I finger a smooth green stone from a vendor’s table. “Is this jade?”

“Nephrite.” The vendor is a delicate, sun-aged woman with feathers in her hair. “Big Sur jade.

“It’s local?”

“Yes. Very healing for the heart. Cleans out negative thoughts and energy.”

I run my thumb over its blue green swirls. I’ve heard that stones possess ancient knowing, but remain silent unless you ask. I listen for what this little stone has to tell me.

The stone says, Put me down and take this in, all this Esalen, the organic garden and the chicken coop, the broad sweep of lawn with Adirondacks lazing in pairs, the naked bathers, the rocky shore and the grey waves breaking into spray. Open yourself up and stay that way.

“Thank you.” I put the stone down, and prepare to spend the next five days crossing the divide between worlds. I’ve come to Esalen to attend Visionseeker I: Shamanism and the Modern Mystical Movement, a journeying workshop with Hank Wesselman, Ph.D.

My acupuncturist has studied with Hank for years, and what she’s told me about shamanic journeying has intrigued me. During a recent session, after twisting needles into my meridians, she placed heated stones on my belly.

“Time for new stones,” she told me. “These asked to go back to the beach.”

“Are they too tired to work on me?”

“No, no, they’re fine. They’re close to saturated, though, absorbing all the energy.” She leaned in and rested her hand on my arm. “You know I don’t talk about this with everyone. They return to the Stone Clan, so they can share all the information they’ve gathered about humans.”

I felt an ache, not from the needles. I envied the stones’ ability to traverse worlds.

* * *

This Big Sur jade has me thinking about other stones I’ve known. On a car trip with my parents through the National Parks when I was nine, my father stopped at every rock shop we passed. I remember spending a long time in a shop in Colorado Springs, then loading about a quarter ton of quartz into the trunk of our Thunderbird.

Turns out the weathered woman who ran the shop was stricken with cancer, and my father had been giving her free medical advice. For the duration of our visit there, he’d pretended to be a doctor. His talk was a motivational, common sense-based prescription that suggested eating more fruits and vegetables – especially tomatoes – and praying.

This woman was so grateful to my father that she boxed up armloads of rose quartz, which he had admired, and told me to pick the prettiest three geodes I could find – all for free. The geodes were halved with a diamond blade, revealing the crystal fairyland yolk hidden inside the muddy grey egg-shaped shell. I imagined the thrill of being the first human to split open a geode, to see how different the inside of a thing could be from its outside.

My father bought some petrified wood bookends, and a chunk of pyrite. Then the woman saw us off, waving with renewed strength, until our Thunderbird kicked up enough golden Colorado dust to obscure her.

“Sure, she’s gonna die,” my father said, “but she didn’t have to feel so bad about it. Bein’ miserable’s no way to live.”

“That’s true,” my mother agreed.

“I gave her some good doctorly advice.”

“Yes, Bud, you did.”

“What kind of doctor, Daddy?” I asked from the back seat. I was impressed with the change he’d sparked in this woman. I craved the kind of attention he’d given her.

“What’d she say, Rose?”

“She wants to know what kind of doctor you said you were.” My mother translated everything I said from the back seat like a UN interpreter – somehow my father couldn’t hear me without her mediating.

“The best kind there is.” He grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “The kind that never sends a bill!”

“Maybe she won’t die. Maybe now she’ll be all right.”

“The hell she will.” My father’s grin bottomed out of the mirror. “Didn’t you see her smokin’? Wait till that damn cancer snakes all the way to her brain, then maybe she’ll think about quittin’.”

“If everyone who smokes gets cancer,” I asked, “why do people smoke?”

“Don’t you think about smokin’!” He eyed me hard in the mirror, veering toward the shoulder. “You want to end up all grizzled and spindly like her?”

“No. I’m –”

“What’d she say?”

“Can’t you get cancer from too much sunburn?” I asked without waiting for my mother to translate.

“I’ll give her cancer in a minute.” He angled his head toward me. My mother reached for the wheel. “Quit contradicting me!”

“I’m not!” I said, my throat swelling with tears.

My mother turned to me. “That’s enough for now.”

“Smart alecky kid.” He put both hands on the wheel and steered us toward the Continental Divide.

