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." 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...