Come join us for SHIFT at Whitaker Ponds:

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/finder/index.cfm?ShowResults=yes&SearchText=whitaker+ponds

Saturdays at 12 noon, next to the north baseball field.

Dress for cold, wet, and muddy! Woo hoo!

In reading up on the Celtic metaphor of “the salmon of wisdom”, I ran across a beautiful little essay on past and present salmon traditions here in Cascadia.

It reminds me again of the holiness of our foods, the holiness of our fleshy experience, the power in the aliveness of reality.

In reading the book, Merlin: Shaman, Prophet, Magician, by John Matthews, I ran across a great passage underscoring something that I touched on before, with the help of an excerpt by David Abram: the connection between insight, knowledge, and the land. The quote from the book on Merlin runs thus:

Messages from the Land

Physical contact with the earth is another important part of the transmission of the skills of both the seer and the prophet. The land held information like a great book, which could be accessed by those with the skill to see or hear it. The most subtle methods of prophetic tradition in Britain and Ireland seem always to have been available to those who live within the spiritual continuum of the land, and this, we have seen, is very much a central aspect of Merlin’s life in the wilderness.

The ancient gifts of the seer poets were not fueled merely by clairvoyance or poetic sensibility, but by resonance, touch, connection. Their ability to root into any object, place, or person and discover identity, quality, and answers to questions concerning these is part of this symbiotic continuum. Thus Merlin’s shadowy successor, the bard Taliesin, speaks constantly of “becoming” certain objects — a tree, a staff, a stone or a lantern — as well as being able to slip between the cracks of time to predict future events.

The author goes so far as to reweave the connection between poetry and visionary language, something I feel strongly about:

The Spirit of Inspiration

…We see that the role of the poet and the seer were considered as interdisciplinary. Poets were also seers; seers were poets. Merlin, in his earliest incarnation, is both.

In light of this, it is not surprising that the Celtic prophetic tradition, of which Merlin is very much a part, is primarily fueled by the search for poetic inspiration.

Every place a riddle…every riddle a poem…every poem a spirit…every spirit a place….

Come join us for SHIFT at Whitaker Ponds:

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/finder/index.cfm?ShowResults=yes&SearchText=whitaker+ponds

Saturdays at 12 noon, next to the north baseball field.

Dress for cold, wet, and muddy! Woo hoo!

Check out the new page at the top of the sidebar, called “the Best of the College”. If you’ve just started coming here, you may have missed a lot of the foundational writings on mythic cartography. The short list comprises just a sample of articles, poetry, and stories that have appeared here over the past few years.

Why I like Frank Miller’s work - In the following interview excerpt he explains the dominant theme of his work, and how it came about.

On the story of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae:
“I always loved this story. It’s the best story I ever got my hands on. I was a little boy, seven years old, and I saw this clunky old movie from 20th Century Fox called The 300 Spartans. I was sitting next to my brother Steve, who was two years older than I was, so we were seven and nine and too cool to sit with our parents, so our parents were in the row behind us. Towards the end of this thing, I went, ‘Steve, are the good guys gonna lose?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, ask Dad!’ So I leaned back and said, ‘Dad, are the good guys gonna die?’ ‘I’m afraid so, son.’ I went and sat down and watched the end of the movie and the course of my creative life changed, because all of a sudden heroes weren’t guys getting medals at the end of Star Wars. They weren’t Harry Potter getting cheered by his goddamned classmates. They were people who did the right thing, and damn the consequences. Ever since then, heroic sacrifice has been a theme of my work.”

This recurring theme of anachronistic ‘heroic sacrifice’ really moves me, and feels quite wild and grounding. In a world where relatives must die to feed each other…humans die to feed the soil, salmon die to feed humans, mosquitos die to feed small birds, and they die to feed larger birds, and foxes, and bobcats, and round and round…

In this world, the idea that a hero can succeed by dying, without involving some kind of ideological martyrdom, but just as an act of real protection, sacrifice, or offering of the self to a larger related whole…this idea feels really powerful to me.