We climbed the twisting road toward Pike’s Peak. I stretched out across the backseat and pretended to sleep. My father held the road, and my mother read the map, while I luxuriated in the temporary absence of gravity, watching postcard abstractions of sky, trees, rocks and clouds pixilate through the window, an undulating display of elements. I imagined crossing the divide between the back seat and the front, to the world inhabited by my parents, and what it might feel like to be welcome there.

At least I had my geodes. I wondered about the inscrutible interiors my parents kept hidden from me, preferring to lord their rough grey unified fronts over me for fear I’d snap out of line. I wasn’t an unruly kid – I was quiet and scared. There was never a question of who held control. In a few years, it would become apparent that like the waterways flowing on either side of the Divide, we were naturally headed in different directions.

* * *

Forty years later, I sit encircled with twenty-five people on the floor of Esalen’s Murphy House. Our workshop’s gathering place is a comfortably worn room shaped like a racetrack oval, anchored by an impressive tiled fireplace. Ancient Monterey pines peer in through the casements, and beyond the jagged cliff, there’s the incessant, tumbling hiss and crash of the sea. Native Americans known as the Esselen once presided over this land, with such reverence that they gave a name to every rock and tree.

Hank, a bearded and formidable spiritual warrior in a fleece vest, bends to light some incense. A fragrant thread of piñon smoke curls through the air. “We’re going to make medicine,” Hank says. “And that is no small thing.”

Before coming to Esalen in August, I’d read one of Hank’s books, Journey to the Sacred Garden, and had begun doing shamanic journeywork on my own. I found that I was able to achieve a visionary state or trance, just by listening to a steady drumbeat that stimulates Theta brainwaves. During my journeys, characters, animals, entities and elements appeared, responded to my questions, and went about their business. It was like meditation – with entertainment value and an enlightening take-away.

As a writer, I suspected that I was making all this up, but then I would have to ignore the ways each journey surprised me, or the valuable, new information I gleaned. Suspicion and doubt could only hobble my fledgling ability to cross divides.

* * *

For a six-month stint, when I was somewhere in my thirties, my father cracked open the door to his world. He left my mother at home in Texas and came out to California to help me and my then-husband build a two-story, 1000 square foot addition onto our home.

When he wasn’t pretending to be an oncologist, or an airline pilot, or a CIA agent in order to enjoy finite exchanges with strangers, my father worked as a construction superintendent, a master of all the trades. My husband worked during the week – shooting movies for television – and helped with construction on the weekends. I worked under my father as a laborer six days a week. Wearing gloves to protect my manicure, I used every tool but the saw. We broke for lunch at Chili’s or Black Angus at eleven-thirty, and worked till dark every day, until the addition was nearly built, and I was hospitalized for surgery to remove ovarian cysts.

On the jobsite, or riding in the car, or after bringing our plates back from the salad bar, my father told me stories about himself and his wild buddy, the year they were fifteen, growing up in Pennsylvania coal country at the onset of WWII. When our work was going well enough, he’d start in saying, “This one time…” and tumble into another tale. “All these little stories would make a helluva book,” he told me. “You’re the writer. You should write the damn thing.”

Since I’d become a trench digger, apprentice carpenter, and plumber, I wasn’t writing much.

During the days of digging the foundation trench, which ran five feet deep below grade, we routinely unearthed stones. One in particular gave us trouble. Digging, I leaned my full weight against the spade, and heard the familiar scrape of metal against rock. When I brushed the dirt aside, I discovered the peak of a boulder.

“This rock’s too big to pull out,” I said.

“The hell.” My father had been grooming the sides of the trench straight. He looked at the rock. “That has to come out. “

“It’s too big.”

“Quit arguin’. You complain about every little goddamn thing when you could just get it done.”

“I can’t lift a granite boulder.”

He looked at the rock. “Go get me the sledge hammer. The small one. And the chisel.” The only sound for the rest of the day was the tink tink tink of his chisel as he leveled the surface of the boulder.

Cumulatively, we spent five of the six months locked in conflict. He called me an idiot for bending a nail, yelled when I couldn’t tilt up a framed wall, and yet, despite my daily spates of tears, something father-and-daughterly between us held. Another day, when the building was still in the framing stage, I crouched in the driveway, marking up crooked studs for him to saw into blocks. We were both out in the open, the skeleton of the unfinished master suite looming beyond.

I heard the sound first, the low, bass rumbling, like an underground jet. I watched the studs we’d framed up quiver and shimmy. My legs felt rubbery, and I realized it was the ground shaking, not me.

