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Aha! I think I figured out how to keep you folks with RSS feeds from getting slammed with all the pictures! Let me know if it works.

Anyway, today I did the ritual I had planned to retire my old wolf skin and dedicate the new one. Only a few folks showed up, but it was a good group, and it was a really successful ritual overall. I’ve got a full writeup and some pictures to share here–enjoy!

I’ve been dancing with this old guy since 2002:

He was my very first wolf skin, purchased in the late 1990s, and he told me before I went to my first pagan gathering that he wanted to dance with me. So I split him open, rigged him up with some leather straps to tie him to me, and we went out and danced at the fire circle, with great success! Since then, we’ve danced together around numerous circles. Sadly, I didn’t know much about taking care of hides til much later, and between rainy, damp nights in tents, and heat from the fires, he decomposed over time even though his was a pretty good quality tan.

So I recently made the final payment on my new wolf skin, and wanting to have him dedicated before going to a Beltane festival next weekend, today was prime time for making the ritual happen. Here’s a picture of him right after he arrived in the mail:

At some point I want to post a tutorial on how I got him from that to his present state, but now’s not the time.

So I got things set up for the ritual. Here are a couple of pictures of the altar:

There are some items from the permanent Grey Wolf altar in my art/ritual room, along with my Black Bear rattle which I use to call and send home spirits, a fern frond and a turtle shell of water that I use to purify the ritual area prior to ritual, my ritual knife, and a platter with pouches for part of the ritual later on. You can also see the two hides curled up together, and a collection of spare musical instruments, as well as my own drum.

I started the ritual with purification by sprinkling water with the fern, since I dislike smoke and therefore smudging. (Sprinkling water on people is especially fun depending on their reactions. I’m definitely keeping this!) I then called the various spirits and places of the directions to join us, along with a couple of other beings I wanted to invite, Grey Wolf included.

Then I picked up my old wolf skin and carried him around the altar, talking about our history together, how he taught me to wolf dance, and some of the things we had been through. I talked about how it was going to be our last dance together, and that this was a very special event. Then I put him on for the last time, and while the other participants drummed and rattled, we danced around the altar. I could feel how tired and worn-out he is, but he made a good go of it, and we ended it with three good, long howls.

Then I took him off, and I was crying as I did so. I thanked him one more time for the good years dancing together. I laid him out on the floor, and stretched out the new skin as well. I took the leather straps from the old skin and transferred them to the new skin, whom I had previously prepared.

And then I danced the new skin. And I could most definitely feel the difference! This guy was ready and raring to go! We didn’t so much dance as run, leap, pounce, and gambol. (Yes, I said gambol.) It was tough at times to get him to stay focused on the dancing, which was fine–I’m just glad he was so happy to be moving around again. There’ll be time enough to work out etiquette between us. It was good, though, and I’m looking forward to the fire dancing next weekend.

We then took a break to chow down on the potluck goodies people had brought, and enjoy some social time. After that, I had people bring the small leather pouches I had given them, and I cut off small bits of fur from both wolves and put them in the pouches. Mind you, I never give away fur from my personal wolf skins, so this was a really unusual thing–those who got them received very special gifts. And then I closed down the ritual, said farewell to the assembled (both corporeal and otherwise) and went to ground.

I put the old wolf skin on the permanent altar; here’s a pic:

You can see the Brown Bear altar beneath it, and also some assorted ritual and art effects on the floor at the base. No surprise, I’m already running out of room on the Wolf altar.

And while I didn’t have pics taken during the ritual, here are a few pictures of me in the new wolf skin. (No, that’s not my ritual wear–it’s the outfit I wore during the pics I took for the potential tutorial I may do.)

It takes a very large wolf skin to be able to fit over my 5’4″ frame like that. It’ll take some time for us to adjust to each other; I need to fit the straps properly, and add a couple of others. Also, my arms do fit through the holes that his forelegs went through on the front leg skins, but it’s a tight fit. It’ll loosen over time, though. Still, he fits nicely like my old skin did, and we were very comfortable dancing together.

Also, small bit of timing–my period started in earnest while I was dancing the new skin. Given that the moon is waxing, and Artemis has recently come into my life again, and I am a Luperca in the Ekklesia Antinoou it’s an interesting series of convergences to note.

As I was poking around in my garden today, pulling weeds, turning soil and traumatizing earthworms in preparation for early spring planting, I was thinking about some of the “why” of what it is I’m doing here with this whole shamanic experiment. Because it really is an experiment. I’m testing a whole bunch of concepts, most of which have been tried in varying combinations by other people, but not, to my knowledge, in quite the way I am.

What I was thinking about was an extension of my thoughts in my last column in Rending the Veil, In Defense of the BINABM. Many neopagans and others criticize the fact that Americans (and other Westerners) have a tendency to gravitate toward the Big, Impressive North American Birds and Mammals (BINABM) like Grey Wolf and Brown Bear and Bald Eagle. And even I’ve done the same; hell, a lot of why I wrote DIY Totemism was to help people break out of the idea that those were the only totems with any power.

But I keep finding myself working with these BINABM in my shamanic work, and a large reason is because those are the animals most commonly in our cultural consciousness as being “properly totemic”. Rationally, some of us can realize that other animals have a lot of intense and amazing qualities we can learn from. And we can also realize that we downplay the importance of animals we have domesticated, partly out of guilt, and also out of familiarity. So we don’t really romanticize Domestic Dog, Cow or Pigeon in the same way.

Instead, we look to the totems of animals that many of us will never meet outside of a zoo or sanctuary, and maybe even not then. I mean, I’m a great example. I was only about two or three when my relationship (obsession?) with Grey Wolf began–way before I was cognitively capable of any sort of reasoning or belief. There had to be at least something cultural in there, from all the books (and, to a lesser extent in my case, television) and other media I had been exposed to even at that young an age. There’s something there, and it’s valuable in the practice of meeting people where they are.

See, all those BINABM? They’re one representation of the Other. Generally speaking, in American culture*, the only one I can really speak of with any authority, there’s a pretty severe tendency toward strict duality. We create dichotomies that are sometimes violently opposed to each other, and it’s tough to get people to consider the model of a continuum instead. This leads to a lot of really pointless arguing about everything from men vs. women to science vs. religion to my academic theory vs. your academic theory, in which people throw away the chance for a deeper, more integral understanding of reality in favor of planting a flag somewhere. Anything less than 100% dedication to your cause is seen as weak, untrustworthy.

I do believe there is a place for the concept of the Other, but it isn’t this either/or model. It’s the both/and. Just because I do not see myself as violently opposed to people of other races, cultures, sexes, genders, etc. does not mean I see myself as being the same as them, or being able to speak for them. Far from it. But neither do I see allowing their influence into my understanding of the world as a threat. And it’s the same way with “nature”. I consider myself ultimately to be a natural being; I eat, sleep, breathe, fuck, shit, and do a whole host of other things that require me to be connected to everything else. The fact that there is a city in the middle of my bioregion does not make the bioregion cease to exist. I do have to consider the things that make me different from other denizens of nature, like my frontal lobes, and the adaptations that frontal lobes have helped humans to create. Nature is still an Other, but not one which is entirely untouchable.

