I am firm believer that life and all lives are cycles and that in those larger cycles are so many tinier cycles. It’s so complex when one really get’s into it. I have had so many relationships that ended after having come full circle to where they started. So it’s funny to see our time here in the hazelton’s be devastatingly ended by the same people who made our lives difficult in the beginning.

Archetypes are powerful things. We have all been telling the same story over and over and over in our own lives, but also in the universe. I have been the hero and the victim and the caregiver, but never the scapegoat, until now. It is a very old story, the one of the scapegoat, that has been repeated and repeated throughout history. The translation and rough etymology of scapegoating is first seen in the bible where people cram all their sins and badness into an actual goat and send it out to the desert to die, thus washing their hands of any wrong doing. It is also found in greek history where the people would take a “lesser person” and stone them out of town when the town suffered because of something like a natural disaster or some other horrible thing.

In much folklore and mythology scapegoats are generally strangers who are used by the local people/person to load their problems and their deep seated cyclical badness onto. It is a direct example of othering, and one that seems to work well in our society. It is often part of the reason that people commit suicide, and/or disappear/drop-out of society. It is also the basis of co-dependane and addiction.

But what happens in these stories when the scapegoat fights back and doesn’t accept the label or everyone’s shit? Well, the game doesn’t work as well as they’d hoped, and in many stories they, the persecutors,  are the ones who end up wounded (and/or dead) having to actually look at their own selves and not force their burdens on others.

It is a prime example of the cycle of abuse that so many people, communities and countries experience. It is the “you brought this on yourself” or “this is all your fault.” We are really really good at blaming others, especially when we see them as a threat.

We have been living in a community where I have been the target of the scapegoating for more than a year now. It has finally come around to be ended by a local community member writing lies and defamatory statements and threats in our local classified paper about me from a private conversation. So many people have been hurt in this process and I do not even know the depths to which the negativity of the past has affected my life cycle here. I am not interested in the negativity that this breeds in my own life either. I have been an abused person before, and I have no space for it. James and I are looking for a new place to call home and build a positive foundation on.

and so, in the end, here we stand at the beginning… as the sacrificial scapegoat: “the hero, with whom the welfare of the tribe or nation is identified, who must die to atone for the people’s sins and restore the land to fruitfulness.”

The pain and bullying and abuse is systemic in this community and within many communities inside this community. It has nothing to do with us except for the fact that we have helped to exposed it’s core by being blamed for it. We can only hope that the strongest people here will finally be willing to stand up and be a beacon of healing and possess the intense lightness and transparency required to heal some, possibly century old, cycles.

James wrote this song about Nelson, BC. We think it was also written about this place too, even though he didn’t know when he wrote it that he would ever be here (that’s part of the great joyous mystery of cycles after all, isn’t it!?).

This is a secret sneak leak from his upcoming album Imagineering (out digitally on February 29th!).  Because, one always needs to find a gift out of the garbage in any way they can… this is one of those moments:

Enjoy, and, we will see you somewhere soon,

hearts, Magpie

ps. if you do want to know the nitty gritty details and/or help somehow about things like bullying and defamation/libel concerns, you can ask and I WILL tell.