“Just stay there,” my father said. “Don’t move.”

The quake lasted thirty or forty seconds. My father and I stood looking at one another, as if we were the only solid things on earth, and everything else was in motion. Our gaze protected us. We stayed connected by fifteen feet of sight, and I felt safe.

When it was over, I ran inside the house and bounced from room to room, checking for crashed vases and cracked panes. Everything was fine.

Back outside, there was my father, just standing there, smiling at the wall.

“That was one hell of a nice earthquake,” he said.

My heart was still hammering. Breathing was a chore.

“Did you see the wall?” He made his hand swim like a fish. “That damn wall was undulating all over the place, like a roller-coaster, but it didn’t come down.”

When he came to visit me in the hospital after my operation, he leaned in from the doorway, tentative and contrite, not quite entering the room. As if he understood what my body was trying to tell us by constructing a fist-sized cyst on each ovary – that while I was glad to learn his craft, I was not a day laborer, and what I had to offer as a woman and a writer, as myself, was an equally valid apprenticeship.

* * *

On the first day of the Shamanic workshop, we made an altar in the middle of the room. There we placed personal objects, feathers, stones, rattles and drums. In the center of the altar sits a kamani wood bowl given to Hank by Hawaiian kahuna Hale Makua, with whom Hank studied for many years. The Bowl of Light. A single candle placed there stays lit during the workshop.

My parents spent two decades in Hawaii before they moved to Texas. I loved Hawaii, so I visited often. My mother worked in administration at Queens Medical Center in Honolulu, and my father came on as superintendent to complete construction on the Kauai Airport. There he encountered laborers even more lackadaisical than me. He began to bandy about Hawaiian words and phrases, like pau hana (work’s over) and mahalo (thank you), and learned the difference between mauka (towards the mountains) and makai (towards the ocean).

“For this journey,” Hank suggests, “call in an ancestor.” Hank tells us that ancestors reach back through all time along the bloodlines of our mothers and our fathers, and include all our past lives. “Those ancestors who have crossed over most recently are the ones with whom we have the closest links.” After death, he tells us, the energetic body, or spirit, may spend up to a hundred years in an in-between state the Tibetans refer to as bardo.

Hank drums for us while we lay on floor cushions, cover our eyes, and relax into trance. He sets the trajectory for each journey, and the steady rhythm of beats serves to guide us. To bring us back at the end of the journey, Hank will change the tempo of his drumming, giving us time to return to the room.

I’m not thinking of anyone in particular as I sink into the sound of the drum and abide the ambiguity of darkness. When nothing comes, I look down at my feet, and an image comes into focus.

I find myself on a Tom Sawyer-type raft, pushing off with a pole down a sleepy river. The setting is a bayou, hung with Spanish moss, and every shade of green. Everything is so clean, not a leaf out of place. Disneyland-clean. Next to me on the raft is one of my Spirit Animal Helpers, a magnificent Jaguar named Sinj. When we journey, we have a chance to meet spirits who are willing to help us on our path, and many of these spirits appear as animals. During a previous journey, Sinj appeared by my side, and she has accompanied me on every journey since.

From the banks of the river, a lush, green lawn sprawls up to a white, plantation-style mansion. “I’m not sure what we’re doing here,” I tell Sinj. “I don’t have any people from the South.”

I dock the raft and approach the mansion, Sinj padding along by my side. The white-columned house is immaculate: gardens groomed with topiary precision, oaks tatted with moss arching overhead. On the broad veranda there are two men. One, in a white tee shirt and chinos, bangs on the siding with a hammer. The other, whom I recognize as my father’s WWII buddy, Hugh Bergeron, waves broadly to me in greeting. Both men appear vital, in the prime of mid-life.

“Look who’s here, Bud.” Hugh brims with Southern hospitality. “Come on up. Tell you what, he talks about you all the time.”

“Do you live here?” I ask Hugh. I know that Hugh is from New Orleans, and that my father enjoyed visiting him there.

Hugh glances back at the house. It looks two hundred years old, yet newly built. The paint gleams. “If we ever get it done!”

Sinj nudges me closer to the house. “Hi, Daddy,” I call out. My father stops hammering. He’s just like the last time I saw him, tanned from working in the sun, a full head of platinum hair and sideburns – very different from the way he must have looked when he died five years ago. He seems surprised, and embarrassed, to see me. He turns back to his work. I got to finish this, he conveys to me without speaking.

