HEAVEN RIGHT HERE For Ray Watson (1936-2014) People who know me only from the winter of 2014 must think I write about nothing but death, moving, or cats. I wish the last few days could have slowed down, or spread their events thinner over a longer time. I hate having to write these little elegies, and so quickly, but I feel a sense of urgency with this one. When a person’s death is recent, if it’s someone I saw and spoke with often, the news seems a bit unreal. I get the silly feeling that they can’t be all the way gone so fast, that I ought to be able to call to them, that I could think about them hard, envision their track through the empyrean, shout into the blue sky, and hoist up a word or thought that might reach them and send them on their way with tribute. If anyone else ever feels the same way, it’s time to say that little blessing for Ray Watson, my spiritual friend from Batavia, while he still might be within hollering range. He left us on St. Patrick’s Day, the evening of March 17. He was 77. It was Ray’s presence in the spiritual community that brought our paths to cross twenty years ago when I was focusing my own study of the upstate. Most people in alternative/spiritual circles in Western New York will have known Ray, at least by appearance: broad, bald, and plainly-dressed. His mustache, when he had one, was frost-white. Give him a robe and he could have been a roly-poly monk. He appeared at many a fair and conference, and was a familiar figure at Lily Dale. Ray was a dowser, a diviner, a “water-witch.” He used his pendulums and L-rods to detect both underground energy and spiritual influences. He was the dowsing consultant for Spirit Way Project, the freeform teaching-research organization that Algonquin elder Michael Bastine and I founded to try to lift the bar of understanding in Western New York. He had been one of the officers of the Genesee Valley dowsers, and I regarded him as the go-to guy in that discipline. He would have spoken at the conference we are organizing for April. Ray studied with a number of fine intuitive teachers, including Sig Lonegren and Richard Sutphen, and in turn he mentored quite a handful of local readers and healers. Maybe some of that was in his genes. Ray was of Scottish-American heritage, and the Celts were always considered inherent mystics, gifted with the second sight. They were the Native Americans of Europe. Dowsers come in two types, as Sig Lonegren would summarize: “tangible-target” dowsers–people who look for solid objects like water or natural gas–and those whose quarries are also spiritual insights and otherwise unanswerable questions about the dim past. There was a major schism between the two predilections in the ASD (American Society of Dowsers) back in the 1970s. The homespun characters who had started the outfit used dowsing to find water for their wells and weren’t too sure about you doing anything else with it. They thought their immemorial discipline was being taken over and corrupted with the influx of the new, hippie-style “intangibles,” spiritual dowsers like Sig himself and another incorrigible, Dr. Patrick MacManaway. If you met Ray and you knew about this subject you’d swear he was old-school, somebody who believed in only what could be proved and used dowsing for its baseline function. You’d be wrong. Ray had an intuitive side to him that bore no underestimation. He had more trust in his own instincts than I ever will, and they were usually right, especially about people. While he might have suffered fools without comment and snakes without smiting, he seldom mistook them. If he believed in someone, I knew there was good in them, and if I had my own misgivings, I always gave them a second chance. He seldom said anything negative about anyone, but I wish I had listened better when he had. You’d never have picked Ray for a mystic at all by sight or sound–his diction was earthy and his language salty–unless you happen to be aware that the real ones don’t advertise. They don’t dress or act to a type. Mike and I picked Ray to help us with Spirit Way Project not because we both agreed with everything he said or thought, but because we believed in the effectiveness of his discipline, and we knew he had a good heart. Ray had friendships, not just allegiances. We knew he would never let his ego or ambition get in the way of our mission or override the greater good of those he knew. He understood team play. The last time I talked to Ray was last week. He called on a bitter Thursday afternoon to tell me that he–he didn’t say, “I,” he said, “this body...”–had cancer. In spite of my sadness, a bit of me chuckles at that reflexive separation of “the mortal coil,” the body, from the spirit it holds a lifetime within it. Always the Spiritualist, down to the fine points of conversation. Ray had just been for a round of tests and gotten some diagnosis that completely settled the question of his health or lack thereof. I am flattered to have been among those he called. He wanted to talk to Mike Bastine, too, but had lost the number. Ray didn’t sound like he was in a lot of pain. He mentioned his options, and none of them sounded good, but he was looking forward to at least a few more months. That was the minimal prediction. He wasn’t afraid of what might be coming. He had a strong, but not Biblical faith in a next stage, in another world. He did speculate about the effects of a long struggle and what it would take out of the soul-partner he always referred to as Deb. He did wonder about the expenses of his treatment and whether it might leave her without the resources to live comfortably. It was all so new for him, whatever he had been told. There was a point during our talk when I actually believed that he was doing some discovering for himself on the run as he aired things out with me. I gave Mike’s number to Ray and called him right after. We resolved to go spend an afternoon in Batavia soon. I think we were envisioning a tame and merry April day as soon as I was over the frenzy of moving into my house and the winter finally lifted for good. We were sure we had a bit more time. Ray and I had talked on many an occasion at conferences. We collaborated on a couple TV and DVD