Steering by Starlight
“What the theologian shrinks from, the poet grasps intuitively.”
Once upon a time, I lived in a golden age of mountains and lakes, horses and adventures, lazy nights spent gazing into a campfire and long days spent in the saddle and playing hard with my friends.
I was lean and strong and brazen, full of spit and fire and rebellion. I would sit on the corral fence in the evening and smoke cigars with my friends, which was against the rules, and hide beers in the toilet tank where they would keep cool so we could drink them when no-one was watching. Which was even more against the rules. The things we did during that time, will live on as lore in my mind until I am an old woman. I was so happy then, no phone, no email address, no way to reach me at all, unless I wanted to be reached.
One day, during these golden years, my buddy Sven and I were sitting on the porch looking at the spectacular view of the Rocky Mountains in the distance, chewing sunflower seeds, expertly spitting the shells over the balcony rail and drinking coke, when a plan started to hatch between us. ‘What if’, we said to each other, ‘we went and got a couple of horses and rode bareback to Brynn’s’? Brynn was a cowboy-poet who had a place deep into the forest about a three hour ride to the west of the Lodge where we were. The reason we thought this would be fun, is that it would kind of be a dare. It really isn’t smart to go on a three hour ride without a saddle. For one, its way easier to get bucked off if your horse spooks. Secondly, there is no way of carrying water or food, matches or a flashlight or anything to shelter under if you need to, or even a first aid kit. Up until this day, I hadn’t gone further than under an hour away bareback, and what we were proposing was a six hour return journey. Naturally, this pushing-the-envelope of sanity and safety was 95% of the appeal. The other 5% was how fun it would be to us to surprise Brynn. At this point in the day, it was about 3pm. We figured if we got going right away we would arrive right in time for supper and surprise him, and he would likely be amused at two spontaneous dinner guests and feed us, then send us home. The sun was still high in the northern sky, and it seemed like an excellent way to spend an afternoon. So we sauntered down to the barn, picked out the shortest and fattest horses in our herd to ensure the maximum amount of butt-comfort, threw halters and bridles on them, mounted up and set off in the general direction of Brynn’s place. Sven was a local, who had grown up in that part of the country, he knew it well. We spent a blissful and peaceful afternoon traversing gorgeous alpine foothill country, along the Red Deer river, through a number of various people’s properties, until finally we rolled into Brynn’s yard, grinning from ear to ear and starving hungry for a hot meal.
Brynn was as surprised as he would ever show through his giant handlebar moustache and grizzly beard, standing in his ranch-yard in his long-johns, a flannel shirt and his riding jeans. He never really knew who I was, or if he did, he did a good job of hiding it. I was just a foreigner, a blow in – though I had been there for close to five years at this point. But Sven’s parents were old friends of his, so he welcomed us in and fed us. To our great delight, another old friend was there visiting at the same time. The four of us sat around the kitchen table, and then on the porch laughing ourselves silly and regaling each other with tall tales of runaway mules, grizzly bears and other such mountain-lore. There came a quiet pause, around 9pm which is cowboy bedtime, where the two older guys looked over at us quietly and one of them said, as kind of an afterthought, “well I suppose you’ll be wanting to head off back now”. If they noticed Sven and I glance at each other with a look of alarm, they didn’t let on. We had completely forgotten that we still had a 3 hour return journey, bareback, ahead of us, and it was now pitch black, a moonless summer night.
“We pasted on our bravado thick, and sauntered out into the evening air, saying goodbye as breezily as we could manage. As we swung back up and headed into the dark, leaving the warm glow of Brynn’s place behind us, the two of us became very quiet. I was thinking my thoughts, which were mostly about cougars and not having a saddle.”
I have no idea what Sven was thinking. I assumed he was concentrating on picking out our trail home. About an hour into this companionable silence, in the pitch-black forest and the cold mountain night air, I said to him quietly, ‘you know the way back, right?’
I saw his dirty-white cowboy hat whip around fast in the dark, and the alarm in his voice was palpable, ‘I thought you were leadin’!’.
‘Me?! I’m not from around here, I’ve got no idea where we are. I was following you!’
‘You were following me? I have no idea where we are going!’
This was the moment, I think, that the terror gripped me. We had been riding side by side, each of us thinking the other was leading. Both horses plodding along together. There were no lights to be seen, anywhere on the horizon, as remote as we were deep in the Alberta hinterlands. This was the moment that I wished I knew how to navigate by starlight, as I learned ancient peoples had done. We couldn’t even hear the river, which would have given us a western boundary to work with and a sure, albeit longer, path home. We knew we were only a short way into a long journey, and had no idea whether we were even headed in the right direction.
The temptation to panic was real, in this moment. If something happened and one or both of our horses bolted or bucked, we would be screwed. This was well before the days of helmets, we didn’t even have jackets or any water to drink. I think this was the moment I became someone who plans ahead.
