Running Red Wolf Would Like to Talk About Time Management Skills

And now for something completely different... An essay written in earnest about the complications of Shamanic practice. I hope you enjoy this guest piece! - Doc Thule

Running Red Wolf Would Like to Talk About Time Management Skills

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My brother and sister shamans, its so good to finally see you all gathered together in one place.  It only took us three months, about 150 emails, text messages and phone calls trying to coordinate, reschedule, re-coordinate and negotiate when this circle was actually going to happen.  So before we get to calling in the spirits of the directions and creating a sacred vessel in which to do our work, I have to ask each one of you here (from a space of deep love and understanding towards my fellow healers and medicine workers) one very important question:

What the actual fuck? 

No, I’m dead fucking serious here.  Don’t give me the stink eye, Blue Wolf Cloud, I’m absolutely fucking sick of this.  Three months?  For real?  We’ve been doing this intertribal circle for fourteen years now, and it still takes an act of the Creator Spirit to get us to drag our sorry feather-clad asses into the same space to sit long enough to do our fucking jobs?

Do any of you know what a fucking calendar is, or how to keep track of time?  We didn’t each build our own fucking medicine wheels aligned perfectly to the cardinal points and demarcating the transit of the seasons just for goddamn art projects, did we?  And you know what Half Moon Feather, I don’t give a flying fuck that time is an illusion, or that we’re all living in the Great Moment, because I have better fucking things to do than try to get each one of you flaky fucks to pay more than a Condor Father shit’s worth of attention to the day of the fucking year and stick to a plan more than five minutes out. 

Thunder Bird help me if you aren’t going to make me go all vision quest on your initiated asses with this bullshit.

Look, I know us shaman motherfuckers do alot of fucking drugs.  And- what’s that Red Cloud?  “Its not drugs, its medicine”?  You are one to fucking talk, aren’t you?  I see the way you hit the peace pipe; so don’t you tell me that “you’re just going to do one more journey before you call it quits for the night”.  Yeah, I bought that line for the first few years, but that shit doesn’t fool me anymore.  That ain’t sacred tobacco in there. I checked, thank you, and let me tell you: you need to Slow the Fuck Down with that shit, bro.  Like Whoa.

But like I was saying before I was rudely interrupted: I know we do ALOT of fucking drugs.  Don’t get it twisted, I’ll pop a peyote button and go talk to the ancestors as quick as the next medicine man, but I also keep one fucking foot in the middle world, you know?  And I at least have the fucking decency and respect for each one of you asshole reflections of the One True Self to keep a calendar and actually maintain the fucking thing.

Earth Mother fucking protect the next one of you that bitches about me being a tight ass about time, or not going with the flow, or letting Ego get in the way of Spirit.  Somewhere in those sorcerer spaced-out minds of yours is the ability to look at clocks and jot down an important fucking date or two.  I seem to recall you all being REAL fuckin’ punctual back when your Teachers told you be somewhere, somewhen for your initiations.  Do I have to go into the spirit world and summon up some of them to remind you about how to fucking read a clock?  I’m sure they’ll be thrilled to know their pupils are so on their shit that they forget to even tell their fellow shamans that they can’t make it to a Solstice Sun Circle until three weeks after it fucking happened. 

Yeah Water Spider Woman, I’m looking right at you.  And don’t wave that feather fan at me unless you fucking mean it bitch, so help me I will totally go Wolf Spirit all over your fucking Spider clan ass.

Now if one of you dopey motherfuckers can spark up the white sage and rattle in some fucking directions, we can light this candle.

A-fuckin’-Ho!








(by Andrew Killilea)

A primer on the Norse Mythological Cycle - an Inuit Critique

"Oh man, oh man, oh man - I am TRIPPING my face off." I said, to no one in particular.

At least, that's what my notes said when I had a chance to review them several days later. Apparently I was a bit hung up on that fact, and decided to dedicate several pages to the implications of this particular neuro-chemical experience.

I was headed to Valhalla... or Asgard... it was impossible to keep track of Norse mythological geography at that point. I had been told that we were going to meet Odin All-Father: Spear-Shaker, Vili's Brother, the Master of Riddles, Lord of All Aesir.

Gotta Whole Lotta Awesome wood-carved Propaganda

Or something to that effect. This is what seemed to blabber out of mouth of the Electric Acid Viking rendition of Thor the Destroyer who was escorting me at a feverish pace towards my appointment with destiny. A cold weather Danish military encampment swam around us within a bizarre hurricane of aural and temporal cues as to the actions and intentions of tens of thousands of Einherjer prepared to ride gloriously into battle for either death or glory for their King and Kingdom.

"Valhalla, must be Valhalla", I murmured.

"How do you know of our camp's name??" my captor/spirit guide yelled at me, throwing me against the nearby wall of a hardened winterized shelter.

