Kayaking with humpback whales in Explorer Basin, Tebenkof Bay Wilderness, 2006, Photo by Warren Lynn
Leading my first trip through Rocky Pass in 1994, Photo by Rick Jackson
In 1994 I took the first tentative paddle strokes on a journey that would eventually become the signature work of my life.
This summer, twenty-seven years later, I led my final Inside Passages kayaking retreats in Alaska. One journey has come to an end. Another is beginning. I want to acknowledge and celebrate that shift here, by telling a few stories about this personal journey of a lifetime.
Inside Passages grew out of my decades of work as a commercial fisherman in Southeast Alaska, combined with my passion for wilderness, and my longstanding Zen meditation practice. Some years before I had left behind a career as a Protestant clergyman and university chaplain, and was living in Alaska full time. I was searching for a way to bring these disparate parts of my life back together into a single, integrated expression?
Inside Passages became that expression. I chose the name for its evocative double meaning: outwardly, the name for the thousand-mile long Inside Passage shipping route that threads the spectacular inner channels along the Northwest Coast from Puget Sound to SE Alaska. Psychologically and spiritually, it is also a way of naming the immense journey we all must navigate through the inner wilderness areas of the human heart, mind and spirit. The tools of mindfulness are a compelling map for that deeper inside passage. I wanted to embark on both journeys simultaneously.
Dan Kowalski aboard the Sue Ann in 2012, dressing a large halibut
How Inside Passages came into being. The spark behind this leap of faith was ignited while I was on a commercial halibut trip in Frederick Sound near Petersburg. Dan Kowalski, my fishing partner and skipper of the Sue Ann, shared many of these same passions. We were baiting hooks in a remote anchorage one night, kicking around ideas about how we could use our knowledge of Southeast Alaska's wilderness areas to spark a deeper conversation with leaders from the Lower ‘48 about our persistent ecological challenges. What are the sources of genuine healing? Wouldn’t that healing potential be amplified by the kinds of immersive encounters with wilderness that we have found so powerful? It was Dan who first posed the question. “What if you were to lead meditation-based kayaking trips through Rocky Pass?”
It was one of those clarion moments that struck an immediate chord, to bring elements of my Zen practice into a wilderness retreat on the paddle. The idea took hold of me, and later that summer I assembled ten colleagues to test out the model with me. We spent a week paddling and camping along the intricate channels of Rocky Pass, traveling mostly in silence, with periods of meditation morning and evening at our campsites. We also made time for carefully-held conversations about how this experience might inform our lives and work in the world back home. The results exceeded all of our expectations.
An Evolving Mission, a Changing World
Photo by Warren Lynn
Twenty-seven years later, 750 people have shared in these week-long journeys, ten at a time, including teachers, writers and thought leaders from a wide spectrum of arenas in our culture. In retrospect, I was participating in a grand experiment already underway, bringing the benefits of mindfulness meditation outside the walls of Asian monasteries, and into the heart of Western lay and secular culture. I had found my own eclectic way of doing this, and in so doing, I found my vocation again. I found my voice.
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The nature of these trips have changed a lot over the years, as I have broadened the scope of my own mindfulness practice.
Tebenkof Bay Wilderness, 2003
One of those changes came in 2003, when I was privileged to co-lead a retreat for environmental activists in the Tebenkof Bay Wilderness with Jon Kabat-Zinn, the founder of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. Since most of my participants are not Buddhist, Jon suggested that we drop the formal Zen rituals I had incorporated into the trips to that point. This was not about becoming Buddhist, but about becoming more fully human, and more awake, within the complicated realities of contemporary Western culture.
That is a change that made sense to me, that we “come as we are”. And that is the spirit I have tried to foster ever since.
For the first twelve years our Inside Passages retreats were all camping based, and accessed by float plane in remote wilderness areas of SE Alaska. In terms of the immersive power of wilderness, the retreats in Tebenkof Bay set a high bar. But the level of exposure to weather and physical risk were also high.
Keene Channel Lodge
So as both my clients and I have gotten older, I began basing retreats out of Keene Channel Lodge - a place of nearly comparable wildness and solitude, and fully off the grid, but still offering shelter from stormy weather, and a more consistent environment for practice. Since 2009 this has been the home base for Inside Passages retreats. It is a place of deep personal roots that has become a kind of “monastery in the wild.”
Still, all good things must end. And all endings are also beginnings. One gift of the Covid pandemic, and the Alaska season that didn’t happen in 2020, was the clarity it gave me that, as I enter the decade of my 70’s, the time for me to shift gears is now.
The 2021 retreat season just finished was one of the most satisfying yet, a feast of friendship and discovery - though in truth every season, and every Inside Passages group, has felt like the “best one yet”. I have immense gratitude for these twenty-seven years of wilderness-based practice through Inside Passages, and for the countless friendships and teachings it has given me. When I began this journey in 1994, I could not have imagined that treasure trove of discovery and companionship that awaited me.
I feel the same way now, as a new and uncharted chapter in my life begins. For the past fifteen years I have taught MBSR to veterans at the VA Hospital in Seattle, bridging my own teaching and practice from the wild edge of Alaska into the human wild of contemporary life and culture. I look forward to continuing that teaching practice, and to continuing my online classes that have been another surprise benefit of the pandemic.
To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose. I can’t wait to see what opportunities this new season will open for me, as I seek to give back in kind for all that has been given to me.
Much gratitude to everyone who accompanied me on this extraordinary journey.
