Crying For A Vision At Ghost Ranch “Each time I leave here it is like a Death, and each time that I return it is a Birth.” Georgia O'Keeffe In the old rickety upper pavilion, gazing at the mesas, the ineffectual fans whirred, stirring the warm air, as the morning prayer ritual played itself out before us. Blood and a smashing mirror and the cave of my wounds, as the flute’s song echoed off the buttes and up to Chimney Rock. Then I went out into the silent canyon to begin crying for a vision. Suddenly I was addressed by an inner voice that spoke with the power of the land. ‘How would it be if you raised your family, tended your garden and then you died?’ My long trained piety kicked in and I sought to acquiesce. Then my soul piped up like a Black Capped Chickadee and demanded some recognition, some approbation from the world. The silence of the canyons was thunderous. The sage brush and the gradations of colour on Kitchen Mesa, from pale cream to blood red silently drove home the point - this is what is on offer, this is the vision you cried for, this is the life you are uniquely fitted to live. And I came home from Ghost Ranch and have tried with all my blood to live its message.
Part Four
This post is a brief interlude from the travel journal. Whilst I sat, in the evening, at Lake Lodge, with no Internet, playing solitaire whilst Tom played on his Steam Game Deck, sipping a Bulleit Rye Bourbon, I began to think about rites of passage. We had heard in the books we were listening to, by Joseph M Marshall III, that the Lakota have seven sacred rites.1 One of them is called Haŋbléčeyapi - Crying for a Vision. This felt like a powerful image and metaphor, an archetypal human yearning for an experience of clarity about one’s life. This all set me thinking and writing.
In January 2002 I made a week long retreat at the Centre for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest and founder of the Centre.2 He had spoken at an event the summer before, at my invitation. I was involved in leading a Christian Community and we were having some issues. His talk seemed to provide a bifurcation point in our collective journey. He told me that he liked to support leaders and that if I ever needed counsel and a retreat then I should contact him. That is how I found myself halfway across the world in the high deserts of the American South West.
Richard was a very attentive retreat leader and mentor, giving me a daily hour and even taking me out for the day to Santa Fe. My encounter with him and the South West of the USA really settled me into my 40 year old self. His constant injunctions to trust myself, to find that still centre in my soul steadied me. He then suggested that I could come back in the summer and kill two birds with one stone. To have a family holiday and to participate in the Mens Rites of Passage (MROP) that he was leading at a place with the enticing, if slightly ominous, name of Ghost Ranch.
My family were very keen to see the place I had been so impressed by and so were two of our best friends Aileen and Jenny. So in the August of 2002 we jetted off to the Albuquerque Sunport and a three week adventure. I had become firm friends with the couple who ran the Guest House for the CAC - Stephen and Mary Jo Picha and they became an integral part of the trip. Stephen had participated in the Rites the year before and was now part of Richard’s team.
Richard had developed the MROP after seeing American Indian communities, in the South West, that still practiced the initiation of boys into adulthood. He began to read and study anthropological texts and visit cultures where these were still performed. His experience of young American males was that they lacked a profound sense of their identity as men and of their place in the world. This may be remedied, he thought, by participating in a version of the initiation that they missed as adolescents.
He set about devising a 6 day event that would replicate some of the key themes he had discovered in his reading and research. He partnered with an artist called Stephen Gambill who had experience of ritual and drama. Between them they combined the more universal elements of initiation rites with themes drawn from the Christian traditions of rites of passage. It was in parts a retreat, an immersion, a ritual experience, a vision quest, and group therapy.
After visiting a monastery in Northern New Mexico called Christ in the Desert my family and friends deposited me at Ghost Ranch sited near Abiquiú. It had been the home of the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and was and remains a Presbyterian Retreat Centre.3 There is such a stark beauty to the area it immediately began to work its magic on my psyche. That evening I found myself in an old wooden pavilion perched in the middle of the property with 120 other men sitting in a circle and drumming. As the drum beats faded Richard addressed us: ‘This is not about psychology’ he stressed ‘this is cosmology, it is to realign you in the universe.’
The poem above is an account of the beginning of the first full day of the event. Each morning there were prayer rituals. They comprised a reading of Christian scripture accompanied by a drama/liturgy. The first one involved a large mirror brought into the circle, fake blood, the snapping of branches and the clacking of stones, and ended with a prayer.
‘Abba, Father, things fall apart, it grows dark we lose heart, and must offer you our fear, our fragmentation. Give us the courage to enter the cave of our wounds and to trust those holes in us to show us the way we know not, the way through.’
The final part of the ritual was the playing of a piece of American Indian Pipe music by R. Carlos Nakai called Song for Morning Star. Each of these prayer rituals was then followed up with a talk by Richard on the theme of the day, which on that morning was Separation.4 Very astutely the non-verbal and verbal was followed by an hour’s silence, alone. I wandered into the canyon and sat in a my sacred space and this is where I had the experience narrated in the poem.
As I sat now, in the lodge at Yellowstone Lake twenty one years later, I thought long and hard about all my experiences with the Men’s Work. I had returned from my MROP and helped to get them off the ground here in the UK. The Male Journey is the organisation we founded to foster the work.5 I have led Rites and other events since then and Tom has attended a Young Men’s Rites of Passage that I helped formulate. What struck me forcefully as I thought about all this was, that in a very western way, we had tried to cram a huge amount of ideas and content into a doable event for the, all too busy, white middle class male.
