What I Learned from my Father

Honesty, Love and Love for Honesty

One time I was listening to a podcast, I believe by Tim Ferriss, with another guy of whom my memory is hazy, about the art of interviewing. The interviewing aficionado (IA) told a story of interviewing another guy I don’t remember — a guy who was notoriously nonplussed by press and difficult to interview. This guy had no interest in giving energy to the interview, until he heard IA’s opening question:

“What’s the most important lesson you learned from your father?”

The question changed everything, because it revealed that IA wasn’t digging for headlines or soundbites. IA wasn’t on a script. He was interviewing the man in a way opposite from how AI would do it, or frankly how most modern humans would do it, playing twenty questions and trying to extract something rather than connect. Rather, IA was connecting, deeply and truly, with the human being in front of him.

From my hazy memory, immediately after IA began the interview this way, his guest’s assistant told them something had come up, and the guest had an out to abandon the interview. Yet, having begun this way, the guest said, “no. I want to talk with this man.”

What question is more essential, really, than the question of what we learned from our parents? We learn their good and we learn their bad and we form ourselves into some beautiful synthesis of the two. What we learn from our creators is, essentially, the person we’ve decided to be.

Today I turn 32, and though I woke up planning to mostly just rest, I was struck by the inspiration to write this — to write about what I learned from the man who made me.

Love. First I learned love from my father, from the way he put me first. He explicitly reminded me many times through my childhood that he’d jump in front of a bus for me. His sacrifice was felt, and with him I knew that I mattered. I felt and knew this love even before I could understand those words.

Once I understood words, I also understood my father’s other great lesson — honesty. Ironic that I’d learn honesty from a man drowning in the self-deception of alcoholism, I know, but I did. He almost never admitted he had a problem with drinking, but beneath the many delusional layers of ego that colored the character he presented to the world, his soul broke through.

He spoke to me from this pure place just a few times, and I cherished those times amidst a childhood of near-constant disappointment and disillusionment.

Once when I was ten and spending the weekend at his house while playing a chess tournament, he got especially drunk. He was goofing around with my sister, who was too young to realize his drunkenness for what it was, and in my sober view of my blackout-drunk father, I felt alone. I felt angry. I went to my room in that anger, where I found the space to unearth the deep sadness I felt. I lied there sad, half of me wishing not to see him until the morning, and the other half of me wishing he’d come to me and connect. He somehow heard that latter half of me, and after putting my sister to bed he came to my room. He also somehow felt the sadness behind my terse answers to his drunken questions, and he asked me what was wrong.

I felt terrified to tell him the truth:

“Sometimes I wish you wouldn’t drink so much.”

My words broke him. He stayed silent for upwards of ten seconds, and then as my anger had yielded to my sadness, his deception yielded to his:

“I know,” he barely mustered as he started crying.

He kept crying and crying. He was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, so it’s only fitting that in this — the only moment when I ever saw him cry — it all came out.

“Why do you do it?” I asked.

“Because I love it.” Self-deception returned to the scene. After those seconds of pure realness, I was left again with the mixed bag; delusion stood front and center, but his soul and truth lingered stage-right. The truth was there, because his alcoholism and our pain were indeed matters of the heart, of love. The truth is still here, as is the pain, as even though I’ve been up since 3:30am, I feel like spending my birthday working and crying and writing this to you. Work, if I let it be, can be my own form of addiction — a habit-pattern constructed to somehow manage the pain. Work, if I let it be, can also be a healthy way to process the pain.

My dad told me that his great pain was my mom leaving him. He said, truthfully, that it broke him and he didn’t know where to turn but to alcohol. Of course his divorce with my older sister’s mom, his childhood of beatings from his father and a lifetime of many sadnesses weighed on his heart as well. Even if my mom was the center of it, his blaming her for his decisions was a shortcoming as a man. He had many shortcomings, yet beneath his deception of himself and the people who loved him, there were these moments when he let himself be seen.

