Dancing Bear Men’s Retreat – Song & Poem
Author’s Note
I wrote this song-poem in August 2024 after attending the fourth annual mushroom and meditation retreat with a beloved men’s group I’ve been working with for over two decades. The poem is a weave of moments, themes, discussions, and insights that we shared on retreat. Influences include the Irish Poets, the pre-modern power god classics (Odyssey, Illiad, and Aeneid), and nature writers including Kim Stafford, Alison Deming, Gary Snyder, Richard Nelson, Robert Pyle, Peter Matthiesen, and Patiann Rogers. During this retreat, we were reading Robert Bly’s classic Iron John and watched Martin Scorcese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. All of the men in this group have decades of independent spiritual practice spanning Zen, Neo-Advaita, Tibetan Buddhism, mystical Christianity, and more. In addition to ceremonial engagement with psilocybin and long hikes in old-growth forests, we took turns leading daily meditations, sat by the river, practiced radical transparency, and formally engaged in the intersubjective nondual practice of Enlightened Communication.
Listen
Read
The river flows through the group as if we too are old stones in need of softening. So we come down to supplicate, kneeling in the water, laying our private wound wishes gently atop the light-shifting surface of the water.
And then we listen.
There is, after all, just one of us. One voice vibrating through the chords of our throats out into the river air weaving patience, insight, and love like the swallows that surf the subtle whorls of air just above the water.
They swallow the mayflies and we feed on moments of union, always searching for…what?
This may be the last time, I don’t know. But when we sit by the river, the silence slowly enters us like drops of nectar through the crowns of our heads.
We have also noticed that there is another.
One who walks among us unseen but surely bidden through the ministry of the river. One whose seeing frees us from the closet of knives we keep hidden.
And more than that. This One holds keys to locks we don’t even know are there.
And this initiation, it’s not a new story. Odysseus tied himself to the masts of his ship to avert the siren’s call.
Here, it’s reversed. We sit on the island shore watching the Cyclopes, Circe, the Sirens, and the Lystragonians, passing by on rubber tubes and rafts.
We watch while sitting deep below the roots, cradling great stones, attuned to an elemental song that sets the towering trees dancing and the green reeds asway.
Little lizards pulse their chests. Eagles, Ravens, and vultures circling, circling, and circling.
Circling what? Perhaps it’s our superordinate goal.
A conversation has started. We will stay here until it’s complete.
Our initiation is to be like the tree. Unmoving yet deep in slow flow, our bodies abiding in the earth.
Now we gather for a different ritual. The disclosure.
Our fathers ignored us. Criticized us. Slapped us. Cut us with careless words. Pushed us away. Receded into ice cubes, tumblers, and fermented minds.
Slowly our wounds grew.
Slowly we do the dance of unveiling the wound and bearing witness to it. We wash it in the river.
The heist we’re planning is audacious. Not possible. We will accomplish it. To tell the truth. To return to first principles. To say what we see. And to build an edifice of trust that stands against the bludgeoning tide of delusion.
Real is sacred world. The spell of disenchantment we must break.
At one point, I’m looking at the great rock in the middle of the river. The stone we swim to and struggle to mount. It’s the penultimate day of our ceremony.
Seeing the great stone as if for the first time, I realize our retreat is already over.
In no-time it will be tomorrow night. And tomorrow night will also be right now.
And just like that I’m at my death bed and it too is here, right now. Time, as I know it, has slipped from my grasp and seems to have never been there to begin with.
And then I see it. Beyond my death, also this moment. Ordinary. Lucid. Present. No different. But also another world altogether.
Always arriving, perhaps we never depart. Like the rock unmoving in the current. Same river, always different water.
Something in me never moves. Never has. Never will.
The Wild Man stands on the rock, fists balled, eyes bulging, squatting, shouting in gleeful wrathful defiance.
Like Ozymandias, exhorting, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
And yet, in the next, his ministry: chaos is good news. Then he sits still with legs crossed melting into the leafy tableau.
We see more of each other than we know or care to admit. Granting this feels like part of the work. We aren’t special at all. Just a bunch of guys doing hallucinogens after all.
And yet, the proof of our royal inheritance keeps pushing up through the padlocked floors of our ever dark and unfathomable basements.
Shanti, Shanti Motherfuckers, Shanti
References:
- The Seeing that Frees – Rob Burbea
- Iron John – Robert Bly
- The Four Bodhisattva Vows
- The Wasteland – T.S. Eliot
- Ozymandias – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Odyssey The Podcast – Jeff Wright
- The Odyssey – Homer
- The Iliad – Homer
- The Aeneid – Virgil
- This May be the Last Time – The Blind Boys of Alabama
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