These are things I work with in my shamanism, deliberately, for myself and for those I offer my services to. These are the dualities I want to turn into continuums. Spirituality is seen as opposed to materialism. The body is seen as opposed to the mind/spirit/etc. And, drawing on both spirituality and ecopsychology, humanity is seen as opposed to nature. This insistence on either/or perspectives, as opposed to both/and, creates a very harshly delineated “Other”, one which must remain separate at all times lest we taint ourselves. And that includes the “Other” human beings.

At its most extreme, the “Other” manifests in things like deliberate and institutionalized racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. But sometimes it’s not that intentional. A really good example is in the tendency in both American nonindigenous shamanisms and neopaganisms, and in ecopsychology, toward tunnel visioning on dominant, largely white, culture as a basis. It’s not that white shamans and pagans and ecopsychologists are deliberately trying to exclude people of color. But let’s face it–all of these movements are largely perpetuated by white people, and that’s something we need to be aware of, not in the sense of “well, that’s just who’s interested”, but also what we may be doing that makes these movements seem less welcoming to people of color. It may just be that there’s not enough dialogue about issues of race and culture in shamanism and ecopsychology.

Or maybe we’re uncomfortable bringing up these controversial issues amid our pretty rituals and romantic wilderness idylls. I think Carl Anthony, in his interview with Theodore Roszak in Ecopsychology, really summed up this problem succinctly:

“Why is it so easy for these people to think like mountains and not be able to think like people of color?” (Anthony, in Roszak 1992, p. 273)

He’s referring to the well-known essay by Aldo Leopold, one of the granddaddys of environmentalism and its various derivatives in America. The phrase “Thinking Like a Mountain” has become bandied about pretty commonly among environmentalists and ecopsychologists as a way of reminding us to embrace the Other. Yet we feel it’s safer to deal with an Other that’s more distant–and, perhaps, one that can’t talk back to us so easily. After all, many Native Americans feel patronized and otherwise pissed off when white people claim to have had past lives as Indians, and let’s not get into the horror that is the “guided meditation” to “get in touch with your Native self” (yes, I’ve seen this and variations of it). Clearly we can get away with things like Joanna Macy’s and John Seed’s Council of All Beings in which we speak for beings we assume can’t speak for themselves–like mountains and nonhuman animals. Imagine, though, if we did a Council of All Races, in which a bunch of white people made masks to be like various people of color.

And that’s where we really need to be careful when we’re working with the concept of the Other, and more importantly, our relationship to it. Yes, it’s safer for me to work with abstract totems of various nonhuman animals who can’t complain if I misrepresent them, at least not in the same way other human beings can. But I’m also very aware of the limitations that my ritual work has in working with people outside of my cultural familiarity. As a shamanic practitioner, I know that the whole concept of “culturally neutral” is bullshit. Core shamanism, for example, isn’t culturally neutral. It’s white, middle-class, college-educated shamanism, even if all its practitioners don’t fit all of those parameters. And I know that’s what my shamanism is, too, because I’m the creator, and that’s the cultural background I have.

Here’s the thing. I grew up in a small town in the midwest that was almost entirely white. Then I moved to cities, but still gravitated toward subcultures that again were largely white. So my experience is almost entirely working with other white people, within a culture largely created by white people. Same thing goes for middle class and college-educated. These aren’t bad things, but my experiences are pretty damned limited, considering how diverse the population here is. So I have a lot of Others, as it were.

That’s why I’m training to become a licensed practicing counselor. Especially if I end up in an agency setting, I’m going to be working with clients from a much broader variety of cultural and other backgrounds than what I’ve previously been exposed to. My program is heavily engaged in issues of social justice, which has just helped to make me even more aware of my experiential limitations. It’s not that I’m flogging myself over being a guilty white person. It’s that I realize that my own limitations in dealing with people also limit my potential for helping other people. Becoming a trained counselor won’t automatically give me awesome multicultural skills, but my curriculum has included a lot of information and discussion about how to work with clients with significantly different backgrounds in a way that respects them as well as ourselves. This hasn’t always been a comfortable thing for me, because I have become aware of just how limited my experiences have been and how much I don’t know, but rather than drown myself in white-girl guilt, I’ve instead cultivated a curiosity of “If this becomes an issue, how can I broach discussion with my client of the best way to resolve it?”

And that is also part of my work with the Other. The Other isn’t just the exotic, the nebulous–it’s the immediate and very real. Some people may need to start with more abstract, removed Others, like animals and mountains. That’s okay–it’s where I got my start. But it’s why my shamanism isn’t just the formal rituals and the romanticization of other beings–it’s also a profession that brings me into contact with a whole host of people who can’t just be understood through a simple guided meditation or masked ritual.

* Or, more correctly, predominantly white “mainstream” culture.

So at this year’s PantheaCon in San Jose, CA, I officially did my first big public group ritual. Ever. Really.

See, I’ve been feeling things converging toward taking my practice more public as I’ve become more confident in what I’m doing, and when I’ve checked with both the spirits and human peers, I’ve generally been supported in this. So when the time came to submit workshops and other activities for this year’s PantheaCon, back in the fall, I decided to take the chance of doing a shamanic ritual there. I figured if it got accepted, then it would be a chance for me to really put what I’m doing to the test.

The more I actually practice my shamanism, the more I really find I dislike the one-on-one model of practice, where you just have the shaman and client in isolation, and it’s fairly streamlined, with a little drumming, but not much in the way of pageantry. And I’m really fond of the concept of sacred play and ritual theater as facilitating suspension of disbelief and magical states of consciousness. This is important to my practice because I work with the self as a series of systems–physical, psychological, spiritual, etc. I find it easiest to approach magical work from the psychological angle, but with the understanding that I’m affecting the whole shebang. And play is a great way to engage the psyche.

I also am of the opinion that shaman circles aren’t the way for me to go. I dislike being in a group where it’s basically (please forgive the saying) too many chiefs, not enough indians. Not only does the process have to be watered down to accommodate everyone, but personally, I don’t want, as the presider over the ritual, to be responsible for the safety of a bunch of people in the Otherworld. I do not agree with the common (though not universal) core shamanism assertion that journeying is safer than dreaming (and I don’t even think dreaming is always safe). Just because the place where, for example, Brown Bear lives is close to my starting point and is a relatively safe place for me, doesn’t mean that that place will extend the same courtesy to other people.

Therefore, my conception of a “group ritual” in my shamanic practice isn’t “we’re all gonna journey together and be this raucous drumming party romping through the Otherworld in search of soul fragments and cheap beer”. Instead, I’m fond of the model in which there is a presiding shaman who is the relative expert, and the rest of the community, whether it’s a long-standing one, or part of a Temporary Autonomous Zone, helps to create the space within which the shaman works. That’s where I’ve been trying to go with this concept of shamanic performance ritual.

Other than the Grey Wolf and Brown Bear rituals I’ve done in my home, I haven’t really been able to put this to the test in an actual group setting. I’ve practiced various elements in private in preparation, but nothing is the same as actually doing the work. So the PantheaCon ritual was a way for me to try out, with a larger group and in a different setting, these things that I’d been mostly developing in theory. And it was the first time I’d done work with an in-person client, which I’ll write about more in a bit. (My client had been very aware of this from the beginning and was more than happy to be my guinea pig.)

