RESOURCES

Igniting the Fire of Transformation

Ten desert initiates stand around a large circle of gray stones in a stark, open space. This is the threshold: a portal into the realm of Spirit.

At the circle’s edge, I stand with my co-guide, Cynthia Morrow, and our three assistants. Together, we hold the container for another Great Ballcourt Initiation Fast—a ceremony of dying, the “in-between,” and rebirth offered by The School of Lost Borders. In turn, all of us are held in the cupped hands of a great desert goddess: Death Valley.

Our home for these twelve days is Lemoigne Canyon, a desolate backcountry site reached by four miles of rock-strewn road. Deep in this isolation, we are dwarfed by an expansive desert and a vast cerulean sky, already burning orange at its eastern edge. The morning air nips with a lingering chill, though the day promises a dry, searing heat.

Yes, this is a good day to die.

Over the past three days of preparation, Cynthia and I held an “interview for intent,” witnessing one person at a time to draw out deeper tellings of these ten stories—each a mix of pain and possibility. Some stories harkened back to a core childhood wounding: serious verbal or physical abuse, the death or absence of a parent, or major health challenges. Others lived more in the present tense: the fracturing of a relationship, a dead-end job, a life-altering illness. Each narrative expressed a personal version of the ten thousand joys and ten thousand sorrows that make up a life. Whatever the specifics, we guides helped them all ask the same questions:

           What of the old story is really true?

           What should I allow to die?

           What should I carry forward into the new life?

Each person is looking to transform old woundings and endings into new wisdom.

As we all stand solemnly around the threshold circle, I see a raven sitting on a nearby ridge, eyeing us closely. She’s guarding our passageway to the underworld, I tell myself.

Cynthia invites the group to offer each other final goodbyes: a collective farewell to all the past lives that will end today. This dissolves the circle into a warm cascade of heartfelt hugs. Goodbyes complete, everyone returns to the edge of the stone circle. I offer a song for all to sing: I Wanna Die Easy, an old spiritual once sung by Josh White. 

Cynthia and I take turns stepping into the center of the threshold circle, receiving one person at a time. Each is offered the blessing of burning mugwort and prayers for a safe journey through the time in-between. One at a time, they all head into the desert alone, a heavy pack on their back, to begin a four-day sojourn at a solo spot less than a mile away. While the physical walk there and back is short, the spiritual journey is so much longer. This ceremony will carry each initiate all the way to a rebirth just as the sun is cresting on the fifth morning. 

The word “initiate” comes from the Latin verb initiare: “to begin, originate, or instruct in secret rites.” The Great Ballcourt Initiation Fast is not a secret rite, and yet it is an invitation to begin again. Before that new beginning, though, the dying must come. 

And that dying is happening now. 

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I’ve been a School of Lost Borders guide for nearly 25 years, offering to many a desert ceremony with several key elements – “the bones of the ceremony,” as Meredith Little has called them. Four days and nights in the desert. No food, no four-walled shelter, no human company. Orienting to the four directions of the natural world. Letting nature be your mirror. Telling stories, both in preparing to go out alone and to integrate the experience upon returning.

Early in my guiding career, I became especially fascinated with that last part: storytelling before and after the solo. The School’s ceremony – I saw up close – was helping each person claim a new life story that was more authentic, more in alignment with their present-tense self.

All that set me to wonder: So why do we humans tell stories? Those ponderings led me to write a new book- The Soul’s Red Thread available at Lost Borders Press

First, I went in search of answers to a wide range of questions. How does a young child learn to tell stories? What shapes the emotional content of those rudimentary stories? What role does memory play in this? 

Early on, I realized that to engage a reader I would need to not just convey information, but to tell actual stories – and the stories I knew best were my own. A year into the project, I began getting feedback from friends about early drafts and invariably, the stories told were better received than all the pithy ideas I had about stories. In time, all those great insights had to either be axed or condensed into a few sentences that would fit the flow of a given story. And so what resulted was not the research book I had first envisioned; it was a memoir. I called it The Soul’s Red Thread: Memoirs of a Guide.

 Still, at the heart of the book was that original question: Why do humans tell stories?

I offered the most essential answer in the book’s fifth chapter, “Memories, Stories, Identities.” That’s also where I told the tale of me becoming an AIDS physician. Here’s an excerpt:

What I’ll say about this troubled time – like any stories that draw upon old memories – will be a mix of what actually happened, what I thought happened, and present-tense biases that shape how I now see the world.

