I think the animals are showing us, literally showing us, how to live into this new story, if we’re quick enough to catch their clues.

Recent “forwarded” emails reveal that animals are showing us another way to live and that some humans are responding with grace. Stories, photos and videos from drought stricken Australia in 2009 show koala bears approaching humans and asking for water.  Both four legged and two had to linger long enough in each other’s company to figure out the request and respond appropriately. A recent northern hemisphere tale recounts how four deer swimming far off shore in cold waters approached a fishing boat. The fisher folk clearly understood the animals’ communication…we need rescuing…they lowered the gate at the back of the vessel. The deer climbed on and dropped in exhaustion.

We used to know how to communicate among species. I’m sure of it. Our culture still relies on this fact. My three year old grandson sees the world through animal eyes.  The animals are his first teachers. Why and precisely when that apprenticeship ends I don’t know.

John has bins of plastic animals and floppy plushy stuffed animals and he plays with them all on a daily basis.

He loves books and most of the stories are told by and about animals.

He loves puzzles, many are animal related, including one that illustrates a kazillion species on this planet…creatures I’ve never even heard of.

He loves tracks and battery operated toys that run on them. He often chooses  hex bugs or robot guinea pigs to charge along those tracks, rather than cars.

He loves kids’ TV. Most of them are non-human animal centered. Mickey Mouse, Scooby-Doo, Barney, Berenstein Bears, Jungle Junction, Big Bird and Cookie Monster. The list is long. The show that offered me an epiphany is called Timmy Time and features an all animal cast – owl, porcupine, dog, fox, pig, possum, lamb, sheep, ostrich, duck. There are probably more but I forget them now. The attention getter is that all the characters speak non-human animal! Howls, growls, barks and meows. Chirps and squawks, hisses and hiccups. No human language is uttered. And here is the epiphany.

Any child in any culture anywhere on this globe would understand the storyline.

Think about that!

We all held a pose called Calling the Spirits while listening to a steady rhythmic beat. Because I was holding the posture alone in my living room, I listened to drumming/rattling from a CD. Not as energetically potent as live drumming/rattling, but serviceable. This combination reliably opens doorways in our brain to imaginal consciousness. (Images of poses
are from Belinda Gore’s book: Ecstatic Body Postures.)

In my posture session, I experienced a modern version of the Peaceable Kingdom. Here’s a summary: I experience a profound sense of comradeship with the animals and see that we are all sitting in council. Not everyone is here yet and I see herds of horses cascading down slopes to reach us as quickly as they can. They’re mostly black and white pintos, their vivid spots highlighted by red canyon walls and a glowering, dark sky behind them. I look for the bear family and don’t see them. But then, relief. Here they come lumbering toward the circle, furred in every color, brown, black, white, cinnamon and even golden honey like the one we saw in Montana last summer. I see a girl-woman riding this honey bear. She’s being cared for, protected by and journeying with this bear. My rational mind flashes on all the global myths of relationships between human animal and non-human…cross species nurturing, even marriages. And I wonder how we humans ever agreed to sterilize our perceptions of ordinary reality so thoroughly. We’ve stunted our possibilities.

Last evening, despite the threat of snow, four of us gathered to watch a favorite film of mine, Mythic Journeys. Several people interviewed in the film describe the significance of myth. Contrary to popular opinion, myth does not mean a falsehood.

“Myths are the encoded wisdom of human experience.”

“Myths are a reflection of human experience and human experience is the foundation for all the storylines in myth.”

“A good story brings out the truth of the human condition.”

“ Life experience takes on significance when we tell the story of what just happened to us. It is the telling of our story that gives life meaning.”

“It is part of being human to craft archetypal stories into enduring myths.”

Because of all the myths in which humans and animals interact, when animals care for humans in need, when animals and humans join to work out a puzzle or accomplish an enormous task, ( I think of those ants who help Psyche sort seeds.), I wonder if the myths are reflecting lived experience. Could there have been a time when human animals and non-human animals communicated more readily, when we saw each other as companions sharing a habitat and honoring the need for give and take? I believe so.