Because of the experimental nature of this ritual, I made it very, very clear both in the preparation workshop prior to the ritual, and right before the ritual itself, that if anyone did not feel comfortable participating in something that was still basically a work in progress, they were more than welcome to leave before I got started. Also, I specifically chose a ritual with Brown Bear because s/he is the totem I have had the most experience with in spiritual and magical practice; s/he has always been the first to step up when I wanted to try a new practice, and s/he has been my greatest guide in my shamanic work, even more than Grey Wolf. And we negotiated the parameters prior to the ritual itself, so that the ritual was mainly (though not entirely) a formality to enact what we had agreed. So there were a lot of factors in place to minimize potential disasters.

I also made it very, very clear that I did not want anyone following me into the Otherworld while I journeyed. Trancing during the drumming was fine, just so long as the people remained here, and I had (human) helpers keeping an eye on the participants to make sure everyone was okay while I was occupied with my work. I explained in great detail when everyone else would get to drum/chant/etc. along with me as part of helping to maintain that collective space, but I wanted to make the boundaries clear. To be honest, I was a bit worried since neopagans in general are used to a high degree of participation, and the shamanic circle is pretty common in and of itself, so I was worried that people might be bored, or not get what I was trying for. However, the orientation workshop served pretty well to make my points clear to folks what was happening, and why, and I couldn’t have asked for a better group of folks.

So what, exactly, happened? Along with the above points, I spent the orientation workshop giving background on my practice over the past decade and change, how I was weaving various disparate threads of practice into a cohesive neoshamanism, and why. I answered questions and addressed concerns, and we all had a really good rapport together.

And then there was the ritual itself. There weren’t as many people as I thought would be there, fewer than twenty, but it was also eleven at night and we were scheduled opposite a drum circle (stiff competition when you’re dealing with a crowd used to being heavy participants). Still, it was a great group, and I was able to get right down to business.

My setup was pretty simple. I had brought my brown bear skin, from a very old rug, and laid her out on the floor with my various tools and offerings to Brown Bear on her. My drum was there, too, and my client had laid out his coat to lay on during the ritual. I also had a bottle of water and a bag of jerky, just in case my weird-ass metabolic issues decided to act up, or if I needed to bring edibles into the Otherworld with me (better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it!)

I started off with a warmup. I believe very much in the power of humor to break people out of their defenses, and so I started off with a few jokes, some banter, and a dirty political limerick, all of which went over quite nicely. It got people to pay attention to me and relax and laugh–and focus.

After this, I greeted the land spirits. I don’t do a circle casting, but I do like to greet the more prominent genii locii, and the four directions make convenient delineations. So I greeted local spirits like the Guadalupe river (who I went to visit shortly before the ritual) and both sets of mountain ranges, as well as evoking my connection to Oregon and the Columbia River, among others. I shook my Black Bear rattle and had everyone else drum, clap, etc. along with me. I ended each evocation with a yell, “HA!”, and by the time I was done everyone was yelling with me–which was great fun. I’m definitely keeping that.

Then it was time for the journey itself. I think this was the toughest part of the performance part of the ritual, because I had anticipated there being more drums than there were and therefore didn’t bother preparing myself to narrate during my journey, which takes more concentration. So people mostly were there watching me sit and drum, and make noise along with me, to help act as a heartbeat to help me find my way back. I need to either figure out how to deal with narration when there may be a lot of noise, or some other way to keep the other people occupied with something besides boring old me sitting and beating on a drum while my spirit’s off elsewhere. The risk of dramatic narration is that if I get too focused on telling people “back home” what’s going on, I find myself slipping back to my body before I’m done with my work. On the bright side, I found that having the heartbeat that people were creating helped me orient back to my body, which was a concern since this was the first big journey I had done from a relatively unfamiliar location.

Brown Bear was sleeping, of course, but s/he woke up long enough to tell me what I needed to do with the offerings to hir and the gift to my client. S/he said s/he wouldn’t come hirself, but that s/he’d send a part of hirself with me to help with the ritual. So I did what s/he told me to, and came back to do the work in this world.

Once I returned, I explained briefly what was going to happen. Then I draped the bear skin over me, and tapped out a basic beat for people to follow. I danced until I felt the spirit of the bear skin, and that tendril of Brown Bear’s energy connect in me, and I became a bear myself. I went to my client and sought out ill areas, and he told me later that the first place I homed in on was a place that had been hurting. I went to these places on his body, and I yanked out, for lack of a better word, buildups of “bad energy”. It wasn’t a full-cure–these are chronic conditions–but it was a way to clear out the crap that had built up on an energetic/spiritual level at the sites of these conditions and bring temporary relief. I then breathed in Bear/bear energy/power/whatever you want to call it into the voids left by these things I removed, snuffling and whuffing like a bear, and tearing out the bad with teeth and claws while putting in the good with breath.

I then gave the client a small gift, and told him what to do with it. Were he local to me, I would see about arranging this to be a regular thing, not as a cure-all, but simply as maintenance. Such as it was, he actually reported immediate, measurable physical improvements in his symptoms–whether you want to call this the placebo effect isn’t as important as the fact that the ritual did what it was supposed to do.

I danced Bear/bear back out, and then did another acknowledgement of the land spirits (again with that fun yell at the end!) I had checked on the other participants at a couple of breaks in the ritual itself, just to be sure everyone was alright, and then again at the end once everything was cleared out and I knew my client was okay.

Unfortunately, I didn’t do such a great job of making sure I was okay. I spent most of the rest of the weekend pretty fragged and fatigued, partly due to not grounding properly, but also because I’ve found that shamanic work takes more out of me, physically and otherwise, than any other spiritual and magical work I’ve ever done–and that includes the crazy-ass chaos magic experimentation I did a number of years ago. I now have a much better idea of why people talk about the sacrifices associated with shamanic practice, and why my instincts were screaming at me to dig my heels in when the spirits were still unsuccessfully trying to convince me to do this stuff in the first place. Granted, I already had insomnia and metabolic issues, but they and the shamanic work like to play into each other post-ritual, and I’m still learning to find a good balance of self-care with this sort of work.

My client, and other people, really seemed to appreciate the ritual itself for a variety of reasons. And I learned quite a bit from it about how to proceed in the future, what worked, and what needs more adjustment. Most importantly, though, it reaffirmed for me that yes, this is what I need to be doing. More on that later. For now, I’m going to continue recovering, and assessing the results of my work.

Today was the ritual for Grey Wolf. I hadn’t even consciously planned the ritual for today; I just chose a date that seemed convenient. Just so happens that tonight is a blue moon, and the Wolf Moon, or so I was informed. Which is funny, because I inadvertently scheduled the Brown Bear ritual on a full moon, too.

