A thriving Monkey Puzzle tree from my walk with Mrs. Sherlock on Sunday morning. It was so great to see her and to walk with her. It was a relatively short flat walk, but we were able to catch up. And it was a beautiful mild day. She is recovering.
Later that afternoon I went for a walk with Mr. Boulder. He met me at my gym, and we walked along the river and over the newish, certainly new to him pedestrian and transit bridge and back over the Hawthorne Bridge and then parked ourselves on some public benches and talked for another hour. It was a fun outing, and we may do something similar this next weekend. We shall see.
His introduction into my life has stirred up some things and one of those things is my creativity. I wrote a poem that day as well, that is pretty strong and I may use it as the opening poem for my manuscript. Things about that are finally beginning to gel.
And that got me thinking seriously about when and why and how I am most creative and that got me thinking about my relationships.
When Mr. Finch was alive, we had a tempestuous time of it, particularly at the beginning and I was also miserable in my job. This is when we were both fully immersed in the local poetry “scene”, going to readings three or four nights a week and running our own open mic reading.
At some point in there I thought I might benefit from therapy. I asked around, as I was looking for someone who had a bit of a Buddhist bent. Someone I knew through poetry but was also working in psychiatry at work recommended a therapist who was also a Zen Buddhist teacher.
I started to see him once a week, and it was helpful. After not too long he moved his office across town to a new build place where he had a Zendo, that doubled as a basketball court, a therapy office, and housing for him and his wife and almost grown son. He encouraged me to meditate so I started that.
We would talk about poetry and about the challenges I was having with Mr. Finch. As well as seeing him weekly, I started coming over to his place on Saturday mornings to sit formal meditation with his group and then my yoga teacher moved her classes to a place two blocks away. Although the meditation was useful and good, it was the therapy I was interested in. I would meditate and then go to a yoga class.
Things started to get weird. I felt that in a way he was competing for my attention with Mr. Finch. I was writing a lot, good things, things I am still proud of but it was this hot house atmosphere. I was thinking about this therapist a lot.
Too much. It got uncomfortable. I got uncomfortable. He never made any physical advances towards me, but things were heading in that direction. And then one day he told me he loved me. This was unnerving, flattering as I liked him, but profoundly unnerving. In the end I went back to the person that recommended him to me and told her and asked her what I should do.
She said other than finding another therapist I needed to think about what reporting him might mean for me. With no actual proof of inappropriate behavior. So, I let it go. Moved on. I read somewhere a few years back that he had ended his marriage and given up the Zendo.
This morning I decided to do a Google search on him and discovered that oh my gosh, he did this with at least four other women therapy clients and with one of them, at least, it became physical and she sued the bastard. In 2019. He lost his license.
I thank the Goddesses I had the presence of mind to get out of there before anything else happened, but it makes me understand in such a deep way what the young women that came across Jeffrey Epstein must be going through.
It is such a confusing thing to be victimized like this. And without going into detail this is not the first time something like this has happened to me, which I suspect made me an easier target.
I have spent the day trying to absorb this reorientation of perspective of this uncomfortable experience I had a number of years ago.
We had a meeting yesterday with a retired attorney that has hired two young female interns and were telling him that he was not allowed to meet with them in person or online unless the meeting was recorded or there was a third person present. He was baffled and annoyed and “inconvenienced” by our request. We held firm.
I am so glad for those young women there are people like us looking out for them. I can only hope they will never ever have to experience the confusion and harm that a single messed up individual with certain kinds of authority can perpetrate.
Bleh.
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