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Facilitator Full Bio

Bio Fire

Fire: Maasi Land, East Africa

Tanzania, East Africa, home of lions, wildebeest, gazelle, elephants, and zebra, surrounded by ancient African magic, very near the heart of human origin, Olduvai Gorge. The first peak of my childhood imagination was not in the Rockies, fringing the Great Plains in Alberta, where I had been born, but Kilimanjaro, tallest mountain in Africa. Returning to Canada, I soon learned that North America also once had herds of buffalo (according to historical accounts) thirty miles wide. I was irrevocably lonely for the seething life of the "dark continent," and more than that, for something that would take time to understand: I was forlorn for the very loss of the wild in modernity. I knew at a young age the truth of those lines from Wallace Stevens:

"It is equal to living in a tragic land

to live in a tragic time."

Africa had marked me, crossed my stars, destined my vocation, as surely as if in a tribal initiation rite, as one who could never close his ears to the wild howl of nature. I had accidentally experienced the profound displacement and sense of being a refugee that is so common in today's world. I had yet to understand how exile and return is the exact nature of the initiatory journey spoken of by Joseph Campbell. I had yet to undergo the ancient initiation rituals that transform the marking of destiny into a full vocation. For years the memory of being seen by a witchdoctor lay dormant; decades would pass before I came to realize what had been set in motion by that visit. Time needed until I would recognize the totem animals who had taken me under wing and paw as allies, protectors, and companions. An era before I might know how my path would wander unreasonably only to arrive properly at the only destination it was meant for.

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Water: In the Valley of the Bow

Almost every night as the Great Orb of the Sun went to hide in the west, tucked into the hundred mile shadow of the Rocky Mountains, I could hear coyotes yelping and wailing amidst the summer crackle of prairie thunderstorms or the winter screech of the wind. The "dog-men" captured my heart and imagination through the open window with their defiant exuberance mixing grief, longing, ecstasy, and surrender. Coyote is considered in animist traditions to be The Trickster, god of reversals, humor, ambiguity, shifting perspectives, and living on the edge. As such, the one they name Coyote, Trickster, the Norse god Loki, Eris, the Greek goddess of chaos, Raven, and a thousand others worldwide, is highly aligned with learning.

Loki's behavior in mythology has been so confounding to academics that at least one, Von Schnurbein, noted that "Hardly a monograph, article, or encyclopedic entry does not begin with the reference to Loki as a staggeringly complex, confusing, and ambivalent figure who has been the catalyst of countless unresolved scholarly controversies and has elicited more problems than solutions."

Perhaps it was Coyote, in part, who called me toward a unique high school where students designed their own curriculum.

The school was designed to include much experiential education and "learning how to learn," It was a leading-edge cultural laboratory working experimentally with ideas that had their origins in wide ranging sources from the social justice movement to ecology, cybernetics, and holistic thinking. We were encouraged to take a "walkabout" based on an Australian aboriginal model of initiation. The traditional walkabout is a journey undertaken through the landscape to test the skills of survival in circumstances of jeopardy. My own walkabout saw me travel almost 2000 miles on foot and was a year in the making. The bush life was hard—walking an average of 10 miles a day, eating huge amounts of food to cope with the 40 degrees below zero temperatures, and sleeping soundly at night.

During the year, I came close to death a couple of times. Risk is typical of initiatory ordeals. Trials and hardship get given—it seems we humans don't have to go looking too far to find trouble—Risk is the part of the initiation which has to be chosen. Intensity, and even the risk of death, constellate conditions where your style and what you really love can't help begin showing. As William Stafford said:

"If you don't know the kind of person I am,

and I don't know the kind of person you are,

a pattern that others made

may prevail in the world, and,

following the wrong god home,

we may miss our star."

Within a multiple idea of the sacred (i.e. the mythological or animist) that is not forced too quickly into a unified monotheism, each person may have their own favorite aspects of the sacred. The corollary may also be true: that certain aspects of the sacred have their own "favorites" among people. Some suggest that it is the same god that takes us into our particular trouble and protects us while we are there. Coyote lives on the edge due to her/his job as a sacred bricoleur, a constructor of working processes out of disparate sources, often the discarded, undervalued, and forgotten. I was beginning to understand myself as a member of the patchwork cloak society of the bricoleur, and I was to experience plenty more of the sheer bedlam which is also part of Coyote's School of Hard Knocks.