So Tay helped me clear out the living room again. I set up the altar on the coffee table; once again, apologies to those on the LJ feed as I can’t put in cuts from here:




I collected what little wolfish knickknacks I still have and put them on the altar; I’ve gotten rid of most of them over the years as I’ve downsized my collection of shiny objects. There was also the wolf skull that hangs with my collection, and a deerskin painting I did a number of years ago. The beadwork strips are the first two I ever did, way back in high school in the mid-90′s. That actually gives Wolf a connection to my artwork, since that all started with the beadwork (which I no longer do). The long green and brown thing with the bone spike on the end is a hair wrap I wore for a year, and there are a couple of other random things on there. And the wooden plate has the little gift pouches I gave to the participants.

You can also see the Arctic wolf headdress and tail I wear when journeying, and the full wolf skin I’ve danced with for most of a decade. There’s my big drum, and a couple of spares, as well as the elk bells I made last year. Between the drums is the wolf fur coat that’s part of my costume, to be worn (of course) if I get cold. The blanket that covers the altar is just temporary, until in the spring when I retire my old wolf skin to altar guardian duty.

So once everyone got settled in, I did a brief explanation of what I was doing there today. I explained a bit of the context of why I’m creating therioshamanism the way that I am, with the cultural context and why I’m trying to revive performance rituals as an art form as well as spiritual practice. Then I picked up my drum and began to warm it up, explaining to people why I was doing that.

The journey itself was actually one of the fastest I’ve ever done. When I went to go formally invite Grey Wolf to join us, s/he said “Geez, you didn’t even need to come here; all you had to do was ask and I’d show up”. Which isn’t surprising given how omnipresent s/hes been in my life. But I wanted to be formal about things, and so s/he humored me. (“Should I have snarled and snapped at you when you showed up, just for show? Grrrrr! Look at me! I’m fierce!” s/he said.)

So then Wolf sent me back and said s/he’d follow, even though she knows the way quite well. When I got back and cooled the drum down, I then told the other folks there that now, instead of just drumming along to my single-note journeying beat, we got to do fun drumming! They began drumming, and I put my wolfskin on and began to dance (after taking the journeying headdress and tail off!) It was a bit of a sad event for me, since it would be the last full dance I’ll be doing with that skin. We slid into each other’s energy has we always have, and while the dance was indoors in a relatively small space, it was a good one. While I could wish for a place to do outdoor dancing around a fire on a regular basis, for now, the living room works.

Once I was done dancing, and while we still drummed, we talked some about what Grey Wolf was to us, our relationship to that totem. I also spoke a bit about my wolfskin and what we had done over the years. Then we took a break to enjoy the various edibles people had brought and ground a bit. Finally, I closed down the ritual, thanking Wolf and the other spirits who had been there for their presence.

After everyone left, I set up the permanent altar in my ritual/art room:

There were offerings a couple of people had brought that I added in. The wolf skull went back to its usual place on the wall near the altar, and the various skins went to their homes as well.

One of the things I noticed is that I enjoy throwing in little bits of explanation for why I do things as I do them, just to give people an idea of the reasons for things. I think I may make this more of a regular feature of the public rituals.

Also, while I’m still new to this whole group ritual thing, I want to try building up more formality around the rituals–for example, I would have loved to have had a themed potluck, preparing some kind of meat (maybe venison) for the occasion and letting people bring other things for Grey Wolf (with allowances for non-meat-eaters, etc.)

And it’s tougher to build up a good atmosphere for this sort of ritual indoors than it is outdoors, or in a space that is specifically designed for ritual work. But we work with what we have, and I’m sure I can tweak things to create a better setting as time goes on. While I’m very good at individual ritual, group ritual is still new to me, and so it’s going to take practice.

But overall, it went really well, and people seemed to get a lot out of it. Grey Wolf was pleased as well, and is happy to have a formal “home” within my home now.

So today I was finally able to take the skills I’ve been developing over the past few years and put them into practice for a long-distance client, doing my first soul retrieval. I don’t want to give info on the client hirself, other than s/he’s had long-term health issues and some other deep-seated factors that had led to an overall feeling of “diminishment”. We suspected a lost soul fragment, but since there are other things that can cause the symptoms that were reported, I went in cautiously.

I actually spent several weeks conferring with my guides about this whole thing, since it was my first time through. Ultimately, Black Bear offered to help guide me through, which was very much appreciated since s/he has done spirit work with me before, though not of this exact sort. My client and I agreed on a time when we could both be available for this, and after a phone call to check in and make sure s/he was prepared and in a good place, and to find out which of hir guides I might run into, I began the journey.

As usual, the horse spirit in my drum came and picked me up as I started to drum. The drumskin was a bit damp from the weather here in the Pacific North*wet*, and her hoofbeats were muffled by mud along the river near my starting place–she needed to take me further up the river to meet Black Bear. She actually carried me inside her ribcage, moving her organs aside, for part of it. I found out later that this was because we crossed the river into the Lower World. Black Bear had apparently made a lot of arrangements on my behalf in preparation for this, for which s/he’ll be getting a nice gift from me. Next time I may have to be the one to negotiate with the River Dragon to cross to the Lower World, but this time I had a lot of help.

When we got to where Black Bear was waiting along the bank of the river, the hose told me she couldn’t go any further. So I stopped drumming, and began to shake my black bear skull rattle. I turned into a wolf, and Bear and I started off further up the river. The place we were at was not at all pleasant. Amid the water-smoothed stones under my paws there were lots of old, dry bones, crab shell pieces, and other dry dead things, dampened only by splashes of fetid water from the river–there was no rain here despite the clouds. There were animals all around, too, coyotes and hawks and deer and other vertebrates, but they were hostile, and Black Bear told me to stay very close so they wouldn’t bother me. Still, they made advances at us like wolves testing a buffalo cow and calf. It was very unnerving.

One thing I noticed about Bear was that s/he was very present and visible in a way my guides often aren’t when I journey. I know they’re there, but they’re not in my direct field of vision. It’s like Bear was more there than usual, and I suspect that if it had just been hir usual presence, I would have had to deal with the hostile animals attacking me, unless I showed myself to be as big and strong as Bear was today. Today, though, I was being protected on this journey.

As we were running along the river, we looked up on the mountain ridges to the north, and amid the trees we saw the lights from houses scattered all along. Finally Bear looked to one way up on top of a ridge, and said “That’s the one we want”. As we approached the ridge it was on, Bear veered off away from the river and to a trail leading up. It was a very narrow trail, with smooth stones, but it dropped off sharply into dark ravines on either side. Bear insisted on going first. “Stay very close to my back end”, s/he told me. “Don’t fart”, I replied. Bear laughed, and we started up the trail.

The climb was actually pretty uneventful–Bear made the way very smooth for me, the dangerous things stayed confined to the dark ravines, and there was no ursine flatulence. When we got up to the top, we saw a lodge like that made by some Pacific Northwest tribes in the middle of a clearing. There was a tall, very thin humanoid guardian spirit with a spear in front of it, with a white bone mask with two black eyes, stiff, grass-like hair all around like a halo, and wrapped in brown rags with no visible limbs or features below the waist, just a drape of rags. Bear told me that since I was the one who sought entrance to the house, I had to go first. This was scary, but s/he told me s/he’d be right behind me. So I cautiously went up to the guardian spirit and got hir attention. S/he didn’t act hostilely at all, simply waited for me to act one way or another. “I wish to know who is in that place,” I said. “Who wants to know?” the spirit replied. “I, Lupa, want to–” and then realized I’d just said my name, if not my legal one then one that I identify with very strongly.

