The Myth Rider

When I compare sources describing the shaman's journey and the novelist's journey, I see similarities. Both begin their journeyWhen I compare sources describing the shaman's journey and the nos by relaxing, setting aside distracting thoughts, calming themselves and using their imaginations as the catalyst for the trip that follows. In both cases, the imagination begins the journey, but isn't the journey itself.

Information--whether visual, heard, or sensed--comes to both the shaman and the novelist through motifs and symbols they know and are used to interpreting. During their training, both are urged to journey with intent but with a nonjudgemental attitude. Listen, pay attention, remember and record what happens.

Like the shaman, the novelist often goes through preparatory rituals. In both cases, these serve the same function: they facilitate, empower and honor the trip. The shaman may keep a feather close at hand and ride down to a theta brainwave frequency on the beat of a drum, and that journey may always begin with a nonphysical point of departure such as a meadow or an old log or a camp fire. The novelist may work in a room with meaningful photographs and artwork, and ride into the otherworld of the story s/he is telling on the ticking of a clock or the play of light through the window or music for the moment.

My point of departure in either mode is an "imaginary cabin" in a real valley in Glacier National Park. Those who meditate, whatever their intent, often visualize their departure points as relaxing beaches, meadows, lakes and mountain tops. Once there, the imagination backs away and the journeying, listening, or healing begins.

I placed my "imaginary cabin" in a location I'd physically traveled to many times. It's also a location that has been captured in many photographs, so I see the valley in nearby pictures here in my den before I see it in my mind's eye. I have been using this cabin for meditation for almost 40 years. Over time, it's taken on all the comforts of home. At the beginning, I relied on longer relaxation techniques to "get there." Now, I can "be there" in an instant.

My journeys overlap. That is to say, there are few boundaries for me between a shamanic journey and a writing journey, for in both cases, I am soaking up information and inspiration. My novels The Sun Singer and Garden of Heaven both mention this cabin. Sarabande, my novel in progress, also mentions it. While readers know what the cabin looks like from the descriptions in my books, I think an intuitive shaman or psychic could probably find the cabin in nonordinary reality and see that it is no less real there than the lake it sits beside.

If you write, you probably have your own rituals, techniques, and processes. Maybe you puzzle together your first drafts the way a carpenter builds a cabinet or may you type very rapidly and just let the story flow out across the page or the screen.

While I like the "power" of all the comfortable objects that resemble clutter to everyone else, you may prefer a clean desk and a room with a minimal number of photographs or art works. We each do what works for us. But, should you tell me that there are times when your characters talk to you when you're not even at work and/or that when you are writing, your characters do and say unexpected things, or take matters into their own hands when you clearly have something else in mind, then I'm going to smile and see that there is some journeying in your approach.

Like a shaman, the novelist, composer or artist at work has an opportunity to learn much that s/he did not previously know just from going through the process of creation. In some ways, the book, song or painting that may occasionally result is a byproduct of what is really unfolding within the individual.

"If you want the whole thing,
the gods will give it to you.
But you must be ready for it."
--Joseph Campbell

"There are, therefore, two kinds of knowledge in this world: an eternal and a temporal. The eternal springs directly from the light of the Holy Spirit, but the other directly from the Light of Nature." - Paracelsus

"When man solves the mystery of imagining, he will have discovered the secret of causation, and that is: Imagining creates reality. Therefore, the man who is aware of what he is imagining knows what he is creating; realizes more and more that the drama of life is imaginal - not physical. All activity is at bottom imaginal. An awakened Imagination works with a purpose. It creates and conserves the desirable, and transforms or destroys the undesirable."
Neville Goddard in "The Law and the Promise"

"There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this 'something' as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation. This is what I must do, this is what I've got to have. This is who I am."
--James Hillman

"The nature of life is to contain both chaos and order."
--Deepak Chopra

"The warrior never picks fruit while it is still green."
--Paulo Coelho

"The people that appeal to me are forever discovering new layers of possibility. Their larger adventures are often within. After all, our rich inner lives are what we have to show for how we have invested our energies over the years. Whatever we might accomplish in practical terms is modest, compared with the marvels within. It is as if a life is the task of building an interior castle of ideas, feelings, experiences, and dreams."
--Jonathan Young

"The degree of fulfillment you enjoy at any given point in time depends on the strength of your connection to the Creator--and you yourself are responsible for that connection."
--Michael Berg

"Small hills don't make good mountain climbers."
--Grandfather Elliott in "The Sun Singer"

"We each have a spiritual current that runs through our lives-a river. Connected to that current, our work, our life, has power. I constantly ask myself: What is my relationship to that current? Am I letting it guide me or am I forcing my will upon my life?"
--Roderick MacIver, "Heron Dance" issue 13

"I did not know I was on a search for a passionate aliveness. I only knew I was lonely and lost and that something was drawing me deeper beneath the surface of my life, in search of meaning. There is a hunger in people to touch those depths; to know that our lives are sacred; that our hearts are truly capable of love. It is a yearning to be all that we can be. A longing for what is real."
--Anne Hillman

(Photo: "Storm over Glacier," by Malcolm R. Campbell, copyright (c) 1964.)