projects. He gave some talks for Spirit Way Project, and at least one morning a season we met in one of the East Aurora cafes. Deb told me today how he used to look forward to those breakfasts and the conversations we had. We talked about projects and spirituality and concepts and theories. We talked earth mysteries and Native American spirituality. We tried to make sense out of the local spiritual business, upon which ghost-hunting (which neither of us does) occasionally feigns to overlap. (Surveillance-style ghosthunting has about as much connection to spirituality as that video game “Age of Empires” has to the Iliad. Don’t make the mistake of taking practitioners of one to be experts in the other.) We tried to separate the real from the pose. The funny thing is that we never talked much about either of our lives. I will probably learn a lot about Ray when I see his obituary. I think he was raised in Cuba, NY. I know he had been a schoolteacher, probably spending most of his professional life in Wellsville. I think he may have taught shop and mechanical arts and coached a couple sports. I doubt he had any serious discipline problems. He wasn’t tall, but he was wide, and he had a no-nonsense way about him. Everyone knew he was an ex-Marine, and I think he might have been a boxer in the day. But it wasn’t that you feared him; it was that you didn’t want to let him down. If he had a fine opinion of you, you wanted to keep it. I know Ray raised two successful sons, but not because I needed to ask. He brought them up so fondly in conversation as examples of what he’d learned about human nature. I know he’d learned a lot from his own dad, probably fifty years gone from us, and he never failed to mention him with deep regard. One of his features that touched me the most about Ray was his faith to Deb in all senses. Many couples grow to be devoted companions, but this seemed deeper. She had been through her own bouts of illness, one of which left her for a time incapable of fulfilling all the roles of a wife, even feeling not very much like a woman. She told Ray that he could give up on her if he had to. He never wavered. “I already have Heaven right here,” he said. “How could I ask for anything different?” Ray’s passing on the day of Ireland’s patron saint hit me strangely. St. Patrick’s Day is sort of an accidental holiday–not one associated with a solstice, equinox, or cross-quarter day like most of the world’s classic festivals. It’s not astronomically significant. It’s also associated with ribaldry and merriment. It’s almost a green Bacchanalia, at least for the drinking. But for those of us who admire the Irish and Celtic culture in general, it can be a heavy day, and the one of 2014 brought a bunch of coincidences for me, sweet and bitter, that each could have deserved its own development. That’s the night I moved into my new house, a moment that should have been one of total joy and accomplishment. I welcomed it in with three friends who, in the disorder of the bags and boxes–we had to scramble for wine-glasses–saw the bones of the house as a vision of my own becoming reality and for its potential as a welcoming site for years ahead. We managed to slip out after that and share a quick toast with another friend, East Aurora attorney Jim Navagh, in honor of his Irish-American dad we always called, “Big George,” who had passed a few years ago on the very day. How’s that for an Irishman? I counted George, too, as one of my friends, and sharing a toast in his honor with his son on that day in spite of the bustle was a ceremony too long delayed, the closing of a circle and a debt rendered. And then I found out about Ray, and was incomplete again. I can’t think about the life of this man as any other statement but the one it made. But I can’t help looking at the timing of his crossing into Spirit as something from which I should be learning. They say that with every new undertaking of any import, there is sacrifice. That’s one simplistic explanation for the shattering of the champagne bottle on the side of a launching ship: you herald the birth of an achievement with a ceremonial gift; you show the gods or the ancestors or whatever you seek to honor that their blessing is worth foregoing something you value. Maybe if you don’t do it directly, it happens anyway, by accident or karma, which is no accident. Something comes into your life, and something leaves it. “Sweet sadness” may be the armchair definition of melancholy: regret tinged with a bit of happiness. As you reflect upon the loss of a friend, you inevitably think about that friendship and the times and events that made you value it, and sometimes you smile. Maybe that’s a metaphor for life. In any friendship there is the certainty of parting, and with any love there is the full risk of loss. The only way to avoid the pain is never to accept the joy. I was cross-country skiing in the afternoon Tuesday when the call came on the line I recognized as Ray’s. I was surprised to be hearing from him again so soon after our last talk. I couldn’t catch the incoming call live, so I stopped and listened to the message Deb Watson left, holding the news I hadnt expected so soon. I stood awhile reflecting. How real the pines, the silver birches, the mist of my breath, and the savor of the late daylight seemed. The sloping sun made a long blue shadow of me and spilled it across the jeweled snow. I took a picture of it before moving from the exact spot. It is the one you see with this. When I had talked last week with Mike Bastine after getting the news of the diagnosis, I told him that Ray was at peace with his accounts. His sons were launched well into life, and he was happy with his own work. He sounded concerned, though, about his wife. When I talked with Mike again after the crossing, neither of us knew exactly what Ray’s last moments had been like. I told Mike then that I had been worried that he might will himself off the planet before his time in the belief that it would be easiest on others, especially her. “That’s kinda what I was thinkin, too,” said Mike. We’ve lost a good one. A true one.
Posted on: Thu, 20 Mar 2014 20:09:24 +0000
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