Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
As I mentioned earlier, there were four rounds in the sweat lodge: The first round was for calling in the ancestors and spirits. The second round was for praying. The third round was for healing. And the final round was the “going home” round. At the beginning of each round, ...
Posted in Four Directions | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009
Meeting in Circle with the Wilderness Guides Council
Fire is the element of the east, the direction of springtime. When I first sat in circle at the Wilderness Guides Council, on Monday, April 13, I deliberately sat in the east. This is a part of the wheel that I am least ...
Posted in Four Directions, Vision Fast | 1 Comment »
Monday, May 4th, 2009
I wasn't always a happy camper at the 4th International Wilderness Guides Gathering, held in Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains this April. Previous gatherings have been held in Germany, South Africa, and the UK. People from these countries attended, and many more besides. The gathering was hosted by the Wilderness Guides Council, ...
Posted in Vision Fast | 2 Comments »
Sunday, April 12th, 2009
I seem to be a little reluctant to make the turn into spring. So here's one last look at the winter of '08. This is my sister Katherine, shoveling snow off the roof of her shed in Horsefly, BC. This picture was taken in March! That's a lot of snow. ...
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Thursday, March 19th, 2009
Next vision fast: July 5 - 11, 2009 at Monkey Valley
This week I had the great pleasure of giving a presentation on the vision fast to the Vancouver chapter of the Society for Technical Communication. Our March STC program was a Pecha Kucha event, in which speakers each discuss 20 slides for ...
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Sunday, November 16th, 2008
When you are on a vision fast or medicine walk, you enter into a mystical realm where all events and encounters take on a significance that is bigger than what most of us experience in ordinary waking life. During this time, an encounter with an animal is not just a ...
Posted in Vision Fast, Wild Nature | 1 Comment »
Friday, September 12th, 2008
Indian ice cream—a gift from the land
At the August vision fast at Monkey Valley, the spot where our council circle met had some translucent reddish-orange berries that looked very succulent. I licked one and found it to be very bitter. The faster asked what they were, but I didn't know, and ...
Posted in Recipes, Vision Fast, Wild Nature | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
Cultural misappropriation of sacred ceremony
Cultural misappropriation is a danger in adopting traditional ceremonies for contemporary use. It is true that peoples on every continent have used solo time in nature for spiritual purposes. It is a human birthright—a way of connecting directly to the natural world and to deeper realms ...
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Sunday, September 7th, 2008
A rite of passage
Peoples of many cultures have created traditions and ceremonies involving solo time in wild nature. In North America, the plains peoples are the most well-known groups to use the ancient practice of the vision quest. John Murray recounts, in editors Michael Tobias and Georgianne Cowan's The Soul ...
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Monday, August 4th, 2008
Monkey Valley Retreat Centre has hosted vision fasts, medicine wheel teachings, teachings of ecopsychology practices, medicine walks, inquiry groups, and, of course, many gatherings of family and friends, too.
In the summer of 2008, the grandmothers and grandfathers of this land greeted a vision faster, perhaps for the first time in many ...
Posted in Programs | 4 Comments »