May 07, 2008

Returning from Joshua Tree

I’m back at “work” from my “vision quest” in Joshua Tree National Monument. I promised to share some of the experience. This one was a big one for me, my seventh with a group, my sixth with Chayim Barton and Brian Winkler, two gifted group leaders. The experiences are cumulative, and now spiral into my life as a central orientation.

I went into the desert this time holding my intent as a question—“What am I to contribute to my communities these next years?” I sought a vision about how to respond to the many changes all of us are facing. I intended to ask for guidance about my own purpose and direction as I more fully embrace an elder role. These are not simple questions.

I have discovered it takes time to appreciate what happens in sacred time such as this, for it takes place at a deep, cellular level as well as in my thoughts and journals. This one is “working me” as we say in our Pathwalkers group (a deep dialogue circle of peer consultants that I have been with for six years.)

The format of the vision quest, however, IS quite simple.

1. Gathering Intention: The first part happens before the quest, and involves a daylong walk-about to find the central question one will take, a sweat lodge to deepen this intention, and writing of a letter of intent.

2. Separation: The second part involves severing from the familiar, usually withdrawing into a wilderness area like Joshua Tree National Monument, cutting off cell phones, computers, and all other normal connections.

3. Calling for a Vision: The third part involves spending time alone in the wilderness, fasting, and working with one’s central question in dreams, ceremony, and simple quiet time. The third night one enacts a symbolic death lodge, staying up all night, and asking for a rebirth by the dawn.

4. Integration: The fourth involves a return, telling one’s story, and integration of the insights and “visions” into regular life. This is the part I am in now.

The experience within that framework is a like tracking a very agile, alert animal in the wild. If the animal is my higher Self, my true nature, my connection to the almighty, to great spirit (substitute whatever language symbolizes for you the deep essence of who we are), it can be elusive. My experience is that my active, conscious mind, my waking mind, the one that answers the telephone and does e-mail and keeps schedules, wants to know clearly, understand, figure it out, reduce uncertainty—and in my case draw pictures and diagrams and make models. But I am much more than my conscious mind I’ve discovered, and the deeper layers of awareness are like the faint trails in the high rocks. One of my teachers, Jacob Needleman, a gifted writer and philosopher at San Francisco State, said “becoming truly awake is like a crane flying back and forth over the Himalayas with a silk scarf, hoping to wear them down.”

So why write? Because for me telling the story deepens it, and sharing the story strengthens my commitment to new insights, and I believe sharing it with my communities strengthens them. It doesn’t replace the experience, or even truly describe it. It is an extension of the process.

The response I got from my first posting moved me deeply. It seems many of you share my hunger for deeper meaning and interconnection. It fueled my sense that we are in extraordinary times, and that waking up and shifting our values and consciousness, in very large numbers, is our only real hope. I ask “if it doesn’t start with me, then with who else?”

What About Food?

For many, a central question in this kind of activity is “how can you go without food for three days?” Food, and understanding our relation to it, is in fact a big part of the quest, at more than physical levels. But the physical food is an issue. My last act before leaving on this quest was to pack my food, even though three of the days were to be a water fast. I took simple things. Nuts. Dried fruits. Soups. Soymilk. Instant oatmeal. Odwalla bars. Vivian and Laurie brought similar things and we snacked all 580 miles to Joshua Tree on Friday, arriving at 4:00.

Food came up again at the trail head at Cotton Wood Springs. Slightly off trail are deep grinding bowls in large granite boulders, which could only have been created with hundreds of years of grinding something—probably corn and nuts. Was this land once fertile? Did the indigenous peoples know how to live with scarcity? Are they still here in spirit? If they were what might they say? What might the choirs of animate, weathered boulders have to say? What happens if we truly stop and truly listen? Food wasn’t the only thing on my mind.

These questions are metaphoric, of course, because rocks don’t have vocal chords and don’t talk, but something amazing happens in the psyche when the normal stimuli and cues are removed, and the body begins to think about death as the food is drawn away.

In retrospect it’s not surprising that food awareness is such as early outcome from a vision quest. Extraordinary amounts of everyone’s time is spent thinking about eating, doing the eating, remembering eating, preparing for eating again, scheduling eating tomorrow. It’s fundamental to staying alive— for all beings. The washes feed on crumbling granite from the boulders. The plants feed on the wash, and the water and the air. The beetles and bees feed on the desert poppies, ghost flowers, brittle brush, rock goldenbush, purplemat, cholla cactus, and glorious, red-tipped ocotillo which were all still blooming. And birds and animals feed on the seeds. And bigger animals feed on the smaller animals in a great cycle of life. Cutting off from this cycle, even for three days, is to become acutely aware of how much we are a part of it.

