Things which matter most must never be
at the mercy of things that matter least.
Goethe

A pilgrimage to a sacred place of power is really a ceremony of returning,  awakening and remembering ourselves back, as Australian Aboriginals say, “into human form”.   It is an archetypal opportunity to remember and sort out what matters most from that which too often in our lives takes priority--that which matters least.  As the Huichol People put it, the pilgrimage is a way to awaken and empower our “iyari”--the heart memory of our indigenous mind. 

The Huichols believe that long ago before time as we know it the divine entities  materialized their being in  physical form--places of power such as mountain tops, deserts, waterfalls, springs, etc, and that journeying to these places offers opportunity to commune with their wisdom.   With this in mind, a group of 16 of us met monthly for a year to prepare ourselves to make a pilgrimage over Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County.  For the local Pomo and Miwok People, the mountain was the home of Coyote who had a ceremonial round house inside its massive body.  Coyote is a Creator and trickster figure for the indigenous peoples of the San Francisco Bay Area and our group studied coyote stories as part of our preparation.  Little did we know what the tricky Coyote had up its sleeve for us!

We gathered for  our pilgrimage at 9am Saturday night August 17th and after a brief check-in, we hoisted up our day packs and set out.  After a short hike down the trail we stopped to enter ceremonial space. We lit candles, purified with smudging, and offered prayers to the spirits of place, the ancestor spirits, to all our helping allies and to the Great Spirit.  Each person did a blessing for another group member. Blessings are like enzymes or chemical catalysts that in a world that is seriously under-blessed, increases the realization of more good to come to life. 

Our goal was to open ourselves to the mountain spirit to learn what it wanted from us--people of Marin who see and use it daily for so many purposes--hiking, picnics, rock-climbing, watching plays, marriage ceremonies, scattering ashes of loved ones and friends, etc. Native People believe that we have the Earth to use but that we have to care for it through ceremonial duties--such as a pilgrimage to pay respect and to “feed” or “give back” to it in sacred reciprocity for all the gifts it feeds us with through its constant “give-away” of beauty, power, teachings, protection, food, shelter, etc.  Thus it will continue to “flower” and we, the people who live with her, will be able to enjoy her many gifts and help sustain its life, and thus also help sustain our lives as well. This constitutes the ”right-relationship” with the creative powers of the universe that sustains life, a cornerstone of indigenous spirituality throughout  the world.

James 5:16--Pray for one another so that you may be healed” ,

The act of pilgrimage is characterized by mindfulness and prayer.  During the year of preparation group members prayed for each other and for the health of  the mountain.  We also made Ceremonial Arrows. Our intention was to open our hearts, minds and bodies seeking to connect and commune with the mountain spirit using the arrows to help us in this process. The Huichols teach that the feathers at the top of the arrow transmit the prayers to the higher deities thereby soliciting their help in bringing the goals of the prayers into fruition.  On the mountain we infused the arrows with our prayers  to spiritually magnetized them so they could gather up the power which lived at the site. The arrows also served as antenna, somewhat like transmission towers to send out  prayers and love to those we were thinking about as we hiked over the 2,600 foot mountain. 

During this time we wanted to be  “love givers” instead  of “fault finders”.  In this way by   sending love out into the world we simultaneously would experience it ourselves  thus helping to heal our own  wounds of separation as we give to others. 

Time on the pilgrimage is an opportunity for “boundary loosening” -- for connecting with the presence of spirit as a living force expressed in nature as alive, conscious and seeking relationship with us as well as us with it.  Thus we tried to open our awareness to all the communication signs and signals that might come our way. This required sensitivity, humility, receptivity and respect for non-human intelligence and non-human means of communication.

To aid my own listening process the morning of the pilgrimage I consulted my Tarot deck (Voyager Tarot.)  I drew the cards of the Four of Cups--Anger, then the Sage of Crystals--the Knower, and finally, the Empress. This was very appropriate because inappropriate anger is one of the reactive forces that I have been seeking to transform for a long time in my life.  For many years I have sought to know, grow and use greater skillfulness in dealing with my anger reactivity and to replace it with the essence of the Empress--the one who guards, protects and preserves life.  The Tarot reading alerted me to reflect on what am I in conflict with when I become angry, as well as what needs to be healed.  To deepen my listening I decided to fast that day and before leaving from my new home in Truckee to meet the pilgrims, took a long run in the woods and mountains soaking in the beauty of the Sierra Nevada. 

