Shift keeps happening!  I am working on a winter eNewsletter - since I missed making a November issue.  Since I went intentionally car-less I often find myself missing journeys through deeper Kettle Morraine forests...but I have found several beautiful urban micro-forests a mile or two from here on Milwaukee's east side.  For example, Lake Park is a beautiful wooded bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.  Today I was able to lose sight of the road and breath brisk refreshment for a good while within an almost quiet clearing.

However it was on my way back out of the woods that I glanced up just at the right moment to greet an owl soaring over me.  What an encouraging inspiring blessing that silent sight was for me!

...scarinesses are lurking around the fires and within the waters.  Shamans do not seek enlightenment so much as opportunities to shift reality towards better and best, no matter what.  If a shaman is already perfect, there is nothing approaching out of the gales of any storm crying out for attention...no wounds or dis-eases around to heal...and there would be no storms raging either anywhere in h/er world. 

If a shaman were perfect there would be nothing to shamanize!  And if a shaman is getting any 'business' at all it means s/he in some way(s) has whatever is showing up for healing.  Shamans must have stuff to heal stuff so shamanisms are ways of decending first and last then first all over again.

To focus and flow-energy overwhelmingly towards the best dreams and desires, shamans must face and greet whatever is un-wanted...and acknowledge and make friends with Trickster, the trickster side of nature still traveling with us, always and all ways traveling away from unity.  The shaman searches for the trickster and death and devilish patterns within...and knows s/he will know what to look for by noticing what suffering beings show up on the doorstep of temproary shelter...at the entrance to the cave...and request shamanic assistance.

The trickstering, dualing, separating side of nature is needed for universal re-creation, earthy evolution, and cosmic co-creation - for the 'making of all things new now - but needs to be allowed and guided into healthier happier expressions in the LIFE's universal dreaming and dancing.  After ages of disrespect, denial, and repression, Trickster is resorting to more and more unbalanced, unbalancing extremes to get attention.  Those dances must be celebrated too - before they can be shifted into something better. 

Shaman-fools can befriend the Trickster because the Fool is also adventuring the longest way possible around LIFE.  But a shaman fool may have to give up the capital S and keep falling down to keep dancing with Trickster, an expert at masks, disguises, and shapeshifts.

I write of shamans who have come to realize they are called to be fools...who gave up the capital S  already...who stepped off the spiritual advancement and gifted psychic tracks on purpose...to rattle, drum, sing, and dance on the edges of chaos...for good.  (That link is to a blog post by circle companion and Zaadzter Rezzee who like most of the rest of Companions Circle doesn't get online everyday.)

And as circle companion Chammy often expresses...to keep shamanizing in this world most if not all shamans probably take up foolishness to some degree, no matter what they call it.  Besides, as shamanic jester Shamantic! says...the antics of even the most serious shamans appear foolish to many in this world.  So some of us go ahead and let the world turn us...turn us upside-down and inside-out...and we BE (secretly or notoriously) fools on purpose....which is just another way of saying we live as much shamanic foolishness as possible.

And notice this fun:  Colliding dances birth new stars while nearer to us...circle companion Mars glows brighter again!