A Full Summer
Summer 2013:
I am back home and back in the office, digging in to my own return from a lively summer of fulfilling and enlivening programs at Rites of Passage.
In June, with co-guide Tom Anderson,we held a Vision Quest in the Rocky Mountains near Salida, Colorado. It was a wonderful and diverse group, with people coming from around the globe. Our lovely and loving participants returned with beautiful desert eyes and gratitude for the life entrusted to us.
In July we made our first visit to Canada. The programs we presented helped create exciting new partnerships. At the Medicine Wheel workshop, teachings and insights
about the Four Shields and the cycles of living, dying and rebirth were grounded by the beautiful earth & skies of Alberta.
In August Rites of Passage returned to Australia , our fifth visit in the past few years, to co-lead a Vision Quest with Robert Boyle, our friend and colleague. The land there is vitally alive, dramatic and full of birdsong, a cacophony of incomparable sound with each sunrise. Our participants, full of humor, depth and beauty, belong to that landscape. They returned to base camp, shining with the treasures each received. We’re planning a return visit in May 2014 to the land Down Under.
Finally, in September we held our annual Vision Quest for Transformative Leadership, with co-guide Dana Carman in the mountains near Mono Lake, California. This program has become a source of rich learning and discovery as we bring people into the wilderness from the worlds of business, leadership development, life coaching, and entrepreneurship. An important question for the leadership quest is “How can I bring my gifts back into a world that needs me to give them?” To return like the hero in the old stories and “demonstrate the vision for the people to see.”
Returning to the world is the challenge and opportunity for all those who have undertaken the quest. In each of these summer programs, communities of mutual support, friendship and encouragement have formed to deepen and carry forward the work begun by listening to the soul in the stillness of nature. In bearing witness to this healing and transformative journey, these communities support participants to recall and embody the life changes that the quest has revealed to them.
This strengthens my faith in the capacity of the human heart to open fully to life.
As Rumi says,
“Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
-Mike
