The Shaman’s Lonesome Vigil
It starts with a drip, a single solitary drop, one tear gliding effortlessly down a ruddy cheek to plunge from protruding chin, taking that last leap as a diver from a cliff wall, heralding the arrival of so many more tears. It begins with just one, which fragments into the multitude like splinters of reflective glass made from the fall of a single mirror from the vanity face. The Tequihua begins with a single brick and then more are laid to keep this one company and he calls it a temple. In the great wide world beyond this little forest, dear children, it starts with a single entity, the primal mother that laughs herself into hysterics, splitting her guts so that her children spill forth into being. So it is that here, when we call the primordial, many are present, but the effort starts with one, just one, the only one that you have any sway over, the only one that you can look out from, the one that you have come to call yourself.
To invoke something from outside of the dream it takes just one character within it, the one that you perceive as you, to notice itself within a dream. Every nightmare, every pleasant slumber is filled with many a sordid creation. It takes just one of these to come alive and call out: “Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!”, then the others will follow.
This one may be of any apparent form. It is this act of noticing the self and remembering the dream that makes one a shaman. In any invocation, it starts with an individual flaming heart that spills over so that it breeds like wild fire among the participants. It starts with one, it begins with you.
In the shaman’s bag of tricks you will find nothing at all, great heaping mounds of it. This is the bread that he serves