I Keep Losing Things

I love the play of things in a world of magic and love. I am firm in my belief that the spirit world has a power dimension. I believe that the power issue was primary in the oldest forms of the spiritual walk, that the earliest human groups needed to get the world to cooperate, the prey to come to them, the storms to hold off at critical times, and similar issues, on pain of death. This was no joke. I believe the need for spirit power produced in certain locations a “science of spirit” over generations that in a certain sense could be handed down from master to apprentice.

After literally millions of years the institutions in place were tribal, forms of shamanism. In China, Tibet, and Southeast Asia this was brought forward and institutionalized in aspects of Taoism in China and other local forms elsewhere. These traditional forms of shamanism were deeply transformed by the advent of agriculture but in essence were unbroken.

The shamanic roots of Taoism remain in place still today, why Taoist thinking is overtly alchemical in many areas. Elsewhere on the planet, especially in the near East, India, Egypt and through that influence in Europe, the advent of agriculture broke shamanism and replaced it with priesthood religions that match the political power structures of empire. The shamanic traditions had to go underground, because spirit power could not be allowed to be that democratic.

I love the play of things in a world of magic and love. I am shaman at heart. I have taken my own spirit journeys. I believe music, art, poetry can be alchemical in nature, transformative in ways difficult to fathom without intimacy, magic, love. And with coyote, I say, “you better be able to take a joke along the way.” There is pithy bar talk for that sentiment, because drunks are sky pilots too.

I have a growing relationship with a practicing Homeopath. I know he is certain that spirit power is essential to healing, that the problem with mainstream western medicine is that it has divorced from spirit power in favor of “science”, as if western science is the only kind. This of course ignores literally at least 50,000 years of wisdom. It assumes the ancients were rubes and boobs, buried under ignorance. It is clear the ancients were at least as intelligent as we are all the way along. It is also certain they were highly motivated by their uncertain life to achieve success in marshalling spiritual power. Why would it be surprising that they achieved spirit power along the way?

Here is a poem that comes from another world strangely like this one.

I Keep Losing Things

I see you coming
my way out of the forest,
that place that the moons
of this world visit,
nestling in the trees.
You hold a basket of rose
petals and I know
you are going to
give me a shower of them,
expecting that I
hold the golden key.
I'm sorry, but I lost that
key two lives ago.

March 6, 2009 11:58 AM