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Nature: The Great Temperate Rain Forest

Despite having my own business at the age of nineteen and all the things that make life worth living for, I was living tempestuously, moving like water through the night, angling for the next fish that jumped catching my attention. I was secretly feeling an unbearable grief for the plight of the world. By the time I was in my early twenties, it was building inside, as I see in many people today, and eventually it started to show in cracks of anxiety, panic, despair and depression. I began seeing a counselor, Linda Galloway, a wise healer who worked with dialogue and embodiment who had an absolute faith in the restorative power of allowing the truth to be spoken and witnessed. She was my first mentor of soul work.

On one particular day, I arrived for a session with chills running up my spine, snot dripping out of my nose, weakness in my legs, and nausea in my gut. We began working with the dialogue process. I could "hear" inside my head a long-standing complaint which I had kept private: it seemed outrageous and improper to actually express it out loud. I struggled for minutes until finally "spitting it out," opening the pressure cooker of the "unspeakable," and then burst into tears. But when my tears died away after ten minutes, the influenza had completely evaporated! It was the moment that dismantled my modern mechanistic worldview. D.H. Lawrence maintains:

"I am not a mechanism,

an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism

is working wrongly that I am ill.

I am ill because of wounds to the soul,

to the deep emotional self."

My own childhood and upbringing was incredibly privileged and loving. Saying there are injuries to the soul is not an accusation of mistreatment. Each person feels the song of the world in unique notes, and again, as Wallace Stevens said above, a tragic time of history can be perceived as personally tragic to the sensitive soul even if you yourself are nourished well. One spends time sorting out the distinction between the personal and the universal, between the needed self-sympathy of personal boundaries and the world-empathy of compassion. Two years later, I enrolled in Linda's counsellor training course. A group of twenty would meet once a month for two years and learn the techniques of people work from her.

My twenties seem now to be a blur of amazing adventures and wild living. Along with studying counseling, I began studying Jazz and African dance, and became a volunteer at the local community television station—eventually hosting live shows, directing, and producing. When I was thirty, I sold my business to a young man who I had mentored for several years. I built a house on Salt Spring Island from architect's drawings from foundations to roof. I studied Technologies for Creating with Bruce Elkin and worked my way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. I read voraciously. I was making a documentary film about a youth substance abuse program. Eventually, the documentary led to me being hired as a counsellor in that youth program, where I stayed for four years. 

I was seeking more knowledge, hoping to find wisdom, and, like the Prince in the story The Water of Life, I didn't know where to go, just what the refreshment would be like if I could find it. Like the Prince, I had been a homeless refugee for a time. And like in the story, it took a year and a day of wandering and some characters speaking quietly off the side of the main road to point me in the direction of what I was looking for.

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Stones and Bones: Called by the Spirits

It was in 1995 that I met Michael Meade, a mythologist, ritual maker, and author of a book about initiation and mythology. A few months later, I met Malidoma Somé, an African shaman and holder of two doctorate degrees, and his wife Sobonfu, whose name means "keeper of the rituals." Soon I would meet David MacMurray Smith, an independent educator of movement and performance. I couldn't get enough of the wisdom they were all offering.

 

Of Michael's book, I told friends "I have never seen so much truth in one place together at one time." Malidoma almost terrified me except for the love of Africa I could see we shared. David was my "Yoda," master teacher of strategy and the dance of unseen forces. I continued reading, studied tantra, wrote 150,000 words trying to articulate what I was learning and weave it into a "patchwork cloak."

 

I practiced dance at a local community event—it was the modern version of the long house dance training traditional on the West Coast for untold generations. I was in a stage of initiatory education.

I sought out what was strongly disciplined with a rigorous foundation, but also often at the leading edge of best practice; not because it was fashionable, but because I realized it was the place where, as Meade says, "the dwarf is found standing at the side of the road, ready to give honest directions and real assistance if you take the time to listen." Bill Holm talks about the side of the road in his poem Advice:

"Someone dancing inside us

learned only a few steps:

The "Do-Your-Work" in 4/4 time,

The "What-Do-You-Expect" waltz.

