ALUNA TEMPLE MAGAZINE EDITION No4 'BRIDGES' | Page 53

Sundance was an extraordinary event. We were 140 dancers from around
the world all determined to dance past our previously known limitations and
take a big leap across that great divide into the arms of the unknown.
Carlos Castenada’s teacher, Don Juan, had
famously written about the unknown in this
way.

‘When you look out into it, it is
vast and it simply stares right
back daring you to enter.’
TREE OF LIFE © sites.coloradocollege.edu

The unknown has always been my oasis.
I fell asleep just beyond its gates every night for years when I was a child. But
to meet it in this way, dancing through the hot sun, dancing past my thirst and
my hunger, was a whole new journ ey. I turned my heart towards the Tree of
Life at the centre of our circle and lifted up my prayers again and again. I went
past so many barriers in those 72 hours.

There was so much in the way of the conversation I was trying to have
with the Great Spirit but our ancestors were wise.
They knew it takes time for the everyday mind to let go. They knew
that giving up on sleep and food and comfort was a certain route to the
ecstatic communion with life that nourished them deeper than
anything else whilst reminding them of the big picture in which their
lives existed. And so here we were, thirsting for the spirit, hungering
for surrender and approaching that great mystical doorway on our own
two feet.
The Sundance drummers and singers carried us, holding us steady as our
spirits danced along the thin line that divides the everyday from the eternal.
To say I was changed by that ceremony would be to make a molehill out of a
mountain.

It was as if the silence that dawned with the rising sun and
deepened on its journey through the sky, struck a mortal blow to
the part of me that was committed to my limitations.
When I walked back in through the front door of our tiny cottage in the village
of Ashburton and picked up our young son and held my beloved close, I knew

that I was carrying the seed of a dream that would never let me go.
53