Inner Michael

Most of those outside the sphere of “Michaelology” scratch their heads and strain to understand the loyalty, the fierce defense of the man, his career and now that he’s gone—his reputation. Some fans of course, are enamored by the stardom, the fame and the sex appeal Michael tapped and cultivated for his audience. The sexual mystique is just another layer of the spiritual attraction many feel in Michaelology. The level of maturity guides many fans’ behaviors just as it does any other pop culture idol or performer.  Youth now swoons over Justin Bieber just as my mother did over Elvis and my grandmother over Sinatra. Love is a powerful attractor field (as in magnetic.)

There are those who find it difficult to understand why this one man could attract so much of the world’s attention and why his passing catapulted people into the throes of grief all over the planet—some of that grief deep and protracted.

There are fans and there are fans. Michael Jackson fans are as diverse with as many layers and driving motivations as may be found in the general population of any society or culture. And the layers are not always distinct, but often blend and bleed into one other.

A woman can find a spiritual message in Michael Jackson’s music and lyrics and still find Michael sexy. Or a young fan prone to drama might focus on his dancing and his attractiveness, fantasize about being his lover and hate Lisa Marie Presley because of Michael’s lifelong feelings for her. She can compare herself to Lisa and of course, Lisa loses and becomes a symbol of love unrequited and becomes a target for wrath. There is also a very large population of middle aged women who didn’t know Michael or his work before he died or knew him from a distance and many of them wrote me to say they were puzzled by the impact his death had on them.

I see them as “Earthmothers”—those women who embody the goddess archetype, are fiercely protective of those they choose to champion and find Michael endearing and attractive. The mystery for them is the (why?)  of how they became so quickly and thoroughly drawn into the Michael world. They are the Western women whom the Dalai Lama said would change the world. They do that partly by recognizing the Divine Feminine principle and bringing it to life through Michael’s work and their own attributes. Their job is to balance the yang on this planet with their nurturing yin. They intuit they are all on a spiritual journey. There are some men who share this Michaelology journey but they are fewer in number than the females. Mostly they are men who are in touch with their anima or Divine Feminine archetypal influence.

Another group, intellectually oriented, focuses on the legacy of the man, his work and in particular how a renegade law enforcement machine hunted an innocent man and how the media, hungry for headlines and to sell copy, unfairly portrayed him based on accusation and no evidence. They cite trial transcripts and a library of documents examining the case, the parasites involved and the sequence and motivation of events. They are the women who stand for world justice and a peace through reconciliation or conciliation.

There is another faction of fans whose interest in Michael Jackson is primarily the realm of the spiritual and metaphysical. They have intuited something extraordinary about this relatively minor figure of the twentieth century who became a cultural icon for that very century; they intuit the significance of Michael teaching mirror, Michael being mirror. They may or may not consider themselves fans. They sense the vibe of the wisdom keepers and their work is related to the return of the ancients and they sense Michael’s place in that destiny and via him, their own.
 
People have shared stories with me for almost two years now. They are archived for the future to be anonymously shared as people all over the world who took a journey with Michael, perhaps as a fan when he was alive, perhaps as a newly recruited admirer, perhaps as an advocate focused on setting the record straight with the real story of Michael Jackson and who he was or maybe as a sojourner on a quest for magic and the spiritual key to life through a moonwalking numinous guide.

My own recent journey to Forest Lawn and especially Neverland, changed me in ways I will share with you later, but first I would like to share with you that same journey through the eyes of some women who invited and welcomed me into their quest. Their journeys are marked by milestones, markers, archetypes, symbols and sometimes new understandings or at the very least, new questions. They all felt a stirring within and a transitional change in themselves or their lives—that portends alchemy and new directions. While I stop short of calling their journey a pilgrimage, some of them see it as that. I see vision questing and I salute and applaud their courage.

I have called this introduction to the stories “Finding Nemo Finding Neverland” because these women may or may not have been aware of their surroundings as they were swimming within the transparent walls of a container they didn’t realize was a limited ecosystem  (body-mind-spirit)  until they really looked directly at the transparency of  the glass, saw beyond it, and watched as the ocean appeared.

Their stories begin soon. Stay tuned.