Steven Foster And Meredith Little: The School of Lost Borders

(Originally published in Spring 2000 as “Lost Borders and Found Herons – Or is it Found Borders and Lost Herons?”)

In the fall of 1999, I interviewed Steven Foster and Meredith Little, founders of the School of Lost Borders, a program that organizes rites of passage for teenagers and other solo wilderness experiences in Big Pine, California. A fascinating film was made of their work by Kim Shelton—Lost Borders: Coming of Age In The Wilderness For twenty-five years, Steven and Meredith have led vision quests and done rites of passage work.

            I did not know Steven well, but I knew him well enough to know he had a both huge heart and a tendency towards anger. He struggled with those contradictions, and overcame them at least to the extent that he was able to co-create, with his wife Meredith Little, Lost Borders. Their work touched people all over the world. Many founded offshoots doing similar work.

Like others I have had the pleasure to meet and get to know a little through Heron Dance, Steven was embodied huge contradictions, mood swings, anger and gentleness, self-absorption, generosity and kindness. Perhaps we all possess those contradictory characteristics, but some of us contain extremes. Perhaps out of the internal friction and grinding comes the energy to overcome the obstacles and discouragement and ultimately contribute something of wide impact and beauty.

            Within a few minutes of meeting, Steven asked me to sit with him beside the pond in front of his home. We sat and watched the ducks in the late afternoon. Immediately he launched into a tirade against environmentalists who were working to shut down roads in the wilderness areas he loved. His health no longer permitted him access to some of those areas unassisted. Local people he cared about had grown up hunting and fishing in those areas and had always done so by motorized means. They didn’t like the changes being imposed by young, middleclass, educated environmentalists. I thought a lot about the words of this man with a truly wild heart, a big heart, a lover of quiet and a champion of solitude in wilderness.

            Then I think of the beautiful film Lost Borders made of the work of the school he and Meredith founded. A troubled teenager heads off alone for a three day fast, if memory serves, but gives up after one night alone and walks back into camp. Steven sits and talks with him. The young man expects an argument – or at very least an effort at convincing him to return to his fast. Instead Steven tells him that he did the right thing. He did what was right for him. After talking some more, and thinking about what Steven said, the young man heads back into the desert to finish his solo. Steven asked me what my story was. When I asked him what he meant, he said, “What is your mythology? Tell me about your childhood.”

I told Steven about my childhood, about my often difficult relationship with my parents, with school teachers and peers, and how out of all that emerged an affinity for uninhabited wild places. I tried to explain all this to Steven, and then gave up, saying that it was too difficult to put into words. Steven said, “Yes, but we poets keeping trying.”

Steven was suffering from a terminal genetic lung illness. He refers to where he is now as the Death Lodge. He died May 6, 2003. Early in the interview, I asked him how his life would be different now if he was not facing death.  

I probably would be less involved in the ultimate questions. I would not love my dog so much, I would not love my children so much, my grandchildren so much, my wife. I would probably be more engrossed in the work itself. The work was important, and it is beautiful the way it spread around the world, but it is not my work now. Now relationship is more important than work.

I find myself in deep friendships with people whom I disagree with. A colonel from the Marine Corps who did two hitches in Vietnam. And a couple of people in the town of Big Pine who would be labeled extremist in their opposition to environmental protection. Nevertheless we continue to find common ground.

The teachings of death are so tender and so overwhelming and beautiful, and at the same time so terrifying. Not wanting to leave this life. It has become so beautiful. Being brought to the end by my karma, my fate, by whatever, and knowing that I have to let go. Death has become an ally in a very real sense. I know that this is true for many people as they age. Death brings on the most precious gift of all. The shadow contains the most precious gift of all. Which is love. Love. For God’s sake love, love for people, love for the Earth. It is this caring thing. I am not sure why it should be in us. I know it is in other species as well. The miracle.

I asked Steven the question he asked me: What is your story, your mythology? Steven talked a lot about anger, about losing his children when, as a radical in the sixties he was blackballed from universities in California where he worked, and then was wanted by the FBI for subversive activities and spent some time in prison.

            “Many men I know are angry. It is almost a way of defining men. Not all men, but many of us. The doing of the work, and the living with the woman, and the coming home to love, as I have be able to do in my whole life. A wonderful life. It is a problem to understand the anger inside of me. It keeps trying to be redefined. Re-understood. But it is still there. And in the end, I think it is the anger of the human being shaking his or her fist at the gods or goddesses, and saying, ‘Why? WHY!’ You know. ‘Why did you give me this life? Why life as it is?’ And it involves a coming to terms. Coming to terms with the given.

            “I could never follow the Buddhist way. I tried. That was one of the ways I attempted after I lost my children. To find myself. Okay. If I am not a professor, then what am I? I tried yoga. Kudilini yoga. Tantric yoga. Meditation. And although I learned some wonderful tools from meditation, I was never that fascinated by the notion of letting go. I was never truly fascinated by the idea of becoming unattached. In fact, I think my way is through attachment. Fierce attachment. As opposed to disengaging from. And there is a kind of path that lies through the fierceness and desire and passion. And I guess that is where we get the compassion. With passion. Com means with. Passion.

