Blind Sight (25 page)

Jeff gave us a big speech the first day when we assembled as a group at the Sacred Journey Station with all of our gear. I didn’t hear any of this speech because I saw a rabbit. I know that sounds ridiculous, but we were all crowded together in this little orientation room, and I was sitting on this window seat, and right as Jeff began his speech I saw a small brown rabbit about ten feet away outside. I had just read
Watership Down
, which was a book my sisters had both loved, and so I saw this rabbit and I started thinking about all the rabbits in that book: Fiver, who was the mystical rabbit, and Hazel, the steady leader type, and Bigwig, the fighter. I stopped thinking about the whole story of
Watership Down
and started listening to Jeff right at the moment that Jeff said, “Okay, while we make our first hike to our base camp, I ask that we all maintain a Noble Silence unless there is an emergency, so that we may all reflect on these four points.”

I’ve always really liked hiking, especially if it’s in difficult terrain,
and you have to make choices about how you are going to surmount obstacles, but our first hike was pretty easy, and nobody broke the Noble Silence. I had no clue about what four points I was supposed to be reflecting on, but I wasn’t particularly worried about this. I figured it probably had to do with creating a spiritual goal, or making space in one’s heart for self-love, or something along those lines. When we got to the campsite, though, after we built a fire, Jeff asked us to write “those three things we talked about” down on the pieces of paper he was handing out. When we finished, he told us, we were to cast our papers into the fire.

In situations like these, where you might have totally missed the point or argument of something because you were thinking of something else, like the adventures of fictional rabbits, for example, it’s safest to go for broad strokes. Like sometimes after Assembly, Nana might ask me what I thought about the scripture lesson of the day, and if I said something like, “I thought it was about God’s love for us,” or “It seemed like they were saying we need to trust in God,” that usually works pretty well. I was on the point of writing down things like, “I will be a good listener,” or “I will help others,” when Jeff made a clarifying statement about renunciation, and how we should search inside ourselves for ways of
being
that we were ready to renounce, rather than things like chocolate, or smoking.

So I sat down on the ground and tried to think of three things to give up. I was familiar with the concept of renunciation, because that’s in all religions and both Sara and Nana talked about it. A lot of my renunciations had already been made for me: not eating meat or processed foods, not owning any toys or games that were orientated toward war or violence, not playing football, etc., so it was hard to come up with things. Everybody else was busy scribbling away except me. I wrote down “I will give up” three times and waited for inspiration to fill in the spaces. Inspiration did not come. Soon everybody was casting his or her papers into the fire, so I just left mine blank and threw that in. I guess my whole Sacred Journey got off on the wrong foot, with the rabbit.

Each day on the Sacred Journey, Jeff would hand everyone a small crystal on a cord to wear around our necks to help ground us in the day’s chakra. The idea of chakras is that there are seven invisible wheel-like things in the body, through which you can receive and transmit energy. People relate them to specific organs or glands, and also emotional states, and colors. Wearing or using a crystal associated with a chakra is meant to help activate or balance it. My sisters and I already knew all of this from Sara, who was as likely to give you a turquoise to help you with your sore throat (fifth chakra) as belladonna or honey. By the third day of my Sacred Journey I was already a little bored with chakras, so when Jeff conducted the meditation, I used the time for experimentation.

For example, when we were doing Manipura, the solar plexus chakra, I did the physical action of fire breathing, but I really tried to shut Jeff out and not see the color yellow or the blue ten-point lotus flower, or recite the names of the petals, or find my inner flame, or any of the visualizations. Instead I concentrated on imagining a green frog with purple spots croaking:
boo-ya!

I was just interested, you know, in seeing if I could still get all the benefits of fire breath like increased energy and a smooth bowel movement if I was thinking of something totally non-Manipura. What happened was that I got really dizzy, and for the rest of the day I had the sound of a frog croaking—
boo-ya!
—on some sort of auditory loop in my brain circuitry, which was really annoying. But I also did have a smooth bowel movement, which is a useful thing to have in the woods.

