Some Dare Call It Walkabout: A Very Particualar Journey

By David Wesley Trotter

I wasn’t looking for a vision quest. I had done that in 1990 with the Bear Tribe. Some would say twenty-five years was long enough to warrant another quest, but in many traditions a vision quest is intended for life. I simply wanted to reconnect directly with the folk music, singer-songwriter community of Kerrville, Texas, with which I had become acquainted in 2001 and 2002.

That didn’t happen on the trip here described. I did, however, through seeming happenstance, reconnect with a high school friend from more than forty years earlier and had the pleasure of meeting her husband, and of revisiting Montana.

My journey took seven days. It hurt in many ways: physically, emotionally, perhaps intellectually. In a week’s time I was tested in areas I long-ago passed through and mastered, but which had become tarnished or simply wanted more burnishing.

There is an old Buddhist saying:

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.
After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 25, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365958632

Book preview

Some Dare Call It Walkabout: A Very Particualar Journey

Some Dare Call It Walkabout: A Very Particular Journey

by David Wesley Trotter

Earthwind Publishing

Seattle, WA, USA

2017

Copyright © 2017 by David Trotter

All rights reserved.

978-1-365-95863-2

Second Edition

AN EARTHWIND PUBLISHING BOOK

PUBLISHED BY LULU ENTERPRISES, INC.

Rumi

WARNING

The intelligence of Love tries constantly to protect us and to warn us, but we are vain and follow our desires and illusions, and so fill our lives with chaos and confusion.

One of the essential features of a real seeker’s life is to start humbly listening to the warnings – inner and outer – that the universe will always be trying to give him or her. This takes true discrimination, what Jesus called the wisdom of the serpent, detachment from our own plans, and a constant willingness to listen to the often quiet and obvious instructions of the Divine.

Eryk Hanut

Compiler and Commentator

The Rumi Cards divination deck

Don’t go anywhere, I beg you;

The Moon you are looking for is inside you.

Rumi

TRANSFORMATION

In the universe of Love, all things are in perpetual metamorphosis. Love powers an endless revolution and a cosmic dance in which all things constantly are born and die and change shape.

Excrement and dead leaves become compost for a new birth. A protracted sorrow engenders dazzling joy, new visions of an abundant knowledge dance in the skull.

Eryk Hanut

Gold becomes constantly more and more beautiful

From the blows the jeweler inflicts on it.

Rumi

BIRTH

Each moment of our lives is potentially a new birth, if our hearts are open. Rumi always claimed that the wind of grace is always blowing from God, but that we are too rarely open to its fertile power. Nevertheless, through Divine generosity, signs of new birth constantly dance in and out of our lives, inviting us to hope, creativity, passion, and praise!

Eryk Hanut

They offered many reasons

Why the rose is laughing

None of them knew the truth:

Its prayer has been granted by Spring

Rumi

Preface

I wasn’t looking for a vision quest. I had done that in 1990 with the Bear Tribe, the late Sun Bear’s organization, north of Spokane near the town of Tum Tum.

Some would say twenty-five years was long enough to warrant another quest, but in many traditions a vision quest, by any name, is intended for life. So it is with the death/burial/resurrection ritual of the ancient Egyptians, upon which the Jesus story is founded and which is thought by some to be represented by the symbol of the ankh (though no historical agreement has ever been reached on what this symbol actually signifies).

In the Egyptian tradition, the neophyte priest is laid in a sarcophagus (casket/tomb) for three days and three nights, during which time his spirit travels in the underworld. At the end of that period the priest is symbolically reborn, born anew, resurrected with a clear vision of his mission and life purpose.

There is the walkabout of the Australian aboriginals, which I suppose could be done more than once. I don’t know the details, but it seems that such a fundamental people with a much shorter life span might see a person’s life purpose as set once and for all at the coming of age. I know that was the attitude even in my high school in suburban Tacoma, Washington in 1973 when I graduated. Perhaps old men and women go on walkabout, too, so they can bring the wisdom of their years to the people in their latter days. There are tribes in Central and South America where the grandmothers are given their own hut to share the wisdom of their years with the people.

The walkabout’s significance to this tale, especially in this sense, shall become evident.

I simply was looking to reconnect directly with the folk music, singer-songwriter community of Texas, and its extended family, with which I had become acquainted in 2001 and 2002 in Kerrville, Texas, when I was living in Taos, New Mexico.

That didn’t happen on the trip about to be described, though that was the journey‘s ostensible intent.

The three poems by Rumi quoted on the opening page of this work play significantly in why and how that was, and this is my story.

I did, however, through seeming happenstance, reconnect directly and personally with a high school friend from more than forty years ago and had the pleasure, the opportunity, of meeting her second husband, and this is one of three reasons this story is being told.

A traditional vision quest, as I know it from Native American tradition, lasts three days and three nights. I’ve told you of the ancient Egyptian initiation. I don’t know the time of the Australian walkabout.

My journey took seven days, and in some ways, as I write this beginning the day after returning home to West Seattle, it continues. Writing, too, is part of the journey.

This journey did not go the way I wanted or had planned. Realistically, given the first of the Rumi quotations above, which is discussed below, I had known this from the start, but I was determined to change what I knew (Aries male, oldest of five siblings, fed up with what I call cosmic bullying).

It hurt in many ways: not just physically, but emotionally and perhaps intellectually.

In just a week’s time I was tested in areas I long-ago passed through and mastered, but which had become tarnished or simply wanted more burnishing under the jeweler’s hammer. There is an old Buddhist saying:

Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.

This is a harsh reality for the untrained spirit, and even the Master is still human and can resent the constant kicking by the universe. (Some would claim that such resentment is not the way of a Master, but even Jesus and Shakyamuni Buddha are recorded as having had their resentful moments.)

I know of no better demonstration of this than the Eight of Pentacles in Sir Edmund Wait’s interpretation of the Tarot. The Master is seated at his workbench, doing what he has always done. The Master keeps doing what s/he has always done, simply refining and fine-tuning the work as needed or as called upon to teach others.

As for the promise of Spring in the third Rumi quote above, this, too, will become evident . . . Perhaps.

Right now, I want to share with you the true story of a very particular journey and its very particular ways.

Why WOULD You?

It’s not that a sixty-year-old shouldn’t be hitchhiking, though many, including my wife, Bonnie, will tell you a sixty-year-old shouldn‘t.

A sixty-year-old should be doing whatever s/he desires and is capable of, whether or not anyone else approves or understands. After the toddlership and adolescence of that first sixty years, the individual has more than a right to choose for her/himself and do what s/he came here in this incarnation