In a way we were attempting rapid initiation as a reflection of our instant culture. Things that the psyche needs long spans of time to achieve we were trying to push through in a matter of days. I think Richard’s work and the MROP are commendable and helpful but they were only ever a first step, an essay in the craft (as Tolkien says). They were an encouragement to set off on the exploration of the numerous rites of passage we experience and the various initiations and transformations they require. This work continues in the Male Journey and in the US organisation - Illuman.6 I have also found what feels a more comprehensive approach to these issues in the work of Bill Plotkin and the Animas Valley Institute.7
‘In recent decades, the Western world has rediscovered the vital importance of initiation. We’ve recognized that over a span of many centuries we had lost something essential on the journey to becoming fully human. We’re remembering there’s something crucial that children need at puberty to guide them into a healthy adolescence. We’re remembering there’s something young men (and even middle-aged men) need in order to help them attain what is sometimes called “true manhood.” We’re remembering there’s something young women (and even middle-aged women) need to enable them to embrace the full promise of womanhood.’
Bill Plotkin 8
Bill describes himself as a psychologist gone wild. His website portrays him as ‘a depth psychologist, wilderness guide, and agent of cultural evolution.’ His attention to the whole cycle of life and the various transitions we move through is both thorough and convincing. Here is what he says about the issues I am pondering here.
‘After many years of living these questions, after many expeditions of wandering through the terrible and majestic mysteries of nature and psyche, you, at long last, receive a glimpse or overhear a whisper of the greater, truer story of your individual life or of “the truth at the centre of the image you were born with,” as poet David Whyte says.’
This feels deeply congruent with two things that have suffused my life since the MROP at Ghost Ranch. The first is the power and potency of the natural world to provide both a script and a backdrop to our traversing of our path through life. The second is the gift of our unconscious and imagination to inform us and lead us to that image we were born with. This journey is so powerfully mapped and pioneered by CG Jung especially in the Red Book and all his collected works. To me he is the Einstein of the Psyche.
What I realised in that cabin in Yellowstone was that we have so much to learn from the indigenous cultures that never lost that connection between nature and psyche. Respectful study and enquiry is appropriate, I think. Not in order to raid and plunder their cultures and wisdom. We need to rediscover through the use of our own poetic imagination ways of working with our own inner landscape so that we may devise new and appropriate ceremonies, rites and rituals of our own. My aim in working with men here, was always to move away from anything that wasn’t culturally appropriate in our country and to find the echoes in our own indigenous traditions that felt more congruent, such as the Celtic, the Anglo Saxon and the Norse inheritances.
There has been a fascinating and challenging debate about all this in the recent interaction between Spirit (the Center for Support and Protection of Indian Religions and Indigenous Traditions)9 and the Mankind Project - an organisation working with men in the USA and other parts of the world.10 It all revolves around the issue of cultural appropriation. I will leave readers to explore this but is worth reading the and viewing work of Spirit. It has informed so much of what I would now feel is congruous and has made me let go of certain things we may have done in the past.
I hope my poem is an attempt to honour the traditions of the Lakota and the indigenous people of the USA as their voices are ones I think we really need to hear in this era of climate crisis and general psychological disturbance.
I know I was not engaging in anything like the seven rites of the Lakota. I do, though, recognise we were drawing our water from their well and I feel deeply thankful and honoured to have had a chance to drink again some of that water on our trip. The metaphor of Crying for a Vision is a powerful one and in the Jungian tradition as well as the American Indian spirituality it is dreams and visions that play a central role. I had my own experience of that and I hope it encourages others to explore this journey we call our life.
My final thoughts that began to coalesce in Yellowstone were around the individual and the collective. In his autobiography CG Jung reflects on the task of the individual to differentiate from others and stand on their own feet, to be conscious of their own peculiar nature. He warns that though collective identities can be shelters, home ports for the shipwrecked they can also become beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible and shields for the timid.
You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process.
~ Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502
I don’t think that the arduous task of individuation, as Jung names it, can be done in a collective setting like the one created by the MROP as I experienced it in New Mexico. It may be, as it was in my case, a catalyst to that journey, a springboard perhaps. I watched many men mistake involvement in the organisations that grew up around the MROP for that transforming journey. Thinking that advancement in the collective would mediate that grasp of our peculiar nature. In fact, often it just activated their shadow. There is no substitute for the struggle for individuation. 11
In this era of the MeToo movement I think women are rightly nervous of the rise of these Men’s Groups and organisations partly because of the issues of the individual and the collective I outlined above and the danger they perpetuate male supremacy and misogyny. I do however think work that has a male only component offers a place for men to work together as fellow travellers on the path of individuation. This must at some point involve the feminine and women in the process. Masculinity (gay, straight, or trans) is, I think only achieved in conversation with femininity of all kinds and with those who identify as non binary.
The experience my poem narrates and my subsequent path, deeply informed by my working over the past seven years with my female Jungian analyst leads me to this conclusion. I wish now to contribute to a more individually orientated offering for the human traversing of each initiatory passage, as we move from one season of our life to another. To create a more bespoke set of ceremonies and rituals, experiences and pilgrimages. The Haŋbléčeyapi - Crying for a Vision points the way for our creative and poetic imagination to find new and culturally appropriate ways of working to find the way we know not, the way through.
For more on all this see Adam’s Return by Richard Rohr
Memories, Dreams and Reflections - CG Jung, Harper Perennial, 1995, p375
I think many of us wrestle with the idea of what is enough. I love your poem.