When Thunder Taught Me How to Listen.
A Vision Quest into Sovereignty and the Intelligence of the Living World
This is the account of a four-day Vision Quest undertaken in silence, fasting, and solitude on a mountain in Spain, an initiatory rite of passage. What unfolded was life changing, loosening the illusion of separation and aligning with the myth of being. It showed me how sovereignty is about listening and being in relationship with the living world.
We had arrived at the camp two days before. The week leading up to this trip had been fast-paced and busy, as life at home and at work usually is. I felt excited to be back on the mountain, in the woods in Spain again. My thoughts kept taking me to the experience ahead, and I felt both excited and terrified.
I unzipped my tent, and the morning dew slid down into the grass like naughty kids running away. The early morning light showed a clear sky. I wondered whether the forecast of rain and thunder would actually come true. Last year's vision questers had gone through a lot of rain. What would this mean for my experience? I wasn't sure what to do with those thoughts, so I placed them in my pocket to nibble on later.
27 of us were going up the mountain that day. Some, like me, for 4 days, others 7 & 9. I had done some shorter vision quests before, but the idea of 4 days with no food, no water and no speaking was still terrifying. I had spent some time with experienced questers, soaking up their confidence and courage to guide me on my own journey. To trust in the process and not in my fears and doubts.
The drum was thumping by the sweatlodge, and the fire had been going since 5am. The rocks, as they are, the grandfathers, would be glowing red. It was Mother Earth's calling to come to the lodge as a doorway to the sacred dreamtime. There was a felt tension among us all. Men and women, young and old, we silently rushed to gather as we nealed silently into the lodge, touching the moist earth with our knees and hands as we crawled into the dark. It would be the last time we would speak, eat, drink and gather. Not forever, but for a significant folding in our time perception. Reality would morph and time would bend in the days ahead. The drum, the rattle, the water, the heat, the songs, and the darkness would set the scene, preparing our consciousness and blessing us for our journey ahead.
The darkness of the sweatlodge was kind, guiding me to drop my thoughts and projections, to connect with my deeper inner self, to trust in the process, and to surrender. The beat of the drum, the vibrations of the songs, the rhythm of our collective resonated with the primacy of human-ness, of ritual and gathering. I was part of a landscape vaster than my mind could comprehend, and I was a participant in a timeless ancestral experience.
There was no going back. Among my tribe, I would do this because it's a rite of passage, it's an integral part of this path, and it asks for you to give yourself. I wanted to do this, to experience this path into an understanding that doesn't come from books or stories; it comes from handing your concepts, ideas, fears, and worries over to the sacred fire, to the land, to the Great Spirit. It asks you to surrender to it!
"Raising our prayer to our true nature in the universal, cosmic understanding. Honouring the ancestral legacy, memory and recognising our sacred lineage (...) to reactivate the original memory (...) and recognise ourselves within the legitimate and natural right of the relationship, we are all interconnected, we have the same origin and the same present and also the same future." (Chief of Chiefs Aurelio Diaz Tekpankalli - Sacred Fire of Itzachilatlan)
In humility and trepidation, we emerged from the lodge, grabbed our simple bundle with a sleeping bag, a tarp and a little more, and with staff in hand, we followed our leader into the mountain.
Our chief, has been with the sacred fire for almost 50 years, diligently learning, teaching and holding the prayer for humanity, like that of Black Elk, Tekpankalli, and many more chiefs, "to raise our prayer for the balance, restitution and care of our pachamama (Mother Earth)".
With incredible openness, groundedness, and razor-sharp awareness, our chief has walked that land for 25 years. He has facilitated hundreds in completing their Vision Quests and led many to the Sun and Night dance following this indigenous American tradition. This is his vision, meaning, and sense of purpose: connecting with nature and one's inner self. His commitment, focus and prayer pierce the space. He is so powerful and centred in who he is that he doesn't need to pretend to be anything. He just is. Fully authentic, humble, kind and wise. There are no emotional games, pretence, or facades. He has nothing to prove. When you meet someone like him, you're not quite sure how to be because the invitation is to be authentic, humble, without emotional games - to be present, to be you. Sounds easy, but when you look into a mirror like that, it reflects back what you usually don't see in yourself - something raw, unornamented, profoundly sacred.
He walked up ahead, scraping through thorny bushes and broken branches, making way for us. Our silence vibrated, the trees echoed, the clouds gathered, and the sun watched as we were placed in different spots in the woods, isolated and distant from each other.
Then they left. It became silent, the forest looked at me, and I looked at it. Time stopped.
And now what?
I sat on the ground. It was dry, rough, with a few grasses here and there. I could see about 2-3 meters in any direction until my eyes met different kinds of foliage penetrated by relatively tall pine trees covering most of the sky with needles. The sun was high, late morning, perhaps 11, I thought. Surrounding my designated space was a continuous thread of red string holding 365 small pieces of red cloth containing tobacco and herbs, which I had put together a few weeks earlier. These were my prayers for the year ahead, containing my intentions, my wishes and my heartfelt willingness to open my heart to my purpose. These were tied to 4 staffs, one in each direction, demarking my space and containing me within an energetic hold.
I settled into meditation and let the breeze of my breathing merge with the wind flowing through the forest. As David Abram writes, this perception is a reciprocal relationship with the living world in that “Perception is not a one-way observation of an inert world. It is a living exchange between the body and the breathing earth.” My mind rested, and I felt a synchrony of space and time slowly catching up. Thoughts and feelings came and went through the leaves, the sun moved, and I sat.
Time folded into my perception, and the land whispered gently, inviting me to be.
