At 45, I was a year and a half out of the incredibly challenging relationship that was to mark the end of my interest in partnering. (See Others Views for more about this.) I was also a year and a half into the astonishing and profound process of becoming an unconditionally loving, fiercely protective mother to myself. (See The Little Ones Story for more about this.) I felt at a cusp, at a very powerful threshold moment in my life. I found myself asking Spirit for help in finding some ceremonious way to mark this crossing place.
In the early spring of that year (1986), Spirit answered. I came upon a flyer posted in our local health food store that described a 3-Day Vision Quest experience for women in the Ojai wilderness. The trip called to me immediately
In a second Cosmic moment arranged by Spirit not long after that first Quest ended, I picked up a Shaman’s Drum magazine that someone had left at the library. In it I found an ad for a 10-day Vision Quest for Women in Death Valley scheduled for that November. The leaders for this Quest clearly were both chronologically older and more experienced at leading Quests than were the sincerely dedicated young women who had led the Ojai trip. If that earlier Quest had been an appetizer, this 10 day one felt to be the full course dinner that would follow. I was enormously excited!
As soon as I’d registered, just as the brochure explained, the Quest began for me. Everything that happened between that day and the day of the physical journey to the meeting place in Sebastopol seemed luminous, charged with meaning and implication. It was as though I were living in an altered state of consciousness, readying myself for something momentous.
I moved slowly and carefully through the various stages of preparation for the journey. It was the first time ever that leaving home required that I consciously complete everything, every project in which I had invested my energies. I cleansed and tended my physical and psychic spaces as if I were never coming back to them. I felt as though I were in some magical and compelling process of carefully preparing for my own death. This preparation process felt exciting, exhilarating rather than frightening.
I felt so hungry for and so thrilled about the four days that we would each spend alone with ourselves in the desert. The idea of being able to be so far from the civilized world, so alone and yet so protected by wilderness-experienced women leaders who would hold the space and the container for me–this was an utterly intoxicating prospect!
The three days before and after those four, the ones that would be devoted to meeting, traveling with and developing a base camp and re-entry community with the rest of the dozen women questors, two leaders and three assistants–these were days MUCH less thrilling for me to anticipate. Still, I could feel some profound magic weaving me into this web as the day approached.
Much of my uneasiness about the before time was settled when we gathered in our primary leader’s home. We were asked to commit to being together in sacred silence through that late afternoon and evening as well as through all of the traveling the next day. I couldn’t have wished for more. I would have felt so disappointed to be surrounded by the ordinary social chatter we usually use to "get to know one another." Except for the time each of us met separately with the leaders to set our intentions for the journey, the silence was broken only for instructions or "emergencies." It was such an extraordinary way to build intentional community as we caravaned and kept trading places in the three vehicles that carried us across California and deep into the desert.
We slept out under the stars in the desert en route to our base camp at the end of that travel day. The following morning we drove to our entry point and carried our gear in a couple of miles. Then we all made repeat trips back out to the vans for the kitchen gear, food supplies and the endless gallons of water we’d brought for our selves and for the cooking. After all that, we spent the rest of the day learning about desert safety and about the formal structure for our solo journeys to quest for vision.
I’d already experienced, in my individual intention setting interview, some uneasiness with Sedonia’s (our primary leader) approach to facilitating/teaching. This continued and increased through the teachings she gave that first and second day in our base camp. Her style of teaching/leading felt uncomfortably male-model-of-authority: kind of imperious, top-down and somewhat devaluing of the innate wisdom each of us questors might be bringing to the circle. There clearly was "the way" everything was to be done when we were out on solo, the "right" way. It all felt rather a bit rigid to me. Especially when, in matters where our safety was not at all at issue, there seemed no room for any of us to feel free to improvise with the form to better fit it to our personal styles. The gist seemed to be that the form was "all." That, in our adopting of this Native American tradition, we had to follow the literal form without allowing for it to be modified by or adapted to our different context as mostly Anglo women.
I kept my concerns to myself since this was Sedonia’s show that I’d clearly been brought here to experience. And, too, I kept my own counsel because no one else seemed at all bothered by what I experienced as the pressure of "rules for proper behavior." I figured that, once off in the desert by myself, I could and would do only what felt right for me. Form be damned if it didn’t feel right to me!
