Tamarack Writes Former Student, Again.

The racist, sexist creep just can't help himself (pathological addictions are like that). Exactly a year and a half since the last communciation, Tamarack Song pleads yet again with a female former student, who he once harassed with a bizzare correspondence, to join him at his Playing Indian outdoor school for whites who want to be "Native".

The Mystery Student assures us that she declined his unmanly proposition in no uncertain terms.

And thanks again, Miss, for sending us Tamarack's twisted attempts at public relations. He makes our case against him far better than we ever could.

From: Tamarack Song

Subject: checking in

To: Mystery Student

Date: Friday, June 20, 2008, 7:24 AM

______,



And now another turn of the seasons, another coming and going of pervading winds. Would you like to rejoin with us?


Tamarack


-----Original Message-----
From: Mystery Student
Sent: Friday, June 20, 2008 5:48 PM
To: Tamarack Song
Subject: Re: checking in



Why would I want to do that?


--- On Fri, 6/20/08, Tamarack Song wrote:


From: "Tamarack Song"
To: Mystery Student

Because your heart is here.


"The Eye of the Viper was many things, but above all it was Remember. And so I remember, despite how greatly it hurts sometimes. Though much was lost, the Way of the Viper remains, and it is the Way of the Viper that I wish to walk into my path. [It] is this: patients and precision, subtlety and stealth, unpredictability and wise retreat, a deadly reputation for quickening surprise, a sensual fidelity to sun and water, and the silence and timelessness of eternity."

Uh sorry, Jackass. Looks like her heart is with us. You run along now, cuz we know you have much better things to do - like taking a food drop out to your starving "Seekers". They're hungry, they're bored, and they're waiting....

A Student's Essay For Admission to the Yearlong Program

A former student kindly loans us a copy of her essay that Tamarack required for admission to his Wilderness Guide Yearlong program. His creepy harassment letters and a ticket to the hell that is the Teaching Drum Outdoor School were the result.

Somehow we doubt the admission essay was ever really necessary. As long as suckers are willing to give Dan Konen money, he will oblige them with an admission to his phoney, playing-Indian school.

Yes, indeed. It takes a long time and a lot of work to grow up. The Tamarack Song's of the world are what happen if you don't.

His face masked, arm raised, fingers open, his body clad entirely in black - a moment frozen in a photograph of a broken chunk of pavement just gone through a storefront window. A thousand pieces of bottle green glass all over the sidewalk.

A merchant's corporate window shattered.

At this photograph in a magazine held open in my hands, I stared and stared, bleary-eyed from a four-day trek across America from the deep South to Portland, Oregon. Four days earlier was November 30, 1999. The first day of the anti-WTO uprisings in Seattle.

At this stark photograph of a man in mid-riot I kept staring as two words, two questions kept flying around and around in my head - Shattered, Why? No quick answers came. I put the magazine back down. Only terrorists wear masks. Did they not know that?

Anyway, what did it have to do with me? Activism is a bumper sticker "Save the Whales, Save Tibet, Save our Salmon". Single-issue. Single attack. That's it. You broadcast your message to an anonymous authority who somewhere, somehow is supposed to change things. That's it. Stick a bumper sticker on it. You're done. Or you make a sign and march passively from one end of town to the other. But never ever under any circumstances do you commit violence - especially not property destruction. That is a sin. Property has papal infallibility, the divine right of kings, you will go to Hell if you question it.

The next day, I went back to that magazine and looked at the photo again. Now there were others - pictures of people my age, my background, kicked, beaten, gassed, pepper-sprayed - their suffering blatantly exposing the falsification of history that tells us that the circumstances creating police states and riots happen only in the past, only in the ghetto. Only in the Third World. But I did not fully understand that yet. I just liked the photo. A raised arm. A brick through a window. Shattered glass. It must have felt good.

I put away the magazine once more and picked up the first secretarial temp job I could find. Fourth temp that company had had. They all kept quitting. Not enough to do. No one really caring if anything got done. Unsupervised and unwanted. With internet access. Click, click. Where in the world do you want to go today? Seattle.

It took a while. There were a lot of "isms". The WTO, global finance, third world debt - not exactly easy reading. Then somebody tossed me a lifeline with these three words that came across my monitor like three wise men:

Property is theft.

Come again?

Property is theft.

Is that so? Prove it.

And I was hooked. Like a hound dog on a track, I followed anonymous tips back to the scene of the crime - back to the image of the black clad window-smashers - but this time the image had a newly-minted caption to explain it all Anarchists. Anarchists? Yes, anarchists said the bruised corporate media in Seattle. And they are all from Eugene. I got out my month-old Oregon map. Eugene is one hour and fifty minutes from Portland. Jeesshh. Anarchists in Oregon.

Why?

Around the corner, the boss' footfalls clomped. Away went the map and the internet, up went Microsoft Word on my computer screen. Without comment, the boss disappeared into his office and picked up the phone. My heart pounded. He sat down in his big chair, engrossed in a phone call with his boyfriend. A sigh of relief - I was free again for several hours. Still, better to look busy for awhile. I started typing into the Word document.

Believe it or not, finding jobs like these is not hard, their main attraction being the loads of free time they allow one to dream, to surf, to write. Writing was the reason I moved to Oregon, because once there, I intended to finish a novel about a woman lost in an ancient and deadly forest where the only way out is to learn how to love. But the tale needed a setting and Oregon promised to be a land of mystic oceans, volcanoes, old growth forests. Above all, I needed a forest.

How the story initially took shape and why is beyond the scope of this relating, but it honestly can be said that the main impetus came from a near-death experience. Quite literally, one radiant Fall day, I felt the Angel of Death pass through the room; his presence hovering just long enough to impart one word:

"Ppssstt."

In the wake of his leaving came turbulent thoughts about the reality of my own passing. I imagined being rowed across the river Styx. What would I say to Death should he ask me about my life? The question elicited an indifferent shrug, then a sullen scowl, then smoldering anger, hot tears, and finally beneath it all - despair.

