Wednesday, September 1, 2010

What is the Spirit world?

My art exhibition at the Old School House Gallery here on Cortes Island opened last weekend to lots of interest and questions, but oddly to my view, no one asked me "What is the Spirit world?" I think this would be a most important question to ponder, since how can we be awake in someplace we cannot find? Maybe everyone already knows what this is...certainly I did not when I first experienced shamanic journeying in a Michael Harner style workshop in 1984.
I have come to understand the the Spirit world is this world--nature--with the veils removed--our veils that is. The stones still speak, and do so to us, if only we could hear beyond the noise of our thinking; beyond our veils of science and religion and culture. This drawing is a stone divination; a conversation with an oracle even older than our history with divination cards.

In this Spirit world I have learned that everything is made of vibration. Sometimes I take a drum out into nature, and sit upon the ground, and hum and sing into the painted deer hide while ever so lightly passing my fingertips over the surface. Birds come near, a snake might pause to taste the moving air with its tongue, a breeze ripples the surface of the pond in the same rhythm as my breathing...we are all made of the same sound.