During one of the snowstorms that drove into the East this February, I received this photo from Genie Wing, my friend since college. Genie is an artist who also works as an art therapist in the New York City public school system, and when the schools closed because of the snow, she went outside to play. The result was this delightful snow sculpture of a woman sitting on a bench.

Play is an art. It's also an innate skill that all of us inherited from our animal ancestors but that many of us lose as we age. Sometimes, on the vision quests I lead, people declare that they will "play" during their solo time. You can tell that they're not quite sure they will remember how to do so, that playing might take quite a bit of effort.

Do you remember how to play? Play means slipping into an interactive relationship with your surroundings. In order to play, all you have to do is let the world around you come alive. It's not that hard. Just imagine that you're magic and you can cast a spell that will make everything around you animate, conscious, and eager to hang out with you. Trees, houses, shadows, litter, footprints, even an untidy room... imagine all of them released from their customary roles and inviting you to join them to rearrange your perception.

That's what children do. How often have you seen a small child suddenly squat down on the ground in rapt fascination with some new life form (twig, bug, candy wrapper) that demands attention? Some odd and fascinating thing has spontaneously extended an invitation to the child to enter its world. The child, without hesitation, says YES and starts exploring the possibilities.

There are many ways adults can play. Here are some from my own personal toybox: [bullets] After you load the groceries into your car, ride your empty supermarket cart to the place where the carts are collected and brought back into the store. When you tidy up your house, move one object at a time from its wrongful to its rightful place (place A to place B). Then at place B pick up something and bring it to its home at place C. Pick up something from C. Continue until there's nothing within reach that's out of place. Then you're done. When you're driving, imagine the sights you pass (red barn, kitschy lawn ornament, stone house) clicking like beads onto a string. Then test yourself and see how well you remember the route you've "strung." At twilight, watch for fairies.

It doesn't take a lot of work to play. It's just a matter of letting the world come alive and asking yourself and it how you can explore together.

Join us for the Global Earth Exchange on Saturday, June 19!

On that day people in 100 locations all over the world will be gathering at wounded places to find and make beauty. We have groups planning events in California, Colorado, India, England, Vermont, Utah, North Carolina, and even Antarctica, among others.

Join us to bring attention, compassion, and creativity to a place you love... and to be part of the worldwide network that is forming around a brand new path of environmental activism.

Visit our website and fill out the application form. If your site is among the first 100 chosen, you will:

Creating a sustainable future on Earth depends on opening our hearts to the natural world in its brokenness as well as its splendor.

 To their surprise the School of Lost Borders learned that their application had been denied. The reason: the Bioneers felt that Native Americans might be offended that a non-native organization was offering wilderness rites of passage journeys, frequently referred to as "vision quests."

The term "vision quest" was devised in the nineteenth century by white anthropologists as a way of describing a Plains Indian ceremony that involved fasting in a sacred place and calling for a vision that seeker could bring back home to help his people. However, for thousands of years spiritual seekers of many different cultures have been leaving their community behind and going off alone to seek wisdom and insight in the wilderness. Jesus fasted in the desert and prayed for guidance about the life mission that had been hounding him and that he could not quite commit to. Mohammed went regularly to a mountaintop cave to receive the teachings of Allah, sung to him as verse. The Buddha sat under the bodhi tree to seek the nature of reality; after having attained Enlightenment, he touched the earth before him and asked it to bear witness. According to Greek myth, King Minos of Crete would regularly seek refuge in a cave on Mount Ida; there he would reflect on his rule during the previous eight years and ask the gods to help him in the years to come.

Let me say that I spent several years during the late 1980s and early 90s writing in depth about American Indian issues, and I am aware of and sympathetic to native people's distress when non-natives borrow their traditions and ceremonies without having been granted either training or permission to do so. Nevertheless, the assumption of the Bioneers committee that native people have some kind of exclusive claim on transformative experiences in nature is both condescending to natives and presumptuous to non-natives.

Obviously, some ceremonies aimed at transformation and connection, such as the notorious sweat lodge in Sedona last year that killed three people, are clearly borrowed from American Indian traditions and are irresponsibly carried out. But there are many simple practices and exercises that any person of any cultural background can do to deepen their relationship with nature, discover truths about themselves through what fascinates them about the natural world, and have powerful experiences that are at once completely unexpected and profoundly familiar. The vision quests that my colleagues and I lead do not use Native American traditions. In fact, part of the reason we love the work we do is that we are shown, over and over again, that when any person of any background spends time alone in nature, what happens can transform their life.

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

Endless Mountains Vision Quest

This four-day program, held in a secluded 400-acre nature preserve, is specially designed for those who seek a meaningful rite of passage in a beautiful, yet accessible place. You explore many of the same processes and practices as in the longer vision quest, but with a focus on reading Nature's lessons and discovering how they apply to your own path in life. For the twenty-four-hour solo you may choose from among diverse ecological niches: glacial pond, meadow, wetlands, stream, or forest. Minimal backpacking.