I am wary of men named Raven. Especially naked 52-year-old men spreading their legs toward me in the hot springs while waxing on and on about their mellow attitude towards life. “It was ‘given’ to me,” they tell you when you ask them how they got their name, though never by whom nor under the influence of what. Ever notice they’re never “given” names like “Nudibranch” or “Naked Mole Rat”? No, they are always named after creatures with grand mythological significance. Carnivores, usually. And handsome. Raven. Bear. Wolf.

These men are travelers, seekers and vagabonds. They’re the ones who have a “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” sticker on the bumper of their beat-up Subaru from the early-’90s, and some part of me is fiercely attracted to them. They are, in physical form, everything my 12-year-old self wanted to be and know. They are wise, or at least proclaim to be. They know names like “Rumi,” “Dogen” and “Lao Tzu,” and they like to drop them. They’ve worked as carpenters, cooks, airplane mechanics in Alaska and, almost always, have lived on Hawaii “for a while.” They have grown daughters they barely know. They go to ashrams in India and are familiar with the feeling of cheek on couch cushion. They eat nutritional yeast and Braggs Liquid Aminos, and are proud of their gray ponytails and loose scrotums swaying in the hot spring like kelp in a tide pool.

I am wary of men named Raven, but when I end up with one in a hot tub on Halloween, I sit and listen to him talk about the incredible cashew gravy and mashed potatoes he made for dinner tonight because I am trying to be more open to what strangers have to offer, because I am a guest in his natural habitat, and because he tells me things I need to hear: “Find what you love. Find something you really love, and figure out a way to get paid for it.” And then, “As some wise Asian man said, ‘Prayer is not asking, but demanding. God responds to demands.’”

I don’t really believe in God, but I do believe in convictions as fierce as the most urgent prayers. And mine could use some steam. So even when he bores me with the details of the expert tile-laying job he did in the bathhouse and moves on to the phenomenal work he did with youth-atrisk several years back, I stay in the hot water because some part of me is pumping my fist and shouting, “Fuck yeah!”

I mean, here is a gray-haired, withered skin, saggy-balled man who has spent his life doing what he loves, bucking the norm, wearing his hair long, and the middle-school me that exclusively wore clothes from the Himalayan import shop and burned nag champa by the boxful is relieved to know that there are options other than the steady indoor life people start dying in as soon as they become adults.

I stay in this hot tub listening to him because I am in the early, exhausting, insecure stages of starting my own business, my dream job, my own writing studio, and I am questioning my path, its potential, and my ability to make my dreams come true. I need to hear the things he says: “Make sure your work is creative. Humans need creative challenges.”

But if he loves his life so much, I begin to wonder as my skin softens and shrivels in the hot water, if he’s really at peace with it, why on earth does he need to talk about himself so much? And why doesn’t he seem to notice that I have said little more than a polite mmm hmm for the past twenty minutes? Why doesn’t he ask me about my passions, my life, my creative challenges?

And I realize it’s because he doesn’t care. I understand that whatever inspired him to claim the potent power of the raven in the first place is the same thing that compels him to talk about himself to every person in this pool before and after me. And that is not wise at all. Even my 12-year-old self knows this, so I leave for cooler, quieter waters. Grateful for the message. Disgusted by the messenger and the saggy scrotal underwater ballet I had to ignore to receive it.

Becca Deysach’s work has been published in Terrain, Punk Planet, The Rambler, The Externalist and Camas. She lives in Portland, Ore.