The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved

By Trebbe Johnson

Johnson explores the concept of the Beloved — the elusive, alluring force that beckons us forth to passionate engagement with the world — and shows how our sense of love is often linked to something far greater than ourselves. She explains that mistaking a human lover for the inner, eternal Beloved is the first step in any romance, yet the ability to distinguish between the two ultimately holds the key to our quest for personal freedom and fulfillment.

Steeped in Western and Eastern myth and romantic imagery, The World is a Waiting Lover guides us through story and thought in order to discover passion, Eros, and our authentic selves. It is a personal story and, at the same time, an invitation to explore our individual yearnings to live with fearless authenticity as we find more passion and meaning in our work, relationships, and view of the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New World Library
• Release date: Feb 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781577318125

Trebbe Johnson

Trebbe Johnson is the director of Vision Arrow, an organization offering journeys to explore wildness and allurement in nature and self. She leads vision quests, workshops, and ceremonies worldwide, from Ground Zero in New York City to the Sahara Desert. A passionate explorer of outer as well as inner frontiers, Trebbe has camped alone in the Arctic Circle; written a speech for Russian cosmonauts to broadcast to the U.N. from Mir on Earth Day; and hiked through Greece. She teaches workshops on desire, allurement, and the figure of the beloved throughout the United States, Canada, and overseas, and has written on a wide variety of topics for numerous national publications. She lives with her husband in rural northeastern Pennsylvania.

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Soul

PROLOGUE

THE EMBRACE OF THE GOD

Many mortal women have made love with Krishna. Long ago — some say the practice continues even today — the playful, sensuous god who, as a child, was often caught stealing butter from the neighbors’ churns, would go among the villages of his hot, moist land and call to the women to join him in an afternoon of delight. Age mattered nothing to him, nor did looks or marital status. The god loved all women and wanted to be loved in return. And the women, if they had any erotic curiosity at all, answered the summons. Who would choose not to? And besides, little good comes to those who turn their back on the call of a god.

When Krishna’s alluring invitation interrupted their attention to their tasks — or to their daydreaming in the midst of their tasks — these women awoke to a great possibility. They smelled perfumed skin and fresh mangoes. They heard bells tinkling and felt long grasses tickling their legs. They experienced the touch of the sun in their dark, secret places and recalled, suddenly, that something once had burned inside them, something precious and bright. They remembered that it had been quite a while since they had thought of this lost, elusive thing, longer still since they had tended it, and they experienced a small shiver of regret to think that, by their neglect, they might have allowed it to fade.

In the wake of the concern came a sense of relief, even joy. Perhaps the bright thing shone yet. Yes, it shone even now, and burned, and the quickening had to do with the call of Krishna. The women remembered then that they had a task to fulfill, not just in their homes but in the very cosmos itself. They recalled that the gods had always expected more of them than simply watching over the cattle or sweeping the floor or minding the babies or rubbing the aching feet of their husbands. A tantalizing and vital thing had to be done, and they, only they, could attend to it. Their bodies tingled with anticipation.

So the women answered the call. The gopi, the cowherd girl, left her animals browsing on the hillside. The obedient daughter paused in her weaving to listen intently. Then she stood, left the loom, and turned toward the doorway. The servant set the spoon in the cooking pot. The mother walked past her children playing among the spilt flowers under the jasmine bush. The elder withdrew her thoughts from the faraway hills and gathered up the hem of her sari. The dancer in the temple paused in the midst of a mudra. Off they went, all of them, to the flowering grove, where Krishna awaited them.

There the dance began. The women raised their eyes to the sky and twirled and laced their arms together and moved as winemakers pressing out the luscious juices of the cosmos. They danced with abandon, and Krishna danced among them, and at some point — they scarcely knew how to distinguish when it began — the god made love with them, each and every one, in the way they liked best. So intoxicating was Krishna’s touch, so attentive his presence, that each woman felt herself to be the sole recipient of his passion. Each woman he made love to was, in that moment, beloved of the holy one and filled with him.

Then it ended. No one, after all, can remain for long in the embrace of a god. Waves of orgasm smoothed into ripples of contentment. Each woman fluttered down from her ecstasy and recalled her humanness. The god, lighthearted, light-footed as ever, moved on. The women stood up and arranged their saris and made their way back to their cows and looms, their families and duties.

