Caravan of No Despair

By Mirabai Starr

Tragedy and trauma are not guarantees for a transformational spiritual experience, but they are opportunities. They are invitations to sit in the fire and allow it to transfigure us.

How does one become a mystic? I’ve never asked that question before. I guess I always imagined they sprang that way full blown from their mothers’ wombs. Mystics were and are always meant to be mystics, right?

Well, in telling her story of suffering and transformation, Mirabai Starr showed me one path to the mystic life. (Even her naming was a mystical experience). By telling the story of her childhood, her personal journey, and her suffering, Starr showed me one beautiful portrait of the human journey within, and the resulting expression of spirituality.

And it wasn’t through what I would call traditional spiritual channels.

Early in her life, Starr’s mother set upon exploring alternative lifestyles. Not just the dusty secondary research many academics undertake in the tidy stacks of the libraries. Starr’s parents sold everything they owned and traveled to experience communal living in a variety of locations from Belize to the Yucatan Peninsula to New Mexico. As an adolescent and young adult, Starr rubbed shoulders with Ram Dass and Pema Chodron. The adults in her life were the people exploring and experimenting with psilocibyn, marijuana and various types of family constellations. All the while she explored and tried to understand her own mystical experiences and spirituality in a world that seemed quick to interpret it all for her.

She shows us, in this book, the raw material of her spiritual transformation. I am especially taken with her tenacity at weaving these tragedies, traumas, and everyday confusions into a beautiful tapestry of bringing new translations to mystical writings, speaking and leading retreats on the mystics and contemplative life.

Richard Rohr says in his book Everything Belongs:

Religion, as the very word, re-ligio, indicates, is the task of putting our divided realities back together: human and divine, male and female, heaven and earth, sin and salvation, mistake and glory. The mystics are those who put it together very well.

I have gratitude for Mirabai and her willingness to show us how she does this in the daily, earth-bound circumstances of her life. How she does the work of alchemy, turning the dross to gold.