Kundalini and the Art of Being ... 4I still saw Jeffrey around town every once in a while. If I happened
to be on foot or on my bike, then I would always stop and talk with
him. He was the one person in Eugene that I could connect with
on a truly deep and real level—with whom I could wholeheartedly
share my spiritual challenges and experiences of personal growth.
He walked a path similar to my own, so he could understand my
dilemmas like no one else in my life at the time. It always gave me
a sense of reassurance and grounding to connect with him and be
reminded that I wasn’t entirely alone on this ongoing, bewildering
spiritual path.
That summer brought many adventures. One was that my young-
er brother, Christo, came up from school in California for summer
break. I got him a job at the pizza parlor where I was now work-
ing, and he ended up moving into Matt and Sharon’s place for the
summer, into the same spare bedroom where I had previously been
staying.
Shortly after Christo rolled into town, he and I, along with my yoga
instructor John and three other people from yoga class took off for a
two-week summer vacation, and headed for the 1994 annual Rain-
bow Gathering festival, in western Wyoming that year. I’d been to
one such event the previous summer, and John had been to several.
The six of us left Eugene late morning near the end of June in
two pickup trucks: John’s and mine. We drove all that day through
the Oregon desert. We spent the first night at a rest stop along the
way. The next day, we drove across Idaho, to a small town on the
Wyoming border. A few miles into Wyoming, we eventually found
the narrow Forest Service road that led into National Forest. It turned
after a few miles from pavement to gravel and then to dust, as the
evening sun was fading below the horizon.
As seems to be the tradition on the way to Rainbow Gatherings,
three hours and only thirty miles later, we were thoroughly lost. Af-
ter passing other hippie-laden vehicles in the dark, also lost, we fi-
nally stopped at a pull-off to spend that night camped by the side of