Bear told me quietly to offer something in exchange for the spirit conveniently forgetting I’d said that. So I offered to dedicate something made out of mink skins I got recently to the spirit; while it wouldn’t belong to the spirit, it would have a little something to memorialize it, sort of like a bit of graffiti of someone’s name–not enough connection to the spirit to make it hirs, but kind of like “Kilroy was here”. This was acceptable. Bear then gave the guard a false name of mine to replace the true name that was taken back.

Also, when the spirit spoke with me, the bone face lifted up as if on a hinge, and a little brown weasel poked hir head out to talk to me–”Pay no attention to the weasel behind the mask”. It would have been almost funny if I hadn’t been in a situation where I could have been speared. I had no doubt that the weasel (or weasels, if there were others in there) could have made the “suit” act immediately. Still, in retrospect it was, ah, kinda cute. I wish I could draw better to show it.

I was allowed to approach the house, and I called through the blanket over the doorway that I wished to enter. I negotiated with a voice as to whether that could happen, and finally was let in. There was only one big room, and there were hundreds of weasels running all over the place, doing various tasks. At the very back of the room there was one enormous weasel reclining, with little weasels crawling all over him. Behind him on the wall were rows upon rows of clear glass jars, with colored balls of energy floating inside of them. I would find out later that the big weasel liked the smell of these, and so properly I could call him the Big Old Weasel Who Likes Smelly Things, but for short I’ll just call him the Old Weasel. He wasn’t the totemic weasel. Black Bear, when s/he shows up like a large bear like for this journey, feels like a small part of something bigger. The Old Weasel felt more complete–old, but not bigger than his appearance.

I approached him, but not too closely, with Bear beside me. I asked him if he had anything that tasted like my client, and I breathed out a memory of what s/he tastes like to me through our interactions. He breathed it in, and said yes, and picked out a particular jar full of yellow balls of energy–not a full soul fragment with a personality, but still a substantial part of my client that had gone missing. I told him I would like to give it back to her, and that I was willing to offer part of myself. I held forth a necklace that I had made before the journey.

Now, in the creation of artwork, there is always a piece of myself that goes into what I make. It’s a renewable energy, rather than the core energy that I was trying to retrieve for the client. So that’s what I had in the necklace. Bear also contributed, having me put a bit of black bear hair in the necklace.

“Let me smell you,” the Old Weasel said, “and see if I like it”. I approached closer, but then the Old Weasel lashed out with his huge jaws, and almost bit me. I leaped back, hackles raised. “Ha!” he said. “Almost had you. I could have smelled you across the room, you know”. Then he had a few of his small weasels bring out an empty jar for the necklace. “Not until you give me what I came for,” I said. “Very well,” and he had them bring the jar to me. I placed the necklace in the empty jar, and took the one with my client’s energy. I breathed in the essence of my client and put it in the place where I had stored hir memory.

“Do you have any more?” I asked. “Yes,” the Old Weasel replied, and pointed at eight more jars on the wall behind him. “You can have them if you bring me more of your smell. I like it.” So I’m going to be taking more necklaces to him. Since I’m menstruating, I’m going to make sure they’re made during that time, so I may make one a month for the next eight months, to give myself time to replenish.

We took our leave of the weasels, being sure to back out of the door so as to keep an eye on them. Then we went back past the guard, who couldn’t remember my real name. And when we got to the trail, it had gone all muddy, so Bear and I had a great time sliding all the way down the mountain like otters! We made it back down the river with no problems, too, even with the hostile animals, and my horse was waiting for me. I took my leave of Bear, and the horse took me back home.

I then breathed my client’s energy into the physical necklace I had made, letting it take the place of my energy that had gone to the Old Weasel in the necklace’s spirit form. I’ll be mailing it to the client, who will be wearing it for several days, until that energy reabsorbs back into hir. And I’ll continue this with the rest of the necklaces. I did a followup call with hir to see how s/he was doing and let hir know what happened.

I am exhausted. This was a really challenging journey, but it turned out well. I learned a lot, including some things for when I’m going to have to do this more on my own, making my own decisions and negotiations with the spirits myself. And it’s helped me to see how my strengths, especially artwork, can be woven into my shamanic practice, making it (relatively) easier to do. Most of all, though, this feels right, like I should be doing this.

I’ve just sent in the final .pdf proof of my next solo book, Skin Spirits: Animal Parts in Spiritual and Magical Practice, which should hopefully be out in the next couple of months. Already there are things I wish I could add in, even though I know there’s a certain point where one has to say “Okay, the book is done, get it out there!”

Over the past few months I’ve been working with my relationship with Death. It’s a rather uneasy one. I haven’t had anyone really close to me taken suddenly, and the deaths among family and friends have been few. This has historically caused me to feel anxious about Death, and what it will be like the first time I do lose someone close without warning. Plus, of course, there’s dealing with my own mortality, especially as I’ve entered into my early thirties, and I don’t feel quite so immortal as I did in my twenties.

One of the alterations I’ve made to the rituals I go through when purifying things I’ve made out of animal parts is to consider the mortality of my own flesh. I look at the hides and the bones lying prone and dead on the floor, and I then look at my own flesh, and the bones beneath it, and I contemplate the fact that some day this vehicle that I am intimately connected to 24/7 will cease to move, and will be akin to the remains around me. It makes me even more appreciative of being able to work with the remains of these once-living beings, and by extension being able to continue my life by eating the remains of animals and plants that were only recently still alive.

It’s like the (in)famous epitaph on certain gravestones, which are variants of this:

Remember Man as you go by
As you are now so once was I
As I am now so shall you be,
Prepare yourself to follow me*

And this all goes back to a large part of why I work with animal parts in my art and spirituality. Yes, there’s practicality to it, but there’s also reverence. I never view the skins and bones as trophies, or toys, or really even as possessions. It is a privilege to work with them in the way that I do, aware of the death that occurred, and that these were once warm, living beings the same way I am now.

I know I can’t inspire the same reverence in those who buy my artwork, but it’s my hope that at least some of them will see what I create as more than just “pretty shinies”. I know there will be people, for example, who buy the totemic dance tails as fashion accessories, not as connections to archetypal spiritual beings, or even the individual spirits of the animals whose tails they were when living. And I know that some of the things I create as ritual tools will end up instead as part of people’s “collections of dead things”, more for display than active work.

But that’s why I do the spiritual work I do, and then write about it, and how others can utilize it. Because some people will pick up on what I do, and adopt it to their own practices.

And it’s also why I do the food totem work that I do, honoring the totems of the animals and plants whose physical counterparts I eat to stay alive. I cannot live without killing something, unless I went entirely fruitarian, and even then some would argue that eating seeds contributes to the loss of potential life.

I don’t take Death for granted any more. No matter whether the death was from a trap or bullet or disease in the wild, or by gas or electrocution after a lifetime in a cage; no matter whether the intention of the death was for food or for fur; no matter whether the death was at the hands of humans, or another animal; no matter whether it occurred after two weeks or two centuries; the fact is that some living being ceased to be a part of this life and the world that I still have the privilege to interface with, and that is reason for a moment of solemnity, moreso if I was directly involved with that death.