He hasn't noticed yet the woman

standing away from the lamp,

the one with black eyes

who knows the rhumba,

and strange steps in jumpy rhythms

from the mountains in Bulgaria.

If they dance together,

Something unexpected will happen.

If they don't,

the next world will be a lot like this one."

At the beginning, I thought I was only wandering following my whiskers. But I slowly began to notice that the "strange steps in jumpy rhythms" were choreographed by a deep structure of music. I began to see the wisdom in what Malidoma called "maintenance rituals," rituals for ongoing health which one repeats many times in a life, such as the grief clearing ritual, or simply the gathering of each gender for a specific time each year. I was beginning to unlock the mysterious chain of impulse, imagery, emotion, personal memory and ancestral history in my work with David.

Malidoma was bringing indigenous wisdom to the West that had managed to survive colonialism. I was growing to appreciate and respect it immensely, taking notes and every opportunity to ask questions. One day he wryly answered one of my questions by stating, "You're more interested in the 20% that you don't know than in the 80% that you do know, aren't you?" The teacher was giving me a warning that the time to apply the theory might not be that far in the future. I was happy learning, healing, and exploring, and then something happened which drastically changed all of that in 2000.

I had been noticed. One of our informal cohort that was learning about ritual and mythology asked me if I could perform a ritual for his wife. She had growth on her cervix that was abnormal. They were pursuing conventional medical help, but they also wanted to address any spiritual aspect of the illness. With any ritual, an intention must be formed, and there must be some kind of "divinatory process" to seek guidance from the elements of nature, the ancestors, and the spirit world, to begin to understand what is called for to rebalance the whole community, seen and unseen. In this case, the imagery sent by the spirit world, and (as always) by my "patient's" own description, seemed to be pointing at a serious ritual we had first encountered in Malidoma's autobiography: the frightening, awe-inspiring, and possibly life-threatening, overnight Earth burial ritual. There was a major problem—I hadn't undergone the ritual myself.

 

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Dr. Michael Meade
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Professor David MacMurray Smith
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Elder Dr. Malidoma Somé
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(Right) Russel Shumsky, drumming.ca
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Daniel Deardorff, Story Hut

Journey to the Centre of the Earth

I had already encountered the idea that a medicine person has three days to decide whether he or she will assist with a ritual, but I now realized that it would be hard to ever say no if the request was genuine. Sobonfu was to be my advisor by phone. I enlisted a colleague and a couple of close friends to take me through the ritual first; we had unwittingly become researchers in the experimental recovery of indigenous knowledge. It was a considered gamble.

We prepared as best we could with all of our knowledge, but at the critical moment, found we could not heat the earth to the required 20 degrees Celsius—hypothermia was essential to avoid so the burial could be a ritual rather than a medical emergency. In fact, we couldn't even heat up a cup of soil, never mind enough to cover a human body. We were ground to a halt. I knew this was the way things happen, "more often than not," as Malidoma says, in the realm of real ritual. I had been singing at this point for almost two hours, but it was time to pray directly to the Earth spirits. I ranted and raved, calling in my most eloquent language attempting to get the attention of the spirits who could help us unlock the formula. Miguel de Unamuno says:

"Throw yourself like seed as you walk,

and into your own field . . .

from your work,

you will one day

be able

to gather yourself."

Every ritual will have a point where it is necessary to make a direct link with the spirit world, and this is the province of the medicine people, shamans, or "technicians of the sacred," as scholar Mircea Eliade called them. The crisis point creates an opening for spirit to enter the calculations as a factor along with the human knowledge. For us, at the last possible moment before dusk, the doorway opened, the technique for heating the earth was revealed, and we were able to proceed. Within a quarter hour we had our huge mound of earth at exactly twenty degrees. To cut a long story short, after being buried myself I was now able to act as a guide, and the couple now have two wonderful children.