I agree with Deepak Chopra in the Mythic Journeys film. He says, and I paraphrase of course, that our collective soul is hurting and we need a new story to heal it.

It’s snowing today and the temperature hovers at freezing here on Bainbridge Island in the Pacific Northwest. It almost feels like real winter and my dogs and I are smiling! With the Montana climate deep in our bones, I think we three long for the extremes of hot, dry brown summers and crackling cold white winters.

“Why?” you may wonder.

Variety, challenge, sensory delight – after a day of cross-country skiing, have you ever lain on your back watching the stars while soaking in a hot springs? My animal nature and sensual body croon with memory.

Speaking of animal nature, I want to harken back to an earlier post in which I described the dismay I felt when I first learned I was an animal.

Do you even remember that fact about being human? We are animals? I doubt it. We modern urban folk are unlikely to think of ourselves as animals except in the pejorative sense of a statement like: “What was s/he thinking? S/he behaves like an animal.”

I described my seven year old self lying on the summertime prickly, pungent grass wrapped by scents of clover, the sound of buzzing bees and the sight of blueblueblue sky cupped by my hands held round my eyes.

Despite my immersion in the world around me, my mother shocks me one afternoon by telling me I am an animal. Maybe she was admonishing me for being an animal because I was getting grass stains on my shirt. I fight her, she fights back. Maybe the dialogue goes something like this:

 “Deb, stop acting like an animal.”

 “ I’m NOT acting like an animal.”

 “Oh yes, you are, “she might have said. “ You know, Deb, actually, humans are animals.”

 “We are NOT,” I shout in horror.

 “But we are. We’re animals, really.”

 “We are not,” I say, lower lip trembling a bit, as doubts begin assembling. But I cling mightily to my belief system and repeat, “But I’m not an animal. I can’t be. I talk.”

 “But, honey,” she’s softening a little, now, getting into her teacher mode, “The scientists have figured it out. Biologists know. There are all kinds of animals…birds, reptiles, fish, spiders, bees, horses, elephants, all kinds… The humans are the kind called mammals.”

 “But I can’t be an animal.” I remember my panic rising. “I can’t be. I walk on two legs.” I begin to whimper as I feel my world view changing.

 “So do birds,” she says.

That memory rivets me and links to the snowy day today.

Despite modernity and the daily race to accomplish much, folks here cancel events and close schools several days before snowstorms are predicted to arrive. ByMontana wild standards, this is just plain silly. Weather forecasting is as unpredictable as the weather. But by urban, rat race standards, I think maybe premature cancellations serve to feed our hunger to slow down. Potential snowstorms and the possibility of icy roads are good excuses for hunkering close to the nest. At a time on our planet when we human animals forget our total dependency on nature’s largesse, I’m grateful for these storms that bring us home.

Huh?

Simple enough to explain really. We’re a group of humans who gather every other week to open the door to expanded consciousness via Ecstatic Wisdom Postures.

The name Clan of the Dreaming Bear came to us in ecstatic trance in early December. We’ve been meeting regularly for not yet a year but already we’re “tight.” The practice nurtures the safety of community while spurring excitement for edge-walking. This past Monday though, we never even got to holding a posture because our talking circle lasted for three hours, spiraling deep and wide. We amazed ourselves.

Jeff ( explore his website )  ignited a fire when he suggested that we humans are meant to cultivate mystery. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that avoids mystery like the plague.

Yet, seeking certainty is doomed. What a waste of effort!

Jeff went on to describe three levels of mystery. We got positively giddy swimming in his pool. Plunge in with me:

MYSTERY – THESE ARE THE HOLY SHIT MYSTERIES. THE ONES THAT TEAR EXULTATION FROM YOUR THROAT…AURORA BOREALIS, CYCLONES, MOONS AND MILKY WAYS, BIRTHING, DEATHING, SEXING. YOU KNOW WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT…THE MAJESTIC MYSTERIES THAT EVEN GOVERNMENTS CAN’T DENY.

mystery – These are the everyday inexplicables and magical moments that happen to most of us – synchronistic phone calls, chance meetings, prophetic dreams, intuitive hits – the events that spice up life by contributing unanswerable questions. Yet these mysteries are debunked and quickly denied, suppressed, or explained away as coincidence.

