The hero and the hermit

When I was four and people asked what I wanted to become when I grew up I said: “I want to become a maker of things or a hero”. What a maker of things exactly would be I didn’t know, but for the hero I had a clear picture in mind. I saw myself in a red deux chevaux driving around and picking up sick and injured animals who would magically be healed again. When my parents moved from the big city to the country side the image of the red deux chevaux disappeared and I started saving hedgehogs and snails in de shed, funny enough only the hedgehogs stayed in my make shift animal hospital but the snails all disappeared. My real success as animal saving hero came when I was seven and my brother found a baby magpie. He found it, but not being the nurturing hero type, he handed it over to me. With little guides from my dad, I cut up worms and pushed it down the magpie throat. I had a wonderful time seeing the magpie grow stronger and attached to me. But baby’s grow into adults and the magpie needed other magpie to be really happy, so we looked around and found a rescue center for all kinds of wildlife and they were willing to take our magpie in. Saying my good-bye’s to the magpie was a mixture of sad and happy, I had to say goodbye to a real close friend but at the same time, visiting the rescue center, opened up a whole new world for me. For years after my first success as a hero I tried to save baby birds, kittens, hedgehogs, ducklings, a piglet, a goat and a pony, some I’ve saved, some died but they all taught me big lessons.

When I was sixteen I joined the animal rescue as a volunteer. At first I only had radio and telephone duty, but soon I was allowed to ride “shotgun” on the ambulance and for a while I lived the dream. One day we got a call about a horse that had fallen over in its trailer and was trapped, we rushed over and found the horse lying on its side with its leg caught under the partition, the big cut on its leg was bleeding heavily. I could feel the shear panic of the horse crawl inside of me. There were so many people standing around, doing nothing or doing too much that I froze. I meekly followed the ambulance driver into the trailer and looked at the big cut and then looked the horses in the eye and in an instant I know that the horse knew that it was having its last fight on earth. Silently I promised the horse I would stay till the end. Then it all went very quickly, the horse tried to get up, the ambulance driver tried to get the partition off the trapped leg, the owner cried, the gush became bigger and the partition cut into the main artery, the blood came gushing out in the rhythm of the panicked horses hart, I was pushed out the trailer, others rushed in, the horse was dragged out and a big circle off people was formed to see the spectacle. I stood outside the circle feeling the live drain out of the horse, I wanted to shout: “leave him be” but I didn’t. On the way back in the ambulance I felt drained, the ambulance driver felt all pumped up, when I started to cry he stopped the ambulance, put his arm around me and maybe said something nice, than he started to feel me up and tried to kiss me, I jumped out disgusted and walked all the way home. The walk home took about two or three hours and gave me lots of time to cry and think.

I quit my job at the animal rescue and was done being a hero, or so I thought. The years that followed were filled with ambiguity; to rescue or not to rescue, beings and human beings, connection and disconnection. Then one day I met up with a woman who had her own rescue syndrome. I was lead into the world of psychiatry and a group of hero’s that all were plotting to help people that were in psychiatric care make the transition back into the “normal” world. The hero in me jumped in and I saw more madness than I care to remember, from electro-shock and people who were fine with their medicated lives, to rescue workers that didn’t know when they were beaten by the rescues and the total disconnection between system and syndrome. After three years I realized that most people there didn’t want to be helped at all and that to most people who were helping that was exactly to their liking. I left that world of pretence.

Then I met a ex-junky who had seen the light and started a place where other ex-users of all sorts could come and find their way back into the “real” world. Because he was from “the other side” and had a totally different approach I put my hero energy into that center of pretence and experienced more elaborate ways of using the worlds resources, situations and people than I could ever hold possible. In all fairness I must state that I have learned a lot during that time. The main thing being that whatever I did helped me more than it helped anybody else and I should drop the pretence.

Whenever people would asked me at that time what I would like to be I would said, I want to become a maker of things or a hermit. For a long time I’ve worked on the hermit part, but having neither the money to buy myself a small island, nor the makings of a devotee to become a nun. I had no choice but to be among humans. I’ve met loads of wonderful people, funny people, wise people, strange people, dangerous people, warm people, people in whose company I’d felt save and I rejoice having met all of them, learned from them, connected with them. And as it stands now I somehow turned out to be a pretty good maker of things.