
Jesse Wolf Hardin

Gaia Eros
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Kindred Spirits Recognizing
Our Animal Teachers, Totems & Guides
“They tattooed the animals on their skins badger hawk
bison boar cruaths images of forests earth ice
woad and thus took on their powers wild horse white-maned
herds of wind of rain howls wolverine bear
raven fish naked among trees and caverns ancestors the
cruaths spread over their immense bodies constellations of
beasts in the flesh of blue stars over the universal
imagination of night they hunted the animals of this
dream owl deer river worm and fire dragons of
vision inside the skull and thus became their powers”
- Barbara Mor, (picts) Even now we can feel
them. Even now, through the layers of our humanity, our protective clothing,
the shielding walls of our offices and homes. Notice how easily they penetrate
our every physical and psychological defense, pass right through our skin, meld
with cell and self, impact our vulnerable psyches for life.
They’re
seeking us out, offering themselves up as role models, promising to lead us
through dreams and visions back to our true selves. And something deep within
us— something deeper than our fears, far deeper than our disbelief, as deep as
our bones— likewise draws them unto us.
They are not of our species. They
are the terrestrial “others,” spirits of the winged and furred, bearers of talon
and claw. They’ve served humanity for millennia as personal totems, teachers and
allies. They’re our kindred spirits, fellow dancers in a choreographed universe,
coparticipants in the unfolding of magic and miracle, sister manifestations of
an indivisible living Earth. They’re playful creature reminders of our own
innate animalness, our suppressed instincts and as yet unlived dreams. By
embracing rather than denying our animus, every sense is heightened, every skill
sharpened, every act empowered with the strength and grace of our particular
totem spirits.
Our search for our real selves, our quest to reclaim peak
animal awareness, our effort to discover our place among the whole of creation
is essentially a rewilding: a vital totemic journey. While there are
guides who can show the way, we all begin the journey in a moment of profound
solitude. It may begin when serendipitous magic impacts the unprepared, or
instead, be initiated with deliberate intent. For all the artful words that can
point us in the direction we want to go, the journey starts with a moment of
sudden and overwhelming quiet, when the tape-loops of the mind dramatically
snap, revealing a world of stark and arresting clarity! An opaque film is
suddenly lifted from the lens of our perception. The great clamor of
civilization, of our own busy minds, suddenly gives way to the subtle music of
wind and water. The details of every little thing around us rise up in
prominence out of a common gray field. The rocks, the wind, the pen we write
with seem to stretch out towards us, like cats in pursuit of attention. The
shallow human conversations around us may seem seem to turn inexplicably foreign
and either unintelligible or irrelevant, while every honest metaphor comes alive
before our eyes. Once familiar hallways may appear strange and foreboding,
while some hint of delight and wonder pulls out out-of-doors. Whether through
delirium or device, the once rock-solid mirage thins until fully transparent,
and one is thrust into the immortal world where magic and the mundane are one.
You realize that you are no visitor, and never should have been made to feel out
of place. That you exist not “on” but with and in. That this is your home,
your context, your flesh! That your being is as a single cell of a corporal
planet, your planet but a cell making up the greater body of an unlimited
universe! In time, even the cacophonous wailing of our hectic schedules
and the harsh pounding of the industrial machine slow down into a simple and
steady cadence. Listen for it now: a pair of steady beats one after the
other, the second slightly quieter than the first, then followed by a beat of
silence. Thump, thump. Thump, thump. No matter where we are, city or
wilderness, we find ourselves fully here. Here, at the perpetual beginning, at
the center of experience, the center of now. It’s here we find that very first
sound, the unifying heartbeat of Grandmother Earth. It was that maiden noise
that greeted our developing ears, still floating blissfully in the fluid
universe of the maternal womb. And it is likely the last sound to echo in our
conscious minds in the moment that we die. You’re not imagining it!
