A Vow to Soul
A story of soul initiation & becoming the Lighthouse vow
Written on Sunday, April 20, 2025
It was on Easter Sunday, five years ago today, that my vow found me.
A month earlier, I had what Bill Plotkin calls a soul encounter experience, which came with the non-negotiable demand of a mythopoetic identity that changed my life forever.
It was during the closing ritual on the last night of a vision quest ceremony in Joshua Tree, California. I faced, in many ways for the first time in my entire life, my absolute biggest fear: I allowed myself to be fully seen.
Let’s pause for a moment to give context. For two years prior, I had been deep in the void of a dark night. I separated with my partner of 10 years, quit my job at the height of my career, nursed an excruciating herniated disk injury, sold all my possessions and moved away from my dream life in Los Angeles that I had worked so hard to achieve. You can read more about that journey here.
So what unfolded next comes in the context — and I’d say could have only come in the context — of the immense grief, pain (both physical and emotional), spiritual surrender and the endless well of letting go that I had been dissolving into prior.
In Joshua Tree, it was made obvious to my psyche that there was one thing I still hadn’t fully let go of: allowing myself to be truly, deeply, nakedly seen on every level of my being.
Since 13 years old, I was a fiercely passionate photographer who traveled the world capturing everyone else’s stories, literally and metaphorically hiding behind my camera, trying to be a “fly on the wall” — invisible yet silently witnessing.
This led to an epic life, one that I have no regrets about. But in the desert that day, somehow my soul knew that in order to mature into the next chapter of my life, I needed to allow myself to be seen: emotionally, physically, spiritually, soulfully.
Sitting in front of a roaring fire, I watched as my vision quest guide got up and told us to look at the stars. “Soul is watching,” he proclaimed. “On this final night, what do you need to let go off, once and for all?”
My heart started pounding out of my chest. I knew immediately what was mine to do, and I absolutely hated the idea of it. I began bargaining for my literal life.
“Aw, yes, I could see how doing that would be transformative…but how about I do this next time?” I pleaded with my soul.
“Maybe this is a test, and what I’m actually supposed to do is NOT do the thing that I know that I’m supposed to do. Aha, maybe this is all a trick!”
This went on and on for seemingly ever until suddenly my legs started standing up, and the rest just happened.
After making a frankly desperate prayer offering into the fire, my body began taking off all my clothes in front of the full moon (no pun on words) and the hellish flames of fear, with twenty people watching on, as I writhed on the ground like a possessed animal for two minutes and an eternity.
It was a total out of body experience, something that has never happened before nor since, as if I were watching my body from the POV of Soul, as life-force eviscerated my being into something new.
In a flash, it was over. I was back in my body. I picked up my clothes and shuffled off to the side in shock, not knowing what just happened, but also knowing exactly what just happened.
Suddenly, a phrase began repeating itself, like a ping pong ball echoing through my energy field, far wider than my somatic boundaries. The voice, which was not my own but unmistakably mine, whispered, “Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen.”
It haunted me, building in intensity with time, repeating itself as if tattooing every cell of my psyche with its spell.
“Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen.”
I had absolutely no fucking clue what it meant. Those words meant nothing to me. Seer? Never a word that I had ever consciously used nor contemplated before.
At one point I demanded to this voice: STOP! Shut the fuck up. ENOUGH.
“Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen.”
After the ritual ended, I hid away into my sleeping bag under the open sky, looking up at the moon. Suddenly, a lunar ring appeared, and it looked like a giant eye staring down at me.
The voice kept drumming on like an indigenous mantra that was testing my sanity.
“Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen.”
I fell asleep wondering if I had lost my mind.
That night, my Animas guide, Geneen, came to me in a dream. I’m at a house party in front of a coffee table. She sits down next to me and slams her fist on the table, startling me into presence: “Tucker, never forget: your gift is your eye.”
I woke up, as if for the first time. The voice was still there.
“Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen.”
Finally submitting, I wrote it in my journal and said to the Universe, “Okay. Okay. I’m listening. I’m listening.”
What unfolded in the coming days were an unprecedented number of synchronicities that would take an entire book to illustrate. Believe me when I say there was not a moment that went by where it didn’t feel as if Soul was speaking to me, as me, from this new me that it was inviting me to be.
“Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen. Seer: the one who sees and is seen.”
I felt different. I was different. I just didn’t know how, or why. Yet.
I departed the vision quest and turned my phone back on to discover that our planet was coming to a standstill via COVID-19. I was told to board a flight immediately and go home.
The problem was, I didn’t have a home. I was fully nomadic. No possessions besides the clothes on my back.
But I knew where I needed to go: the place where I was born almost exactly 30 years earlier. An island in Maine called Peaks.
I rented a room in a friend’s house right on the beach overlooking the wild ocean as wind-chimes of lighthouse horns trumpeted in all directions.
My next step was crystal clear: read Richard Rohr. Someone on my vision quest suggested — no — more like instructed me to dive into Rohr. I had never heard of him, but after growing up third generation atheist, a budding interest in Christian mysticism was mysteriously roaring into being.
The first book I saw of Rohr’s on Amazon was, “The Naked Now: Learning To See How The Mystics See.”
The Naked Now? Are you kidding me?!
That book changed my life. It was all about seers and seeing. I devoured it with a devotion that I didn’t know I was capable of.
While the world was going into a global crisis and dark night, I was beginning to feel my own being come out of one, seeing a literal light at the end of the tunnel, which was none other than God offering me a hand, like a lighthouse extending its flames directly into my heart.
Fast forward a month and a lifetime later.
Like a lighthouse guiding me home, I discovered in the vast ocean of the inter-webs Daniel Thorson’s Emerge Podcast, Alexander Beiner’s Rebel Wisdom, Peter Limberg’s The Stoa as well as other emerging network nodes in the soon to be coined Liminal Web. I also devoured Richard Rohr, Ken Wilber, Toko-pa Turner and about fifteen other books that all seemed to perfectly fall into my lap at the exact right moment with the exact right teachings.
A whole new reality was downloading into and as my consciousness, opening my eyes to worlds I never imagined possible. With crescendoing soul-full-ness, I found myself bursting with a palpable, nearly overwhelming, eros and aliveness.
On Easter Sunday — synchronistically, yes, but also seemingly coincidentally (meaning unplanned) — I couldn’t contain it any longer. While dancing in my kitchen to (fittingly yet hilariously) Third Eye Blind, I fell to my knees weeping, grace pouring through me with a love that I couldn’t hold alone, so God held it with me.
“I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you anything. I’ll give you anything. Just to see you.”
Anything by Third Eye Blind
In front of the oceanic womb that I called my cocoon, at home on the island where I was born and now reborn, I spoke to God with all my heart, “I’m all yours. Use me. I give myself fully to you. I’m all in. Whatever it takes. I’m yours.”
Mere moments later, like a miracle, in exchange for my life, I received a vow. It came as a download that had nowhere to go so it went everywhere all at once…
Make Love Visible.
Make Love Visible.
Make Love Visible.
It was so simple, so sweet, so perfect, so right. Resonance was radiating through every pore of my being. It was a total, all pervasive knowing, or gnosis.
I grabbed my walking stick which served my underworld journey as a playful yet sacred guide, and I knew what I needed to do: make this vow visible.
I walked onto the beach in front of everyone in their homes, locked in from COVID, risking being seen in my devotional insanity. I wrote in giant letters on the sand and howled to the heavens: MAKE LOVE VISIBLE.
I blessed this vow with a baptism in the frigid Maine waters, allowing my body, mind, heart and soul to be purified with the boundless love of Home.
And just like that, I was now married to soul.
Then, and only then, is when the fear finally caught up.
Fucking shit, I just gave my life to God and my soul to this vow. Now I need to live this? Who, me? I can’t live this. How the fuck do I know how to make love visible? I’m too small for that, too imperfect, too flawed. Is this all some kind of cruel joke?!
“Relax, my child,” God said. “You already are this. But still, it’s good that you’re humble. Now it’s time to apprentice your ass to this vow. Get to work, but also know, it’s already complete.”
For the next several months of COVID lockdowns, I engaged in a 24/7 shamanic practice of apprenticing to Seer: the one who sees and is seen, and to our vow to Make Love Visible, and to the island that gave birth and rebirth to me, and to the love that I was certain I was too small to hold alone yet too large to ignore.
