My First Vision Quest
Four days and nights alone and fasting under a tarp in the wilderness — the experience before the experience
What’s a Vision Quest, or a vision fast? Where does it come from? How do you prepare for one? What’s in it for me? Here are some thoughts about the experience, the steps that led me here, and how I’ve lived the whole process before the experience itself.
I’m writing this a few days before I leave, after preparing since October of last year. On purpose. On October 15 I’ll meet six companions and their guides at a camp in the Gila Wilderness, in New Mexico, to begin my first Vision Quest.
When I come back, I’ll have lived the experience. Experiences told afterwards tend to tidy themselves up: challenges become necessary, the unexpected becomes a sign, confusion becomes a lesson.
I want to put down in writing, with a date on it, what I know, what I think I know and what I expect. Afterwards I’ll write a second part. The most useful thing I’ll be able to tell will probably lie in the distance between the two.
What a Vision Quest is, and what it isn’t
What I’m about to do is not an Indigenous ceremony. That’s worth saying first. The phrase “Vision Quest” mixes two different things.
The first is the practice of fasting and solitude in search of a vision that exists among several Native peoples of North America. The most often cited is the Lakota hanbleceya, usually translated as “crying for a vision.” It is one of the seven rites Black Elk described to Joseph Epes Brown in The Sacred Pipe (1953). These practices have their own language, their own cosmology, their own keepers and their own conditions of access.
The second is a contemporary rite of passage in the wilderness. Steven Foster and Meredith Little began developing it in California in the early seventies, and in 1981 they founded the School of Lost Borders. From the Indigenous fast they took three elements: fasting, solitude in nature and the inner search. They arranged them according to the scheme the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep proposed in 1909 for all rites of passage: separation, threshold and incorporation. Foster himself tended to call it a vision fast rather than a vision quest.
The program I’m joining belongs to this second family. It is led by Sparrow Hart, who did his first quest in 1980. He later founded Circles of Air and Stone, and he has been guiding eleven-day programs for more than three decades. All the documentation they’ve sent me uses van Gennep’s vocabulary: severance, threshold, incorporation.
The origin of the Vision Quest, though not as such
On June 10, 1993, at Lakota Summit V, some 500 representatives of 40 Lakota, Dakota and Nakota groups unanimously approved a “Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality.” The text stated that their ceremonies belong to those nations alone. It explicitly criticized the imitations of the New Age movement and of the so-called men’s movement.
The lineage I’ll be questing in is not Lakota and doesn’t claim to be. This is a modern rite of passage, Euro-American in origin, inspired by Indigenous practices and distinct from them. I’ll use “Vision Quest”: that’s what the program is called and what people search for. I know which part of that name is borrowed.
How this version works
Eleven days in the Gila Wilderness and Upper & Lower Scorpion, in southwestern New Mexico, from October 15 to 25. They’re divided into three phases that follow van Gennep’s scheme.
- Severance (days 1–4). Base camp with the group. Daily councils to prepare body and mind: ceremony, safety, fasting, how to build a shelter with a tarp. On the fourth day, each of us walks to the area where we’ll look for our place.
- Threshold (days 5–8). Four days and four nights alone, fasting, under a tarp, with no books and no conversation. Once a day you visit an agreed pile of stones and leave a sign that you’re all right. That’s the only contact.
- Incorporation (days 9–11). Return to camp, a shared meal, and a council in which each person tells their story. The group listens and gives it back to them like a mirror.
Two practical details say more than any “spiritual” description. The first is the temperature. The October average is around 21 °C (70 °F) by day and 4 °C (39 °F) at night, but it can drop several degrees below freezing. The sleeping bag has to hold to about −9 °C (15 °F). The second is the liability waiver. It says clearly that during the solo time no one is watching me. The guides won’t even know exactly where I am. The program fee covers preparation and integration. Support during the solo is offered free of charge, “in keeping with tradition.”
I find that last sentence honest and hard at the same time. The threshold is not for sale. Whatever is crossed there is the responsibility of whoever crosses it.
Six years of waiting
I’ve known about this ritual for many years. I’ve been trying to do it since 2020, and I’ve followed the work of Sparrow, our guide, for two or three. He has been doing this work for 40 years.
Last year everything was ready. The program started on October 7, exactly on my birthday. It was cancelled for a personal reason on the organizers’ side, and I moved it to this year.
If someone asks me why I’m going, the most honest answer is that it’s time. I’m certainly not going with the idea of fixing anything. Behind it there’s no crisis, no lack to fill, no urgent question demanding an answer. I treat my life as a laboratory, and this is part of the experiment of living it.
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I know that answer clashes with what’s usually told about these rites, which almost always begin with someone who arrives broken or needs to make a big change. That’s not my case, or I don’t know it yet. I’d rather not invent a wound so the story has an arc. I’ll leave the emotional heist to others.
Preparation happens every day
The Vision Quest doesn’t begin on October 15. It begins months earlier, with very concrete tasks.
