Jellyfish Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

Hidden Gifts

At least tonight drawing a few cards for wisdom and watchwords didn’t feel completely alien. The atmosphere surrounding life itself continues to feel out of sync to me. Things are off. Even the weather seems confused and ill-tempered. The temperature here dropped twenty degrees yesterday, but the humidity seemed to have increased, which seems impossible as everything’s sopping wet already. But could our inclination to withdraw into ourselves to escape lead to the discovery of hidden gifts?

That’s what a quick consultation with The Ocean Oracle would seem to suggest.

Instead of getting fancy, I asked the age-old cop-out question I use when I’m not sure what else to ask: “What do we need to know right now?”

Jellyfish – Hidden Gifts

“The Story

The florescence of the object drew her towards it. It was a jellyfish, washed up on the shore, its whole being spread upside down before her. She realized with some clarity the luck at the jellyfish being reversed. Upright and she would have risked stepping on it, not being able to distinguish its translucent shape with the beach around it. She bent down to study the still creature, noticed how out of its natural environment it instilled awe in her, and not fear. She thought how often we give more power to things through fear, things that out of context are diminished; safe; unalarming. She saw the intricate beauty as the jellyfish was laid bare before her. She was able to study the hidden side of this perceived danger with a sort of reverence – she never realized the beauty which resided in this creature, because she never had the opportunity, or took the time, to look. There were so many hidden gifts to be thankful for.

The Messages

Are you in a situation where you have to look deeper, or beneath, in order to see the hidden gifts before you? Even if you cannot physically remove yourself from the presence of what you perceive to be threatening or harmful, in your mind or heart remove yourself to equal ground. Turn the situation around to see the gifts being offered to you. There is huge fear around how things can hurt you, but do not let this distract from the gifts they offer. Edit the voice which tells us that what appears dangerous and poisonous and harmful we must stay away from or watch out for because it will hurt us. There are gifts in every situation.”

At the Foundation

Underneath the startlingly relevant card described above was the Shark card – Opportunity. The simple fact of Opportunity laying at the foundation of the Hidden Gifts speaks volumes.

For now, however, I leave us all to the ‘opportunity’ to contemplate what hidden gifts might be presenting themselves to each of us right now. Hidden gifts that we might otherwise be afraid of, but which are precisely what we require in the moment.

(T-90)

Another Shoe

I was going to title this “There’s the Other Shoe!” or something like that, and then I realized all the crazy destruction of the Rule of Law in our country that’s flagrantly taking place in plain view of us and the rest of the world isn’t ‘THE’ other shoe. It’s just ‘another’ shoe.

Welcome to the apocalyptic Final Five Months. They’re either going to be the final five months of DT’s presidency or the final five months of the United States of America as we know it. And as I mentioned the other night, no matter what happens on election night (just like it didn’t matter how the Supreme Court ruled), if he wins: we lose; if he loses: we lose because he acts out, throws a bomb into the toilet (or worse), refuses to respect the election results, and dares anyone and everyone to remove him from office.

Whoa, Lisa. That’s dire. Aren’t you being just a tad hyperbolic?

No, actually. I don’t think I am.

Not the Half Of It

I sensed this week would be a challenge. The eclipse took place over the weekend, and it just felt to me as though it was going to kick off a month of unprecedented revelations and discoveries of corruption and rot throughout this Administration beyond our worst fears – including its malignant enablers in both Houses, but especially the Senate.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ve seen the half of it yet. (Then again, to be fair, it’s not even been a full week since the eclipse.)

But believe it or not, I’m trying to rein myself in. I’m trying to refrain from gaming out the repercussions of DT’s commutation of Roger Stone’s sentence and the effects it will have to the bigger picture.

I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that DT did this, tonight, when we also received confirmation that the number of positive Coronavirus cases in one single day in our country topped 70,000 tonight, too. In case you’re keeping track, only one week ago we were horrified that there were more than 50,000 positive cases diagnosed in one day.

These are daily cases. Over 70,000 people tested positive today. And our president just commuted the sentence of a man who said out loud just today (when requesting a commutation) that he deserved it because he resisted providing evidence of the president’s complicity in a crime.

Step Back – Re-think

I chose cards a few days ago requesting guidance on how we might want to view and respond to whatever unfolded this week. As you might recall, I chose Stingray – Flow the first night, and then followed up in the next post with Jellyfish – Hidden Gifts and Sea Glass -Transformation.

Choosing the Flow card was in itself a comfort. In some ways, every moment I deliberately chose to go with the flow and not worry over “What ifs” provided my nervous system with opportunities to remain peaceful, which in turn kept me centered and even hopeful every now and then.

The Hidden Gifts and Transformation cards were the ones I chose specifically for guidance on dealing with DT’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling on his tax return cases, so it feels incumbent upon me to actively resurrect them in our consciousness.

There are hidden gifts in the blatant erosion of the Rule of Law. Our country is being threatened from within in a way that rivals anything in our just-shy-of 250 years, with the possible exception of the Civil War – and it may even, pardon the irony, eclipse that.

Hope

But my eyes keep going back to a couple sentences in the accompanying text to The Ocean Oracle, in ‘The Story’ of the Sea Glass:

“(…) She thought of the journey the glass before her had taken, how these pieces were all parts of something else at one time. A bowl, a jar, a bottle – some sort of vessel. And how these vessels had been abandoned. Or lost, or broken; left to the rhythms of nature, broken down over time. And she thought of the forces which had shaped the sea glass in front of her – forces which broke down the original structure by pummeling, pulverizing, caressing into a shape which was softer, translucent, and more adept at change. (…)” (emphasis added)

I want to hold on to hope that our country and everything we stand for will, in the coming days, grow more translucent and adept at change as we face, head-on, the gifts that are hidden in the egregious behavior and neglect that’s being perpetrated on us and our system of government every day. Every day there seems to be another shoe dropping. Please let us discover the hidden gifts they reveal that lead to a transformation that benefits us all.