|  Yet I remained puzzled by my hostess’s assertion that these were gifts “for the spirits.” To be sure, there has always been some confusion between our Western notion of “spirit” (which so often is defined in contrast to matter or “flesh”), and the mysterious presences to which tribal and indigenous cultures pay so much respect. I have already alluded to the gross misunderstandings arising from the circumstance that many of the earliest Western students of these other customs were Christian missionaries all to ready to see occult ghosts and immaterial phantoms where the tribespeople were simply offering their respect to the local winds. While the notion of “spirit” has come to have, for us in the West, a primarily anthropomorphic or human association, my encounter with the ants was the first of many experiences suggesting to me that the “spirits” of an indigenous culture are primarily those modes of intelligence or awareness that do not possess a human form.
— David Abram How do you contact the spirits of the wilderness? Bill Plotkin, director of Animas Valley Institute, says that the spirits – or Spirit, or Soul, or the Sacred Other, or, as James Hillman calls them, the Gods – speak to us in images, dreams, visions, fantasies, imagination; and we speak to them, in turn, by ceremony and ritual. I like to recall what Joan of Arc says to the inquisitor in George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan: JOAN: I hear voices telling me what to do. They come from God.
ROBERT: They come from your imagination.
JOAN: Of course. That is how the messages of God come to us.
The books in this section are among those I have found helpful in teaching me to listen and to speak to the spirits in the wilderness. They cover rituals and ceremonies, dreams and dreamwork, shamanic journeying, journaling, sitting in council, the vision quest, rites of passage, chanting, constructing altars; they teach me to discern authentic callings; they encourage me to embrace simplicity.
 Herbert Anderson et al., Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals: Weaving Together the Human and the Divine (San Francisco CA: Jossey-Bass, 1998), ISBN 0-7879-5648-1. One author is a professor of pastoral theology, and the other is a professor of liturgy and music; together they have produced a book on ritual that transcends sectarian boundaries. The book links narrative and ritual, showing how to connect the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives with the rituals we enact. When stories and rituals work together – when rituals include and recognize the personal stories of the participants – they can be, in the authors’ terms, mighty and dangerous, deepening our spiritual connection, making us more fully human, and teaching us to live with complexity and contradiction. The book focuses on three life milestones – welcoming a child, preparing for marriage, and encountering death – and shows how these familiar life-cycle rituals are infused with new life as their participants become connected in a narrative web linking past and present, human and divine. And it discusses the ways in which we can create rituals for our other stories for which our culture as yet provides no ritual voice – leaving home, divorce, adoption, stillbirth, withdrawing life support.
 Christina Baldwin, Calling the Circle (New York NY: Bantam Books, 1998), ISBN 0-553-37900-3. What others call council, this book calls circle, with participants sitting in a circle, passing a talking piece from person to person, and speaking and listening from the heart. She gives detailed instructions and suggestions for getting started, setting goals, and solving disagreements safely and respectfully. She also offers examples of circles in action – a women's spirituality group, a father and son in crisis, a PTA group that averts a school strike, and a work project team.
 Christina Baldwin, Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest (New York NY: Bantam Books, 1990), ISBN 0-553-35202-4. The author – a psychotherapist and a leader in the renaissance of personal writing – sees journal writing as a tool for increasing our self-understanding, expanding our inner horizons, and relating more meaningfully to the world. She offers journal topics, ideas for writing practice, exercises, questions, quotations, techniques, and sample entries taken from the her journal workshops.
 Robert Bosnak, Tracks in the Wilderness of Dreaming: Exploring Interior Landscape through Practical Dreamwork (New York NY: Delta, 1997), ISBN 0-385-31529-5. Jungian therapist Bosnak has been leading dream groups for twenty-five years, and he has developed a widely influential visceral and tactile method of reentering and exploring dreams as real worlds. In this book, he offers practical tools and techniques with which to explore this part of our our inner lives, based in part on his interaction with Australian Aborigine dreamworkers. “If the dreamworlds and their dwellers are real and entirely unknown to us,” he writes, “they must belong to wilderness, to unknown lands with laws of their own and creatures untamed, fascinating, and frightening.” This book gives practical techniques, examples, and stories that help us learn to enter and explore that world.
 Sedonia Cahill et al., The Ceremonial Circle: Practice, Ritual, and Renewal for Personal and Community Healing (New York NY: HarperCollins, 1992), ISBN 0-06-250154-2. This book provides practical information on creating ceremonial circles and related rituals. More explicitly founded in a sense of spirituality than other books on council circles – and specifically women’s spirituality – this book discusses not only family circles, intimate circles, men’s and women’s circles, and political circles, but also drumming, smudging, rattling, healing ceremonies, and prayer lodge. The author interviews Starhawk, Elizabeth Cogburn, Vicki Noble, Brooke Medicine Eagle, and others.
