Old stuff

Come in and enjoy the fire. The cold is bitter. Isn't it amazing how the end of February and beginning of March have to remind us that it is indeed still winter? So huddle up, grab some blankets and enjoy. This is something old I did for a journal I did in a one hundred level class. It's pretty bare bones but I liked it.

There are two animals I share a very deep and meaningful bond with. Both are my totem animals and their example is what I use to guide my life. First is Owl, which is the totem of my birth. The second is Coyote, the Eternal Teacher and Trickster, and this is the nature of my spirit and the one I most identify with. Both give me guidance in my dreams and in the decisions I make, and the things I do.

Owl is not the solitary creature that is portrayed, but instead one who reveres family. It is one of the darker totems, a harbinger of death and the keeper of secrets and knowledge that should not be common. Despite this I find Owl a close companion and it reflects in the roles I play with my family and friends. Death has never been the scary prospect it is for most people, I have dealt with it as a constant since my father committed suicide when I was only six. I don’t see this as anything more than another stage of life, for physical death is merely that, a loss of one phase, and the start of another. As well I have done, heard, studied, and attempted many things that are not considered normal. Were I to disclose all the things I have done in my life very few would look at me the same, if at all a sane and pleasant person. Yet these things I know, see, and do have created what I am today, a person of compassion and deep feeling, someone who sees the world around me with love and caring. I don’t find the strange or different unappealing; instead these are the things I love. The idiosyncrasies that people may hate in others are the very things I cherish and adore about the people around me. All are welcome in my world and all may come to me no matter the cause and need, for while I know and see the dark, I love the possibility and chance of greatness all things carry.

Coyote is who I am, and who I am is Coyote. I teach, mainly through my own examples but I can teach anyone anything. I have a knack of finding the most important aspects of what must be learned and putting it into a form the person can use, and most times I do this without seeming the teacher. As soon as someone feels you are trying to teach them something an attitude of master to student must be attained, a state where one is seen as greater than the other. Most chaff under this ideal and this is where I thrive. Knowledge does not make someone better, and I recognize this, and while I personally revere and place great respect within those I wish to learn from, I feel no need to be seen as greater merely because I can teach. It is a part of the trick and the beauty that is Coyote. Coyote knows the best student doesn’t intend to learn but must come to the knowledge by themselves. They must own that lesson and live through it for it truly to be of any importance, and as such Coyote never gives anything without a price in the knowledge. That price is usually nothing more than humility, but in that humility most lessons are learned.

By my own connection with these animals I recognize the importance of all things, and the birth of my second daughter shows that even with that I have to learn some things as well. Before she was born, where I lived I had pigeons and robins that roosted and lived in the eaves and trees around my house. I loved waking up to the trilling and cooing of these birds, and looked forward to it even through I was working a job that had me up until four in the morning. After a few years, the crow population in downtown Regina exploded as they migrated due to the avian disease that was killing them. And these were big crows, the kind that don’t give two shakes about the other birds, in fact I watched as several scared off my robins and pigeons. At times I was so annoyed at their intrusion and their loud braying calls I considered even breaking the law by bringing out my paintball gun and shooting the ones in my neighborhood. They’re smart birds, if enough of them died, they’d stay away. I never did, mostly because I take any firearm usage very seriously. A few years later my second daughter was on her way, and I had a series of dreams about her, and in them they revealed her totem to be Crow. It made me think of those that moved into my neighborhood and why and I gained a new perspective because of my newfound adoration of this very lively and incredibly bright animal. And my little girl is as bright and loud, and voracious an eater, as any crow out there.