Mystery – These are the x- factors, the unknowns, unexpecteds and uncontrollables that we’re taught to fear rather than embrace.

For thirty years, I’ve championed fear’s usefulness. There may be no more important topic than a healthy discussion of why we avoid fear at all costs, including the cost of suffocating our lives. Can we not redefine the nature of fear and our relationship to it? Fear is a barometer of aliveness, showing us that we’re no longer stuck in a rut, we’re stepping onto the ledge of our known world, choosing risk, standing in our truth, moving toward loving engagement with our own life’s mystery. Relating to fear as an ally elicits courage, empowers trust, reveals the potency of surrender and in most cases serves to enhance our living.

In one form or another mystery takes our breath away, but there is a huge, though oddly subtle, difference between gasping with wonder and holding our breath in fear of fear.

In your life
today
how will you cultivate mystery?

Two of my favorite bloggers have used that term recently and it reminded me of some of my posts in the fall of 2010 about Eairth.

Check out Kate Shrewsday. She starts a recent post entitled, “Skying” with this description:

Will we ever tire of looking upwards?

If I could get in my old red Mercedes and direct it vertically upwards past the airborne pigs, it would take just six minutes to drive the 10 miles through our troposphere, where 80 per cent of our atmospheric gases are concentrated.

And, indeed, just five hours to drive to the complete vacuum of outer space. For the rest click here.

That knocks my socks off. Isn’t that a marvel to realize our skin of air is only six minutes thick? Humbling a bit. Reminds me how miraculous it is that we’re all still breathing after several hundred years of dumping all our noxiousness into that which cocoons our bodies and makes it possible for most of the planet’s current life forms to live.

Then check out this blog called Zazenlife. . .many bloggers, many topics and full of edge walkers. Deiselpokers wrote this one yesterday: Where Does the Sky End

When you look up in the night sky, you might see some pretty stars and cool constellations, but how many of us actually realize that we are looking at something that goes on FOREVER? For more…

Great post about infinity and endlessness but I noticed how s/he also used our familiar cultural phrase ” looking up”…

I like to play with that idea of looking up. Are we really? Just because our heads tilt back doesn’t mean we’re looking up. Think about it. We’re on a ball within a ball within another ball ad infinitum – space upon space with no edges. We could actually be looking DOWN…Don’t you love it?

At the very least, we’re looking OUT not necessarily UP. Unless of course we really do live on Pratchett’s Disc World – then my notions make no sense at all.

But sometime ago, maybe two summers ago when I was on the top of Hurricane Ridge after dark looking through a telescope so large we sometimes had to climb a step ladder to look through the lense, maybe it was then I had this epiphany. Nope, here comes a memory closer to the truth. I think I first learned this notion from Brian Swimme in his video series called Canticle of the Cosmos. One of the videos is devoted to perceptions and how our human assumption is that what WE SEE is the only reality.  As an exercise to help us get out of the box of habitual perceptual thinking, he suggested gazing at the stars while imagining that we are looking down. I tried it. An act so simple, yet it was completely disorienting. . .in a magnificent way that permanently changed my sense of reality.

Another similar habit is how we talk about the sun setting or the moon rising. Well those special orbs are doing no such thing. They’re simply hanging out in space moving in their own orbits that have nothing to do with rising and setting to our horizon line on a daily basis. That’s US spinning on our wee globe, looking out and drawing conclusions. Makes me wonder how much else we assume is accurate may be in error.

We get so used to thinking reality is as inculcated by culture that we forget to question our perceptions, to bask in the mystery of living on the planet eairth.

I’ll leave you with one of my paintings that illustrates this short rap on looking down. It’s called: Falling UP.

In that latter post I asked the question: What do we need to sacrifice in order to live a new cultural story that will help us co-evolve a more meaningful human wholeness and … contribute to resilient life on the planet?

