FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON GUIDANCE I SHOULD HAVE BEEN GIVEN

One of the great missings in our world is the lack of psyschospiritual adults and elders to provide guidance to our adolescents and chronological young adults as they seek to find their way towards spiritual adulthood.  I wrote in a previous piece (https://www.earthbasedjudaism.org/indigenous-jewish-practices/i-was-born-to-be-a-techer-of-animist-earth-based-judaism or https://animistearthbasedjudaism.substack.com/p/i-was-born-to-be-a-techer-of-animist)  “I’m imagining myself sitting on the rocks overlooking Lick Creek in the Ozarks on the commune I lived on after college.  I would be asking what’s the next step is in my spiritual development.  The divine would be saying to me that you are an Earth Based Animist Jew.  You know the whole world is alive and you know that you are a Jew.  Now you need to find a chevre, a community of others who believe and practice this. Not the path of Rabbis, but the path of your ancient ancestors.” 

As I said, I’m not sure how much help that would have been, given the dearth of obvious allies on a Jewish path. 

Today I want to share another missed opportunity. I did a vision quest in the summer of 1988 in Coyote New Mexico.  Rereading some notes, the guides asked me good things.  Find a medicine name and a song.  Take a lost soul with you who would benefit from the journey. Dedicate the days.  Prepare for a death lodge.  Do a purpose circle and go in prepared to die and be reborn.  Walk away with a statement about what I am here for and what my gifts are.

I was pretty defensive towards the guides.  In retrospect, there were multiple issues. First, they were a couple and they were a mess in their own lives, so it didn’t feel safe to my inner kids.  I didn’t trust them to hold the container.  Now maybe I would not have trusted anybody, that’s certainly possible.

Second, I experienced their questions as demands on me, and oh boy, they were premature demands. It might have been different if they had said see if you can find a name or a song, and if you can’t, that’s fine. Or explore the questions of what are you here for and what are your gifts. One thing they certainly did not do is take my experience as I recounted it afterwards and connect it to these questions. Nor did they understand my experience at all. 

Here are a few things that stood out to me about my experience.  I spent a lot of time entranced with the sensuality of the desert.  I remember watching lizards and absolutely marveling at their colors. I remember the scent of sagebrush flooding my body.  I remember feeling the skinniness of the cows wandering miles each day looking for something to eat.

I also spent a lot of time revisiting my time in Israel.  This was 12 years previous by this point.  Why Israel?  That was a question the guides just never asked.  Probably it was because I was sitting in the desert and because I was ready to start finding my way back.  But they never asked.

The visions of Israel centered around two of my fellow participants in the Kibbutz based group program.   The leaders construed this just as a young man’s sexual interest in women. I pushed back on that with them because they weren’t the women I was lusting after when I was on Kibbutz, and one of them I didn’t find attractive at all anyway.  But one of them was blond and had big boobs and I recounted the tale of her saying I have new teeth, only her Hebrew was bad, and she said instead “I have new boobs and the women to whom she was saying this cracking up.  So blond and big boobs meant that it had to be lust. 

The question that was never asked of me is why these two particular women, amongst all the possible people?  And why Israel—what was the message there, what was the unfinished business such that this came up so strongly? 

I was recently recounting this story to one of my students who rightly said that any time a male has a dream or a trancey kind of visit from women, it’s his Anima showing up.  Further, Israel as the bride of the divine is a well known metaphor that I was familiar with at the time. So why these two women?  The fact that I hadn’t lusted after them in Israel, and I certainly lusted after a number of other women in my group, should have been a big clue. They were both from California, which I associated with as not grounded.  I didn’t think that either of them were particularly deep; that may well have been an unfair judgment, but I didn’t know them well.  Some of it was cultural; the attractive blond had a kind of bubbly personality which I think hid her depth.

The message in hindsight was that I was distant from my anima and I needed to find my way back to her and to my Judaism, and that was the same journey.  Had the women I had lusted after who seemed more down to earth come to me, I think that would have meant that my anima was closer to me.  It would have been a clearer sign of a direction to follow.  Having these two particular women come to me meant that I was just at the beginning of the path of return and it needed to be a slow return where I could feel safe.

This was a missed opportunity because the guides just sucked.

Another thing that was completely unexplored was that I wandered in a different way than anyone else had.  They had led a number of quests in this area, and everyone had gone upwards to the mountain tops so they could see.  But I instead spent my time wandering through the canyons and valleys, probably channeling my inner cow and looking for something, anything, to eat. I was drawn downwards and that should have pointed to something very different than the desire for enlightenment and vision on the mountain tops that other participants wanted.

In hindsight, they should have said something to me along these lines:  Jared, there’s some unfinished business with Israel and Judaism.  (I could have easily connected those two for them).  That business isn’t about ascending to the divine, but is somehow about sinking to the underworld. Your also disconnected from your feminine side, but you want to be connected.  Go read some stories about descent—maybe Persephone or Inanna or read Jung on underworld descents. Or maybe there are some dark deep secrets you need to uncover (as was indeed the case). One of your strengths is your sensuality and your connection to the more than human world as manifest in the connections to the lizards, the cows, the sagebrush.  Somehow all of that is tied together for you.

They did none of that.

I did eventually get, in part from the quest, that I needed to be back east.  I moved to Missouri when I finished social work school a couple of years later after spending a lot of time praying about it in the national forest behind the trailer in which I lived. I moved back towards Judaism in fits and starts; it’s been a long path. I wouldn’t have expected any specific help from them about Jewish paths, but they should have picked up on that my connection to my ancestral heritage was a gaping and confusing wound. I have no idea why they didn’t think that my choosing to wander in the valleys and canyons of the desert wasn’t significant.

There’s obviously no way of knowing how my life would have been different if they had picked up on any of this.  Maybe I would have become an outdoor therapist, and maybe my life would have unfolded exactly as it did. But I find it hard to believe that I would not have found my way towards an Animist Earth Based Judaism decades before I did—because all the pieces were already there.