But they went transformed. From that day forth they listened with their whole being for the call of Krishna to summon them back into his embrace. The longing became a source of exquisite torment, for it formed in them a hole shaped like the divine one himself, and able to be filled only by him. And because the longing breached them so utterly, they found that they remained open and expectant, like a clay urn just before it is dipped into a rushing stream. All experiences and prayers and gestures that passed through them then molded to the longing that was shaped like their moment in Krishna’s embrace and hence took on the outline of the holy. Every act these women undertook became imbued with sacred presence and readied them for their next encounter with the god. Thus began their lifelong thrall to soulful yearning. Thus did they walk into the world as into the arms of a waiting lover.

LET US BE REALISTIC. We are modern women and men. We lead demanding lives. We do not, most of us, tend cattle on the hillsides or weave our family’s clothes, and if we do, we do a thousand other urgent things as well. Nor have most of us been trained in a spiritual tradition that enables us to recognize the call of the holy lover when it comes. Who, then, is the god that might beckon to us? What is the seductive force that will arouse us and remind us that we are shining beings with vital tasks to perform? What will carve into us the shape of what we most long for? It is the Beloved.

The Beloved is the elusive, alluring presence who has beguiled lovers in the myths of many cultures, from Persia to Sweden to the icy seas of the Arctic. Ecstatic mystics of the world’s great religions have called out to their god as the Beloved they ached to know more intimately. According to Socrates, the erotic force that animated the soul was the semidivine partner, the daimon, who never forgot why his special mortal charge was born and who served only to keep that person on track while faithfully bearing his prayers to the gods. To Jung, the beloved Other who appears occasionally at night to clasp a dreamer in an embrace she wishes never to awaken from confirms one’s wholeness as a human. The Beloved is our link to what we hold most sacred and long to be a part of, and, at the same time, it is our most intimate companion. The compelling force that lures us to where our soul most needs to go and emboldens us to get there as only we can do, the Beloved is the fuse between loving and being loved.

To walk toward the arms of the Beloved is to choose an erotic connection with life. Just out of reach, like a figure half-hidden in dappled sunlight, the Beloved beckons us into a passionate embrace with all we undertake, from the boldest first step to the simplest spontaneous response to some arising need. Unmappable, shape-shifting, always sidling out of our greedy embrace, only to lure us forth once again, the Beloved impels us to embark on a journey toward ecstatic engagement with people and places, ideas and acts. The Beloved is less an iconic image to be obeyed and to remain steadfast to than an invitation to accept with fascinated curiosity.

The World Is a Waiting Lover charts a quest rooted in the myths of many lands, fleshed out by mystics, cosmologists, psychologists, and poets and profoundly relevant to men and women today.¹ It is a personal story and, at the same time, it weaves a modern myth of its own — about the different guises (and occasional disguises) of the Beloved; the obstacles, mirages, enchantments, and treasures encountered on the search for that rare and rapturous embrace; and the human yearning to live with fearless authenticity. It is the story of women and men who have used the heartbreak of an unattainable love or a lifetime’s indefinable longing for Spirit (or God or the great mystery) as an opportunity to define and form a bond with Eros. And it is an invitation for our time, when so many people are looking for some way to bring passion and meaning to their work, their relationships, their view of the future. It is a quest that often finds resolution, but never completion.

My own search for the Beloved began with a love affair that could not be realized. I was fifty years old when I fell in love with a young man who was assisting on a wilderness program I was leading. When he told me at the end of the trip that he loved me, I succumbed to a whirl of passionate desire that melted me like the hot summer days during which I moped for him.

