A Lakota Vision Quest

I've spent a good part of my life in the wild and in pursuit of it in myself.

A few days ago I returned from South Dakota, where I participated in a traditional Lakota Haŋbléčeyapi, or vision quest, with my friend and teacher, Jaylen Garnett, and his relatives.

It was unlike anything I've ever experienced.

I've spent years practicing vision quests and, more recently, facilitating them. Yet I had never participated in a traditional Lakota Haŋbléčeyapi. When Jaylen invited me to join him and his relatives for the summer solstice ceremony on their lands, I said yes immediately.

I met Jaylen a year ago in an Inipi sweat lodge in Nebraska. We connected right away and have stayed close ever since. We've spent many hours talking about ceremony, vision quests, the land, and what it means to live a life in service to something larger than yourself. Traditionally, this is not a ceremony outsiders are invited into casually. I understood that. I knew what a gift it was just to be there.

I arrived on the Oglala Lakota Reservation on a Thursday afternoon after six hours of driving across open farmland and prairie. For hundreds of miles there was nothing but sky, planted rows, and farm equipment. Then the ponderosa pines appeared. Their scent brought me home immediately. I was hours from Boulder, but something about those trees connected me to the mountains I live in and love.

Jaylen was there with his brother John and several younger relatives. Together we raised tipis, cut wood, prepared the lodge, and readied the ceremonial grounds. We worked until well after dark. It felt good.

What interests me most about vision quests is not any single tradition. It's the pattern that shows up across cultures and throughout time. When human beings need clarity, we step away. We leave the village. We go to the mountain, the cave, the desert, the forest. Our truth is rarely absent. Life just gets too noisy to hear it.

The ceremony began with a sweat lodge, or Inipi. We entered to pray, purify ourselves, and prepare. Sacred songs filled the darkness while the drum echoed through the lodge. I brought with me the wings and tail feathers of a red tailed hawk that had come into my life a few months earlier. Others brought their chanupas (pipes) and sacred items.

After the sweat, those of us going "on the hill" gathered in the large teepee. Two of the men, both named John, participated in a traditional flesh offering. Deer antlers were pierced through their skin. Ropes attached to heavy buffalo skulls were tied to the protruding antlers.

Standing next to one of the men, I was asked to help. While Jaylen pierced the skin with a scalpel, I inserted a small antler through the opening. It was done quickly and without much ceremony or any cries from either man.

The two Johns led us out of the teepee where the drum was playing and the relatives were gathered. They dragged the skulls around the fire while the singing intensified, doing their best to allow the weight of the buffalo skulls to tear the antlers free.

Jaylen explained it simply. Our bodies are the only thing we truly possess. Material things won't follow us when we leave this world. Offering a piece of yourself is among the deepest sacrifices a person can make.

After that, draped in our blanket, one of the only items we would have with us on the quest, we were led to our quest sites. In the days before, we had tied 405 prayer ties by hand. Small bundles of tobacco wrapped in red, yellow, white, or black cloth and tied onto a single cord, each carrying a prayer. At our sites, four saplings were planted in a rectangle approximately six feet by three feet. This would be where we would stay, aside from relieving ourselves, for the next three days.

My site sat on a grassy knoll among ponderosa pines, overlooking a meadow to the east. It felt right the moment I stepped into it.

That rectangle would be my home for the next three days. No food. No water. Only prayer.

The first night I slept eleven hours. My body seemed to know exactly what to do. I've noticed this on quests before. Rather than fight the conditions, something in you settles. The nervous system finally gets the message. There's nowhere to go. Nothing to accomplish. No one to impress.

The following day I slept often as well. In the spaces between dreaming and waking, I started receiving some clear messages.

My prayer entering this quest was simple. I wanted to stop holding back. Not because I doubted my path. Quite the opposite.

For years there has been something in me moving toward a clearer way of standing in my work. Denali. South Africa. The desert. Guiding others through their own quests. Each experience brought me a little closer. Yet some part of me was still holding back publicly. I wasn't fully ready to stand up and say, "This is who I am. This is my work."

Lying there between sleep and waking, that shifted.

I saw that I had been measuring myself against a future version of myself that doesn't exist. The realization was simple: I am him. Not the future version or the someday version. The one I've been walking toward all along.

The first day was cold and damp. A storm threatened all day, and just after sunset it arrived. Thunder first, then lightning, then rain. A real prairie downpour. Lightning struck close enough that there was barely a count between flash and thunder. Unlike the quests I lead, there were no safety measures in place and I wondered how long it might take for anyone to know if I'd been toasted. The cold of the storm made everything harder. It also made me feel more alive and deepened my prayers.

The rest of the quest unfolded in long stretches of stillness, prayer, silence, sleep, and dreams. Three whitetail deer visited me. A yellow butterfly. More birds than I could count. I've learned not to rush to interpret any of it. Sometimes it's enough just to be visited.

I also spent time with the hawk wings and feathers. For months I had felt a connection to them without fully understanding why. During the quest, that changed. I was finally able to receive them as a gift from the hawk itself and as something I may carry into my work going forward.

When the third day ended, Jaylen and his relatives returned. My prayer ties were removed and placed high in a tree. A blanket was placed over my head and I was led back to camp.

We entered the Inipi once more. After three days without water, my first drink came from a buffalo horn dipped in cool water. I didn't feel particularly thirsty until that horn made its way to me. Inside the lodge we shared our experiences and visions.

Listening to the others, I found myself appreciating the beauty of the Lakota way even more deeply. This ceremony emerged from the lives, landscape, and history of the Lakota people. Being there didn't make me want to replicate it. If anything, it gave me a deeper respect for how traditions grow from the people and places that create them.

I didn't go to South Dakota looking for a better vision quest. I went looking for understanding. What I came home with was a deeper appreciation for both their path and my own.

After what felt like an eternity in the Inipi, I had very little left to give. The world was spinning and my body was cramping. I staggered to my truck, my water bottle, and the pouch of Skratch Labs electrolytes I knew I would need to bring my levels back.

We ate well that night and later gathered for another ceremony, this one for a young man preparing to leave for boot camp and take the warrior path.

Driving home through the night across the northern plains, I felt something settling into place. I saw a herd of buffalo walking toward the building storm in the west. One final image stayed with me. Feet painted sky blue walking through tall native prairie grass. Then more feet joining them. Different colors. Different people. Moving together across the land, leaving small traces of color behind.

I don't know exactly what it means. Maybe I never will. For now, it feels like enough to know that I saw it.

I'm back in Colorado now, again surrounded by ponderosa. Back with my family. Back to the work. Carrying South Dakota with me. The prairie. The songs. The storm.

Since returning, I've noticed a deeper sense of responsibility. Not the kind that weighs on you. More like a knowing. The quest didn't change my direction. It confirmed it.

What feels different is my relationship to that direction.

I'm willing to let people see me doing the thing I'm actually here to do.

We'll see what comes of that.