The Luckiest Man Alive?

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Keeney’s emphasis on improvisation made a name for him in the field, and he started getting invitations to deliver lectures, write books, head up academic programs. But something inside him was still unsettled, something that began to emerge one day when he gave a talk on family therapy at a social service agency in a hard-hit neighborhood of Minneapolis. A Native American man, Sam Gurnoe, came up to him afterward, not to ask a question but to open a door. “My tradition welcomes you,” Keeney remembers him saying. “I hope our ways may help you find the truth in your own ways.”

At first, Keeney didn’t know what to think. He’d come all the way from Florida as a distinguished professor to instruct folks in this poor community how to overcome their problems, and now one of them was volunteering to teach him. But he was intrigued, and later, when he got an offer to move to the Twin Cities to help launch a new program in professional psychology, Gurnoe’s offer helped him make up his mind.

Gurnoe soon had him packing for his first vision quest, alone on a cliff with just a blanket, a pipe, and some sacred tobacco. “I didn’t realize how really cold it was in Minnesota,” he recalls. “It rained. I had never even been camping before.” Just when he was ready to hang it up and hike in the direction of the nearest motel, a coyote appeared right in front of him. “It was amazing, but I was also scared silly. Can a coyote hurt you? I wondered.” Not knowing what else to do, he started to howl in harmony with the coyote. The next morning, with the cliff now shrouded in heavy fog, an eagle swooped toward him, making what looked to Keeney like eye contact. “I jumped up and sang like a wild man.”

He marks the experience as the point when his fear, going back to the kundalini incident, began to shift inside. And as Sam Gurnoe had prophesied, he found himself drawn toward his own spiritual roots. He began attending a predominantly African American Baptist church. “It was the way back to my granddaddy,” he says, noting that only later did he learn that many native cultures conduct religious ceremonies as a way to stay in contact with their dead relatives.

“This is not ancestor worship as the early anthropologists described it,” he says. “This is a continuing relationship with those you have lost.” As he writes in his recent book Ropes to the Gods (Ringing Rocks Press, 2003), the Bushman people of the Kalahari dance and dance until they see ropes of white light dangling from the sky and those ropes connect them to everyone they love.

“A lot of healing happens out of this love. The dancers break down in grief about losing their loved ones and then get up again filled with ecstasy. Strip away all the meandering discourse and you’ll find the religious traditions, the Christian mystics and Zen Buddhists, are all talking about love.”

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