I knew, almost from the start — though, frankly, I tried to deny it — that my longing betokened a plunge into something other than a relationship with this particular man. Curious, spellbound, I was compelled to explore a new frontier by tracking passion itself. And so I came to know the longing for ardor and oneness with myself and my world, which, as the myths make plain, is a very old and universal quest. It changed my life. It revived my postmenopausal sexuality and shifted the ground of my attitude toward my femininity. It deepened my relationships with my husband, my friends, my colleagues, and my clients. It emboldened me to offer programs, as well as ideas and approaches within those programs, in a more spontaneous, effusive manner, unafraid of being judged. Through my pursuit of the Beloved, I saw the world change around me: strangers in airports and restaurants ceased to be mere background figures and took on a shimmer of impenetrable mystery. I no longer saw distances between myself and people, ideas, and prospects without also envisioning the bridges that might link us. My heart, breached by longing, forgot how to close. The journey to the Beloved taught me how to walk into the world as into the arms of a waiting lover. It started with a mountain in southwestern Colorado that held a dream that, so it turned out, not just the dreamer but the dreamed of had need of.

CHAPTER ONE

THE LEAP OF THE FLAME

THE SOUL’S LONGING TO THRIVE

Longing draws us toward what we have never known and will recognize instantly. We yearn to be a part of the world. We long to be at home wherever we go, to enjoy fearless, passionate relationships with the people we meet and the things we do. We yearn to express our true self, the essence of our being that has too long flickered inside us like a timid flame. We ache to move in joy, as a dancer does, or a musician in ecstatic dialogue with his instrument, as an athlete running for her life. We want that pitch of commitment. We want to smell and taste the world we’re passing through, as we shape it with our hands, our being, our delight. We long to be embraced by wonder, to be imbued with the Mystery that pervades all things, to be swept off our feet by a world that falls in love with us, over and over, because we are who we are. We long to be welcomed by the world because we have something to offer that has been sorely needed for a very long time.

Every now and then we have heeded the longing and given license to the flaring of that flame: when we spoke up, despite our fear, in the face of an injustice, or raised our arms in exultation at the beauty of some wild landscape, or done some unrehearsed and generous thing. We have felt it when we set out to make something — a painting, a garden, a wooden spoon — and lost ourselves in a pool of unself-conscious enchantment. The flame of authentic passion leapt up even in the face of death, illness, or loss, when, huddled in a ball of unspeakable grief, we recognized ourselves as part of something eternal and undimmed, and felt fortified as a result. In these moments we glimpsed the possibility of living so intimately with our own possibilities that our blood and the world’s huge, incomprehensible currents flowed as one.

Too often, just when those moments of brighter burning began to warm us, we’ve been tempted to quench the flame. Such intensity seemed dangerous. As if chastised, we jerked ourselves back to the more familiar view that we are but puny and helpless things. How, we asked ourselves, as if to justify our tampering in potential greatness, could such passion survive in the world anyway? Living it, we would go crazy, would we not? We would die in exile, abandoned by all our friends. We would be ridiculed for our foolish presumption.

Each thing, Spinoza stated in his Ethics, endeavors to persist in its own being.¹ Trout and paramecia, dinosaurs, oaks, and dandelions, polar bears, chimpanzees, human beings, and red-winged blackbirds — all busy themselves zealously in doing what they must do to thrive. Being alive is not just surviving and making do, it is living with zest and glory. Even a quartz crystal, growing in the dark earth at the rate of two millimeters a day, accretes each of its glassy molecules in a pattern of angles and planes distinctive to it alone. Life strives, wrote deep ecologist Arne Naess, to perfect itself. You could say that each entity on earth seeks union with some possibility of itself that it can hardly conceive yet to which it nevertheless moves resolutely closer.

I MYSELF HAVE HEARD THE VOICES OF BEINGS striving to persist in their own being as I’ve sat in circles of men and women who struggled to find words to express what has compelled them to undertake a vision quest. Vision quest is the name anthropologists of the nineteenth century assigned to a Native American rite of passage that has counterparts in cultures worldwide. It is the practice in which a seeker leaves the community behind and ventures alone into the wilderness to fast and pray for guidance, that she may return with some insight into the most personal, specific, and crucial way that she can practice her own self-perfection while contributing to the self-perfection of her people. The vision quest is a mythic journey. Battling demons (rain, heat, bugs, boredom, fear of the dark), accepting the wisdom of helpful allies (a hummingbird, a face in rock, a dream), facing old anxieties and deep longings, and emptying the heart, the seeker suffers spiritual death that she might be reborn into her higher, beckoning self.

