Coyote’s Call to Adventure
In the time of the beginning, the People had come up out of the ground during the first spring. They had never lived on the earth before, so everything was new to them. The Sun was warm, and the land was abundant. They went about their business through the first spring and summer, never planning for the future, because life was so easy.
Because they had never lived on the earth before, they did not know about the seasons. They lived as if spring would be eternal.
But soon came the first autumn. The trees were ablaze with bright reds and golds of the season. The People did not know what this meant, as they had never seen it before. They had assumed that it would always be spring and that the weather would always be warm. But as the first autumn began to give way to the first winter, they soon came to know that things were changing.
Since this was their first winter, they had no way of knowing that spring and summer would eventually return to the land. As the nights grew cooler the People began to panic.
“Is this the end of everything?” they cried, “Someone must do something! What if the Sun never returns?”
They all went to their Chief, saying, “The days and nights are getting colder! If you do not do something, we will all surely die!”
So Chief Buffalo held a Council to figure out what to do.
After many days of thinking about the problem, the People finally decided that they should elect a scout to go out and search the world for a warmer place to live. One by one all the animals were considered for this quest.
“What about Brother Eagle?” the People asked.
“Brother Eagle flies high and sees far,” said Chief Buffalo, “But he is far too serious. He might choose a warmer place, but would he also be able to find a place where the children can play and be happy?”
“Then what about Sister Cougar?” the People asked.
“Sister Cougar is crafty and wise,” said Chief Buffalo, “But she is also a loner. She might find an excellent place with plenty of sunshine, but since she prefers her own company, she might like it so well there alone that she would forget to return and share it with us.”
“How about Brother Bear?” the People cried.
“Brother Bear is indeed strong, and wise in the ways of healing, but since the nights have grown colder, he has withdrawn to his cave to sleep and nobody has seen him since. He may never return!”
“What about Sister Salmon?” They asked in desperation.
“Sister Salmon has disappeared upstream,” said Chief Buffalo, “And she too may never return.”
One by one the People named all of the animals of the forest, and one by one Chief Buffalo found a reason why they could not go.
Finally, the only creature left was Coyote. Because Coyote loved to play tricks, and because every one of the People had been the victim of one of Coyote’s pranks at one time or another, nobody wanted to name him as the scout. They did not think him responsible enough to determine the fate of the entire tribe. But they soon had no other choice.
“What about Coyote?” they asked Chief Buffalo.
“Ah, what about Coyote indeed?” asked the Chief.
“Coyote is certainly fleet of foot for such a journey, but who among you trusts him?”
The People admitted that Coyote was not very trustworthy, but they were out of options.
“Perhaps,” they said, “His trickery may come in useful on the journey!”
The People were hesitant, but since they had ruled out all the other members of the tribe for one reason or another, they were finally willing to settle on Coyote.
So it was agreed that he would be chosen for the quest.
The Call to Adventure: On the Nature of Reality
I moved to Pensacola, Florida shortly after graduating high school in 1978. I had begun investigating alternatives to the religious dogma of my Southern Baptist upbringing a few years before that time, and I was still trying to figure it all out. One day I was at the beach, wading in the water while meditating and taking in all the scenery, when I had a revelation.
If you’ve ever been to Pensacola Beach, you know that the water is crystal-clear. Or at least it was back in those days. I had waded out on this particular day to about waist-deep and was staring at my feet through the water. As I looked at my feet, I watched the image refract, expanding and contracting with the motions of the waves. I remembered from my high school physics class that matter is essentially vibrations of energy patterns. As I watched the patterns the water made across the images of my body, refracting them and bending the images at random, I began to see myself as vibrating waves and not as solid matter.
The ripples of the ocean waves made my body appear as if it were dissolving and reappearing in clouds of probability around the center of my being. As I watched these ever-shifting images I had my revelation. The ripples represented the atoms and molecules that make up my body. They vibrated in and out of existence, just like subatomic particles do. Yet my body was still there. I looked out across the sea, watching the ripples recede into the distance. All of those ripples were separate and distinct, yet all were interconnected by the waters of the sea.
As I watched, I realized that this was a perfect metaphor for existence.
Each group of ripples could be seen as an individual entity. The subatomic vibrations that make up a human body or an animal, or other living thing, are all groups of vibrations resonating at a shared range of frequencies. The ripples could represent any inanimate object as well. By focusing on a particular group of ripples I could see that group as separate from the whole, but eventually they melted into other ripples, which melted into other ripples, and so on into the infinite horizon.
