There were a bunch of things that came out of my last vision quest but I’m wary of trying to capture them. Some seem like elegant nuggets, they can be named and shared, there is a temptation and a danger in reducing the experience to these.

Other things happened that have a felt impact on me but their meaning is elusive, they have an archetypal resonance that ripples out into my life. Every time I see a skink I think of the skinks on my quest and wonder about the relationship between then and now. I don’t want to reduce the magnificent being of the skink to some kind of lame ‘message’ for me but when I see them it makes me pause, drops me into the deep listening place, shifts the way I am reading my context in that moment.

There is a third category of happening that seemed insignificant at the time but later became intensely meaningful. I wove a crown of lomandra on the first day that represented my relationship with personal power. I initially hung it on a hollowed tree that served as an impromptu altar space but when it started to rain I placed it within the hollow around some banksia cones I had been playing with. Several days later I was describing to my girlfriend how the banksia cones represented the people in my family and how I had tried and failed to find one that represented me. As I was telling her this I suddenly realised that the crown represented me and that placing the crown around the banksia cones was symbolic of my family being cradled by my empowered self. An impulse driven by practicality upon further reflection turned into a symbolic act.

The fourth category is the great mystery itself, things that happened that may well have some kind of meaning that will never be unpacked, never be recognised or known with the conscious mind. Much of the time I was out in the bush I felt bored or sleepy or frustrated, much of the time it felt like nothing was happening, I often hear others describe their quests as largely uneventful. When I walked out of my quest site I cried, when I left the property I cried again, I can’t say why. My body had its own experience, its own mysterious journey, the experience shifted me on a fundamental level and I cannot begin to explain it.

Each of my quests has been a powerful ritual of surrender, to my Self, to the Earth, to the great mystery of which we are all a part. Each quest has seemed to send ripples of experience out in both directions, the things that happen before and after are as important as the time spent in the quest itself.

This last quest was very much about creativity, I suppose it’s obvious from my recent posts that I am quite preoccupied by this at the moment. The Echo of the Shadow was the week before my quest and the Teatro delos Sentidos workshop was the week after. I had powerful dreams of making music, sharing the stage with musical/spiritual heroes of mine. That’s not all it was about but I guess that’s the bit that I’m most interested in. Tonight I take a small step in that direction, I’m playing a gig at my house for a small group of friends to share, for the first time, some songs I’ve written.