Food was our last activity before departing for our solos. We collectively made a large vegetable stew. In went the carrots, potatoes, celery, parsnips, hickima, tofu, lentils, mushrooms, onions, garlic, and squash—but NOT kale or cabbage. We learned that lentils are in the same family and the combination would create a lot of unwanted gases and turmoil for our digestive systems. Knowing it was our last meal we began to crack open the door of our awareness to the great flows of food upon which we all live.

For some it was a challenge to drink only water. The body cries for what it is used to eating. Our sugar rich diets cause us to overproduce insulin, and withdrawing from sugar feels awful. Fortunately I’ve learned to taper off long before the quest, and had eaten no sugar or heavy foods for several weeks before. Drinking only water becomes a purifying experience, and a chance to de-toxify. Some people fast regularly for that reason. Laurie revealed that she had, as a younger woman, actually completed a 40 day water fast. “I wouldn’t do it again” she said. But we were amazed that a body could do this and three days didn’t seem like such a big deal after her story.

At the other end of our solo, coming back out of our time in “sacred space” Thursday morning, we were all greeted with a fruit salad, the experience of which gave meaning to the concept of paradise. Nothing seemed to have ever tasted better. And the big salad we all made for lunch was equal in magnificence.

I’m left realizing how much of the time I’m simply grazing, seeing eating as a task to complete, not tasting, not appreciating, and certainty not thinking about the great chain of work and care that is involved in getting the food to its position in front of my mouth? If you think of food as a metaphor for all that we take in—the information we study, the energy we use, the help we receive from others, the material we consume to support our work and contemporary habits, then asleepness to being part of the great cycling of life may be part of the issue we have as a civilization. In the desert ALL is food, and when you take, you give back. It’s this deep reciprocal relationship that sustains life. For this wake-up alone I am thankful.

What About Visions?

I didn’t go to the desert for food awareness. That’s a dividend. I went for a vision, and that is a trickier thing. Vision includes a lot of phenomena. What the eyes sees is a kind of vision— the appearances of things, the way light falls on a particular rock, the way cholla spines reflect the light when backlit, and shapes modify.

Then there is the inner seeing. My cortex is capable of making sense of patterns, inferring what I can’t see, and projecting past experiences on the new stimuli. My memory quilts visions with dreams threaded together with imagination.

My body, when fasting, becomes super sensitive to feeling. The wind on my skin—the faint smells of cactus—, the touch crumbling rock all become what we call “medicines”—lessons, and gifts. In the quiet, long days thoughts and images become clappers to the bell of my body. The interplay becomes a song, becomes a dance, and sometimes it seems as if the rocks and trees and wind itself have voice.

If this material were produced by drugs, or media, it would be easy to dismiss. But when this material is produced by nothing but myself, drinking water, I begin to pay attention. What are these patterns? What is this whispering I hear? What is this yearning, this calling, this vision? Can I touch my essence? Can I know the knower? Who is the one noticing, and seeing? What is this white light, wave of energy and feeling of spaciousness?

I spent three days in the pile of rocks shown here, attracted by the one on the right that looks like Shai-Hulud, the sandworm of Arrakis, the “old man of the desert” in Herbert’s Dune series. From here I’d move out onto the ridges to greet the dawn, moving back into the caves and the shade in the heat of the day, moving back to the ocotillo flats and lone boulders with the setting sun. I became one with this land by day and the stars by night. And nature, in its immensity, did indeed begin to speak to me.

 

I come from the high desert on the East side of the Sierra, up near Bishop, California. The heat, the smells, the water-retaining vegetation are all familiar, and the sky, high mountains, and long vistas were my friends growing up. Even though this desert is more southern, Sonoran, and the plants are different, the effect on my psyche was like coming home.

I consciously spiraled around my central question, opening to whatever answers came forth. I created cities and sand trays in the washes, tracking my attachments and the sources of my love of high performance, what, in the tradition of the Cheyenne medicine wheel we were using as a framework for this quest, would be called a “northern” orientation to work and life.

What leads me to overwork? How have I embodied the speeded-up, corner-cutting, relationship-slighting culture of speed and convenience that seems so common? Why do I do e-mail in the evening? What keeps me from saying yes to my other callings, my grandchildren, my children, my art, my dream time? I examined the impacts of church, school, and work institutions on my notions of success. I journaled extensively.

By the second day I was slowing waaaaay down. We were guided to walk in a meditative way, stepping on no living things, and I did this wherever I went. I learned that life was everywhere!

In the caves I journeyed in my imagination, calling spirit animals and asking them to take me to see the future of California. I rode a white horse up the great central valley, now filled with water, and saw suburban lawns converted to truck gardens as re-localization of food supply became a necessity after oil supplies peaked. Surprisingly I saw people cooperating in helping persons displaced by the rising seawaters. I felt fear. I saw disruption.