 Tom Cowan, Shamanism as a Spiritual Practice for Daily Life (Berkeley CA: Crossing Press; 1996), ISBN 0-89594-838-9. This is a very practical handbook, based primarily on the techniques and teachings of Michael Harner and the Foundation for Shamanic Studies, explaining how to develop a personal spiritual practice by blending elements of shamanism with inherited traditions and current religious commitments. It covers the central role of power animals and spirit teachers, visionary techniques for exploring nonordinary reality, the recovery of childhood spirituality, and the journey to your ancestral shaman to recover lost knowledge. If you have ever thought of doing some shamanizing yourself, this book will teach you the techniques; but, more important, it will show you how shamanic practices can help you answer your inner call for a spiritual practice.
 Gayle Delaney, All About Dreams: Everything You Need to Know About Why We Have Them, What They Mean, and How to Put Them to Work for You (New York NY: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998); ISBN: 0-06-251411-3. The wilderness brings dreams, and this book provides solid practical approaches to exploring and understanding this gift. The author gives a historical overview of dream theory, including the work of Freud, Jung, and Boss – “the architects of modern dream theory.” She then provides a useful straightforward method – which she calls the dream interview – for exploring the dream’s plot, setting, participants, themes, symbolism, emotions, and meaning. The method works as well on visions and fantasies. The basic principles underlying this book’s method of dream interpretation are simple: dreams – wherever they come from – are metaphorical expressions of feelings, thoughts, and ideas; dreams have a point, and metaphorical reflections on dreams can offer the dreamer new or unappreciated pieces of information; this information can help the dreamer to solve problems and adapt to changes in life; and the dreamer, upon awakening, has all the information needed to understand the dream. The trick is to tease out this often elusive meaning, and this book gives practical advice on how to do just that.
 James Endredy, Earthwalks for Body and Spirit: Exercises to Restore Our Sacred Bonds with the Earth (Rochester VT: Bear & Company, 2002), ISBN 1-879181-78-9. Purportedly based on the traditional practices of the Huichol Indians of western Mexico, his book sets out forty-five walking exercises intended to help develop attention, quiet the mind, expand consciousness, and rediscover our sacred relationship with the earth. There are walks of attention and awareness; walks of group connection; walks of connection to the powers of sun, water, wind, fire, and earth; walks of connection to the powers of animals, trees, and places of power; and walks of offering and vision. Beginning with the Fox Stance, the book progresses through such exercises as barefoot walks, walking blindfolded, walking with the wind, walking toward the rising sun, relating to animals you encounter, and making an offering to the animal powers and the earth.
 Steven Foster, et al., The Book of the Vision Fast (New York NY: Fireside Books, 1992), ISBN 0-671-76189-7. This is probably the key text in the development of the contemporary vision fast. Steven Foster, along with his coauthor Meredith Little, founded the hugely influential School of Lost Borders, a ceremonial and training facility in the Eastern Sierra. Here he tells the story of his own early unformed wilderness quests, and he recounts his experienced guiding others on the path he developed. Much of the book is actually written by others who have participated in vision fasts under his direction – and not all of them successfully, either. While other books are much more helpful in discussing the actual mechanics of a vision fast in the wilderness, if you have any interest or curiosity in the subject, this book is the place to start.
 Charles Garfield, et al., Wisdom Circles: A Guide to Self-discovery and Community Building in Small Groups (New York NY: Hyperion, 1998), ISBN 0-7868-8363-4. This book on the practice of council - here called wisdom circles – is based on a set of ”ten constants” that structure the council process. The authors – psychologist Charles Garfield; Sedonia Cahill, author of The Ceremonial Circle, discussed above; and Cindy Spring, founder of the Wisdom Circles organization – describe a structured setting in which people can meet regularly for whatever purpose they choose – getting to know each other better, sharing personal and social concerns, or offering mutual support and healing. The book offers practical guidelines to help participants create rituals to begin and end a session, agree on a goal or intention, create a safe space for truth telling, and allow all the members to share leadership of the gathering. The book also discusses how to deal with problematic members, such as those with psychological problems or those who find it difficult to participate in an openhearted exchange.
 Robert Gass, Chanting: Discovering Spirit in Sound (New York NY: Broadway Books, 1999), ISBN 0-7679-0323-4. There is no doubt in my mind that the spirits enjoy music, and the human voice in particular; this belief is clearly shared by the world’s spiritual traditions, for many of which chanting is recognized as a path to wholeness and communion. Robert Gass, a scholar of religious music and the founder of Spring Hill Music, has been leading a cappella choirs and teaching people how to chant for decades, and in this book he reviews the use of chant in Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, African, Shamanic, Goddess, and Native American traditions. Along with his coauthor Kathleen Brehony, a Jungian psychotherapist, he explores the physical and psychological effects of chanting, and its use as a tool for relaxation, body-mind healing, and spiritual self-discovery. Included are more than twenty musical scores to help you develop a personalized chanting practice that you can bring with you into the wilderness.