All of the afterlife theories in the world cannot provide incontrovertible proof that there’s anything once the body shuts down. That objective uncertainty is even more reason to be aware of when we send another being into that unknown before us, and to be aware of the fact that someday we’ll be there, too. Not necessarily to dwell in gloom over it, but to simply consider the immense change we are facilitating when we contribute to a death.

* Of course, there’s also the witty reply to this: “To follow you I am not content/How do I know which way you went?”

I’ve just started reading Denialism by Michael Specter (haven’t gotten deeply enough into it to determine whether I agree with all the negative reviews–which I haven’t read deeply anyway so as to not bias myself). It’s the latest in a number of influences ranging from a scientific-rationalist-transhumanist partner, to reading things like Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, balancing out a lot of the more woo-woo reading and interaction I do. I’m of the firm belief that my spirituality does not have to be antithetical to science; in fact, I see science as an augmentation of my understanding of my cosmology. Totemism, for example, stems in large part from a metaphorical extrapolation of human observations of animal behavior. And there are plenty of ridiculous and even unsafe behaviors that can come as a result of being chronically ungrounded and out of touch with consensus reality (regardless of how much you personally disagree with that reality, it’s still important to be keenly aware of its existence and the mutual effect you and it have on each other).

One of the things that I tell people curious about totemism is that one of the best ways to get to know totems is to study their natural history and biology, to get to know the physical animals attached to the totems. What I see all too often is a romanticization of animals, and a lack of understanding of actual animal behavior. For instance, there’s the oft-related myth that non-human animals never injure or kill another except in self-defense or for food. Yet this ignores a host of documented, and sometimes common, animal behaviors. Male lions taking over a new pride will kill the young of their predecessors so they can breed with the lionesses. Male dolphins rape females. Foxes and other canine/vulpine predators have been known to kill an entire flock of chickens (or, in the case of larger predators, sheep), much more than they can eat and cache.

And there are other projections of human ideals onto animals. Look at the lone wolf, for example. In American culture, rugged individualism is prized, and wolves are often seen as the symbol of the wild (independence). Thus the ideal of the “lone wolf”. Yet in actuality, a lone wolf is generally one who is marked for death if s/he can’t find a pack to join. S/he may be too old, or may have been driven from the family pack to avoid inbreeding. Hunting large ungulates, which are important food in cold months especially, is too dangerous to do alone–a single kick from an elk can snap a wolf’s jaw or leg, which is essentially a death sentence. Hence wolves having evolved to hunt in packs. Therefore, the lone wolf ideal is just that–an ideal, not reality.

Even concepts that were made in good science at the time can be changed. L. David Mech, for example, has publicly rescinded the alpha wolf concept he introduced way back when. That’s not a bad thing, as far as I’m concerned. Science is not a perfect system, but it is designed to minimize errors. You simply can’t have a 0% rate of errors when dealing with human perception and behavior.

And natural history and biology are ways for me to gain better understanding of the totems and animal spirits I work with, as well as the greater cosmology (way of understanding the universe) I work with. I’m admittedly fond of myth and metaphor as structures for understanding, but I keep them in addition to, not opposed to, literal, materialistic, scientific explanations. I know, for example, that my perception of Brown Bear being a totem of healing for me has a good deal to do with human interpretation of certain traits and behaviors of brown bears, and the mythos that has grown up around that. That doesn’t mean that physical brown bears will walk up to me and give me a healing herb if I end up sickened in a forest in Alaska. I’d rather know how to safely avoid conflict with large omnivorous animals that could do me some serious damage if I don’t respect them and their territories.

I am even more convinced that one of the best ways to get to know more about a totem is to study the behaviors and other traits of its physical counterparts, whether you have access to the animals themselves directly or only through media. Not only does it give one better knowledge about the animal, but it also helps to reduce unhealthy romanticization that can give incorrect information about the physical animals, which can then lead to inaccurate public perception which can affect the realities of things like species management and reintroduction efforts. Yes, we want people to know that grey wolves are not the vicious killers that European-based folklore paints them to be. But we do need to acknowledge the complaints of ranchers who actually have lost stock to wolves; if they feel heard and included in the debates, then perhaps they’ll be more amenable to finding solutions that benefit the wolves but don’t leave the ranchers completely out of the loop. (Hence not hyper-romanticizing wolves as never, ever preying on livestock, etc.)

I have a longer post on science and spirituality I want to write at some point, the gist of which is “Science is not a way of controlling the world; it is a way of understanding the world. You don’t make reality happen through science, and it’s not some force to be combated with magic or spirituality. It’s simply a systematic way of perceiving the world in great detail, and that does not have to be antithetical to spirituality”.

Aside from my emotional personal work with Elk, I’ve been exploring new territory with Brown Bear. As I’ve been returning to the more ritualized portion of my shamanic practice, Bear has been right there with me, telling me what s/he needs of me and how to do it. Part of this, of course, is for hir benefit; however, it’s also been great training for putting together the more formalized ritual practices I’ve been developing piecemeal for a while now. Much of this is stuff that I’m simply not able to talk about just yet–not out of any sense of “Woooo, I have mysteries that you can’t comprehend!”, but in the sense that it’s not yet ready for me to share, and the spirits would be unhappy if I brought it out prematurely.

Thinking back, I’ve realized that Bear has been the first one to step forward when I’ve wanted to try something new along (neo)shamanic lines. When I first started exploring totemism beyond Wolf, Bear guided me through some of my first rituals. And now s/he’s here again as my practice begins to branch out past my own personal needs, and I prepare to start shamanizing for others.

I was talking to Bear during a journey last week, and I told hir of my concerns as to whether I was “doing enough”. I talked about a friend of mine who is a much more experienced practitioner who’s been doing some serious work as of late. I look at what I do, and I feel like I’m such a novice. Even though I’ve been a pagan and magical practitioner since the mid-1990s, with shamanism I feel as though I’m just beginning to reach a new depth of experience that I really haven’t gone through before. This path has challenged me more than any other, though I think it took me until two years ago to really be ready for it. (Wow, has it been two years already?)

Bear told me that I’m giving myself more expectations and therefore more pressure than I need to. Even within a specific community, different shamans not only have different strengths and specialties, but also different commitment levels. If I end up not being as intense a practitioner on some levels as some other shamans in this culture, it doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m not trying hard enough. There’s a tendency toward competition and one-upsmanship in American culture, and in many magical traditions it manifests as “Who can be the most non-fluffy?” Shamans may compare tough journeys and sacrifices as though the more you suffer, the better you do objectively speaking.

Yet Bear simply told me that we’ll see what I’m realistically capable of. I can’t just drop everything else in my life to try to eke out a living hanging up a shaman shingle. Granted, grad school and my future profession are linked to the shamanism, but I also have a life outside of that–significant others, friends and family, video games, Western martial arts, etc. Shamanism proper may never be an all-consuming things, and my “official” profession as a therapist may always eclipse the ritual work to some extent. But then again, it may not. Bear has a very wait-and-see attitude, and the long view of the fact that I’m only thirty, ideally I have a few more decades to live, and plenty can happen in that time.

