HUMMINGBIRD

HUMMINGBIRD

Hi, Emily--  My Hummingbird feeds on life!

MY FIRST SHAMANIC JOURNEY

          During the twenty five years before the onset of my Initiation as a Shaman in December, 1990, I had been studying everything I could find on techniques of transformation.  In the early 1980s, I found myself working with Michael Harner’s excellent and influential book, The Way Of The Shaman.  Harner describes the difference between ‘Ordinary States of Consciousness’, and ‘Non-Ordinary States of Consciousness’.  A shaman travels and works in the NSC; specifically, in Harner’s work, through the ‘sonic drive’ method of using a drum to propel the shaman into a trance state.  He gives explicit instructions on how to do this, so I made my own tapes, using my drum and a rattle I had made from a cat food can and the wooden handle of a toilet bowl plunger.  I began to experiment with the Shamanic Journey described in his works, and taught in his workshops.

            In my little apartment, I set up my tape recorder, lay on the floor in the bedroom, and began to listen to the tape I had made.  The object is to travel through a ‘tunnel’, and emerge into the Other World.  For me, it was very difficult.  I had to try many times, and finally, I found myself having to actually dig the tunnel through the ‘earth’ of my vision.  I had to use timbers to shore up the walls and ceiling of the tunnel.  Eventually, I saw light at the end of the tunnel, and emerged into a familiar landscape.

In the early 1970s, when I had been a poetry student in the Graduate writing program at UC Irvine, I had traveled to a place east of San Juan Capistrano, over some hills, which dropped off abruptly to a flat plain with a wide lake on it, Lake Elsinore.  On the hillslopes approaching the lake, I had seen huge cigar-shaped boulders.  They were single, or in clusters of two or three, standing erect like loaves of French bread, whitish, and quite striking.

            As I emerged from my trance tunnel, I sheltered myself behind a cluster of these boulders.  I could see a beautiful landscape before me.  It was like a Technicolor movie-scape.  I emerged from behind the boulders to venture toward the stream heading from left to right in the beautiful pastoral green world around me.  The far bank of the stream was a steep cut, and atop the bank, I saw a deer munching a mouthful of grasses, looking directly at me.  He was not afraid, but he turned away to continue feeding, and twirled his tail meaningfully at me.

            I decided to merge with the shallow stream, and got into it, sitting down in the flowing waters, and letting myself flow along with them, feet first, down the stream.  I came to a place where I could get out of the water, and climbed a slight rise.

            At the top of the rise, I came upon The Eagle.  The Eagle was a Power Animal, as described in Harner’s book.  He was huge, much larger than I.  He looked at me and invited me to climb atop his back.  I did so, and he flew off over the world.

            We flew and flew, until we came to The Edge Of The World.  At this place, we discovered huge craggy bluffs, in a dark, almost black-and-white landscape.  The Eagle let me off his back, and I walked along a narrow stone path cut into the face of the bluff.  As I came around a corner, I could see the actual edge of the world.  Right there, on a flat place in the stone, was The Eagle’s nest.

            In The Eagle’s nest, as if it were an egg, was a small crystal cluster.  It was glowing with a beautiful, bright light.

            I came back up the tunnel.

The next day, I set out on my walk, intent on ‘following the Eagle’, to see where he would lead me.  I came upon various cues which caused me to go one place rather than another, until I eventually found myself at the Thomas Burke Memorial Museum, on the University of Washington campus.  I went into the building, and found the gift shop open.  In the gift shop, along the back wall, was a case with various items in it.  One of the items was a small crystal cluster, exactly as I had seen it in the Journey.  I bought it and went back to the house.

I have used that cluster ever since.  But my Shamanic Journeying (in the Harner style, at least) was soon over.  As I approached union with my spirit Allies, I began to journey through crystals, and upon the arrival of the Allies, I traveled on their energies, as I assimilated these beings into my own transforming energy field.  Eventually I began to teach Journeying in my Transformational Techniques in Poetry workshops through my Seattle Poetry Workshop.  Some of my students became adept at this style of Journeying, but after a few weeks, my Ally, Queen Nefertiti of Egypt, plucked me from the group and placed me on a bridge above my students as they cruised beneath me in a ‘Spirit Canoe’. 

The bridge morphed into a funeral barge upon the Nile.  I became Osiris, a charcoal corpse, lying in state upon the barge, with an enormous erect phallus of gold.  My Journeying became very much more intense after that.