mesa Archives - Owl Medicine: Shamanic Healing

Photo: L. Weikel

Mesa Rode Shotgun

I took a ride late this afternoon to enjoy a little bit of alone time with my beloved Tohickon Creek. But I’ll be honest: it wasn’t enough. I’m going to have to go back – and soon. My mesa rode shotgun, though. And I’m pleased to report, as can be seen, she was considerate of others.

Even though it’s easy for me to maintain complete isolation when I go to the creek (primarily because I won’t stop or sit along her banks if there are any human beings in sight), I find I’ve not been to the Tohickon anywhere near as often as usual. I realize it’s not because I’m wary of visiting the creek. It’s because I so rarely get in my car and drive anywhere anymore.

Yes, I can walk there from our house, and I do – occasionally. But my more routine visits were always spontaneous stops on my way to, but more often than not on my way home from, client appointments, errands, and various other excursions.

As a result of the pandemic, I barely drive anywhere anymore.

Refreshment

This was the temperature display at a bank along Route 611 this evening. While I grant that this outdoor thermometer tends to routinely lean toward the high side, I can vouch that my car’s thermometer indicated 90 degrees at that same moment. And as you can see, it was nearly 6:00 p.m. when I took this photo. Earlier in the day, it had been even hotter.

Imagine, then, my gratitude when a mere mile and a half away, I pulled off the road and alongside my favorite place in the world. How could I feel anything other than magically refreshed, allowing myself to drink in the serenity of this place?

Tohickon – Cool Respite – Photo: L. Weikel

Reflection

I’m finding myself contemplative on this eve of our country’s birth. I am marveling at how different this 4^th of July weekend feels, for so many reasons, obviously.

Because of the pandemic, we’re not going to be traveling to Connecticut, where we’ve celebrated for decades. That’s a big break from tradition, and I feel wistful recalling the homemade blueberry muffins and Motherpeace readings, to name a few of my favorite memories. (Not to mention Jarts, croquet, lobsters, Wimbledon, and a myriad other treasured experiences.)

On a larger scale – from the personal to the national – it feels like this Independence Day is being viewed through a completely new pair of glasses. Suddenly, we’re seeing who we are as a country with an incredible new clarity that’s both deeply uncomfortable and also truly liberating.

The fact that we’re even discussing our historic oppression and mistreatment of our fellow Americans (including those who called this land home for thousands of years before white people ever stepped onto these shores) is heartening and exciting.

This is our history. It is important to tell the truth, even if it’s ugly and painful. Because that’s where our true freedom rests. In honesty. In gratitude. In forgiveness.

Tohickon – magical reflection; Photo: L. Weikel

(T-511)

Reprogramming

I’m just having a thought – and I want to flesh it out, but I’m not going to have enough time to do it this evening. It’s a sort of weird sense that maybe we’re undergoing a reprogramming.

Ha ha – just rereading that first sentence I have to laugh at myself. “Lisa! You’re having a thought! Good on you, girl! Let’s celebrate!”

Seriously, though. I was just having a brief online conversation with a friend and fellow mesa-carrier. As you may recall, my mesa is my sacred medicine bundle, called a mesa (or misa) in the Q’ero tradition. Anyway, we were talking about the recent suggestion we’d both heard from a respected Paqo (the Q’ero word for shaman or medicine person) that we need to ‘reprogram’ our mesas.

Cosmic Unplug

While I want to contemplate this more extensively for myself, it dawned on me that perhaps at least part of what we’re all experiencing with this pandemic is the equivalent of Spirit unplugging all of us in a huge effort to get us all to re-set ourselves back to a baseline from which we can rebuild a new way of being in the world.

Admit it: how many of us have often freaked the heck out when our computers or cell phones went on the fritz and we couldn’t get them to respond appropriately no matter what we did? In the old days, especially, when these amazing electronic marvels would suddenly stop doing what we were just getting used to them doing, we’d want to melt down ourselves.

“Oh my God, it’s going to cost me an arm and a leg to get this repaired.”

Or “Oh good grief. What if I never get this thing running again? What will I do?”

Miracle Cure

And then our IT person (be it someone literally from the IT department where we work, or – more likely in my case, at least – one of my sons), would ask, “Did you shut it down and restart it?”

We all know, nine times out of ten, that was the Miracle Cure we were looking for.

Well, I’m wondering if the societal ramifications of the coronavirus are forcing us into an involuntary shutdown. Actually, the answer is an obvious yes in a literal sense. Our economies across the world, but especially here, have been forced into a shutdown in order to prevent the spread of the virus.

But I’m wondering if we might benefit from sitting with this concept and playing with it a bit more. How might we choose to ‘restart’ our lives, or what might we want to have our lives look like when we ‘restart’ if this shut down was meant to force us into rearranging the way we think about ourselves. Rethink how we want to BE in the world.

If we were able to reboot ourselves, how would our newly re-ordered internal perceptions line up?

(T-551)