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Trebbe Johnson's Newsletter
September 2009
From Loss: Art and Joy
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Dear Questers, Friends, and Seekers of the Beloved,
One of the participants on the Endless Mountains Vision Quest this past August 3-7 was a woman whose husband had died two years earlier. She had been living in grief ever since and was aware that she harbored conflicts about whether it was even appropriate to emerge from that bleak state. During her one-day solo she had a remarkable experience. What happened to her reaffirmed what I hold to be a singular truth: that even the worst grief and despair can be pierced by beauty, transformation and joy. Transforming loss is the subject of this month's newsletter.
To those who are receiving this newsletter for the first time... welcome! Here you'll find news of upcoming Vision Arrow events, reflections, profiles of extraordinary people, and stories of transformation that occur when we accept, in small, bold, startling ways the invitations that the world is always sending us.
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WALKING AROUND DARKNESS
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 Faith came on the 2009 Endless Mountains vision quest to explore her relationship with grief. Her husband of twenty years had died of pancreatic cancer in 2007, and since then she had lived with oppressive grief. She continued to work, published a book of poetry about her relationship with her husband, and is the primary caretaker of her young grandson. However, she has been not only unable but even somewhat unwilling to find her way back from mourning.
On the first morning of the quest, when the group did a "medicine walk" (to find nature's "medicine" for personal healing), she found herself attracted to a dense Scotch pine woods that had been planted in the 1930s as a Christmas tree plantation but never thinned. As a result the woods are very dark, and all but the uppermost branches of the trees are dead. Sitting in this "forest of the dead," Faith looked at the periphery of light in the hardwood forest beyond and found that she was reluctant to move into it. If she abandoned the grief, she realized, she felt she would also be abandoning her husband.
Originally, she had wanted to participate in a longer ten-day vision quest, with a four-day fast and three-day solo, and she wondered if anything "major" could happen on a solo of only twenty-four hours. She was already skeptical about such things as mystical experiences and visions. After her first unexpected and seemingly coincidental pull to the "forest of the dead," she expected that during her time alone, she would simply focus on the different allures of light and dark and practice walking in and between them.
The day after the solo the group sat under a great white pine and the fasters told their stories. When it was her turn, Faith looked a little sheepish. Something had happened that even she was finding difficult to believe. She told us that she had set up her tarp in a place in the woods between a dark forest and a light, open area. In front of it she created a half circle and made an altar on the flat stone before it. Beyond was a pine that struck her as powerfully alive, and she named it the Gatekeeper of Silence and Measured Words. She spent many hours sitting in the center of her half circle facing the altar and the pine tree and welcoming the silence. It had been a pleasant, restful day, but nothing much had happened.
In the middle of the night, after she had awakened and had gone to sit again at the center of things, Faith felt the presence of a figure emerging from the darkness. He asked if he could sit with her, and she obliged. The visionary figure sat cross-legged before her informed her that she had called him. He then told her that she could not stay in the darkness any longer. It was time for her to spread joy.
This powerful and unexpected message made her both incredulous and utterly determined to follow the counsel she had been given. She returned home with a plan to begin the journey back to the light by cleaning out the clutter of the past in her home and to invite back in the friends she had been unable to be with in her grief.
To purchase Faith Vicinanza's book of poetry, Husband, contact her directly.
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PUPPETS WITH A MISSION
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 The Balinese people deal with personal stress and tragedy quietly, within the community, the banjar, and through the rich, complex cycle of ceremony that is intrinsic to everyday life. But after the nightclub bombing in Kuta in October 2002, many people began to show signs of post traumatic stress disorder.
Rucina Ballinger, an American-born dancer who is married to a Balinese man and has lived in Bali since 1974, got the idea of organizing a special wayang kulit, a Balinese shadow puppet play, to address the tragic event and suggest through story a way of dealing with it. She contacted I Made Sidia, a puppeteer (dalang) who was known for the incisive political commentary he inserted into his performances. For this special wayang Sidia made several innovations. He used Microsoft Power Point to create a colorful, illuminated background instead of relying only on the traditional oil lamp. He also extended the length of the screen, making it so wide that the dalangs had to scoot across it on skateboards to make their puppets cover the entire expanse. He even created several entirely new puppets out plastic, instead of paper, so they were more flexible.
All Balinese shadow puppet stories come from classical religious literature, such as the Ramayana or Upanishads. The story Sidia chose was "Dasa Nama Kerta" (The Ten Names of Peace"). In it the god Sanghyang Siwa, who been living in isolation in a graveyard as a demon, starts missing his wife, whom he has banished to earth. When he returns to join her, however, he meets up with a pack of lesser demons and bands with them to wreak havoc on the world. The worried gods, Wisnu, Brahma, Iswara, and Barong (a mythical beast who looks something like a cross between a Pekinese and a caterpillar), put an end to the destruction by changing themselves into dancers and puppeteers. The beauty of their art so enchants Siwa and his cohorts that they forget their destructive ways. The characters also included people who had lost loved ones in the bombing. Two clowns appeared to listen to their stories and comfort them.
