I think of my kinds of creative process as directions on the Medicine Wheel. I align my drums with the west, my shamanic mentoring with the south, my painting with the east and the Journey Oracle card deck with the north. Sometimes one of these directions will seem to disappear from my view, and I will rest from its effort. This happened across the last several years with my drums. I seemed to forget that I knew how to make and paint them, and that they were my first doorway into shamanic journeying. For several years I thought I was finished with this work, but how can the west disappear from the constellation of my relationship with spirit? And then I made and painted this drum.
This is the first elk skin drum I have made; its darkly-mottled, translucent skin received the paint very dramatically, and Lightening Bear appeared. I know now that a rest is not a conclusion; a pause is not the end. I see now that my commitment to my drums needed to renew itself in quiet, in the same way that this season of the year—the autumn that I associate with the west—needs to fold the rush of summer into stillness, in preparation for the quiet of winter that becomes renewal in spring.
Perhaps my readings with the Journey Oracle divination deck are also coming into a quiet time. The press of summer residents and visitors has left the island, and a growing stillness surrounds my opportunities to share the hidden teachings in the Journey Oracle. And yet the great storms of November are whispered on the breath of breezes that shiver the cedar brackets into the ponds and cover the roads with gold. Perhaps the time of the Journey Oracle is yet to come, in the dreaming and story-telling of a northern winter.