One afternoon I had journal conversations with eight people who have been my teachers but have all passed on. I asked questions and then wrote their answers. I do enough journaling that writing without resistance or inhibition is second nature. I was amazed at the guidance that came out the end of my pen.

And I slept a lot! I found that I was exhausted, bone tired in fact, from the intense schedule I’ve been keeping. I sustain client work AND am President of The Grove and have active roles in several communities. I feel these responsibilities as intensely as I do my work commitments. Robert Putnam, in his book, Bowling Alone: The Rise and Fall of Community in America, says that my generation is the most socially affiliative of those he studied, and that the amount of affiliation activity has dropped 35-40 per cent since its peak in 1975. He relates affiliation activity to what he calls social capital, and has shown statistically that health, educational achievement, and economics all rise and fall as a function of this social “soil.”  He points to television and urban sprawl as having taken time from relating to clubs, civic engagement, service organizations, and things like bowling leagues.

I know my children don’t get involved like I do. I see signs that the youngest generations are re-engaging. But I’m aware of how challenging it is when e-mail, travel, and virtual work layer over the top of other commitments. It doesn’t take a vision quest for me to appreciate that something is very wrong with the pace and imbalance of work life. As an organization consultant I feel I must blend and match speeds in order to even be in the work. So I am riding the beast of our high performance culture and paying the price.

So I slept. And as I recovered, and began to wake up, and began to feel again at the deepest possible level, I began to see.

Ruach

The night of my death lodge and “rebirth” I headed for the high ridge I’d chosen as my “purpose circle,” intentionally chosen so I could see the sun rise in the East, the place of freedom and creativity and my inner spiritual child in the medicine wheel, see the “trail” to Lost Palms Oasis ——symbolizing civilization—and see the little peaks near our base camp and the big vista holding all my fellow questors.

A death lodge it became. As the sun set, I drummed in all directions, AND the wind began. I had chosen to leave my sleeping bag back in the rocks. The nights had been warm up to this point. I was well layered, with long underwear even. I expected to sit up all night and talk to the stars and whoever else showed up. I had my wool Pendleton blanket that I use on these expeditions.

But the wind persisted. I lay on the ground, wrapped in my blanket. The wind grew stronger. It buffeted me for hours. It will die down any minute, I thought, as it had ever other night. It didn’t.

Somewhere after midnight I realized this was a very bad idea staying up there without a sleeping bag, and nothing was happening except my fighting the wind. I was beginning to chill, my body vulnerable from fasting.

Now the wind is a special thing to me. On an earlier quest, when I had been struggling to heal a deep sorrow, I asked one of my guides if I was spiritually wounded. The guide happened to be a deceased swami, Chinmayanandagi, whose work I had encountered while consulting in India in 1997. He appeared and said “feel the wind?” I relied “I thought you were realized and returned to the Atman, how are you here in a human image?” I asked. “You met me this way and it’s a channel you can receive on,” he replied.

I felt a gentle wind on my cheek as the reverie continued. “Try and wound the wind!” he said. “You cannot wound the wind, you cannot wound spirit. Your feelings and your soul may feel wounded, but spirit is the wind.”

This visitation was a great healing for me at the time, and after I visited my father, who is a practicing Congregational minister (at 92!) and he told me that in Hebrew the word for spirit is “ruach” the word for wind. So this is an old metaphor, and I’ve come to see the wind as alive with a new kind of meaning. This night it seemed relentless.

I decided to abandon my purpose circle, and pick my way back to camp and my sleeping bag. As I came off the ridge I felt like the lesson was about the perils of “grandiosity.” So my high performer had taken me to the high ridge, assumed I didn’t need a bag, led me optimistically to imagine a wonderful night of visioning – and now this, defeat, humility, crawling back to my rock aerie. The wind remained stiff there as well, but I was in my bag. I promptly fell asleep. I was supposed to be enacting my death lodge. It seems, in retrospect, that this is in fact what I did.

I woke to first light and re-climbed the ridge, open and ready for the dawn and my “rebirth.”

It was gentle.

As the sun jeweled out from the Eastern peak I heard a small voice. “Your path is sound. You walk in a sacred way.”  I felt at peace.

Storytelling

Walking back to base camp was pure joy. I sang my favorite song, Mystery, learned from Paul Winter’s album Missa Gaia as sung by Donna Osborn. Every bush and flower seemed a miracle. The finches in the willows felt like friends. And the group—gathered over the fruit salad in the sunny wash—cheered as each arrived. We laughed, and cried. We were newborns!