To recuperate powerful emotions threatening to overwhelm everything, I put Death in the book and gave him a brother - the God of Love. To the woman in the story I gave four guides - a condor, a wolf, an owl, an opossum. To her adventure - a forest haunted by love and death and the dawning hope that nothing is as it seems. The book was an attempt to face the grief of a lost home and a broken family, to recuperate the energy of a looming nervous breakdown, to try to understand why I am so alone. I became convinced I was nuts.

Yet how was I to explain the three or four great horned owls that moved into the woods outside my apartment window, the opossums in the yard in the middle of the night, the vultures surfing the air rising up from the hollows into whose folds my apartment complex was built, and then one day, a snake lying across the sill of my door when I came home. Not too long after, a large stray dog shot out of the woods and clamped massive jaws onto my ankles and wrists in a terrifying hold whose meaning I still do not understand.

As it all unfolded, possessive relatives began to cling more and more tightly as I tried to pull away for the psychic space necessary to write. Unable to escape their empty conflicts, their golden cages where anything may be had but personal growth and freedom, I ran away. To Oregon. To a land of mystic forests.

But most of all, I was writing to convince myself that wilderness is only a story; I was writing to silence the nagging doubt that the artist gives to her art what she cannot give to her life. Then somebody threw a rock through a window. Shortly thereafter, I drove to the Hoh Rain Forest on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington. Spellbound, standing beneath old growth Elders in the Hall of Mosses, I felt a message come loud and clear: You cannot justify cutting down even a single tree for a novel that will never describe a forest as well as Nature can.

As fast as I could, I got away from those trees, and for a little while longer fought their wisdom. A great novel had to be written; I wanted to become famous and wealthy. How else does a person get out of meaningless McJobs, isolation, banality? Without money, one cannot have a thatched cottage by the sea in a Gaelic-speaking county in Ireland. Without money, one cannot grow bamboo for a Zen hut to be built beside a hidden spring in the heart of Florida. Without money, one cannot....

But I was not really convinced. Fame and money rarely change anything - certainly not isolation and banality. A few days later, a terrible case of writer's block set in. Still I slogged on. The block got worse until finally, exasperated, the Angel of Death lost his temper. Grabbing me by the back of the collar, he dragged me to the door and rasped gravely, "Get out!"

I went to a protest. Gaping like a tourist, I saw my first in-the-flesh anarchist giving a fiery speech on class war. Homeless, he was a resident of Dignity Village - the self-governing tent city in Portland that once every few months gets evicted from their campsites on public land by armed eunuchs of the State - evicted because the presence of a tent city in the neighborhood drives down the price of real estate.

The struggles of Dignity Village increasingly embodied everything I was learning about the economic and spiritual violence of capitalism, and about the resistance to that violence that Dignity Village modeled in their anarchistic selfdetermination. Anarchist theory poses a question, how can we live our lives without domination, coercion, violence? Without hierarchies and pyramid schemes? In Dignity Village, and in street protest as well, I saw what the Zapatista Marcos meant when he said we are fighting for communal spaces against market forces. Yet there was an unspoken barrier between Dignity residents and their supporters - we could help but we were not homeless. I kept reading.

As my faith in the system steadily unraveled, at night sometimes, I went to bed shaking, pulling the covers up over my head. I am going to Auschwitz. They are going to put me in Auschwitz. Because I don't believe in Them anymore. Because I can see what They do. For seeing the truth, for wanting to leave Them, we are all going to be beaten and imprisoned. War is the health of the State. Yes, I know. I remember childhood.

On and on I read, the books piling up beside my couch as a great, nagging fear that some collapse, some terrible reckoning, is just around the corner would not let me rest. What could a person do, how would one survive when it came? Survivalist books shot to the top of the reading list. Meanwhile, the corporate media was still looking for someone to blame for Seattle. They found John Zerzan - the primitivist writer from Eugene. He was to blame for the property destruction in Seattle because he and "his" tribe hated Civilization. How wicked!

Off the library shelves flew the books by Zerzan (and others), who page after page, methodically demolished the sacrosanct, civilized ideologies of time, technology, language, number, agriculture, art, and industrialism. It was exhilarating. It was as if something long dormant, scarcely to be believed, but there all along came springing up like hearty weeds through the cracked pavement.

The mists of pre-history clearing away, an enlightened picture began to emerge of the people who lived before the conquest of civilization. Particularly inspiring were their intimate ways with the natural world, their freedom from time and toil, their refusal of accumulation, and a marked absence of exploitation and hierarchies. Just as surprising came the evidence that there are still primal peoples living the old ways; that it is even possible (and desirable) to do so.

Yet this idea was terrifying in its implications, in its risks. America's ongoing policy towards Old Way peoples has always been nothing less than exterminationist. With my own eyes I have seen a measure of this kind of intolerance in Portland's treatment of Dignity Village. If Native Americans got genocide, if Dignity Village's homeless cannot even have a communal place to pitch their tents, then what chance do any of us contemplating this lifeway have?

Then I remembered the radical's challenge that if it does not revolutionize your daily life, it isn't revolution. And in this day and age of ecological and spiritual devastation, anything less than revolution is death. Perhaps it is too alarmist (or hopeful) to say that civilization is collapsing. I really do not know. But it has collapsed inside of me.

That our feral natures and primal selves are eternal and irrepressible is miraculous news yet not really new, for it seems that for so long the natural world has been trying to make contact. Only just recently have I learned that this understanding has a name: Dodem. It is the only way I know how to explain what I wish to become. This is our story:

Unfazed by concrete, suburbs or social climbers, the Relations were not long in appearing. That first house in the South where we lived when I was a toddler was adjacent to a piney woods, and one day while I was playing in the yard, a copperhead came slithering towards me out of the woods. My mother managed to intercept the creature with a garden hoe just in time to prevent the occurrence of what most likely would have been an interesting conversation. Despite my mother's hostility, the viper clan was not deterred.

