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I walk down a trail and pick up a feather a blue jay left behind, or wander across the beach looking for interesting shells. It's kind of like shopping. There are certain things I would leave behind, like throw a clamshell still alive back into the ocean or shuffle past a tiny bird nest in a forest, best left to a kind memory than on my windowsill so the chickadee can use it again next year. There's things there I'd just love to have, but my heart knows just how too expensive it would be to have beyond just a quiet appreciation that it is there at all. Who can take the cool air of a cave back home in the cup of their hand? In some respects, how can you take certain things away, knowing it won't be in that sacred place tomorrow, realizing it's not quiet the same in either place again.
It just seems to keep going no matter where I am, there I go, there it is. Where will our ancestors walk whence we have tread there? What will whisper to us. Even secretly like some dream catcher, displayed in the back of a stall among many, in rows of shops of things for sale at some carnival crowded with people and trinkets, in every meaning of the sense; "I am here, you are there. Take me home." It's like finding the wolf child, masked in the forest of a metropolis. Where will we find ourselves? If not on the earth, in the earth, part of the earth. To shine away when the sun does?
I know what it's like to shop through or buy or take something awesome from mother earth into my own creative fold, where there is a profound whisper in my heart considering, in every sense; did I thank her, did anyone else appreciate her enough ... Even in a fantastic agate, and what it took to take her from the ground. Who appreciated the quail whose feathers I dorn myself, or did they just die without the appreciation, respect and spirit I meant to wear. Would you honor me? Can you honestly replace me with purple chicken feathers? What about them chickens too? The scale is enough to make it hard to walk down the street with fellow man at all. Sometimes we just call them commodity, and I don't particularly like it. We all need or want something bad enough, but ... geez man, where does sacred begin and plastic end?
My own animal spirit is Wolf. I am very particular to red wolf, and when I see something like a wolf pelt or a fang being sold, there is a profound sense of connection. It is my own spirit, where I come from and where I go, who I am and what I would want to be if I was reincarnated as an animal. I am a wolf child. Yes, I would like to take it home with me, but, I would never buy. I would never sell. Among some Native American traditions, a long while back, a hunter would be paid to gather something like a wolf pelt for someone like me who cannot kill their own animal spirit ... It is just too much for me in my heart like I am looking upon another human being. In my own eyes, if I buy that pelt, I am the killer, because I think the wolf might had died without the appreciation of a thankful hunter. It's not the way everyone feels, it's my own conflict. Like no one should have to go through, but we all do in our own ways. Sometimes we just call it conservation.
Sometimes it feels like looking in awe down a row of cases of interesting jewelry, and the next thing you know it's all swastikas and Nazis. Then I lift my head and wonder what kind of shop am I in anyway, because they just became people I wouldn't have anything to do with.
And then I make things, because I love to. I want to make things that represent something natural, beautiful, earthen, tribal, even wolfy. It's not like a wolf can't appreciate making a beaded belt of a sister rattlesnake afterall, and what's a world without rabbits, deer, dragonflys? I gather things other people made in the same spirit. They made it from bone, wood, stone, glass and hide with something on my mind most of us think to call quality.
I like my string to be strong, durable enough to wear down the beach, through the woods, to a Powwow or Renaissance Festival and up the mountain. Kevlar, nymo, sinew kinda stuff like Tim the Tool man going arrr! And, the necklace or craft it weaves together, good looking enough to want to keep it forever, or give it away to someone who finds it meaningful.
Maybe I'm not the best artist in the world, but I meant what I had in my heart to make it, and maybe I'm just saying I'm particular about what I'll get to be creative with. Sometimes my conscious tells me some things are just out of the question. Y'know? In other ways, some things are just to be given, yet other things, shouldn't even be had at all.
Even if the bear claw might be a replica, the wolf beaded on a loom, they all should, at least to me, mean as much as thanking a turtle shell for its life, to make a pouch I created and sold. I hope it will really mean something to the one who buys it. These are our things, and even the items we make have spirit. Why would I make any compromise? We live in, on and as part of Mother Earth. Why would I make something, and then just give it to you, or buy something from you that was made, if I did not care what it is, in every sense? It is Mitakuye Oyasin, all my relations.
That's how I like my shopping cart. |
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