Therioshamanism: Black Mold as Fungus Totem →
As many folks who have worked with animal and other totems know, not all totems are cuddly and friendly. Sometimes they’re what are popularly known as “shadow” totems, who challenge us through embo…
As many folks who have worked with animal and other totems know, not all totems are cuddly and friendly. Sometimes they’re what are popularly known as “shadow” totems, who challenge us through embodying some of our less pleasant aspects. Others represent animals or other living beings that we don’t care for, or maybe even have adverse relationships with.
This latter description fits my relationship with the totem of black mold pretty well. This is a common name for Stachybotrys chartarum, a fungus that commonly resides in drywall in houses and whose spores can cause illness (sometimes fatal) to a home’s inhabitants. Black mold has also been implicated in sick building syndrome, causing the same sort of havoc at work as well as at home.
How can this be anyone’s totem? Find out here.
Finally got the chance to upload these new full hide wolf headdresses! Three of them are completely unadorned, other than my signature fangs I added to the muzzles; the big Arctic wolf, though, I made into a much more elaborate costume inspired by the green wolf myth from Normandy (France). You can find more pictures of them, and more information about them, on the Green Wolf Etsy shop!
No Unsacred Place: Screaming Scrub Jays! →
Had a bit of an experience with Scrub Jay yesterday during a break from writing, and of course I wrote about it ;) http://nature.pagannewswirecollective.com/2013/03/22/screaming-scrub-jays-2/
Therioshamanism: Oak Moss Lichen as Totem →
[Lupa’s additional note: I lichen totems <3 )
Lichens are a unique set of beings. Rather than being a kingdom of their own, lichens are a combination of plant (either algae or plant-like cyanobacteria) and fungus. While it is possible to separate the plant and fungal parts of a lichen in a laboratory, and some of these plant and fungus species also live independently, for all intents and purposes lichens are singular beings rather than colonies.
I’ve long paid attention to lichens when I’m outdoors. Part of this is because they’re really good indicators of how polluted the air in a given location is. Lichens are very sensitive to airborne pollutants as they gain some of their nutrients from the air, and the more lichens you see and the bigger they are, the healthier the air is. I also try to take care to not step on them, as they take a long time to grow back.
Oak Moss Lichen. Photo by Lupa, 2013.
But from a spiritual standpoint they’re also fascinating! When I’ve worked with the totems of lichen species, I’ve noticed a curious phenomenon. Sometimes the lichen totem itself shows up; other times, I work with the totems of the individual plant and fungus species that make up the lichen. I’ve even had meditations where the lichen switched back and forth between the forms. I haven’t noticed a pattern, such as older species of lichens preferring to stay singular. Each lichen totem has its own preference, and for the purposes of my writing I’m going to refer to each one in the singular from here on out.
One of the lichen totems that seems to like shapeshifting is Oak Moss Lichen (Evernia prunastri).
Why Plant and Fungus Totems Are Important to Animal Totem Work →
In every spiritual system there are specialists and there are generalists. I’ve been turning more into a generalist over the years, as I’ve gone from just working with the animal totems to expanding my work throughout the totemic ecosystem. It doesn’t make my work less important to me, but as a fan of systems theory I’m finding that understanding the complex relationships among the various components of a system is just as important as knowing those parts in and of themselves.
And so it is with animal totems. There are plenty of practitioners who prefer to specialize in animal-based spirituality, and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, one of the most important ways to learn about an animal totem is to observe its physical counterparts’ relationships with the plants and fungi in their environment as well. For omnivores and herbivores the reasons are pretty obvious; plants and fungi are food, and if the food no longer grows, the animals must move on, adapt, or starve. But the plants and fungi affect all animals in other ways, too. The presence or lack of trees, for example, can affect the weather patterns and overall climate of a place. Sometimes the relationship between an animal and a plant is so intricate that the species cannot live without each other. Some populations of sycamore fig rely completely on one species of parasitic wasp for pollination, and numerous other animal species need the fig tree to survive as well. Plants and fungi can present physical obstacles (as in a rabbit ducking into a thicket to escape a fox). If algae overgrow a pond, they can choke out animal life (sometimes literally, as in algae blocking the gills of fish); some algae are also sources of toxins that can harm or kill aquatic life.
These are all important things to note, because they shape the natural history and behavior of animal species and thereby their totems. How an animal develops physically, mentally, and otherwise is due in part to its environment and the plants, fungi, and other animals in that environment. So it is important that if you’re going to get more than a cursory understanding of a particular animal totem, it’s a good idea to get to know the plant and/or fungus totems also associated with them, even just a bit.
Therioshamanism: The Human Body as a Bioregion →
We humans like to think of ourselves as individual entities, moving autonomously through a world populated with other individual entities. We think of our skins as the boundaries between ourselves and everything that isn’t us. Symbiotic living is left to the like of the Portuguese man-of-war and lichens, colonies of group minds are for bees and ants. We might recognize consciously that we rely on other living beings for our food, oxygen, and the like, but we view ourselves as rugged individualists.