Part of Sedonia’s instruction was a very strong message for us each to "really push our envelopes," to move out of our comfort zones, to move to our farthest edges and then beyond. This, too, felt very "male-model" toned and very at odds with where I was in my own journey of learning to be much more gentle and much less demanding with my recovering overachiever self. I wasn’t sure how well I would do at not getting caught back into this pressure that I’d lived with all of my life. Pressure from which I had only so recently been able to begin to break free.
The second day at base camp we were all sent out into the further desert to "find our sacred spot" for our solo time. Once we’d found it, we’d be back and forth to ferry four days stock (nine gallons) of water out to it. Then we’d gather in circle in base camp to mark our spots on the base camp map with something we’d brought back from our spots. And, we’d be paired with the closest other questor as "rock pile buddies." Rock pile buddies would be establishing a rock pile together in a place between their secluded solo spots. Each of the four days of solo time, both buddies would separately come to the rock pile to leave each other evidence that they were ambulatory and doing okay: drawings, rock arrangements, desert flowers and such like.
Some of my cohorts went way out to the back of beyond to find their sacred places. One of the women (who became a very dear and special friend of mine until she died some years later) actually got lost for quite a while before she found her bedraggled way back from her spot to base camp.
When I left base camp on my search I was feeling quite agitated by Sedonia’s instruction to "push [my] envelope." It seemed to me that I’d spent too much of my life pushing my envelope, trying to do everything way ahead of schedule, way beyond what might be reasonable to expect of myself and way faster than the slowest part of me ever felt either safe or capable of going. (See 75mph for more about this.)
Stewing in my agitation as I walked outward into the desert, I still clearly noticed a small mesa just ahead that seemed to be beckoning me. It was within easy walking distance from base camp. Once there, I found that I could see the chaparral surrounding our base camp without actually seeing the staff people moving around inside the camp. It was the closest I could be to camp while being invisible to camp and having camp be invisible to me.
This was the absolutely PERFECT spot for my journey! For me, seriously pushing my envelope meant risking, daring NOT to push myself into some compelling "achievement" or over some more literal "edge." Being so undemanding of myself, so extraordinarily gentle with myself was, FOR ME, the truly most powerful and empowering envelope-push/edge-walk. It was SUCH a magical blessing, feeling that sweet little close-in mesa calling to me! Calling me home to myself.
The following morning we were beautifully, ritually birthed out of the womb of our base camp and sent, with blessings, off to do our solo questing. I arranged my shade shelter, tying down my tarp as a lean-to at the base of the mesa, laid out my sleeping bag, pens and journal and began this next phase of the journey. Four days of fasting on water. Paying open, keen attention to everything around me, drinking deeply of this wild place. Listening deeply within for the voice of Spirit. Writing and drawing in my journal. Trundling daily to the rock pile.
It was, as well, four whole days of being laid low. Feeling constantly, overwhelmingly, wrenchingly sick with nausea. At the time, I thought the nausea to be a reaction to the heat leeching the cloudy plastic of the containers into the water making it so I could barely drink without gagging.
Yet, when I told the tale of my journey later during the re-incorporation circle at base camp, the retching and nausea seemed to be filled, as well, with symbolic significance. All through the four days, I had been deeply experiencing the toxicity of all the internalized societal "right/acceptable/valuable" ways that I had used to push and rush and punish myself mercilessly. That I had used to abuse my little, vulnerable, delicate self. I had been retching and vomiting all of that out of my being.
The wind and the heat of the desert had stripped away all the form I had come in with, my own life-long internalizations and all of what Sedonia’s teachings had added into that package. I understood that, had I followed the form she had imparted, I might well have learned something of value. Still, in the cauldron of my nauseated "sickness," I had come to see that, for me, the deepest learning was to listen only to the guidance from my own core–that part beyond all the toxic internalizations. This I did with an incredibly fierce gentleness and endless aching tears for the endless past years of breaking my own heart and my own spirit with those terrible "shoulds."
At the close of our solo time, we were to spend the whole last night sitting in the middle of the circle of stones we had arranged in our sacred place. We were to spend the whole night awake, inside our circle and in prayer both for our own vision and for the psychic community of people and concerns represented by our stones. On that day, I made my last trip to the rock pile. I felt hollowed out, exhausted yet safe and profoundly protected by the sweet, gentle, undemanding love and grace with which I had tended myself and my little one(s) through this transformational desert sojourn.
