Friday, September 04, 2009

Vision Quest

“So what is this trip you’re going on?” my daughter asked me as she set the table.  “It’s a vision quest,” I say.  “A native American practice where you go out into the wilderness and seek a vision to help you in your life.” But she’s bugging her sister now, “Dad, Aimee’s texting at the dinner table.” I pretend they’re still listening, and continue.  “In a vision quest we go out alone, draw a circle on the ground, and stay in the circle for two days and nights.  No tent, no sleeping bag.” No reaction.  “And we don’t eat or drink anything for two days,” I say.  Both my teenage daughters gasp, “Dad, no food for two days?  Won’t you die?”

Our vision quest group began in the woods of southeast Michigan with a sweat lodge ceremony led by a man initiated in both Cherokee and Ecuadoran shamanism.  In preparation for the journey up to Manitou Island off Northern Michigan, we took off our watches, turned off our cell phones, locked our laptops in the car, and went off line.  Recklessly unhooked from the constant, hypnotic IV drip of television, talk radio, and e-mail.  And we began to relearn how to relate to other living things: trees, plants, animals, even insects.  How you don’t have to scream, slap or spray at every small creature that has more legs than you do.  “How would you feel,” our shaman said, “if a huge, loud and bad-smelling human came stomping into your habitat unannounced?  You need to let them know why you’re there,” he continued, “and that you’re not there to harm them.  You can ask them to help you, during your vision quest.”

Sound pretty whacked-out?  All I can say now is, try it sometime.  Greet the maple in your back yard in the morning.  It’s a lot older than you are.  Turn to the four directions: say hello to the rising sun in the East.  Salute the Canada goose winging out of the North, the direction of wisdom and detachment.  When you open a relationship where it hadn’t occurred that one existed before, it spoils you.  Because after that, as with humans, it’s a little more complicated to hate, displace or dismiss other creatures so thoughtlessly.

I chose a spot on a desolate beach, and drew my circle in the sand.  Bugs were everywhere: gnats, mosquitoes, flies buzzing, ants crawling.  Yet none of them bugged me.  I got hungry, but it came and went.  I got thirsty in the glaring sun, shivered in the dark under a diamond-studded sky.  After two days, things began happening, very subtly.  My usual endless stream of abstract thoughts, planning and worry began to weaken.  But the air was alive with scrawking seagulls, dank driftwood, vivid yellow and purple wildflowers, waving shore grasses.  As the red sun dropped slowly to the water, my restless mind just fell silent, like someone had turned off the overhead paging system in a hospital.

And right about then, the vision came.  Not a Mormon Tabernacle chorus descending on a cloud with chubby angels.  But a clarity of… vision, as if you had been surrounded by fog for months or years and then in moment, the fog disappeared.  And there it was: my life in the present, and the path ahead, clear as day, right from the heart.  All thanks to the solitude, the shaman, and all my new creature-friends from the woods, the beach, and the sky.  Even the insects.

“So, did you get your vision?” my daughter asked as I came in the back door.  But I was too startled by the words glaring from the yellow and green aerosol can sitting up on the hall shelf, right where I had left it.  “Fly and insect killer,” it read.  “Guaranteed kill.”

Broadcast by Jeff Nixa on September 04, 2009 • WVPE's Audio Archive
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