So you want to be……

So you want to be a shaman…
So you want to be a witch 
a bruja
a medicine woman
a wise woman
a healer . . . . .
Sit down outdoors with your spine straight and your shoulders back.
Open your chest and clear your throat.
Speak from the simple silent soul place deep in your belly.
Speak to the earth
to the sky
to the wild ones and
to the world.
Speak to the ancestors and say :
Make me a witch
a bruja
a medicine woman
a wise woman
a healer . . . . .
Pull out one hair from your head,
one small symbolic bit of self
lay it on the ground and say Good Bye.
Don’t look back.
Ride the wildest roller coasters
sled down hills that are a little to steep
a little to fast
a little to icy.
Learn to breath when you’re frightened,
sing when you’re tired,
laugh through tears and
comfort a loved one when there are no answers.
Learn to laugh loud and change gears on a steep hill without rolling back.
Get a good car and sensible shoes.
Grow your hair long, brush it often and
bathe in honey, flower petals and sweet oil.
These are essential skills because
Spirit will strip you of pride
so that you may know power.
Spirit will strip you of pity
so that you may reach into any hole,
no matter how deep,
and help another to begin climbing.
Spirit will lead you,
eyes open and hair flying
head long into the stone wall
of your own foolishness and
knock loose the broken shards
of your old self
so that they rattle around in your skull
go liquid and settle in the base of your brain
to drip down through your body
flow out your feet
and fertilize flowers on the footpath.
Spirit will drop you into the lap of trouble
with only one tool in your pocket
And your wisdom will be judged by how long you search
everywhere but there
for just the right cure.
Spirit will furnish you with a sticky page photo album
complete with perfect pictures of every scabby knee,
every broken heart,
every callous word,
every wasted moment,
and it will fly through the pages and flash by your face
like an old silent movie
whenever you are about to screw up through arrogance.
Bind it in your favorite color.
Place it with your Holy Books.
Learn to think while you are falling
and believe in Magick strong enough
to turn the rock surface
hurtling toward you to cool water.
Close your eyes,
point your toes,
raise your arms,
straighten your spine,
hit the water clean as an arrow shot
and remember that sometimes the only difference
between falling and flying is the way you land.
So, you want to be a witch
a bruja
a medicine woman
a wise woman
a healer . . . . .
Learn to recognize the enemy,
sleep sitting up,
face everything,
walk away from anything,
pee in the woods,
efficiently pack a suitcase and
sing a Sacred Self song
Learn to be helpless and helpful
fulfilled and a walking void
a midwife and
a funeral director
and then,
you may begin . . . . .
~ Mary Standing Otter

“Outside of its…

“Outside of its gates of rot,
is the door to your ancestral heart
In your inner ear, deep within,
Hear the whispers of ancestral souls, the voices of people of old
They are whispering to those who chose not to hear
Whispering to those who choose to distance themselves
from the source of the whisper
deep within their own inner ear
Still the murmuring goes on,
with the will to survive,
the will to survive. There it is!
There it is- Did you hear?
~From the “perfection’ of the Western concept of Christianity cannot separate me. Nothing can separate me from the sacred voices of the first garden of my ancestors. “For I have spent my life gazing at it’s will to survive”

From his book The Cry of the Huna by Moke Kupihea

The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip . . .

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

In Europe there is grown widely a large beet they call the mangel-wurzel. Perhaps it is mangel-wurzelthat we see in Rasputin. Certainly there is mangel-wurzel in the music of Wagner, although it is another composer whose name begins, B-e-e-t—.

Of course, there are white beets, beets that ooze sugar water instead of blood, but it is the red beet with which we are concerned; the variety that blushes and swells like a hemorrhoid, a hemorrhoid for which there is no cure. (Actually, there is one remedy: commission a potter to make you a ceramic asshole—and when you aren’t sitting on it, you can use it as a bowl for borscht.)

An old Ukranian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”

That is a risk we have to take.

~Tom Robbins

The flower that lives above the clouds

Long Long ago when the flowers first awoke to life on dear Mother Earth, each got to choose the color of it’s petals and live wherever it chose.

          “I will cover the ground and make the bare soil happy with bright green blades” Cried the Grass

“I will live in the fields and by Roadsides” laughed the Daisy.

“I too” Echooed the buttercup, the cornflower, the poppy and the clover.

“Oh give me the ponds and the lakes” the water lilly called

“and let us have the streams and the marshes” begged the Irises & Cowslips

“We love the shaded woodland spots near our friends the ferns”lisped the shy forget-me-nots and violets

“And we wish to be loved within the gardens” declared the Roes, and the pansies.

“I love the warm dry sun, So I will go to the sandy desert” Called out the cactus.

Soon all places within mother nature had been filled with the beauty and medicine of the flowers and herbs except the bare ridges of the high Mountains. For no plants wished to venture to such cold and desolate places. “there is not enough warmth, there is not enough food, it is so bare and chilly” They all decided “ let the gray moss go and cover the rocks”

The gray moss did not like this idea “ How can I live without moisture, warmth or nourishment? Surely the bleak places of the mountains must do without flowers. How foolish it would be to try and make the ragged mountain tops lovely?”

But the Gray moss had not yet chosen a place to live and everything else was taken.

So the gray moss climbed over the bare rocks and beyond the places where the forests ceased to grow. All was desolate and silent up there. Up higher and higher he crept until he reached the jagged rocks above the clouds covered in ice and snow. There he stopped short in amazement.

For quietly clinging to the crags and blossoming was a gentle star shaped flower. It was as white as the snow and its heart was soft and yellow. So cold was it atop the mountain the little flower had covered its leaves in soft wool to keep warm and alive despite the bleakness.

“Oh!” Cried the gray moss in surprise. “ Who are you? What are you doing here where there is no warmth, no moisture, no nourishment? We are high above the forests, even higher than the clouds. Did the others make you come here like they have made me?”

The little starry flower nodded in the chill wind “welcome, I am Edelweiss, I came here on my own, quietly. I came because the mountains needed me. A blossom that might brighten this solitude, for there are no flowers up here but me.”

The edelweiss is closer to a star than to the daisy, the buttercup, or the rose.  It holds a special place in the hearts of those who have courage, those who dare to seek it out high above the clouds, where it grows ever gladly. They call it Nobel White- Edelweiss! Love, like Edelweiss, knows self-sacrifice.

A special note: I did not write this story, I merely adapted a version that I found. I have yet to find out who the real author of the story is or if this is just a legend passed down to children. Should you know the original author, please let me know so that i can give proper credit.