Manuel is speaking, but he’s wrong…

This thought hits home as my unseen flight ends with a trip over the ledge that marks the boundary of a small incline. Ahead of me, the tourists turn and politely ignore the unhurt figure in the dust, though others are laughing.

What was it that Jerome had said? ‘Shamanic methods are ultimately kind…’ The exactness of that hits home, and with it comes a realisation that the Shamanic world – really the objective world seen by the Shaman – is brutally centred in the now, but has an implicit trust in the motives, or rather, direction, of that living wave of Creation.

Conventional ‘goodness’ has nothing to do with it, though individual kindness does. Perhaps this is one of the secrets: that the true Shaman can swim skillfully enough in that flow to create a little eddy, a safe-moment, in which to…

The count had reached forty steps by the time the newfound realised what was happening. Below him, the rising air from the plateau smelled, newly, of summer grasses and deeply-perfumed flowers. 

The sun, near vertical overhead, beat down with a ferocity that touched skin which seemed naked; and yet fed, unburnt, from the sky-borne radiance. It was summer’s height and yet, at the same time, it was midday. Disbelieving eyes blinked, as the import of the snarling lines of light bore into what had been his brain.

Eighty steps, and the ground below seemed to be falling away. Ninety and it was a distant memory, yet still there. His legs were walking in the air, in large circular steps, as the Jaguar sought and weeded out the pale image of a calendar on his study wall, replacing it with a movement that involved his whole body in ecstatic, radial motion.

The…

POSTCARD #265: Chiang Mai: I’d decided to use this image for the header thinking the way I cope with my headache is an improvised thing, much like the way this traffic sign has been bent back into shape after something has crashed into it – then as I write this I’m distracted by wind chimes from the balcony of the next-door house, which suddenly play a perfect chord in the air. I slip into wakefulness from the dream of that which I’m held by, and become an extension of the wind-chime’s notes. Horizontal on the bed as if shipwrecked on a sandy beach. Waves rushing in to the shore crash-crash, and the whole thing receding back. Comes rushing in again, crash-crash-crash, becoming a form that shapes into the body of the sea rolling over on its side like a great animal trying to sleep in an enormous bed. Then I…

Really? A giant, black, Jaguar materialised from the south face of the Chichen Itza pyramid and thundered across the ground to devour you?

On one level, it’s a preposterous thing to write; on another, it’s the heart of the matter.

“If you can’t let go,” Jerome had said, under the quiet shadows of the one silent place in the hotel grounds, “then you’ll get little, apart from academic worth, from Chichen Itza.”

Manuel had moved his guided group on, away from the the place of the first sighting of the temple complex, and to the fabled ‘ball court’, leaving a solitary figure staring at the pyramid, from which the jaguar that was filling his perception had emerged.

They had split time, the Shaman and Manuel, the gentle guide; had opened a door of perception known about but never personally experienced in this form. I had, as I wrote in the

Many foxes…
Copyright: MJ Heritage @ Mr Fox

Fast forward a year to the “Leaf and Flame: the Foliate Man” weekend. The directors of the Silent Eye (a modern mystery school), not really knowing what they might be letting themselves in for, honoured me with a request to present one of the exploration sessions.

These punctuate the weekend, expanding on themes weaving through the tapestry of the unfolding story driving the ritual elements. To say that I was intrigued, that a thread involving Spirit Animals could find its way into the 2016 retelling of the story of Gawain and the Green Knight, would be an understatement.

The outline of the exploration was drafted in my head by December, re-drafted by January, fiddled around the edges in February, and completely forgotten by March. The work-book arrived sometime in April. Under normal circumstances, I’d have had opportunity to read through…

There’s something wrong with the two-legs. She’s not broken exactly, but she’s not working right. I keep having to remind her about impotant things… like my dinner.  ‘Off colour’ she calls it… I thought that only happened to the fish when they go weird, but no. This time she’s right…she is a funny colour.

Normally my two-legs is sort of pale pink. Well, she calls it pink. I wouldn’t … more like an earthworm or that pastry stuff she makes. By this time of year she is normally browning nicely with the sun, but well… she’s looking more sort of undercooked at present. Most of the time anyway.

Till evening comes and she gets weirder…

It’s not the heating…she turned that off ages ago, even though it isn’t very warm yet. I was glad about that though, ’cause it was playing havoc with my spring moult, you know… hair falling…