Hazardous Journey

This past Wednesday evening, I spoke by phone to a cousin who lives in California, zip code 92128. I was relieved to hear his wife's voice, and then his, and he told me that their home, although the entire area was shrouded with smoke, was two miles from one edge of the "Witch Fire," the largest of the wildfires scorching Southern California this week, and that it seemed as if they would be okay.

Okay or not, their situation, along with those of Peter and Faith, Floyd and Marion, the three-year-old with the swollen-shut eye (all from the previous three posts), and the millions of other journeys on this human path, reminded me of Ernest Shackleton's invitation to join his 1914 exploration of the South Pole. I first became aware of Shackleton's language while listening to Bill Plotkin speak at an Animas Valley Institute seminar some years ago. He joked that with a little revision, the ad that Shackleton had placed in a London newspaper would serve well for the vision quests that he and the Animas guides offered.

Shackleton's ad: "Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success."

Bill was only half-joking. In Soulcraft: Crossing Into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche (New World Library, 2003) he offered this revision as a possible ad for a quest: "Men and woman wanted for hazardous journey. Bitter cold and intense heat, long hours of complete darkness, boredom, no food, constant danger, encounters with the unknown, return in same condition doubtful. Vision and more hardships await in case of success" (330). Anyone who has enacted a vision quest can vouch for the literal and metaphorical truths in that description.

Anyone who chooses to live a conscious life, and I mean really pay attention to all of it to the extent he or she can in any given moment, can grow into a worldview that can vouch for these truths as well. Not one of us needs to create an enemy in order to embark on a hazardous journey. No one needs to drop a bomb, crash a plane, fire a gun, throw a punch, sarcastically criticize, or passively dismiss to live a daring, challenging, attainable life worth living.

All any one of us has to do (yes, the italics are literally true and a painfully ridiculous understatement) is to fully engage body, mind, soul and spirit to commit to finding out what our unique self is called to do during the time it has to do it, and what our true identity is within and beyond this calling, and we will have the grand adventure that is already ours. But we have to pay attention because the fire and the cancer and the arthritis and the hurricane and the flood and the heart attack and the accident and the depression will try to distract us from time to time, and not one of them is the journey that we're hoping for. Any one of them can suffice as a painfully distracting detour from or an attention-holding guide on the journey. We get to choose.

That's enough for now. I need to pay attention and see what it is I'm not paying attention to right now.