The letter of intent organizes your intention, purpose and goals according to the three phases. What am I separating from: which attitudes, habits or situations no longer serve me. What do I want to take in. And what lies at the threshold: what do I truly fear, what keeps me from letting go of what I want to leave behind and taking up what I want to bring back, which allies do I count on. Writing it forced me to answer things that go unanswered in daily life.
The council of allies, or circle of intent, is a group of people you tell about what you’re going to do and ask for support. It does the job community used to do. Sparrow suggests other preparatory practices: the Death Lodge, where you say goodbye to people and things as if you weren’t coming back, threshold exercises, Talking with the Wind, or designing your own ceremony.
The medicine walk is a full day alone in nature, a month beforehand, with no plan, letting yourself be led. That’s where I ran into a scheduling problem. From August 14 to September 16 I was at a Zen monastery in Japan, offline, continuing my training as a lay monk in the Soto school. I asked Sparrow whether that time could count as preparation.
He explained the reason for the medicine walk: he doesn’t know the people who come in any depth, and they come from two extremes. Some have plenty of experience in the mountains but little inner work. Others have done a hundred retreats but have rarely been alone with the physical, primal reality of nature. The medicine walk covers both. It puts you in contact with the natural world and makes you move without a plan, guided by something that doesn’t come from the head. In my case, he told me not to worry.
What stayed with me was the way he thinks about it. For him, preparation is a way of measuring what each person is missing.
The paradox of intention
This lineage insists on one idea above all: you have to know what you’re looking for. Without a clear intention, the time alone scatters.
In one of the preparatory sessions I said my intention out loud. When I finished, I asked myself why I had to have one. The answer was simple: I’d been asked to.
Soto Zen has a word for the opposite attitude: mushotoku, sitting with nothing to gain. You don’t meditate to calm down, or to become enlightened, or for anything at all. The practice is already the end.
So my intention has ended up being to be there, to live it, to go through it.
I don’t know whether the two ideas contradict each other. Maybe they aren’t talking about the same thing, and the intention of the quest works as a tool for focusing attention rather than as a goal to reach. Or maybe the contradiction is real and I’ll have to live with it for four days. It’s one of the questions I’m taking with me, and I’m at ease with it.
The unexpected always knocks
So far, the biggest surprise has come from the other six people, more than from the fasting or the solitude.
We don’t know each other. We’ve only exchanged a few emails. And still, something like a brotherhood has formed. Each of us has shared why we’re going, and the stories are powerful and very personal. My six companions are all over fifty. I feel lucky.
The curious thing is that it was announced. The first page of the program dossier warns that the hardest thing to describe is the community that forms. It usually arrives as a surprise: everyone comes focused on their own thing. I read it and didn’t give it much weight. It happened anyway.
From Japan to the desert
I arrive at this Vision Quest from a 2026 out of another galaxy, already landed from the Great Victory but still adapting to this new world, if there is anything to adapt to at all. Less than a month ago I left Annonji, in the mountains of Japan, where I lived with Jinen Roshi and Nicolás Taigen. Life there was very basic: takuhatsu (alms rounds), work on the land, ten to fourteen 40-minute sessions of zazen a day, with bears, snakes and deer around us. Jinen Roshi has been meditating twelve to fourteen hours a day for more than fifty years. He is the first person I’ve met of whom I can say, without exaggerating, that he is realized. He describes it as having realized the essential self, which is no-self.
From there I landed in Spain, and from Spain I’m heading to New Mexico. In between came a birthday unlike any before it. On October 7 I turned off my phone for the whole day and part of the 8th. I didn’t answer anyone. The only outside sign that it was my birthday was a “happy birthday” on the gym screen when I scanned my fingerprint. I spent the day celebrating with myself. I had never celebrated it like that.
Until the day before, I was convinced I was turning 43. I was born in 1982. I was turning 44.
This is part of the state I’m arriving in. It doesn’t mean anything more. I’ve practiced and done the work that matters in 2025 and 2026 like never before. I don’t know whether that prepares me better, or whether it will make me expect from the desert what I found in the monastery.
A few days before the Vision Quest
What I know is little and concrete. I know the structure of the rite and where it comes from. I know I’ll spend four days and four nights alone, without eating, under a tarp, in a valley by the Gila River. I know the name I’m using is borrowed.
Almost everything else I don’t know, for a change. I don’t know how my body will respond to fasting out in the open. I don’t know whether the solitude of the desert will resemble the solitude of the monastery. I don’t know whether the question of intention will resolve or dissolve. And I don’t know whether “I’m not looking for anything” is a truth or the pose of a sophisticated idiot.
When I come back, I’ll keep a journal that separates what happened from what I made of it. I won’t call anything a vision just because it was intense. I’ll let several weeks go by before writing the second part. And before I write it, I’ll reread this and say where I was wrong. Hopefully, I’ll be 200% wrong, just as I was when I entered darkness for the first time.
See you in the wilderness.
** References: Black Elk and Joseph Epes Brown, The Sacred Pipe (1953). Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (1909). Steven Foster and Meredith Little, School of Lost Borders.
