Spiritual people - from growling Christians to placid Buddhists to shiny Shamanists - like to pretend they aren't part of the culture - that others are somehow entrapped by the false love of poodle hair, but my prayers deliver clear skies.

Therapy is grounded in a basic goal to help the patient (the "sick" person) return to functioning smoothly in society. In other words, what makes you sick is that you have fallen out of being able to function in society. The medicine (therapy) makes you well, and able to function once again in society. But is it medicine to return someone to functioning smoothly under the gentle shadows of poodle hair? Is mental health really defined by living happily in "the system of rip-off economics [that] promotes its communal senselessness by substituting "more" for "beyond?" (God bless James Hillman.)

And so we drink and dance to forget the poodle hair conundrum. And so we wall ourselves into a poodle-less fort made of Netflix. And so we keep our nose to the grindstone, never looking up to the skies so we don't have to think about the poodle or lack thereof. And so I we lash out at our lover, or the president, or "those" people" for not curing my poodle-hair problem.  

The shamanic path comes down to one word: beauty. As both a personal spiritual path and as a healing modality, shamanism is about resuscitating beauty in you.  Beauty is not something you can believe in (or be shamed or compelled to believe in). Beauty is only something you can experience. This is the basic difference between the shamanic path and the way western religion is taught – one is based on believing, one is based on experiencing.

We live in a culture that doesn’t understand beauty, and indeed is afraid of beauty. We confuse money with beauty, which has caused immense damage to the western soul, and when the soul is damaged, we cause damage to our lives and to the world. Institutional religion often pushes beauty aside to replace it with obedience. We feel how this poisons us, but often cannot articulate it for years, decades. Beauty, by its nature, refuses to be tamed by humans. Beauty comes not to obey our small ways, but to shatter the smallness that has been imprinted on us in so many ways.

Beauty is a spiritual power, a breath of the Holy, and it does not arise from the senses but comes from beyond the senses. So wealth, status and sexiness, as powerful as they are, are really are not forms of beauty – they are expressions of the culture.

Four things of womanly beauty in this world: the deep lines on a woman’s face, Spirit’s brushstrokes on the earth, the sigh of pleasure filled with grieving well met, a body softened and expanded by bringing forth life.

Four things of manly beauty in this world: Scars marking a defeat, tears after a battle has been won, the courage to be slain by love, dancing with a limp.

Are any of these truly honored by our culture?

An ancient Irish story tells us that, at the center of the Otherworld (the world of spiritual power) is a well, out of which flows five streams in five directions. The guardian of the well says each of us, by fact of being alive, drinks from the five streams (the senses), but no one may have wisdom unless they drink from the well itself – the source.  The “people of many arts” drink from both the well and the five streams.

Who are the people of many arts? They are the teachers, healers, poets, leaders - the ones whose smallness has been cracked open, or torn open, by the power of beauty, a spiritual force from beyond the senses, and the source of the senses.  The people of many arts are also known as the Aes Dana: the people of the earth goddess whose veins are the rivers and whose cloak is the green of summer and whose voice is each living creature singing its own “Oran Croi (pronounced “Oran Cree”), the small song of the heart that is one note in the great song of creation). These are the people – like you who have read this far- who, as poet Joy Harjo says, “are born with nerve endings longer than our bodies” 

Beauty is the vibration not from this world, but from the world of spirit, perhaps delivered through the senses, but also delivered in non-sensical ways. “That’s nonsense!” may be an affirmation of the presence of the direct breath of the divine. When we talk about shamanism’s job of resuscitating our beauty, we are talking about repairing the rupture between the body and the spirit, remembering the sameness in the salt water inside the small container of our human body and the salt water in the infinite ocean of creation. When we resuscitate beauty, we re-weave sense and sanctus, eros and hieros; we bend low and sip from the five streams, and also the well itself.

Underneath everything I teach (see the sidebar) and inside my healing work, is this foundational action: the resuscitation of beauty. This weekend’s rattle making workshop is not about making rattles- it is about marrying Sense and Spirit, creating a doorway through which they may meet. The October retreat up north is about the meeting “the Dark Goddess” but it’s really only about resuscitating beauty. On and on the work goes.

I leave you with Joy Harjo’s wonderful "Eagle Poem."

BY JOY HARJO

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Joy Harjo, “Eagle Poem” from In Mad Love and War. Copyright © 1990 by Joy Harjo. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press, 
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.

People don’t like worms because worms are all about death. Their job is to munch away at creation until it becomes fully uncreated. Worms are our travel agents to the other world. We know they are watching us all the time, licking their lips. Well, not lips exactly, but whatever worms have.