On my way to the rock pile, I noticed a small mound of something oddly out of place in the beige and pale gray landscape along my daily route. It was brilliantly bubble gum pink with a trailing strand of paler pink fiber. When I picked it up it turned out to be a now deflated, once helium filled balloon with printing on it.
When I stretched the rubber out to read the printing, I roared with deep belly laughter. The message printed on it? "CHILDCARE IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS!" What a powerful YES! from Spirit for all the work I’d been doing at the base of my little mesa in my womb-like lean-to. I felt deeply and profoundly affirmed in my own path and for choosing that path.
We all returned to base camp radiant, exhausted, transformed and prepared to begin the "re-incorporation" phase of the process. We were ceremonially welcomed, fed some gentle fruit soup and called to meet in the sacred circle of our desert-born community. Here we began the almost three day cycle of each sharing the stories of our solo quests. We sat in solemn (and sometimes hilarious) witness to each other as we each wove our own personal heroine’s journey mythic tale.
Of course, as is often the case in my life, my journey tale was way at the other end of the continuum from those of the rest of my desert tribe. I sobbed and wept my way through much of it. Revisiting how much of my journey reflected my life long struggles to hold myself as valuable while inevitably holding the place of "outsider," the different, the odd one out; while inevitably struggling with the pressure to "fit the form."
And, at the end of the tale, my epiphany: The pink balloon and its message from Spirit affirming my path, confirming what my thread is about in the world. The joy of that coming home, of feeling welcomed/seen as part of the community even as I lived my differentness. And, being given my journey name: "She Who Walks Her Truth In Beauty."
After all of us had shared and been witnessed in our Heroine’s tales, we began what for me was the most exciting and transporting ritual of the whole Quest. One in which I got to see all of who else Sedonia was as a teacher/facilitator and woman of power. This was the miraculous "Sacred Theater " Sedonia had created as the final ritual of the Quest.
The staff disappeared at dusk leaving us questors to prepare our selves for this as yet unknown next step. Lumiaries (votive candles in paper bags filled with sand) glowing orange against the desert blackness and extraordinary drumming and chanting guided all of us questors out into the further depths of the desert. There each of us–bedecked in ceremonial garb we’d been asked to include in our gear and wearing body paint we had been given to decorate our selves–processed into a magically candle lit circle/arena. There each of us, in turn, created the dance of our journey. We each celebrated ourselves with words and movement and song. And, we joyfully celebrated each other’s beauty and power.
The gifts of that Quest were enormous. Sedonia and I (with another sick and sleeping questor in the back of her camper-pickup) drove the 9-hour journey back to Sebastopol deeply engaged with each other in amazingly intense dialogue. We talked and dreamed together about the possibility of holding power from the Sacred Feminine. About building new images of empoweredness that went beyond the hierarchic forms we’d learned in patriarchal culture. We talked about form and formlessness. We talked about the power of gentleness.
We birthed a connection that fed us both richly for many, many years. A connection that spawned an incredible Women’s Lodge of 10 other "powerfully empowered" women committed to exploring together how power looks and feels and lives when held from the Field of the Sacred Feminine. And, a connection that was a soul-nourishing friendship for both of us for all the years until her death.
So much of power and empoweredness in our world is conceived as connected with moving fast, doing more, always accelerating and expanding into bigger and more and yesterday. It takes enormous faith and courage to break away from the relentless pounding rhythm of that trance. Enormous trust and willingness to move differently, to listen for the much quieter voice of the soul. The voice that asks for us to slow down, to listen inward. That asks for us to savor the stillness in which magic can be born. That asks for us to be honoring and cherishing and gentle with our tender selves.
Wishing you the courage to go only as fast as the slowest part of you feels safe to go,
P.S. So many of your delicious e-mails send appreciations for the affirmation, support and nourishment you receive from the site. When I answer them, I don’t always remember to let you know that having your own deck of the Rememberings and Celebrations cards is a way to bring this same loving voice into your everyday world, to have it at hand as you need to remind yourself of the "real" truth moment to moment in the crazimakingness of the so-called real world!
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The card on this page is part of a set of 64 handcolored bookmark-size cards called the Rememberings and Celebrations deck. They can be used as an oracle, a meditation focus or a "book-in-pieces" to kindle and grow a compassionate, gentle, unconditionally loving, fiercely protective inner-Mother to help you carve safe healing space for your emerging self and for the wounded little ones inside.
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