Chapter 1 Orientation

The Sun shines on us all.

White Eagle Sun Dance Chief, William Nevin (1949 - )

All mystics speak the same language and come from the same country.

Louis Claude de Saint-Martin (1743-1803)

A decade of Sun Dancing has convinced me that a Sun Dancers’ Journey can start in the most unlikely places; the depths of the gutter, the pews of a church, a politicians’ office, or as far away as the Arabian desert. My Sun Dance Journey began on the outskirts of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1964 when I was ten years old. Despite the passage of fifty years, I can still see my young self there, a small figure wandering off under the cloudless turquoise sky, exploring the beige dunes in that Sun blasted landscape. That desert place, beside the fallen stones of the abandoned Turkish fort, on a hill above the black topped Mecca Road, is still vibrantly alive inside the cave of my memory.

View from the old Turkish fort along Mecca Road

I was not thinking; this is where the Prophet Mohamed once walked, and centuries of faithful Muslim Hajj pilgrims have traveled, or that Lawrence of Arabia once roamed this land. I was just an ordinary American expatriate kid, enjoying an afternoon of freedom and adventure in the Bedouin wilderness, away from the crowds and humidity of the Red Sea port city we called home for ten and a half years. 

My father, Andrew N. Fetterolf, downtown Jeddah, 1961

My parents, brother and sister, were napping after our family picnic, lolling in the shade beside our battered little Fiat car that day. 

  At the Turkish fort, my sister Karen, above, and my brother Craig beside me.

After reconnoitering the area on my own, I decided to climb a nearby hill. While struggling to reach the summit, the force of the Wind struck, and then I felt The Presence come over me, like a luminosity. It was the Sun Light but not just the light of the Sun. Hairs rose on the back of my neck, and goosebumps broke out on my arms, as these things still do, in moments of heightened Awareness. Although I was frightened, I sensed this was not dangerous, but important, requiring my full attention. A Truth was being revealed. And I understood then that whatever we call that Power; Allah, God, Jehovah or Great Spirit, is as Real as our noses are. And the Sun shining on our faces, is how we relate to that Spirit. Names can take us closer towards It, or exile us from It.   

Mecca Road leaving Jeddah 

Overcome, I fell to my knees, weeping with a combination of awe and gratitude; a potent mix of emotions which has overwhelmed me each time It has revisited since that day. Unable to put into words what had happened to me, I never mentioned that event to anyone. But as the years have passed, I see what a crucial difference this encounter, and its very physicality, has meant to me. It removed, once and for all, the curse of doubt from my life. It was the turning point, my first moment of Great Certainty. 
This type of firsthand, felt sensation seems to initiate all the mystics, whether the paths we take are in the footsteps of Muslim Sufis, Christian hermits, Tibetan monks or the Sun Dance way. My spiritual conscience was awakened that afternoon, and it has guided me through many forms and places since. 

Looking back, perhaps it is not so surprising to end up almost four decades later, beneath the same blazing Sun, albeit on the other side of the world, at the White Eagle Sun Dance in Elsipogtog, Canada. In hindsight my stumbling, fumbling steps look almost logical in their progression. After all, wasn't it the same Omnipresent Sun, which laid claim to me that day in the desert? Why not learn to sing and dance my prayers, with the People who never left the land I was born in, that my ancestors came to, in search of religious freedom? So much irony resides in the weaving of all these threads, but I must not get ahead of myself in telling the story. 

My parents spent a total of twenty-one years in the Middle East. After ten and a half in Jeddah, they spent another ten and a half years in Beirut, Lebanon. That's where I'd been sent to boarding school, because there were no high schools for us then in Saudi Arabia. After my graduation in 1972, I wandered several years before returning to the United States to attend New York University and get my bachelors degree in journalism and Middle Eastern studies. I spent a good many years living and working and visiting Switzerland, England, Venezuela, France, Spain, Turkey and Israel. During those times, before I finally returned again to the USA and married at age 33, the Sun remained the only constant. My Awareness of its' spiritual significance waxed and waned, rather like the Moon's passing through its' phases. Something was always urging me on, something I could not ignore or escape, leading me inexorably, towards what became the Sacred Tree, in the Sun Dance Arbor, where at age 48 I would find my spirit self revitalized, beneath that same Sun once again. 

Light is awareness...The spark of life is the spark of Light. The purpose of life is to generate Light.

Chokecherry Gall Eagle in Beyond the Lodge of the Sun

(The rest of this chapter deals with my young adult years, work, marriage & children. 1960's - 1990's, with emphasis on my spiritual life as this is a spiritual memoir.)