Sinj raises her head toward a porch swing hanging on the wide veranda, which I hadn’t noticed before. I let my dad know that I’d like him to sit with me, but he keeps working.

Hugh picks up on this. “For Crissakes, Bud, sit with your girl on the damn swing, she came all this way.”

At Hugh’s urging, my father rises and walks over. We sit on the swing together. Sinj lays down on the porch and washes her paw. I begin to say something, try to talk with him, but it’s awkward. He won’t speak. After a moment, he silently conveys to me: My way of talking wasn’t good.

He might be referring to the way he’d talked to me on the jobsite, or maybe the times he’d disowned me, and stopped speaking to me. Or the time when I was fifteen, and he threatened to kill me for wearing denim: overwhelmed by his fear that I’d turn into a hippie, he tore through my closet, pulled out everything that was blue, and threw it in the trash. I have a long menu to choose from, but really, I don’t need to wonder. I know exactly what he means. This is an apology, his acknowledgment of all the threats and admonishments and accusations that were his approximations of love at the time. And now that he’s seen them for himself, I don’t need to look at them anymore.

“Cancer messed him up, but he’s all right now. See?” Hugh says, then leans in confidentially. “Listen, don’t you ever smoke! Smoking’s a bitch.”

Hearing that, my father says to Hugh, loud and clear, “She don’t smoke!”

There have been a few moments in life when my father stood up for me, when he vouched for me in full view, and this is how they felt. It’s nice to be reminded.

Sinj pricks up her ears, alert. Her tail twitches and twists. The drumming changes tempo. “I have to go,” I say.

My father looks square at me, and just as I’m leaving, I feel welcomed. I sense that he appreciates that I’ve come to visit, that I’ve crossed over to reach him.

“Tell your guy,” he says, in reference to Hank, “Mahalo.”

The drumming slows, and Sinj and I pole back upriver to ordinary reality.

* * *

Back at home, after the workshop, I google Hugh Bergeron, scanning for a date of death, an obituary. From what I can find, he’s still alive, around 84 years old, just like my father would be.

Staring at the computer, doubt erodes what felt like direct experience with my father, degrading the episode into something I may have imagined. And if that’s the case, the validity of every journey I’ve experienced, all my time at Esalen and all the prophetic journeys that came before, are now called into question. If Hugh was alive at the time of my journey, what was he doing in my father’s bardo?

“Everything in this world has a representative aspect in the spirit world,” Hank told us. Maybe Hugh was the buffer, standing in for my mother as the kind of mediator who is also willing to be a bridge.

Before my father died, cancer had been eating him inside out for two years. I had no idea – by that time, my parents and I had stopped speaking. The divide between us had grown so great, I couldn’t even tell them that I’d gotten divorced. When my father was moved to hospice, one of my cousins called me in secret to tell me he was close to dying.

“Why wouldn’t they tell me?” I asked. “Should I fly out?”

“He probably doesn’t want you to see him sick. Listen, your mother made me promise not to tell you. But I couldn’t live with myself. I wanted you to know so you could make your own choices about it.”

I thought a moment about what choices I had left.

“Have you seen someone hang on?” I asked my cousin, referring to her decades of nursing experience. “Where the person is horribly sick for months, but despite the pain and misery, something is keeping them alive?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “All the time.”

“I wonder what I can do?”

We fell into silence. I paced in figure eights next to my bed, until an image came to mind – my book.

“I wrote something,” I whispered into the phone, it felt so much like a confession. “A novel. My father put all his stories on tape, this is years ago, and asked me to write about them. I did write the book. He knows I wrote it, but I never wanted to show him the manuscript until after it was published.” Actually, I’d wanted to wait till the Oprah appearance and the book-signing at Costco, just to make sure he couldn’t give me any “notes.”

“I know. He talked about that book.”

“What I’m thinking is that I can print out the manuscript, and send it, with a note that says thank you, that I love him. That’s something I could do out of the blue, without knowing he was sick.”

“I think it’s perfect,” she said. “It’s just right.”

After we hung up, I printed a fresh copy of my manuscript to overnight to Texas, Saturday delivery, keeping in mind something else my cousin said:

“Your mother told me if God is good to her, He will take him over the weekend.”

* * *

So much of my bayou journey makes sense. My father probably hadn’t seen Hugh in a decade or more before he died, but their kinship is evidenced in the flicker of 8mm memories my parents recorded in New Orleans, during the pre-Kodachrome era before I was born.