"In this Wayang," Rucina wrote in an article about the event in Inside Indonesia Magazine, "we are reminded that demons live within each and every one of us and we must confront and conquer them.... By lending a concerned ear, we can help restore people's faith, give them back their will to live."
Adapting a traditional art which already had imbued within its timeless form many lessons for living, and directing it gently but specifically to an issue devastating to an entire culture, "Dasa Nama Kerta" enabled people to see the bombing as something that was both part of the cosmic pattern of good and evil and as tragedy that was not their own fault. At the end, the dalang reminded people to nurture and keep in balance the ten elements of peace: earth, water, fire, wind, plants animals, fish birds, humans and gods, or things will get out of control.
Rucina Ballinger is one of our guides on the Bali From Within journey.
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RADICAL JOY FOR HARD TIMES NEWS
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I discovered a great new blog recently... intelligent, witty, and extremely thought-provoking. It's called Ecology Without Nature, by Timothy Morton. The most recent posting is a reflection on American front lawns. A lawn, according to Morton, announces to neighbors: "I am an uncanny repetition of you, my space has no decoration, I am not feminine, I am a non-feminine being, I have crew-cut grass, don't walk on it please, look but don't touch, this is private property, keep off, but admire by all means, look at this big empty space with nothing alive on it, it's a symbol of the flat green stuff in my wallet..."
Morton is professor of English Literature and the Environment at University of California, Davis. He has a new book, also called Ecology Without Nature, which I have just ordered.
The new posting in my own blog, Radical Joy for Hard Times, discusses how the ancient Persian story of the lovers, Majnun and Layla, has something to teach us about a new approach to living with an ecologically damaged earth.
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RADICAL NATURE EXHBITION
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 When I was in London in June I went to an exhibit, "Radical Nature," at the Barbican Centre. The show brings together artists, photographers, filmmakers, and visionary activists whose work both reflects the serious problems that the natural world is facing and proposes solutions--one of which, of course, is the creation of art itself.
I was particularly struck by Mark Dion's "Mobile Wilderness Unit," which greets visitors as soon as they enter the museum. A taxidermally stuffed wolf stands on a small two-wheeled trailer with a representative sampling of foliage stuck around it. The piece reminds us how easy it is to try to understand and even love nature that we parcel into small, comprehensible bits. In truth, those fractions of nature are cut off from the whole bioregion on which they depend for survival. Hence they are artificial.
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BOOK AND WORKSHOP NEWS
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Order my book, The World Is a Waiting Lover, with a foreword by Thomas Moore, author of Careof the Soul, from Amazon.com or from your favorite bookstore.
See my article, "Without Heart You Have Nothing" in the current Parabola. It's about the ancient paths that the nomadic Tuareg use to move through the Sahara and the inner path of Ashek, Tasaidert, and Ull that guides their lives.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS
Sept. 5, 10 AM-1 PM
Radical Joy for Hard Times: Meeting with the Bees
Denville, NJ
A gathering at an apiary to explore the complex and mysterious lives of honeybees, currently undergoing mass deaths worldwide due to a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Focus on what the ways of the bees have to tell us, and honor them and their compatriots throughout the Earth
For more information, contact Trebbe
September 11-18
What Now? You've Changed, The World Has Changed, Has Your Vision Changed
With Eugene Hughes and Trebbe Johnson
Nantahala Forest and Joyce Kilmer Memorial old-growth Forest, NC
$950
Whether you've been on a vision quest and received a vision of who you are and what you need to do in your life to feed your own joy and the world's hunger, or whether you have been gripped by another kind vision of how you long to serve your world...
There comes a time when even the clearest and most scintillating of visions needs to be re-examined. Maybe the vision you once had feels too big for you. Maybe it doesn't feel big enough. Maybe you feel it belongs to a former You who has now changed. And yet... the vision remains so intimate and alive. What to do?
What Now? Offers an opportunity for visionaries to gain clarity on who you are and how you can refine your vision so it responds to your needs and the needs of our changing planet. Plus, you will meet others with the same concerns and so develop a network of mutual support.
September 22 and 29, and October 6 and 13
Upside of the Downturn
Join our fourth round table session and explore your relationship with money as an old ally that probably needs a new job assignment. $85 for four one-hour telephone conference call sessions. Limited to six people: four places left.
January 2-23, 2010
Sahara Camel Caravan and Vision Quest
Southern Algeria and northern Niger
If you're interested in the Sahara camel caravan and vision quest, it would be a good idea to sign up now. We take a maximum of 12 people, and we already have eight paid registrations. For a registration form, contact me.
March 9-21, 2010
Bali From Within
Next year our one-of-a-kind trip to Bali is timed so we can participate in the three-day Balinese new year, Nyepi. Nyepi begins with everyone in the village chasing huge papier maché monsters out of town, continues with a day of reflection, and ends with an evening of mingling with friends and eating on the street. The trip, as usual, also includes visits with Balinese artists, a gamelan musician, village priest; hikes in the forest; a blessing ceremony at the sacred spring Tirta Empul, and many other events visitors rarely have a chance to engage in up close.
For a complete list of programs offered by Vision Arrow, see our website.
Call 570 727 4272 or email Trebbe if you have questions or would like to talk about any of these programs.
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