Category: Spirituality / shamans / teachers

What nurtures

Katharine Asals1 Comment

Early in the summer I was with friends at their cottage, and we’d been talking about the element of EARTH.

It’s the element I’m supposed to be engaging with this year, in the round the wheel / elements & directions / shamanic cycle work I’ve been doing, one year at a time. The first year was the basic foundation, the next year was the direction of the East / the element of Fire / and the Joy Child. This year is the year of the West / of Earth / of Stone People / and of the Nurturing Parent.

And frankly, it’s been a bit of a challenge. Like, Fire, I get it, am totally fascinated by if somewhat afraid of…

Water I love love love and could be in all day long …

But Earth? What the heck is Earth about??? How do you immerse yourself in / fall in love with / be fascinated by Earth? It seems so… kind of… inert.

One of the other shamanic teachers I used to have focused a lot on the direction of the West as the place of Dreams and the place of Death. And this year of connecting with the West and the Earth started with the death of the cat, so that felt rather on-brand.

But I figured surely there must be a whole bunch more positive stuff to pay attention to, and presumably learn from, I just don’t really get it yet…

The earth builds us, cell by cell. Earth is the ground beneath our feet and the soil into which we plunge our hands. This is our physicality and our grounding.

~ Manda Scott

Anyways, there up at the cottage early in the summer, my friend, a Virgo (an Earth sign) wanted me to see the local Mother Tree – the massive old source tree in the forest system near their place –

Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest. They are the glue that holds the forest together. Through their huge photosynthetic capacity, they provide food for the whole soil web of life. They keep carbon in the soil and aboveground, and they keep the water flowing.

~ Suzanne Simard

Thinking about Mother Trees reminded me that the other concept bundled into our project of connecting to the West, and to Earth, is the concept of the Nurturing Parent. And I started thinking about Earth – the planet and the soil and the capacity for everything to grow, as being a place of nourishment, of nurturance.

Earth represents the gift of life. Earth refers to the body of the planet Earth, the human body and Nature herself. It refers to what we make of it: our health, wealth, security, grounding, solidity, and stability.

~ The Four Winds

Later in the summer I was out in BC where nature is just off the charts, and we were in this place called Cathedral Grove, where they helpfully point out for you things like “nurse logs”.

When a tree falls to the ground, we may see only its death, but this death is the beginning of new life and the natural cycle of a forest…”

Further West, out in Tofino, as far West as you can go, where you sit and stare at the vast power of the Pacific Ocean, one of my BC friends gave me a little Earth gift to help me along my voyage…

On the back of the card, it says:

Earth Spirit represents the all-encompassing circles of life, the end of one journey is the beginning of the next. Life is a series of many infinite circular experiences – before, during, and after your existence.

~ Roy Henry Vickers & Lizzie Snow

Bit by bit the whole thing was starting to come together for me – the sense of death as being within the cycle of life in a very organic way, and of the element of Earth as being the rich and nourishing container for the movement through these cycles.

Still later in the summer I was up near Owen Sound (yes, I did make a point of jumping on every chance that appeared to get out of town and enjoy summertime and nature and friends I don’t see often enough…) and I was staying in a little cabin by the river. Each morning I’d get up early with the sunrise and walk down to river, my bare feet delighting in the cold dewy grass of early morning and the soft tender nurturing feeling of grass and earth underneath my feet.

Where I live is all concrete with flourishes of steel, so neither earth nor grass nor even natural stones are easily found, and the more organic rhythms of growth and decay are hard to remember amongst the domineering rhythm of a city ever hungry to keep building infrastructure …

I thought of my first night of initiation into this year, and of the tree down by our rather urban beach that seemed to reach and reach down down down into the Earth to get just enough nutrition from which to eek out a life –

How vivid a contrast between the lives of all these trees in different soils, different environments, different levels / qualities of nourishment. The hard scrabble tree barely surviving versus the towering giants of BC, or even a massive Mother Tree in a proper forest in rural Québec. What a strong image of what Nurturing is and does.

