(Names of the questers and guides have been changed for privacy)

The journey begins before the sojourner might anticipate—at a luncheon in Minneapolis, a fundraiser for some young women who completed a year’s worth of training in a Women’s Rite of Passage. They are raising funds to complete their final ceremony in Tulum, Quintana Roo, Mexico. Still on my juice fast in preparation for my Vision Quest, I enjoy meeting these young women, and touching on a piece within me that calls me to be a teacher or mentor to more women coming of age, to look inside themselves for their power, not without themselves into pop culture.A potluck dinner follows that evening.

As my husband and I leave for the airport, the men and women shower me with fresh flowers and a beautiful parting song to carry in my heart on the airplane to New Mexico. With a 45-minute wait ahead of me in the terminal, I sit serenely at the gate, empty seats on both sides of me, awaiting the boarding call. Within 10 minutes of being there, I watch CNN on the airport television. Larry King interviews Peter Jennings with his usual directness. Jennings speaks about his lung cancer diagnosis. In the corner of my eye, I spy this giant of a man (6′3″…linebacker-type body) approach the gate counter…he carries himself well and I think, he is a man of integrity and confidence. I return my attentions to Larry King when I hear this voice behind me say with light sarcasm, “This is JUST making national news, now? That smoking kills?” And the man I spied earlier sits next to me. Our conversation moves from the news.”Do you live in Albuquerque?” he asks.”No, I live in Wisconsin. Madison.”"Ah, quite the liberal town.” We share some common knowledge of my home town.”Well then what are you going to New Mexico for?” “Oh, I’m going up by Abiquiu. I’ll be camping out on the land.” A small voice in me wonders why I am revealing what I do to this stranger, but I feel totally at ease with him. My reticence to reveal everything lies more in my fear of being judged.”So what’s with the bear?”I’m wearing my zuni-shaped silver bear pendant. “Oh, it found me. This was given to
me by a friend.”"That’s right. No one ever asks for bear. Bear always finds you, and it won’t let you forget it. My dad’s our tribal shaman up by Taos, and he has strong bear medicine.”I then give him a shortened version of my bear experiences the summer before in north central Wisconsin…in life and dreaming.”You know you’re in bear country in New Mexico, right?” he adds. “Really? I somehow think of only armadillos and cougars down here.”"There are a lot of bears in the mountains. Hey, be sure and stop in Santa Fe at Keshi…it’s just off the town square. It’s an artists’ co-op. You need to honor our bears and pick up a bear fetish…and keep him in a handmade leather medicine bag…not some China knock-off.” He pauses, and then says, “You’re coming to New Mexico to just go camping? You know someone there?” he questions.”Okay, I’m going there for a Vision Quest,” I finally blurt.Without hesitation, he says, “Who’s your teacher?” “WhiteEagle.”"Do you know her? You gotta be careful…lots of wackos out there offering this kind of stuff.”"I’ve been training with her for two years, and I trust her.”The airlines calls us to board the plane…our seats are not together, so it is the last we speak to one another.

Awaits

After arriving in Albuquerque, I meet with Bob and Sandy at the Hertz car rental. We are three of the six who will be out on the land that last week in April. Our correspondence over travel arrangements the preceding months merges our flight times for a stay in Albuquerque at a hotel late Saturday night and joint car rental for the drive up to Abiquiu the next day.Bob and Sandy are fabulously intense people. Both of them have been through Coach training and neither has worked with WhiteEagle before. They tell me they heard about her through others in Coach training. Most of our drive north fills the windshield with rain, which cocoons us in a way that by mid-day on Sunday, we manage to know some of the most intimate details of one another’s lives. We stop in downtown Santa Fe, (despite warnings from the woman at the convenience store who says everything is closed Sunday morning) where I pick up my bear fetish at Keshi (kee-shee).

The staff fill us with great lore about the co-op itself, and tell us about the individual artists’ whose work we picked out.After perusing more stores and eating lunch, and viewing some sun peeking out from the clouds, we head north to Abiquiu. Seventeen miles down the wrong road, we realize we took the wrong turn out of Espanola. Taos is only 30 miles ahead. Yes, I am the navigator! I find us a road which avoids us going all the way back to our missed turn, Once back on the main highway, fierce winds blow the rain hard against the car. This is only a tease for what is to come.We arrive at WhiteEagle’s land just short of her request that we be there by 4 pm. With light rain on and off and gusty winds, we pitch our tents around her trailer she fondly refers to as Tatonka. She requests we walk the land a bit to pick where we want to pitch our tent in the morning. It fully sinks in that I will reside in the same spot, about 40 feet in diameter, for the next four days, not walking the land as my imagination had teased. I am up against my first real edge of ’staying put’.To give a little background, WhiteEagle and her husband, Lee, bought a 10-acre parcel of land, west of the Abiquiu Dam and edged in the northwest by a deep canyon cradling the Rio Chama. Ten acres to the west of their land was set aside for a dream of community housing and ten acres to the west of that hosts an adobe home being built by “the grandparents”: RainbowHawk and Wind Eagle, who were the ones who trained WhiteEagle in Keepership for 15 years. This land has been overgrazed by free roaming cattle and in drought for many years. WhiteEagle says people told them they were crazy to buy here…that they would not have water. And even a year after the land was purchased, before any building began, most of the piñon trees were devasted by a beetle. However, it was a reminder of the cycles of life, that returning this land to its natural habitat/vegetation (removing the cattle) would bring back balance. WhiteEagle calls her place Land of Shining Stone. It is here, for centuries, that tribes agreed to hold no war. The land reveals the abundance of chert used for making tools (and likely weapons, too). Most of what we see revealing itself after each rain are the white glints of chips that were scoured from each spearhead, hammerhead and hide scraper.We eat an abundant meal that evening, and as the rains increase, we seek shelter inside Tatonka to string our beads (one person speaks at a time, using a talking stick) and use tobacco to put prayers into a pipe for our final pipe ceremony.There are nine of us: WhiteEagle, six (three men, three women) to go out on separate quests: myself, Bob, Sandy, Rose (who struggles with altitude sickness that first night), Jeff and Jeffrey, and two guides: Susan and Blaine.We weather strong winds and rains throughout the night, and in a pocket of dryness in the morning, pack up the tents. Throughout the night I wonder about Bob, who I know to be new to camping, and he borrowed a Eureka tent from a friend–one that was not really set up for resisting driving rains or harsh elements. He tells us that morning, over hot oatmeal and tea, that his sleeping bag is soaked. Over side conversations, we exchange extra items that some of us brought, and others forgot, like rain pants, gloves or fleece. Last night’s chill helps us decide with what we can survive (or not).After breakfast we each trek to our site where we will be alone for the next four days, except for one or two visits each day by WhiteEagle, and the morning and evening food offerings from our guide (Susan is the guide for the women).

