Spirit Horse Falls

An excerpt from The Shamanic Drum by Michael Drake

 

Jade Wah'oo Grigori, my mentor and teacher, stood before me. "Find Spirit Horse," he exclaimed! The shaman vanished from my dreams as quickly as he had appeared. I awoke in the morning with the words "find Spirit Horse" indelibly etched in my mind. I had not seen or spoken to Jade in over four years, but I remembered full well his teachings of Spirit Horse. Jade had taught me that, through sacred drumming, one could ride Spirit Horse for personal empowerment and healing the land.
 

I contemplated this dream throughout the day, trying to discern its meaning. I was finally drawn to a stack of back issues of Shaman's Drum magazines in my office. I fervently leafed through the magazines with no idea of what I was looking for. Midway through the stack, I opened the winter 1990-91 issue to an article titled "Native Americans Join Efforts to Preserve Sacred Ridge on Mount Hood."

Enola Hill, a densely forested, pristine watershed ridge on Mount Hood (Oregon), was under the threat of logging operations. A coalition of Native Americans, historians, and environmentalists appealed and delayed the U.S. Forest Service's timber sale, pending ethnographic studies to determine the area's cultural significance. The ethnographic studies revealed that Enola Hill is a tawyash, a Sahaptin Indian word for a place where spiritual power can be obtained and maintained. In fact, there is no other site in the Pacific Northwest with such great cultural significance. For thousands of years, Enola has been a Native American Mecca -- a revered and sacred place for pilgrimages, ceremonies, and vision quests.    

As I continued to read the article, I came across a reference to a spectacular waterfall known to natives as Spirit Horse Falls (Devil Falls on USDA maps). The falls got its name from vision questers who saw a spirit horse rising from the mist. As I read these words, I was overcome by a profound sense of euphoria and resolve. I knew that this sacred waterfall was the "Spirit Horse" that Jade had told me to find. I expressed my gratitude for this gift in a prayer to Creator.

Two weeks later, I stood for the first time on Enola Hill, overlooking Spirit Horse Falls. The power of the roaring falls and the beauty of the rain forest filled my senses with a lucid-like awareness. I felt a holistic connection to my Earth Mother. In my heart I felt that I had finally come home. I drummed and performed a ceremony for the protection and preservation of this sacred place that provided spiritual power for this region. I prayed that this nerve center in the web of life would continue to distribute vital energy throughout the surrounding natural systems.

Afterwards, I made the three-hour drive back to my home in Bend, Oregon. That night, and for many nights to follow, my dreams were filled with drums, Enola Hill, and Spirit Horse Falls. In my dreams, I saw myself drumming at all the waterfalls around Mount Hood. I was told that the rivers that flow from this mountain are sacred. These rivers feed the spirit. This water will awaken the people when you drum at the falls. All who touch this water will be awakened. I was told that a home would be provided from which I will go out to drum the sacred places. It is time to consecrate these sacred places. The time has come to awaken them.

Three months later, a friend contacted me regarding a caretaker position in the Mount Hood area. I soon relocated to a community near Enola Hill and Spirit Horse Falls. I spent the entire summer, hiking to waterfalls and drumming the sacred waters. By the end of the summer, I had completed a circuit around Mount Hood. Having completed my mission, I sensed that my work there was done. I moved back to Bend, Oregon, yet Spirit Horse Falls will always be a significant power place for me. I still make pilgrimages to the falls to drum and pray.

Unfortunately, the threat of logging persists at Enola Hill. Though ethnographic studies reveal otherwise, the Mount Hood Forest Supervisor has determined that there are no traditional cultural sites on Enola Hill. The Forest Service contends that Indian cultural use of the site was transitory and doesn't qualify for the National Register of Historic Places. The U.S. Forest Service hungrily eyes the mature forests on Enola. This greed for more timber to cut makes the agency loath to acknowledge the native cultural and religious value of the area. The continuing degradation of sacred sites stems not only from colonial attitudes about the lands where native people live and worship, but also from prejudice and disrespect for native religions. Indian religious freedom is an environmental issue, and the destruction of sacred sites is the ultimate environmental racism.

"Shamanism for Every Day: 365 Journeys"

In Shamanism for Every Day: 365 Journeys, shamanic practitioner and intuitive consultant Mara Bishop offers readers a full year of calming, transformative journeys providing a daily connection to Nature and Spirit in a turbulent time. The book features daily exercises to unfurl your sensory tendrils to experience your relationship to the elements around you and within you. With daily guides that lead you to fresh observations, conscious interaction, and connection to the universe, this compact book will enable you to expand your sense of oneness with the rhythms and flow of nature.
 

