The old and the new
Honoring my heritage — and transcending it
Like most people I lived a young life when I was young — although there was less social skill, less mindless partying and more soul-searching in mine than some. I lived in books and wrote my first stories. I often felt like no one understood me, or they had to be ten years my senior. Only when my mom came home from a numerology course (I must have been sixteen or something at the time) and explained to me that the number on my chart that corresponded with my inner self was the one signifying the old wisdom of a teacher or sage, I felt something suddenly becoming clearer.
I embraced the notion of being an old soul.
In everything I did, from school over university to looking for a job and raising a family, that ancient wisdom (or rather: the notion of somehow having a connection to it) was in the back of my mind. I would reach for topics many find uninteresting or complex, very often in the sphere of psychology or self-awareness. The courses I followed and the insights they brought came in very handy during my teaching years, and I got used to being ‘wise beyond my years’, not only in feeling but also in what I brought to the world.
Over the last few years, maturing and finding my place in the world, making the journey to my plateau and accepting the call of Soul, I feel I have now somehow come into my inheritance. The old knowledge and skills I have ever known to be a part of me are becoming available to be used — for real.
So that was when I first used the word shaman. Writer — Journalist — Wife/Mother — Shaman-to-be I wrote as biographical bullets when I gave my (Dutch) website a big overhaul in June, and it was both frightening and exhilarating. I felt like I was going naked before the world, and at once I was getting very serious about walking a spiritual path.
I confess I hesitated about the word shaman. But it was the only term that sounded right. It had a ring of old magic and knowledge to it, a sense of deeper knowing, a connection to the forces of nature, to healing and to layers of reality other than the material and mundane. Using this particular word meant somehow anchoring myself on a spiritual path in a more serious manner. And one of the directions I had been exploring for a while anyway was shamanism. Or rather: I find that I am drawn to certain elements and actions, some of which I have been practising privately for years, others which have entered into my field of vision only recently, that all appear to belong to this tradition or are affiliated with it.
Now, one of the presents I received for my Soul Circle was a book about shamanism written by an initiate. I found it — apart from being poorly written — enriching and confronting up to a point. Half the time I could feel myself going: no, this is not me. Not at all. Far from it. (The other — professional — half of me kept thinking: a decent editor would have made this a different book altogether.)
I decided to focus on the content. Some of it was interesting, if lacking in detail or depth, other parts were slightly discomforting, like this quote from contemporary Lakota medicine man Steve McCullough:
“There exists apparently a great desire to travel the shamanic path. Some people assume that the decision to ‘become’ a shaman is one they can make, and they think that if they have followed a few courses or a training in traditional medicine that’s what they are. Some training programs even pretend to be able to train people into becoming shamans.
These so-called shamans, these wannabees, who have developed their own way of working, are in fact mocking the true traditional lore. I think there are a good many people who are playing at being shamans, rituals included. It is even worse when this is done for commercial gain. You cannot become a shaman because you want to. You are chosen to be one.”
(Disclaimer: these are most likely not McCullough’s exact words. I am quoting from a book I read in Dutch, and consequently translating back into English. The gist, I am sure, is clear, though.)
This rang true for me, in the sense that I felt I had to admit to myself that there have, up to now, been no ancestral forces or spirits or whatever other entities that shamans work and communicate with, that have been over to tell me I’m hired — so to speak. No spiritual teacher has approached me with the announcement that I should become his or her pupil (as is common in traditional shamanism) either. This might of course still happen in the future — let’s not rule anything out, and it’s not as if I’ve met a whole collection of them — but in the mean time I felt it was time to get honest with myself and the world.
You are free to call yourself whatever you like, of course, but at the same time words are never completely without value or weight. I am deeply attracted to spiritual work, so much so that at times I have described it as a calling. I am no beginner to certain practices, and I know what I can and cannot do with my current skills to help others thrive in safe, respectful ways. But if not a shaman (or on the road to becoming one), what am I?
I had a wonderful conversation about it with my dear Mom. She was present at my Soul Circle, witnessing what she later described as ‘my crossing over’. She was especially touched by the song I sang, with only the drum to accompany me.