I got worms in the mail last spring. Two pounds of “red wrigglers,” the best compost-making worms in the Western hemisphere. A lady in Michigan raises them and mails them out overnight express. I built a wooden box and put it down in the basement.  I put the worms in the box, on a bed of torn up newspaper. Two by two, and four by four and handful by handful they did enter the ark. I poured in all my kitchen scraps, my leftovers, my tired foodstuff yearning to be fertilizer.

The worms eat up everything, and it passes through them, and when it comes out the other end, the garbage of life has been transformed by some holy and wholly secret process into the most nutritious fertilizer known to man. When I leaned close, and put my ear to the lid of their little box, I could actually hear them gnawing away, transforming my scraps into the compost which gardeners like to call “black gold.” I liked listening to them gnaw.

For the worms, the box was the best of all possible worlds. Plentiful food. Constant temperature. Dark, sloppy and stinky. No floods. No drought. No birds. A world of stability and hope and peace. A perfect world to bring worm children into.

And they were fruitful and they did multiply all summer and did fill the box. Sometimes I would lift the lid and look in on my chosen worms. And I would sing:

“From germinating earth
to terminating firmament
Where is your mirth,
since nothing here is permanent?
The truth can make you squirm:
everything goes to the worms.”

They ate everything that I put in the box. Egg shells became a cup running over with worms. A cantaloupe rind became their hammock. The hull of a watermelon became their canoe, gliding over a sea of delicious rot. They lived in a perfect world with sweet and salty manna raining down from the Great Hand, which did regularly lift the lid of the universe.

Did they argue over whether I existed? Did some claim there is no worm-god; rather, the falling food can be explained by the four laws of wormo-dynamics? Did some say it is a worm-eat-worm world, and to concern wormself with myths was a waste of time? Did others construct psalms of praise, huddling together, murmuring their writhing melodies, their hymns to the unknown, unimaginable unseen hand? Were there worm fundamentalists who insisted that I was shaped like a worm and that I wanted worms to act in a certain way to assure their prolonged life? Did believing in me help bring meaning to their Earthy life?

It is daunting to be a god. I admit I preferred them to believe in me. But I couldn’t tell by their actions who were true believers and who were not. And when I fed them, I did not only feed the faithful. When I sprinkled water in the box, the drops fell equally on believer and faithless. I loved them all. I was their God, who brought them out of Michigan, and who placed them in their promised box.

Then the centipedes came.

Of all the bugs and microbes in the worm box, the centipedes are the only predators, the only worm-ivors. They hunt down and devour worms. What chance does a squirming worm have against a hundred-limbed trained killer? At first there was only one or two of the leggy monsters. Soon this was the best of all possible worlds for centipedes too.

Dozens of fat centipedes roamed smugly through the former worm-Eden. Clumps of forlorn worm refugees huddled in corners or under grapefruit rinds. Some desperate individuals escaped by squiggling up through the lid only to fall off the edge of the world and dry up on the basement concrete. What must have their last thought been — to exit their small world, to expand their consciousness, but to die for their noble effort?

Did a melon rind faction blame the situation on the corrupting lifestyle of the spinach eaters? Did others say that it was somehow the worms’ own fault for falling out of balance with box-nature? Or did certain worms claim that the centipedes had been there from the beginning and were an eternal foe of the unseen hand, forever locked in battle?

More disturbing yet: did centipede priests sing praises to me for bringing them at last to a land flowing with worms and honey? Was I the God of both centipede and worm?

But I had my own problem. Fruit flies. Swirling clouds of them drifted up whenever I lifted the lid to drop manna into worm world. Fruit flies are kindly beings. They float more than fly, with a gentle grace. They do not spurt nor leap. They do not bite. No bug is their master or slave. Fruit flies have no ambition save one: to reproduce. They love this life so profoundly that all they care about is to bring hundreds of children into the world to experience its magnificence.  For fruit flies, too, this was the Promised Land, the best of all possible worlds.

No one can truly hate a creature as ineffectual as the fruit fly. But the multiplying thousands upon thousands were too much for me. Even a god does not brook fruit flies up his nose. So I set out to eradicate them. I placed glasses of beer in worm world. Intoxicated by the ambrosial fumes, the fruit flies plunged by the hundreds into that hoppy lake of woe. Neither did they know I had engineered their death. They went singing my praises.

Every morning at ten o’clock I came with the shop vacuum. And the great whirlwind did wreak desolation on the fruit fly civilization. What kind of stories were the fruit flies telling about this god of punctual wrath and hellish deceit?

I had to admit it. Worm world was out of my control. I was a failure as a god. Certainly a worm Nietsche was proclaiming that I was dead. My fantasy of being a god was going to the worms.  I did the only thing I could do: I packed my bags, and I went on an end of the summer vacation.  It didn’t matter where; I just wanted to get away from all of — them.

When I returned, autumn was settling in around the house, and an unnatural silence hovered over worm world. I lifted the lid. A couple of dainty fruit flies tried to swim up my nose and I splattered both against the wall with one quick master thrust.