 Sacrifice in our modern urban world tends to be rejected as something with which we don’t want to associate, as if it’s bad, that the only way to sacrifice is by killing something else so that we may live.  No wonder we avoid sacrifice with definitions like this one from Websters’: to suffer loss of, give up, renounce, injure, or destroy especially for an ideal, belief or end.

Yet haven’t we also been taught the end justifies the means? What if the end we sought was the ideal of an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilling, socially just world? What then might we be willing to sacrifice?

What if the end we sought was the belief that humans might actually love living with and for each other, that they might participate fully, not just “spectate”, in the creative juice coursing through life itself. What, then, might we sacrifice?

 What if we humans remembered that ecstasy  revivifies our love of living? What if the ego could relax its stranglehold on our psyches and embrace its role as a helpmate not a controller? What if we remembered that happiness is feeling embodied and in touch with the constant flow of this energy called living, that happiness is a process of loving not a product? How then might we sacrifice?

Folks are still finding Creation Stories and serendipitously that post connects us to the unfinished thread of November 1st, 2011 titled False Faces.

See how an unfinished story is now catching up with itself? Nothing lost, nothing gained, the plot just continues. Our lives in the proverbial nutshell!

You who read this blog regularly may remember that I chronicled the story of our masked dance last August in which we moved toward imagining a new myth to support all life on eairth. I hoped to discover more precisely what our dominant cultural paradigm might have to sacrifice in order to rewrite new storylines for a resilient American culture that contributes to the planet.

My only post in November brought us to the moment before we began the actual ceremony. We were garbed in our masks and costumes and then, and then I faltered. I left you on the precipice about to jump into the mythic world and by now you’ve probably forgotten it all. That’s all right.

Our August ceremony was so complex and richly textured, it was simply beyond words.

We did experience for a few short hours living the new myth of a communal, resilient culture that includes unseen neighbors and animal companions, but I didn’t know how to give it tooth in this linear fashion.

I can chronicle some of the storylines though:

Leadership shifts from one to another to another

Diversity is respected

We all need recognition and support

Light and dark balance each other

Feelings are honored
Love is bedrock,
Fear deserves recognition and serves as a barometer,
Anger’s purpose is noble – to protect and to empower

Everyday magic is everywhereallthetime, expect the unexpected,
life – and ceremony – never turn out the way you think they will

Context cradles us

Spirit orchestrates the human symphony

Perfection depends on our response to imperfection

We lived in a world like that – for a brief afternoon and early evening – and the memory sustains me today. Will you please tell me how this list of qualities moves in your life today? How do these storylines brew in you?

And thank you for reading!

I vow to be a little more consistent in this new year.

I now know that I had so many readers in 2011 that they would fill approximately three NYC subway trains. That’s kind of cool don’t you think? But I hope to increase numbers in the new year because my purpose for blogging is to inspire folks to broaden their perspectives about what it takes for a planet to thrive, to imagine what makes us truly happy humans, and I’m thinking only 3900 “hits” doesn’t make much of an impact. 39,000 would feel a lot more potent. Help me get there, will you? Tell your friends, link me to others who might be ready to think both widely and deeply about life on this planet, comment…oh please do comment.

WordPress noted the fact that my most popular post in 2011 was January’s first one called No Detours.

That chronicled my invitation to join a cooperative art gallery and put forth the idea that there are no detours in life. Everything leads to the next thing no matter how we twist and turn to avoid what we think is a pothole.

Curiously, exactly a year later I have resigned from that same gallery.  Was it a mistake to have joined?

No way.

It just took me awhile to realize that I did not have the freedom there to display my work the way I wanted to. Art is the expression of soul…and our individuality was squelched in order to present a uniform look.  That esthetic has never fit me and didn’t seem to attract customers. But I have learned much, been inspired to paint regularly, was found by a collector, sold a few originals though still not the one which illustrated No Detours, and made good friendships which will grow through time. But now I know it’s time to leave.

Ebb and flow. The way of everything. Inspire/expire. The Tao.