Indeed, you were here from the very beginning, and your bones will never
forget. Like skeletal antennae they continue to pick up vibrations from the
distant past, tap the wisdom of mountains thrust up from the sea, the geologic
remembrance of purpose and place. You were always here! The atoms making up
your being once shimmered in the breath of dinosaurs, and fueled the fearsome
fires of genesis. The same primordial lava courses through your veins as set
the oceans to boil, and cooled to form the continent where you stand. You’re a
direct product of and descendant of the very earliest organic molecules. You
carry in you the molecular memory of a blood-red sky tinted with rainbow bands
of unmixed gases, the saltwater repeatedly pierced and stirred by amorous
lightning thrusts, a great cauldron giving birth to the first living cell. All
that follows is a part and extension of that ancestral cell. All of life, from
ocean sponge to howling wolf, redwood monarch to questioning human, share this
single common progenitor. You remember the heartbeat, and then the slow
layering of more complex rhythms as life develops and diversifies. Encoded in
the matrix of your bowels is a map of the evolutionary voyage, the dead ends we
know as extinctions and the continuous unfolding of new and fecundate forms. It
is a voyage reenacted in the womb of every pregnant woman, from single-celled
simplicity into a tailed fetus, on through the toddler’s first upright steps.
You are a permanent part of a three-and-a-half-billion-year celebration of life
and sensation. You extend into every life form that has ever have existed, and
even now, the spirits of those other life forms extend into you! Your muscles
recall waiting for the sun to warm your reptilian body before you could move,
and your nerves are familiar with the giddy feeling of taking flight from the
highest crest. Remember the way pointed teeth sprouted from your jaw, the way
fur grew sensuously from your body. A shared genetic memory lies just below the
conscious surface, a protoplasmic record, engram, intimate knowledge of survival
and bliss. What today we call “instinct” is the audible will of the
planet. In the totemic journey we learn to listen to the text of intuition and
the specific example/instructions of our allied totems. Recognizing an affinity
to particular totem spirits is more than attunement to our guides. It’s the
recognition of aspects of one’s own self. Quick assimilation of their lessons
can be the most demonstratively empowering of all “magic” practices.
You already live in the land of your totems. Fate stalks you in dim alleyways,
while familiar spirits arm you from within. Buffalo hooves reverberate in
heaving strata, well below the asphalt and the maze of gas and sewer lines.
Expectant seeds shoulder their temporary concrete burden, patiently awaiting the
return of sunlight. Above ground, bright green ice plants— essentially
unchanged since the Pleistocene— slowly digest the edges of the sidewalk. And
everywhere, the spirits of the “others” call out your
name.
“where are noble animals coyote the wolf listen
to them howl a long white spray
of utter stars of pure grief out of night the nebulae of
lost spirits explodes flows from throats of animals
who cry upward from the roots of earth we die the air
is extinct the tribes of water of fire and forests
compressed of a billion years of mineral bones wild hunger
where we were in the solitude of fur muzzles and bellies
of milk in dens of rock where all things curl to sleep dream
the earth extinct the home of noble animals in a huge
night” -Barbara Mor (picts)
One day I was walking down
my enchanted river canyon, caught up in cerebral discourse, needing this, not
wanting that, worried about someone else’s interpretation of my intent. I
proceeded as though through a tunnel, self-absorbed, temporarily oblivious to
the majestic twists of the cottonwoods and the orange and magenta glow of the
sacred Kachina cliffs ahead. I stopped and stared blankly into the river,
unaffected by the play of autumn colors, lost in the dark folds of loneliness.
Then it caught my eye— a new movement among the always shifting patterns of
sand and current. At first I suspected some fish or animal concealed in the
water, but just as quickly realized it was the reflection of something from
above me. As I raised my head I was blessed with the sight of two bald eagles
flying straight into one another, then tumbling end over end, claw to claw in an
acrobatic dive. They separated less than five feet from the rocks at the
river’s edge, skimming the tops of the tall grass before heading their
individual ways. Sometimes it’s difficult to tell if the animal we
encounter is in physical form or not. It may reveal its presence through
nothing more certain than hoots or howls from concealing foliage, or an
incontestable feeling in the pit of the stomach. Or the form may seem
implausible (such as an owl in daylight or a mountain lion in the suburbs), or
so exaggerated that you’re tempted to dismiss it as “only a vision.” The
totemic journey is similar to the quest for a vision engaged in at one time by
most primal cultures, of most races. A quest usually involves fasting, the
intense heat of the sweat lodge, the prayer focused on suspending the
preconception and disbelief of the rational mind. This quickly results in the
blurring of any superimposed distinctions between physical embodiments and less
definitive visions. >From the outset of the quest every feeling, every
encounter, every act of recognition is a meaning-filled part of the total
lesson. This is true, as well, for the potentially lifelong totemic journey. A
journey that you, the reader, have likely already begun. The entire
natural world is trying to tell us something, all the time. They do so with an
urgency, communicating not only their normal lessons of fullest living, but also
the anxiety of a living Earth under siege. Our failure to heed them means more
than an interruption of personal growth. When considering the potentially
apocalyptic results of ozone depletion or nuclear holocaust, we’ve come to
realize that the survival of the vast percentage of existing plant and animal
species depends on our successful application of the lessons they themselves
offer us. We tend to think of human speech as the only true language,
flowering against the backdrop of a mute and mechanistic Earth. In actuality
it’s only one way in which the living world speaks to itself— and it’s a
language that remains largely incomprehensible to the rest of creation. Unlike
the explicit purrs and growls of our fellow mammals, our speech makes for
difficult translation by our fellow species. For tens of thousands of years the
only survivable interspecies interpretation of any and all human utterance has
been “danger!” Throughout this same length of time the myriad other lifeforms
have been speaking to us in familiar tones, in diverse dialects readily
understood by our tribal ancestors. While our more complex and abstract
languages have communicated but a single dire warning to the rest of life on
this planet, those other life forms have in a comparatively simple parlance
continued to instruct us in the exact details of physically, emotionally,
spiritually living with/in the Earthen body. In the modern world,
interspecies communication has been relegated to our most distant and romantic
history, to saints and shamans or the trivialized characters in Sunday paper
cartoons. The natural world that once spoke to us as a people has not fallen
silent yet. As a species we’ve taught ourselves not to listen, agreed not to
hear. There’s a lot of fear and denial when our totemic instructors take
a more ethereal form, as animate spirits free of the constraints of a corporal
body. The cultural demonization of earthen spirits has left many of us
terrified of those we encounter. Such conditioning was part of the same
insidious program that bred separation between men and women, humanity and
nature. The perceptual severance of our personalized connection to the Earth
(in all its inspirited forms) parallels the severance of our instincts, our
bodily senses, our sexuality and so-called “psychic” propensities. Recovery of
any one of these original tendencies and gifts contributes to potential
“powers-that-be” today as it was to the Inquisitors who once burned millions of
Earth-loving women at the stake, or to the United States government in its
efforts to disconnect Native Americans from the source of their strength, the
sacred land and living religion. Such totemic guides are the continuous
essence of the many ways Spirit has re-formed in flesh and bone, essence of
swimming, essence of flying. They’re more than echoes or after-images, teaching
us with complex, personalized dynamics and a seeming flair for the dramatic.
The spirit of all species ever to crawl out from under sun-baked rock or to leap
on guileless prey is accessible to us through enlivened intuition and power
dreams. To them our skin is no more than a permeable membrane, not the hairless
barrier you imagine defines and restrains your human form. When words truly
fail you, they’ll lend you their paws or their wings. As Spirit connects
and interpenetrates all life, some vestige of every totem exists within us at
all times. Some, however, will prove to be the preponderant influences in your
life, recurring again and again. Of these, there will inevitably be one
particular totemic species that will reveal itself most often, guiding you
through your most difficult crossroads. It will appear in your dreams more than
any other creature visage, and with more amperage. It will usually make
consecutive appearances during childhood or puberty, but those detached early
from their psyches may not notice until their first surrender to emotional and
spiritual experiences later in life. It’s not your favorite animal, nor the
animal you would most like to be. It’s your personal totem. You do not pick
it— it picks you. It lives you. Know it yet or not, you are a permanent part
of its clan. Despite your rational self’s best efforts to suppress it, you will
react in life as it does. You! The bear people— heavy-footed, clinging
hugs, a grizzly in the office briskly shoving piles of paper aside! Squirrel
people— furtive, excitable, stowing away conversations like seeds in a hollow
log. Snake people, confesssss!— low profile, eye for details, unwavering
stare, hidden defensive fangs, the happy wiggle, the craving for hot sand
beneath a smooth belly! Face it, we don’t get to choose. Totems are
spirits so familiar they’re an integral and irrepressible part of our persona,
whether we’re conscious of it or not. Have you ever encountered someone who is
clearly of the badger clan, unaware of the fact even as they seem to forever be
backing into holes, fussing and grumping, nearsighted and introspective, taking
swipes at anyone who gets too close? And most people will adamantly deny their
horse totem, even though they “feel” so incredibly equine to us that we might
expect them to snort and gallop away at the slightest provocation. If we
could have our pick, it seems most of the people I know would have eagles as
their primary totem. I’d be a small hawk, preferring speed and maneuverability
to size or color. But the fact remains that I, like the others, would opt to
fly, free at times from the pressing subjectivity of the ground. We may be
filled with the energy of crested ducks, but few acknowledge totems that rob
other’s nests or muddle about on webbed feet. I suppose raptors are safe from
predation by other birds, although I venture few of those calling themselves
eagle people have envisioned the rush to kill, or the feel of blood dripping
down a golden beak. And indeed, I would never have picked the wolf...
There could be no name more difficult to wear in modern America than “Wolf,” and
no spirit guide has greater potential to alienate one from the bulk of their own
species. The wolf totem sets standards of freedom and integrity I’ve had to
strain to live up to, and family cohesion I’ve never been able to equal. But I
had no choice! A she-wolf came and entered me time and time again, in dreams
that repeated themselves in every detail, and in playground flashes of furry
paws extended ahead me as I ran. Ran to be free. Ran to be real. Early on I
was made fun of, teased for being “the Wolfman,” and I inevitable felt set apart
by the moniker as much as my intrinsic wolfen traits. No matter how I
introduced myself, once they heard someone say “Wolf” it seems they could call
me by no other name. A student of mine seemed to be battling to discover
her personal totem. She went so far as to draw up a list of what she accepted
as her characteristics, alongside the names of prospective totemic guides and
their commonly assigned traits. She drew from a popular set of “animal cards”
and came up with a different animal each time, but through a personality
“points” system she believed she was narrowing the field down.
Throughout this process, diminutive brown canyon wrens sang nonstop just outside
every available window. Their trill is a gentle cascade of high to low notes,
ending with three spaced peeps. They sang with unmatched enthusiasm while she
reshuffled the cards for the umpteenth time. One actually flew into the room and
landed briefly on the altar, cocking its tiny head and looking into her eyes
imploringly. There have always been wrens nesting in the eaves, in the gutter,
and in the space above the door— but now they’d begun to move in with a
passion. When I suggested the bird could be her spirit guide she launched into
vociferous denial. Wrens were “insignificant” and, worse yet, they were
little! Shortly before leaving the area she committed to a solo quest on
nearby cliffs. Throughout the three days and nights she was visited by a
creature that came within inches of her outstretched feet. An animal with tiny
reddish-brown wings, a long thin beak, and a song just for her. Some months
later I received by mail a photocopy of a page out of a bird book wherein a
small, combative woman had circled specific references to the canyon wren as
totem for the war chiefs of various Southwestern tribes. Now that she
liked. One woman I know developed an uncanny rapport with owls, able to
converse freely with everything from the spotted to the great-horned. It was
during a stint working on a spotted owl survey that they taunted and encouraged
her into overcoming a lifetime fear of the dark. She knew them to be important
guides for her life’s path, yet she never acted as an owl would in any given
situation. It was only when she felt her physical safety imperiled that she
fully took on her real, dominant totem power. Note that she did not fly away
into the safety of the night. Neither did she gallop off in a panic, or rush
forward to spring cat-like at the oncoming danger. Instead, she moved slowly
and steadily off to the side, never once taking her unblinking eyes off her
tormentor until she imagined herself safe beneath a pile of rock. It was only
there, as far removed as she could get and still poked at with a stick, that
she’d make her single decisive strike: the way of the snake! Soon she
began to recall her childhood dreams, where the fear of serpents blended with
fascination, and she began to recognize a subjective resonance with the
reptile’s clean and honest ways. She felt revealed, transformed, re-formed into
her immortal animal self. She felt re-empowered to face both threat and
pretense, armed with the clear intent and integrity of her snake totem.