Spiritual leaders of many traditions have sought — and found — God in wild nature. Jesus, after his baptism by John the Baptist, consigned himself to the desert and there toughed out temptation, fear, lust, and vainglory until he could accept at last that he was born to preach to his people a theology of forgiveness and love. Muhammad repeatedly climbed to a cave on Mount Hira for twenty-three years to meet with the angel, who transmitted the Koran to him in snatches of song so unforgettable that the human messenger could easily chant the verses to transcribers each time he went back down to Mecca. The resolute but not always patient Moses twice trudged up and down Mount Sinai to receive Jehovah’s commandments. Sitting under the bodhi tree, the Buddha flailed at all the distractions of past and present lifetimes until he sank into the peace of nirvana and grasped the Four Noble Truths. King Minos of Crete, it is said, retreated to a cave on Mount Ida once every four years to review his rule with the gods and to take their counsel for the years ahead. The most recent narratives of the vision quest belong, of course, to the Plains people of North America, whose tradition of solitary fasting and prayer has remained unbroken (if severely challenged) for many generations. The selfless, sometimes apparently foolhardy paths of action (such as boldly prancing on a war-painted pony before an army of aimed rifles) that Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Black Elk, and other spiritual warriors took in an effort to protect their land and people from white control were often revealed to them while they fasted in a sacred spot.

The contemporary variation on the practice began in 1974, when Steven Foster and Meredith Little, two suicide-prevention hotline volunteers working in Marin County, California, began to meet after hours. As they were falling in love, they were also speculating on how a coming-of-age rite of passage might benefit the young people whose despair they attended to every day. They began to take teens, then adults, out into the California desert both knew well and to support them through the process of self-acceptance and even the first stirrings of sensible self-love. They consulted Native American elders and other indigenous spiritual leaders for advice and support. Often, those they had guided or put out on the mountain returned, begging to be taught how to introduce the work into their own communities. The Fosters started an organization called the School of Lost Borders that combined vision quests with the training to lead them, and people from all over the world came to learn. Currently about 150 people and small organizations offer wilderness rites of passage in the United States, and there are even more in Germany, Switzerland, South Africa, Russia, and other countries.

A seeker who embarks on a contemporary vision quest might be graced with any variation of the metaphysical experiences that enlightened her forebears: a moment of oneness with all creation, a clear understanding of the path that she must take, a poem or song emerging whole and perfect and searingly true, a healing, an acceptance of her whole self with all its marvelous, messy parts. Quite often it is not a single, blazing moment of truth that occurs, but a kind of layering: some ray of insight, which seems to be immediately and directly magnified by a natural event — a hummingbird hovers before the eyes, a boulder leaps down a mountain, a spruce branch grabs hold of an arm — which, in turn, illuminates another aspect of the self. There was no difference between me and what was happening all around me, a schoolteacher from Michigan once told us upon her return to base camp. I finally stopped trying to figure out what was me and what was outside of me, because I realized we were one.

On the wilderness rites of passage my co-guides and I lead, the group meets for a few days before each individual goes off to sit in solitude for three days and three nights. On the first evening of the journey, as twilight dims the borders between what is known and taken for granted and what is mysterious and unknowable except through soulful exploration, we form a circle and, one at a time, the questers tell a bit of their story. Almost always, what they say reflects their longing to feel the heat of that inner, too often timid, flame.

My life is devoted to God, to spirit, says an Episcopal minister. I know what I do is valued in the community. But I feel like I’m working from the organized body of the Church, rather than from my soul.

A successful songwriter admits, I’ve got a reputation for writing hard, tough love songs, but somewhere inside of me there’s another kind of song trying to get free. I want to know my own heart so I can write the songs that have never been sung.

A woman whose husband left her for another cries, I feel as if I have no home, as if there is no place for me in the world. Maybe on the mountain I can find my true home, which I know is within me.

A physician says, I’ve been a doctor for thirty years. What I really want is to become a healer.

A successful businesswoman weeps, I have money, a beautiful house, prestige. But I have contributed nothing of value to the earth.

Such longing pierces the heart. Awakened, it hurts even more than when it is allowed to sleep undisturbed. Tears flow in this first circle, not only from the eyes of the speakers, but from the eyes of others as well, for everyone’s ache for a life of meaning, authenticity, and passion is gouged deeper by each consecutive voice. They would do anything to find the antidote to this holy yearning. They would do anything to embrace the joyfully self-perfecting soul, the authentic nature that they were born with and that keeps titillating yet eluding them.

