Orientation meeting, calling in the Light, intro of our guides and staff, logistics, blessings by Leigh and John. Balancing and fueling of the rocket for take-off.
It’s the “start” of the “trip”…although the trip starts when you decide to go, generally months in advance, and the “trip” is actually a weeks-long retreat in the Mystical Traveler energy—except that we’re moving more than we do in what’s usually thought of as a retreat. The movement enhances the letting-go process. And it includes the lands and people that we touch while we’re on this trip inside of ourselves. It’s an un-contained, all-inclusive retreat. We’re here for us, or what’s left of us after months of clearing and inner preparation—and for All.
I think that my preparation started sometime around the early spring of this year, when I found out that I was going on the trip. A couple of minor illnesses reminded me of my mortality and reinforced my commitment to my Self. I started exercising a lot and brought more lightness into the body.
Then in the couple of weeks before the trip started I was prompted to let go of my Jeep, a lifted, gargantuan-tired 2001 Wrangler that symbolized all my happiest times doing photography on journeys in remote places in nature. One morning I woke up and my one and only car-love seemed to transform from a deep-green, sleek, powerful, protean lord of the jungle and beach into an overweight hunk of excess metal and corpulent rubber that used more gas than I could afford, and seemed mildly absurd lumbering across the LA freeways like an elephant that had escaped from a zoo. I was amazed at how my consciousness could be transformed literally overnight.
I was actually being nudged to let go of a longstanding attachment to the solidity and familiarity of the natural world as a substitute for the unpredictability and ethereality of Spirit. So in a manic burst of creativity I went into my internet-cave and blueprinted the perfect counterargument to my past, a metallic-aqua Mini Cooper convertible that would propel me deftly and cheaply through both the natural beauty of the California coast and the sclerotic tangle of its freeways. Just a few days before I was going to leave I found the perfect one, a hundred miles away. I was in love again. It felt so right, so guided by the Almighty. Over three days I rushed back and forth to the dealership trying to bend the calendar to my will before my flight—but at the last minute I noticed a mechanical problem with the soft top and my dream of letting go of my past through materializing the symbol of its opposite fell through. I knew it would be sold by the time I got back from the trip.
But I didn’t feel disappointed. Mostly I felt the relief of releasing the baggage of symbolism, anti-symbolism, the natural world, my past, and my human desire to push outward into the world. I was being guided by Spirit—not into creativity, but into a benevolent destruction. I could feel all my pushing energy being directed into a harmonious inwardness by the energy that was building for the trip. I was just me, without my shroud of sheet metal pseudo-enlivened by velocity. The right vehicle would be brought to me to get me where I needed to go, in perfect timing. And all my careful and ardent creativity that was poured into manifesting the new car settled into a serene mountaintop view of the lower worlds, above the waves of creation and destruction. As the trip starts I’ve been moved further into Spirit, lighter and more nimble, more of my energy going up instead of down into creating in the outer world.
In the photos you’ll see around 70 different variations of this kind of story, counting both participants and staff, all gathered in a brightly lit hotel ballroom in Istanbul, sitting with eyes closed in meditation or laughing or both, re-meeting each other in the wake of years of previous trips, getting their radios, name tags and travel trinkets, primed and ready for takeoff, and aligning with a 3-week flight plan through an ancient land, shielded only by their Soul-car of Spirit.
