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Aloha Vince,
An update to stay in touch. It’s been a busy week. I’ve done enough mushrooms most of the week to keep me lucid and help to work out the composition and characters. This is fun and it is difficult to put all the pieces together.
I put together this doc to address some of the deeper meanings of Spirit-Medicine Animals I have and what that term means for me. Looking for feedback from you regarding this.
I have a rough layout of the tree and the characters placed on the tree.
What is a Medicine-Spirit Animal?
In the early 1980s I spent time with Hyemehosts (“Chuck” as we called him) Storm. Storm was a half-Crow, half-German Medicine Man who wrote a book called “7 Arrows” about native American teaching stories and had a small community in Northern California where he taught the Native American Medicine Wheel. I met him through a friend who I worked with when I was at the animation studio Ruby-Spears Productions where we made mostly forgettable Saturday morning animation cartoons.
One of the services a Medicine Man provides is to tell you what your medicine animal is when you ask. And when you want that, you give the Medicine Man a gift of pouch tobacco. In this tradition, your medicine animal is the animal where you had the highest level of consciousness in a previous life. It also has attributes of your personality in this life.
Before I had the time to ask, the other guys in our circle made fun of me: Because I couldn’t see very well, maybe I was a mole living underground. Maybe I was a ringworm. On and on.
So the day came and a late evening in his tipi I met with him and offered him the gift of tobacco. At that time he was almost completely blind from cataracts. He took a drag off his cigarette, thought about it in silence for a few minutes and then told me my animal was a Bobcat.
He described to me the attributes of a Bobcat. When the Spirits looked at the Bobcat, it had feet bigger that what you’d expect from an animal that size. It had a long tail and with its large feet was always in balance. So the Spirits ‘bobbed’ the tail of the cat so that is constantly searching for balance.
The Bobcat doesn’t learn by looking directly at the light, it sees much better by reflection. It lives in the cold climate of Canada through the American Southwest down to the heat of Mexico. It is also very flexible with diet. It can eat a vegetarian diet of berries, fruits and vegetables and also meat.
Bobcats are dangerous especially when cornered. A hunter doesn’t send his dogs after a Bobcat. They run away and the dogs chase them. The Bobcat stops suddenly flips over on his back and rakes the belly of the dog as it passes overhead spilling its entrails and ending its life.
I can relate to a lot of these attributes. Does one’s Spirit/Medicine Animal change over life? I don’t know. I know different cultures can describe a spirit animal in different ways.
In Hawaii, (I forget the Hawaiian name) translated I was given the name of the “Turtle who walks the Path up the Mountain As a Child and Carries a Wound”. I wish I still had the Hawaiian name. I may find it one day.
I write this to you as to think more of your Spirit Animals and their meanings. What does it mean that you are a Cougar (Otorongo)? What do you do, not on a superficial level, but more as your deeper soul purpose?
And Bini, why is she a Phoenix? What does her soul do that brings that out?
Some of the descriptions of what I see are superficial habits of some of the characters maybe there is a deeper soul purpose of which the description mentioned is a symptom or a hobby.
Nedyalka makes sense as her being the grandma as the Tortoise in many cultures is the bedrock on which the world grows.
Wenzi, what deeper purpose could be represented by him loving postage stamps? A communicator?
Stefan, reading a newspaper. What is a deeper soul purpose? A connection with history? A keeper of ancestral knowledge?
So, this is what I’m looking at. This may be out of alignment with what you want but just sharing my ideas.
Does this make sense?
