Shaman's Grace: Body Without End

Shamanism is a dimension of human experience that can be found in every culture in any age. It can be observed in a variety of forms, ranging from a fundamental spontaneous experience, derivative culturally shared practices, or as veiled motifs of spiritual, medical, artistic, scientific, and psychotherapeutic interventions.

Paradoxically, as shamanism becomes more culturally shared, it may become less authentic—less culturally challenging—and degenerative. Provoked by an experience of everyday life as a sort of “half-truth,” shamanism is a method that focuses on the erroneous belief in a separation of human life from nature. Shamanism focuses specifically on remaining alert to the creatural dimensions of human life that can be overridden by cultural, socio-psychological dimensions of everyday life.

Shamanism is an expression of an enduring wild state to remain alert to the changing conditions of existence and integrate into the natural world that continues to design and express human life across the long run.

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Body Without End

Words are still deeply feather and fire.

The body is without end, extending into every event and into infinities of smallness and largeness, and into the ancestral and the far future.

Every experience—rain on the roof, a passing conversation, a stoplight, a candle’s flame, or the moon outside the window—offers an uncoiling, graced pathway.

And every event offers a waking bell, and speaks in a luminous, sometimes wry, and accessible voice if we will only calm and listen.

You or I, each water droplet, each grain of sand, a star putting on its mask of leaf is a turning in and out of form—a current expressed by an oceanus of infinite reach.

Shaman's Grace

Sunday, April 1, 2012

Body Without End

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