This idea takes the “Disney” out of wild, natural relationships, the artificial “lynx vs. rabbit” in the nature video, where the modern viewer roots for the prey. The prey won’t lie down for the predator, it must keep the predator at top form by trying its best to flee, but no-one gets out of this world alive…what better death than feeding life? Awash in the fugue of the doping endorphin rush that occurs as the rabbit lies dying in the jaws of the lynx, it hasn’t failed, it has made the world live for the first time, all over again.

Recently three different cultural phenomena collided together for me: introduction to a movie called the Secret, a rewatching of the vaguely dissatisfying What the Bleep Do We Know, and a dissatisfying yet intelligent critique of both of those movies by a fellow blogger.

If you don’t know about the Secret, you should check out a run down, and perhaps even a critique or two. It basically repackages the Law of Attraction, the notion that “we create our own realities - what we think about, we call to us”. Julian Walker lucidly puts this idea in its place…especially in its guise as the wish-fulfillment engine for a hungry new age consumer. I have similar complaints for the message of What the Bleep Do We know. The message of both movies seems especially designed for the narcissistic materialism of the middle class american consumer.

As he continued his critique, I became aware of a common yet tiring notion receiving re-packaging as “evolved” thinking. To support his critique of the Secret, Walker refers to buddhist philosopher Ken Wilbur’s idea of the “pre/trans fallacy“. Wilbur basically asks us not to see all non-rational activity as the same…that non-rational activity may differ into two types: the pre-rational, and the trans-rational. The pre-rational includes what I’d consider “explaining something away”, rather than actually investigating and explaining it, and confusing causation with correlation. Trans-rational then refers to states of awareness where the observer receives information that we might call “mystical”: metaphorical, layered, emotionally intense, and too complex for the rational state. The problem enters in when thinkers want to ascribe some evolutionary process from pre-rational, to rational, then to trans-rational, especially mapped out onto the last 10,000 years or so. Walker describes Wilbur’s stages from pre-rational to trans-rational as “archaic, magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic and integral.”

Archaic (Uh-oh…a synonym for ‘primitive’…)? Magic? Mythic? All, according to Wilbur, fall in the pre-rational category, and all provide the foundation to the spiritual traditions of indigenous cultures the world over, traditions that operated in magnificent harmony with human and other-than-human relations and communities. I count it one thing to chalk up assumptions, “explaining away”, and unreflected habits as pre-rational. But to refer to the pre-rational as archaic, magical, and mythic, clearly indicts those who benefit from such fields of inquiry and relationships to the world. It gets worse.

Walker writes: “…pluralistic and integral are trans or after ‘rational’, yes? New Age spirituality is in part predicated on the emergence of a pluralistic, transrational worldview that can appreciate other cultures and is interested in an embrace of multiple perspectives.”

Essentially this sounds to me like an ethic of the cosmopolitan urban environment, or empire. Pluralistic? As if one people’s/tribe’s/extended-family’s spiritual experience didn’t suffice, requiring them to constantly hunt for more and more. Perhaps only the rootless and the lost hunt for pluralism and ‘integral’ philosophy (meaning a weaving together of the countless diversity of traditions that emerged from different environments? Why?).

Walker continues: “Well think of it this way: at the rational level of development we realize that magical ideas about reality (i can make it rain by chanting a special prayer for example ) and mythic ideas about reality (jesus was born of a virgin for example) are not literal truths. They may have some metaphorical value, but they are not accurate reflections of reality. Period. Rational people agree on this fact, it’s part of the definition.”