The year I turned fifty, I sat in one of those circles in a ranch house at the foot of a solitary peak in the San Juan Mountains of southern Colorado. As I listened to the voices of the people who had come on an Animas Valley Institute (AVI) quest led by the Institute’s founder Bill Plotkin and me, I congratulated myself on having attained, at least for the present, some relief from that fierce longing.² I was doing the work I loved. I was married to the man I loved. I was postmenopausal, my red hair was whitening, and even though I had begun to stop thinking of myself as a sexual being, I was fired with energy for bringing myself into the world. I looked forward to becoming less a hungry flame and more a lantern, steadily burning to guide the searches of others.

In any tale, such smugness is an invitation to the Fates to create a little chaos. On this particular vision quest Bill and I had welcomed as an apprentice guide a handsome thirty-five-year-old psychologist from the Puget Sound area. Lucas would gain experience in the practical and metaphysical aspects of leading a wilderness trip devoted to enhancing one’s relationship with the soul, the unique and particular essence of the self, as he helped out with cooking, setting up base camp, counseling individual questers, and undertaking such random yet specialized odd jobs as digging the pit for the ceremonial fire of sacrifice, helping questers tie their tarps tight against thunderstorms, and drumming for ceremonies.

Five nights after that opening circle, after our group had climbed two thousand feet higher up the mountain known to the native Utes as Shandoka, Storm-Gatherer, Lucas had a dream. The next morning he joined me in the circle of seven spruce trees we called our kitchen, where I was boiling water for tea on a camp stove. Fifteen feet above our heads, roped to a sturdy pole wedged into the forks of two trees, and inaccessible, we hoped, to bears, dangled four industrial-strength garbage bags containing our food for eight days in the backcountry. The early-morning air was clear and cool. Lucas and I were alone; the questers had left the previous morning for their three-day solo, and Bill was catching up on his sleep. I made the tea. As we grasped the hot cups in our cold hands, Lucas told me his dream.

He was making his way up the mountain to a tiny cave that he had, in fact, noticed as the group backpacked up the trail and that was visible from the meadow where he and I had strung our tarps. What lay below had faded away. He concentrated only on the ascent. Standing in the opening to the cave, beckoning to him, was a woman he recognized as me. A long purple scarf, printed with stars and moons, was tied around her head. The cave was her domain. He realized that she was singing to him, and the song was an invitation to join her there. She was singing him up to the far depths of his own heights, and he felt an irresistible pull to be united with her. And so he climbed. It was a very powerful, vivid dream, he told me, and he had awakened knowing that he must undertake the actual journey that very morning.

Who is the Trebbe of yourself? I asked him, following the theory that every character in a dream represents some aspect of the dreamer.

She’s the older, wiser inner guide of myself. It’s that energy of yours that I have to claim for myself up there. There is something about you as a guide that my soul needs.

He prepared well. When Bill got up, they peered through binoculars at the slope, an obstacle course of boulders that had crashed down from the summit, and discussed the most feasible route. In a daypack he stuffed warm clothing, rain gear, extra water, and some trail mix in case of emergency. He resolved to be back at base camp before the afternoon thunderstorms rolled in.

He asked if I would send him off. I went to my tarp in the meadow and got out the purple scarf printed with moons and stars, which I had, in fact, worn the previous morning during the final ceremony for the departing questers, when, one at a time, they had stated their intention for the solo and stepped over a ceremonial threshold of stones into the adventure awaiting them. Now I stood on the far side of the stream that separated base camp from the long, broad skirt of the mountain’s slope and bid Lucas good-bye, offering words (symbolic, now forgotten) to the tune of his dream. I played the part of myself as a part of him that he needed to embody. In short, I invited him toward his own calling. We hugged, and he stepped over the stream and began the climb.

At first the slope rose gently, a grassy hill punctuated occasionally by enormous boulders and tiny spruces. Soon, however, the incline turned sharper. The grass disappeared as the rocks became more abundant, so the slope, from afar, presented a design of a gray hand reaching down and a green hand reaching up to interlace fingers. The steep upper third of the ascent was a tumble of rocks.

