It's nice to be moving out of the introspection of winter. Introspection is good but so is action. There were some fun activities the last couple weeks of the winter term. We burned bowls out of logs and purified water in them, had a sensory awareness day spent blindfolded (read more about it on Rees's blog), among others. Then over spring break I went on a vision quest. I had high hopes and high fears for my vision quest. The reality was below such expectations in both cases. In most ways it wasn't as hard or boring as I thought it would be, however I ended up feeling fairly sick the last half of the 4 day fast which really challenged me. I ended up sticking it out, but didn't feel like I recieved much insight during the time. Of the 11 people questing at the same time, my experience seemed fairly unique both in feeling so sick and not experiencing much insight. Fortunately over the following couple of days I had a couple of important insights, which I can't directly link to the quest, but seem likely to have stemmed from that time. I did have some cool nature experiences while sitting out there, including a barred owl flying in during the evening light and perching briefly in two different trees within 10 feet of where I was sitting.
Anyhow... To spring!
The day after the vision quest wrapped up I went out with some friends and took a leasurely expedition to harvest knotweed which we used to make custard, sauce, juice and stir fry. Yesterday a couple of us harvested nettles to make nettle "chips" and today I harvested dock, nettle, and dandelions to put in a stir fry. There are several wild flowers now in bloom as well, including coltsfoot, violet, huckleberry, and trillium.
Tomorrow I'm planning on looking for fish.
6 comments:
Hey, how come I wasn't invited to all that locally-harvested festing? Sounds like fun!! (Especially from where I sit .. at my 10th day of a fasting cleanse!)
Great blog entry!!
Didn't know you'd be interested. Will probably try and pick some dandelion and elder flowers this weekend, so maybe you can come along then.
Missed seeing you at the meeting last night.
You forgot to smoke Salvia Divinorum on your vision quest
www.sagewisdom.org
Supposed to be pretty trippy, apparently that's how the mexicans do it.
Though I read one news article where a teenage boy smoked some and "realized" the meaning of the universe ("nothing!") and hung himself from a tree in his backyard. Some "knowledge" is not for the weak minded, apparently!
The people running the vision quest strongly discourage tripping on vision quests because "you may end up just hallucinating rather than recieving your vision."
How do they differentiate between a hunger/thirst induced hallucination or other random dream/nightmare, and a "vision"?
I'm not sure, but I didn't have any such hallucinations, so... Oh, and they encouraged people to drink a gallon of water a day, so probably not gonna be many thirst induced hallucinations and I wouldn't think that 4 days without food is that long in the hallucination scheme of things.
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