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Paying Homage to the Dark
Since moving from southern to northern California, the winter solstice no longer passes by without my notice. Although it is only 500 hundred miles from L.A. to these foothills in the Sierra, the terrain is vastly different, at least to my provincial mind. The darkness of the early afternoon, the mulch of soggy oak leaves,…
Read MoreThe Cultural Legacy of the Big Lie in Modern Rites of Passage
It has been nearly a year since I’ve published any new posts on this blog. To let you know that I am still breathing, I’m adding this piece that I recently wrote for the School of Lost Border’s webpage. It speaks a lot to what I have been thinking about these days and so I…
Read MoreTending Winter’s Garden
“The cold wind takes our breath away. We stumble and turn our backs to the worst of it. Boreas will howl in our faces all the way home. If we have lived a life of fidelity to the best of that which winter brought forth from us, and if we have watched the other creatures…
Read MoreStories in the Land
In 1998, my friend Cindi Alvitre and I received a small teaching fellowship from the Orion Society called Stories in the Land. At the time I was a school counselor at the small K-12 public school in my hometown of Avalon. Many years before this, while I was still a kid, my father, Norman Perluss,…
Read MoreAncestor Preparation: On Becoming a Good Dead Person
Note: This short piece has been submitted to Circles on the Mountain for publication. For better or worse, wilderness rites of passage programs have gained a great deal of popularity over recent years. For better, because many of us have worked hard to see meaningful rites regain their importance within modern culture. We know that…
Read MoreLet me tell you a secret
In his oft quoted poem, “Don’t go back to sleep”, Rumi, writes, “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don’t go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don’t go back to sleep”. For obvious reasons, this is a favorite poem among wilderness rites of passage guides, as a…
Read MoreClimbing the Alchemical Mountain
I’ve spent a lot of glorious time in the California Sierra this summer (meaning I didn’t do much writing) so intead of posting something new, I am posting this older piece I wrote for the journal Psychological Perpsectives, which is published by the Jung Institute of Los Angeles. It’s a very long piece for blog standards,…
Read MoreThe Wild Imaginal World of Storytelling and Mirroring
Preface: This is a slightly longer version of an essay I wrote the for the upcoming issue of Circles on the Mountain, a journal published by the Wilderness Guides Council. The essay is about storytelling and mirroring, a practice we teach at the School of Lost Borders, initially created in this form by Steven Foster and Meredith Little. If you…
Read MoreWe Are All Rainmakers
What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? – Thomas Merton Chen Jiru (1558-1639), Thatched Hut by Tall Pines. Richard Wilhelm, Chinese scholar and theologian, told the story of the Rainmaker to Carl Jung while at a gathering of the…
Read MoreSun Stands Still
If you will contemplate your lack of fantasy, of inspiration and inner aliveness, which you feel as sheer stagnation and a barren wilderness, and impregnate it with the interest born of alarm at your inner death, then something can take shape in you, for your inner emptiness conceals just as great a fullness if only…
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