I recently had a meeting with a spiritual teacher while on a shamanic journey. He told me this story:
Moose comes down from the mountains to a small town. He begins feeding on the nice food in the house gardens of the town's human residents. The townspeople become angry and start murmuring against him and there is the worry of a threat against him. He then puts on human clothes and the townspeople began to think well of him and complain no more, and are actually delighted to see him. Everybody is happy.
OK, that's a very short tale, and while it was being told to me I wasn't sure where it was going or how long it would be. I was worried that I would have a harder time recalling a longer tale, but it was short enough that I could recall it and tell it to the group afterwards.
I think that the story not only has some special meaning for me, but it seems that it has some general teaching, too. Some of the people heard the story and saw Moose as a trickster and some saw the story as being about the inability of people to see what is right in front of their eyes. Moose is a huge creature and just wearing a plaid shirt and slacks would not seem to be enough to pass as human. Maybe the idea of Moose dressing up as human is like the way that a shaman will dress up as an animal spirit.
I also think that there is an aspect of dressing up what is not acceptable in better clothing in order to achieve your ends. Is Moose wrong to pass himself off as human? I like the idea of Moose socializing with the happy townspeople while eating their vegetables. Moose has provided food for many people and it only seems fair that humans return the favor.
Doing a little bit of searching on the web for Moose as an animal spirit shows that a lot of articles associate Moose with self-esteem and the magic of life and death. Digging deeper it seems that the idea of moving to and from the other world has something to do with this, so it seems right that Moose travels down to the human world and dons human guise to blend in. There's an interesting connection here to journeying between worlds, which is how the story arrived here.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Inception Chart
I thought it would be interesting to create an inception chart for the blog. I'm not going to interpret it now, except to say that it seems like a good horoscope for a blog as far as these things go. I'll come back to it later when it seem appropriate. The data for creating the chart is: March 22 2009, 10:22 am, EDT +4:00 40°N25' 079°W53'.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Snakes, Again
Since dreaming is one of the major focus areas in my life now it is only appropriate to lead off with a dream that led to my creating this blog.
Snakes in the kitchen...
I am in the kitchen of a house that vaguely resembles the house I grew up in. There are two other people there with me. In the middle of the room is a wooden table and on the table is a large Snake curled up like rope. Snake is very unhappy and agitated. Looking closer I see that Snake is shedding skin or molting and that the skin is curling off in little snake-like tubes and I realized that Snake is creating baby snakes this way. Somehow the kitchen is not the right place for this. I look out the kitchen door and see that the yard is drenched in very bright sunlight and so, without much thought, I act on my impulse and grab the edge of the table and tell one of my companions to grab the other edge and I push open the door and quickly carry the table outside. In the middle of the yard is a small tree or tropiary that casts a little shade and I place the table here so that Snake is in the shade. I think that this is good and that Snake can adjust to the temperature there and create the new baby snakes. Snake is happy and I am happy and when I wake I feel that I have achieved something.
Later, I consider if Snake was more than one snake or not. I also think that Snake was wearing a crown. A number of events in the waking world flow from this dream. I see that the project we had been stuggling with at the little company where I work might be brought out into the world and made into many new things. I also see that a lot of the work I have been doing on my own shares the same aspects. There is also a deep need in me to start a new dream group after the last one faded when a few members went through difficult times, like job loss or family loss. And on the first day of Spring I think to start a blog about dreams and other similar journeys.
Another aspect has come out. For the first time in a long time alchemical symbols have become very interesting again. I recently purchased 'The Alchemical Tarot: Renewed' by Robert M. Place, which I waited a long time to see reprinted. The symbols have really grabbed my attention and I wish I had more call to use them. I had never really understood the images and they always seemed to take place in some strange other land whose ideas did not very well accord with the world we now live in. I think that perhaps my efforts to strip away a lot of cultural conditioning of our Age of Reason has allowed these images to become more real to me.
I popped open Jung's book 'Dreams' which I have been meaning to read for a while but which has seemed somewhat intimidating. I found a big section on alchemical symbols in dreams which I had not noticed before. It now seems to me to be a worthy area of study as there are a lot of patterns in dreams that seem symbolic but the symbolic meaning is not clear. Some of these alchemical symbols seem to fit in. For example, a few years ago I had a series of dreams where two old ladies would appear. They would often be ambling through my dream, commenting on it or interfering or causing trouble. I spent a lot of time researching them, searching myths and tales for two old ladies but nothing seemed to fit. But in the first few pages of the Jung paper I find an illustration of twin mermaids that seems tantalizingly close to making some kind of sense as the old ladies. I'm not sure what it might mean, yet, but sometimes dreams speak like that, just below the surface peeking out, near, hinting at depths. Sometimes, no matter what, you can only wait and ripen.
Snakes in the kitchen...
I am in the kitchen of a house that vaguely resembles the house I grew up in. There are two other people there with me. In the middle of the room is a wooden table and on the table is a large Snake curled up like rope. Snake is very unhappy and agitated. Looking closer I see that Snake is shedding skin or molting and that the skin is curling off in little snake-like tubes and I realized that Snake is creating baby snakes this way. Somehow the kitchen is not the right place for this. I look out the kitchen door and see that the yard is drenched in very bright sunlight and so, without much thought, I act on my impulse and grab the edge of the table and tell one of my companions to grab the other edge and I push open the door and quickly carry the table outside. In the middle of the yard is a small tree or tropiary that casts a little shade and I place the table here so that Snake is in the shade. I think that this is good and that Snake can adjust to the temperature there and create the new baby snakes. Snake is happy and I am happy and when I wake I feel that I have achieved something.
Later, I consider if Snake was more than one snake or not. I also think that Snake was wearing a crown. A number of events in the waking world flow from this dream. I see that the project we had been stuggling with at the little company where I work might be brought out into the world and made into many new things. I also see that a lot of the work I have been doing on my own shares the same aspects. There is also a deep need in me to start a new dream group after the last one faded when a few members went through difficult times, like job loss or family loss. And on the first day of Spring I think to start a blog about dreams and other similar journeys.
Another aspect has come out. For the first time in a long time alchemical symbols have become very interesting again. I recently purchased 'The Alchemical Tarot: Renewed' by Robert M. Place, which I waited a long time to see reprinted. The symbols have really grabbed my attention and I wish I had more call to use them. I had never really understood the images and they always seemed to take place in some strange other land whose ideas did not very well accord with the world we now live in. I think that perhaps my efforts to strip away a lot of cultural conditioning of our Age of Reason has allowed these images to become more real to me.
I popped open Jung's book 'Dreams' which I have been meaning to read for a while but which has seemed somewhat intimidating. I found a big section on alchemical symbols in dreams which I had not noticed before. It now seems to me to be a worthy area of study as there are a lot of patterns in dreams that seem symbolic but the symbolic meaning is not clear. Some of these alchemical symbols seem to fit in. For example, a few years ago I had a series of dreams where two old ladies would appear. They would often be ambling through my dream, commenting on it or interfering or causing trouble. I spent a lot of time researching them, searching myths and tales for two old ladies but nothing seemed to fit. But in the first few pages of the Jung paper I find an illustration of twin mermaids that seems tantalizingly close to making some kind of sense as the old ladies. I'm not sure what it might mean, yet, but sometimes dreams speak like that, just below the surface peeking out, near, hinting at depths. Sometimes, no matter what, you can only wait and ripen.
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