A little sample of a layering paint technique I’m experimenting with to look like a landscape covered in mist.
Pretty!
“Saturday Morning Sanctuary”
My piece for the group show “Happy Little Trees”, a tribute to Bob Ross opening September 27th at Screaming Sky Gallery in Portland OR.
Therioshamanism: Taking the Plants and Fungi For Granted →
I was sharing around the link to my last post about working with Black Morel as a totem. While choosing tags for it on my Tumblr, I had a bit of a chuckle thinking of how disappointed some people might be when searching for “mushrooms” and “totem”, and getting thoughts on a rather choosy, wrinkled edible rather than stories of far-out psilocybin trips.
It got me thinking about our biases as humans and spiritual practitioners engaging with the world around us. With animal totems we have a tendency to privilege those wild beings that we consider most charismatic and “powerful”–Gray Wolf and Bald Eagle and American Elk and so forth—though I and other totemists have worked to expand awareness and spiritual work to the totems of other species. People still don’t work with the totems of “mundane” domestic animals much, other than sometimes Dog or Cat, probably in part because we don’t feel they’re “special” enough.
With plants and fungi, most of the spiritual writings and work seems to be with those that benefit us the most, physically or emotionally. The majority of books on plants and fungi in spirituality are herbals that tell how to use the physical plants, some druidic and other writings on trees (which are big and charismatic), and a handful of texts on connecting with the spirits of psychedelic plants (because they can get us high, man!). We value them according to their uses and attractiveness, not necessarily their spirits. So again our biases are showing.
A Few Thoughts on Plant Totems →
[See? Told you I write stuff! —Lupa]
In my years of practicing totemism, I’ve noticed that it is much easier for we human animals to connect to other animal beings. And we are especially biased toward those animals that more resemble us—mid-sized, erring on the side of larger, mammals, very often carnivores or omnivores. If we deviate much, it’s usually to birds, our living dinosaurs. Reptiles and amphibians are rarer, and if you want to get into the downright exotic work with a fish or an invertebrate. (Rather sad that the greater portion of animal life forms in the world can be boiled down to the one word “invertebrate” in this case.)
Still, we recognize in animals something of ourselves. I recently watched with great fascination a three-part series called Walking With Monsters. This featured the struggles of animal species prior to the dinosaurs, and focused especially on those animals that would eventually evolve into us. Even those species alive today who deviated far away from us early in the ancestral tree still share common ancestry, and we resonate with that.
But animals are not the only, or even the most numerous, living beings on the planet.
Celtic Zodiac
July 14, i’m holly
I see this, and it makes me cringe. It’s basically someone trying to shoehorn ogam into a watered-down version of Western astrology that focuses only on sun signs. The tree ogam is only one of many ogams, and it’s nowhere near as simple as “Hey baby what’s your sign?” “Reed!”
If you want to actually know about ogam as more than just “trees”, this is the person to talk to, and here’s just some of what she’s written.
(Click for bigger version.) Another shot from my hike at Multnomah-Wahkeena last week. Source: http://fav.me/d4ld373