Shimmering with the Old Ones

I hold the expectation that myself and one other person are there to create a Journey Shield while the others will do something different (what it would be, I do not know). I learn at the end that we all worked on our Journey Shields, and that this was a nurturing type quest (as we were given food and water).

On the first day I set up camp, defining my space and sitting with the land, getting comfortable. WhiteEagle stops by to show me the boundary around my tent, and gives me two oranges. She says in the mornings, my guide, Susan, will bring my breakfast of cooked grain, fresh fruit and hot tea, plus two oranges to eat throughout the day. She will bring a light supper with hot tea at the end of the day. Upon nearing the space, the guides cannot meet our eyes to respect our prayerful intentions.

Staying put for four days remains a big edge for me, and it really shifts a lot of perspectives in me, one being thoughts I have about prisoners…who cannot leave their domain…for years. I begin menstruating while there (as I did when I had my ‘Dreaming Bear’ experience the summer before!). WhiteEagle knew about this ahead of time, and her response was the veils are thinner between worlds for a woman during her moon time. She added I might perhaps have a stronger questing time. Her teachings do not preclude women from participating.

There is one day of calm, warm, sunny weather, and the evening that follows is a night of pure pleasure sleeping under the Star Nation, talking with the moving bear constellations, and being awakened by the yips and croonings of the coyote. The rest of the time the winds gust, I am sure, up to 45 mph; the temperatures plummet below freezing at night (my 20 degree sleeping bag, I find out, is not keeping me warm), and the periodic rains have me keeping most of my things inside the tent. I maintain an indoor and outdoor altar–the outdoor rock and wood altar holds still in these winds.
I learn about the ‘zen’ of wind gusts…that is…tucked inside my tent, rain fly zipped to the ground…each wind gust brushes a handful of sand under my west rain fly and sifts it through the screen of my tent, filling my journal with a fine cover of earth. Through my unzipped screen on the right, I dust off my journal onto the ground to begin writing another sentence. This process repeats itself for HOURS.
We learn later from WhiteEagle that some local ranchers stopped by to see what was going on. When she told one she was holding the space for those in Vision Quest, he told her there must be some great work going on as he was in his 60s and had not seen weather like this since he was a small boy.

I speak with the ancient junipers often. Did you know a tree takes ALL DAY to breathe in (carbon dioxide/photosynthesis) one breath and ALL NIGHT to breathe out its one breath of oxygen? I can never look at a tree the same way anymore.

On the day of the intense gusting winds, when I could no longer bear being inside my tent…I sit on my ‘couch’…a stone ledge overlooking a far off canyon that I held in a meditation 1-1/2 years earlier (which is why I pick this particular spot for my Quest). I sit there for quite some time when these words grace my consciousness:
“Humans will always abandon us because they are human, and that is okay. We are always learning. But the Mother Earth will never abandon us, as long as we don’t abandon her.”

For just one minute, those howling winds came to a complete standstill; chills run up and down my body, and I think…do I have the power to make these winds stop in order to hear this message? I still hold doubt about this incident and when I speak of it later with WhiteEagle, she simply says, “You DO have the power.”

In the Journey Shield process, there is much beauty in rewriting my history. I pick some key changing points in my life, and rewrite what good came out them. One piece of this is to highlight the beginnings and endings in my life…and when I mention to WhiteEagle that there are not a lot of ‘endings’ in my life (one just moves on rather than acknowledges something has ended)…she has me make a list of those events and people I have not said goodbye to, and then call them in, one by one (alive or dead) and say good bye, cut the ties. This was one of the most powerful, emotional pieces of work I’ve ever done.
By the end of the quest, I have a new life story to claim with Mother Life. What a gift She gave me to feel reborn, to reclaim my soul as a creative, powerful, loving, compassionate, discerning woman.

Four days, four nights, of living with the Mother, without the distractions of daily life, remains one of the most powerful life events I experience in 44 years. It was difficult to say good-bye to the Land of Shining Stone, the land that so lovingly nurtured me into new beginnings.