As a fun aside, it turned out Dr. Bob was a fake psychologist who’d forged his diploma, degree and credentials. I vaguely remember hanging out in his home / office once as my parents worked with him, and seeing his pet parrot. Like my mom, I sometimes just have to step back and appreciate life’s poetry. It was poetry that in his final years, my dad moved into the cramped apartment where I took the photos above, that after a lifetime of racism he was one of the few white people living there, and that across the parking lot from the apartment complex was a restaurant called Bad Daddy’s Burger Bar. I couldn’t write that poetry, nor could I write the poetry of my lost-in-deception father seeing a deceptive “psychologist” who enabled my parents to marry, and to deceive themselves into believing their marriage would last beyond 1997. Dr. Bob’s deception and my dad’s self-deception were nothing more, nothing less than poetry. The seas of deception were sad, yet their immensity is more reason to appreciate the honesty that managed to reach me.

At a critical age, just before I started college, my father gave me one more of those honest moments.

Before UChicago adopted me at 18, my mom and dad accompanied me to that now-nostalgic city to help me set up and to see me off. By this age I’d witnessed plenty of my dad’s bad, and I’d watched his good slowly recede beneath wine and whiskey-fueled inflammation, but on our last night together in a shared hotel room, I figured I’d dig for just a little more good:

“Dad, if you could give me just one piece of advice in life, what would it be?”

He was silent, feeling and thinking — just as he’d been when I was ten and I saw his heart’s pain. After seriously considering my question and resolving to give me something real, he gave me his mind’s truth:

“To be honest with yourself.” In this last moment being deeply honest externally, with me, he said something about internal honesty that I’ve never forgotten. Okay, I’ll paraphrase because I forget the exact wording, but I’ll tell you I’m paraphrasing because that’s how deeply my father imparted onto me this value of honesty:

“This life is so complicated. With all the people and situations and entanglements we get into, it gets really hard to always be honest with others. That’s hard enough as it is, and if you can’t be honest with yourself first, you’ll never be honest on the outside. You have to start by being honest with yourself.”

Ironic that something that profound came from an alcoholic in his final decade, but it did, and I’ve held onto it.

My father’s shadows were painfully apparent. His love was laced with conceit — pride in me as his only son — and its recipients turned from people into bottles. His honesty was laced with delusional self-justification — saying he’d quit drinking, then saying he could contain the problem to “just a few,” then saying there was no problem — when ultimately, the problem overtook his honesty. Yet, even if only in moments, my father’s light was apparent, too.

Today I felt called to write this, to acknowledge my father’s shadows and to appreciate my father’s light that transmuted through my mother and took the human form of Reiman 32 years ago. His and my lives have been visible in their light, in their shadows and in their all.

I never thought of my dad as any kind of artist while he was alive, but he did deface one of his business shirts that I found after he passed, so there’s that. He also wrote a little poetry, which I’ll share at the end of this post, and as I already spoke to, his life itself was poetry.

I inherited from him this twisted artistic sense, a twisted but true love and many karmas both dark and bright. So, how about the honesty?

I feel I need to be honest about my own struggles with addiction — to overworking and undersleeping most recently, as well as to drugs. In January I wrote yet another ridiculously long post about my addictions to cannabis and tobacco, and now I feel to update you on the declarations I made in that post.

First, the bad news: Those declarations of sobriety lasted only a fortnight before I turned to tobacco in my craving for spiritual connection. Then I went to the jungle and did the “healthy” drugs / medicines, then I spent another month on the ganja from February to March. During my last trip to the U.S. I even drank alcohol for seven days straight to cope with the energy.

Now, the good news: Alcohol has never been and still isn’t a serious addiction for me, and other than a couple beers last night I’ve been dry in June. I’ll enjoy one glass of wine tonight. While I did dip back into smoking tobacco, that’s only happened about a dozen of the past 90 days. And, most positively, since the relationship with cannabis was my biggest problem, tomorrow will mark 90 days free from ganja.

That post five months ago was wrong regarding the timing of my sobriety, but I have indeed gotten much more sober, and will continue doing so. That post written from a cloudy mind was wrong about a lot of things — the notion of marriage and children (hey, now you know my parents… can you blame me?), the blindness to work as an addiction and the perspective that psychedelic medicines are sneakily, harmfully addictive. Drinking Ayahuasca in February and in April has been a big help, and in truth, the line between drug and medicine can always blur. What matters, I still believe, is the relationship. A relationship to nearly anything can be harmfully addictive, and a relationship to nearly anything can be healthy. Not cocaine, not really Jeffrey Dahmer, barely alcohol, but almost anything can be medicinal in right relationship.

