Trebbe Johnson's Newsletter
February 2010
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 Dear Questers, Friends, and Seekers of the Beloved,
Whenever
I go on a journey into the wilderness, far away from telephones, email, and
sometimes (as in the Sahara) even the ubiquitous icons of airplanes flying through
the sky, I am always curious, and a little nervous, as the trip ends and we emerge
back in civilization. I wonder what might have happened in the world while
I was not there to witness it. In 1997, while I was guiding in the Utah
Canyons, my stepson and his wife had a little boy. In 2001, during a vision
quest in Scotland, September 11 befell America. On January 23 of this year,
when our Sahara vision quest group arrived in the airport in Algiers, I went
straight to the newsstand, where I read of the horrendous earthquake in Haiti.
A few days later I learned of the death of an old friend. Life buffets and
caresses, and we feel its touch both when we're in direct line of the action
and when we're swayed by the ripples of what happens to someone else.
It's not
exactly a New Year's resolution, but I've decided to stop worrying so much
about whether I'm doing an A+ job on every single project of my life, great and
small. I've always been good at playing, but I've limited my play to moments I seize impulsively, while trying hard to triumph at the rest of life. I now hereby invite
the spirit of play into the whole of what I undertake, even the most serious
things.
Also, for now I've
decided to abandon the idea of identifying a theme for each of these
newsletters. Part of play is mixing unlikely elements together.
To those who are receiving this newsletter for the first time... welcome! Here you'll find news of upcoming Vision Arrow events, reflections, profiles of extraordinary people, and stories of transformation that occur when we accept, in small, bold, startling ways the invitations that the world is always sending us.
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JOIN THE GLOBAL EARTH EXCHANGE!
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On
Saturday, June 19, our non-profit environmenal educational organization, Radical Joy for Hard Times, is sponsoring a Global Earth Exchange, an international event to bring attention and beauty to the Earth's
wounded places. On this day people on every continent of the planet (including
Antarctica!) will gather at clearcut forests, polluted rivers, sites of gas
drilling and mountaintop mining, places where show horses are over-trained and
honeybees are vanishing, at urban eyesores like abandoned strip malls, and many
other places to reconnect, share personal stories, and make simple acts of
beauty.
We need
your help!
Join us by hosting a
Global Earth Exchange at a place you care about.
All it takes is your concern for a place or
species and your willingness to bring to it your curiosity, compassion, and imagination.
Visit our
website and fill out the application form. If your site is among the first 100
chosen, you will:
- Receive a free packet containing a T-shirt, a Radical
Joy for Hard Times flag, guidelines for how to host an Earth Exchange, and
other items to support your event,
- Be offered regular support that we will make
available to all our hosts worldwide, including, we hope a web-based
gathering shortly before the event, so everyone can "meet" one another!
- Bring international attention to an ecologically
wounded place
- Possibly be featured in a book that we are
creating about the event
Creating a sustainable future on Earth depends on opening our hearts to the natural world in its
brokenness as well as its splendor. That's a project for every single one of us.
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RHYTHMS OF THE SAHARA
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 We had an
especially wonderful vision quest and camel caravan in the Sahara Desert last month: ten vision
questers from four countries, two vision quest guides, one assistant guide,
eight Tuareg guides, and thirty-seven camels journeyed deep into the desert
whose very name conjures up images of vastness, purity, and spiritual seeking.
The days
took on a rhythm that echoed the one the nomadic Tuareg have
followed for thousands of generations. Every morning we woke before daybreak. Dressed in our desert clothes, the long tunics called
the gandoras that the Tuareg wear and the adaptable shesh that covered our
heads, we set off with our camels shortly after the sun was up. At first we led our camels on foot, setting an easy, steady pace. Then, after a couple of
hours, we'd ride, directing the camel with our feet, which we press into the
animal's warm, furry neck to urge him on. Each camel is chosen intuitively for
each person by our camel master, a sweet, funny, gentle man named Ouhetta, and
people usually end up absolutely adoring their particular camel.
At
lunchtime we stopped under the shade of a lone acacia tree and spent the
hottest hours of the day as sensible people everywhere do: by resting. After
that, we set out again, walking and riding until late afternoon, when we stopped for the night. Ouhetta knows the desert intimately and plans each of our
stopping places carefully so there is shelter from the wind and sun and beautiful vistas. After six trips to the Sahara, I am still amazed at
how the desert can change so much, not just from one day to the next, but even
from one hour to the next: from golden dunes to black mountains to broad
plateaus to rocks of fantastical shapes to clumps of whispering grasses. At
night, after spending some time doing practices related to the aims of the
vision quest, our group gathered in a circle around the fire to eat dinner,
then to talk together and sometimes to sing songs (and even play a riotous game
of telephone with five or six different languages) with the Tuareg.
