YAKIMA GRAFFITI

ON MY WAY HOME...

It's just about exactly a mile from the coffee shop back to my apartment.  I like to take the bus to the coffee shop, so that I can walk home, for the exercise.  I used to walk both ways, but I guess I'm getting old.  On the corner of 5th and D  this group of buildings has just been boarded up, after having a series of tenants moving in and out in recent years.  D Street in this block is now all boarded up, or bulldozed.  The gangs are having a field day.   The building at left was hit by arson a couple of years ago,   Just after that, a man was gunned down by the police across the street.  Yakima has the worst gang violence in Washington State.

One of the bulldozed lots has some new construction which began last week.  That's a surprise, in this depression era.  

The City of Yakima has seen cuts in its budget every year since I moved here, like most small towns across the country and the world.   

I walk because that's the best way to protect what health I've managed to salvage from the years of abuse during my Initiation as a Shaman.  I do yoga for the same reasons.  Yakima is a sort of redneck city in the Red State half of Washington.  Many people here, especially medical professionals, have a dim view of the Medicaid program.  I've had to take charge of my own medical treatment in recent years, after developing allergies to medications, and a deep distrust of the people who dispense them.    

Fortunately, the Medicine Energies I've built up in and around my apartment help me to remove dangerous influences I pick up from the people I meet.  Being able to SEE, as a Shaman, has given me the power to know when some pernicious spirit has clung to me from the coffee shop.     

The basement section of the coffee shop is frequented by the local Christian population, and the Soul-Stealer predators that feed on their foolish unknowing.  I am not the only one who can SEE!  These predators can see me, even better than I can see them.  They often send harmful spirit energies to me.  The walk helps to shake them off, and the yoga techniques when I get home, combined with Shamanic work, keeps me in decent shape.  I often marvel at how so many people fool themselves into thinking a life without yoga can be in any way healthy!     

If people could only see the auras of the people around them, and how gray they look from the medications they are addicted to.  It's so much easier to pop a pill than to bend over and do yoga!  Or to light up a sage smudge to cleanse the home.  To be a good citizen is to take good care of yourself, first, and you do that by building the Medicine Energies in your home and environment.