So once again I’m grateful to Brown Bear for hir perspective and reminding me that this isn’t a competition; there are enough people (and other beings) in need that I don’t need to prove I’m more 1337 than the next shaman to be able to help.

I just spent the past four days in the woods out at Beacon Rock State Park for a wilderness therapy intensive for grad school. It was incredibly rejuvenating in some ways, and very challenging in others. However, I have a much clearer view of what wilderness therapy is, why it isn’t just “wilderness boot camps” like the media portrays (even though many of the teenage participants are there under duress, mainly because it’s a last resort to keep them out of jail/alive–which is a tough controversy we discussed), and how I as a therapist-to-be can incorporate elements of it into my practice as well as help clients figure out whether it may be a viable option for them or their children.

Where a boot camp mentality deals with strictly regimenting teenagers to challenge them through tough hierarchies, rigid scheduling, and pressure to conform to authority, what we learned about are ways to use the challenges that naturally come up during long-term hiking and camping as parallels to challenges the kids face in everyday life. It’s a matter of waiting until the individual participant hits a point where they need support, offering that support, and helping them to learn a better solution of how to deal with challenging situations than what they’ve been doing. They also learn the value of working with others, not through being ordered to do so, but because cooperation helps everyone involved.

We actually incorporated a few of the more common teambuilding techniques in our intensive experience. One of the most important ones for me was meal preparation. We were divided up into three teams of four (twelve students) and each team cooked one of the three meals each day. In order to get it done efficiently and with the limited gear we had, we had to work together–not as one leader telling the rest what to do, but as a quartet working together, adopting or delegating tasks as needed to get things done. There was no competition between the groups (well, other than a round of rock, paper, scissors to determine who did what meal), just shared appreciation for the work that went into the meals. There were other exercises, but this seemingly simple daily ritual really helped to demonstrate to me the difference between being ordered to do something, and doing it for mutual shared benefit and the pleasure that comes from it.

Anyway, there was a lot more to the formal educational portion of the experience, but I wanted to explore a few things that happened that are relevant to the spiritual aspects of what happened. This is one of two posts that will cover that.

This one deals with a drawing that I did as a bit of art therapy in one of our exercises. We were asked to draw the various influences–media, cultural, spiritual, experiential, etc.–that contributed to our understanding of the word “wilderness”. I ended up drawing an open book near the bottom of the page. Above it there were pictures of lots of wild animals, wolves, elk, foxes, etc., and lots of trees and ferns. Below the book, in a very small space, were the small animals I had encountered a lot in my childhood and beyond–songbirds, snakes, rodents, etc.

What this spoke to was my actual experiences with wilderness, which aren’t very many. I grew up in a family that didn’t hike or camp. And since I didn’t have much in the way of friends growing up, I didn’t really have anyone to take me out to the woods with their families. As for Girl Scouts? Forget it. My troop leaders’ idea of “camping” was having us all sleep in sleeping bags on the floor of an old commercial bakery, where the only wildlife was the cockroaches. So this led to a life completely devoid of camping until my twenties. Seriously.

Living in the Pacific Northwest has made me really self-conscious of this fact. A lot of people here are avid hikers and campers, and not just the kind that park a camper somewhere and walk down the paved road in the middle of the campground. We’re talking through-hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail, and those who can take a single backpack into the woods and stay for a few days, no problem. I really envy them, though people have been really awesome about helping me get up to speed.

Anyway, one thing that I realized as I was making this drawing was that I got my early conception of the wilderness primarily from books. As a child, I must have read Jack London’s White Fang and The Call of the Wild countless times. London, of course, described the Arctic regions in very stark, manly-man, eat or be eaten terms. So that informed a lot of my understanding of wilderness growing up–which just made me even more attracted to it, especially since I mainly had yards and open lots as my substitute for wilderness (and which I still found endlessly fascinating).

And as I got older, and I continued to have really limited access to anything but generic suburbs, I found more and more that I formulated my understanding through books. In a lot of ways being a nerdy little bookworm helped me out a lot. However, I often substituted the map for the territory to the point that I often didn’t realize the difference. I ended up with a lot of abstracts based on not a lot of actual experience.

In some ways I wonder how much my spirituality is based more on the abstracts I’ve constructed. As I’ve finally been able to start fleshing out my experiences, it’s been sobering to see just how much I haven’t been in contact with the natural world. My increased exposure has changed my spirituality quite a bit. I’m finding more ways to ground my beliefs in my experiences, a good example of this is more work with local totems like Scrub Jay. And admittedly I’m pretty embarrassed about the fact that I’ve never seen my primary totem, Gray Wolf, in the wild, even if it’s mainly because I haven’t been in places where I’ve had that opportunity open to me.

I don’t think it’s a matter, though, of scrapping everything I’ve created. Even the abstract bits have helped give me a personal mythological structure to work with. Like my current Elk work. I haven’t met an elk in the wild, either, other than the two that nearly ran me over in a field back in June. But it’s helped immensely, as my next post (when I’ve time to write about it) will explain.

But I do think that I’m going to be spending more time grounding my spirituality in the Nature that it’s supposed to be based in. Neopaganism is full of abstractions, which just helped me to further distance myself from the source of my spirituality. (When you have people who worship deities of natural phenomena who claim they aren’t practicing a Nature-based religion, that should say something to someone, somewhere.) I think, perhaps, that therioshamanism has been in part a way for me to get that groundedness, even if I didn’t consciously realize it until recently. I’ve always enjoyed the outdoors, and I’ve observed principles of my spirituality at work in it (and vice versa) but I think now I’m trying to make the distinction between the spiritual and the physical less…well…distinct.

More tomorrow.

First off, before I get into the main topic of this post, I just wanted to give a brief squee of joy: I am not the only person to actively connect animism with bioregionalism! I got an appropriate comment on Bioregionalism and the Genius Locii with the above link, and having looked over the blog, I found it full of lots of good brain-foods (as well as some good ideas for further getting to know the bioregion I’ve chosen as my long-term home). Highly recommended.

So. Scavengers. A friend of mine over on Livejournal had remarked a few days ago that despite the importance vultures have had in various paleopagan religions and cultures, most notably Egyptian, neopagans really have a tendency to either ignore scavengers, or romanticize them as not-scavengers (think ravens as spirit guides–more on that in a bit). That really says a lot about the cultures that formed neopaganism; my experience is primarily with American neopaganism, so I’ll speak mainly to that.

In this culture, everything’s hygienic. Houses. Hospitals. Food production. Even the body-fluid-messy acts of sex and sexuality are presented as “glowing”. Because we are so far removed from our own bodily effluvia and that of other animals, we have the luxury of conveniently forgetting they’re there. So scavengers, animals that eat already-dead stuff that smells to high heaven, aren’t exactly the sexiest critters in the neopagan-totemic world. Well, okay–Raven’s pretty popular. But Raven’s also presented as intelligent, and with glossy black feathers, and associated with cool deities like the Morrigan. However, nobody wants to talk about the fact that ravens eat dead stuff–except for a few people who joke about ravens eating eyeballs. OTOH, ravens eating putrid, half-decayed intestines? Not so awesome. (Mmmm. I could go for some sausages right about now…)

(And let’s not get into glossy black feathers full of mites. Insects = NOT COOL according to a lot of modern totemists. Especially if they aren’t dragonflies or butterflies or other pretty bugs. And beyond that–tapeworms. Totemic tapeworms. Really.)