The Southern Mansion in my journey had the impeccably maintained, artificial authenticity of Disneyland’s New Orleans Square. The Happiest Place on Earth felt like a second home to me growing up in Southern California, and because my parents let their guard down, it became a safe haven for us.

In Fantasyland, my mother waited on a wrought iron bench while my father rode the Matterhorn with me. Clutching the front of the bobsled, feeling water spray my face as we sped behind the waterfall, I released a few tentative yelps. Behind me, I could hear my father giggle gleefully as a girl, yelling, “Yee haw!” as we banked sharp turns. I wanted to see what he looked like having fun, but even at a young age I knew that privacy was affording him the freedom to giggle and yip; he would never let so loose in full view.

What if shamanic journeys are not actual visions of other worlds, but allegories? Are they still a legitimate source of information?

* * *

In Spirit Medicine, the book Hank co-authored with his wife, Jill Kuykendall, Hank relates a story about ancestral healing. For several months, a persistent sore throat had troubled him. Doctors were puzzled. Then Hank remembered that his grandfather had contracted throat cancer in his fifties, Hank’s age at the time. After much thought and consultation with his spirit team, he journeyed to find his grandfather in his bardo, which happened to be the rambling garden of his Nantucket Island estate. Hank enlisted the help of animal spirits to work on healing his grandfather’s throat. After a few visits, his grandfather was no longer waiting for him. He had ascended. “By removing the cancer, the distortion in my grandfather’s spirit body,” Hank told us, “all of his descendents, myself included, are also freed of that anomaly.”

Not long after, Hank’s throat stopped hurting.

After Esalen, I am invited into a monthly journey circle near my home in Santa Barbara, led by a woman named Mujiba. At the November meeting, when we lie down and cover our eyes, Mujiba suggests that we journey to an ancestor, and see what they have to say. She begins to drum.

This journey gets off to a bumpy start. It’s as if there are trailers for coming attractions, nothing right away involving any ancestors. Then I see an old Chinese woman. She lived a long time ago, at least a hundred years. Since I don’t have any Chinese ancestors, she must be from a past life.

The Chinese woman is bent over some embroidery, sewing stitches finer than the eye can see. She creates a wedding robe for someone important. The robe is remarkable and well received, but she gets very little credit for her work.

The Chinese woman approaches me and gives me a lotus flower – fragrant white leaves unfold around a bright yellow pistil core, fringed with a spray of stamens. The moment I accept the lotus, I am floating on the raft with Sinj, heading down the same Disneyland-clean river until we reach the sprawling plantation home, my father’s bardo.

This time, when we approach, I scarcely recognize my father, sitting alone in a rocking chair. He is older now, and wracked with cancer, thin and bald, with dark, sunken eyes. There’s an empty rocking chair next to him; Hugh is not there.

I grab hold of Sinj to steady myself, shocked that my father is letting me see him this way. Bearing witness to the raw horror of his full-blown cancer feels like cracking open the first geode and finding the vivid, crystalline truth hidden inside.

I walk up to him and give him the lotus. “The woman in your Chinese embroidery painting gave it to me.” The moment I say the words, I recall the pair of embroidered “paintings” my father had in his art collection, portraits of an old man and an old woman. The embroidery work on the panels was so fine you couldn’t see the stitches.

When he accepts the lotus, he instantly transforms, becoming vibrant with health, visibly free of disease. Sinj prompts me to say: “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”

It’s a Hawaiian healing practice called ho’oponopono.

I became familiar with ho’oponopono after reading an article about a clinical psychologist named Dr. Hew Len, who came to Hawaii State Hospital to help with residents in the locked ward for the criminally insane. Instead of interacting with patients, he focused on healing the thing in himself that caused the problems he perceived in each patient. He sat in his office, looked at their files, and said – to himself, to them, to God: “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.”

“I love you,” I say to my father. “I’m sorry.” I wonder if he ever saw my novel. “Please forgive me.” Before I ask, he conveys to me silently: Just get all that stuff out of your head, and write your own book. Tell your stories. You know what to do.

The weight of thousands of pages – the multiple drafts I’d written in my efforts to tell his story – lifts from my shoulders. I look over at Sinj and sigh, relieved.

I turn back to my father, and say, “Thank you.” There, on the porch, I see two empty rocking chairs.