Saturday, November 24, 2018

Change your self-perception


Spend some time looking for a deep pattern in your past that still emerges in some of your actions and awareness of yourself today.  Especially notice if how you understand this pattern’s meaning or presence in your life has changed.   I am using myself as an example.


I see a pattern that I call “the Walrus.”  No, this is not a retro-moment for the Beatles.  A walrus is able to use its head, back and tusks to break holes in the ice to haul out for resting, socializing, breeding. 


Years ago I read (somewhere) that walrus were not able to create a big enough opening to pull themselves through their own hole in the ice.   They therefore provided a service to other creatures they were not able to access for themselves.


I associated this walrus behavior with a number of what I saw as “ice blocks” of my own—where I could help others but not benefit myself:


I can help others use creative visualization to access their intuitive wisdom using my Journey Oracle cards but do not have inner images in my mind's eye.


I can help others journey to the spirit world with my drums and rattles but do not seem to go myself,


I have encouraged others to meditate, who go on to find the deep inner stillness and absorption that mostly eludes me.

Across the years it has been easy to wobble between resignation and self-pity—an oh well, just how it is attitude.  And then while doing research for something, I discover that my initial understanding of the pattern is wrong (!) 


Walrus do just fine , hauling themselves out of ice holes using their tusks.  And in fact, the scientific name of their genus, from the Greek, is Odobenus, which translates as "tooth walker.”  This name comes from observing walrus pulling themselves out of holes in the ice using their tusks.


So it is time I retaught myself about being a walrus.  I don’t know what this means, or how to do it yet, but here is this insight, and an opening in the ice is possible.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

A hiking holiday in Sedona, Arizona


To what kind of Earth do we think we belong?


While on a hiking holiday in the red rock landscape of Sedona, Arizona, I read The Songs of Trees by David George Haskell.   Again and again he says "We too are nature.  Unsunderable."


Our tendency is to impose a duality between nature and human on the world.  This results, in the words of the Wilderness Act of 1964, in the preservation of lands in their natural, primeval condition where "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man."


Our inner narrative of what belongs
 and what is alien is challenged by the desert.
The desert rewards relationship.


Close attention to the inner nature of the human
 and the other-than-human,


the rocks, plants and water 
brings a sense of spirits that dwell in the landscape.


"The belief that nature is an Other, a separate realm defiled 
by the unnatural mark of humans,
is a denial of our own wild being."


The desert rewards effort.


We have no deficit of nature, only an unwillingness to listen, or a lack of awareness to see inside the oracle of nature's wisdom for our goodness of fit.


"Nature needs no home.  It is home." 
And we are home within it.