 Los Guarino, Writing Your Authentic Self (New York NY: Dell, 1999), ISBN 0-440-50871-1. The author, a visual artist, gives step-by-step advice for keeping every type of journal, from a personal diary to a dream journal – how to capture experiences, write down your dreams, embrace your memories; how to find the best journal format; how to let your journal teach you about yourself. The book has chapters on the benefits of journal writing, topics for a journal, how to get started, different ways of writing, and finding your personal voice. The book is filled with advice, exercises, references, and examples.
 Carl Hammerschlag, et al., Healing Ceremonies (New York NY: Perigee, 1997), ISBN 0-399-52303-0. Carl Hammerschlag is a Yale-trained psychiatrist, and author of The Theft of the Spirit and The Dancing Healers; his coauthor Howard Silverman is a Stanford-trained family physician who has done extensive hospice work and pioneered the use of ceremony in medical practice and training. In this book they discuss ritual as a cross-cultural phenomenon, and they offer step-by-step guidelines for building rituals which incorporate myths and legends to celebrate the transitions of life and help to confront tragedy and illness. The book is filled with examples of the way in which self-created ceremonies help people deal both expected and unexpected transitions – the birth of a child born blind, graduation, premature death, retirement, menopause, death.
 Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (New York NY: Harper San Francisco, 1990), ISBN 0062503731. This handbook on practical shamanism is the book that – along with the early writings of Carlos Castaneda – started the current neoshamanic revival. It has been powerfully influential, although I am troubled by its attempt to wrench shamanism from its cultural context, eliminate its performative aspect, and avoid discussion of the vexed question of the use of psychotropic substances in shamanic practice – despite the fact that the author, originally an academic anthropologist, studied the yage-using Shuar in the Peruvian Amazon and edited the scholarly anthology Hallucinogens and Shamanism (New York NY: Oxford University Press, 1973), ISBN 0195016491. With that said, the book remains the primary resource and reference on the adaptation of shamanism to modern practice. Despite constant hints, Harner has never written a follow-up book; what we have here is a tenth-anniversary edition with a new introduction and a guide to current resources.
 Buddy Helm, The Way of the Drum (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2001), ISBN 0-7387-0159-9. Drumming in the wilderness has become something of a cliché; but it is true that drumming is one of our most ancient forms of connecting with ourselves, with each other, and with the realm of nature around us. People enjoy drumming; humans have probably been drumming for hundreds of thousands of years; people will – when they think no one is looking – drum on the steering wheels of their cars, on the desktops in their offices, and on their own bodies. Drumming alone or in a group can dissolve ego, liberate from self-consciousness, and let your groove connect to the rhythm of life. This book is part hand-drum instruction manual, part rock-n-roll reminiscence, and part a spiritual guide to invoking the drum god, conjure drumming, personal drum magic, invocation, and opening the heart with the drum. It comes with a CD.
 Gregg Levoy, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (New York NY: Three Rivers Press, 1997), ISBN 0-609-80370-0. Change is often initiated with a call – a dream, a coincidence, an illness, a gift, a tragedy. Such a calling may be to do something -- change careers, go back to school, have a child – or to be something – more creative, less judgmental, more loving. How do we know if we're following our true calling? How do we sharpen our senses to cut through the distractions of everyday reality and hear the calls that are beckoning us? How do we distinguish a true call from wishful thinking, frustration, whim? How do we handle our resistance to a call? What happens when we say yes? What happens when we say no? How do we translate a calling into action? This book examines these questions, using stories of people who have heard and followed their calling, and in the process guides us toward awareness of the calls in our own lives.
 Denise Linn, Altars: Bringing Sacred Shrines into Your Everyday Life (New York NY: Ballantine Books, 1999), ISBN 0345434463. An altar – whether constructed in the wilderness or kept in a corner of your home – is a way to stay in contact with the spirits and keep alive our experiences of learning and transformation. The author, who also wrote Quest, discussed below, describes in this book how to integrate such altars into our daily lives, how to make more conscious what we may already be doing, with little thought, on corners tables or bookshelves in our homes. “The urge to create sacred spaces is so deep in the human psyche,” she writes, “that, even when there is no formalized intent to make an altar, we often create them subconsciously by the way we gather our photos on a piano, or by the way we carefully arrange objects on a desk or around a computer." She suggests ways to make altars for specific occasions, events, relationships, or transitions; she offers ideas for things to put on the altar and how to arrange them. The book is excellently illustrated with color photographs.
