ELDERS AND INITIATION PART 3

I did a vision quest when I was 29 years old in the summer of 1987 in Coyote New Mexico. 

I judge this quest a failure because I was just as lost after the quest as I was before.  That’s not to say that I didn’t learn some lessons that worked for me later on in life.  I learned that I could fast when alone in the wilderness with no issue, and that’s not nothing and contributed to my next vision quest where I had little anxiety about fasting.  I also had this glimmer of needing to return to Judaism, which eventually played out. 

I say failure because had I better mentoring, I might have wandered in the desert fewer years and arrived at the promised land sooner.   I had an ambiguous vision that I couldn’t interpret and had no help from the supposed elders.  I came back after four days in the wilderness with a medicine song, a ton of time spend in the valleys of the mountains rather than the mountain tops and having spent a lot of time thinking about two women I had been on Kibbutz with during a gap year between High School and College about 12 years earlier.

Knowing what I know now, here’s what I would have explored with younger Jared. 

First, I would have explored how the medicine song came to me and how I could incorporate this into some kind of ongoing practice--after all, a medicine song is a pretty powerful thing.  I actually wound up doing this intermittently over the next couple of years without any guidance and it really helped in my decision to move back east since I realized that this was a medicine song for a desert, not for a green land. But, I didn’t capture the importance of drumming and singing for me, that’s for sure and I spent decades not doing any of that.

Second, I would have asked about the significance of my spending time in the valleys rather than the mountaintops, and I would have coupled that with the fact that cows showed up at this quest, where the guides had done multiple quests before and never seen any.  Some of this would have pointed towards an agricultural spirituality, some of this might have pointed towards the kind of depth work that coincidentally Bill Plotkin was doing not that far from where I did the quest in New Mexico or maybe Jung’s work.  But I thought of spirituality as being about the mountain peaks and not the depths or the settled valleys and I’m not sure my guides even had any ideas about spirituality—certainly none got communicated to me.

Third, my vision of these two women was construed, naturally enough, in a sexual sense.  But that really wasn’t right. I hadn’t been interested in either of them when I was a horny seventeen and eighteen year old on Kibbutz, though I thought that one of them was quite cute, and I certainly never had any desire to reconnect with either of them.  In hindsight, I think I thought of both of them because they were from California and that was the closest parallel to the ecosystem in which I was doing the quest. The women I had been attracted to while on Kibbutz had all actually been from the east.  So what should have been explored was why these California women and why Jewish women and what that said about my relationship to Judaism and to my sexuality.

I’m not resentful.  Look, I got to do a vision fast.  I was really nervous about it until I did it and was proud that I was able to stay out the whole time and have visions.  That was very affirming. The guides should never have been offering a vision fast, that’s for sure, because they weren’t adequately trained and hadn’t done enough of their own spiritual work. If I hadn’t done the fast with them, maybe I would have found Plotkin and that would have changed my life—or maybe I would not have done a vision fast at all. There’s no way to know.  But for sure, for sure, their failure to guide me was both a personal failure for me and for them, and a communal failure because of my lost contribution as I wandered in the desert longer than I needed to.  There’s an old joke about Moses wandering for forty years in the desert because he was a stubborn male who refused to ask for directions. Here I was asking for directions, but getting none.

New Mexico Mountains