It’s never too late to change our minds, renew a vow, redo a project, untangle a mess, reframe a situation or complete an unfinished project.  Sometimes beginnings stay unfinished for a long time. Maybe it’s not my destiny to finish some projects, but it WAS important to begin them. Do you have any projects or commitments like that? Aspects of your life which nag at you because they hang around gathering dust both literally and figuratively?

Speaking for myself here, I need to make peace with myself for not finishing that skirt I started knitting two winters ago. To finish or not to finish, to stay or to go, to say,” Yes,” or to say, “ No”,…the answers to such conundrums can often be found only by putting one foot in front of the other and continuing to walk, trusting there are no mistakes, no detours, only a circuitous path called living.

Happy BEGINNINGS to another GREAT CYCLE of LIFE! May your dreams pull you into your future.

I love night’s beauty. .. the magnificence of day blind stars, the aurora borealis yanking audible awe from my throat, moon sprinkling diamonds on snow, the forest breathing more slowly as trees, quite literally, fall sleep.

I am more invisible in the dark which makes me feel freer, more at home in my own skin – even, dare I say it, safer – no flashlight reveals my whereabouts, no fire reveals my face to the other. I can more easily slip into that sense of oneness with the black womb around me.

Creativity flows and dreams quicken in the winter. I love the inward turn of focus – possible only for those of us lucky enough to be able to adjust our frenetic schedules to account for seasonal changes. Like hot house plants, we northern urban two-leggeds live like summer all year long, forced by indoor heat and artificial light to keep producing. No wonder we have a new disease called SAD ( Seasonal Affective Disorder ). I doubt we’d feel so sad if we considered it normal to slow down in winter. With weekly regularity, perhaps, we might curl up under a blanket and sleep longer, respond creatively to the dreaming night, cuddle together near the living room fire and tell stories, sing songs with friends and families, share food and hot drinks.

I grieve the shortening of night, maybe because we never celebrated its lengthening. We seem obsessed by the light as if it were our only guide, our only friend, the only medicine good for us.

Hog wash.

Hibernating bears teach me about the dark. I am blown away by the white forest bears who still live in BC and may have lived inNorthern Europe, if we can believe some of the old stories like Valomen. They can’t dig dens the way a grizzly can because their claws are too short. Dependent on the old growth trees which hollow out as they age, the white bears burrow into a tree for the long nights’ winter, the females, hopefully, pregnant and dreaming perhaps of new life coming,  salmon eggs spawning,  seeds gathering momentum for the great splitting open of Spring.

How could we thrive without the respite of dark?

But wait – this makes no sense. We’re putting on masks to expand our experience of our selves… How can that be?

Don’t masks hide our true identity? Don’t I, don’t we wear masks every day?

My Mother taught me to put my best foot forward, whatever that means. When I was young, she suggested I bleach my hair to make me more attractive,  wear rouge and mascara to make myself pretty, as if my DNA hadn’t made me pretty enough, match my sweater to my skirt and wear matching socks. And though I fought it, I also complied to the best of my ability, whatever that means.

What are these false faces that we wear everyday?

An attempt to keep the world engaged with me, that’s what my mask is. Pimples and smells, creamy colored teeth instead of snow white, any deformity at all and even simply being plain don’t cut the mustard.  Habits of personality have frozen our faces into certain configurations. We are all petrified versions of our natural spontaneous and warm hearted selves. Luckily,  my sagging face has lots of laugh lines but for many, disdain, anger, fear and depression have left unappealing tracks.

I never even knew I wore a mask  -   until it fell off.

In 1982, I was co-facilitating a therapy group for men and women with my colleague, a male psychiatrist. One particular night I was feeling quite sassy and was zinging with helpful insights. I flung one to a woman in the group who zinged right back with:

Who the hell do you think you are?

Lightning flashed!

I had not a clue.

