I woke up early, about 5 am and got up right away. This is the day of my work shift and I didn't want to be late. I headed down to First Aid. The man introduced himself but I don't remember his name. I do remember that he is a local, a paramedic for many many years, now travels doing workshops on using Ebay, has a wife with a chronic condition (chronic fatigue or fybromyalgia, I can't remember which), and he raises dalmations. Nothing really needed attending to. He was relieved by another local person. We talked some and another volunteer came in. Then the time was up and I returned to CAWmunity.
After breakfast I headed out to a workshop by Ken Deigh called "Map of the Post Tribal Shaman". The map was essentially the three worlds: lower, middle, and upper. The lower holds the ancestors and big animal spirits like Bear rather than a particular bear as well as some of the deity forms. It also holds the spirits of the diseases. I don't remember what the middle world holds but the upper one holds things like enlightened spirits, bright deities, angel forms, etc. This map is accessed through the world tree, which is found in the shaman's lodge in the middle world. We did a trance induction as an introduction to the shaman's spirit body. It was a bit complex actually. We went through a gate to our inner body and stood before a mirror where we saw the reflection of our inner shaman's body. We sent our chi/energy into that body through the gate of the mirror along with our consciousness until we could be aware of being in that body. Then we moved in that body and sent energy to our outer shaman's body to act in the other worlds. I found it unnecessarily complex but it seemed to work fine. I am looking forward to the other workshops in the series.
After lunch I headed over to the "Tripping: Brighter Realms" by C. Hayes workshop. I was actually pretty disappointed by this one. There was a lot of interesting information, categories of experiences but the facilitator simply read from a prepared paper. The acoustics were poor, and there was traffic on the road. I had a lot of difficulty hearing him. Then he asked for experiences from the audience in specific categories but wasn't able to handle it when people just went off on a long tale of their trip that was unrelated to the type of experience he was trying to elucidate. I stuck it out anyway unlike more than half of the participants.
I also went to one on "Shielding" by a D. Mer who turned out to be the CAW May King:) He talked about a variety of types of shields and suggested ways to use them. He also said practice, practice, practice. Something I haven't really done in quite a while. I used to do regular exercises like that. Now I am wondering if I ought to consider doing them again. Certainly as a clergy person one becomes the focus for other's thoughts and energies both good and bad. It seems like a good idea to work with shielding again before that happens. I don't need to take on other people's stuff. David talked about things like cocooning, mirroring, permeable shields, shielding familiars, even shielding one's toothbrush, which isn't quite as bizarre as it sounds at first thought. A toothbrush is something that is taken into the body so in some ways past the shielding. Having its own shield so it doesn't pick up stuff prevents some energies from being carried into the body. Any way I found the ideas presented thought provoking.
Later that night I looked up to see someone approaching that looked quite familiar. It turned out to be someone I had not seen in maybe 5 years at a previous Starwood. We had met at a Spirit Gather in February but not gotten together until that Starwood. It was a pretty intense attraction for me. He squatted down in front of me and seemed so delighted to see me that the energy just surged. I wanted to bed him. We arranged to get together later and I hightailed it to get a shower. After my shower I came looking for him. I went over to Ronn's asking about him. Ronn was showing me where his van was when someone else came up and Ronn said he wanted to introduce me to him. He was a tall, good-looking man with a red beard. I reached up and asked if I could touch him and he said yes. So I stroked his beard. I liked it. He had the most beautiful eyes. Then he reached down and picked me up and hugged me. I put my legs around his waist to support my weight somewhat. Then he put me down. If I had not already been focused on the first man I would have stayed to talk with him. There was just something about him.
I connected up with the man I was looking for and we went to his van. It was nice to catch up with him. We talked about some of the changes in our lives. I was glad to hear that he was still married. Long-term relationships are a goodness, I think. The sex was really good, better than I remembered it being the first time and he seemed to find that true as well.
Copyright © 2001 Kyril Oakwind