“So then,” you might ask, “will your stories even be true?”

Yes, they’ll be true. Or true enough. I’ll have to add some flourishes to fill out each story, but what I’ll tell will be my version of what happened.

Here’s an even better question you might ask: “Did these stories serve your evolving sense of self?”

Yes, indeed. No doubt there.

We all do this sort of storytelling. We selectively remember what we’ve experienced. We use these chosen memories to spin stories about who we are in the world. And these stories shape our emerging sense of identity.

                Experiences into memories.

                Memories into stories.

                Stories into identity.

Here’s another excerpt, later in the same chapter:

It’s all part of a self-narrative that, to this day, I’ve carried inside me about life during that terrible time. Like all of us, what I remember best are those experiences that I once spun into stories that became essential parts of my own fabric of identity. I did all that original storytelling to make sense of an overwhelming number of life events, an ever-growing cast of characters, and a mysterious array of motives and causal links. Ultimately, what mattered most was a mix of what was true and what was useful. And these stories about Hathaway were more than useful.

They were essential.

Without these stories – the ones where Hathaway wears a black hat and Zoey and I wear white ones – I never would have continued climbing up that shadowy, slippery AIDS canyon.

 

By the age of 32, my identity in the world had solidified into two stories: “I’m an AIDS physician . . .” and “I’m Bill’s partner . . .” As I headed fast toward middle age, memories from those identity-defining years grew fainter with each passing year.  What I recalled best were not the actual big experiences I’d once had so much as the stories I had often repeated after each experience. As I became much more settled in my ways, that unidirectional sequence – experiences into memories, memories into stories, stories into identity – began moving in reverse.

                Identity influences the selection of experience.

                New experiences reinforce the same old stories.

                These new/old stories further solidify that old sense of self.

And so, the great risk for any middle-aged person is that the stories they tell – and thus, the lives they’re leading – stop evolving. 

By the age of 42, I was an AIDS physician, I was Bill’s partner, and I was little else. That worked for a while. Until it didn’t. And then came the inevitable midlife crisis.

 

That’s when I did my first-ever desert fast. 

It was 25 years ago and 25 miles away from here, off in another Death Valley canyon called Hanaupah.

A long-ago time.

A faraway place. 

 

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With everyone through the threshold circle, we’ve reached the in-between time: the four days between dying and rebirth. Listening and mirroring back people’s stories – both before and after the solo – is the most exhilarating work I’ve ever done, and the most gratifying. It’s also the most exhausting.

Cynthia and I, along with our three assistants, return to the group kitchen and collapse in our chairs. During a slow, meandering breakfast conversation, we all transform into human-size lizards, sitting on a great rock, soaking up the slow-building heat of the day. This is deep relaxation of a kind that hasn’t been possible for days. One of the perks of being a vision fast guide is the uncommon spaciousness that we’ll have these next four days. Spaciousness of place: a vast desert with a limitless sky. Spaciousness of time: leisurely days, full of promise and possibility. Spaciousness of ceremony: a way to reveal what lies inside you – for the guides, not just the participants. 

Spaciousness that invites expansiveness.

Assuming no emergencies arise (and they seldom do), the guide team will have just two tangible tasks for the coming days. We willl always have two or more of us in basecamp, in case anyone comes in needing help. And each day we’ll offer prayers for each participant – prayers we had them write before they went out.

The rest of these four days will be blissfully free. 

Free to meditate.

Free to write. 

Free to read. 

Free to listen to music. 

Free to stare off into this vast open space.

By mid-morning, I go to my camp and settle under a nearby tarp erected days ago. A high-pressure weather system – “a heat dome” – has settled over the western United States, bringing uncommonly high temperatures for springtime in Death Valley. At our higher elevation, temperatures this week are expected to top out around 95◦. Staying too long in the direct sun will be super-risky – that’s why this place is called “Death Valley” – but in the shade of this well-constructed tarp, this should be lounging weather of the best kind.

 

To fill these four days, I brought with me a writing project (an early draft of what you’re reading), a few novels, and Peter Ames Carlin’s latest book, Tonight in Jungleland. Given the heat of the day, I decide to start with Carlin’s book: a guilty pleasure about the making of Bruce Springsteen’s breakthrough album, Born to Run.

