Written: December 21, 2022
Here in Kentucky the days are growing shorter and everything is entering into a death phase before its winter slumber. I find the spiritual seasons of my life often mirror what is going on in the natural world. Much of this fall has been a death phase, starting with the ascension of our dear brother Parker.
The past year has held more beauty, tragedy, and transformation than any in memory. It's been a reminder that the spiritual path isn't just love and light, or peace and equanimity. It is a process of expanding our capacity to experience and hold more pleasure, pain, love, and sorrow. Because it is in the territory of our edges that we find the will and faith to expand beyond the known back into the infinite.
Medicine work is an accelerant to the spiritual path, and I've felt things within me dying off at an accelerated rate. A major theme of my personal work has been the tantrification of my inner renunciate, and the integration of the human. Since childhood I have craved monastery walls and a hermit's cave, and have lived in the world as a householder only because I felt like I had no other choice.
For the first 26 years of my life my heart was completely shut off, and I existed in a state of perpetual alienation. That alienation led me to law school, where I hoped to acquire the means to build a fortress around myself of money and power.
Then six months after passing the bar I had a sudden spiritual awakening that caused my heart to fly wide open and the person I had been to die. In the moments after I wanted nothing more than to run away to an ashram or cave and spend the rest of my life in meditation and prayer. But the desire for escape that had manifested in material terms had thoroughly enmeshed me in the world.
In the days after that awakening my work became clear. My desire for monastery walls and the hermit's retreat were expressions of my desire to run away from a messy, complicated, and often unpleasant word. Not primarily a desire for self realization. My edge was pursuing the spiritual path while living in the world well, and being in relationship with others.
During my decade of practicing law I followed the model of the householder yogi. I did my spiritual practices in the privacy of my home and kept it separate from my professional life. I was an employer, leader in my community, and many other things. However, the lack of integration between my spiritual life and worldly activity created a retreat for the private self, which allowed me to be active in the world, but not intimately involved with it.
When Parker invited me to serve medicine with him at the beginning of 2022 I saw an opportunity to more deeply integrate spirit and form and to move into deeper alignment and service.
Parker's extroverted and gregarious nature allowed me to focus on the medicine and healing part of our work while he built community. With a chacruna like him as a partner I was able to remain within the walls of my private self, only to come out to be of service during ceremonies.
With his transition I'm finding another layer of separation between myself and others is needing to come down. In order to continue being of service I need to be in deeper and more intimate relationship with the world and everyone in it. I need to be more vulnerable and raw, more human and available for connection. Because the act of vulnerability and the sharing of our private self is a prerequisite for giving and receiving love and building community.
This is the personal work I've been doing over the past several months, even as I have stepped forward to be of service. As far as I can tell the personal work is never done. We just get more skillful at using our service as a vehicle for growth.
I wasn't quite sure how to continue Parker's newsletter after his passing. So I decided to follow his lead by sharing the story of the medicine, which includes my own personal journey. Hopefully doing so will be a light on the path for others.
In November 2022 I had the pleasure of gathering with soul family and kindred spirits for ceremony in Sedona, which turned out to be even more incredible than you might imagine. Sedona alone is a beautiful and healing place, but when you add sacred medicines into the mix your ability to appreciate those things increases exponentially.
I could write volumes about the beauty and healing we experienced during those ceremonies and still wouldn't do it justice. Some lessons were big and profound, while others were more practical. Huachuma has a beautiful way of teaching us deep spiritual lessons along with the practical ways of embodying them.
By the end of that cycle of work I found myself on a spiritual peak where I was feeling pure, blissful, and full of love...which meant the work of integration began almost immediately.
Because we live in a benevolent universe with a wicked sense of humor my connecting flight home from Sedona was through none other than Las Vegas, Nevada - and thanks to a canceled flight my one hour layover turned into a 48 hour Odyssey.
Even in my darkest most alienated moments I never felt called to Vegas. The gaudy lights, relentless sounds, and overall aura of gluttony and greed epitomize everything my inner renunciate has an aversion to. So it's fitting that I spent fourteen hours stranded in the MGM Casino before I was able to get a room.
I wish I could say I found a way to enjoy Vegas, but I didn't. The entire city felt like the sticky floor of a dive bar, and I was frequently in a state of boredom and discomfort. Once I got a room I barely left it, and it became my monastery wall.
In the wake of that experience I've been reflecting on the aspects of myself that crave sleep and escape, along with those which seek awakening and presence. As we purify our desires we must often go more deeply into both aversions and attractions in order to learn what each has to teach us.
Since Vegas I find myself more acutely aware of where sleep and escapism show up in my life, and how I might cultivate more presence, reverence, and devotion. I'm also trying to notice where suppressed desires are lurking within me that still need to be explored. Renunciation of attachment is essential to the spiritual path, but that which is renounced prematurely tends to find expression as our shadow.
In a few weeks I will be flying down to Peru for a month of medicine work, starting with five ceremonies with Grandmother followed by our Huachuma Pilgrimage with don Martin. When Parker and I first planned this adventure we joked that we didn't know who or what we would be by February, but that we hoped it would be something good.
As I prepare to make the journey alone some sadness arises, along with a little loneliness. The loss of a friend and brother is a hard thing, and grief doesn't happen all at once. It comes in waves and manifests in different ways.
One of the lessons the medicine has been teaching me lately is the ways in which loneliness and alienation are a matter of perspective. When we focus on what has been lost we feel lonely. When we think of the brothers, sisters, mentors, and friends we are blessed to still walk the path with, life feels impossibly full.
Both aloneness and connection are simultaneously true. We are both alone and surrounded by infinite aspects of ourselves expressed as the multiplicity of the universe. As I work to integrate these things more deeply I'm finding it easier to be alone but not lonely, while being non-attached but not disconnected. In this way I hope to be more deeply involved with the world and everyone in it, as I strive to live para el bien de todos.
Infinite Love,
Zachary