As Bayo Akomolafe says, “We do not exist apart from the world we perceive. We are entangled with it.” Here lay my invitation to connect with a morphic field (R. Sheldrake) outside my habitual me, to experience, through the land, a fractal of my existence, my story, and the universal story of being. A post-human mythic ecology. The “I” is no longer the centre of experience, relationship is. This was an invitation into a wider field of sentience, a relationality in an ecology sung by a chorus of intelligence beyond my sense of self, yet I was entirely part of it.
Then thunder struck, roaring through the worlds, stomping with an unquestionable power and determination. Maybe if there were more thunder in the world, humans would seek greater humility and reverence for nature, and would better understand their place, engaging in healthier relationships marked by respect, integrity, and responsibility.
I coiled under the tarp as water gushed down in droplets, no longer shy nor mischievous but certain and determined to wash away thoughts and old stories. I stayed staring at the darkness, not knowing time, dimensions, or place. The whole universe is enfolded in each part, and each part is enfolded in the whole. (Bohm)
The incantation of the rain rippled through my being like an ancient lullaby told across time, to remember an eternal language mystified, coded and aligning. My microcosmos heard, the macrocosmos echoed.
The thunder continued, and I listened. The rain and my awareness danced. The storm did not meet me; I was with its ways of arriving.
As the night deepened, I weaved through the branches and needles away from the darness of the ground in anticipation of the clarity emergent from the sky. With incredible accuracy and perseverance, the sun returned, bringing hope, warmth and prosperity, the possibility of a new me, within a new humanity. One that does not control the wind, but chooses to breathe with it (Abram), one that recognises the land does not belong to us. We belong to the land (Kimmerer).
I sat, I moved, I circumbulated my thoughts. I became restless. I couldn't be there. I was anxious about my confinement; I wanted to leave. Time seemed eternal. A day seemed like a week. The only reference was the sun slowly drawing its path across the sky. I felt the love and support from the base camp. The sacred fire was kept alive through prayer, with morning and evening songs to hold our commitment and give us inner strength. I settled with myself and let the space be, dropping disturbing thoughts which lead to anxiety and restlessness. I observed them nevertheless, for they haunt me most days when I'm running my habitual business of being me. I continued to sink into being me with that sacred mountain, the fire, the rain, the wind. I was not trapped, I was free. I could go, but I chose to stay.
Echoing Bayo Akomolafe, we will not save the world by heroic control, but by learning how to fall in love with what we cannot command.
I held my prayers in awareness, like seeds in an autumn garden, planting one by one, knowing they will need time to mature, to germinate, to emerge, to form, and to blossom in their vibrancy, sensuality, and joy, as part of an emergence in the mythical ecology of existence.
On day 5, they came for me, emerging from the bushes and the folding of the mountain. I was glad my moment had arrived. I bowed in reverence to those staying 7, 9 and eventually 13 days with a litre and a half of water and some fruit on those visitation days. We walked down to the sacred fire in the temple and drank some fruity water. We sat around the fire, still without being allowed to speak. We looked at each other with such grace, kindness, and humility. It was beyond anything I had experienced. I felt so incredibly alive, so grateful to be alive and present in this sacred experience. Once again, we entered the sweatlodge to close our retreat, to receive our voice again through expressing our hearts and to hear the communion of a collective brotherhood and sisterhood. Sharing ourselves in this way is deeply profound, deeply human, ancestral, ancient and speaks of a way of being transcendent to the egoic mind, deluded by the failing dream of modernity, by the falls in human maturity, ignorance and trauma.
This is what Bayo Akomolafe calls slowing down—not going slower, but sinking into the places modernity teaches us not to inhabit. Letting yourself get lost. Letting the world become alive again.
A Vision Quest is literally the ritual technology of slowing down.
How do we want our children and the 7 future generations to inherit our legacy? What can we do to be part of a new pattern, a new emergence?
The Vision Quest is a threshold practice through which maturity, independence, and sovereignty are not achieved through control of the self, but through release into a deeper alignment with life itself. It initiates the practitioner beyond egoic identity into sovereign responsibility within a living web of relations, where authority arises not from dominance, but from coherence, listening, and embodied presence.
Bibliography
Abram, David.
The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World.
New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.
Referenced for reciprocal perception and “breathing with the Earth.”
Akomolafe, Bayo.
Various talks, essays, and interviews on post-humanism, relationality, hospicing modernity, and the critique of control.
Notable themes referenced:
“We are entangled with the world.”
“The times are urgent; let us slow down.”
“We will not save the world by heroic control…”
Berry, Thomas. (Implicit philosophical influence)
The Dream of the Earth.
San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
Underlying framework for Earth as a communion of subjects.
Bohm, David.
Wholeness and the Implicate Order.
London: Routledge, 1980.
Referenced for the microcosm–macrocosm echo and the implicate order:
“The whole universe is enfolded in each part…”
Kimmerer, Robin Wall.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.
Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
Referenced for relational land ethics:
“The land does not belong to us. We belong to the land.”
Lao Tzu. (Implicit philosophical influence)
Tao Te Ching.
Non-dominion, wu wei, non-controlling relationship with life.
Sheldrake, Rupert.
A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance.
London: Blond & Briggs, 1981.
Referenced for the concept of the morphic field beyond the habitual self.
Tekpankalli, Aurelio Díaz (Chief of Chiefs, Sacred Fire of Itzachilatlan).
Oral teaching and ceremonial prayer tradition.
Quoted for:
Ancestral memory
Sacred lineage
Interconnection across time
Collective future responsibility
Yunkaporta, Tyson.
Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2019.
→ Referenced implicitly for:
Pattern thinking
Non-linear time
Story as ecological intelligence
Relational law vs. domination
Knowledge as land-based, not abstract
Note to the workflow: The text is original, written by Ricardo using Grammarly to aid grammatical flow.
AI was used in parallel to support the literature review, including the bibliography, and to structure thoughts. The writing of this core text is entirely human-generated.