Well, we’ve found the kernel here I think. I heartily support reason, and critical thinking. When someone starts planting a flag down where they’ve decided they’ve found the center of the universe for all “rational” people, I start to wonder about their need for such a thing. A pluralistic, integrative, all-consuming, one-size-fits-all, grand-unified-theory-for-everyone? Sounds a lot like the evangelical mood of civilization. Where animism stays contextual, observant, relational, respect-based, modern rationalism seeks fixed, reliable models of realties. Much of Martin Prechtel’s writing goes to demonstrate the decidedly non-metaphorical side of indigenous Myth…it has weighty reality. Walker’s ‘literal truths’ can only then refer to the truth of ‘literate’ cultures, the truth of the word on the page. Experiential truth flows in an entirely different direction. I would say that we could describe the statement ‘jesus was born of a virgin’ as exactly a literal truth, since we read about it in the bible. Perhaps some one also had experiential ‘truth’ of this, at the time.

If all ‘rational people’ disagree with animists who have observed phenomena that they find life-creating, powerful, and quite tangible (as in, receiving rain by chanting a special prayer request to the cloud family), then…well…where do we go now? I guess I never worried about my own status as rational or non-rational. I care about: do I ask questions? Do I seek to uncover my biases? Do the results of my inquiry spur me on to new questions…if not, have I reached a false sense of “knowledge”, or have I discovered a blindspot? Does my inquiry create more life for me, my family, my landbase? How does it improve my relationships?

More and more, the simple activity of a village philosopher seems to me far more “rational” than the modern rationalist’s, but what do I know?

I just keep asking questions, and dreaming, and watching the world go by, and smiling at the Sun licking the spring growth into life, like a golden-tongued momma cat…and hear the whole green world purr, and purr…

The diversity of ways to model the compass has no end, as the painter Mark Ryden shows…

Can you start peeling the riddle apart?

Come join us for SHIFT at Whitaker Ponds:

http://www.portlandonline.com/parks/finder/index.cfm?ShowResults=yes&SearchText=whitaker+ponds

Saturdays at 12 noon, next to the north baseball field.

Dress for cold, wet, and muddy! Woo hoo!

Mom-

i know you leave issues of economic/political collapse mostly to me and the cadre, but i ran across a very digestible and relevant online powerpoint summary of US collapse issues, from the point-of-view of a russian who lived through the Soviet collapse! He says some awesome, inspiring, emboldening, sobering things, that make me think of us on the right track (even more than I knew), and make me think about ways in which we can prepare even better. I really recommend you read it.

http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=23259

I of course visited Russian in the middle of its 12-year collapse, in Spring of 1993, and witnessed first hand the attitudes and lifestyles of the people dealing with the insanity of “free market reforms” as a solution to a political and economic crash. Maybe that stuck with me more than I realized at the time - I always used to think about it as my trip to the Third World, but once upon a time, not too long before I came, Russian belonged solidly to the First World. Their very capacity to create boondoggles indicated the amount of resources they had to throw around.

When I came to Khabarovsk, I saw a city slowly melting into the Earth, filled with verdant and wild abandoned lots, monumentally buckling pavement, and the bustle of people and public transportation (such a paradox! but not - crash will look exactly like that, crash looks exactly like that). Reading Orlov’s powerpoint presentation, and thinking back on the beautiful postcard photos of a perfectly coiffed Khabarovsk, I realized that it may indeed have looked like that a mere 5 or 10 years before I arrived. I always thought I had seen the true face of Khabarovsk, rather than the “false” ones promoted by the Intourist marketers in postcards and advertisement, but now I think I only saw the inevitable face, one that will surely emerge again as demand drives our finite fuel supplies out of practical reach.

See TrackersNW for more. Don’t forget to check out his workshop this weekend at TryonLife Farm.

Collegiates will help out at the Jon Young workshop this weekend instead! We encourage you to attend…the workshop still has space available.

How do we examine, question, discern the ways of the world without breaking it up, compartmentalizing it, severing connection?

We do it the same way every indigenous culture has the world over…we use a model of the world that always relates the part to the whole, that makes them inseparable.

Every culture of place has some way of delineating and relating to the compass directions. Every people has experienced the sun rising in the east, standing high in the south, setting in the west, and the stars spinning around the axis of the north. Every culture, as humans, has a way of modeling these phenomena.