A few years later, we moved to another Southern state, and one day my father took the family out in a boat on a popular lake. As lunchtime neared, we anchored about twenty yards off a small island during an unusually humid May afternoon. My mother, when she relates this story, says that there was something about that island and the unusual weather that just felt "snaky". The island was covered in thicket with shady trees hanging low over the water.

Ignoring her intuition, my mother began to pass out sandwiches to a hungry and cranky crowd. Next to me, a red can of Pringles potato chips sat on the right side of the boat nearest the island. Suddenly, like a dark flash of lightning from the shore came a tremendous, black explosion through the water. A serpentine missile, it drove towards the boat with great speed and blasted the red Pringles can head first, knocking the chips into the water.

Gape-jawed, I sat with half a sandwich clutched in my hand as the water moccasin slammed into my side of the boat again and again. Had she chosen to, this water viper easily could have slithered into the boat as she was well able to raise her head high enough over the edge to knock out the Pringles. My father gunned the motor into reverse and we fled. That was our first welcome to the area. There were more to come.

At eight years old - scrambling hand over hand up an embankment above a rain gully - I was just about to place my hand on the next hold when something inside said look. I glanced down in time to keep from placing my hand on a baby moccasin hidden under a brown leaf that he had just raised up enough with his head to look me straight in the eye. My heart stopped in my chest. Then I fled.

To no avail.

At ten, my childhood friend and I were running across a long-abandoned railroad trestle that passed over a wide creek in the woods below our house and fields. Way ahead of my friend and flying over the thick, rotting ties I felt a voice again say look. I glanced down and saw - a step away and easily within striking distance - a tremendous water moccasin sunning himself on a support tie below the top of the railroad. He had to have been at least six feet long as his fist-sized head was propped up at a forty-five degree angle between several coils, his tail placed coyly under his chin. I will never forget the look that viper gave me. I turned and ran.

Incredibly, we came back a few months later to hunt crawdaddies sure to be lurking beneath the hardened slag under the railroad trestle. Finding a particularly promising slab about three feet in diameter, I instructed my friend and his sister to ready themselves on the other side for all the crawdaddies that were sure to come flying out and into our pails as soon as I tipped the slab on its edge. Heaving the tall slab back, I could not immediately see what was under the capstone, but looking across into the shocked faces of my friends, I knew we must have hit the mother lode. I grinned and peeked over the edge of the slab. It was horrible.

A slimey, graybluegreen mass, the medusa's head beneath the capstone seethed and twisted and writhed like the living viscera of some monstrous animal. There must have been thousands of them. Looking up at my friends whose color had blanched completely out of their faces, I managed to choke out a single word: run. Slamming the capstone back onto the nest, hundreds of writhing, seething missiles shot out on the enormous splash towards the backsides of my fleeing companions.

Barely escaping with our lives, we never played together in that creek again. Two decades later I happened across a specimen of the monster in a natural history museum. At last, the beast had a name: Gray's crayfish snake. Perfectly harmless, and as fond of crayfish as any child.

Nonetheless, the water moccasin got the blame and the woods and creek remained abandoned with the approach of adolescence. Sixteen came and I was again in the yard of our house, only this time no happy toddler, but a distant, sullen teenager working on the only thing that really mattered - a perfect tan. A radio headset covered my ears shutting out all the world. Turning over to bake the other side, I saw something flutter in the corner of my eye. It was a blue jay hopping madly beside my mother's rose garden (which she watered obsessively, causing both the frog and nesting bird population to shoot up dramatically and thereby attracting predators fond of said populations).

A black whip cracked maniacally at the blue jay's head, and the jay slashed back at the water moccasin with its sharp claws. Undeterred, the viper continued heading straight towards me. I shot out of the yard and onto the porch and into the house.

Then away to college at a big university, then off to LA for film school, then to a Pacific island resort to teach American sports to Japanese tourists, then up to Kyoto to teach English, then home once more to join the military, then to months of physical therapy for permanent injuries from that dumb stint, and then lots of temp jobs and a vain attempt to explain through a novel why my father went bankrupt and lost everything including our home and why my parents divorced so brutally.

Nevertheless, these temporary diversions have utterly failed to convince me that the viper in my mother's garden and the viper on the railroad trestle were not one and the same. Civilization's complicity in keeping this fact from coming to fruition has not succeeded either; its war against memory has failed. The ancient Eye of the Viper has looked into me and revealed just how deep primal memory goes. After all, these reptiles watched the dinosaurs die.

Now maybe water moccasins cannot really help to explain what is happening to me, and maybe I am about to overstate their importance to revolutionary Return, but when all else failed, they remained. They remained when the wolf and the Indigenous were murdered, when the trees were taken and the land exploited, when labor was enslaved and dissent silenced, they remained.

They remained to remind the genocidal South that you cannot control what is wild. They remained to retreat to some of the most god-awful hot and humid places ever created. And they flourished. And in these places where they flourished, they built a reputation for legendary unpredictability. In their numbers and in their stealth, they became the reason why we call some swamps hell.

The wolf and the Indigenous temporarily beaten back, the oppressors let down their guard and the moccasins began pouring out of the swamps - into swimming pools, into log piles, into basements, into rose gardens, into barns and boats and bathrooms. Everywhere. To walk anywhere in the South is to feel that you take your life in your hands; it is to know that you had better look before you reach or sit or step or lift. It is not that the moccasin is a fierce or particularly deadly creature. It is that s/he is so unpredictable that little can be said definitively about their nature.

Sometimes when threatened they vibrate their tails like a rattlesnake. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they warn before they strike by exposing the inner white of their mouths (giving rise to the alternative moniker cottonmouth). Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they inject venom when they bite. Often they don't. Sometimes they swim out with their heads up like periscopes to bite people who have fallen off of jet skis. Usually they don't.

Highly territorial during the mating season (May/June), they are sometimes aggressive. Sometimes they can be counted on to be lethargic in the wintertime. Often not. Sometimes docile, water moccasins occasionally have been picked up and handled without incident. Some people do the same and lose a limb. Experts claim that snakes do not crawl into sleeping bags to warm themselves up next to folks. Sometimes pit vipers wait near sleeping bags for mice seeking crumbs to drop by. Solitary creatures, moccasins usually travel alone. People who have fallen into nests of them say it is like wrestling with a ball of barbed wire.

