I travelled to Kari Kari to dance with the storm.
At the time, I wanted to break an unhealthy connection I felt caught within and to free myself from its grasp.
On a bleak winter's day, as low clouds swept across the sky, I walked through the forest beneath the dark vaulted cliffs of the Kari Kari valley and emerged onto the wind-swept black sands of the West Coast. This coast has always been a place of power for me, and nowhere is her presence more fierce than in the depths of winter.
Seeking counsel from the land itself, I drew an inward-turning spiral in the sand. As I traced its form, I gathered the darkness pressing upon me, not to resist it, but to contain it, amplify it, and transform it. Then I stepped into the centre of the circle and faced the sea.
Breathing deeply of the biting southerly wind, I kissed Moana and called upon Tangaroa. Slowly I began to spin.
At first I sensed only vague currents moving around me, half-imagined forces gathering at the edge of awareness. As I surrendered to the rhythm, they seemed to draw closer, swirling in wild gyres around my body. The wind rose. I spun with it. What had first felt hostile and chaotic gradually merged with the movement itself until I could no longer distinguish between the storm and the dance.
Then I saw her.
I dropped to my knees so that the animal, at least that is what I assumed she was, could see that I meant no harm.
She stood motionless upon a sand hill, watching me.
At first glance she appeared to be a white wolf. Yet I found myself suspended between two worlds, glancing around in search of some ordinary explanation. Perhaps someone was nearby. Perhaps she was a dog that had wandered ahead of its owner. But the beach was empty.
I whistled softly and patted my knees.
In response she released a long howl that froze me where I knelt. A surge of electricity rushed through my body. Something about the sound struck at the foundations of my rational mind and filled me with the unmistakable feeling that I was participating in an encounter beyond my understanding.
Slowly she approached.
She moved in halting circles, her mournful baying punctuated by strange guttural cries. Moments of fear flashed through me. I imagined her lunging forward, fangs bared, tearing at my throat. Yet I remained where I was, breathing deeply and trusting that she would come to me in the spirit in which I received her.
She stopped just beyond my reach.
I gazed into her luminous yellow eyes and marvelled at her beauty, spellbound and overwhelmed by the desire to touch her.
She reached forward and gently kissed my hand.
Then, moving away, she began to circle me, howling with the wind and joining the dance. Her movements were no longer challenging but seemed to be of a protective nature, head turning, watching unseen movements in the air around me, engaging with forces I could not see.
I turned towards the ocean and felt a wild, uncontainable force swelling up within me, rising from somewhere beyond thought. It felt as though the storm itself had become a song and that I was being invited into it.
With a final silent glance, she left me kneeling at the edge of the ocean, full of wonder, gazing out to sea.
Exerpts On wolfsymbolism:
After telling this story to a friend who shares my interest in mytholgy, shamanism, and trance, he suggested that I investigate wolf symbolism. Having had no previous knowledge of Wolf Mythology prior to my encounter, I was facinated to descover correlations between my experience and the wolf myths and symbolism of different cultural traditions:
Cherokee tradition gives meaning to each animal guide, and then further defines their relationship through their colour. The wolf is considered to be the highest spiritual teacher in the kingdom, even above the hawk and eagle. Each colour of the wolf brings a different lesson or knowledge. In my traditions, the white wolf is a phantom beast, it lives between realities, two worlds, two planes at the same time. It comes to teach the lessons of balance, of bridging the physical world with the spiritual world, and how we can cross the planes of existence to learn and share knowledge with our higher self and with the unseen teachers and guides
The wolf appears in many legends as a messenger, a great long distance traveller and a guide for anyone seeking the spirit world. To Native Americans, the wolf is a powerful spiritual symbol. They were moved by his howling, which they sometimes regarded as talking with the spirit world. Wolves are considered to be teachers or pathfinders. The milky way was the wolf's trail-the route to heaven. In time, the wolf also became associated among the great natural forces with the clouds. Wolf medicine is very ancient and born of living experience. Wolf will look deep into your heart and share the greatest of knowledge, but will demand full participation, and absolute sincerity. When Wolf has walked by you, the very presence of the wolf will rekindle old memories within your soul. Wolf is the Grand teacher. Wolf is the sage, who after many winters upon the sacred path and seeking the ways of wisdom, returns to share knowledge. When the Wolf walks by you - you will remember.