We fell
asleep each night under a sky filled with more stars than you can possibly
imagine.
This
year, questers from Switzerland, the U.S., Ireland, and Germany underwent, each
in her or his own individual way, a process that never ceases to astonish me.
Many people embark on a vision quest with the intention of clarifying their
life work or identifying some task or goal that will truly fulfill them. As the
journey unfolds, however, they fine-tune this intention. They recognize
patterns or attitudes they no longer need and start opening up to a part of
themselves that is at once dazzlingly new and deeply familiar, something that
is big, bold, wise, and utterly who they are. It is so hard, even for a
confirmed wordsmith like me, to put this unfolding into words. But I think the
reality of the process, and the profundity of it, is what has motivated the
tellers of fairy tales of many lands to write of miraculous
transformations: ordinary serving girl to princess, frog to prince, ugly
ducking to graceful swan.
Photo by Malu Deck
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GOODBYE, ERICH SEGAL
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When I got home from the Sahara quest, I learned of the death of the first person
I worked for after I graduated from college, Erich Segal. It was the fall of
1970, and Erich was the best-selling and very public author of the romantic novel,
Love Story. As
a literature major in college and a published poet, I was feeling quite
disdainful of this literary pop star as I waited outside his office at Yale for
my interview. He hired me because he needed help answering the piles and piles
of fan letters he got every day, and I was happy to have an unconventional job
where I would have lots of free time to write.
As time
went on, I began to do research for his magazine articles and his book
on the history of comedy. I not only typed his articles and books, but edited
them, drove him to the airport for his frequent appearances on Johnny Carson and other talk shows, transcribed
his lectures at Yale, and did his grocery shopping.
Over the
course of the next two years and seven months, we became good friends (never
romantic friends, contrary to what many people assumed). From him I learned to
create what he called "ploys" to make life interesting. He would contrive some
wild and improbable thing that he wanted to do and set about to make it happen
as if it were a game. I learned that you can turn your fascinations into
financially rewarding projects. I learned that the best relationships have a
lot of laughter in them. From Erich Segal I learned how to make a really good
spaghetti sauce and that it doesn't work to cook a steak in a microwave oven.
Through him I discovered the works of Aristophanes, Euripides, Ovid, and Samuel
Becket.
When he got an invitation to teach at the University of
Munich, he paid for me to go to Harvard Summer School to learn German. Although
I quit my job a few months after we moved to Germany in 1973 (I'd fallen for a Dutch
photographer), I have enthusiastically kept up with the German language all
these years. It's why I'm now guiding in the Sahara, where most of our questers
are German-speaking Swiss. It all goes back to Erich Segal.
He was way over-exposed in the media for a couple of years and
he wrote a silly book. Nevertheless, he was a brilliant classics scholar, a wiry
and determined man full of the spirit of the life force, and an inspiration for how to live with delight.
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UPCOMING EVENTS
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My book, The World Is a Waiting Lover, with a foreword by Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul, is available from Amazon.com or from your favorite bookstore.
UPCOMING PROGRAMS
March 9-21, 2010
Bali From Within
There is still space available on this wonderful adventure!
Get a 15% discount if you bring a friend!
This year our Bali trip is timed so we can participate in the three-day Balinese new year, Nyepi. Nyepi begins with everyone in the village chasing huge papier maché monsters out
of town, continues with a day of reflection, and ends with an evening of mingling with friends and eating on
the street. The trip, as usual, also includes visits with Balinese artists, a gamelan musician, village priest; hikes in the forest; a blessing ceremony at the sacred spring Tirta Empul, and many other events visitors rarely have a chance to engage in up close.
Path of the Lover Workshops
This
popular workshop, based on my book about love and desire and how we can work more consciously with it, shows you how the many different paths
of love in your life are really all connected--and part of the
dynamic inner force called the Beloved. You will:
- Connect with the archetypal
Beloved in you, that knows how to say YES to what you love
- Discover how your past loves
(including those that didn't work out) were essential in opening you up to
a bigger capacity to love
- Learn to recognize the inner
voice of the "loyal soldier" that wants to hold you back from following
your heart
- See how
- fascination and
allurement have led you all onto important paths
This year the workshop will be offered in five locations:
April
30-May 2: Cincinnati (contact Tom Rubens)
May 7-9:
Gainesville, Florida (contact Martin Goldberg)
July
30-August 2: Seattle (contact Ruth Dow Rogers)
November 12-14: Schloss Glarisegg, Lake Constance, Switzerland (contact Silvia Figel) November
19-21: Eschwege Institute, Eschwege, Germany
For a complete list of programs offered by Vision Arrow, see our website.
Call 570 727 4272 or email Trebbe if you have questions or would like to talk about any of these programs.
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