This morning I didn't feel like doing my regular exercises so instead I went for a long walk. I tried to get in touch with the land and thought about Snake from Monday's trance. The land is beautiful as always but I wasn't losing myself in it. That may have been because I knew that we had someone else on the land hunting turkeys that morning. I was conscious of staying away from the area where the stand is set up. On the way back towards the house I decided to climb all the rocks (ok most:) up the hill to the house. There is a section where it looks like soil was washed away exposing a line of rocks or they tumbled down off the hill and all fell in a line. I started up them climbing up and over, and down, and over fallen trees, and up the next one. Some I could just step over to but few were the same height if they were next to each other. That would have made it too easy. It was far more strenuous than I expected but fun. My knees are not as good as they used to be so I have to be very cautious in switching my weight or stepping up onto or down off a rock. I can't rely on my knees to always support my weight or to do so without painful complaining. But it was ok. I was careful and didn't let stiffness or pain stop me. It was great! I forgot about everything but climbing. The world dropped away for a time. By the time I got near the top though I was having trouble lifting my legs high enough to clear the vines and downed branches. LOL I was weaving a bit, clutching small trees to pull myself up on the slippery dead leaves from last year's ferns, out of breath, and so glad I was almost home. It was worth it though. The fiddleheads are showing!
I started reading Cowan's Shamanism. I am finding it quite interesting although most of it I already knew from reading Michael Harner's Way of the Shaman twenty years ago as well as doing a paper and presentation on Shamanism for a class on Ritual Theory that I took at UW. Still I am trying to get a feel for why Snake as shown up in my trance at this time in my life.
After working on my priestess training "classes" I started searching the web for plastic panels. I tried Home Depot but they didn't have any. That would have been convenient as there is one on the west side of Madison, only 30 min. from home. That actually turned out to be lucky because while continuing my search I found Sundance Supply, which not only had panels and the right hardware for screwing them into wood frames but included a lot of information about building with them. Tom has been thinking about exactly how to build an enclosure over the hot tub so that next winter we won't be freezing our hair in the frigid wind. The information provided made it a relatively simple matter for him to begin to work it out. He will, of course, continue to fuss about many little details for awhile but it looks like we might actually get it done this summer.
Copyright © 2001 Kyril Oakwind