I am writing the story of time across the fabric of my being, like wildflowers write the season of renewal across the body of earth.

Long ago, in midst the darkest night and the blackest black, a deep call was awakening in me vast longing and terrible grief, yet it would not stay silent. So I awoke, trembling, on the edge, closing and opening in equal parts to the mystery, until at last, one fine spring day, at the fine age of thirty, I found the ledge that so many had supported me in finding, and began at last to do the work I was born to do.

This is that work, a vocation more than a job, a calling more than an answer.

Last week, I got to sit with my teachers, these younglings who, in direct awareness of their rite of passage, called forth themselves toward an initiated adolescence in which they would bring their inner child with them and nurture a growing and expanding sense of self without leaving their body and child behind.

I learned a lot of new words on the first day, and it is hard to really grok the change in slang and technological orientation for teens today from when I first embarked on a wilderness adventure some thirty years back . There was no 'Ris', no 'primary Opp', and most assuredly no smartphones or social media. Yet quite quickly, the land and our immersion in it called forth from us an ancient cadence of emotion, of awe and wonder, of meaning and discovery.

We named our stuckness-es, our distracted states inherited from the wider culture. Each of us, opened ourselves to check-in to the forest and the sensorial lifeworld around us. We cocreated a container, both for our humanness and for/with/in the more-than-human lifeworld.

I think often of Naropa University, of the embodied and contemplative education I received there, of meeting my love there, of the vast practices of dismantling the internalized and encultured structures of our confusing world. On the land, we let the crazy wisdom emerge end belong.

Chogyam Trungpa (1991) was an initiated and lineage holder in crazy wisdom, a skillful means practice of making the unseen seen. In this era of bright darkness, dazzling technologies, and accelerated lives and learning, this can be as simple as naming our distraction and as complicated as reclaiming the lost parts of our lives which were thrown out for not conforming, and/or injured by overtly dissociative states of people in positions of power.

And so, in a wilderness nearby, the seven of us ready to Awaken Our Soul Fire steeped in such wisdom, and opened ourselves to the ceremony and the great mystery of a wilderness rite of passage.

Yellow Pea and Monkshood cover the ground in all directions, while a few very old and tall Aspen provide us just enough shelter amidst the midday light to make a basecamp. Soon, we will stand, each with our stone, and create the threshold circle–-a place each child will step into as they mark their rite of passage and step out of as an initiated adolescent. First, though, we will make a vow to keep ourselves safe, a promise to return, and sing a song that has been sung by thousands of questers headed to the land:

we are one with the infinite sun, forever and ever and ever

we are one with the infinite earth, forever and ever and ever

The echoes of the stories still permeate my consciousness, and I can hear the depth and wisdom of these young voices and beings as they made sense of their place in the vast lineage of belonging amidst so much social, cultural, and historical confusion…

We held vigil with our inner worlds, and called in…

healing

strength

creativity

sensitivity

vulnerability

being wanted

being a good friend

being loveable

acceptance of our shadows as gifts

as okay

as enough

as love too

We were held by Aspen, Spruce, and the vastness of a thriving high mountain ecosystem. We let the white butterflies touch us and remind us of our innate and unbreakable purity. While the hills were steep, we learned to hike them for our people, and both drew and gave inspiration into our humyn and more-than-humyn communities, near and far.

We took naps, muddied our feet, and sat with our fears and tears. We told time with the shadows, with the casting of light and dark across the terrain of the land and our bodies. We drummed on the land, and called out in bird whistles to our people, and they called back.

We roared.

We whispered.

We let the wildness embrace all our parts.

I can still see clearly this exquisite yet mundane moment along the trail. We were exiting a high meadow of Aspen trees, a vast openness, and beginning the final decent into a spruce/pine forest of the last two miles of the trek. The initiated adolescents were now in the lead, and as we guides were in the rear, we could see them walk under a thin gossamer thread of a spiders web strung between two ten-foot evergreens on either side of the trail–-a perfect threshold under which we all passed, ready to claim and enact out initiations, in all their various forms.

In humility and gratitude,

tbird

References

Trungpa, C. (1991). Crazy wisdom. (S. Chödzin, Ed.). Shambhala.