Words from the Desert

My life story seems full of clues which, like those in a mystery movie, are only recognized as having significance in hindsight…my bet is that this is true for all of us if we take the time to reflect.  A single star becomes part of a larger constellation that is pointing us to ourselves and our place in the cosmos…

Two years ago I was sitting on a boulder in the desert of Arizona during a five day initiation/vision quest encounter.  It was just months before I remember first noticing the bump which turned out to be cancer, but it is likely that the Melanoma cells were already growing away on my neck, unbeknownst to me.  Surrounded by nothing but wild flowers, red rocks, cactus, and looking directly across a canyon at an ancient Apache village carved into the hillside, I jotted down in a journal a few terse words that I rediscovered a couple weeks ago.

About a week ago, I was spending a full day with eight other men discussing the vision of This Healing Ground. This Healing Ground, or THG as I have heard it called, started as a group of five guys who wanted to address wounds in their lives and in the lives of other men.  THG has put on a number of retreats and workshops for ordinary guys who simply know that they have some kind of pain and rather than continuing to pass it on to the people around them, want for their own sake and the sake of future generations, to do the work of addressing it and transforming it. 

As I sat in the meeting, I brushed the dust off my journal and it to take down some notes.  Instead of writing, I was stunned to stillness, as the words from my time in the desert jumped off the page and into my chest. 

“Die before you die.  Live as if you have only 3-5 years left.”

Could it really be that my sense about how I should live was not just a metaphor but perhaps also an omen?  Was it the cosmos preparing me for a fight which was upon me already?

I remember much of that trip was about me facing my mortality.  Living as if I have 3-5 years to go has a certain significance for me.  It is a short enough of a time frame to make sure that you are making each day, each moment count.  It is short enough that I wouldn’t be preoccupied with 10 and 20 year business or personal plans—I am forced into a more healthy horizon of time.  But it wasn’t so short a time that I can sell everything and take the family on an extended European vacation…3-5 years was long enough that to some level I would have to live in the normal rhythms of work, play, rest, etc, but would do so with a heightened sense of purpose.

It is one thing to live this way when you really believe that in fact you have decades left…it is quite another to have the gift of cancer force you to live into this lifestyle when there is a very good chance that you indeed have only 3-5 years.  And again I’m forced to ponder: was this some divine teaching/preparatory moment, or will this be remembered after I’m dead as some ominous signpost?

Well whatever the meaning, with what has happened since then, I can say that I’ve done my best to experience the prophetic nature of those words…to some level I feel like I’ve died and come back…I’ve let go of my need to be alive here on earth and experienced being more fully alive because of it.

This April, I’m heading back to the same Arizona canyon.  This time however, I’m taking five other men who are brave enough to volunteer for something they know little about, in hopes of encountering the Creator in a way they never have before.  Perhaps you, gentle reader, feel a divine invitation to come too...it may happen.  Mostly I’ll be going back to hold space for these other men.  But there is something more waiting for me in the desert.

At some point during my time, a certain dry creek bed that tumbles down a mountain side will call out to me, and I’ll answer.  I’ll follow its twists and turns upward.  When it deadends in a bottleneck canyon I’ll climb the dry waterfall at the end and continue ever higher, paying attention to see if marks from a previous journey are still there or if they’ve been washed away by a flashflood.  Eventually I’ll find myself sitting on a certain red rock, looking across the canyon at an Apache village, drinking in the paschal mystery seen even in the cactus flowers around me, and staring down at a blank page in the same dusty journal.

...I can't help but wonder: 

What will be whispered through my pen this time?



An Understanding of the Question
Why doesn’t a soul fly when it hears the call?
Fish on the beach always move toward wave-sound.

A falcon hears the drum and brings the quarry home.
Why isn’t every dervish dancing in the sun?
You have escaped the cage. Your wings are stretched out.
Now, fly.

You have slept in sheds and out-buildings so long you think you live there.

How many years, like children, do we have to collect sticks and pieces of broken pottery and pretend they’re valuable?

Leave childhood. Go to the banquet of true human beings. Split open the cultural mould. Put your head up out of the sack.

Hold this book in the air with your right hand. Are you old enough to know right from left?

God said to clarity, Walk.
To death, Help them with discipline.
To the soul, Move into the invisible and take what’s there.

Don’t sing the sadness anymore. Call out that you have been given both the answer and an understanding of the question.

-Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks