Phyllis Barber - To the Mountain: One Mormon Womans Search for Spirit

To the

MOUNTAIN

To the

MOUNTAIN

ONE MORMON WOMANS
SEARCH FOR SPIRIT

PHYLLIS BARBER

Theosophical Publishing House
Wheaton, Illinois * Chennai, India

Learn more about Phyllis Barber and her work at www.phyllisbarber.squarespace.com

Find more books like this at www.questbooks.net

Copyright 2014 by Phyllis Barber

First Quest Edition 2014

Quest Books

Theosophical Publishing House

PO Box 270

Wheaton, IL 60187-0270

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Cover images: Author photo by Catherine Hope. Morning landscape of Mt. Pandim by Pallab Seth/

Getty Images

Cover design by Mary Ann Smith

Typesetting by DataPage, Inc.

Earlier versions of chapters 1, 5, and 8 were published as Dancing with the Sacred, Three Parts, in Numero Cinq Magazine (March 2012).

Chapter 2 was published as The Knife Handler in Agni Magazine, no. 71 (Spring 2010).

Chapter 3 was published as The Precarious Walk Away from Mormonism, All the Time with a Stitch in My Side, in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 29, no. 3 (Fall 1996).

Part of chapter 4 was published as With the Goddesses in Quintana Roo in Exponent II (Winter 2012).

Chapter 7 was published as In the Body of the Serpent in Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature (September 2012).

Chapter 9 was published as Sweetgrass in upstreet, no. 5 (2009).

Chapter 11 was adapted from The Gift of a Broken Heart, published in Sunstone: Mormon Experience, Scholarship, Issues and Art, no 118 (April 2008).

Chapter 12 was published as At the Cannery in Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 42, no. 2 (Summer 2009).

Out of the Mouths of A Thousands Birds is from The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz (New York: Penguin, 1996), translated by Daniel Ladinsky and used with his permission.

Some of the names in the essays have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barber, Phyllis.

To the mountain: one Mormon woman's search for spirit/Phyllis Barber.First Quest edition.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-8356-0924-1

1. Barber, Phyllis. 2. Spiritual biography. 3. Spirituality.

4. Religions. 5. MormonsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

BL73.B365A3 2014

289.3092dc23

[B] 2014001204

ISBN for electronic edition, e-pub format: 978-0-8356-2171-7

5 4 3 2 1 * 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

CONTENTS

To those who helped with the inception, creation, and production of this book, I would like to give my thanks.

To Richard Smoley, editor of Quest Books, for recognizing the worth of this manuscript and bringing it to fruition; and to Sharron Dorr and Will Marsh for their enlightened editorial comments. To the writer friends I first met with in Denver after moving back to Colorado in 2007Mary Domenico and Harrison Fletcherwho shepherded these essays in their earliest incarnation and reassured me with their enthusiasm.

Always to my sister, Kathryn Gold, and her son, Jay, who read through many of the essays and suggested that I keep working when I was ready to say, This is done. To David Jauss, my colleague from the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program, and Dan Wotherspoon, founder of Mormon Matters and former editor of Sunstone, who read through the entire manuscript and offered not only their expert opinion, but their encouragement. To Lance Larsen, who, with his well-trained eye for the poetic line, helped me refine the text of many of these essays.

To Gladys Swan and Leslie Ullman, my longtime writing colleagues, who have sustained me through the years with their appreciation, critiquing, praise, and friendship; to Shirley Smith of Meander Adventures, who helped open the doors of the international world for me; to Virginia and the late Jim Pearce for their assurance that they did not want to change me; to David Barber for his curious mind that jolted me out of any complacency in which I might have been tempted to bask; to my many writing students at VCFA and our lively interchange about writing and life; to Barry Sharcot, Rick Posner, and Elyse Hughes, three of my Lighthouse writing students who helped me find a title for this book; to Janice Roetenberg, Sylvia Milanese, and Andrea Doray and other members of my writing classes in Denver for their thoughtful editorial observations; to Karen Taylor for her helpful suggestions regarding Sweetgrass; to Emma Lou Thayne for her friendship and wholehearted support of this manuscript; and to the VCFA MFA in Writing Program, where I first gave a lecture on Spirituality in Writingthe origination of this collection.

Last, but not least, to my three sons, Christopher Jon, Jeremy, and Brad, and their families, for the joy and sustenance they give, and to my husband Bill Traeger, for his forbearance, his respect for the fact that I write and want to keep writing books, and for his love and generous support.

For Bill and his brand of spirituality

The spiritual life is the life of mans real self, the life of that interior self whose flame is so often allowed to be smothered under the ashes of anxiety and futile concern. Without a life of the spirit our whole existence becomes unsubstantial and illusory. The life of the spirit, by integrating us in the real order established by God, puts us in the fullest possible contact with realitynot as we imagine it, but as it really is.

Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

The word religion is based on the root lig, meaning to bind or connect together (as in ligament), so religion means reconnecting or rebonding broken relationshipswith God, with neighbor, with stranger and enemy, with nonhuman life, with all creation.

Brian D. McLaren, Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?

May thy Spirit be with and guide us this day.

Phrase from my childhoods family prayer

E ver since I fell off the precipice of knowing, I have been searching for places where Spirit residesthose ineffable places where I feel connected to others, to nature, and to the ethereal. I find that as I have given up trying to file answers in my I Know box, I more than ever before want to capture the essence of Spirit and keep it in a cricket basket where it can breathe, yet be examined. Yet I know that captivity is folly. If one pursues Spirit with determination and a basket, it turns away. It recedes. It hides.