We Who Have Gone Before: Memory and an Old Wilderness Midwife

Steven Foster

Nearing the end of a full life as a teacher, husband, father, eco-therapist, and vision fast guide, Steven Foster calls on the coyote-wisdom of ancestral and morphogenetic memory to enliven the mysteries of great and small, love and death, reality and illusion, truth and imagination, sacred and profane, nature and human. Having given his life to initiatory experience in the wilderness, he speaks from a uniquely human perspective of solitude and the love of desert places. With his wife, Meredith, he has written many books, including The Book of the Vision Quest, The Roaring of the Sacred River, The Trail to the Sacred Mountain, and The Four Shields of Human Nature. They live in the eastern Sierra, where they founded and co-directed The School of Lost Borders, The Training Center for Wilderness Passage Rites.

“This is a most wise and tender book, a treasury of priceless jewels, a song, a landscape of never-ending beauty. Steven Foster reveals the deepest truths to all of us.” – Joan Halifax Roshi, Head Teacher, Upaya Zen Center

“The literature professor turned vision quest guide, left his middle class life and moved with his love to the desert. Now, thirty years later, as Old Man Coyote, he gives us his reflections and ruminations on memory and the ancestors, on poetry and youth, on sickness and joy, on stones and beetles and other desert dwellers, before he shuffles off into the mountains, laughing.” – Ralph Metzner, psychologist, author of The Well of Remembrance

“With his clear, direct and vivid voice, Steven Foster is both intensely personal and generously wise as he reflects on life, death, wilderness, and memory. We Who Have Gone Before is a pleasure to read and hard to forget.” – Rupert Sheldrake, Ph.D., author of The Presence of the Past