The Wolf - Ancestral Guardian & Power Spirit
The wolf mysteries throughout Europe are very old. Their central theme would revolve around the symbolic death of the initiate and a subsequent rebirth. This re-birth took place after a shamanic journey to the Underworld to commune with its Master and Mistress.
The shamanic journey or 'wolf trance' involved moulding and releasing the shaman's energy field or hamingia . This would allow for the etheric shield to form into a wolf. This would then carry the shaman's consciousness to the Underworld. In the Underworld a shaman would commune with the animal soul that lies hidden, deep within the levels of the subconcious.
Here again we have the association of wolf with death. But this is once more symbolic of a cleansing and transition in order to undergo a spiritual re-birth. Through this transformation knowledge and understanding comes.
At the heart of Celtic Shamanism, the main goal was to take on the shape of a particular animal in order to gain knowledge or instructions for a particular need, such as healing. Many animals were invoked and among them was of course the wolf. The wolf would often be called upon for guidance in another plain and also for protection as well as knowledge.
With proper development of the above the wolf will guide you to knowledge and understanding.
In order to gain this knowledge and understanding we have to journey to our own personal underworld. Here we learn our weaknesses and our inner darkness. From then we journey with our wolf as guide, guardian and companion into the light of knowledge and understanding. With this comes the development of our spirit.
The wolf stimulates all levels of consciousness. Stirs our spirit to begin the quest and awakens within us the call of the unknown - the call of the wild.
THE REENCHANTMENT OF ART by Suzi Gablik Page 42:
One of the peculiar developments in our western world is that we are losing our sense of the divine side of life, of the power of imagination, myth, dream and vision. The particular structure of modern consciousness, centered in a rationalizing, abstracting, and controlling ego, determines the world we live in and how we perceive and understand it; without the magical sense of perception, we do not live in a magical world. We no longer have the ability to shift mindsets and thus to perceive other realities - to move between the worlds, as ancient shamans did. Ritual signals that something more is going on than meets the eye - something sacred.
In our culture it is no easy task to accept the validity of experiences that are called "visionary." The modern personality is much more respectful of the rational aspects of the psyche. We have no prescribed way to do the vision quest, no ceremonies for meeting the gods in the magic circle; the faculties with which we might have joined them have atrophied. Those who want to learn to enter the "Dreamtime" today in order to initiate healing have to find ways of effecting a release of archetypal memory that predates the loss of our integration with nature. But for this, we have to get rid of our arrogant attitude toward the magical, mythological and feminine modes that are unacceptable to rational patriarchal consciousness, which believes only in surface reality. These other models of reality - vision outside of the ego's control, vision rooted in the soul, were left behind by the rational and scientific logic of the enlightenment, and need to be reclaimed by our culture. The principle function of the shaman is magical healing and soul-retrieval; soul loss, once regarded as the gravest of all illnesses, is never mentioned in western medical books.
The Reenchantment of Art Suzi Gablik Pg 46
Every culture lives by myth, according to Jung - one myth or another. Mechanistic vision is the cheerless, clockwork way we have been conditioned to see the world through the myth of science, as a "single-tracked" universe. Since the enlightenment our view of what is real has been organised around the hegemony of a technological and materialistic world view, which has eliminated from it's map of reality any means through which to keep visionary energy alive. The visionary function, which fulfils the souls need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things, has been supressed, with the result that as a culture, we have lost the gift of vision. We have lost access to the magical world of archetypal myth and symbol, the world of the "Dreamtime".
NEKYIA (nek-eye-ahh) is a Greek word referring to an archetypal "journey to the underworld"---the creative or spiritual descent which C.G. Jung called "the night sea voyage." A cross-cultural image, the Nekyia is the classic process where shamans find healing power, artists find inspiration, and mystics find union with the Divine.
Humans are mythologizing and one might say world building creatures. We fashion epic narratives to explain our experiences and contribute to a structure of meaning for our lives- in this sense myth is not meaningless fairytale but rather the deepest expression of our hopes fears and dreams.