The record, with its cinematic storytelling and Wall of Sound production, has long been hailed as a timeless masterpiece. Released in 1975, Born to Run was the test launch that catapulted Springsteen from near-total obscurity onto the covers of Time and Newsweek. His next few albums would send him hurling into orbit as the global icon most people would come to know. According to Carlin, the album “captures the essence of fifties rock ‘n’ roll and the beatnik poetry of sixties folk-rock, projected onto the battered spirit of mid-seventies America.” It arrived during an unusually cynical time: right after the 1973 oil crisis, the Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation, and the end of the Vietnam War. For working-class youth, Springsteen’s great anthems offered hope that escape from this darkly apocalyptic time was possible. 

Apocalypse? Hope? Escape?  On first listening, 18-year-old Scott was all in.

Now, reading Carlin 50 years later, once again I’m all in.

A pattern for the next four days soon is set. At first light: I wake up, have a cup of tea, and meditate for 40 minutes. In the cool morning hours: I write and edit The Alchemy of Story. Through the midday heat: I revel in Carlin’s words – a long walk down memory lane, all the way back to 1975. Just before sunset: I take an actual long walk, looking to integrate and understand both what I’m remembering and what I’m now writing.

 

At age 18, I was a mess.

I was a year removed from my parents’ home. I was a confused kid, desperately lonely, who often wondered if and where he would ever belong. I was a college sophomore in Berkeley – a.k.a. “Bezerkley” – experimenting with mind-altering drugs with a few frightening results. I was a sexually naïve kid who wouldn’t come out as gay for another four years.

“A mess with three s’s,” an old friend used to say. 

 

Back then, the 25-year-old Springsteen became a musical mentor for me, offering a mirror for chaos churning inside. Or even better, he became my older brother, modeling how to grow up, how to stand tall, how to walk through the world. Whether it was Springsteen’s storytelling music blasting in my dorm room or his fiery presence at a live show, he would serve up life lessons that would never be taught in a college classroom. About how to be honest and self-revealing. How to transform youthful righteousness into integrity and generosity. How to live with passion. 

Along with the Carlin book, I brought to the desert my big collection of Springsteen music, much of it live recordings from his rock ‘n’ roll heyday: 1975 to 1985. On this first day, I listen to Born to Run straight through, and from there, I move onto the live music. That’s what really enthralls me. This is more than just great, high-energy music. It’s a sonic placeholder for so many of my coming-of-age memories.

After the release of Born to Run, I saw Springsteen live three times in four years. The last show – at the Winterland Ballroom on December 15, 1978 – was the best live performance I’ve ever seen. During my teens and twenties, I went to countless rock concerts: the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Who, David Bowie, the Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison and more. Many more. Some bands might have played equally great music and a few might have gone on for over three hours, returning for multiple encores. But none told stories like Springsteen. Both in his songs and in his banter with the crowd between them.

On day two of the solo time, I cue up the KSAN-FM recording of that 1978 Winterland show. The radio show was heavily bootlegged, the concert having been cited as one of Springsteen’s best, capturing him in the prime of his rock ‘n’ roll youth. Over the course of the day, I listen to much of the show – full volume for my favorites, while skipping those I never really liked. 

From the very first song, I’m transported back in time. “Badlands, you gotta live it everyday. Let the broken hearts stand as the price you’ve gotta pay . . .”   On this night, I’m 22 years old. I’m still living in a queer closet and feeling terribly lonely and confused. I recently graduated from college with a degree in physics, for which I have no use. I don’t have a clue what I’m to do with my life . . . except show up for this concert. Having arrived early, I’ve got a standing-room-only spot 20 feet from the stage.  For the next three-plus hours, I’ve got Bruce right before me – standing and strutting, singing and storytelling. This close in, I can see and feel sparks flying off the man. He’s electricity personified and, from this close in, I catch fire. With tunnel vision, I block out the throngs of people beside me, behind me. It’s just Bruce and me, as he sings and tells his stories. About growing up. About difficult fathers. About betrayal and redemption. About struggling to make his mark in the world. He’s the best friend I’ve been aching to have for so long. When, at show’s end, he walks off the stage, I’m again part of the crowd of 5,000. Together, we all scream: “Bruuuuuuce, Bruuuuuuce, Bruuuuuuce . . .” He comes back for three encores and eight more songs, before finally we’re all released into the night. I go home feeling vibrant and alive, seen and understood, uplifted and hopeful.