Cottonmouths have a reputation for dropping out of overhanging tree limbs and onto canoers' necks. Perhaps sometimes, this is true, although the responsibility largely falls to the agile, tree climbing, and harmless water snake who, cloaking herself in the water moccasin's reputation, is the same color and shape. It takes an expert to tell them apart. Not to be outdone, water moccasins have also been known to climb trees. Sometimes boaters reaching around trees to tie up their lines have been bitten.

Armless, legless and deaf, pit vipers hunt in the darkness with profound subtlety relying almost solely on heat sensitivity (which they register through pits located between their nostrils and eyes). Elliptical, cat-like pupils are at the center of their night hunter's vision. A precious commodity, venom is reserved for prey and used only as a last-ditch defense in the most dire of circumstances. Bloodless in combat with one another, their skirmishes leave the loser to fight another day and the winner to procreate.

Despite their unpredictability, water moccasins are usually forgiving. In fact, I am alive today because a certain cottonmouth took mercy on my childhood carelessness and chose not to instigate a deadly fall from the top of a railroad trestle. On that momentous day, the look in the Eye of the Viper was many things, but above all it was Remember.

And so I remember, despite how greatly it hurts sometimes. Though much was lost, the Way of the Viper remains, and it is the Way of the Viper that I wish to walk into my path. As far as I can discern from limited research and personal experience, the Way of the Viper is this: patience and precision, subtlety and stealth, unpredictability and wise retreat, a deadly reputation for quickening surprise, a sensual fidelity to sun and water, and the silence and timelessness of eternity.

Wanting only this, no amount of face-masking, fist-raising, black-cladding or rock throwing at military formations of riot-geared eunuchs is ever going to mollify the recognition that they are not what's in the way. Besides, I cannot learn from an enemy I do not respect; I want my own fear not theirs.

And it is in the forest, not the streets of civilization, where I want to face this fear; it is there that I want to understand how to deepen love. Even if it means at first to be like an ungainly, near-sighted, omnivorous opossum with little for defense but playing dead in a musk of offal. Perhaps Nature will be forgiving. After all, the bumbling opossum has an immunity to cottonmouth venom up to ten times the dose that would kill a man.

When attempting to explain to the human Relations nearest me my desire to live and learn in the Wild, I am most often met with a sad or cynical "Well, that is all very good, but in the end we cannot go back."

And they are right.

We cannot go back.

But we can come full circle.

Like the snake swallowing its tail - the symbol for eternal Return.

When Cornered, Blame The Dodems

In addition to writing about the sweat lodge ceremony for attention and profit, Tamarack Song also uses his hokey fakelore to excuse his sexist behavior. In the first letter to a former student who inquired about his romantic history, he tries to explain away his failed relationships by blaming something he calls "dodems."

A few years later, the same student confronted him on his e-list about his anti-Indian racism and hypocrisy. The result: banishment from the e-list. And more dodem-blaming.

From: "Tamarack Song"
Subject: the stuff of life
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 2002 13:50:57 -0800

- edit -

Well, Rainy Day Woman, you asked if I would share with you what happened to me eight years ago. I will. I was in the middle of a year of celibacy, taken so that I could break my intimate relationship patterns and gain the wherewithal to begin anew under the auspices of my more balanced self. Lisa, with whom I just parted (and who is the mother of my son) was of Dodem Turtle - an extremely hard energy for me to be with. I knew that I was to be with a woman of Hawk Dodem, so that year also gave me time to gain perspective and clear the way for her. I did that, and four women of Dodem Hawk - four powerful illuminators of the dark side of my Moon - visited me in quick succession. It is because of them that I have the Balance I have today; I am so grateful for what they brought me. They were the last to know me the victim and me the enabler. They were the first to taste the ethereal me, the first to know me in a pluralistic sense. I am ever indebted to them for the life transition they helped me through.

But I was a fool: they were my teachers, not my peers. As each flew way I wanted to hold on to her, in order to hold on to the gift she gave. I didn't trust that I carried it within myself, that I could be self-sustaining. I feared that I would sink back into my treachery without them. At the same time I feared that they would torment my mother, and I did not deal well with that.

In the end I rejected each of them when they flew back and tentatively circled over. I did so because, in my faltering way, I recognized them as of a bygone era in my life.

Sortly thereafter it came to pass that I was told I could safely be with one of my own Dodem. I think that in knowing and accepting myself, as Hawk had guided me to do, I could then open to such closeness in relationship. I still don't know that I have the trust to do so, but I have the awareness - the first step.

Me

Anytime Dan Konen is called on his bullshit, he claims it's a personal vendetta, then blames some more dodems. No one here is trying to hurt poor Konen's feelings; we are trying to warn others to run like hell from this racist, sexist predator.

To: teaching_drum@yahoogroups.com
From: "Tamarack Song"
Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005
Subject: [Teaching_Drum] Will the real Teresa please...

Greetings Folks,

In spite of how it might appear, "Teresa" is a kind and loving person. I care for her dearly, and I am glad that all of you are being respectful of her. Old Buzzard and David, I'm particularly grateful for your thoughtful and non-reactive responses. If anyone treats her disrespectfully, you'll be hearing from me.

"Teresa" has a deep and genuine concern for the issues she presents, and at the same time it appears to be quite difficult for her to carry on an open discussion around them. This is not the typical "Teresa;" if you were a part of our sharings of old, you would probably not recognize the bright, insightful, inquisitive woman she was then, as the same person you have now come to know.

What happened? "Teresa" has a personal vendetta against me that goes back a number of years. She is trying to hurt me by doing as much damage as she can to what is dear to my heart. She has been waiting for her time to strike, and the issues of Andesvirgo and others have given her a platform. Her anonymity allows her to feel safe, and her denial of the truths of others, enables her to keep clinging to her own truth in order to justify her vengeful deeds.

