insatiably intellectual, independent, staunchly atheist and alcoholics. She writes about her intellectual journeys as a scientist who studied mathematics, chemistry, physics, and quantum physics. Most of the book is this content which is interesting, but there does get to be a moment where you say, “Hey, I get it. You’re a scientist and an atheist so this is hard for you, but can we get back to the reason that you wrote this book?” and she doesn’t until about the last fifteen pages.

I understand wanting to be distracted from the question of a numinous outbreak of violence. I also did everything I could possibly come up with to keep myself away from the topic for a couple of decades after spending my twenties “hurling myself at the universe” (as my beloved therapist phrased it)

This “thing” (you can get more into nouns and pronouns with Barbara in the last fifteen pages) that came to her unbidden in Lone Pine, CA was something that in my twenties I stalked like a rabid Squatcher. (My seven year old son is obsessed with Big Foot, and we have taken to watching Squatching videos on youtube where middle age men spend their weekends setting up fake branch covered microphones and infrared cameras to try to prove the existence of Big Foot.)

It turns out that if you hunt the Divine Fox ( “Hunting the Divine Fox”, a theology book by Father Richard Capon my dad taught me when he was my High School Ethics teacher which I will cite in a minute) the divine fox very well may be caught, and like a dog who understands only the joy of chasing the prey, you very well may not know what to do with it when you’ve “caught” it.

The briefest example: I used to be a fringe member of 3HO: Happy, Healthy, Holy. They own Peace Cereal and Yogi Tea and are a bunch of people born in the US who converted to Sikhism in order to more faithfully follow the guidance of their teacher, Yogi Bhajan, the man who brought Kundalini yoga to the US and taught it to anyone who wanted to learn it.

The first white Tantra I ever attended (not sexual, look it up), I was dressed as I had to all in white with a white bandana on my head because I didn’t have a turban. I never converted to Sikhism so I didn’t get the sword or change my name to something like Desingh like my male partner who I met when I showed up who was an unusual guy wearing a southern straw hat over his turban and espoused a rabid interest in Science Fiction. We were to meditate, sitting across from each other, for eight hours that day. In the first meditation we were sitting cross-legged, eyes open, one arm extended palm up touching the palm of your partner, other hand on your own heart chanting Sat Nam. (Truth is my name). After like fifteen minutes, in a rain of blinding light in my head, I felt what I can only describe as being severed in two by an enormous disincarnate sword. (Note to readers…if there is ever a mystical experience Survivor Island, I would definitely be the weak link)

The experience was so painful I had to be carried away from my spot by Sikh American moderators (sort of like the people who hold up sheets in spirit filled churches to keep people from hitting their heads) and placed on a raised dais in the lap of a woman who would later become my yoga teacher while I bawled my eyes out. (An older Sikh American man patted me and told me kindly, “It’s ok. The first time I did Tantric, I got mercury poisoning.” To this day, I have no idea what that means, but it did make me feel better.

So like Barbara Ehrenreich, I get just keeping yourself in the mode of “doing” for a couple of decades to avoid facing the question, “What was that exactly?”

But we eventually get there in the last fifteen pages, and I gotta tell you…her speculations as to what it could have been really kind of freak me out. I appreciate the fact that as a scientist, an intellectual and an atheist she derides belief and instead insists on knowing, wanting to have a go at the numinous with a microscope and a Large Hadron Collider, but I am a little grateful at the moment that I never got above a C- in a Science class because that kind of trying to tap into mystery with intellect comes up with some rather frightening theories on her part. (I won’t spoiler it for you)

I prefer to stick with a class I did get a good grade in and that wasn’t just because my dad was teaching it and quote Father Richard Capon in saying, “a person trying to conceptualize God is like an oyster trying to imagine a ballerina.” by using what it knows of itself only…Is a ballerina oval or pear shaped? Is she whiteish gray or porcelain white? Does she have extremely strong adductor muscles to close her shell if threatened?

But that doesn’t mean, of course, that we shouldn’t try to understand ourselves, and in knowing ourselves, sometimes even the unknowable doesn’t have to be frightening. My therapist said of one of my shocking battles with the numinous which felt again like a tremendous rending and ripping apart, “Maybe YOU knew that you didn’t need that part of you anymore.” This was like the most calming thing anyone has ever said to me.

So maybe Barbara and I would disagree. She would want to use Science and Math and a bunch of other stuff I don’t understand to hunt the divine, and I would rather have the comfort of meaning even if it means making the best of “belief”, but nonetheless I figure we could still hang out in the Florida Keys where she lives and spend a fine weekend DIVINTY SQUATCHING (copywrite man! gonna be my book title) Just remember the ancient words of advice from mystics long gone, If you catch a Sasquatch, Let HER GO!!!!!