Driving down to Marin I looked forward to joining up with my fellow pilgrims and seeing their faces when we met filled me with eager anticipation for our shared adventure that lay ahead.   As we began hiking I felt a wonderful sense of appreciation for everyone and for the year we had shared together.  The night was warm, starlight guided our way and my spirit was high.  We hiked in silence and by agreement, used our night vision deciding that each person would use their head lamp only if needed.  I felt a strong connection with each person and we seemed to meld into one coordinated organism as we slowly made our way up the narrow mountain path through thick woods winding carefully around rocks, roots, bushes and various bumps in the trail.

All was well for the first several hours.  But then we hit a very dense fog bank that had come in from the Pacific and totally blanketed out the starlight.  Between the dense woods and thick fog, it got so dark that I could not literally see my hand held up in front of my eyes.  This of course slowed us down to a snail’s pace.  Without a word being spoken no one turned on their head lamps and we continued on--just very slowwwly.  I had to put my hand lightly on the pack of the person in front of me who seemed to be able to see through the darkness, something my vision was not able to do at all.  I felt a strange sense of peace in surrendering with trust to the person who I was not totally dependent upon and in this way we proceeded accordingly.   Our pace was slowed even more as we traversed steep embankments that a slip down could cause a broken leg or neck or worse.  So going real slow was the only way to go.

This was fine for me, and seemed to work for the others in the group until three or four hours  I hit the bottom of my energy tanks and realized that I had absolutely  no fuel left to draw on.  Between my fasting and earlier mountain run, I had used up my reserves and was now running on “nada”--nothing. I felt totally wasted, had no strength whatsoever, and my backpack was wearing down on me like a ton of bricks.  My experience now shifted from being enjoyable to being an ordeal.  Each step became a struggle and I wanted it to end already. I felt like a small kid on a family car trip who constantly wants to know how much further we have to go before we get there! 

I wanted it to be over already.  I wasn’t enjoying myself and my old anger buttons started to get pushed--at myself for not giving myself enough fuel to meet the demands of the hike, and at others for doing anything that slowed us down.  I just wanted to get there and be done with this “glorious” pilgrimage.  Either that or just lie down and rest until morning when the sun came up.  I wanted to give up, to quit, and collapse into the earth and make everything go away. 

I felt like a total failure and the antithesis of what I had hoped to be experiencing and doing--instead of giving thanks back to the mountain, opening to the spirits, sending out love, I was a cloud of doom darker than the fog which covered us in a dripping thick mass of its weighted mass.  I forgot all my best intentions and only wanted it all to end.  It was at this point that I began to notice that every time I thought the end of the trail was getting closer and that we didn’t have that much further to go, it seemed to mock me and retreat further and further away in the distance.  Time and time again when I thought we were at a landmark that proved we were getting really close, it turned out that I was wrong.  I could swear I heard the trickster coyote laughing his head off at me and what a poor, miserable wreck I was as I tried to put one foot after another and keep going.

That is when I had the thought that this is an elastic trail that keeps expanding every time we get to what I thought should have been the end.  My fatigued mind took off on its own --”I think we’ve entered the twilight zone and we are on a trail that will never end.  We are doomed to keep walking forever and never get there!”.  At first this triggered a panic reaction and I felt total despair.  But then gradually I heard a still small voice that held on to some connection with light offer up these words--”Remember your intention, see what you are in conflict with, notice what needs healing right now and get on with it, Maybe you are right.  Maybe you are on an elastic trail that the coyote keeps pushing backwards every time you approach its end.  Maybe it will never end and you will be hiking on its in the darkness for the rest of your days.  But even if this is the case, you have to find a way to make use of it to some positive outcome for yourself.  Get with it!  Ask the mountain spirit what it wants from you!!”

This message didn’t change any of the externals of the situation,  but it did begin to change my attitude.  It did begin to open my mind to my purpose in being here and so I said a prayer of thanksgiving to the mountain, even to the coyote and I asked what it wanted from me.  Only a few minutes later I got my answer.  It came as a soft voice that seemed to flow out of the fog itself--””REMIND  PEOPLE THAT I AM AliVE ”.   “TELL PEOPLE NOT TO UNDERESTIMATE  MY  POWER!” “. 

