Life in a Tipi

From The Prophet’s Way: A Guide to Living in the Now

Every day people are straying away from
church and going back to God.

—LENNY BRUCE

MY BEST FRIEND THROUGH SCHOOL WAS CLARK STINSON. WE met when we were 13, and instead of pursuing the normal pastimes of teenagers we spent our time studying Sanskrit (we had an old study-guide book I found in my father’s library), reading The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and arguing minutiae of the Bible. Clark’s mother was interested in metaphysics and shared with us a book called Autobiography of a Yogi. Years later, when I went to Detroit with her and Clark to attend an initiation in Kriya yoga by Yogacharia Oliver Black, the oldest living disciple of Yogananda, I recognized Yogananda’s Kriya technique as identical to an ancient Coptic exercise that Kurt Stanley had taught us years earlier, called the Cobra Breath.

I introduced Clark to Master Stanley, and Clark and I began a serious study of spirituality. We were both in our late teens by then, and Clark had recently married. I was recovering from a painful breakup with a girlfriend, and we agreed that to do our spiritual work best we should seek isolation.

So, Clark and his wife bought a tipi, and I bought one, and we three gave away everything else we owned in the world except some clothes and our spiritual books. We bought 100 pounds of wheat, 100 pounds of dried fruit, and some basic camping equipment and got a ride up into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where an old trapper led us on a three-day trek back into the Chippewa National Forest to a small lake that isn’t on most maps.

We spent the summer there, Clark and his wife on one side of the lake, me on the other. We practiced silence three days a week, and we did meditation and prayer every day for hours.

I had a pet tachinid fly, a small insect that looks like a honeybee but is actually a fly. When I’d meditate in the morning on my blanket outside my tipi, he’d come and hover just above my right hand, as if he were drawing nourishment from me. Sometimes he’d hover there for as long as 20 minutes; occasionally, he’d land and walk around with careful steps like an astronaut exploring a distant but friendly planet. I also shared my tipi with a large and furry brown-and-black wolf spider, who came out at night as the sun set and picked the sleeping mosquitoes off the canvas on the west side of my tipi; I watched the play of life and death, predator and prey.

One cold and rainy afternoon, Clark and I were walking through the woods, looking for berries and edible plants. We’d gotten pretty skilled at identifying what was safe and what wasn’t and were filling a bag with leaves and fruits.¹

“This must be what our ancestors lived like,” Clark observed. “Hunting and gathering.”

“Except that we’re vegetarians, so we’re just gathering,” I said, joking.

But to Clark it wasn’t a joke. “Seriously. What we call civilization started when humans started farming. But humans like us were around for tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of years before that. Fully conscious, awake and aware, thinking and feeling just like us. But they were hunters and gatherers instead of farmers.”

“Without agriculture there would be no civilization?” I asked. It was an interesting thought.

“Remember Miss Hemmer?” Clark said. Miss Hemmer had been our eighth-grade biology teacher and one of the best teachers I’ve ever known. Clark and I conspired to make her life difficult, but we also loved her and learned more from her each month than from any of our other teachers in a year. And she was a huge fan of Margaret Mead. “She said that in primitive societies there isn’t suicide, depression, drug addiction, all that stuff.”

“The noble savage,” I said, shivering. “I’m skeptical. And cold. And the Indians who once lived here were probably cold, too.”

He shrugged and said, “This life seems much more natural to me.”

At least I had to agree with that.

A few days later, Clark came running over to my tipi with his Bible, all excited. “Look at this,” he said, pointing out Genesis 4:2. “It says, ‘Cain was a tiller of the ground.’ The Bible is talking about how the first murderer was also the first farmer. And in the twenty-fifth verse, it makes it clear that Abel, the brother who was not the farmer, was the one whom God loved the most.”

“So what? It’s a classic archetype of the oldest child being the most beloved but also the one who screws up; it’s all over, from Greek mythology to Shakespeare.”

“Don’t you see? Adam and Eve were gatherers, like we are now. They walked around the Garden of Eden and picked up food. But then they tasted of the knowledge of good and evil, of life and death. That’s your food supply—you live or die by it. When you live as a gatherer, you live by the whim of nature: if there’s no food, you die. When you begin to store up food, you can defy nature and survive a drought. You then have the power to control life: the knowledge of life and death, or good and evil. So the tasting of the apple must mean that Adam and Eve experimented with agriculture, that they defied the god of nature. It’s a warning. It’s saying that the primitive life of hunting, gathering, and herding was more in accord with nature’s way than is agriculture.^*

Clark dove deeply into the issue, but I didn’t consider it all that important at the time. I couldn’t see how when people started farming after the end of the last ice age it could have been a bad thing—after all, it brought us modern society and science. Clark, however, was totally certain that agriculture and what he called “the organized ones” (whom I’d later call, in writing about attention deficit disorder, the “farmers”) were responsible for the coming death of the earth. I wasn’t to seriously consider the issue again, though, for more than 20 years.

I was also told during that time, quite clearly and directly in several dreams and strong intuitions, that my ultimate spiritual teacher would not be a yogi from India or any of the other Eastern religions (even though I was studying these too) but a Christian from Europe. I was amazed by this, as the Maharishi and all the other teachers seemed to be coming out of India, but the message was unmistakable. And ever since I’d first read Carl Jung’s writings (particularly his autobiography), I’d paid careful attention to my dreams and took seriously their content.

At the time I assumed it must have meant Master Stanley, as he was Swiss. But I later learned that, as Master Stanley had said, he was not my ultimate teacher.

That summer in the tipi was profoundly transformational for me, a time of preparation for what would come next. It taught me that I should never be afraid to lose or give away everything (as I’ve done more than once since then), that possessions can be meaningless, and that there is great peace in solitude. As a “gifted but hyperactive” young adult, I learned for the first time how to truly and profoundly relax and gain control over the wild racing of my mind. I learned to look within for strength and discovered that the forest is afire with life. I felt truly alive, truly connected to my creator, in a more real and visceral way than I’d ever before experienced.

From The Prophet’s Way by Thom Hartmann,
© 1997, published by Inner Traditions International.