originally published in naturecommunion.blogspot.ca
Monday, 16 July 2012
Out here on my little bit of the Pacific Coast, thunderstorms are a rarity. I heard a long time resident comment that it happens maybe 5 times a year but I don’t even think it is that often. The long time resident was commenting along with a lot of other residents because this past Thursday and Friday, July 12 and 13th, the weather was very odd.
Now I know some people are going to look at that and comment that it was Friday the 13th, so there. Well, I don’t have Triskaidekaphobia even though I did do a report on it in French class (try doing that in your second language). But I didn’t even clue to the Friday the 13th thing until later. After all, it started the night before.
I was up all night the 12th in preparation for graveyard work shifts the next two nights. I had the blinds down but I heard the thunder cross over head, then come back, then do it again, several times. The picture in my mind was a big dark cloud circling like a predator. But what was it circling? No idea. I thought it went away when I went to bed to sleep during the day. I think there might even have been some sunshine when I got up once.
But I was getting ready for work in the evening on Friday and there it was again. Hovering, circling thunder. There were some neat photos of lightning in the newspaper the next day but I had the blinds drawn again. This time I was feeling that it was circling the big rock concert that was happening a couple of municipalities over. The concert that had 4 bands and started in the afternoon. The same concert that was causing predictions of traffic gridlock and made me wonder how early I should leave because I had to go right by it.
Why would it circle the concert? All those concert goers in a bad mood? Planning mayhem? (Afterward it was reported that all were well behaved). Was this thunder an entity attracted to all that concert-anticipation energy?
I started thinking about years ago when I was hanging with a lot of metaphysically minded people. Manipulating the weather was said to be a sport for some. Friends in the San Francisco area growled about everybody had agreed not to mess with it. And I thought about gatherings and celebrations we had at our house when I had pictures of clear quartz crystals in my mind. And then it would snow. People started telling me not to think about crystals, they had to do the drive home. But I wasn’t trying to do anything to the weather, I just had crystals in my mind. So what was in the minds of those attracting the thunder? Wanting a conversation with old Thor? Or was it maybe some of the musicians (drummer?) practicing very loud?
As above, so below. We humans are credited with creating much of what is around us, even if we do it unintentionally. A First Nations spiritual teacher talks about the belt of anger around the planet created by us humans. Probably contributes to global warming and weather strangeness.
What if we could direct our power instead of just messing up the weather? I’ve worked on that some. The seed was planted back in the metaphysically minded years. It was a book called Magical Rites from the Crystal Well by Ed Fitch. Although I did the earth cleansing rite as a practice for some time, it was the practice for redirecting the spirits of road kill that stuck with me. But I didn’t feel I was giving it enough energy. So I revised it to incorporate two of my strongest energy experiences.
One experience was late on a Halloween night. The gathering was done, those who were staying the night were asleep. It began to snow. I felt I became part of the dancing snow, –so free– that I went outside, back to the woods and communed with the snow and the wind and the night.
The other experience was when a cat of mine died in the clinic and I wasn’t there. I couldn’t feel him anywhere (usually I can for awhile after death) and kept searching for him, on land and in my mind. I found/felt him when I went to the ocean shore — not a place I’d expect to find a cat soul. With his help, what I had felt as the Essential Fire of Life became personified as Jaguar (I’ve had a thing for jaguars since I was a kid). It is total orange warmth and love and union: comfort and spirit and eroticism. He permeates all Life even though you can see through him to the material world like you look through heat waves coming off a road.
I’ve never got around to taking a course in NLP (neurolinguistic programming) but I’ve read a bit about it. They have a way to anchor experiences with a gesture. So I taught myself to anchor these experiences with visualization when I come across road kill or a creature dying in pain. I visualize the bird or other animal just before the car hits it, being covered with ice and snow that numbs the pain to come. Then the sparkles of the snow and ice flare into the orange love of Jaguar and the creature escapes into that comfort or is given strength from it. There is a vignette about this in A Witch’s Eco-Erotica.
I need visual poetry to hold those feelings accessible for me. Because these experiences hold personal energy for me, I can pass that on. A bird hunched sickly on a window sill flew away with it. A cat being put down because he could no longer keep down food due to his tumour, he stayed connected to that energy, my energy, as his body died.
I spoke to a First Nations shaman of using this energy with dying animals (as a rescuer I’ve had my share). He said they don’t need me to go with them all the way, just that first little bit. So I don’t think about crystals and then it snows anymore. (Probably because Jaguar/the Essential Fire comes afterward in the sequence.) But that’s just my personal affinities. Other people would have to put together their own affinities for their own passionate purposes. Maybe they would substitute internal melodies for my visual poetry. Or would dance.
I wonder what energy called the thunder. I wonder what energy you could bless the planet with.