Jeff was a good guy, and knowledgeable about things like rope tying and plant life and astronomy, and there were some cool people in our group too, so it was fun. On the sixth day (Ajna, the third-eye chakra), Jeff gave me my numerology reading. That was something he did for everyone in our group, but he had to spread it out over the week, because he couldn’t do everybody in one day without exhausting his spiritual resources. Everyone who had had a numerology reading by Jeff agreed that Jeff was amazing.

Jeff did my numbers after we had set up our camp for the night, and everybody was writing in their journals around the fire. I sat with Jeff on a log a little bit away from camp, and Jeff held a flashlight in between his teeth so he could see his notebook while he was writing down my name and my birth date and doing his calculations. He said that he had been doing numerology for a long time, and had a very refined system based on these ancient precepts from kabbalah and other sources.

“Wow,” he said, taking out the flashlight and looking at me. “You have a lot of nines. You have an overabundance of nines. You have the numbers of a Universal Sage.”

“Hmmm,” I said.

“It’s a very clear chart,” Jeff said. “Extremely organized: groups of nines, groups of sevens, a nice clear thirty-three, a repeating seventy-seven. Wow. Makes a lot of sense.”

“Cool,” I said.

“I’d like to deal with this thirty-three first” Jeff said. “That is the Christ number, the age Christ was when he died. Thirty-threes can go either way. They can be teachers, and humanitarians in their most positive aspect, but they can also be martyrs. That’s what you have to look out for, Luke.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You are a sympathetic person. A person with huge powers of empathy, you can be a social reformer, you can effect great change on humanity. The work that you do will really change people. On a global scale.”

I don’t remember what I said to that. I’m not sure that at twelve I had any desire to effect change on humanity, or that I had a concept of global scale. I thought of being things like an astronaut, or some kind of explorer, but I wanted to be an astronaut because I thought it would be cool to travel in space, not because it would be cool to give humanity the benefit of my space knowledge.

“You have trouble granting that your feelings and needs are real
feelings and needs,” Jeff said. “It’s important that you clearly communicate your needs early in your relationships. You are also an adept in the darker subconscious aspects of humanity. That increases your self-knowledge, but it can also draw dark elements to you, seeking your understanding. You have to watch out for that. You’ll have to fight that, Luke. I don’t say this to scare you.”

I don’t think I was scared because I don’t think I really knew what he was talking about. I wasn’t sure what he meant by fighting. I
was
pretty good at t’ai chi. Of course, that’s not a fighting martial art, in the traditional sense. If someone attacks you in t’ai chi, you defend yourself with your ability to anticipate and absorb oppositional forces, you don’t, like, karate-chop them into submission. (I don’t know how well t’ai chi works in some sort of brawling situation. You’d pretty much have to be a Master to stand there in “hug tree” pose fusing your yin and yang while someone came at you with a broken beer bottle.) But of course, Jeff wasn’t talking about actual hand-to-hand combat with people.

There was a bunch of other stuff that he said that I don’t remember and two other things that I do.

“You are on a thirteen-year cycle,” Jeff said. “Every thirteen years you will experience a complete epiphany that will change the direction of your life.”

“Starting when?” I asked, since I was just about to turn thirteen.

“From the beginning of your life. Also, 2007 will bring the number two into play for you, and that will be the only time that it does and it will change things at a very fundamental level for you.”

So that was my numerology reading, and then we went back to the campsite and Sara asked me how I felt and I said, “Good.”

After we finished with our seventh chakra day we had two more days of spiritual integration and some other stuff like rope tying and shelter building and then we did our solo camp.

This was where you went off on your own and spent a night by yourself communing with all your new knowledge and testing your
skills. It was also where you might find your totem animal. Sara was really big on my finding a totem animal.

It’s hard to induce a coming of age, but I had everything I needed for one. I was in the mountains. I had nothing with me but a small backpack that carried basic supplies. There were a variety of forest creatures about as potential spirit guides. I was totally up on my chakras. I was apparently, according to my divine numbers, on the cusp of a personal epiphany. I was ready.