With dread, I gazed into the box. Not a single movement. Not a single sound issued forth from my creation. Worm world was dead.

But not just dead. Empty. No bugs. No centipedes. No worms, dead or alive. Every living thing had vacated worm world. What happened? Where did they all go? Was this the worm rapture? Maybe the centipedes had eaten the entire known world and had moved on to other conquests. Or one of the worm prophets who had gone through the lid came back to lead the worms away to another promised land, through a crack in the basement wall, out to the garden. The mystery endures to this day.

I owe a lot to worm world. I know now that I am not long for this box, and while I’m here, I want to eat a lot and wriggle around with my pals as often as I can. I want to stay away from the centipedes.  I want to be sure that whoever I sing my psalms to knows what he’s doing.

Now, sometimes, late at night, I too wonder if I live in a mail-order universe. Maybe I’m from Michigan, too. It’s impossible for one small wriggling creature to know such things. I keep my eyes trained on that lid, to see if I can catch a glimpse of whoever is out there, dropping food, or messing up the best of all possible worlds. And I sing my praises to the unknown and unknowable lid-lifter.

So often, we can learn big lessons from small things. One of these lessons arises from our impulse to take pictures of the beautiful ceremony we are doing, or the altar we built. Why is this simple act considered disrespectful? I offer two answers - one shamanic and one psychological.  

First, the shamanic answer. When we open sacred space, we are feeding the spirit world. The altar is a banquet table laid with a feast for Spirit. Songs, flowers, offerings, smoke, dance, costumes, tears - these are food and gifts for the spirit world. To take pictures of any of it - while it's happening or after the action is complete - is a way of taking the gift back, of wanting to keep the food for ourselves. Imagine your hungry relative that you invited over for supper reaching for the food you just cooked and you pull it back at the last second saying, "No, this food is so tasty, I think I'll save this for my breakfast tomorrow."  Imagine your lover unwrapping the present you gave them, and, as they gasp with delight, you snatch it away, saying, "You're right, this is so wonderful, I think I'll keep it." 

It is implanted deep in our western consciousness that we should have whatever we want. Shamanism teaches us that some things belong to Spirit.Ceremony teaches us to give to spirit, to feed what feeds us, to place ourselves in proper perspective to nature.

The core of shamanic theology, as I understand it from 30 years of study, and as I practice it in my healing work, is humility and gratitude. When these two core energies are present, beauty naturally appears everywhere around us. These two energies are so often the antidote to our life of rushing around in an ugly world. Humility comes from the word humus, meaning "close to the earth." Only a fool sees this as powerless and meek. Gratitude comes from the word grace- being touched by the power of Spirit. These are two powerful energies. 

Humility is the roots of the great tree at the center of creation reaching down deeply into the life-bestowing earth, drawing sustenance from the Sacred Mother. Gratitude is the branches of the tree reaching up to the light-filled celestial world, drawing wisdom from the Divine Father. Their marriage feeds all of creation, in the world, and inside us. 

Without humility and gratitude operating under everything I do, I act from my ego, which is not evil, just smaller in its goals, vision and power. The ego likes to convince me I am immense and powerful. But the ego is actually fearful of true immensity, so it spends its effort distracting me from it by luring me with smaller-sized delights. This is why when we actually do come into contact with immensity, the ego tries to tell us we are crazy, ridiculous, or in danger.It's a central irony of shamanic work that our power as workers comes from connecting ourselves to something far beyond our desire to be powerful workers.

And now a "Self-Help" answer. When we take pictures of ceremony or sacred space (or any moment of beauty for that matter) we are saying that we don't trust that we'll ever experience this kind of moment again, so we'd better hold onto this, the last time we will ever be touched by beauty. Every time we reach for the camera in a moment of beauty, we are affirming our mistrust of life, mistrust of the abundance and generosity of Spirit.

Learning to live fully in the ephemeral moment, opening to it wholly, receiving it abundantly while at the same time fully giving it away - this is learning deep intimacy with life. (And it opens those two power centers- humility and gratitude.) 

Nature offers us constant lessons in openness to ephemerality. The fleeting breeze, that birdsong, the moment of glistening dew, the sunset, our flower-drenched ceremony - every time we drum together and the Groove takes over and drums through us for 40 minutes - all of these offer us lessons in ephemerality. We open fully to it, we let it live fully in us, we fully let it go. 

When we practice intimacy with ephemerality in any of these ways, we can apply the skills with each other when our warm breaths mingle together in the quiet room. Loving ephemerality is a skill that unflattens our lives compacted by technology, competition, hurry, envy and fear.

Take a moment today to love anything ephemeral. The blossom on the day-lily. The weed in the cracked sidewalk. The cool breeze. Your life. Take it in, love it, and let it go.

The poet says:

...To live in this world 
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it 
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.


(Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods)