Here's a depiction of me, taken by my friend, while I was panicked.
Do I feel like I'm freaking out? On the interior I was so afraid. Information coming from out of the nowhere, a charge of insights and "memories" (from past lives), details about folk herbal medicine from long ago and far away, was consuming me at the minute my friend took the picture.
Yes I'm a shaman and yes these things occur to me, but shamanic experiences frighten me - they do. They are powerful, overwhelming. I always wonder Is now the day I really go off the bass end?
We'd just been to the Folger Library's exhibit on women and medicine during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Encountering the images and books in the show sent me into a shamanic tailspin of soul recovery from another time and place. I knew those images, I knew those books. Gazing at them made my hands start buzzing. I'm not making this up, because when I went to apiece of the triumvirate of earth (with whom I was seeing the exhibit), they all said my men were on fire, energetically speaking.
Here's the thing. Usually when I get some form of shamanic experience, I'm alone. I assume, based on the agitation I feel internally, that from the outside looking in, I appear crazed, wild eyed, even dangerous - or - at least frightened. One of the most amazing gifts I received last week was a hazard to see what I feel like when I'm in the thick of shamanic drama. I'm sitting there, right? Gazing, perhaps lost in sentiment or maybe meditating. You would never guess, looking at that picture, that I was totally blown off in that moment, yes? I don't see it, nor do I see ecstacy in the banner pic, taken while I was dancing shamanically with the cherries at the Tidal Basin. I feel like I'm doing tai chi or something. I look centered, grounded. On the interior I was swinging from the chandeliers, ecstatic beyond belief.
Since I was a small girl I've had a sight of myself in old age with long grey hair, drying herbs in my kitchen. It has come up for me thousands of times over the years. When I saw the books at the Folger, put those memories together with the fact that I'm about to enter on growing herbs in the front grounds of the chateau this summer, and considering all the grey hair I've got going on, I realized I'm becoming my image. I'm engaging with my sight in earnest now.
But that's not the place of this rather rambling post. The head is, my friends showed me how graceful I feel when I'm flopping around in shamanic states. Wow. What a revelation. No wonder people think I'm grounded. Ha. If but they knew. Maybe I should take to play poker. Ya think?
All I can say is: wow.
After dinner at the Argo with the Triumvirate of Earth.
If you dare, click this link. The call will run loops through your mind for the relief of the day, though.
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