On top of that, she and I have a unique dodemic relationship, which causes her to feel threatened by me, and me to be wary of her.

How is all this affecting me? My first concern is for "Teresa," because I know how long and hard this has been eating at her heart. I'm glad she is finally able to get something out, disguised and twisted as it might be. I've been praying that she could some day step out of the shadows and begin speaking her truth, and I'm elated at this beginning. My second concern is for all of you. I'm used to being on the firing line -- it goes with the turf; however, you folks have been drawn to this circle for other reasons, and I am concerned that you are not getting your needs met. Issues like this tend to take over and suck up the group energy.

Because this is ultimately about me, I'm hoping that "Teresa" will soon feel safe enough, and have the courage, to come to me with it. If some of you want to keep eavesdropping on this drama, that's OK with me, as I have no secrets. On the other hand, I know that some of you are getting fed up with it. Please let me/us know what you think.

In Balance,
Tamarack

----- Original Message -----
-snip-

Yes, they do practice Ojibway culture both materially
and spiritually at the Teaching Drum. They also
engage in sweat lodges, which is a sacred American
Indian religious practice. When I was visiting there,
a terrible storm came one night and blew a tree down
so close to one of these lodges that it almost
destroyed the structure. I recall Tamarack having
admitted that it was a sign that violations against
this sacred ceremony had been committed.

To do these things on Ojibway land without further
educating people about the abysmal conditions facing
Ojibway people in the Teaching Drum's area is an act
of cultural imperialism. It is racist at its core.
Once again, white folks are putting themselves above
the law. That land the Drum is on is bound by treaty
to the Ojibway people.

Somebody needs to "awaken" themselves to the domestic
and international laws that do indeed bind us to honor
any agreements our ancestors made with American Indian
people. To try to put yourself beyond those treaty
laws by claiming you have no particular ties to the
land you are standing on is a deeply political act.
Once again a white man says: the law does not apply to
me. It is especially offensive when coming from a
white man who owns and profits from a very particular
piece of land that was never his to buy and sell or
profit from in the first place.

You Are Out To Destroy Me! I Love You!

One of the difficulties in confronting gurus sick with terminal narcissism is their self-congratulatory ability to take every form of confrontation as a validation. Rest assured that despite Tamarack's paranoid and violent assertions to the contrary, not a single contributor here has expended even an iota of excess energy trying to "destroy" him. He is perfectly capable of doing that himself. We just facilitate his flow (7th letter).

In light of the previous post defining sexual harassment, consider Tamarack's description of the student's "excessive" reading. Do you think this shutdown during the Yearlong program might have been a perfectly understandable response to the harassment she was undergoing?

Personal responsibility, Mr. Konen, as you claim to be taking here, does not mean falsely accusing the victim of being "angry," "spiteful," or "vindictive" when she rightly calls you on your gendered violence.

From: "Tamarack Song"
Subject: Fw: Email list Removal
Date: March 2003

Greetings _____,

In an hope you are well. I'm glad to hear you have settled in amongst new friends. It should prove to be a nourishing, supportive environment for you. I want to thank you for opening up to Lety and sending her copies of my e-mails to you. Your letters helped tremendously in gaining a portal into your reality. They gave a real feel for your anger and spite -- no wonder you were out to defame and destroy me!

I am deeply sorry for my role in hurting you. In retrospect, I wish I had spoken more directly with you over the Green Season when you were here. At the time it seemed so important for you to do what you were doing (in terms of attacking me) that I decided to step back. I also didn't want to embarrass you with facts that might have contradicted your assumptions, in front of your cohorts. And, before your letters to Lety, I wasn't aware of some of the assumptions you had made. Also, I found out later that other people had passed their assumptions on to you, which probably fed your growing anger as well

I guess I didn't help the situation either, because I'm quiet about my private life. You should hear some of the rumors and gossip that get passed around and exaggerated! I usually just let it go, unless someone comes to me with it. I've come to realize that, for better or worse, bigger-than-life hearsay and criticism go along with being a public person. I can now see how, if somebody told you it was so, you would believe that Lety and I had a sexual relationship before I said anything to you about her and me. It never dawned on me that you would doubt my integrity, so it didn't occur to me to tell you that Lety had, three years prior, taken a Vow of Celibacy.

It was not until sometime in February, perhaps a few weeks or a month after I told you about Lety, that she was released from her vow and our relationship became intimate. This is perhaps an example of how rumors and misunderstandings begin, take on a life of their own, and become accepted as truth. I have to take personal responsibility for this one -- for not being more communicative, for not foreseeing the potential for misinterpretation and hurt, and for not confronting certain individuals when I suspected that they were jumping to conclusions and spreading them as fact.

It seems also that some of my actual attempts at communication may not have been very clear. In my early e-mail to you, I thought I was clear that, although I hoped that our intended sharing would be a mated one, I wasn't sure what it might be. I mentioned that it could also be Dodemic, for healing, or maybe for some other reason. Perhaps I should have been more explicit? Or emphatic? At the time, there was no one else I had the remotest interest in getting to know intimately, Jill and I had officially concluded our relationship on Nov. 6, and I had been told that it was time for my mate to come.

So when you manifested before me, and as beautifully as your inner light shone, naturally I would be suspect, and hopeful, that it be you. In fact, I was full of hope -- I had been living alone and waiting for eight years! That hope continued through our first couple e-mails and phone conversations. As beautiful as our initial sharing was, as deeply and personally intimate as it was, it was not romantically intimate. You and I didn't talk about whether we were seeing or had an interest in someone else, and we didn't express the desire to meet so that we could share personally. We didn't become sensual or intimate over the phone or in our written correspondence, nor did we talk about it.

In fact, our sharing went in reverse: our communications became more sparse and sporadic, you asked me to slow down, and I grew more distant, more confused as to what this intendedness, this energy between us, was all about. When Lety and I woke up to each other and realized our calling, I took it has confirmation that something else was intended for you and me other than matedness. As soon as Lety wrote me the letter that signified our realization as to who we were to each other, I contacted you about it. I felt clear -- I then realized why you and I didn't click in the way that I had hoped. It didn't feel to me as though there was overlap between you and Lety. You were each quite different people in my life, in different roles.