Or so we think.
Truth be told, our bodies aren’t entirely our own. Take bacteria, for example. We have plenty of human cells and the like, but for every cell in our bodies there are at least ten bacteria. As Anne Maczulak said, “Microbiologists are fond of pointing out that if all of a person’s DNA were mixed with the body’s entire bacterial DNA, that person would be genetically more bacterial than human” (1). Thousands of species of bacteria live in and on our bodies, creating films that coat pretty much every surface inside and out. Most of these live more or less in harmony with us, as we have co-evolved over time. For the most part, scary-sounding bacteria like Eschericia coli and Staphyllococcus aureus occur naturally in our bodies, and they are not the evil enemies that they’re often made out to be in the media. Problems predominantly arise when one sort of bacteria ends up in a place where it shouldn’t be (such as gut bacteria entering the abdominal cavity at large through an intestinal perforation) or overpopulating and causing infections (such as tooth decay caused by an overabundance of certain mouth flora).
Along with bacteria, we have various tiny fungi and protozoa throughout our systems. Many women know the hell that is a yeast infection, when Candida albicans and other fungi that normally inhabit the vagina along with a host of other living beings suddenly overpopulate and create a rather unpleasant result. We usually only think of amoebas as the little single-celled beings that often represent asexual reproduction in basic biology textbooks, or as the cause of amoebic dysentary (which in truth is solely due to an invasion ofEntamoeba histolytica). Yet several non-pathogenic species of amoeba make up part of our internal communities; E. histolytica‘s cousins Entamoeba coli andEntamoeba dispar are rather benign. While eyelash mites (Demodex folliculorumand Demodex brevis) usually don’t cause a problem, their overpopulation can cause itching, swelling, redness, and other symptoms of the eye.
And these are just the welcome (or at least neutral) neighbors. We also host outright parasites.
Kudos to sunandfog for telling me about this! I LOVE the animation in this video, with its animal people and bizarre quasi-celestial settings. Very awesome.
The Green Wolf: Reminder: Free Live Animal Totem Guided Meditation Workshop this Friday and Saturday! →
Just a reminder, the next workshops I’ll be offering for free via Livestream will be Feb. 8 and 9. This time instead of just a workshop with Q&A, I’ll be leading viewers on a guided meditation to find a totem animal. Here’s when they’ll be happening (you can use this site to determine what time…
Alright, tonight’s meditation went really well—thank you to everyone who showed up on Livestream! Here’s the information for Saturday’s version thereof at 11am PST—again, there’ll be an introduction followed by the meditation itself, and then a Q&A/comment session after.
In the meantime, here’s the archived version of tonight’s workshop. And for those whose meditations didn’t go as well as they liked tonight, or who want to use it again in the future, this video features just the meditation itself, so if you like you can use the audio for your own meditation.
Enjoy :)
….and here’s this morning’s version of this workshop now archived on YouTube, as well as a separate video of just the meditation itself if you want to use it (this one is better than yesterday’s meditation-only video, IMO). I should have information on the next set of free video workshops sometime this coming week; my schedule for the next several weeks is going to be crazy, and so I need to find a good spot on the calendar :)
Also, if anyone has any particular topics they’d like to see me cover in future workshops, feel free to let me know!
The Green Wolf: Reminder: Free Live Animal Totem Guided Meditation Workshop this Friday and Saturday! →
Just a reminder, the next workshops I’ll be offering for free via Livestream will be Feb. 8 and 9. This time instead of just a workshop with Q&A, I’ll be leading viewers on a guided meditation to find a totem animal. Here’s when they’ll be happening (you can use this site to determine what time…
Alright, tonight’s meditation went really well—thank you to everyone who showed up on Livestream! Here’s the information for Saturday’s version thereof at 11am PST—again, there’ll be an introduction followed by the meditation itself, and then a Q&A/comment session after.
In the meantime, here’s the archived version of tonight’s workshop. And for those whose meditations didn’t go as well as they liked tonight, or who want to use it again in the future, this video features just the meditation itself, so if you like you can use the audio for your own meditation.
Enjoy :)
Therioshamanism: Black Cottonwood as Plant Totem →
By far the most common tree at the riverside beach I volunteered to keep clean is the black cottonwood (Populus trichocarpa), also known as the western poplar. A young-ish forest of these tall, lanky trees crowd up almost to the edge of the river, stopped only by the sandy beach itself. I’m used to hiking through forests of aged conifers, Douglas fir and Western hemlock and the like. The energy of these fast-growing poplars was almost frenetic in comparison (though certainly conifers can contend well in the upward race to the sun).
Photo by Lupa, 2012
I spoke to the totem Black Cottonwood about this, and found that because these trees are relatively short-lived, they tend to be more “sped-up” than some others. It’s worked to their advantage in several ways, to include in competition with other plants. A stand of new cottonwoods can create a young canopy in less than decade, quickly (and literally) overshadowing smaller, slower-growing trees and shrubs.
This comes at a price, of course.
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