"We live in intense times," writes author Mara Bishop. "The pressures of daily life can leave us emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually depleted. Shamanic journeying can enable us to rejuvenate, reconnect to wisdom, and restore health, despite those pressures." While there are many paths to well-being, this book is designed to provide themes and topics for you to think about during your day, suggestions and observations to help reconnect you to your own innate wisdom, and to be fully in the moment, with focus, energy, and intention.
 

You’ll discover:

• The ancient roots and principles of shamanism and the practices of shamans, who straddle the spiritual and physical realms;
• The crucial concept of shamanism: the interconnectivity of all things;
• How to journey, tap into the wisdom of our ancestors, and how to find a guide;
• The Why of the journey--a rekindling of the connection to your own spirit;
• The importance of helping spirits, whether human, animal, plant, or other;
• Setting the stage for your journeys;
• The power of drumming;
• How to practice interpreting what you learn as you go along.
  

The book also includes an informative Q&A with the author, a detailed list of notes, resources, and references, a guide to journeys based on themes including Moon Ceremonies, Solstices and Equinoxes, and Welcoming the Spirit. Look inside Shamanism for Every Day.

What is Shamanism?

Shamanism is universal and not bound by social or cultural conditions. It’s the most ancient and most enduring spiritual tradition known to humanity. Shamanism predates and constitutes the foundation of all known religions or philosophies. In essence, shamanism is the spiritual practice of ecstasy. Ecstasy is defined as a mystic, prophetic or poetic trance. Ecstatic trance is an academic term referring to those inwardly focused experiences of cosmic oneness, that mystical connection to a living, intelligent Universe that exists within each of us. Practitioners enter altered states of consciousness in order to perceive and interact with the inner world of the self. The act of entering an ecstatic trance state is called the soul flight or shamanic journey.
 
The shaman’s trance is an intentionally induced state of ecstasy. Shamanic trance is characterized by its flexibility, ranging from light diagnostic states to full embodiment trance states. Shamans use intention and discipline to control the nature, depth, and qualities of their trance states. The shaman may progress through a range of trance states until they reach the level that is necessary for healing to occur.
 

The capacity to enter a range of trance states is a natural manifestation of human consciousness. The ability to enter trance states makes us human, not shamans. What makes shamans unique is their mastery over an otherwise normal human trait. It requires training, practice and devotion to master any expressive art. Shamans master the art of ecstasy to see the true nature of the universe.
 
Shamanism is a way of perceiving the nature of the universe in a way that incorporates the normally invisible world where the spirits of all material things dwell. Shamans have different terms and phrases for the unseen world, but most of them clearly imply that it is the realm where the spirits of the land, animals, ancestors and other spiritual entities dwell. Spirit encompasses all the immaterial forms of life energy that surround us. We are woven together into a net of life energies that are all around us. These energies can appear to us in different forms, such as spirits of Nature, animals or ancestors. The spirit world is the web of life itself.
 
Shamanism represents a universal conceptual framework found among indigenous tribal humans. It includes the belief that the natural world has two aspects: ordinary everyday awareness, formed by our habitual behaviors, patterns of belief, social norms and cultural conditioning; and a second non-ordinary awareness accessed through altered states, or trance, induced by shamanic practices such as repetitive drumming. This second-order awareness can be developed over time or appear all at once, but once it is discerned the world is never the same. According to shamanic theory, the ordinary and non-ordinary worlds interact continuously, and a shamanic practitioner can gain knowledge about how to alter ordinary reality by taking direct action in the non-ordinary aspect of the world.
 
Rhythmic drumming is a simple and effective way to induce ecstatic trance states. When a drum is played at an even tempo of three to four beats per second for at least fifteen minutes, most people can journey successfully even on their first attempt. Transported by the driving beat of the drum; the practitioner journeys to the inner planes of consciousness to obtain personal revelation and spiritual experience.
 
According to shamanic cosmology, there are three inner planes of consciousness: the Upper, Middle, and Lower Worlds. The three realms are linked together by a vertical axis that is commonly referred to as the World Tree, or axis mundi. This central axis (spinal column) exists within each of us. Through the sound of the drum, which is invariably made of wood from the World Tree, the shaman is transported to the cosmic axis within and conveyed from plane to plane.
 
The shaman traverses the inner planes in order to change and shape experience. It is an inward spiritual journey of rapture in which the shaman interacts with the inner world, thereby influencing the outer world. In the shaman’s world, all human experience is self-generated. Experience is shaped from within since the three realms or resonant fields that define our experience of reality exist within each of us.
 
The essence of shamanism is the experience of direct revelation from within. Shamanism is about remembering, exploring and developing the true self. Shamanism places emphasis on the individual, of breaking free and discovering one’s own uniqueness in order to bring something new back to the community. Shamanic practice heightens the ability of perception and enables you to see into the deeper realms of the self. Once connected with your inner self, you can find help, healing, and a continual source of guidance. To practice shamanism is to reconnect with your deepest core values and your highest vision of who you are and why you are here.