To continue moving into right relationships, my current intentions are to essentially never drink alcohol, to not smoke tobacco unless it’s ceremonially and to stay clean from cannabis until 4/20/25. And, my current intention is also to go to bed by about 9pm each night and refrain from working myself to death. As it turns out, some people here in Vilcabamba actually want me to live.

My neighbor Claudio and production coordinator Isabela above are just two of more than a dozen people here who’ve sent their love today, and I’m extremely grateful. I couldn’t possibly produce an exhaustive list, but Tamar, Edu, Darren, Juanchis, Luis, Nick, Rasmus, Nic, Serena, Kim, Maya, Nykia, Todd, Jolene, Bruno, Alaya: Thanks so much for loving me. My family of origin and my Vilcabamba family have made me feel so loved today that it’s actually quite hard for me to receive it all. I don’t regret writing to you rather than just resting in all the love today, but I have to acknowledge that I’ve spent a long time tirelessly (and then very tiredly) overworking in order to “deserve” love. Today confronts me with the reality that I’m already loved, as things are, pre- “making it,” and as corny as it sounds, I’m loved not just for what I do. I’m loved for who I am.

I do my best to be honest with myself, and in turn with others, but I see now that I’ve held onto a core internal lie: that I’m not really lovable.

So I’ve tortured myself in academia, on reality TV, on meditation retreats and in jungles to become lovable, even though striving for love — what we actually are, and always have been — never works. It’s as nonsensical as a hand grasping for itself. I’m still learning this beyond the surface level of mind that allows me to explain it here, and I still have aways to go in truly receiving love emotionally and internally. Yet, I’m okay with where I am in that process. I’m grateful to everyone showing me love. I’m grateful that Alaya, a brilliant woman whose Heart-Centered Therapy work we’ll soon share on Light & Shadows, has helped me recognize my core inner lie of being unlovable. Alaya has so dramatically deepened my understanding of truth and lying that I’m inspired to continue over-writing (it’s my birthday try and stop me muahahaha), and to share something she wrote on the subject:

Truth and Lying

I heard there was an article online that stated that couples lie to each other about every 8 interactions. My first response was a long and howling, “Whaaaaat?” Impossible. Haunting me, I looked hard and wide for deeper understanding of how this could be. I looked further into my own vocabulary of truth.

Like snow to the Eskimos, there are at least 25 types of snow, and there just might be as many subtleties of lying as well, innocent and not so innocent.

Essentially, we all want to be honest, to express our truth, to be heard and to be accepted and loved. Authenticity, pure honesty, getting what we want in life and overcoming our fear to express ourselves without hurting or causing limitation can become a bit complex in our simple longing to love and be loved.

This is not about Universal Truth, but human relative truth. So my 2nd glimpse:

1. The Pleasing Lie: People may lie when they want to please someone.

2. Lying by omitting: a lie to avoid hurting anyone with unkind or critical words even though you may have very strong feelings otherwise.

3. Lying to avoid conflict and keep the peace. This could be to protect a friendship or personal interests. Acquiescing your Truth. Agreeing to something you disagree with, to end an uncomfortable conversation or prevent an argument.

4. Saying nothing and hiding true feelings to avoid conflict. Non-verbal lying.

5. Insincere compliments to gain favor and safety.

6. Survival Lying from Fear: People may lie when they are afraid or if they fear they will be rejected or judged wrongly.

7. Dominating Bill and Mary: Mary is caught off guard as Bill asks her a hard and direct question. She knows her truth will not fit the expectations or needs of Bill. This ignites a sudden fear of being reprehended, blamed, or judged. The fear sends Mary into her amygdala. An answer is fast fired, and untruthful words come out of her mouth before she has a chance to even integrate and rethink her answer.

8. Bending the Truth: A belief that we won’t get what we want unless we lie or distort the truth.

9. Mary wants something and knows that her authority figure, “Bill”, does not support this or feels that what she wants is unreasonable or not supporting his best interests. Mary may then simply bend the truth to justify her needs in order to get what she wants.

