Thin branches of woods are making a glowing mosaic of the sky
hiding the setting sun.
The forest inhales warm air and starts to exhale cold air.
A conversation starts between the forest and me.
Yoshiko: I feel like I’m
going to melt into infinite
whenever I come here at this hour.
Forest: You looked in
deep thought, when you came in.
Y: I
find myself here when concerning about something.
Could you listen to my mail friend’s story today?
Let me call her Elm temporarily;
she is a descendant of a Native American and an a painter.
When Elm was raising her children, she happened to meet an elderly craft-man,
who was also a Native American, at his booth at a flee-market.
Let me call him Magpie. They gradually deepened their friendship
through talking about their arts and traditional wisdoms.
One day, she was presented four beautiful owl feathers from Magpie,
with no explanation about them.
Later another native American suggested Elm to burn the feathers,
because an owl feather was used as the symbol of death to invite its holder
into death,
contrary to an eagle feather symbolizing awaking vigor often used for many
ceremonies.
According to his story, Magpie might want exchange his life for her youth,
Elm thought.
Magpie had wanted to do many things, she remembered.
Then Elm got too scared to keep the deadly symbols among her children and
family;
and burned the feathers.
Magpie passed away, keeping unrevealing the reason why he gave her
such a present.
F: Hum,
An eagle gallantly flies in the blue sky; but an owl acts in the darkness.
Both are just living along with each destiny of the life system;
and no magical power or curse is in the materials of their bodies: their
feathers.
Humans are strange creatures, aren’t they?
They create a symbol and imprison themselves in it.
Y: I’m
also creating symbols….
Aren’t other animals scared by some symbols?
F: Hmm, they
could be reflectively frightened and escape,
when they feel the symbolic situation of their terrified experience.
But humans design and direct symbols of peace and fear.
Even if nothing happened, they intentionally control images by symbols.
With personal experience or not,
they’ve strengthened the system of symbols taking generations to
control their images.
Those symbols are sometimes as literary things,
and other times as ceremonial tools like the feathers.
Elm had to be very afflicted.
Y: Yes, the feathers
must keep burning in her mind even now, 20 years later...
With my sympathy, I was recalling my parenting period experience too,
to think of the power of spiritual concentrations attached to a tool or
object.
One day, I went for an annual event at a Mikkyou Buddhism temple
to sketch a fire ceremony.
The chief Yamabushi/yogi, who was controlling the big bonfire,
was wearing unusually deep color on his clothes.
After the event I questioned him on the color;
and our friendship started as he ordered me to make his portrait.
He, Dairyu, was an ordinary man supporting his family
with farming and fishing until the age of 40, he said.
One day, led by his dream, he decided to devote his life
as the assistant of Fudo-Myo-oh,
whose statue he drew into his house from a disused old temple in his
neighborhood.
The wooden statue was powerfully beautiful,
symbolizing another side of the Sun God of this Buddhism,
with its angry face, a sword and a rope sitting in flames of fire;
and made about 800 years ago.
Since then, more than thirty years, Dairyu had trained himself
with his own way of saturating his body with 108 vessels of cold water
at a time,
every day even in the heavy snow.
Putting on the Yamabushi clothes after the water purification,
he gave prayers to heal suffering people.
Once talking with him, you had to find out he was lowbrow and worldly;
also far away from a saint image.
Even so, some people, whom western medical doctors gave up curing,
were healed through his prayers; and hearing these bush telegraphs,
his believers were increasing.
His clothes were originally pure white cotton; and he never
washed them for all of more that 30 years of ceremonies and prayers;
and the color grew by his perspiration, aging and sparkles of bonfires.
He seemed to believe that his clothes could suck up the problems
of the suffering people, because his overlaid spiritual power had been
concentrated into them, each time throwing his life out under the cold
water.
Because of the one point that he threw his life out for others,
I got impressed by him.
His clothes had only one generation history,
but still worked similarly to the Native American’s ceremonial
feathers,
didn’t they?
F: Yeah, here
native shamans had trained in traditional ways, led by their seniors.
But Dairyu seemed to take “death” into him,
hurting himself on his body with his own method.
All individuals have to die; and the death supports new lives.
This natural order, humans hardly get in.
Look at me, here I exist for tens of thousands of years in the cycles
of lives and deaths.
You are momentarily on the surface of lives, but soon will be under the
shade.
The cycles are like breathing; but humans just don’t want to see
it all.
Usually you only see the living side or lightened side,
narrowing the view of natural world.