 Denise Linn. Quest: A Guide to Creating Your Own Vision Quest. Ballantine Wellspring (1999). ISBN 0345425448. The author, who also wrote Altars, discussed above, here sets out the basic structure of a vision quest and the ways to undertake one. This structure is very different from that developed and taught, say, by the School of Lost Borders, as set forth in Steven Foster’s Book of the Vision Quest, discussed above, and other works. There is much here that is helpful, including proposing alternative forms of vision quests – a group quest in the wilderness, a day of silence at home, a personal guided quest, a solitary garden quest. Most important, the book provides guidance on what to do during the quest, wherever it may be and however long it may last – how to discover your life's purpose, find mystery and wonder at the core of your life, release limiting beliefs about yourself, call for a vision, harness the power of the Sacred Circle, confront and free yourself from fears, experience your connection to nature, heal emotional wounds, and develop peace of mind.
 Joanna Macy, et al., Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World (Gabriola Island BC: New Society Publishers, 1998), ISBN 0-86571-391-X. This book – an update and expansion of the author’s earlier Despair and Personal Empowerment in the Nuclear Age – offers a series of group practices and exercises that point the participants out of anxiety toward “the work that reconnects.” An introduction discusses apatheia, the deadening of heart and mind in our current culture, and the alternative reconnection to nature and the world. Practical exercises are designed to help groups acknowledge and honor their despair at the abandonment and deterioration of the natural world, develop their sense of gratitude, see the world with new eyes, reconnect with past and future generations, and “come back to life.” The exercises include variations on the the well-known Council of All Beings, which was first developed in John Seed, Joanna Macy, and Arne Naess, Thinking Like a Mountain (Gabriola Mountain BC: New Society Publishers, 1988), ISBN 0-86571-133-X.
 Ralph Metzner, The Unfolding Self (Novato CA: Origin Press, 1998),ISBN 1-57983-000-5. The author – psychotherapist, academic, seeker, psychonaut – sets out the variety of metaphors used in cultures throughout the world to express the process of self-transformation. He finds twelve of these metaphoric structures – or, depending on your point of view, archetypes, deep structures, or primordial images. These include awakening from a dream; moving from captivity to liberation; purification by fire; dying and being reborn; reconciling with the inner enemy; moving from darkness to light; returning to the source. Such metaphors both characterize and stimulate the process of self-transformation. Each chapter explores the metaphor, places it in cultural and historical context, discusses the myths and stories in which it is embodied, sets forth its psychodynamic functions, and seeks its connections to other metaphors.
 Rachel Pollack, The Power of Ritual (New York NY: Dell Publishing, 2000), ISBN 0-440-50872-X. This is a handbook for crafting rituals. A ritual, the author says, “connects us to each other, to nature, to the cycles and rhythms of life. It opens our heart to love and to intense emotion – sadness and longing as well as joy. And it opens a space for what we call the sacred or spirituality to enter our lives.“ The book sets forth the sensory building blocks of ritual – sight, sound, smell, and taste – and the idea of sacred time and space; it discusses rituals as various as walking a labyrinth, making a pilgrimage, celebrating menopause, and burying a placenta. It explores Buddhist prostrations, American Indian sweat lodges, Japanese tea ceremonies, and the Wiccan May Day, and shows how ideas borrowed from a variety of sources can be woven together in a way that works well for us, our family, and our community.
 Kathleen Wall, et al., Rites of Passage: Celebrating Life’s Changes (Hillsboro OR: Beyond Words Publishing, 1998), ISBN 1-885223-76-5. Every transition in life – leaving home, marriage, childbirth, illness, bereavement, divorce, retirement, impending death – is an opportunity for learning, for finding new ways to relate to the world and to the other people in our lives. This book describes five sorts of life passage, which it calls letting go, wandering, polarities, new beginnings, and rooting. When we ritualize these transitions, we mark the change as both a social and a personal event, reinforce the leaving behind of old patterns of behavior and relationship, and commit to new patterns that fit with the new places in our lives. This book provides a guide to reinventing our own rituals and ceremonies – rituals of youth, divorce, friendship, midlife, and loss – and using them to navigate the inevitable changes in our lives.
 Jack Zimmerman, et al., The Way of Council (Las Vegas NV: Bramble Books, 1996), ISBN 1-883647-05-3. This book sets forth the model of council that was developed at the Ojai Foundation in California and is currently being taught by the Center for Council Training. It includes a basic introduction to council, extensive material about leading councils, discussions of variations in council formats, chapters on the use of council in various settings, and the art of council leadership. Most important, it approaches council as a spiritual practice, with the personal goal of becoming a “carrier of council” in one’s daily life. If I had to pick one book on the practice of council, this would be the one.
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