Thank goodness for the friends who enabled the many summer adventures out in these variations on Canadian natural splendour, where it was a whole lot easier to really connect with Earth, and with this concept of Nurturance while being out exploring nature, and talking to my really very knowledgeable and, ahem, very very nurturing friends…

…the Earth element symbolizes the link to our collective past, our connection to the planet, and our inescapable bond with every life form. The Earth element nurtures, it protects. The Earth element is the womb from which all life comes. From plants, to plankton, to eagles, to grasshoppers, all life began in the Earth and in caves, where life was protected from the sun’s radiation and life forms began to evolve and emerge.

~ Omar Rosales

And you, Dear Reader? What nurtures you?

Some local drama

Katharine Asals8 Comments

Over the holidays some dear friends who have moved out to BC were here at mine for a couple of days, and we did a thing which is becoming tradition for us – an “unravel your year” exercise, where you look at the past year and do your best to remember deeply what each month was about, to better envision what you would like to achieve or experience in the year ahead.

For all three of us, one of the big highlights was the visit I made out to their new home on Vancouver Island. For me, the one doing the traveling, it started with a gorgeous flight out over the Rockies –

The flight began in the dark of early morning, but as we flew west the sun rose in the east faster than we flew, giving the sensation of being chased across the earth by the sun.

Perhaps I was feeling especially aware of the turning of the earth as I’d done an exercise for my shamanic “course” some weeks earlier. The course itself is really a yearly engagement with the directions – east, west, south, north. This summer I moved from doing a year in the east – the place of fire, sunrise, and new beginnings – to the west. The west is about sunset, earth, stones, dreaming and death. And as part of engaging with the west, one exercise is to try and spend an entire night out sitting on the earth, seeing the sun go down and then come up again in the morning, sensing the turning of the planet.

Where I live is very urban, so I figured I could sit in our local park, amongst the trees by the beach. But then as the evening played out, groups of guys with cases of beers and boomboxes blaring reggaeton started to show up – it was after all a beautiful Friday evening in summertime – and by the time the sun went down I was too distracted and went home and sat instead on my balcony, heading back to the beach before sunrise to see how much I could feel into the experience. 

As the sun rose, I sat by this tree who seems to reach down into the earth apparently getting just enough nutrients to make a life.

So all of this leaning into feeling close to the earth was still with me while flying west – thinking of the west and the earth while flying west over the earth…

And then being in BC for a week, well… BC is just one of the most gorgeous places on the planet.

So very gorgeous that my friends attempts to try to convince me to move out there stayed with me quite powerfully upon my return to my neighbourhood of condo towers and the never-ending construction of more and more condo towers.

But there are things here that keep me here. 

There is the ongoing graffiti art project I’ve got happening here which is still a lot of fun, even in the ways that it engages with the worst of this area in all of its hideous highway underpasses and traffic jams –

And then, in the most bizarre juxtaposition, just meters away from the ugliness of the traffic, are all the pleasures of life by the lake –

And part of life by the lake for the last few years has been the delightful convenience of the New Year’s fireworks being set off from a barge on the water, meaning all we need to do is stumble down our stairwell a few minutes before midnight to revel in not only the spectacular flashes and bangs, but also the throngs of the young people of this city.

Happy New Year !!!

Lens Artists Challenge – Dramatic

Dark Waters

Katharine Asals2 Comments

Some weeks ago, on a still bright evening, I was out at the waterfront with a friend, and a couple of women with youngish kids full of beans were just behind us as we leaned out to get a closer look at the water. There is no tall guardrail or anything at the lip of the boardwalk – quite easy to fall in, really, if you aren’t paying attention – so when one of the kids came up closer beside us for a good lean over the water, his mom snapped at him to step back, saying to us, “dark waters – those are dark waters”.

So true! I remember the light blue of the water at Cayo Coco, Cuba – you know that Caribbean thing with the impossible white of the beaches and then the transparent turquoise of the water, and it’s so clear you can see pretty multi-coloured fish from a distance, gorgeous and brilliant, swimming around…

No, no – up here it’s the great lakes, the water is deep and very dark, and we’re on the edge of a harbour where recently a fisherman pulled up a muskie he didn’t expect to find.