All of these ripples were separate in a way, but they were all interconnected to one another in another way. As I stared out across the surface of the sea, I saw it as a metaphor for the Universe and all the energy it contains in all of its myriad shapes and permutations.
At the time I had been reading materials on the ideas of clairvoyance and premonition. It seemed to me at the time that if people could really see the future, then this gift should work all the time, and not just intermittently, as was so often reported. My scientifically-minded viewpoint was that if there was such a thing as clairvoyance, it should work 100% or not at all. But as I stood there in the waters, watching the waves come and go, I began to see things differently.
As I stood in the sea, I saw one wave rise, only to be obscured by another wave. I could see the peak of one wave for a moment, but as another wave rose up, that wave was hidden from sight. I saw the ocean as a metaphor for the fabric of time. What if time isn’t linear, but vibrates like waves on the surface of the ocean?
I pictured the waves as the sea of time in which we live our lives. What if those with the gift of clairvoyance can see the future, but only when the waves of time are in proper alignment? That would explain why clairvoyants aren’t able to be 100% accurate 100% of the time. Time is not a solid thing, but a pattern of waves, like an ocean. If an event occurs, it is like throwing a stone into the sea. That event produces ripples that change the pattern of time. If a large event occurs, like a war, a cultural revolution, or a change in consciousness, it is like a storm at sea. That storm makes a huge change in the patterns of the waves. As the waves spread out from the events that cause them, it changes the pattern a person with psychic abilities might see. So a vision of the future might vary from moment to moment as circumstances change.
What is the dividing line between one entity and another? How do we decide when one collection of vibrations is separate and distinct from another? For me, the answer is that there is no true separation. The idea of separation is an illusion that we have consciously chosen to accept for our own purposes. So if I perceive any separation between you and me, or between me and other living things, or between you and the inanimate objects in your environment, then that separation doesn’t exist in reality. It’s just a temporarily useful framework our minds have created to more easily make sense of things until a better hypothesis comes along.
Einstein demonstrated that there is also no separation between space and time. Space and time are part of the same thing. Time is just another aspect of space. Because of this “wavy” nature of reality and time, what we mean by “reality” isn’t necessarily written in stone. So there can be multiple realities based on where you choose to place your perceptions and how your consciousness chooses to organize those perceptions.
One of the characteristics of a shaman is the ability to walk between the worlds. In most shamanic traditions, this means that the shaman has the ability to go into the Otherworld where the spirits of the dead lie. Some people like to think of this Otherworld as having an actual independent existence outside of our own minds. For these people, the Otherworld is an actual place where the spirits of our departed Ancestors dwell. Others prefer not to declare that the Otherworld is a real place, but instead is the realm of what Carl Jung called the Collective Unconscious. In this place of Collective Unconscious, the Otherworld lies in our own unconscious minds and does not have any independent existence outside of our own thoughts and perceptions. In this case, the Otherworld, or the collective unconscious, is the repository of all our unconscious archetypes. It is the genetic memory shared by all human beings.
In either case, whether you believe in the Otherworld as an actual place or as a construct of the unconscious mind, what matters is our perceptions of the Otherworld. If the Otherworld alters our perceptions, gives us useful information, and teaches us about ourselves and others, does it really matter whether it is a “real” place? What do we mean by “real” anyway? From this point of view, the Otherworld of the shaman is simply a non-ordinary reality created by altering our perceptions and consciously re-ordering those perceptions.
I imagine that a great deal of time and effort has been wasted on arguing about the “reality” of the Otherworld. I for one don’t care if the Otherworld is ‘real’ or not. I’m far more interested in whether or not the Otherworld is a useful concept when it comes to re-ordering perceptions and changing consciousness. If the concept of the Otherworld is helpful to me in any way as I answer the Call of the Coyote, which is the Call to Adventure, then it has fulfilled its purpose.
The Call to Adventure is the moment in a journey when we leave the familiar “real” world for a quest filled with growth opportunities. In ecospirituality, the Call to Adventure happens when we realize that we can no longer continue on the road we have been on and that something has to change. This change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of answering the Call to Adventure and making changes in our lives.
While the Call to Adventure may be a challenge, it is also an opportunity to create a new, life-changing reality for ourselves and for the loved ones in our lives.
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