Pink Coyote

Down from Warrior a Notch

   

What a lovely weekend I've had with my favorite mountain medicine women.  When we gather, we seldom have a plan (except for food, of course!) and the weekend unfolds as it is supposed to.  We've become so tuned in on this path, that we often make easy connections between what is going on for each of us and that unofficially becomes the theme of the retreat.  This weekend was all about finding peace in the midst of the unknown.

I found in my journeywork that it is easy for me to spend time in the realm of seeking treasures underground-my mole medicine was very strong!  My message was that I need to come up above ground and learn how to BE when there is pure chaos going on around me.  I have pulled into my safe cave since giving birth over 2 years ago.  I don't even have cable or watch TV, and most certainly don't read the newspaper.  It isn't that I don't want to empathize with what is going on for people, or be involved with the world, I have just been using my energy differently to benefit myself and others.

I also feel like I am finally coming to peace with my job as a bodyworker.  There are about 10 other jobs I would love to try, but right now, I love the job I have and it has been so good to my family and me.  (I go to work to relax, as we say at the spa).  The clientele I've built are the goodliest people I could ever wish to see each week.  I think that I take what I have acheived for granted at times and just yearn for the next adventure.  I'm trying hard to love what I am doing and what I have at the moment.  That includes living in this town where only one day out of every five is a healthy air day!  Hard to sit still in this, but I'm trying.

Good Little Deaths

It seems that everywhere I turn, the people in the various communities that surround me are experiencing little deaths.  From a shamanic point of view, we journey to undergo psychic death of an idea or something we just can't seem to figure out, in order to come back with the energy and perception of someone who has been born anew.

I find it exciting to know that I live during a time where people speak openly about what it is they struggle with, that healing comes to us when we refuse to repress our mistakes and weaknesses.  I am so thrilled that my son gets to grow up in a generation where many of us embrace that it is okay to make mistakes!

Like mythical heroes, we get to leave our challenges behind and plant our feet firmly on the path to our adventure of self-discovery and greater conscious awareness.  We can choose to be "unstuck" from the sticky mess the generations before us may have been mired in, and blogging, meeting with, and talking with friends helps this process unfold.  It seems that by exposing our stories, we find ourselves acting out or embodying the plots of the heroes within us and rising to heights up and beyond what we may have felt set up to do.  This is so inspiring to me.  I feel grateful.

Today seems time to move further into my journey. 

"Today there are support groups and twelve-step programs for almost everything.  Just a few years ago, people were embarrassed if they had to see a psychologist; now they discuss their therapists over lunch with their friends and colleagues.  We have seen a proliferation of self-help books that have avid readers. Ours is, in some ways, a culture that wants to get well, and one increasingly open to spiritual as well as scientific means for getting there."--Carol S. Pearson

GREAT JOURNEY RESOURCES THAT NEVER GET OLD:

The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell (or anything by Campbell or Jung).

The Heroine's Journey, Maureen Murdock.

Swamplands of the Soul: New Life in Dismal Places, James Hollis. (sounds dreary, but really a good resource for any challenge any of us face-great, too, for anyone with residual anxiety, fear, doubt, angst, among the other depressed states)

Soul Retrieval:Mending the Fragmented Self, Sandra Ingerton (a good source if your soul was really abused by neglect, abandonment or trauma).

Way of the Shaman, Michael Harner. 

The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By, Carol S. Pearson

and, of course, anything by Jungian analyst, Robert Johnson. 

How will you hear your truth speaking to you today? 

Untitled Perfection

It seems that "God" is often the hot topic where I work.  In this small town, religion rules.  B and I were pillowtalking about gnosticism, atheism, brights and other -isms last night.  I told him how I was just tired of labels. 

I am.  Would you judge me a better person if I told you I was an "environmentalist", a "vegan", a "liberal"?  I do make assumptions about someone's character when I hear their label, and I have put my own labels out so that people will make assumptions about me.  When I started to eat fish, I was hesitant to lay down my vegetarian label because it felt comfy, plus I still wanted to be associated with the positive ethical assumptions one sometimes makes about vegetarians.  But I had to, because it didn't fit anymore...it was a too tight sweater that had to be tossed in the donation pile no matter how I'd loved it.  I fell short of its expectations and at times seeped through it's seams.  It felt uncomfortable because it wasn't true.

God is no different.  Most assumed definitions of God make me fidget and do little for me spiritually.  Divinity, too, but I like the word better than the G-word.

Einstein referred to what amazed him as "the awe of the universe".  I clutch that phrase a bit because I am so amazed by life and emotion and people and miracles-it seems to encompass so much.  Some things are too complex, beautiful, and emotional to describe in language.  The little things that sparkle in the spaces between what we can talk about are the places I feel divinity dwelling, like in the suppression of air beneath my baby's hand as he is placing it over mine or the gasp between my neck and earlobe of my lover's breath.

I reach for my pen or my camera and find that this disappearing and reappearing piece of lovedust has escaped through my fingers again.

My friend SJ gives the greatest hugs ever, no one can duplicate them. She makes a circle on your back with her hands, but it feels like a swirl of warm energy on your soul.  Divinity.

That splithair second between a dividing embryo's cells-divinity.

Wings and wind lifting together...a fleeting pink and purple sunset...the subtle and sometimes surprising drive in each of us to act out of immense love toward another being...a sincere almost-tear floating in the corner of my girlfriend's eye...colostrum's magical antibodies...

For me, none of this magic lives in judgement of others, in the concept of a wrathful God, punishment, sin, or whatever the opposite of sin is, or in labels.

I don't know what to call it and I don't suppose it needs to be called anything at all.