Coming Down the Mountain
My first experience of Vision Quest (2011)
I do worry that I am not doing more with my life.
There’s something in me that keeps pushing—something that wants expression, that nudges me toward risk, toward the uncomfortable.
But in a world where more is everywhere, what is the place of this more?
What more do we actually need to do?
And how do we know when we are on the track of the more that is ours?
Many years ago I started doing vision quests in Brazil. I was 29, and the more inside me was calling me out of my comfort zone—into something that felt like an initiation.
I knew this more was right for me.
I needed something that would move me into manhood, into adulthood.
I may have looked and spoken like a man, but on the inside, parts of me had not yet made that crossing.
It still feels like a crossing now, a bridge.
And at that point, more of me was still standing on the other side.
Even though I had worked, supported myself, travelled, held down a long-term relationship, and done years of inner work—something hadn’t moved.
This was my second time on that island in Brazil, in Florianópolis, but my first time going up the mountain alone.
Four days and four nights. No food. No water.
And it was winter.
Rain was coming.
And I wasn’t prepared for it.
We weren’t allowed plastic—only skins and natural materials. I had made a kind of makeshift tarp with beeswax, which, looking back, was already showing its fault lines.
What it was really showing was something else.
That this character Ryan had grown up with an absent father and an over-present mother. Not so much in the physical, but in how I had come to rely on her.
And of course she could not be both.
So something in me had learned to lean—and at the same time, not fully trust that I would be held.
On that mountain, the conditions were just right to expose all of this.
I was the only non-Brazilian. And from where I stood, the others felt like the embodiment of masculinity and strength.
And those old feelings came up again—
that I didn’t have what I needed,
that I wasn’t ready.
And the truth is, I wasn’t.
Which is what made the quest right for me in all the wrong ways.
There is a community at the base of the mountain. You are each taken to your own space, surrounded by 365 tobacco prayer ties.
You don’t leave that space until it is over—unless you choose to come down.
Morning and night, the community sings for you from below.
But in the end, it is just you and you.
I settled in. The first day and night passed. The fasting, the discomfort.
Then the rain came.
And it didn’t stop.
Second day into the third night.
By then I had dug myself into the ground, covered in leaves, trying to stay dry while everything I had brought kept failing.
That night was one of the hardest of my life.
The next morning wasn’t really a waking. It was just a continuation.
I was cold. Wet. And done.
So I went down—one day short.
I felt like I had failed.
I had come all this way, and I hadn’t completed what I set out to do.
A few days later, I sat with a Brazilian elder. She asked me why I had come down.
I remember feeling almost offended by the question. Had she not seen the weather?
But she looked at me and said:
Abandonment.
You felt abandoned.
It took me years to understand what she meant.
But it went straight to the centre.
Underneath everything—the cold, the rain, the struggle—was this feeling that I was on my own. That I couldn’t rely on anyone. That I had to do it all myself.
And beneath that, something I didn’t even know I was carrying—an abandonment from my father.
I was still, in some way, looking for my mother.
Only now, it was just me.
And something in me had to cross.
That, I came to see, was more.
Not finishing the quest.
Not proving anything.
But moving.
You can’t do a vision quest every day.
But the movement toward more doesn’t stop.
We are always becoming.
And I think there is something in us that knows when we are not moving—when we are stuck in sameness.
But the speed of the world now can confuse this.
I saw a headline recently: you have two years to upskill yourself or else.
The “else” carries a kind of threat—fall behind, become irrelevant.
But that is not the more I’m speaking about.
That kind of pressure pushes us into rushed movement. Into doing more for the sake of keeping up.
The more that is ours doesn’t come like that.
Sometimes it asks something big of us.
But often, it is much simpler than we think.
In a time where everything is moving so fast, maybe the most important thing we can do is slow down enough to hear what is actually moving in us.
To follow that.
Even if it’s small.
Even if it doesn’t look like much from the outside.
In the end, movement is simple.
We listen.
And we follow.
Not because it’s clear—
but because it’s ours.