I have a couple other close friends who I am intimate with, though we are not sexually or romantically intimate. If you and I had become sexually-romantically involved, I don't think it would have affected how things unfolded. Had desire brought us together, I don't think it could have kept us together, if we were not intended. And, proper or not, whether or not it be the best timed, when revelation comes, it comes. The awareness of my matedness with Lety was so immediate, clear,and strong, that it would not have mattered what was or was not going on.

Regarding your reaction to my reaction to your reading material, I think you may be misinterpreting me. For example, I have high regard for John Zerzan; I think he's right on. I feel honored that my writings are appearing next to his in journals. I'm asking him to write the preface for my next book. My comments were not directed at your reading material per se, but at the fact that you read so much. Besides my general concern that we all talk, read, and watch movies, too much, I was concerned for your personal unfolding.

If you had your nose continuously in my writings, I would have felt same way. It's not that I don't have some ego attachment to my writings or that I don't feel hurt when they are criticized or ignored. Yet, as a believe you know, my overall feeling about the written word applies to mine is well --that it can get in the way of the real Guiding Voice, that it reflects my own prejudices, that it is no substitute for direct experience and is at best a signpost, and that it is expendable and should be passed on as soon as it no longer serves.

There are no doubt other misunderstandings between us that could be cleared up with communication. And then there are likely some genuine differences. That is okay with me, as I've had at least some differences with virtually everybody I've ever known. I'm okay with our differences. Were it not for differences, I would not be blessed with new ideas and perspectives, I would not be challenged to grow. I would not be the person I am today.

Perhaps our challenge is to sort out our genuine differences from the misperceptions, misunderstandings, misinformation and tittle-tattle. Then perhaps we could accept and honor each other for who we are, and maybe even begin to grow from the cross pollenization of our "differences". Believe it or not, I see beauty and purpose in your viciousness and criticism, and in your efforts to defame me and destroy my relationships, the School, the Year-long program. You are helping to make me stronger. A Tree that grows in the lee of the Wind may look good, but is weak-rooted and will topple in the face of the first Storm that sneaks around the backside of the Hill. The Tree that grows on the Bluff and is buffeted by all that the Thunder Beings can throw at him, grows wise, resilient, and long-lived.

I know that in all criticism there is a kernel of truth, so I accept it with graciousness, and give thanks to the source. I am thankful for what you have brought me, and I ask you to continue. I will only grow stronger, more self-aware, and hopefully a wiser and better person. In fact I encourage you to speak more of your truth. I think you are holding back, I think you have more to offer. Of course, I wish it were to my face and not behind my back, and I wish that more of it could be constructively, rather than destructively, oriented, and I wish that we could deal with the feelings directly, and work on healing the hurt they have caused, rather than letting the wounds continue to fester and feed the disharmony.

Without dialogue, without empathy and understanding, there will continue to be war. Interpersonal or international, it's all the same. At this point, I'm not going to go public with the facts, or with my personal feelings and reality around our relationship. It's not my way. And again, I don't want to embarrass you. Or contradict you in front of others. I want to honor what you consider to be right and just, even though it may appear to conflict with my ways. I know that you are doing what you feel you have to do, and I encourage you to continue. A River must run its course.

If it is wrong to love you, then I am guilty. Yes, you were right in feeling love from me. It is not romantic love, but it is love. And it is a strong, undying love. No amount of venom you have spat at me has yet tarnished it. In fact, it shows me that you care also. You would have long forgotten me otherwise, and you wouldn't be wasting your invaluable energy on me. I still believe that we were drawn together for a reason. When your Journey is over, I would welcome again sharing with you, so that we might offer to others the promised gift of our sharing. I hold no animosity toward you. I still believe in you, and look upon you with wonder and awe, just as I expressed in my first e-mail to you. You are always welcome here.

In Balance and Healing,

Tamarack

PS I believe you were taken off of the e-group mailing list. You received the mailing below because you were in my personal address book. Occasionally I'll send something out that I'd like to share with those I know, that is not directly related to the School. If you wish me not to have your e-mail address, please let me know and I'll remove it.

Tamarack Admits He Approached Female Students and Volunteers

"Approached."

Otherwise known as sexually harassed. Can you imagine the fallout if he had "approached" male students, volunteers, and staff in this way? Why do you think he felt so comfortable with this heterosexual male entitlement? Patriarchy? You betcha.

The following letter was sent as a matter of spin control to the female student he once "approached" when students in the Wilderness Guide Program began questioning Tamarack's treatment of both her and other women. The whole, sordid tale had finally come out, adding even more drama/trauma to that year's Wilderness Guide Program, a program that twelve out of fourteen students would eventually quit in disgust.

Conveniently, Tamarack forgets in this letter to add Lety Seibel to the list of women he hit on. She was a student in the previous Yearlong at the time they began their romance, and eyewitnesses have stated that she was more than an occasional visitor to his house that winter, when Tamarack was also writing the applicant/future student.

From: "Tamarack Song"
Subject:
Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2002

Greetings *****,

I've lived alone for the past nine years, since Bub's mom and I parted. In that time I've known three women: ___________ in 1994 - 95, _____________ in 1998, and ________ in 1999 - 2000. They were long distance relationships (______ lived in Texas and Hawaii, ______ was from Illinois, _______ hailed from Madison) and none of those women were associated with the School. Prior to you, I have not approached, nor had involvement with, a student of the School.

When _________ first came to the School as a volunteer, I wrote her a letter, she responded, and we each quickly realized that we were different people. Perhaps it is sheer coincidence, perhaps not, that you and her - the only two women I have opened to here at the School in the 15 years of its existence - are here at the same time, in the same camp.

I think you are aware of this, I think you know me. My hunch is that many (if not most) of you at camp (you included?) have made more romantic overtures, and had more intimate partners, than me, in the past 15 years, even considering that some of you have not been sexually active that long.