I took these messages in and thought about them as I struggled onward up and over the mountain.  Finally we began our descent and after many more hours we finally, at seven twenty in the morning, made it our the parking lot by the ocean where our van awaited. We made it. The soft light of sunrise through the fog felt like a much welcomed bath of soothing energy as we took off our packs and hugged one another in joyous exhaustion.   As we drove over to the house of one of our members that was right on the Bolinas Ridge overlooking the ocean, there to break fast and celebrate our meeting the sea, I thought back over the message from the mountain. 

I saw quite clearly how I had in fact underestimated the power of the mountain and thus had not fully humbled myself to its aliveness.  As a result, I had been busted badly and had to face and be with some of my own shadow darkness, step by step, for the many long hours of our hike.  My struggles didn’t lessen as a result of hearing the voice.  I still had to persevere.  I had to work my “endurance muscles” and it made me think of all the people in history who had to travel by night for their very lives, not just for some voluntarily chosen hike over a mountain such as I was doing.  I thought of the Cherokee People who suffered through many long nights on the Trail of Tears as they were forced to move from their homeland in the southeast and travel through the winter cold on their feet to the new “home” in Oklahoma.  I thought of the Jews traveling by night to try and escape the Nazi’s hunting them down in Europe during WWll.  I thought of all the worlds suffering people trying to escape their war-torn homelands and being hunted down by soldiers, police, dogs, bombs, planes.  

I also thought of a friend who had just died from a life-long illness and all the suffering she had been through, and her husband who had to undergo all his own suffering in watching his wife go through her ordeal that he was powerless to stop.  And so my pilgrimage became a vehicle to work with suffering--both self-imposed suffering, as was mine, along with the suffering that comes in life unasked for and unwanted. 

Sometimes it seems that there is nothing to do but endure through it and try to find a way to make the passage not just tolerable, but to find a way to actually get something positive from it.  Yes, there is the suffering that doesn’t necessarily release or lessen, but there can also be a way to bring forth from its ravages something that furthers life and the felt quality of living it in the moment.  And so on the last stages of the hike I began to see beauty in the gracefull sculpture of undulating tree branches, draw strength from the rocks, take solace in the dark blanket of dripping fog.  Perhaps, I thought to myself, this small suffering I am doing serves the purpose of strengthening the mind-muscles that I need to strengthen so I will be less quick to anger when under stress in the future.  Perhaps, like the mountain spirit said, this will help me to be more humble in the face of the power and aliveness of nature, and to work more skillfully with its moods and manifestations, both within me as well as without.

The next day my back was quite sore and two days later my lower back seized up in extreme pain.  It took several weeks for the pain to subside and as I listened to its message, I got that the mountain pilgrimage served as a doorway, an opening, for a vital piece of work that was very necessary for me to do at this time in my life.  My listening said the I needed to shapeshift some of the key foundation blocks of my being, my center--the opposite side of my body from where the pain was, and replace them with different blocks that made for a healthier foundation.   The building blocks I had to transform were fear, anger and the tendency to try and force things whenever I got my anger and fear buttons pushed.  My trek over Mt. Tamalpais opened the doorway of awareness to work more skillfully, at a foundation level, to replace fear with love, force with faith-filled flow, and anger with inner peace--even in the midst of struggle and suffering.

So that is the new mantra that I am working on now, every day, and when I am conscious, in every way --.I REPLACE FEAR WITH LOVE, FORCE WITH FAITH-FILLED LOVE AND ANGER WITH PEACE.   As I work this process, I am able to stay in better connection and attunement with the presence and power of Great Spirit’s love, be an instrument for its flow through me and into the world, and to better harmonize with the natural world--enjoying its beauty, its teachings and by giving back appreciation and love, walk in more balance with however the mystery of life shows up at any given moment.  I know I am not there yet.  I know this is a pilgrimage I will be walking the rest of my life.  But I walk a bit more awareness that everything is alive, that I am not alone, and that I always have the ability to create a response to whatever comes my way that helps me to find a way to enjoy the path and grow my potentials to their greatest fruition. 

So thank you Sacred Mountain, thank you Coyote, thank you fellow Pilgrims, and thank you Wisdom Elders of Indigenous Medicine Ways that show us the value and power and significance of the Path of Pilgrimage for us modern folks and the challenges we face in today’s world. Long live the sacred places of power and long live the ancient wisdom-ways of right relationship to them so we can open to their teachings for how to live with them in respect, harmony and love. May it be so.