Because of my youth, Jeff was keeping an eye on me for my solo. He wasn’t, he said, going to interrupt me, but he would be within shouting distance and he gave me a whistle that I was to wear around my neck and blow on in case of emergency. I wondered if I would see a bear, and if that would mean that it was my totem animal, and if so, what would it mean if you were mauled by your own totem animal?

I enjoyed the building of my shelter, and of my small fire. I made a little clearing and designed a labyrinth, with rocks and twigs and leaves and things. I walked my own labyrinth, very slowly. I listened to the sounds of the woods. Eventually I rolled out my sleeping bag next to the fire, because it was a clear night and I didn’t need my shelter. I looked at the stars. I prepared myself to have deep and powerful dreams and the next thing I knew it was morning and all I could remember of my dream was that at one point Sara and I were driving in our car and we passed a McDonald’s and I said, “Can I get some fries?” and Sara said, “No,” which was weird only because I would never ask Sara to stop at a McDonald’s.

We all reconvened at our group campsite and people were invited to read from their journals or share experiences.

“How was it?” Sara asked me. “Wasn’t it wonderful?”

I agreed and Sara asked me if I knew my animal and I said yes and that it was a rabbit. It was what came to mind, I guess, because of
Watership Down
. I didn’t want to disappoint Sara. I was taking a bit of a risk, because I had no idea what rabbits symbolize, but I figured there had to be at least one culture where the rabbit was the
ultimate mark of
something
that Sara would read as very significant and Special.

It was a good guess. When we got back home, Sara did research on the meaning of rabbits. In some North American native tribes, Nanabozho—the Great Hare—is a hero and creator of the Earth, born of a human mother and a spirit father. (In some versions of the tale, Nanabozho is a very amoral figure, but Sara passed over that.) Depending on where and who, the rabbit can symbolize fear and overcoming limiting beliefs, benevolence, whimsy, innocence, abundance, rebirth, and almost always: sexuality. The rabbit was a favorite animal of Aphrodite. Pliny the Elder said that eating the meat of the hare would increase your sexual attractiveness for nine days. The number associated with the rabbit is 7997. (Also 58, and 2065.) The rabbit is also often associated with the moon. The moon goddess Ostara had a magical white rabbit attendant who laid colorful eggs that were handed out to children during spring fertility festivals. Early Christians thought the rabbit portended disaster and was the preferred form of many witches. The Celts said that eating a hare was like eating one’s own grandmother. Chinese astrologers say Rabbits get along with Goats and Pigs, but on no account should they marry Roosters. Lord Buddha was once incarnated as a hare, and when he was unable to procure food for Lord Indra, he threw himself into a fire so that Indra could eat him.

You can add up all these rabbit things and put with them the other stuff I’m supposed to be. In astrology, I’m a Libra with Scorpio rising. In the Chinese calendar they would call me a Dragon. Combine these and it means someone who is energetic, brave, charming, diplomatic, honest, and idealistic. Also someone who is short-tempered, stubborn, eccentric, and bad with money. I’m destined to be a Universal Sage or a Martyr. I should be careful of my lower back and my kidneys. I respond best to water and should try to live near it. I have a fear of knives that I am not even conscious of having. People are drawn to me.

There is even more stuff. Sara has interpreted my dreams, her friend Eileen has read my tarot cards, and her friend Aju did a past-life reading on me (a monk, a violinist, a healer, a warrior). Then there is Nana, so I’ve also been reassured that I am a Child of God. Jesus loves me and died for me.

The universe is watching over me. Abigail Perkins and twelve generations of sisters culminated in ME. I have a DESTINY TO FULFILL.

Last year I turned seventeen and that is the legal age you can donate blood in Delaware, so I made my first donation. Afterwards I was given a little card that said “I Just Donated!” and listed my blood type: A+. I keep the card in my wallet, not just for a possible accident, but because I like it. I think of it as a sort of private trump card. My ace in the hole. You can think I am a Dragon or a rabbit or a fourth-century warrior or whatever, but I have the evidence: I am A+.

You can take this whole essay and everything you think it reveals about me and shove it up your ass.