Some models we call “the Medicine Wheel”, some we call “the Mayan Calendar”, others “the Four Directions”, others “the Seven Directions”. If you look deeply, you will find the way any particular animist culture related to the spinning, cyclical world. A world that spins on cycles of day, month, year, and longer.

I call the set of these models, the class of descriptions of the directional phenomena, “the Wise Compass”, because each model does far more than simply point out directions. It hangs principles of wisdom on its axes. The models help the human bodymind, an organism that evolved under the influence of these phenomena, align itself in tune with the way the world works.

I’ve tried writing about this once before, because in understanding the compass you cannot avoid learning about center.

The story of the coyote that I told then (and which I ask you to read before continuing) leads me to where I need to go next. A model of the horizon directions, a Wise Compass, like any good model, should predict the future, should help us see around corners, should illuminate the once-invisible.

A case in point.

If, as Coyote seemed to say, Taoists belong to the animistic world, and watch the wild world like any other indigenous bodymind, then Taoist wisdom should translate into real-world uses.

Let’s rewind a little.

As I mentioned in SHIFT: The Return to Center, it all begins with a horizon circle.

Then, according to our particular tradition, we delineate directions.

We’ve now created the animist’s mental razor. We can look at the entire universe through this lens, safely and wholly. If you look in Tom Brown, Jr.’s the Science and Art of Tracking, you’ll see an excellent example of this at work in his footmaps. How it surprised me to see the cross-hairs of the compass appear there!

This tool has so many profound implications. It protects our minds from many errors of reductivism, of presumptions of objectivity, and more. Because if we discern a single part of it…

We will never forget that it fits into a whole, a seamless entirety. Whether a species, a member of a tribe, a celestial phenomena, or anything, it always exists in relationship to the whole, it cannot exist without the whole. In fact, implicit in this tool we find that, as an observer, we cannot seperate ourselves from our observations.

What else can this model tell us?

In the beginning it will help us with the most basic of understandings, as we rewild ourselves. For example, what would you say, if I asked you to tell me the hottest time of day, and I put it on a 24 hour clockface?

You might say noon (and many urban folks seem to say that), but if you really reflected, you realize that the hottest and laziest time of day falls in the after-noon, in the hours before sunset. Yes, the sun’s rays have the most intense power at noon, but the heat continues to build as the day wears on. Graphing it on the clockface as reaching out from the horizon line to the center, with coolest farthest out, and hottest reaching to the center of the clock, it might look like this.

What about the coldest time of day? Again, some might say “midnight”, but if you’ve ever shivered in your tent in the wee hours of morning, having spent the first half of the night snug as a bug, but now begging for the first frigid rays of dawn to come up and spare you, then you know without a doubt that the coldest time happens right before sunrise. And it might look like this.

Now, if I represented the sunrise as a white circle in the East, and the sunset as a black circle in the West, and I combined both heat and cold into one clockface compass…

Look familiar?

Now you see what Coyote told me that snowy day, something that I’d never heard explained nor read anywhere else (though recently I’ve discovered a celestial interpretation of the yin-yang symbol). Coyote sunk into my bones the understanding that this cycle reflects the powers of the day, the seasons, and beyond. This model allowed me to fit together fragmented experiences into a whole understanding.

Coyote showed me the first two-directional Wise Compass that I’d ever seen.

Natural Way: Indigenous Voices is Honored to Present
Bradford Keeney, PhD

Bradford Keeney is accepted as an elder shaman and spiritual teacher in numerous cultures throughout the world, including the Japanese tradition of seiki jutsu, the Guarani Indians of lower basin Amazonia, the Zulu sangoma community, the elder Shakers of St. Vincent, diverse folk healers of Brazil, and the Balians of Bali, among others.

Check out the Earth and Spirit Council’s website for more info, and to sign up for the workshop that weekend.

Or download the flyer.

The cartography gang plans to go cut willows for baskets out on the Columbia river this Saturday (the end of willow cutting season has arrived! now or never!)…so we’ll have no SHIFT at Whitaker Ponds, but rather out on the river. If you want to join us, contact Willem by Friday evening 8pm.