It was hard. Very hard, physical reality reminded me.

"Ow" I offered in response. The impact caused the world to break apart and swim around like pieces of plastic in a snow globe. Just existing was also starting to get HARD.

Thor's eyes went wide, and then narrowed in simmering antipathy. "He will pay for this treachery with his life's blood", he spat through clenched teeth, before grabbing me again and continuing our interminable shuffle towards Odin's chambers.

Time seemed to collapse and loop in on itself in no particular direction. anthropomorphic sea otters danced around the edges of my vision - cavorting with Svartalfen temptresses. I knew intuitively it was merely a distraction, designed to take my attention away from more important matters... such as concentrating on preventing my molecular structure from dissolving.

Suddenly, the dream collapsed in on itself. Mainly because I had been thrown face first onto the floor of a Cyclopean throne room, resplendent with shining jewels and the grim faces of warriors who would gladly die at a word for the pleasure of their monarch.

That, or a pimp military-grade winter shelter overloaded with electronics and bored, cold Danish defense contractors. Distinctions were truly beginning to feel irrelevant.

For some reason only known to the mercy of the Ancestors, I didn't look like Vin Diesel.

I lay on the ground for what seemed like an eternity, contemplating the entangled nature of quantum particles and electromagnetic repulsion preventing me from falling deep into the gravity well of the planet. I also contemplated the possibility that my nose might have been broken by the impact with the ground. I was stunned to realize that since I had, by the blessings of Sedna, landed more on my cheekbone than my nose, it was only a gash in my face that was bleeding - and not smashed nasal cartilage.

The realization of this stroke of fortune allowed me to slowly tune back into the reality simmering and percolating within the demichamber of Odin All Father. Human voices coalesced alchemically from the buzzing and howling swirling around the room.

Sadly, those voices spoke the bastard tongue of Man - Danish.

"What the hell is this trash and why is it leaking bodily fluids into my antiseptic environment??" bellowed a voice filled with malice, authority and the sickly-sweet smell of mead kept just a little too long in the bottle.

Either Odin or some sort of Mayan Death God - taking my chances, I assumed Odin.

I heard some disdainful murmurs from the ring of warrior god/defense technology specialists hanging ominously around Valhalla's mighty meeting hall. A place of warriors and stories of heroism - a space for laying cunning plans and stratagems - a place where a young Danish conscript could get away from it all in isolated prefab encampment far away from intoxicants and the possibility of intercourse with anyone they might want it from.

I heard (or perhaps felt), my Electric Acid Thor the Destroyer preparing himself to launch into what was probably the most exciting opportunity to look awesome in front of his superiors he'd ever had. "A traitor, a spy and a miscreant, sir!" he screamed with gusto, beginning his epic tale of my capture. "A man filled with the lies and cunning of a wolf, the Great Demon Fenrir himself - Sun-Swallower, armbiter, most misbegotten of Loki's broodmares..."

Yeah, when they say you look this bad-ass, you know you're doing it right.

Realizing that it was now or never, I daringly chose to interrupt. "Excuse me Odin All-Father, I hate to interrupt your son, Thor the Almighty Warrior, High Lord of the Wintermark here - but do you high-born Aesir have a bathroom that the child of the Arctic Gods could use? Nature, and my little friend the psilocybin mushroom, is calling lustily for me to purge my stomach of at least three generations of ancestral pain, illness and guilt. And I don't suppose you'd want that all over the floors of... where.. when?.. ever we are currently."

All sounds and motion seemed to stop. I felt a million hard cold eyes burning with fire boring into the back of head and body, each one willing death by a thousand hard Viking daggers into me.

Realizing that I may have been completely misunderstood, I took a moment to consider what any sensible Inuit, surrounded by war-maddened Viking demigods would do.

At this moment, this was probably not to be considered sensible.

Coming up completely blank, I thought a quick review of what I might have said that could have been considered a faux pas.

Could it be that I had offended my hosts by not invoking the appropriate list of honorifics due the Lords of the Aesir? Or because I was still lying face-down on the floor in a pool of my own blood (and probably making something closer to a hideous Jabberwocky-like burbling noise)... or perhaps it was just that I had not used language even remotely akin to anything that the human mouth is supposed to ever utter - my mind and mouth comfortably detached by a beautiful wall of glossolalia?

"Oh yeah - I am still tripping face. Right, got it." I thought to myself. Maybe if I got up into a sitting position and tried again in a human-oriented register? Or maybe just yelled - yelling works wonders to break down communication barriers with foul-smelling Nordic barbarians. At least, that's what some ancestral voice screaming in rage at their murderous intrusions into our homeland, seemed to be saying.

But then I realized how much of a mistake Getting Up would prove...

I don't think we're in Valhalla anymore, Toto.

To be continued...