I have high regard for your intelligence and astuteness. My hunch is that you know me, that you are aware of the above. And I think you likely remember how I approached you, what I was clear about and what I wasn't. In the same breath I wish to state that I feel you need to do what you are doing, so I offer no judgment or resistance.

Tamarack

PS If/when you might like to connect, I would probably be willing.

No judgment or resistance, aye? OK, we're gonna hold you to that when we move into the Banishment phase of your "approach" to those who dare resist your depredations.

He Gets His "Intended to Be Mated" On With Sexual Harassment

Poised to overwhelm.

Alright then. In the last few posts we've looked at some of Tamarack Song's white supremacy, and we've examined his anti-activist hypocrisy, so what ought to be up next? We thought about launching into his Fake-Lore writings, but... yuck. We just did not have the stomach for that much New Age, wannabe phoniness this weekend.

It seems timely and appropriate now to go ahead and publish some of the letters Tamarack sent to a female applicant to the Wilderness Guide Program while he was still in the process of deciding who would be chosen to attend his school. Note that in the last letter in this post that what Tamarack terms the female student's "reluctance" is a classic sign of a woman backing away from a harasser. This same student will later be accused of having a "vendetta" against Tamarack when she declines further participation in his fraud. Cult leaders often hit on female seekers precisely for this reason - that they may later claim the woman-scorned defense against any females who confront their lies.

Previously published letters will open in their own separate web page. Our original remarks from those posts are in italics.

Lecherous Boy That He Is, Part I

After a visit to his school back in early Fall 2001, one of our contributors received this in their inbox. Looks like Song Boy is getting an itch he's a gonna wanna scratch, folks. "Screaming for release..."?

Now aren't you just dying to know which part of the Wilderness Guide Program covers that one?

From: "Tamarack Song"
To: No Name Necessary
Subject:
Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2001 20:03:36 -0700

Greetings ____,

Good to hear from you, and glad you arrived safely back. I think your time here was well chosen and well spent. I believe you may well be ready to face your fears and grow further into yourself. Knowing you even as slightly as I do, I'm clear that then you will have much that is uniquely you to gift back to the Healing. I caught glimpses of you that are screaming for release. And I think your personal background will lend itself to what you can contribute to your comrades as you all grow together. If it be intended that you partake in the Yearlong Program, you will grace it well.

I'll ask Rusty to send you the initial paperwork forthwith; you should have it within the next week.

In Balance,
Tamarack

Next is the handwritten letter that Tamarack mailed to the female applicant in November 2001, after receiving her required essay on why she wanted to participate in the Wilderness Guide Program. It has been rumoured that this woman was not the only one to receive such a letter over the years.

Let Me Immerse Myself in Your Breadth

Freezing-over Moon
waxing full

I don't read many peoples' works; in fact I don't read much at all anymore. I read your piece twice. It's not your depth of awareness that caught me, it's your breadth of awareness. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how rare you are?

You gave me a window into your substance, clear as first-formed ice. I need to melt the ice, hold my breath and immerse myself. I respectfully ask if you will continue to share your breadth with me. I am willing to do same.

In Balance,
Tamarack

A Taste of Your Touch On the Fabric of Balance (this has not been previously published, so there is no separate web page).

From: "Tamarack Song"
To: Name Withheld
Subject:
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2001

...cut...

I’m pensively preoccupied this morning, along with being touched by the seldom Sun -- a good time to share with you.

Your name, as I am guided by the dictionary, tells me that perhaps you are a woman of grace and honor. I already knew you well enough to suspect that. But I don’t know you well enough. Not near well enough. The voice of my dreamself urges me to come before you and respectfully ask if you might open yourself to me, and to offer the same of myself to you. You have approached me as a Seeker; perchance I will be your Guide. It may also be that we, as peers, will be both Seeker and Guide to each other.

It has been a long, long time since I’ve known someone who senses the synergy inherent in the meeting of compassion, the Spiral of Life and the intrinsic self -- and who can express it with a cadence resonant to mine. I cherish that you have gifted me a taste of your touch upon the fabric of Balance.

I believe we have been guided each to the other, for a reason that both encompasses us and reaches beyond us.

...cut...

As to what might be intended for us I have not even a faint glimmering. But I am enlivened at the prospect of the unfolding, and I trust in it. From the onset I would like to be a Truthspeaker with you -- I will hold no secrets and will strive to be fully open to you and to the Voices.

...cut...

Getting His Intended to Be Mated On

We wonder what would happen if a student applying to the University of Wisconsin received a letter like this from the Dean of Admissions. Slapped with a sexual harassment lawsuit, perhaps? You better believe it.

By the way folks, we think Same Ole Song's hitting on female students anticipates the need to deflect any future criticism with the "spurned woman" excuse. Rumour has it that several women over the years have received one of these "intended to be mated" letters. We are putting the word out for copies.

We were in fact contacted by a woman who had also been on the receiving end of Tamarack's sexist abuse, but she asked that we not publish her story because she feared his retribution. As a survivor of male violence and the potential victim of more, she had every right to ask that of us, and we will continue to honor her request.

From: "Tamarack Song"
To: Name Withheld
Subject: This and
Date: Sat, 29 Dec 2001

So, you say it's been a while since you've met your match in a man. The same is true with me concerning a woman, and that may currently be changing forme as well. As you know, I felt some powerful resonance with you as I indulged in the piece you sent along with your application, and the timing of its arrival and a couple other signs involving you only reinforced the impact.

We may have been guided to each other for one of several reasons;one may be that we are intended to be mated. The prospect alone excites me, as I have lived alone for eight years now and I dearly miss the dimension a woman of shared spirit could bring to my life. Oh, there have been women,and I know women now, but I haven't known one with the rare courage and vision it would take to Walk beside me. Nor have I known a woman I have been able to be myself with in the fullest sense.

