If we always got our way, we wouldn’t be forced to work on a true, radical change, one that runs far deeper than political party or ideology.
When a meteor hit earth 66 million years ago leading to the extinction of the dinosaurs, there were some savvy frogs who survived impact by burrowing underground and staying there until it was safe to reemerge.
Nearly 9 out of every 10 of all frogs alive today are descended from just three lineages that managed to survive this mass extinction event. It was the tree frog who led the way for the global expansion of frog species by exploiting a new ecological niche—trees.
The small tree frog is a “survivor” writ large. Just as survivors of trauma instinctively protect parts of themselves in underground, subconscious realms, the tree frog teaches that perseverance and adaptability are the legacies available to those who do their work in the dark, subconscious realms of body, feeling, memory, and dream.
To be plunged into depths, to feel old pain, to find oneself back in the cavernous spaces of darkness once again may feel hollow and without hope, but shamanism teaches that these are the true halls of power, not the celebrated addresses of white marble artifice.
It is within the subterranean caves of psyche and soul that the sacred rites of remembrance and healing are realized. This process of descent is a collective, as well as an individual, labor.
The old patriarchal dinosaurs of this age, those now strutting about and crowing over their “success,” will soon be extinct. The balance has shifted. This age belongs not to the heights, but the depths. This age belongs not to the sun, but to the moon.
The coming change will not originate in the heavens from a meteor strike or appointments from a high seat of power in Washington DC. No, this change, the coming earthquake of transformation, will come through us in our connection to Gaia, the living and ancient Goddess.
We do not have to yield the political sphere to those who crow and bully and lie, but it is incumbent upon us to engage the world from a different center of gravity than the one we have inherited. True revolution implies that we find a new center around which to orbit.
“The master’s tools will never bring down the master’s house,” the poet Audre Lorde once said. Our best efforts to bring about radical change are hindered from within—by us—due to social norms and habits, surely, but more fundamentally through the symbolic universe we have inherited. We dream the dreams of the oppressors. We traffic in the Empire’s maps of reality.
Where to turn? How to betray an endemic rape culture and undermine our internalized oppressor consciousness?
For me, answers are to be found in meditation on Gaia–mother, teacher, and first prophetess–by applying the spiritual and practical lessons of the natural world to our lives.
I am working on a series, perhaps an experiential class, centering on the lessons of the honeybees, that I hope to announce around Thanksgiving to begin in the New Year.
Until Thanksgiving, however, I will offer $60 sessions for those who are seeking to remember their resilience and recover their power in these darkening days of change and collective transformation.
To make an appointment just hit the “book appointment” button at the bottom of any page on this website, http://gaiashamanism.com/
Together, let us remember our strength and wholeness. Together, let us change the world from within and on Election Day.