Free World Man

By Alexander MacDonald

The “Dark Night of the Soul” was the title of a poem written by St John of the Cross in the 16th century. Although the poem itself seems cryptic and esoteric, the title has been co-opted into the vernacular to mean a period of desolation and despair, when hope is lost to uncertainty and confusion.

In Free World Man we find one who is lost, confused, hopeless, and hurting. But even more, he recognizes he can’t continue on as he had all his adult life. He is at the edge of an abyss that is dark and foreboding. He has been circling up to the edge of the abyss and then backing away for years. Every alternative he could imagine he tried. Nothing worked. Nothing served to provide the freedom and ease he had a vague inkling was possible.

The man was razed in a middle-class suburban family by being neglected and bullied. He suffered insecurity and low self-esteem, as people do in epidemic proportion in the industrialized world. The bane of his existence in his youth was his deep sensitivity.

As a boy, the man walked through his days continually confounded and knocked off his axis by the strong feelings coming into his awareness from all directions. He experienced morsels of feelings like jigsaw puzzle pieces sharply penetrate him as he moved among people. These were puzzling pieces of feelings that could neither be joined into a coherent picture, nor really even fit together. As a preteen he began to question his sanity as a result of the thoughts and feelings billowing through him as if carried on a mystic wind that could not be empirically experienced.

That’s were alcohol came in. The boy realized that drinking alcohol enabled him to be alone in his head — most of his other voices were quelled. Of course the voice from the spirit in the bottle was a bad influence, but it would take years for the boy/man to figure that out.

Alcohol addiction was circumvented by an increasingly acute allergy to drink, but by then the man had added a myriad of drugs to his escapist strategy, so he was free to blithely continue on his egotistical and ignorant way. He had all but quashed the dissenting voice beyond reason that kept tugging and trying to nudge him back to sanity: the drug program was working! The unimagined side effect was drug addiction.

Even though the man grew into a high functioning addict steeped in denial, he was unhappily attending a tenuous balance — it was only a matter of time before he would topple, and of the collateral damage? By then he had married and fathered two children. There was great potential for disaster.

Before long, and inevitably, the man distracted himself a little too much and lost his balance. He and his fragile reality crumbled around him. In the wake of the crash there was nothing left, but neither was there a reason to go on, or any way to backup and undo the calamitous events. He had neither tools nor courage to do other than writhe in misery amid the wreckage, wonder up to the sky, and weep.

The devastation was so traumatic, expansive, and overwhelming, the man was shaken from his drug addled mistaken perspective. For the first time since before his fifth birthday — when he was initially broken by childhood abuse — the man started getting real.

The first step in the recovery process is recognizing and accepting there is something from which one needs to recover! The man has reached that point and it is there we find him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexander MacDonald
• Release date: Mar 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463615485

Alexander MacDonald

Alexander is a social and syntactical anarchist, steeped in ignorance and unencumbered by formal education. He was razed in and rejected from the Ontario public school system, is hypersensitive and highly intelligent, although in an approachable and accommodating way. Alexander is a complicated simpleton: a multi-faceted, multidimensional metaphysician with gratitude alchemizing life’s experiences into Pure Gold. He lives small, opens wide, dreams big, and offers much. Alexander’s primary focus and motivation is to live life, and produce art that comes from the Heart, with the intention of reaching other people’s Hearts. He resides off the wild West Coast of BC, on Haida Gwaii.

Book preview

Free World Man

By Alexander MacDonald

February 2000

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 Alexander MacDonald

Also available by Alexander:

The Little Big Bus Book

Out of the Frying Pan and into the Fire

~Table of Contents~

Author’s Foreword

Call To Order

Lost Wandering Dream Child

National Arts Centre

The Mountain Buddha

And So It Goes

Epilogue

About Alexander MacDonald

Author’s Foreword

In 1999 I was hunting bears — with my camera. I was invited to use a fishing lodge that was closed down for the winter as a base of operation for my bear seeking expedition. The lodge was on an isolated inlet on the wild west side of Haida Gwaii, in an area many bears were purported to frequent.

For eight years I’d been living and travelling extensively on Haida Gwaii, a remote archipelago off the north coast of British Columbia, with the intention of capturing the images needed to illustrate my coffee-table book with a conscience. This book was initiated in 1991 with the clear intention of correcting the missteps I’d taken while on the path to being recognized as one of the truly great contemporary photographers.

Ironically, the steps to correct missteps resulted in additional missteps, and then, eight years into the project and light-years from where I’d started, I found myself again at the crossroads of confusion, despair, hope, and loss.

Amazingly, I consistently received that which I needed (not always what I wanted!), and when I was hired to replace the outgoing caretaker of the remote fishing lodge I recognized this was an opportunity I needed — but at the time had no understanding why it was needed! My inducement, the bait to pique my interest, was the promise of many many bears in the neighbourhood. Again ironically, in the more than three months in which I called Tasu Sound home, I never saw a bear.

Nonetheless, my time at Tasu, alone, looking deeply into myself, was some of the most important time with which I’ve been blessed to live in my life. I hasten to add that is not including the time spent with my dearly beloved children to whom I dedicate this book.

Even though I was coming to recognize and realize my folly while in my family, I grieve I failed to fully inhabit my Heart and make more creative choices that may have provided an alternative to my family fracturing. I pray my beloved kids will someday release any and all offence they received from me while I thrashed in the mucky morass of my internal conflict and the unrefined savage strategies I employed for survival.

The journey to my Heart is of utmost importance only because in making the journey I’ve been able to make hearty choices that I pray will support my beloveds on their journey to their hearts.

Likewise, I pray this story is of benefit to all who read the words, and will take pause to contemplate: Am I content? Am I stuck? Am I really willing to reach past my personal truth? What does that mean?!

Free World Man

Enter the stoned man, a practicing addict. Still practicing, never yet got it right. As long as he can remember it's been that way. So enough is enough. His head, heart and body tell him