I'm doing my yearly spiritual retreat in November, and this year it's about survival and creativity on the road and in the wilderness.
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Every year, I go on a spiritual retreat called the King's Ride, a ritual I was taught by the demons in the religious system I invented with them (which we call The Court for short). I am on this retreat right now, as it started November 1st and it's already the 3rd.
I've written about the King's Ride on Patreon before and given instructions for how to go on it. It's too late for anyone to start it now, since it has to be started on midnight of October 31st/November 1st, so it's actually pretty safe for me to write about it for others to read now. It's rare to get a glimpse at someone's experience of being inside a mystery cult as they experience one of its mysteries, so I hope you enjoy what I can provide here.
First of all, the point of the retreat is to be "stolen" away from the world in a way that gives me distance from mundane everyday life. For the month of November I experience a mystery, and each year the mystery is different. One year, I wrote a novel all month and experienced elements of the novel integrating into my daily life. Another year, I focused entirely on my gender transition and the mysteries of being a trans man. This year I am being sequestered in exile to better understand the spiritual aspects of creativity that are involved in being a Scribe.
Being a Scribe means that certain truths always hold for me. For instance, everything that I Scribe is true. Everything that I Scribe is real on some level. Everything that I Scribe is holy. This year I'm focusing on the impacts of this while living in the modern world. I need a paycheck to survive but I can't Scribe for anyone. That's not a thing this century. So the demons of the Court are helping me find how I can support myself in this world while being a Scribe.
It is difficult to go back and forth between a mundane job and a life of being a Scribe. Being a Scribe means unreservedly committing yourself to the expression of truth that comes out of you, and there's not a lot of day jobs where they're looking for that sort of thing. So in mundane life you have to turn off the information hose and the divine inspiration; and then going back to esoteric life, you turn it back on. It's very hard to have the hose go at maximum output when you know you're gonna shut it off again for twelve hours soon. During this month, though, I can open up the floodgates and let it all pour out. Everything's lined up to have that happen. Without any distractions, in fact. And in the perfect physical and mental space to produce the results needed.
So, this is an odd wrinkle in things: I am currently homeless. I have no house. I am married with cats, but in a vehicle, not a conventional dwelling. And at first I wasn't sure if we could do the King's Ride. I didn't know if it was possible, or even advisable. But I also knew that the King's Ride will rearrange and rewrite reality to do what it needs, and it has done so before. Being homeless is a completely different level of trust fall than I've had in any King's Ride before, because while I am doing a holy retreat, I am depending on the universe to provide for me and allow me to have that retreat. This is happening to the scale that my husband is participating as well by supporting me fully through the retreat, truly along for the Ride.
This is also, however, happening to us at a scale that I don't think is commonly experienced. Most people who go through initiations do so with the intent to access whatever is behind that initiation. Special knowledge, abilities, access to a spirit, et cetera. They want this and so they do what is required. The steps of an initiation that make up the process of the ritual are basically a collection of "things that happen to people who do this sort of thing." Usually it's to show that someone is chosen by a god.
A god will show they've chosen a person by, say, making them win at a contest of skill three times in a row, surviving being set on fire, and then having a white elk appear in the area. Something that couldn't easily be faked. But, if you set up a ritual in a certain way, it can be done on purpose, as opposed to happening spontaneously and randomly. You can rig the contest of skill so that it's easily won three times. You don clothes that protect you from fire and then have people quickly douse you with water after being set ablaze. You have a plaster white elk statue that you wheel out on rollers when the initiate comes into the room. Yeah, it might seem cheap, and yeah, it is. Rituals often achieve a minimal amount of similarity to the actual incident they are imitating, and it's usually just enough to convince the necessary forces to allow the proceedings to go forward.
So when it comes to the "survive in the wilderness for thirty days" requirement that may or may not be part of an initiation I may or may not have meant to go through this month, how does one do that in the modern world while not being affluent? How do you go stay somewhere in the woods or somewhere else wild and remote in a country that's either urbanized or government-protected forest land? How do you safely beg door to door for alms in a state that's got open carry laws? Basically, has anyone modern ever QA'd some of the esoteric rituals of initiation to check and see if they're even possible? Because I've got to tell you, camping in the woods is now very expensive if you want to do it legally, and very risky if you want to do it illegally.
But that's the thing. There's also an element of illegality in many of these rituals. A bit of taboo to make the ritual more demonic or more rebellious or whatever it is that the divine forces like about mages breaking the law to do magic. When you break the law for a ritual that requires it, how token are you allowed to be in that illegality? If you are supposed to do everything in perfect love and perfect trust, how do you do something that's truly against your ethics? How ethical is it to even be homeless in this day and age, when we're taught to buy expensive things because they are more morally righteous to own or consume than the cheaper things? I can't afford to buy all fair trade goods now. Does the ritual care about that? Do the powers that be need me to have wifi and netflix and doordash? How much do you need to give up to make it a sacrifice? How many of your possessions need to be given away to count as "all" of them but still leave you able to survive on the street and NOT also overburden a charity when you need the sorts of things you thought you'd already decided to leave behind? How do you do a spiritual retreat without overtaxing the community around you? Does it require depending on services the world is no longer willing to offer?
I've got to say, it was nice when the world gave me coffee yesterday. A business we went to happened to have free coffee on just that day. Free coffee used to be an everywhere thing but nowadays it's very rare to have happen unless you're already paying for something on the level of a hotel. I said a prayer and really acknowledged it because it seemed very special, and it was. It felt like the universe actually supporting me.
And that is the thing: would I notice the universe supporting me right now if I weren't homeless? If myself and my spouse were doing fine, would it mean as much when someone tips me on ko-fi? If my husband had a paycheck right now, would it matter as much if I was getting Patreon patrons? No. When we get a box of food from the food pantry and there's something there we said this week to thin air that we really wanted, we know we're being supported. And unfortunately, you really don't notice you have a working safety net until after you take a fall. You don't really understand how well you know your trapeze moves until there's no safety net to fall into.
In that the King's Ride is a retreat this month, it is a retreat from the safe world. An escape from what we know. A departure from the mundane. It is not a vacation and it is not pretend. It is very, very real, and its encounters in my life are very, very real. If an initiation asks you to sacrifice something, be prepared to lose it. If a ritual demands payment be made to an entity, be prepared to make it. And if a spirit swears you to an oath, that oath is binding. Pantomime is real and the play is not an act. Spiritual theater is physical reality. If I am an actor, I'm doing it method.
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