Like mosaic shards crumbling off an old stone wall, my face shattered on the ground at my feet. There was a replica underneath that sort of looked like my old face but with more vulnerability, more realness. I burst into tears of shock. For hours I cried. Each heaving breath brought a sense of new possibilities and I became aware that I was undergoing an unbidden, uncontrollable deep cleansing of old cultural and familial habits of thinking about myself. A blessing!

So the mask of propriety and perfection is one kind of mask many of us have been taught to wear in our modern, urban world. There are myriad variations – pretending to be fine when we’re not, of being nice when we’re not feeling very generous or kind, of looking 25 when we’re 55, of saying what we think wants to be heard not what we really want to say, all false faces that dishonor our souls, hide our authenticity.

Then there masks worn by both hero and villain. Robbers, rapists, the lone ranger and superman all hide their identities behind the mask.

But today, the masks we are about to put on our faces  reveal our deeper/wider selves. Masks crafted with the help of invisible energies and expansive ideas, masks which stretch our limits and enlarge our sense of self… revealing aspects of ourselves that we didn’t know belonged to us. These masks allow us to be more fully who we are and in service of something larger than our short lived selves.

It is these masks which we don now.

We encounter our mythic selves more deeply by experiencing the birthing posture. One of my favorites, this particular pose is found all over the world, from Bolivia, to “the Near East, where they date from about 7000 years ago, to modern examples in central and western Africa, New Zealand and throughout Polynesia.” The birthing figure shown below comes from Rurutu and “shows the god Tangaroa …apparently giving birth to other gods and humans who are shown as small figures carved in a variety of ritual postures all over his body.” ( p. 213-14, Gore, Ecstatic Body Postures.) I can identify many of these poses as ones we call ecstatic postures: empowerment, chiltan spirits, bear, singing shaman, realm of the dead. This fact acknowledges the importance of these particular physical poses to our ancestors, though we can only imagine why.

The following day, we ask Tennessee Diviner to help with the task of designing our ritual. Divining postures in general reveal that which is hidden. “ … (P)eople tend to receive answers both in images and words. It is not unusual for someone to hear a distinct message, such as, ‘seeing is not seeing, feeling is seeing.’ Perhaps that is one reason people respond so strongly to the Lady of Cholula and the Tennessee Diviner as very real beings; they speak to people in words, and they have identifiable personality styles.” ( p.101, Gore. )

Not an easy pose for most of us to hold, Tennessee Diviner reliably outlines detailed rituals. I have no explanation for why this is so, but over the last thirty years, many groups in many places affirm the capacity of this pose to help us create potent and unique rituals related specifically to the sacred work at hand.

Here is a sampling of what Tennessee Diviner shared with us:

Music:

two original songs with words and melodies.
one remembered song from long ago.
a simple series of notes which at least four of us heard:
F, C-, C. These notes were suddenly recognized as the melody in one of the songs mentioned above.

             Movement:

enfolding and unfolding seemed to be a repetitive                                      theme:

undulating back and forth with the feet as well as side to side
slow arm movements rising and falling, up and down.

Spaces:

the teepee

the medicine wheel which was revealed to have a fault line running through it.

the forest as mystery

the lodge as the womb of darkness, the void

the forest as reflected brilliance

the meadow as the coeur of the sun

Storylines:

                        There’s a story waiting to be told and no one to tell it.

The story starts here.

Warriors in all cultures are reaching for freedom.

The sun has to be convinced to shine.

The sun is the heart is the core of it all.

There’s a vertical axis with soaring views and earthen hues.

There are all seeing eyes everywhere.

Process:         

                        D gifted us with a clear, almost step by step, progression of where to begin and how, where to go next, and then next, including specific details like needing to circle with our backs to a cedar tree looking out,  sharing our love for the world outward, and needing to collaborate  to entice the sun from hiding.

A final note for today: Choosing to co-create with spirit demands trust and so we grow in freedom and delight. Each person receives only a portion of what the group needs to know.  By asking our egos to trust not-knowing and to depend on each other, we liberate ourselves to join with the living moment, giving and receiving, leading and following, honoring natural rhythms and communal resilience.

ahhhhh yes, a new cultural story begins and we’re sharing it here now.