10. Deliberate Creative lying: This can be conscious manipulation and creative Story Telling: This is more hard-core lying. One can consciously create a story, distort the truth or add power to an already accepted lie to manipulate reality in one’s favor. This could be for personal gain or to serve one’s own self-interest.

11. Protective Lying: to protect someone from knowing something that would be difficult to bear or something that may hurt them.

12. Telling lies to save face. Too hard to take responsibility for wrong doings. Making a story or excuses to cover the truth.

13. Redesigning the Truth: Applying partial truth, omitting unpleasant portions.

14. Lying to hurt someone. This is more of a revengeful kind of lying consciously creating a campaign to turn others against someone that you don’t like or that threatens you.

15. Deflecting one’s own wrongdoing or resentment towards another by making them wrong.

16. Denial: Unconsciously believing and holding on to a non-truth in order to avoid feeling or facing something that is painful.

17. Lies of the Mind that justify any wrong doing: The mind can find a good reason for any and all violations against self or someone else

18. Reality built on a lie. Lying to defend and support untrue, long-standing beliefs that we have trusted and believed in. Therefore, updating and facing that the values and things that were deeply important to you are now not true could threaten one’s security, identity or world model of reality. We try to avoid the pain of being lied to and mislead.

19. Contagious Authoritarian Lying: This lie, which was either deceptive or innocent, is accepted by others and is spread throughout a community as accepted and factual truth.

20. A person or company that falsely presents themselves as an authority; one that absolutely “knows” or has enough evidence to “prove” and sustain an idea, theory or concept that is not true.

21. A lie that is presented with no evidence, just an unchallengeable air of authority and knowing that is commanding. It can bring harm or merely distract people from looking further for the real truth. Believing in the lie is disempowering in itself.

22. Distortion of a truth or playing one’s emotions in order to get attention, support or sympathy.

23. Exaggeration to prove a point.

24. Passive/aggressive lying. Lying to make someone feel guilty or ashamed.

25. Guessing at an answer and claiming it as truth because it “feels” right and fits into your paradigm.

Yikes. I’ve certainly done my number of these, and these lies have certainly done a number on me. Hell, Light & Shadows itself is a production that is almost inherently editorialized. Heeding my dad’s lesson may be harder than anyone thought. Yet, a good start is to do our best, heeding the Toltec wisdom (per one of my favorite books, The Four Agreements) to:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word.

2. Don't Take Anything Personally.

3. Don't Make Assumptions.

4. Always Do Your Best.

Now, I’ll do my best to remember that I’m lovable.

I sit and write as my healing back aches, as my aching heart heals and as my family and community hold me in love, reminding me of what’s true. Edu, my oldest friend in the Vilcabamba community, reminded me by gifting me a cigar (for ceremonial use) and by writing me a beautifully heartfelt letter. Rasmus, who has been instrumental in starting up my businesses of water (Yangana Source Water) and earth (Tierra Renacida), reminded me by gifting me a few last smokes of tobacco and some Rapé (pronounced Hapé) medicine, which helps one wean off of the habit of smoking. My neighbor Claudio and my closest friends and my family and innumerable people remind me all the time, in unspeakable ways.

My heart feels full, even with the growing pains of letting all the love in. It feels like too much love, yet I’m learning there is no such thing. A few hours ago my team members Juanchis, Isabela and Luis (it’s yet more life-poetry that the three main shamans I’ve worked with are named Don Juan, Isabel and Don Luis) surprised me with an ice cream, a blueberry cupcake, a letter by Isa and a long group hug. I trembled as they confronted me with love. I had to sit on the ground and my eyes watered.

As I struggled to receive their love, the team reminded me that they are family, and I felt it. I felt okay being so vulnerable with them, and now I feel okay being so long-windedly vulnerable with you. I admit that I write in a nonsensical search for love that is already here, but I also write to be an example of self-love and healing, to remind you that you are lovable. Life is a mirror, a reflection, and you’re reading this because you are the love that I am. We are different notes in the same beautiful song.

Music. Other than math maybe (probably not), music feels like the manifestation of love that’s most essential, straight from the divine. During my 45 days in the jungle two and a half years ago, when I was drinking so much Ayahuasca that I was basically on Ayahuasca even when I wasn’t drinking it, I realized this profoundly through a vision.

