My parents moved from Poughkeepsie, New York to Boulder during the great IBM migration of 1965. I was born a few months after their arrival. Growing up, a large part of our life was centered around St. Andrew Presbyterian Church on Baseline. My father was a deacon and sang in the choir, my mother taught Sunday School. The experience of living and serving the community through Christ was, at its foundation, what was forming me during that time, that and growing up in a collage town of the ‘70s.
As was the case in those years of IBM (“I’ve Been Moved” as my dad called it), another migration came in 1978, to Tucson, Arizona. From being in a town, where everything was within walking distance, to the edge of the desert, where there were only saguaros, rattlesnakes, and coyotes for miles and miles, my paradigm went through a major shift. Within a year I went from bikes, paper routs, and walks to stores, to wandering in the desert, learning a whole new set of skills. I took up competitive shooting and began hunting. By the time I was 15 I had over a dozen various firearms.
During those years I shifted away from church. From early on I had had pagan ways of thinking and feeling. I felt more at home with the trees than in a church. Even from my time at St. Andrew, I have a clearer memory of the rock patterns of the pulpit than the sermons. It was during this time that I also discovered that my very “Christian” great-grandmother, was also a practicing Druid. I told my mom I no longer wanted to go to church, because the wilderness was my church and nature was my religion. My mother was very wise and told me that if I didn’t go to church, I needed to do something spiritual every Sunday morning. For me, at that time, that spiritual practice was walking off into the desert with a six-shooter on my hip and a rifle on my shoulder. I romanticized the whole mountain man experience, hunting rabbit and quail, skinning them and cooking them up in various Old West recipes. I had a depth of gratitude for this amazing earth and all that it provides. After years of shooting and hunting, I became proficient and confident with guns. Killing for food was a natural part of being alive and I embraced it.
Then one overcast day when I was out hunting, everything I thought I knew about life was turned upside down. I was walking along, just me and my beagle Dutchess, and from the sandy wash I saw a rabbit run out from under a bush. He was a big one, the kind I was on the lookout for. As I put my rifle to my shoulder and lined up the shot something unexpected happened. I was suddenly overcome with a feeling of fear, not my fear, but the rabbit’s fear. It washed over me like a wave and was followed by an experience of compassion that I had never known before. What followed this was ineffable, and no matter how many times I have tried to explain it, it falls short. It felt like I was feeling the fear and pain and suffering of all rabbits. This sensation kept expanding outward, in waves, moving into an experience of the same for all sentient beings, and then expanding further into a sense of wonder and connection to all of existence.
The rabbit ran away, but I stood there for some time. While the intensity of the experience passed, it had changed me. When the following weekend came, I went to a place called the Swap Meet and sold my guns. Over the next few months, I used the money to buy cameras and started taking pictures during my wanderings in the desert.
Now when I tell this story, it is expressed as my “moment” of enlightenment. And, maybe it was. But it was only that… a moment. While I have always been caught up in the wonder of life and any experience, I also would be drawn back into the depths of bewilderment. My journey took me many places after that day, one after another informing the next. I went on to practice Shamanism, Sufism, back to Christianity, then into Kabbalah, Taoism and Buddhism. I was seeking that experience with the rabbit again, but never found it in the same visceral way. What I did find, after delving into the depths of each practice, and then moving to the next, was a soulful place I could strive to embrace going forward. It was during a late night, after meditation and contemplation, that I wrote in my journal something that has informed the rest of my life and had a major influence on my work.
I wrote: “I am nothing, therefore I am everything, because I have not limited myself to something.”
With that moment, I was able to be with the whole that the rabbit had shown me all those years before. I was able to be in communion with anyone, because I was no longer something they were not. I became radically open and ready to receive, and that has informed my spiritual practice, my work in psychology, and how I relate to everyone I meet.
John Kellow is a board member of INMI, he has worked for over 30-years in mental health treatment and education. His current project is BolderMind: a grant funded program that brings support to individuals and groups through talks and tabletop events, connecting with people where they are, rather than through institutions.