Better than a turn of the seasons ago I, quite by happenstance (yea, right!)found myself the holder of an appointment slot with Dr. Gregory Antonym, an intuitive healer from Russia. I expected a medical reading; I got clarity on my relationship lifepath. In a nutshell, he described the spiritual landscape of my aura and said that my mate will need to be someone also of expansive landscape. He cautioned me against seeking a "pretty face",stressing that I open myself only to a woman of spiritual sensitivity. There's more, much more, but that is the essence of what I feel important to share with you right now.

I didn't entirely connect with Dr. Gregory's approach or perspective, yet he did reinforce my own awareness. I know what is intended for me, and I would rather remain alone than compromise that in order to be with someone. In an important sense I believe you and I know each other well. In many other ways we are virtual strangers. So I have only an intuitive impression as to who we might be to each other.

I am aware that my impression could also mean something quite different than matedness. But clearly it is a strong and beautiful enough impression that I want to continue exploring it with you, no matter what we find our intended relationship to be. I'd like to know now, of course, and yet I would not wish to be deprived of the joy of discovery. The mystery of a gift is enhanced by its careful unwrapping, and to me you are already a gift such that I don't believe I've ever beheld.

Me

I Feel A Tug

Meanwhile, ole T is romancing a student, Lety Seibel, in the current (2001) Wilderness Guide Program! He acts like her letter is such a surprise, but eyewitnesses in the Guide Program later told us that the romance had been going on for quite some time.

From: "Tamarack Song"
To: Name Withheld
Subject:
Date: Mon, 21 Jan 2002

Greetings ***,

There's something I feel the need to tell you right away: I received a letter from Lety (I believe you'll remember her) asking if I would be her mate. I viewed our relationship quite differently - as Seeker and Guide, and I knew her to be celibate besides, so I am taken aback. A doorway has been opened that I didn't know existed.

I know you and I have just begun to crack the 'strangers' shell, and we know not how our sharing might unfold, and at the same time I am clear that you are a singularly unique, cherished and vital person to me, guided to me for some special reason. That may have nothing to do with the present unfoldment regarding Lety, or it may. All I know now is that I feel a tug, a need, to open to you this new state of my being.

You are far away; hard as it would be, I would feel much more comfortable sharing this with you in person. I am concerned about your feelings; I will honor your needs in whatever way will best serve you.

Me

Feed My Bloated Ego With That Woman-Energy Stuff

From: "Tamarack Song"
To: Name Withheld
Subject:
Date: Sun, 27 Jan 2002

Greetings Be Woman Being,

You've been known to delight me, on specific occasion you've amazed me, and now you brandish both at once! I am deeply grateful for your perspective, your self awareness, and your acceptance. It is an honor to know you as I do. My affection and regard for you has not changed, could not change; it will just manifest in a different way.

You mentioned that over the past few weeks there were personal signs or indications that were causing you some uneasiness around our unfolding. If you would feel comfortable sharing that with me, such as how they manifested and your way of being (there's that woman-energy stuff again!) with them, I would surely enjoy the broader knowing of the ways of your feelings and sensitivities.

The Activist piece that I had in mind to send you is, as I now look at it, far from even a rough draft. It's more a stream of consciousness and collection of notes. And yet I will send it, because it is timely and topical, and because I would like to share that aspect of myself with you. And, most importantly, I send it because I promised! After all, what is a man if he is not a man of his word. Yea!

Blessings to you,
do-wop a doin' man

PS This weekend I am making determinations regarding enrollment in the year-long program. I would be honored to have your participation. You'll be getting some paperwork in a few days. And I promise that you'll learn how to catch Fish. (There I go giving my word again . . .This time you have it in writing, so you can hold me to it!)

And now we've ALL got it in writing. Jackass.

Overwhelming, Consuming, Chasing (Violating ) You

Tamarack thinks women are given to him to "facilitate my flow." The female student's reactions that he is describing in this letter reflect a perfectly natural response to sexual harassment. He uses the accusation "overwhelm" as a self-compliment rather than its intended indictment by those, who in the past, have experienced his gluttonous, desperate violations.

God what a self-absorbed creep.

From: Tamarack Song [tdrums2@newnorth.net]
To: Name Withheld
Date: Thursday, January 31, 2002

Greetings ****,

When I first became aware that something special might be intended for you and me, my natural impulse was to get together with you to explore and discover what that might be. I thought I might ask you if you also be desirous of such, and if you might be able to take a short break from work.

My friend, Fox, suggested instead that I rather allow some time to see what might unfold. That made rational sense to me, as after all we barely knew each other in a conventional sense, and to boot I have a history of overwhelming people.

In short order our early history seemed to verify Fox's advice: I perceived most of your correspondences as being sparse and guarded, and some of them painfully slow to come. And then there was your admission that you were feeling overwhelmed and request for me to slow down.

After that your signals grew mixed, or so was my perception. So I relaxed into that, deciding to allow our sharing to find a dynamic that was comfortable for both of us. That to some degree stifled my spontaneity and my ability to list to and honor the Voices, but it seemed better than the not-so-unlikely tradeoff - consuming you. The upshot, the cost, was that I lost, or partially lost, the continuum with you. It had nothing to do with you being second choice. It had to do with fear -fear of overwhelming you, of chasing you away, and of hurting you in the process. I believe that Lety may in part have been given to me in order to spare you and to facilitate my flow.

In retrospect I would have respected Fox's advice, and yet followed my own guidance. I would not have tried to second-guess your actions-reactions, as another's reality does not validate or invalidate mine. Perhaps I would have completely overwhelmed you, and that would have been OK. And then again perhaps we would have blossomed into our sharing. Because of my negotiating with the now, we will not know that. I should have known that you were capable of many and wondrous things, in fact I was aware of that, but my fear of the possible fallout, and my caring for you, overshadowed that.

Now I am in a place of acceptance. I feel sadness and I feel joy. I wonder what might have been and what will be. My main desire is to be in the moment, to realize that things unfold as they are intended, and to glean the teachings from my choices. My biggest overall regret is that I do not know you as a whole person. I do not know how to relate with you, listen to you, share myself with you, in a way that I feel confident is true and full. Such a dichotomy: you have been so close and yet so far away. I don't believe I will make that mistake again.

... cut ...

Me