Just walking along the waterfront, you can see the flicker of a shiny belly sometimes. Right now most of the geese have left, but there’s still a few mallard ducks and a number of cormorants who dive and sometimes will suddenly appear on the surface after a long deep search, but there are other obviously scaled bellies that will flicker up above the surface for a moment… mysterious large prehistoric looking fish.

I’ve been thinking a lot about elements lately, as I recently signed up for a seminar about “energy medicine”. It’s something I’ve checked out a bit in the past and loved, but then in the chaos and sweep of other life things got distracted from. But the last few years I’ve had this little health thingy developing that has been demanding some attention, and I have to admit, a visit to the doctor sometimes seems to cause more problems than it solves, so checking out what else is out there, available, and potentially helpful strikes me as worthwhile.

Just this week someone posted this quite spectacular paragraph from Virginia Woolf about the, ahem, “journey” into dark waters health issues can take us on –

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confused his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently force to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

~ Virgina Woolf

So, since I seem to have found myself with a need to learn more – or maybe it’s a need to learn something different – about how to take care of my health, I’d signed up for this workshop. It’s stuff that borrows a lot from Chinese Medicine – meridians and such – but has been kind of synthesized and reshaped by some California white women types who have turned it into a bit of their own thing.

And gosh, Saturday morning of the webinar, just doing some of their very simple exercises was feeling so awesome, and they are little things that are so easily integrated into anything else you might be into – yoga or dance or whatever – and I was feeling better minute by minute, and was so excited to be reminded of how much I enjoy this practice, when the webinar went to lunch break, and some music was put on for the break period –

Did you hit play there? Did you check out the level of insipid swill?

If so, I’m taking a gander you’ll understand how every cynical bone in my body was triggered into overdrive, that all the goodwill and trust I’d been feeling towards this teaching retreated, the faint hint of bile could be felt in the back of my throat in reaction to the sacharine insipidity, the kind of tune you’d expect to hear on Romper Room or Mr Rogers.

Okay, okay, maybe I’m being harsh, but you know, I came up on tunes like this –

And even now the kind of thing I listen to is better reflected by a local track I can’t get enough of – that speaks to me partly cause it feels like it represents the kids in the city where I live (so much talent, so much class), and then also cause the video is shot just around the corner from our building, just down Cherry St, with a bunch of epic shots in the parking lot where the grain towers are, and you can see the condos across from us in the background…

Both White Riot and 24 are such full-bodied tracks – different schools of music, different cultural references, but they are genuine and rockin’ and don’t have an insipid bone in their bodies.

Anyways, I’d had such a visceral reaction to the musical soundtrack from this workshop that I played it for a friend when she was over. “Oh! The worst of America!” she gasped. So, okay, maybe not quite America, all things considered, but perhaps some of the worst of California.

Werner Herzog – a highly original artist / human in both his films and in his person – has got to be the best at taking the piss out of all things California (where he lives!) –

Of course, California is also where some of humanity’s most astonishing stupidities started, like the hippie movement, New Age babble, stretch limos, pyramid energy, plastic surgery, yoga classes for children, vitamins and marijuana smoking… There are a lot of well-educated people doing very silly things in Los Angeles, like a man in my neighbourhood who one day casually mentioned his cat was in some sort of a frenzy, so he called the cat psychic. He put the receiver to his pet’s ear and for $200 the animal’s problems were solved. 

~ Werner Herzog

Okay, personally I adore both yoga and marijuana (neither of which were invented in California) and find hippies and New Age babble to be pretty full of potential, but given the degree of the woo people can take things to, yes, I feel the same derisory snorts at the story of the pet’s psychic.

But here’s the thing – I do feel a distinct positive gain from doing the “energy medicine” stuff these California ladies are teaching.

So is it just – “take what you like and leave the rest”?

Art installation by Elwood Jimmy

Cause I’m not sure if maybe I feel another question poking out of the corners of my consciousness as well, and I think that is :

How much change, or which change, is necessary to heal what is out of balance?

How deep and how far reaching does the change need to be?

Art installation by Elwood Jimmy