This moment, right here.
What happened next was that we got real scared. The kind of scared you can’t hide from another person. I don’t remember who’s idea any of this was, but in the end, we decided our best strategy was to lay the reins down over the horses necks and hope they would get us home if we stopped directing them. We then rode even closer together, held hands and sang hymns at the top of our voices to try and keep the cougars away.
Four hours later when our horses stumbled wearily into the wan light cast by the sole globe we had left on outside the round saddle-house, I shot Sven a sideways glare and with all the stern aggression I could muster in my weak-kneed relief to be alive and home safe, I promised him, this boy who had been like a brother to me, that if he ever breathed a word of the fact I had held his hand that night I would skin him alive. I never saw any sniggering, so I think he held his end of the bargain, and the statute of limitations on that night is now over so I’m coming clean.
“There is a kind of danger like that, an honest kind, that brings your psyche to the precipice of immediate threat, forcing you to look it in the eye and start to make the kind of awful contingencies that you never imagined you would have to consider. To have a friend by your side in these moments is a blessing indeed. This story, though truly terrifying at the time, is a lovely fond memory for me now. Another testament to my foolhardy, adventurous early life which reminds me that I have been fortunate enough to squeeze more into my four decades that most.”
There are other kinds of danger, however, that cannot be discerned in the moment; it is only later in hindsight that the horror creeps up the back of the neck and you realise how bad it was. There is the hidden kind, for example, which functions like a landmine. The kind where no one tells you that you are in an emergency, or in danger. And so your capacity to protect yourself is rendered useless. This kind of landmine-danger gets implanted deep inside the psyche and emotional body of existence, and the brain begins to split off from itself in order to protect our survival, in order to make sure the body can still live. These dangers are like cancers, causing cellular, DNA level damage, which can often not be detected until it is too late. When they explode, they have a habit of creating volcanic or nuclear-level catastrophic damage. They are dishonest, hidden or secretive dangers that function like tiny rudders, giving our subconscious and energy fields certain codes for behaviours, choices and templates for life which we cannot know or see or understand until well after the detritus has cleared from the explosion.
I have become a forensic investigator of hidden dangers, having thoroughly explored all the honest danger I could sniff out in the first two decades of my life, of which the story I’ve told here in this post is an excellent example. I now realise that I sought out dangerous situations, put myself in them repeatedly, in order to crack my psyche open to the hidden dangers I could sense but not yet name. I have learned to observe splatter patterns of harm and fallout from those hidden dangers, and chart commonalities. I’ve learned this by investing in a lot of my own therapy, reading and listening to wise elders who know more than me, and being privileged enough to have others share their most painful and private life stories with me. I have learned to discern where the fibres of bone and marrow meet at the intersection of spiritual abuse and underlying mental illness. I have deeply studied the connection between evil and stupidity, and noticed how the capacity for addiction often indicates a commensurate capacity for spiritual power and awareness. I have made detailed notes about where intent ends and consequences begin, where family of origin patterns lay the groundwork for enabling harm, and where that groundwork overlaps with the safety and survival of individual members. I have mapped the subtle but discernible differences between a psychotic break and a spiritual awakening. I have circumnavigated the delicate meeting place between shamanic power, spiritual anointing and energetic intelligence. I have learned that one usually precedes the others, and that if they are not tethered strongly into a robust mind, humble spirit and teachable heart, they will create a Frankenstein-esque monster capable of untold destruction.
Whilst I am doing my best here, this terrain is beyond the language that I have available to me at this point in my life. It is not, however, beyond experiential knowing anymore. To be clear, I never would have willingly chosen to map these dynamic and powerful inner landscapes as thoroughly as I have. I was invited into this work as a critical puzzle piece to find when it was time to bring about my own integration and healing. I came to this work the same way I suspect others come to it, in the archetypal pattern of Chiron, the wounded healer. What I have discovered in this process, is that the only way to stay in the sweet-spot of healing and freedom from hidden danger, is to remain in utter submission to the energetic dance. This requires on the one hand, a quiet and disciplined mastery of my own inner life, and on the other, to live every part of my life the same way I found my way home that night, by paying attention to my five senses in the darkness, trusting the process will deliver me exactly where I need to end up, leaning into the wisdom of my body in partnership with all of creation, and letting go of all illusions of control. Richard Rohr calls this ‘the way of the monkey, and the way of the kitten.’
