Stepping toward the Sunrise
By Trebbe Johnson

Editor's note: Trebbe Johnson, vision quest guide and author, lives with her husband, Andrew Gardner, a potter and rustic furniture maker in rural Pennsylvania.  She leads ceremonies and workshops to introduce the Beloved to others throughout the United States, Canada, and overseas. Her writing on myth, nature, and the human quest for meaning has been published widely. Johnson trained as a vision quest guide with Animas Valley Institute, the School of Lost Borders, and SOLO Wilderness Medicine. Visit her website, visionarrow.com, for further information on her publications, public appearances, workshops, and vision quests.

Several years ago, while leading a wilderness rites-of-passage journey in the Utah Canyonlands, I made up a game with the sun. One chilly dawn, while the participants were out on a three-day solo, I walked to the edge of a grassy plateau, now covered with light frost, to watch the sun rise over the top of a slick rock canyon wall. So exhilarating was the spectacle — the great red globe emerging with startling speed over the top of the rim, the accompanying heat that warmed me and melted the frost, the infusion of optimism that comes with a new day — that I wanted to experience it all over again. And I realized that this was actually possible. If I just moved a few yards closer to the canyon wall, into an expanse of scrub still in shadow, I could watch the sun rise a second time. And so I did, waiting with the same bated breath for the dawn of the new day. That morning, just by stepping closer and closer to the darkness, I was able to attend four sunrises.

I see the aging process the same way. Elderhood, the Second Journey, does not come at me like a train. Rather, I must constantly — and consciously — move toward it with curiosity, playfulness, and the willingness to stand for a while in darkness and cold before the light appears.

Of course, certain events do push us toward the sunrise more forcefully than others. For me the big turning points were an early menopause and a late and life-altering falling-in-love.

I was post-menopausal by age 45. I wanted to commemorate the occasion in some way, but the obvious approaches did not seem to fit. At that age, I was certainly not ready to declare myself an elder. And, since I had decided long before not to have children, the passing of that biological phase was not relevant. Instead I took as my guide a line from W.B. Yeats’s poem, “The Phases of the Moon”:

Before the full
It sought itself and afterwards the world.

Similarly, the first half of my life had been devoted to gathering in as much of the world as I could: knowledge, inspiration, experience, wisdom. The second half I would devote to giving away what I had learned. I had already started the process that year. After having spent my entire life thinking of myself as a solitary, introverted writer, I had begun training to lead vision quests, wilderness journeys of transformation that combine adventure travel and soul-searching. To my amazement I was discovering that an exuberant, playful, extroverted part of me was eager to burst forth.

To celebrate my transition into “After the Full,” I held a weekend event at my home to which I invited women from all phases of my life. Seven appeared in person, and the rest sent photos and letters. Part circle of sharing, part slumber party, part ceremony, the occasion culminated in a ritual procession from the back yard into the meadow, representing the journey into the wide unknown. There, I ritually gave away what I had gained “before the full” by taking off the scarves and necklaces my friends had adorned me with and draping these gifts on them and on the apple trees that rimmed the meadow.¹

Five years later came the second big event to shove me toward a new sunrise. At the age of 50, happily married for twelve years, fulfilled in my work of leading vision quests in beautiful places, and writing about myth, nature and spirit, I lost my heart forcefully and unexpectedly to a younger man. Because I truly loved my husband, this sudden passion presented a terrible dilemma. Should I run off and have an affair with this man? Should I view my feelings as inappropriate and immoral and turn my back on them? Should I go into therapy? Instead I decided to follow a fourth path: I would explore desire from several perspectives and try to learn what was happening to me.

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What I discovered was the universal archetype of the Beloved, the personification of passion that seduces us into the beckoning unknown that we yearn (despite our fears) to be more intimate with and, in the process, invites us to embody our greater selves. This journey, which I recount in my book, The World Is a Waiting Lover: Desire and the Quest for the Beloved, has changed my life in many ways, probably the most significant of which is that I now feel truly at home in the world, and I have the sense of being constantly engaged in deep play with life, alone and with others, in small ways and large, in times of celebration and times of sorrow and doubt.

Tuning my attention, my hours so that I bring myself into mindful, creative, bold relationship with the Beloved, the inner fire that heats and illuminates the life path, has become the most important practice of my life, the essence of my vision quests and workshops, and what I hope to leave as a legacy for others. I feel very fortunate to be able to do this work through my writing and my Vision Arrow programs, but I also find that I am always on the lookout for the flaring-forth of the Beloved in other people. Having spent so much of my life as an introvert, I now feel like an explorer in search of buried treasure — in friends, clients, and strangers.

I often tell people that the single most important challenge and subsequent reward that we can give ourselves is to do one thing every day that we are afraid to do — and know we must do. In this way we keep stepping beyond the limiting boundaries we set for ourselves and move out into ever-widening circles of creativity, community, learning, teaching, giving, loving. Last year, for example, I, who had never imagined myself as a community leader and organizer, was moved to apply for a grant to plant 75 trees in our small, rural village in northeastern Pennsylvania. This effort is not only beautifying a formerly neglected town, but is bringing together a group of enthusiastic people I would previously never have gotten to know and hence deeply appreciate, for example, a logger, young people from the 4-H, and the Baptist minister.

I am blessed to have been married for twenty-one years to a man with whom I still fall in love several times a day. An artist and craftsman, he has abundant interests and activities of his own and is unfailingly supportive of my pursuits, even when he can’t understand them (even, amazingly, when one of them was launched by my infatuation with another man). We have a tacit rule that we will not hold grudges for even a minute, that we can stop a fight at any time and start all over, that we will never expect the other person to read our mind, and that some things about each of us just won’t change.

Relationships with my friends are essential, too. I realized many years ago that I could either get a resentment if some cherished friend failed to get in touch regularly or else I could keep the friendship alive by maintaining contact myself. My friends stretch through several countries and through all the phases of my life, from the woman who was my best friend since seventh grade in Omaha to a woman I met recently on one of my vision quests in the Sahara Desert. Last weekend, five of my college friends came together for a weekend reunion at my home. On Saturday the six of us talked non-stop from 8:00 in the morning until 1:00 a.m. the following morning, covering every conceivable subject. My friends and I know the depths of each other and the shallows and love it all.

Constantly I must ask myself: How can I live in a way that is true? What is the existential gesture I need to take, the act that, although it may have no outward consequences whatsoever, is something that I absolutely must take to follow the Beloved and be me? What’s seducing me next — not to grab and possess, but to connect, transform, create, discover, unearth more beauty and meaning?

I think I have always had the sense that pieces of my soul were scattered all over the world — in places, books, other people, ideas — and that I must constantly be on the lookout for them, so that I can piece together my full being. What I realize now that I am almost 60 is that I am just as likely to find part of that essential puzzle in a long line of frustrated passengers at O’Hare airport, when storms have shut down the friendly skies, as I am at a full moon ceremony in a Hindu temple in Bali. The trick is being observant at all times, keeping an eye out for the miracle, and trying, so far as I am able, to keep on stepping in the direction of the sunrise.

Notes

¹ My article about this ceremony, “After the Full,” was published in the Spring 1996 issue of Sage Woman.