The frame drum is the shaman’s instrument. It is also one of the oldest instruments in the history of man, and it links back to ancient practises, Native American, Egyptian, Celtic and prehistoric alike. I have always loved powerful percussion, and the resonance of the drum goes very deep for me. Claiming it as my instrument was one of those small but important steps I took in the last few months. It is also, yet again, a link to these old spiritual traditions.
Now my Mom told me, with that typical wise clarity of hers:
“It’s appropriate to respect these traditions, and to honor their heritage — your heritage. But remember that you are the one who told me from the start that you feel compelled to bring old wisdom into the world in a new form. You might feel akin to the Native American or prehistoric traditions, but you are not a Lakota or a cave dweller in this lifetime. So of course traditional shamanism in its ancient form doesn’t ring ‘true’ to you. That is where you are rooted, it is your past. It is not your future. You have called your friends to you to cross over into a new phase, in which you will help new insights being born into the world in a new way. Your friends have come, and they were many. There are even a whole many more, who are with you from afar, or who are ready to appear. You are not alone in this work, and it’s a powerful process. That is how it feels. So in my opinion it is only logical that you are not ‘called’ to traditional shamanism. This has been a time of surrender and letting go for you, in a number of different ways. Perhaps it’s time to let go of this particular idea as well…”
Did I tell you she is wise?
As a result of this conversation I decided to follow my gut feeling and change the phrase on my website. It now reads Writer — Journalist — Wife/Mother — Walker between the Worlds. This, I feel, is both right and true in this phase of my life.
As if all of this wasn’t enough, I got another confirmation of the same process in a totally different form a little later this same week.
Sapling inspiration arrives in any possible shape or form. So when I sent Jurgen a link to a publishing house we might contact, I mentioned a notebook of theirs that used the image of a fox and a raven. This immediately catapulted him into the La Fontaine fable (of the flattering fox who succeeds in getting the raven to ‘sing’ so he drops the cheese he’s holding in his beak and the fox runs off with it). Even as I was still thinking about an original approach to this well-known concept, he came up with a beautiful image.
It is a ‘classical’ image, nothing as voluptuous and outrageous as what I had been nursing in my head, simply showing the fox looking up at the raven in the tree. The big difference with the original is that the raven isn’t holding a piece of cheese in his beak, but seems to be holding the full moon instead. Subtle but brilliant. And all the freedom in the world to come up with a different version of the story.
Only my mind didn’t spontaneously jump on board of the new-and-different-freedom train. Instead it went in neat little circles as I decided I was going to try and write a new version of this fable as a fable, rhyme schemes and all. The — at first sight — rather innocent style of Jurgen’s image combined with my own presuppositions about fables and how a text of this kind is supposed to work (namely, as a somewhat infantile story ending with a moral), had me firmly lodged into — here we go again — a ‘tradition’.
That’s where I hit a nice hard wall of my own making.
The writing flowed anything but freely, and even as I was toiling away at it and managed to produce a few verses that didn’t ring too bad, I was not pleased with the result. I remembered how I had never, not even as a child, been amused by these classical fables. The rhymes held little attraction for me, and the moralizing was blunt and obvious. Characters got hurt in ways that were meant to teach the reader a lesson but that only sounded painful and needlessly cruel to me.
Sure, fables like this one come from a different era in time, and I don’t mean to judge them by today’s standards. They are an heirloom, and as such they are valuable. But why on earth would I try to squeeze my creativity into their cramped structures? This, too, was the past. I needed to do things differently, in order to move into the future, whatever shape or form my work might turn out to take in the process.
I texted Jurgen that I had learned a valuable lesson and thanked him for the mirror his image had provided me with.
Then I proceeded to write a new text. It honored the past by hinting at it, but I didn’t repeat it. I made it my own.
I won’t share it here, since it’s a Sapling we might want to publish at a later time. I will tell you, though, that in this new version the raven does not drop what he’s carrying…
There’s no need to repeat the past anymore.
Instead, I feel like welcoming the light of a brand new day.
