Reflecting on a very enthusiastic conversation about vision quest from last night, a thought occurred to me about the vision quest process, and how it has worked through me. One of the things I love most about vision quest, and especially rites of passage, is an idea I heard from one of my guides, Will Scott at the School of Lost Borders. It goes something like this: when we go to the land and make a claim we are courageously opening a big new crack in ourselves that the universe will do its best to fill in during incorporation. In essence, the universe wants to “test its new toy,” kick the tires and see if the person will literally in-corp-orate what they went to claim on the land, out in the world at large.
I am realizing now that before I quested for manhood this summer, it was as though I had been living inside a self-created cage. This cage was very complex, and mostly built from all kinds of different limiting beliefs and expectations I had about myself and my life, like that I wanted to “reach” a certain level of enlightenment as if it was a pot of gold I could attain, or that I wanted to meet a completely perfect woman and have a completely perfect relationship with no problems at all, or that I believed life could just be either good or bad, et cetera. And every time life reminded me, by way of the present moment, that those rigid expectations would never actually come true, because life and the soul is rich and deep and intricate and filled with paradox and mystery, NOT certainty (the only certainty being that I will die); every time those reminders came I would become afraid and anxious, because my little cage was built from this utopian vision of what my life SHOULD be. These reminders came often (thank god) and I spent most of my time being anxious and afraid to be who I actually was, instead trying to be the image of the “good” person I had invented. The cage held me back from embodying myself in the present moment almost everywhere I went. And I think it was easy for the people around me to notice when this was happening, because I would appear to be somewhere far off. And it was true, my mind was far off, haplessly daydreaming of all the ways that someday my life would be perfect, the telltale condition of an over-seeker. And the whole time I was missing the incredible wonderment of the moment that was right in front of me the whole time, an opportunity for freedom that was mine if only I could open myself enough to fall in love with it.
Well, somehow, before I realized all these things, even while all of this self-caging was still happening below my consciousness, something deep in my soul in the most ancient part of my bones knew I wasn’t ok with that kind of life anymore. That frankly I would die if I didn’t do something about it. That the rampant fear and anxiety was making a mockery of my own divinity, slowly squeezing all the life out of my potential, my gifts, the possibility of what my life could become, directing me to hopelessly fixate on what it SHOULD become. And so, even amidst the cacophonous din of the ten thousand voices in my head, I somehow heard the roaring of the sacred river in the distance, and it was too loud and too strong for me to say anything but yes in response. I think it was ultimately the seeker in me that led me there, fitting that the same part of me that put me in prison would eventually be the only one that could lead me out.
The quest taught me that there is no should, there is only is. Joseph Campbell said “We have to be willing to give up the lives we’ve planned for ourselves in order to experience the lives that are waiting for us.” This has been the story of my quest. So I have a new image now of how this story worked and is still working itself, and it looks like this: my rite of passage, my initiation in front of the council of all beings, opened the door of that cage and invited me to step outside. Invited me to step out of the frail “certainties” of my ego cage and into the sonorous chambers of my cavernous soul. It has felt scary at times, for despite the cage’s limitations, it was at least familiar, and at least at first, the outside of the cage was not. Nevertheless, the quest has given me permission and freedom to live in the not knowing, and feel alive and in love being myself in the world. And frankly, the felt experience of divinity that is available in the soul space is as familiar to the most ancient dusty reaches of me as anything.
It is as if I poured myself a new mold on the quest, and the task of my incorporation has been and continues to be to fill in that mold with as much of myself as I can in every moment, for myself for my people. I have thus, in this initiation, learned a new definition of the very north shield concept of “showing up”: Being Myself. And I can only ever call anyone else out to do the same. This is one of the great works of our generation and our times: to reject that which has told us to be afraid of being ourselves, and retake our love for ourselves and for one another, and for all of creation. This is liberation, and…
This is a CELEBRATION!

Let this be a theme song for our courageous march into the present, individuals united as one for the love of life.