The day before I moved away from Peaks Island, in June of that year, I walked to a majestic lighthouse. I wept. I bowed. I promised.
Seer, the one who sees and is seen. The one who makes love visible.
It was there with the lighthouse, on the island that I call Home, that sparkles of insights began to come alive, illuminating what is mine to do with these vows, myths and miracles.
I was told that, in right timing, I was to help source, birth and steward a land-based regenerative village, a lighthouse where those who felt lost at sea could be guided home to the island within.
The vision of the Lighthouse Regenerative Village was born. It felt insane, and insanely right. Like I had through photography and filmmaking, I would help illuminate a new story for humanity to help people feel more at home with each other, our planet, ourselves, our souls and with God. This would be a living story, a meta-narrative that sees life as art, and invites others to become the creators of The Creation, stewarding our collective becoming with care and love as offerings of our full devotion and whole humanity to Life.
At the depths of this knowing arose an ocean of doubt. This video journal, which I just rewatched for the first time in five years, is to me an adorable yet powerful depiction of the hesitations, fears and confusions that often (or maybe always) arise when we come into deep alignment with that which is ours to source.
My next steps were calling me home like a beacon: time to apprentice to soul, to my vows, and to this lighthouse vision. The student was ready. And just like that, my teacher arrived.
The day that I left Peaks, I drove two hours north to Belfast to begin apprenticing at The Possibility Alliance, a radical regenerative electricity-free ecovillage, where I met my teacher, Ethan Hughes, a truly extraordinary man who of anyone I know is walking the talk of making love visible.
It was one of the moments where a clear chapter ended and a new one was beginning. I had left what Bill Plotkin calls “The Wanderer in the Cocoon” and journeyed into “The Apprentice at the Wellspring.”
The rest, my friends, is history-arising-now as an ongoing perfectly imperfect (meaning still sometimes messy and always mysterious) unfolding of a vow-soul-human-spirit alliance.
I’ve never shared this story publicly before. We were recommended by our guides at Animas Valley that we shouldn’t share such things until we feel secure enough to handle the criticism, skepticism, doubt, eye rolls, or whatever else may come our way, so as not to detract from the knowing in our bones.
Today, on Easter Sunday, 2025, I’m sharing this story with you, and with the me that is now. A reclaiming of my vows, and a bow to the grace of it all.
A grace which, if nothing else, has made love visible.
For those who are interested, below are some playful musings weaving the experiences of vow, soul initiation and sourcekeeping, which I wrote earlier today and helped birth the idea for this essay.
I see soul initiation as a crossing of a one-way threshold (meaning we are forever changed upon crossing), and somehow that threshold also crosses us into a set of vows, which arise with clarity while still saturated in absolute mystery. A union is birthed in this marriage: soul vows to soul which vows to its vows, and from that multidimensional relational field arises (in right timing) that which we're here to source in the form of a creative initiative, be it a vision, project, organization, experiment, etc.
What we sourcekeep in-forms our vow-initiated souls which saturates our lives with their creative aliveness, which further informs the uniqueness and particularities of our vows, which inevitably evolves our souls - as well as the embodied beings who are homes for our souls - and the whole dance co-arises, co-informs, co-creates, and co-unfolds itself/ourself as one dynamic process made of infinite loops responding to its very own erotic desire, which we can call LifeForce.
The oil that keeps this system running smoothly is resonance, the experiential felt-sense of aliveness and love that acts like a lighthouse for itself, guiding us further home into wholeness which is naturally creative and pulsating with erotic impulse, even in death.
This vow-infused impulse magnetizes other soul beings with a disruptive force that tests our vows and strengthens our will, or not, and the whole system (which is its own being) shapeshifts to dynamically meet its moment, interpenetrating as possibility longing for its expression to touch reality with more fullness coming home to its emptiness, illuminating something holy-in-human, like a small miracle that makes simple sense on bones-deep level, so much so that all we can do is bow again to our vows, and their creator, who is us, and All.
To learn more about my community weaving projects, the Lighthouse vision, the Illuminating Life Podcast, and my film work, visit TuckerLighthouse.com.
Tucker, this was wonderful and brave and beautiful. I will watch the videos before commenting further but placeholding something here.
So beautiful and powerful. Thank you for sharing this story of your journey, Tucker. I resonate so deeply with so much of it.