 

Hours later, I take another twilight walk, just as the sun is setting behind the nearby western ridge. It’s then I make a series of historical connections.

In The Soul’s Red Thread, I tell a true story about “a long, salty kiss” I once had with a man named Dean, during Christmas time while we were traipsing about Union Square and looking at window displays. Dean and I never became lovers, and yet that seismic kiss marked the very start of my coming out as a gay man. That threshold crossing – I now realize – came almost exactly a week after the Winterland show. Bruce’s passionate music, his intimate stories, and his endearing stage presence had ignited in me a great fire of transformation. He had given me the courage, the confidence, the passion to take my honest place in the world.

As the sky continues to darken, I scan across all my memories of seeing Springsteen live – seven times in total.

In October 1999, when I was almost 43, I saw Springsteen in concert for the first time in two decades. By then he was a megastar and the concert was at a much bigger venue, the Oakland Coliseum Arena. My seat was up in the rafters and yet Bruce still did not disappoint. I remember vividly standing up and screaming for more at the show’s end and I remember after the show seeking out all the live recordings I could find. Here’s the great kicker to these memories. At the time of that show, I was preparing to do my first vision fast, at Hanaupah Canyon over the New Year. That concert, and all the live Bruce music I listened to during the ensuing months, reawakened the dormant 18-year-old I once was – that messed up, yet passionate kid who was looking to take on the world. That would help power me through a desert rite of passage that would dramatically change my life.

At the turning point of the twilight walk, I stop for the longest time to stare across miles of the vast desert floor. I then see all that Springsteen has meant to me these past 50 years. When I was a teenager, during a midlife crisis, and now. Each time, his music gave force and direction to a life about to change.

For the established doctor stuck in a midlife crisis, transformation meant doing a four-day fast to realign my outer life with a true self lying within. 

For the wilderness guide I am now, transformation means channeling that passion, yet again, in support of these ten people who are here dying to an old life, so they might be reborn anew. 

In the silence at dusk, with this expansive view surrounding me, I see a bigger truth that transcends my own personal story. In this desert ceremony, the Great Ballcourt Fast, personal passion is what every initiate must access if they’re to ignite their own fire. And the vast spaciousness of this desert provides the much-needed oxygen for that fire to burn. Without that passionate spark, without all this open space, there is no ceremonial fire. 

And out of that fire will come the new life, the new story.

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When I first began writing The Soul’s Red Thread, I read lots about the human capacity to remember. Memory, I came to see, lies at the very heart of our great urge to tell stories:

 

            Experiences into memories.

            Memories into stories.

            Stories into identity.

 

Of all I read, most important was Daniel Schacter’s The Seven Sins of Memory. Schacter’s basic message: our ability to retain accurate memories is seriously flawed, especially over the years. If we revisit a long-ago experience, we’ll have retained, at best, a few solid puzzle fragments of what happened. Arriving early for the Winterland show. The tunnel vision at the peak of the show. The exultant feeling by evening’s end. How we put together a memory mosaic from those few pieces will inevitably be more in service to our present-day identity than what happened long ago.

Is this faulty memory such a problem?

No, says Michael Pollan in his latest book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness.

Memory helps constitute self, but at the same time, selves are constantly hacking their memories in order to better adapt to changing conditions. Never set in stone, memory is malleable clay that the self reworks as new circumstances demand. Forgetting helps us in this continual work of revision, as memories are compressed and shorn of context, allowing them to be freely reinterpreted in new and more useful ways.  

This is the great boon of having a faulty memory!

While we retain some memory fragments from long ago, we lose much of the detail, which leaves us free to reshape our stories about the past in service to our present-day reality. But to do this reshaping well – to restore ourselves and to re-story ourselves – we may need to step away from the great rush of our daily lives.

That’s what the Ballcourt dancers are doing at their solo spots. And that’s what I’ve been doing here in basecamp.

I’ve been calling upon Carlin’s words – and even more, Springsteen’s music – to bring back long-ago memories of the 18-year-old I once was. That, in turn, has allowed me to bring forward the lessons and gifts from that time, so they might inform who I am, right now. A teenager’s embryonic reaching for honesty, authenticity, integrity. The hope that he might rise above. And, most of all, the passion to make all that happen.

These are the very qualities I most need as a wilderness guide.

 

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One by one, the ten initiates return safely to basecamp, passing through the threshold circle – out of Spirit realm and into human community.

