The Unit

In my scouting days, I think I was in love in a way, not romantic love no, but platonic, the love that binds together a unit. I may never feel again the sacred of running with a unit through the green forest, all of us young and strong and capable, bound together by the faith we had in our Scouter that he would always lead us true. I might have been the only person who felt that way, but I like to believe that wasn't the case. Leaping over logs and sprinting through the soft green grasses of that woodland above Enderby where deer had grazed off all the new buds, I felt incredibly happy and incredibly at peace. There is absolutely nothing in the world like running with a unit or maybe there is and I just haven't discovered that yet, but I know one thing and that a unit is sacred. It was amazing; we could all feel awkward going into a hike, but a few hours later, or the next day we would always just mesh, all of us, like loyal dogs running for the same musher. Running through the forest that powerful day when Dean had gotten us lost on purpose, then turned us right again, we were in heaven. I think that day he really gained our trust after he got us utterly and completely bonkers lost in that forest then used the GPS to point us home. At first we hadn't really believed that he had pointed us in the right direction at all, but then we started to see things in the forest that were familiar, then Daryl or Dustin broke into a run, then we were racing, all of us together.

Or that day I ran five kilometres through the forest at Dean's heel, yet never broke a sweat.

The forest does strange things to people I think. It makes me a marathon athlete and turns my spirit wild but the controlled feeling of that unit is where I was happiest. Our scouter did things which seemed almost magical to me, like how he told us to stay quiet at our first Scoutvivor, that the other scouts would rue mocking us if our small troop won. We did win. We won best overall and the other most prestigious award at the game. Our scouter had made a bet that we wouldn't, so he had to take us out for pizza and the movie Spiderman. It was epic. We were a championship scout troop. We were a whole team of Secretariats but we were probably nothing without each other.

Thinking about my troop and some of the dreams I've had, I wonder about past lives and if perhaps in them I was some type of soldier. If they're too close to me fireworks scare me and the one time I fired a gun it shocked me, making me wonder if my last human life ended with me in a state of shell shock. As a child, I absolutely refused to watch fireworks and I had to wear earplugs because they terrified me so much. It's said that things in your past like which killed you are things you remember subconsciously to avoid in your next. I'm also deeply afraid of drowning and of heights. You'd have to be nutters to ask me to climb Mt. Everest. As much as I love mountains, mountain climbing is something which I will absolutely never do. I died that way once and I don't believe my spirit is willing to relieve the experiance once again. But soldiering and the unit - that sings particularly deeply with my soul, from my deep admiration for anyone in a military uniform (I almost cannot stop staring at them) to the way that I am gun and explosion shy, as if some trauma from these things left a deep scar in my spirit. In one of the World Wars, on one of the sides, I died or maybe I lived, because no matter what, I love the military. Whatever caused my death I did not relate with the army, because I have an almost fanatic obsession with war, the art of it and the weapons. Was I a cavalry soldier? Probably more than once. I love war and I love horses, yet I have almost no use for modern technology besides the artistic things it can offer me. My mom thinks that I must have been some crazy old military guy who made warring his career, one of the really insane bastards who actually like it.

Whatever happened in that last soldiering life, I believe that I am still recovering it spiritually and that that is why I have anxiety disorder. Something so completely terrible happened to me that it cut my spirit deep enough to last through several lives, for I believe that in my previous life I was a wolf. I will probably always love the army, but in this life I will not ever join in. Anxiety disorder forbids it and I cannot hurt or kill anyone. I don't have it in me. Perhaps my spirit just got tired of killing and decided "never again."

But the unit - there is nothing, nothing like the beautiful symbiosis of everyone doing the same thing under the same leader. Perhaps what I have to do in this life is find a new, non-military unit where I can work and live out my days in that unit. Last night I had a dream that I did have a unit, a cavalry group and we were camped out strangely at my family's lake lot. There was a grey haired sergeant leading our individual little group and I was his lieutenant, but I did something which didn't impress the general woman and I had to run with my Dad, who helped me escape, yet while the army hunted me, I knew the land, so I avoided them. It was a strange and wonderful dream, because in the end the general let me come back and we all ate cake. (I've been craving cake lately.) The angry general woman represents somebody who ended the sanctity of my scouting unit. The other soldiers looked like members of my scout troop. The grey haired sergeant is the anomaly because as far as I am aware, I have never met a guy like him anywhere. He got me back into the unit though. This dream may have been fictional, but it still resonated deeply with me. I was in my paradise, the lake lot and it was even better, because I was with my Dad and then my unit.

So I think maybe what I'm really looking for is that unit. I can't live alone, but I may end up spending my entire life hunting for a pack that might not be there. I want to get away from society. Whenever I go anywhere with nature, I never want to leave or go home. It's painful to pry myself back to this hole of a room when there is so much beauty that I could be admiring.

I don't know. I never know. In the meantime, my spirit will keep keening and hopefully someday some other soul will hear it.