The Hidden Life of Trees

Peter Wohlleben, a German forester and author, has a rare understanding of the inner life of trees, and is able to describe it in accessible, evocative language. His book, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, has sold more than two million copies worldwide. Wohlleben draws on groundbreaking scientific discoveries to describe how trees are like human families: tree parents live together with their children, communicate with them, support them as they grow, share nutrients with those who are sick or struggling, and even warn each other of impending dangers. Wohlleben also shares his deep love of woods and forests, explaining the amazing processes of life, death, and regeneration he has observed in his woodland.

 
A revolution has been taking place in the scientific understanding of trees, and Wohlleben is the first writer to convey its amazements to a general audience. The latest scientific studies, conducted at well-respected universities in Germany and around the world, confirm what he has long suspected from close observation in this forest: Trees are far more alert, social, sophisticated -- and even intelligent -- than we thought.

 
There is now a substantial body of scientific evidence that shows that trees of the same species are communal, and will often form alliances with trees of other species. Forest trees have evolved to live in cooperative, interdependent relationships, maintained by communication and a collective intelligence similar to an insect colony. These soaring columns of living wood draw the eye upward to their outspreading crowns, but the real action is taking place underground, just a few inches below our feet.
 

All the trees in a forest are connected to each other through underground fungal networks. Trees share water and nutrients through the networks, and also use them to communicate. They send distress signals about drought and disease, for example, or insect attacks, and other trees alter their behavior when they receive these messages. Scientists call these mycorrhizal networks. The fine, hairlike root tips of trees join together with microscopic fungal filaments to form the basic links of the network, which appears to operate as a symbiotic relationship between trees and fungi, or perhaps an economic exchange. As a kind of fee for services, the fungi consume about 30 percent of the sugar that trees photosynthesize from sunlight. The sugar is what fuels the fungi, as they scavenge the soil for nitrogen, phosphorus and other mineral nutrients, which are then absorbed and consumed by the trees.
 

To communicate through the network, trees send chemical, hormonal and slow-pulsing electrical signals, which scientists are just beginning to decipher. Edward Farmer at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland has been studying the electrical pulses, and he has identified a voltage-based signaling system that appears strikingly similar to animal nervous systems (although he does not suggest that plants have neurons or brains).

Five-thousand miles away, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Suzanne Simard and her grad students are making astonishing new discoveries about the sensitivity and interconnectedness of trees in the Pacific temperate rainforests of western North America. Dr. Simard is a professor with the UBC Faculty of Forestry, where she lectures on and researches the role of mycorrhizae and mycorrhizal networks in tree species migrations with climate change disturbance. Networks of mycorrhizal fungal mycelium have recently been discovered by Professor Simard and her graduate students to connect the roots of trees and facilitate the sharing of resources in Douglas-fir forests of interior British Columbia, thereby bolstering their resilience against disturbance or stress and facilitating the establishment of new regeneration.

They found that the mycorrhizal network serves as a belowground pathway for transfer of carbon from the nutrient-rich deciduous trees to nearby regenerating Douglas-fir seedlings. Moreover, they found that carbon transfer was enhanced when Douglas-fir seedlings were shaded in mid-summer, providing a subsidy that may be important in Douglas-fir survival and growth, thus helping maintain a mixed forest community during early succession.

 
Simard's research indicates that all trees in a forest ecosystem are interconnected, with the largest, oldest trees serving as hubs. The underground exchange of nutrients increases the survival of younger trees linked into the network of old trees. She has found vast underground tree root systems that are kind of like giant brains. Like the neurons in our own brains, trees send messages via their roots. In fact, she says that trees aren't only communicating, but are also sending resources back and forth to help out other trees -- even if they are a different kind of tree. 

Simard calls the older trees (up to 500 years old) "mother trees." Mother trees are the biggest, oldest trees in the forest with the most fungal connections. They're not necessarily female, but Simard sees them in a nurturing, supportive, maternal role. With their deep roots, they draw up water and make it available to shallow-rooted seedlings. They help neighboring trees by sending them nutrients, and when the neighbors are struggling, mother trees detect their distress signals and increase the flow of nutrients accordingly.

 
When mother trees begin to die, they start passing their resources off to the younger trees around them. Simard says it's like the passing of a wand from one generation to the next. Besides being a beautiful way to understand forests, this information also gives us one more reason to stop clear cutting, which is when timber companies clear tracts of land of all trees. It's easier for the loggers, but it takes away the mother trees so they can't pass along those resources to the next generation. With the logging of mother trees, they wipe out whole forest communities, and that's nothing less than attempted ecocide. After learning about the complex life of trees, a walk in the woods will never be the same again.