So that you create stress inside, with unreasonable narrowing
and unnatural breathing; and get sick.
As I often say, humans are also a part of nature.
Digging deep inside, you’ll find yourself just like I am.
Everyone has light and shade;
and there are eagles and owls in each inside forest.
So when contacting the earth, opening your whole life,
you feel like being one with nature;
everybody can smile, released from stress.
Complete harmony makes you really smile, but not by ridding yourself
of half a world.
Getting ill or healing yourself, or preparing a peaceful death,
all are made by each individual body as nature.
The healing power is not in words or tools of a healer.
They just help your returning to your natural condition,
letting your spirit realize it.
Yet to do the job, a healer should live holding death together.
The survivors, whom Dairyu’s prayers effected,
passed through the depth of their death,
letting their spirits join in the water with Dairyu.
When a shaman uses an eagle feather outside,
his spirit also holds an owl feather inside to balance it;
this is their fated job.
Whatever Magpie intended by the feathers,
Elm could use them for her own useful way, if she wanted to be a shaman.
She chose burning and deleted the image; and that was a way too.
Symbols are the kind of thing, I suppose...
Y: I see. Symbols
can only be alive by user's strong intentional feeling!
That's why a tradition can support the power of a symbol;
and we have to be careful about the system.
Speaking of it, I have a question.
You mentioned literal things and words for symbolic tools.
Did you mean not only spells but also bibles, too?
There are tremendous violent scenes like the end of this world
in the Revelation at the end of the New Testament.
Recently I heard that some American Christian authorities
were going to accomplish violently finishing the world
to follow the description of the bible….
F: Hahahaha,
it sounds the same as “the family has owl feathers,
so we should help them die.”
Nature on the earth many times had dropped into
tremendous ending situations; almost with deadly finishes.
But somehow each time a new beautiful harmony was born among survivors;
then lives restarted: that is nature.
Similar things could happen in an individual living body.
Imagine one lost his eyes by an accident.
As long as he thinks his former ability and the visible world is the
right way,
he feels all his organs are useless and has to lose
his entire body balance to bring it to the end.
But if he thinks he got a new body with no eyes,
and starts to learn to be in the new world,
all of his organs would try to work their best,
making harmony to see things without eyes.
He might get more beautiful sights and light than before.
Instead of actually losing eyes or life, using a deadly symbol,
humans have tried to imagine this great ability of nature.
Straining after words in a traditional symbolic image is silly.
Nature changes the surface all the time.
See deep inside of the image; catch the truth in the image.
If not, all symbols could be dangerous tools.
written by Yoshiko
Appendix
The Features of owls:
Owls are chiefly nocturnal birds of pray, with large heads and flattened
face
with large, forward-facing eyes as a human's, unlikely to birds.
Flight noiseless, moth like. Some species have "horns/ears."
They eat rodents, birds, reptiles, fish, large insects, nearly worldwide.
Because of their unique faces and features, they have become traditional
symbols in many places.
<<"Western Birds" by Roger Tony Peterson
Traditions related to owls:
The little owls are regarded as a special ward of the goddess Athena in
Greece,
also as emblem of wisdom. Romans considered owls an evil omen: An owl alighting on a housetop
presaged death. Pima Indians in the America Southwest held that at death the human
spirit passed into the body of an owl,
and to help it along they gave owl feathers to the dying person.
<<"Water, Prey, and Game Birds of North America" by National Geographic
Society
The "wise owl" still appears with witches at Halloween (the Celtic
feast of the dead).
The wise-woman or witch had the same name in Latin as the owl: strix, plural striges, later the Italian strega, "witch."
To the Algonquin Indians, the owl was a bird of death and of the
winter, creator of the north wind.
To the Babylonians, hooting owls were ghosts of women who died in
childbirth,
calling for their offspring. The time-honored connection of the midwife
Goddess
with owls may have contributed to this idea.
In medieval times the owl was sometimes called Night-hag, like the
daughters of Lilith
who had been reinterpreted as demonic succubae. Female spirits with owl
wings were
feared as potential kidnappers of infants: another manifestation of the
mother ghost. Christian legend insisted that the pwl was one of "three disobedient
sisters"
who defied the Judeo-Christian God, and so was transformed into a bird that
could never look at the sun.
(Actually, owls' vision is keen in all conditions of light and dark though.)
Attributing to demons is popular superstition in many places,
because of owl's noiseless flight and its ability to turn its head almost
all the way around.
<<"The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols & Sacred Object" by Barbara
G. Walker 1988 Harper San Francisco