On a night off from ceremonies, the group I was with was having dinner, but I couldn’t eat. I didn’t know why. My stomach was totally empty and I was skinny, but I had no desire to nourish myself. Since I couldn’t eat, I just quietly left the dinner table and lied on the ground, breathing through the sadness. A shamanic woman in the group (I’ll call her Jen) saw what was happening, and rallied the other four to join her in coming to me and kneeling around me in a circle. Two put their hands on my legs, two put their hands on my arms, and Jen knelt by my head. She asked me what was happening.

“I don’t know. I just can’t eat. I don’t know why.” (I’m paraphrasing again, and I’m sure I don’t need to qualify that, nor do I need to write any more words nor publish all these words, but I’ve gotten this far honestly, so I’ll continue honestly.)

She asked me how I felt.

“I don’t know. I feel sad.”

“Why do you feel sad? We love you. There’s so much love here.”

“… there’s a feeling that I don’t deserve it.” As those true words left my mouth without me even thinking them through consciously, I started crying like my dad cried when I was 10. They continued reminding me: “You’re loved. You do deserve love.” They massaged my limbs and head and held the space for what I was going through.

“I don’t know what’s going on with me!!” I cried out in exasperation.

“That’s okay,” Jen said. “You don’t need to know.”

The group held me for minutes and minutes, until I could start actually feeling the love in my body. When I did, Jen continued: “This is a corrective experience.” She asked if I could conjure an image to associate with the experience, and immediately the vision of a 1/8 music note appeared through my third eye.

This post has gotten long. You hanging in there? Tired of reading the word “love” a million times? Sorry. It’s my birthday.

Sigh. The things we write and say and do in our searches for love. Love love love love love love love love.

Let’s wrap our love fest up so that I can have some dinner (which I actually want to do!) with people who love me, and let’s bring it back to where it started: mom, yes, but also dad.

We receive the good and bad from our parents, and we choose what we carry forward, but our choices aren’t perfect. I struggle to receive love because my mom and dad struggled to receive love. I may be making new choices and having corrective experiences now, but the wound is there, and I’ll share how it showed up in my father, back when he was a boy. He also felt unlovable. He also felt he needed to succeed in order to be loved. In this case he felt he needed to succeed in baseball, and this is what he wrote:

After the silent drive and downpour of tears, my dad couldn’t eat, couldn’t enjoy his reward, because he felt unworthy. These three pages are all I have of my dad’s story, but if you’re curious about how the story continues — how my dad’s dad comforted him — I shared it in a speech to the outdoor racquetball hall of fame in 2019. My dad’s dad, frankly speaking, was a savage man, but in this story I see how he, too, was just doing his best. My dad did his best. I will do my best.

I received a lot of light and beauty from my dad. I didn’t receive all I needed; in this world, does anyone? Thank God for corrective experiences, for communities and for friends like the ones surrounding me. Thank God for medicines.

I did my first plant medicine retreat in April 2019, when my dad’s death was becoming imminent. After tremendous experiences with Ayahuasca, Rapé, Sananga and other medicines, we drank some mushroom and cacao tea on the last day for integration. Before I knew it I was writing, though it’s not exactly true to say that “I” was writing. No cognitive or rational or controlled experience was happening, really. Words were happening, and they were finding their way from my hand to the page, but it wasn’t anything I was thinking through. It was simply a happening. Writing was happening through me and the magic mushrooms, tears were pouring on the page, and here is what happened:

I literally just turned 32, if we’re counting the minutes, and after all this gooey opening, it’s high time to close.

Thank you, dad, for loving me and for teaching me something True.

Love, with a capital L, and honesty. Are the two different?

We’re all different, and we’re all the same song.

Thank you, you, for listening.

I’ll always try my best to hear you, too. Enough writing for a day? Yeah… that’s enough. We’re all enough.

I’m grateful for this 33rd trip around the sun. I’m grateful to be alive.

If Davey were here, he’d probably say, “shit, son. That was a lot of words. You ok?” You may wonder the same.

Yes, I’m good.

For my birthday please don’t worry about me, and please take from this whatever helps you.

I’ve got nothing left for you but love

and a grindstone of music