One of the most enjoyable projects I ever worked on was a combination of
costumed dance and drama we called “The Dance For All Beings.” As it turned
out, the only dancer not able to make it was the woman representing the
endangered bear family. My publisher friend overcame any semblance of her usual
stage fright when she spoke for the bruin in front of five hundred people.
Hesitancy that had at times held her fast like a leg-hold trap now gave way to a
confidence larger than life. With no costumes to be had on such short notice, we
tied the tanned hide of a real bear on her instead. During rehearsals she
tended to stumble on her lines, while I prompted her to surrender to the animal
of her childhood dreams, to the spirit of the bear itself. She almost backed
out at the last minute, but recognized the opportunity as a crucial step in her
personal becoming. The dancers and speakers preceding her were lithe and
suggestive, and the line between performance art and ritual dissolved completely
when my friend stepped out of the shadows and onto the stage. The entire
auditorium was instantly converted into sacred space. The audience held their
breath, watching her steps slow and grow heavy, heavy, heavy. When the bear at
last rose up to speak, she appeared irrefutably larger than was physically
possible. She moved out of the spotlight unhurriedly, infinitely wilder than
anyone might have imagined. Indeed, she would thereafter go about her business
a bigger bear. Anthropologists are often quick to pigeonhole totems as
clan “mascots.” Most hold that the origin of totems lies in our ancestors’
feelings of inadequacy and envy of the superior speed or strength of other
species. But totems are much more than emblems for societal and clan
affiliations determined by bloodline. Long before animals came to
represent a certain genealogy, clans formed around shared power dreams and
mutually, exclusively experienced totemic spirits. There must have been a time
when no one was admitted into the wolf clan solely because their parents were.
Rather, those people dreaming wolfen dreams and instructed by wolfen spirits
began associating with one another. This sort of association would have
eventually solidified into the totemic clan structure that remained to be
studied and recorded by the anthropologists arriving so many centuries
later. Tribal peoples, whether Aboriginal, Sami or Native American, are
expected to quest for their individual power animal and seek guidance from all
available spirits, regardless of what animal-identified clan they were born
into. Persons may carry several names including the one their parents first
called them, another denoting what clan and lineage they belong to, and still
another either extolling their deeds as an adult or identifying their personal
animal guide. In our totemic journey we go beyond unconscious symbiosis
with other lifeforms and enter into a personal, intimate and committed
relationship with particular advisory totems. It’s a circular journey with no
known end. The acceptance of kindred spirits as guides must include a pledge to
fully utilize their gifted lessons, acting for the good of the Whole with all
the joy and resolve that could be expected from the honorable totems
themselves. "What is this joy? That no animal
falters, but knows what it must do? That the snake has no
blemish, that the rabbit inspects his strange surroundings
in white star-silence...? Those who were sacred have remained
so, holiness does not dissolve, it is a presence
of
bronze, only the sight that saw it faltered and turned from
it. An old joy returns In holy
presence.” — Denise Levertov
Shhh!
For a while the softening shadows return, and even the pounding of the heartbeat
seems to fade in the distance. Come forward. Step out of the cave of your
solitary experience and unshared pain. Ignore the glaring neon of our times— it
is in many ways Grandmother Earth’s darkest hour. Step up to the circle,
where the certain blackness gives birth to light.
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