Then I said to Steven:    ‘The amazing thing is that time and again I think that I am just beginning to find my way. Five years ago I thought that, and I think that this morning.’

            And Steven responded, “Isn’t that amazing? Me too. Me too!” 

I asked Steven about how they kept going through the early years. Later I interviewed Meredith and explored the same question:

     “Love. Love. Love. (laughs). Love! The love we had for each other. In the beginning, I was a Kelly Girl. I hired myself out to various offices and agencies as a typist. As a secretary. And Meredith cleaned houses. We made just enough to scrape by. And we had love. Every night we had each other. And we would go to bed at night feeling completely defeated, and lie in each other’s arms. In the morning we would get up and be ready to go again. Anxious to go again. That was help. Supernatural help.”

Meredith:

     “Oh yeah. I feel like we have been enormously blessed. Even when we literally didn’t know how we would put bread on the table for our kids, the next day somehow there was always enough. Miraculously enough — in so many ways. We have been blessed by the teachers who have come into our life. There is a part of me that doesn’t even want to look back at why it has happened. There is a part of me that feels that this life of ours is co-created with something mysterious and bigger than I understand, and our own incredible flame as individual consciousness. If we fully engage in that partnership, it matches us. Somehow it meets us. That has been such a big part of our work and life.”

When I interviewed Meredith, she seemed a little nervous, and in the course of our discussion, I asked her what was hardest about living the life she had chosen. She said, “Probably being an introvert in a people business. As you know, to make something happen you have to give it everything. As an introvert, there isn’t always the time to integrate what is going on. It is everyday, a lot of people, rarely a break. As an introvert, I need empty time to process what is happening. When I don’t get that, it creates stress.”

Meredith has a particularly gentle way about her. She doesn’t talk much. She walks very softly, and listens quietly. When we would talk over a meal, I would get the sense that she was listening carefully but not judging, just absorbing. She seems to understand things in a deep way. Meredith said many things that provoked thought on my drive home. In particular were her observations on the value of our dark side – that aspect of our being and personality that we like least. Modern psychotherapy assumes that the dark side has to be addressed, and worked with and overcome. But in the ancient way – the way of indigenous peoples – the dark side is embraced and worked with and mined as the source of individuality and creativity, “Like a tree shaped by a bad winter, or years of drought,” she said.

            “Over the years we tried to understand how early cultures listened to people who came back from the vision fast or rite of passage. Always they would come back to a council of elders, where they would tell their story. It was really enlightening for us to have an old Paiute teacher here in the valley.

            “What we learned we came to call ‘mirroring’. The council would listen to the story, and they would bullshit about it. ‘Oh, yeah. That hawk . . . . what did you get from that hawk? What was the hawk telling you? I remember, when I was alone, that that happened to me too.’ And they would open the story up. They would treat everything that happened to that person as sacred, as a message from Spirit. They saw every moment as important, as a teaching. They would see in the story the gifts that that person has.

            “So in planning the different ways of listening to the story, we realized that the way to tap a story was to give it back. It is a way of giving the story back to the person without judgement and without our own values getting in the way. We tell the story back to them so that they can hear it. In that way, the story becomes empowered. The persons sees that everything they did when there was no body to turn to and nothing to turn to – how they dealt with their fear in that moment, when they maybe hadn’t eaten for a day or two – could be directly co-related to the message of how to deal with the fear in their life. The message that is calling them and to them. That is their story. If we lose our story, we lose our life.

            “The people who have the most difficulty understanding the difference between therapy and mirroring, are people who have been trained as therapists. It is beginning to change, but therapeutic and modern psychology is problem-orientated. It is finding out what is broken, or what causes someone pain. Whereas in mirroring there is enormous honoring of pain. Rather than taking it away, it is the understanding that if we are capable of embracing our own pain, we also have the opportunity to discover the gift that sits right there next to it. Often when we are able to embrace and accept the pain of grief, or feelings or emotions that might not be comfortable, we can see the ways that that pain defines who we are and the gifts that we have to offer others. “

Meredith got me thinking about my dark side, and about my gift, and how I see that gift as lying just on the other side of what I think of as my dark side. For me, my dark side is my intensity, my tendency to overwork, to push ahead, regardless of the impact on my relationships, on the quality or beauty of my work, or even on my health. My gift, I think, comes from what I have known of true peace, of deep peace, of beauty, from time in wilderness. I have discovered out there a whole different rhythm. It is a rhythm that is counter to our culture. It is a concept different from more words, more interviews, more data.

            Relax, rest, think. Beauty. Create. Wilderness canoe trips. Loons. Distant campfires. Freedom. Stories. Breathe. In Meredith’s words, that is the message that is calling to me from the core of my life. I don’t want Heron Dance to be about wilderness, but I want to create it out of the rhythm and sense of peace I find there. I begin the second five years of Heron Dance filled with creative inspirations of ways to do that.