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Betwixt and Between

I was left in the strange state of being initiated as a traditional healer but existing in the very profane modern world. The training for traditional healers varies widely in different cultural contexts, but the preparation always involves traditional information tailored by direct experience in the spirit world. Each traditional healer works in a particular "department." I was to find my own "assignment" in a surprising and traditional way.

I began to plan and conduct rituals, often using some of the traditional stories I was beginning to carry. Normally, in a cultural context where the mythic world and nature is considered part of "community," people approach the local "technician of the sacred" and ask for a ritual, as the couple had done. In a time where the very idea of the indigenous is on the verge of being lost, it is perhaps necessary to actually advocate for the conversation between the mythic world, nature, and the human community to at least legitimize the discourse of indigenous ritual alongside the modern forms of science and propositional justifications for interaction with the environment.

More than five years passed as I continued to study and began drumming on the West African Jembe. Rhythm can be an integral part of certain rituals. One morning, after a very intense ritual, I awoke from a dream suddenly, as if the mast of a ship had cracked in a storm. Startling words had woken me, and were echoing in my ears: "Your name is Calls Forth Voices." I opened my mouth to cry out, and realized in an instant that I had in reality lost my own voice. I was terrified that I had lost my ability to speak permanently. And I had no idea what this voice from the dreamtime could have to with me!

Looking back, it is quite amusing, but at the time, I was in such a state of shock that I could do nothing else than stay put and consider seriously what it might mean, if anything. The Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa said:

"If you have a dream,

wake up in the morning, and

start walking toward that dream."

Reviewing my life, lying on my back in bed, it slowly began to dawn on me that this was a central image of my life. It always had been lurking around no matter what the surface details of circumstances looked like. My interest in a situation always had been deeply aligned with the encouragement of "voices," whether they were in words or emotions or even movement. In fact, by the time an hour or two had passed, it seemed to me that my name could only be "Calls Forth Voices."

The dream had given me a redeeming and unified image—and provided an impossible to fulfill assignment. This kind of naming gives a person work that they cannot do alone, and they cannot complete in their own lifetime. And this is the proper way—it reminds us the genius inside is at once completely independent and completely inter-dependent. And mythology says this paradox of two opposing facets is proper; the tension between them is real and ongoing, the solution is to live both—custom stirring a mix for this moment, and then this moment, and so on.

Receiving a name in this fashion is the completion of one cycle of indigenous training. And of course there are always more layers, and learning, and according to Elders, further increases in trouble and responsibility.

There are many kinds of "technicians of the sacred," or what people sometimes call "shamans" nowadays. There is a lot of confusion about what actually constitutes a shaman. The current Wikipedia article on Shamanism provides a comprehensive and balanced overview. There are signs that shamanism (uncapitalized) is experiencing a small renaissance currently, and this is probably a good sign indicating a longing to reweave the strands of connection among nature, people and spirit. Anthropologist Wade Davis gives a good guideline to what is shamanism and a way of keeping sight of the sometimes strange goings on that occur around them:

"The shaman's role, was, by definition,

to seek the catalytic release

of the individual's wild genius,

whereas the priest's role was to

actually inculcate the collective

into a religious ideology."

My own particular responsibility is to call forth voices, and listen deeply to hear the song that is the source of those "strange steps in jumpy rhythms," especially voices from the edge—the voice of grief, of longing for the soul to follow its own drummer, the voice of desire for true vocation, the courageous speaker of welcoming, the one whose oratory makes reconciliation, the twisting wisdom of the body which tries to emerge in movement, gesture, feeling, inclination and inspiration, the cry of the wild, hiss of the elements, keening growl of the ancestors, the orchestra of the indigenous soul, those long forgotten urges of the heart to create beauty and sing the song of ecstasy, the deep wisdom of myth and the storyteller's croaking poetry: the discarded, undervalued, and forgotten. This is the work I do with my partner Rowena under the fabric of WildGenius.

A traditional Eskimo song praises the value of expression and says it can change everything:

"That was the time

when words were like magic.

The human mind had mysterious powers.

A word, spoken by chance,

might have strange consequences.

It would suddenly come alive

and what people wanted to happen

could happen—all you had to do was say it.

Nobody can explain this:

That's the way it was."

RTJ, Coast Salish Nonesmanneslond, 2020

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