We spent the day sharing our stories, sitting in circle in the wash. At the end of each story Chayim and Brian would ask the storyteller to enact, or dance, or sing the heart of their story, the budding seed of their vision, and we would all gather and support them.

I was the last to speak. It was dark. We’d been telling stories for hours. I wasn’t sure what all had happened to me. I read some of the conversations I’d had with imaginary people from my journal, using my headlamp. I shared my story of the wind. I shared my vision of California. And then I sang Mystery. It came alive as I remembered my quest. And as I ended there was silence… for a long time.

Then Brian said, “let’s give Sunseed Turtlebone (my medicine name) a big ho!” and that was it. No dance. No additional invitation. I was alone in the night.

From prior quests I’d come to find that no matter how deep I thought I as going, still much of it was out of reach of my conscious mind, and the invitations to enact the central part of my story in a way other than talking have always propelled me into the heart of the real vision. I felt cheated. I felt angry. I felt self-critical. I’d been too intellectual. I’d talked too long. It was too late.

Then I began beating myself up for having those thoughts. How can I possibly be feeling bad after such a rich experience in the desert? What is this, being in the grip of a performance expectation? This is hardly in the spirit of the vision quest, or opening to the subtle and the numinous. Oye was I being “worked.”

I went to bed and slept and woke up in the morning feeling better, but still thinking about the way the night ended. I wondered if my song had been so moving that they felt nothing more should be added? I wonder if Chayim and Brian knew I was experienced and would work the vision myself, and chose to allow people to make the dinner they all wanted, and probably needed at that point. (I’m used to making positive interpretations that balance out my negative ones. It’s an essential facilitative skill for maintaining equanimity in my attitude toward all I work with.) But I wasn’t completely convinced.

My heart skipped a beat as I saw Brian coming down the wash. He was giving people a ten-minute warning for the final circle, where we would share our gratitude and gifts from the week together. I had this awful feeling that I should say something, even though it would be revealing my self in what I would think of as a far less than enlightened light.

So I girded myself.

“Have you heard the plan for this morning?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“You know, I’ve spent a lot of time processing not being asked to dance or anchor my vision story,” I said.

He looked a little startled. “Chayim and I talked about this last night,” he said. “Your story was so rich we weren’t really sure what the thread was, and it as late.”

“Well I want to thank you for the gift,” I said. “I went out to break my attachment to the north orientation and let in the east… and I’ve had the chance to look at my performance orientation straight in the face.”

I was amazed at the feeling that went through my body as I said these things. My heart opened. I felt a release. It was as if naming the demon freed it to move and transform.

Brian smiled. He knew exactly what was happening, and being the skilled guide he is, was very happy I had said something.
“I’m so glad you shared this with me,” he said. “If you don’t feel complete we can….”

“I am complete with this,” I said. “Thank you.” We hugged.

I made some oatmeal and was leaning against a rock eating it when I saw Temple, a vibrant young professional guide and herself a vision quest leader walking down the wash. I wondered how she was this morning. I was still shaking with the amazing way my conversation with Brian had turned me around. I’m not going to do anything— just see what happens—I thought. She’ll probably head straight on by to her camp.

But she didn’t. She headed straight toward me, and hopped up on a rock jutting out of the sand in front of my camp spot.

“I come to read you a poem, Turtlebone!” she beamed. And to my complete amazement read me the following.

OCEANS
I have a feeling that my boat
Has struck, down there in the depths
Against a great thing.
And nothing
Happens. Nothing…Silence..Waves…

—Nothing happens? Or has everything happened,
And we are standing now, quietly in the new life?

—Juan Ramon Jiminez

Oh my, how the universe brings gifts!!! I felt like a leaf carried in the wind.

The final circle was as moving an experience as I can remember with a group. We each acknowledged what we had received from the others in our time together. I received a huge amount of validation for my role as an elder and someone who helped create a strong, safe environment for the others. Many heard the drumming the night before. I began to see that my “northern” orientation is a gift if it’s a choice and not an attachment—serving community and awakening and not compulsion.

Return

My experience continued for the long ride home, and a weekend alone integrating before I returned to work, but that is another story.

I went to the desert to find guidance for my community. I came away with a feeling that having the courage to simply be me, fiercely and authentically, in service of awareness and community, was enough. I came away knowing I can’t know the future, but convinced I can live it when it arrives. I come away knowing that I can’t prevent change, but that I can appreciate its gifts. I know I can’t stop aging or death, but I can learn to accept the light that comes through the cracks of sadness, and the breakthroughs that come from breakdowns. I know I can shoulder the work of a leader, but I’m also being called to make way for others to lead.

As I said at the beginning of this post, I have only begun to understand what happened on in the desert. But I know my heart is now singing with the stars, and that my boat has struck, down there in the depths, against a great thing.