A series of story councils will start late this afternoon, once the worst of the heat has passed. Until then, we guides will keep the day mostly empty. Each person will have the freedom to slowly return to their bodies. To taste the miracle of food. To relearn how to live in this world of social animals. To enjoy the great pleasure of a sponge bath after days of not washing. To spend time reflecting and journaling. To lie in the shade and soak up the desert heat. Or to do whatever else spaciousness might invite.

This also leaves me free for a few more hours. Wanting to conserve energy for the story council to come, I pass the time lounging about: staring into the distance, listening to an occasional song (still only Bruce), and reflecting. Mostly, I’m thinking about this group of ten, this Ballcourt ceremony, and all the years I’ve devoted to this work.

Soon, my mind floats back to my own first vision fast, 25 years ago, over in Hanupah Canyon. Here’s the most vivid memory from that four-day solo:

On the last evening, an all-night vigil, I stare into a starry night sky for hours. For the first time ever, I see how immense the cosmos is, and how infinitesimally small I am.

 

“Just a speck of cosmic dust,” I write in my journal. “A speck ready to be reborn. Ready to be cradled in the arms of the Great Mother.”

At sunrise comes rebirth. 

Rebirth into a new life, a new story. 

Under the safe shelter of my tarp, basking in the heat of the day, I see so clearly: I’ve been on the Incorporation Road ever since.

 

Long after that fast, my own ceremonial fire was ablaze. Ten months later, I was assisting at another wilderness fast. A year later, I did The School’s two-week guide training. The year after that, I began co-guiding day walks (the short form of a vision fast). After another year, I was co-guiding four-day fasts. Two years later, I left the AIDS Clinic, so I could devote myself to supporting people who were dying physically (as a hospice doc) and those who were dying symbolically (as a wilderness guide). 

That’s why I’m here in the desert – right here, right now.

In another few hours, the group will huddle under the shade of a much larger group tarp. There, each person will be invited to forge the first telling of their new life story: the first step on Incorporation Road. 

                 What happened when you were out there, all alone?

                 What of the old life has died?

                 What visions of a new life were you given?

In the telling of this sacred solo story, each initiate will begin that uniquely human process: turning memories of a BIG experience into a new story – a story that just might reshape their once-fixed identity and alter their life course. With the deep listening of this supportive circle, each person’s newly emerging identity will feel potent, alive, luminous. 

Trouble is, old stories don’t always die easily. 

Once a person goes back home, they’ll be surrounded by the same friends, the same family, the same job, the same responsibilities – all of which will mirror back their old identity. This calls to mind an old guides’ tale, lines that have been repeated often at The School, though no one knows who said it first: “This ceremony won’t make your life easier. It will make it more authentic.”

The raven, our guardian at the gateway to the underworld returns, hovering in the sky. She swoops down and settles on a large rock just a stone’s throw away.

 

“Mirroring back a person’s story is the most exhilarating work I do,” I say out loud to the raven. “How best to do that?”

“Yeah,” I say out loud. “I get it.” 

I think about this for a few heartbeats. In story council, when I tell a story back to a faster, the words I speak are surely important. But what matters most is whether I fan the flames inside them.

“Yep. That’s what’ll light their way – all the way home and into their new life.”

When the raven finally flies away, I’m left to mull that over for the longest time.

 

 

A half-hour before the council is set to start, I make myself a cup of extra-strong black tea and sip quietly. Then, with only minutes left before I’ll have to leave, I cue up my latest go-to Springsteen song: the Winterland version of “The Promised Land.” The original is from Darkness on the Edge of Town, an album that came out when I was 21.

Earpieces in place, I turn the volume to max:

             “The dogs on Main Street howl

             ‘ Cause they understand

              If I could take one moment into my hands.

              Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man

             And I believe in a promised land

             And I believe in a promised land

             And I believe in a promised land.”

 

With my own inner fire burning bright, I walk over to our tarp-covered circle and take my seat.

Cynthia and I take turns offering a few opening words about story council. One of the ten initiates volunteers to go first and over the next 20 minutes, she tells a riveting story about her time alone for four days and nights. Sitting stock still, I listen deeply. 

When it’s my turn, I mirror back the fire I see burning inside her.

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 You can see Scott’s current programs here The next cohort of  The Four Seasons of Storytelling: Weaving Our Stories Around a Celtic Year will be starting in September 2027