Ahem. I digress. But you get my point.

So yes. Nobody wants to play with the scavengers in the stinky dead stuff. Only a particular sense of humor would find this comic funny. (I laugh every time I read it–and the rest of the artist’s stuff is pretty good, if mostly more sanitary. /excuse for another parenthetical statement) Not surprising when you consider most people who eat meat have never killed or seen killed the animal they’re about to eat (except maybe crabs and lobsters, but those aren’t cute and furry and don’t count). And most of us here in the U.S. will never have to deal with what your average emergency room employee deals with, or clean up dead bodies–or, hell, see those bodies as anything other than the makeup-bedecked corpses in shiny coffins at funerals.

Lots of people don’t like human scavengers, either–again because we’re so removed from the processes involved with our basic needs. There’s a certain sense of entitlement on the part of some people in this culture. It’s the idea that because we can have access to food all the time, as well as medical care and utilities and other such things, that we’re not only allowed but encouraged to take them for granted. I see this every single time I see people leave a restaurant without taking substantial amounts of perfectly good leftovers home with them, instead leaving them to be thrown away (or, if you’re in Portland, at least they’ve a good chance of being composted). I saw it the time I was walking down a sidewalk behind a guy who was sorting out all the pennies in his pocket change and simply dropping them on the ground. I see it when people throw out perfectly good furniture and household items on trash day, instead of Freecycling it or having a local nonprofit thrift store come pick it up. Waste is a way of life here, because we think that we can get away with it.

So the dumpster divers and other people who take pains to salvage what others discard are seen as “strange” or “desperate”. I know of people who think that never buying anything used is a sign of success, and anyone who does otherwise is beneath them. Look at the trend of where our household appliances are going. Don’t worry about getting things repaired–just get a new one from the store! Anything else is seen as taking up too much time, and who’d be crazy enough to get a toaster repaired when Wal-Mart has a sale on them for ten bucks?

The thing is though…we do this because we do take what we have for granted. We assume that we’re always going to have access to food, water, shelter, safety, utilities, and other such things. We figure that the only way we can’t get a television at Best Buy is because they just had a huge clearance and everyone else beat us to it until they get the next shipment in–and even then, it was only on the one really fantastic new model that just came out. They still have televisions, but who wants those? Yet let there be one tiny hint of a shortage, and people panic. Remember what happened last year when it was reported that there was a shortage on rice? The stores couldn’t keep it in stock, partly because shoppers panicked and snapped up as much as they could. But we don’t actually have to worry about that happening for real, right?

Yet the scavengers say otherwise. They remind us of the uncomfortable truth that security is an illusion. They’re not afraid of that, though. They’re realistic. They make the most of the resources that are available. Most Americans are unfamiliar with just how precarious our situation is. Our economy is based on resources whose prices are artificially lowered thanks to government subsidies. Those resources drive our utilities that we take for granted, the things we assume will always be there that allow us to have the sort of lifestyle we have.

“How quickly you forget your history”, the scavengers say. I’ve heard people refer to the current recession as being as bad if not worse than the Great Depression. I don’t buy it. Yes, it sucks right now; I won’t deny that. But have you ever heard of a Hoover Hog? It’s a rabbit, a common, ordinary rabbit. During the Depression, numerous people, particularly in the southwest, ate rabbits because there was nothing else available. At least now we have the cheap hot dogs and burritos at the convenience store to fall back on. And if all else fails, there’s always ramen, staple food of poor college students everywhere!

And only a couple of generations ago, during WWII, we had rationing and Victory Gardens. Do you know how people would respond today if they had to ration? We’re still fighting multiple wars, and yet life goes on for most people because we don’t have any immediate reminders of the fact that there are hardships. There are still soldiers (and civilians) dying where these wars are happening–over 4,330 military personnel just in Iraq since the war began. And yet I guarantee that if rationing were imposed, you’d have more people out on the
street protesting that than were out with me and mine when the war first started. Priorities, what?

Scavengers are that reminder that we’re all gonna die. They’re the reminder that no matter how pretty a picture you paint of your life, nothing’s permanent. And it could all fall to pieces before you’re done with it. But, again, the scavengers aren’t afraid. They know what to do. They’re realistic, and prepared. And that’s their message that we so often ignore with our rose-colored glasses.

And the old pagans knew this, too. They didn’t have that luxury of being so removed from death and other unpleasantness. That’s why they didn’t just romanticize their view of nature to the point where it wasn’t real to them any more. We, on the other hand, have so removed ourselves from the reality of the way things are that we would prefer an imaginary stagnancy to the vibrant (and yes, sometimes subjectively unpleasant) variety and vigor of vida, vita, la vie!

Does this mean we should all walk around in sackcloth and ashes and bemoan our fates? Of course not. But what it does mean is (I can’t believe I’m about to use this cliched phrase) a shift in consciousness. We. Are. Privileged. The very fact that we can take basic things for granted that many, many people in other cultures–and yes, in America, too–have to scrabble for on a daily basis means that we have a metric fuckton of privilege. We shouldn’t let that be a reason to berate ourselves or, conversely, artificially inflate our importance. What we need to be doing is actively appreciating the technological and social advances that have made everything from indoor plumbing to antibiotics possible. It’s not just the basic actions we take–it’s the awareness guiding those actions that we need to start with. Many of the problems the human world faces today are due to taking things for granted and acting on some really shaky assumptions, as well as a big honking helping of deeeeeee-nial!

And we need to quit hating on the scavengers, human and otherwise. We need to stop glossing over the fact that yeah, Raven might be a trickster to some people, and a totem of a war goddess to others, and somehow a nocturnal (?) graveyard denizen to yet another, ah, demographic–but that Raven is also the totem over a species of birds that eat stinky dead corpses full of pus and other fluids, and that’s every bit as important as the mythos, if not moreso. Because whether we like it or not, they have important things to teach those of us who have our hands slapped firmly over our ears while we sing “La, la, la, la, I CAN’T HEAR YOUUUUU!!!!”

And if we can’t handle the very basic knowledge that death happens, decay happens, change happens, then how the hell are we going to be able to get anything out of the more esoteric lessons that the facilitators of those changes have to offer us in being more realistic and prepared for the things life may throw at us that we may not like, but need to deal with effectively anyway?

(Oh, and for the record, all you people with cool, impressive carnivorous totems like Wolf and Lion? Guess what? Your totems’ physical children eat carrion, too. Why go through the trouble and potential danger of injury of wandering across the land looking for animals to eat that may very well fight back, when hey–there’s a dead critter right there, ripe for the munching? It’s not just the scavengers who are practical, ya know. That’s why I don’t question whether I misidentified Wolf as my primary totem just because I love scavenging of numerous sorts–wolves aren’t going to turn their nose up at easy resources, no matter the origin.)

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