I watched Lucas’s journey until he reached the rocks and became so high and small that he turned into a mere symbolic figure, a shadowy movement on a mission to something remote and alluring. Standing below, I was a mirror of his dream image of me. Instead of watching his face come toward me from the cave, I saw his back move away. In his dream, I was the soul guide, drawing him up toward my high precinct with an inviting song; in the waking world, I was a mentor, pushing him upward and away from me, closer to his life’s next step. As he approached the cave, I started to feel that I was spying on something that was none of my business, so I turned and headed back to our base camp in the spruces.

What happened to Lucas in the cave that day is a story that belongs to him alone. Suffice it to say that he encountered something sacred there, which seemed to have been waiting for him, and that he returned to base camp transformed, with a vision of how he would bring his work into his community in a new way. The being-there is his. The dream, on the other hand, belongs irrevocably to both of us, because the ascent he made was only the beginning of what it ignited.

TWO DAYS LATER, we guides got up early to prepare breakfast for the returning fasters: an avocado half, followed by a stew of yams, carrots, onions, brown rice, and miso. Before long they started reappearing, making their way slowly across the meadow from the slopes below or through the trees from the uplands. They were thin, sweaty, dirty, unshaven. The eyes of most were radiant. Some wept when we hugged them. Some could not let go. A couple, not yet ready for the shock of company, broke away from the welcoming embrace as soon as possible and went to sit by themselves. They ate slowly and with concentration. In late morning we gathered in a circle and began to hear the stories.

The musician told us that on the third morning of his solo, he had awakened suddenly because he thought he heard drumming. He sat bolt upright, only to realize that the sound that had alerted him was the beating of his own heart. The rhythm pounded on. It seemed to him that all the land — trees, birds, clouds, the mountain itself — was drumming out some song for him. Because he had wanted to leave behind everything that might remind him of his past identity in the music world, he had taken no drum or rattle on his solo. Now, however, he felt the imperative to join in whatever it was that had to be played. He remembered his emergency whistle. Holding it up to his ear and shaking it, so the tiny ball inside served as a rattle, he joined the rhythm the place was giving him. Over the course of several hours, the rhythm occasionally peeled back to reveal a song, which he now sang for the group, accompanied by a big yellow whistle. It was a song about the mountain, about solitude, about the body being broken down and the heart filled. The man who had wanted to write songs from his heart had emerged with one that had begun, literally, with his own heartbeat.

On the day the questers had searched for their solo spot, the woman whose husband had left her for another had returned to base camp in tears. She who had hoped to discover on the mountain the refuge she longed for had not even been able to find what felt like the right place to spend three days. She had ended up claiming a site that would suffice, nothing more, and went off to it the following morning with glum resignation. That afternoon she was on her way back from the stone pile, a cairn midway between the spots of two fasters, where each quester places a stone once a day as a sign that they’re all right, when she tripped and fell. It was the final insult. Her husband had left her, and not even a mountain could support her. She burst into tears, then giving herself over to grief and outrage, lay on the ground sobbing. Finally, she calmed down and sat up. And then she realized that the spot where she had landed was beautiful. She had a clear view of the mountain peak. There was level ground between two trees where she could tie her tarp. The stone that had tripped her would be her altar. This, then, was her rightful place. She moved her things, set up a new camp, and began to fall in love with the place that had brought her to it in so undignified a manner. On the altar she placed small stones representing her husband and his new girlfriend and prayed that she might accept what had happened and that her own life be strengthened and sacralized because of it. She gave thanks to the four directions. On the last evening, she held a marriage ceremony in which she wed her highest self.

During an all-night vigil, sitting in a circle of stones and facing east, the minister had a vision of herself as a dancer who could move gracefully between the light of spirit and the dark concerns of her parishioners. A man who had sacrificed his childhood to care for an ailing mother had awakened every night for three nights in a row to see a falling star he could wish on. Sitting for hours before a tree that held in a crook of its branches another toppled and dying tree, the doctor realized that what he needed to become a healer was not new skills but the compassion he had always been too busy to practice. What happened to each