Ultimately, I have learned that letting go of the illusion of control has been the hardest lesson to learn, but also the most enriching one to master. Once we let go of controlling outcomes, we become breathtakingly free. I honestly didn’t know how relaxing life could be, until I made ‘letting go’ a way of being, a permanent state, rather than a time-bound practice – which is what we learn through meditation, prayer, yoga, mindfulness or other kinds of relaxation techniques. It turns out, it is possible to live in a permanent state of that kind of bliss which we learn to enter into by spiritual or mindfulness practices. A word of warning about this however; I did discover that things got a little – *ahem* – shall way say ‘loose’ once I began to live like this all the time. Like, it is now fairly common for me to forget meetings or appointments, or even to check my diary, forget to buy food or fuel, miss turns on the map and end up lost – or other basic life-skills. Once I realised that my new blissed-out approach to life was turning me into a scatterbrain, I had to begin to put things in place. I automated all of my bills, for example. I set up subscriptions to things I need to buy regularly – like hair products and coffee beans. I use Siri to set alarms all the time. “Siri, set an alarm for 4pm. Call it ‘call Elijah’s teacher back’.” Putting life-scaffolding in place is infinitely easier than living in a permanent state of cortisol flooding and stress, which is how I managed to pull off a ‘productive’ and ‘organised’ vibe from the ages of 10 – 41. I like living a little free-range, playfully with hands-off the reins. I like the feeling of having my brain finally rest and the expansive sense that there is enough time, enough space, enough internal and external support to go around and that I am being masterfully held, seen and loved by my Beloved. I don’t see it like an excuse to wriggle out of my responsibilities, like I might have in my twenties. Now it just feels like grace in each moment. Now it feels like my secret superpower. Like exactly what I need will show up exactly when it is needed and not a moment before. I think, on the other side of forensically studying both honest and hidden dangers within and without, that I have been invited into a second naiveté.
Isn’t life surprising like that? In a million years, I never could have predicted that healing from the nuclear fallout left by my own silent and hidden landmines which lay dormant for three decades could have delivered me here. It is evidence, as if I needed more, of the scandalous grace of the goodness of Divine which shines – like the sunset over the farmland around me tonight – on everything, without discriminating. I will never get over this, never get used to it. Never stop being in awe at the wonder and the beauty now available to me. The price I had to pay to get here was worth it.
It was all worth it.
It has become my evening practice to sit my chair outside in my backyard and watch the stars appear every evening. Their orderly and liturgical appearance remind me that the pattern, the timeline and the scope of the picture we live in is so much more complex, beautiful, ancient and more powerful than I had ever imagined, than I had ever been taught. I crossed long ago over the thresholds which were proscribed and described to me by my teachers of old, the well-meaning pastors in their Sunday pulpits preaching their Calvanistic behaviour modification, quoting their leadership books veneered with Jesus, their conditional, limited scope of Divine. The more I grasp of this new limitless horizon before me, the more beautiful the Logos – the Christ Consciousness – appears to me, and the more powerfully aligned I become with the frequency of unconditional love; the Divine energy which holds it all together. Going to church and learning about Jesus was my gate into this place, and for that, I will always remain grateful. Jesus did describe himself as the gate for the sheep, and he has delivered on this esoteric riddle for me, time and time again.
My other practice has become re-membering my love of play and adventure which was slowly killed inside me through the vicissitudes of life, and as a grueling consequence of repeated self-abandonment. Play comes through joy which flows easily through a healed and integrated soul, psyche and heart, and this has profoundly shifted the way I now parent. As I am writing this piece, I have just spent a glorious week on holidays with my boys, my baby sister and her little guy. Swimming in freshwater dams, exploring beautiful forests, eating, resting, talking and playing together. The more I play with them, the closer we become. My eldest is now at the age I was when I had my baptism of fire, and I have been paying even closer attention to what my boys notice, see, know and hear. Because they do so without the kind of transmission interference adolescence and adulthood bring with it. The things they teach me, astound me. The more deeply I listen and respond to them, the clearer it becomes to me what they need from me, which puzzle piece I give them next, and the hungrier they are for this kind of spiritual and soulful learning. As this new, positive cycle of increasing respect, listening and attunement grows between the three of us, I notice they are getting softer, more empathetic, more resilient, more courageous, more confident. They are feeding back to me their intuitive sensing, knowing and experiments with responding to it, and I get to help them reflect on what they notice, and how they can shift and align with this energy flowing through their veins, and how they can put language to it. I honestly didn’t realise parenting could be so rich. When I stuff up, they tell me truthfully, and are also able to name how the remedy needs to look. The upshot of this divine dance is that I am more powerfully tuned into them than I ever have been before, and they are filled with a kind of heartbreaking grace for my many shortcomings, which humbles and silences me.
My hope for them is that their dangers will be honest, that they will see them coming.
My hope for them is that the hidden landmines which have exploded in me will have shifted the landscape that they walk on permanently.
My hope for these boys of mine is that their own scope for adventure is immeasurably widened and deepened by a growing fearlessness which is their divine birthright, their natural way of being and the resonance of their original blessing.
And so it is, and so it is, and so it is.